The Bible is the inspired Word of God, written by real human beings under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That’s the short answer. But it’s worth unpacking what we mean by “inspired” because it’s different from what many folks around here learned in Sunday school.
Not Dictation, Not Just Human Opinion
If you grew up Baptist or in a non-denominational church in Southeast Texas, you probably heard that the Bible is “inerrant” or “infallible.” We’d agree with the heart of that, Scripture is trustworthy and authoritative. But Orthodox Christians don’t think God dictated the Bible word-for-word like a boss dictating a memo to a secretary. The biblical authors weren’t stenographers taking divine dictation.
On the other hand, we’re not saying the Bible is just a collection of human religious opinions either. It’s not merely what ancient people happened to think about God. The Scriptures are genuinely God-breathed, theopneustos in Greek, from 2 Timothy 3:16. God’s breath, the Holy Spirit, worked in and through the biblical writers so that what they wrote conveys divine truth. But the Spirit didn’t erase their personalities or override their humanity.
Think of it this way. When the Holy Spirit inspired St. Paul to write his letters, Paul’s vocabulary stayed Paul’s vocabulary. His rabbinical training shows up. His passion and his occasional frustration come through. He’s not a puppet. He’s a real person writing real letters to real churches, and the Holy Spirit is guiding the whole process so that what Paul writes is what God wants the Church to receive.
The same goes for the Gospel writers. Luke writes like a historian. John writes like a theologian and poet. Matthew arranges his material for a Jewish audience. Mark’s Greek is rougher, more urgent. These differences aren’t problems to explain away, they’re evidence that God works through human beings as they actually are.
Scripture Lives in the Church
Here’s where we part ways with the “Bible alone” approach common in Protestant churches. The Orthodox Church doesn’t believe Scripture stands by itself, independent of the Church. The Church wrote the Bible. I don’t mean the Church made it up, I mean the apostles and their communities, guided by the Holy Spirit, produced these texts as part of the Church’s life. The New Testament came out of the Church’s worship, teaching, and mission in the first century.
So when we talk about inspiration, we’re talking about the Holy Spirit working in the Church. The same Spirit who inspired the writers also guided the Church to recognize which books belonged in the canon and which didn’t. And the same Spirit continues to guide the Church in understanding what Scripture means. We don’t read the Bible as isolated individuals trying to figure it out on our own. We read it as members of the Body of Christ, within the Tradition that produced it and has interpreted it for two thousand years.
This isn’t some abstract theological point. It matters practically. When you run into a confusing passage, and you will, you don’t just guess at what it means or rely on your own best judgment. You look at how the Fathers understood it, how the Church has read it in her liturgy, what the councils said about it. You’re reading Scripture with the Church, not apart from her.
What About Errors?
People often ask: “If the Bible has different human authors with different styles and perspectives, does that mean it has errors?” It depends on what you mean by “errors.” If you’re asking whether Luke got the year of Jesus’s birth wrong by a couple years according to modern historical reconstruction, or whether the Gospel genealogies of Jesus match up perfectly, those questions don’t keep Orthodox Christians up at night. The biblical writers weren’t trying to write modern history or science textbooks. They were proclaiming the Gospel, teaching the faith, preserving apostolic Tradition.
The Scriptures are authoritative and trustworthy for what they’re meant to do: reveal God to us, teach us how to be saved, guide us into union with Christ. That’s what “inspired” means in Orthodox theology. The Holy Spirit ensured that Scripture accomplishes God’s purpose. It won’t mislead you about who God is or how to live as a Christian. But it’s not a geology manual or a comprehensive chronicle where every date and number has to align with modern standards of precision.
Reading With the Fathers
If you want to go deeper on this, I’d recommend the Ancient Faith podcast episode “Orthodoxy and Biblical Inspiration” from the Search the Scriptures Live series. Fr. Stephen De Young and others have done excellent work explaining how the Fathers understood inspiration as illumination, God enlightening the minds and hearts of the biblical writers, rather than mechanical dictation. The Orthodox Study Bible is another great resource. Its introductions and notes show you how the Church has always read these texts.
When you come to St. Michael’s and hear the Gospel proclaimed in the Divine Liturgy, you’re hearing the inspired Word of God. Not because a book fell from heaven, but because the Holy Spirit spoke through human beings in the Church, and the Church has faithfully preserved and proclaimed that Word ever since. That’s what we mean by inspiration. It’s not a theory about how the Bible was written. It’s our lived experience of encountering Christ in the Scriptures, read and interpreted within the life of His Body.
