Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Revelation, Part 5.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

In our Defenders class, we've been thinking about the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, and we've been looking at the

qualities of inspiration. And this section of the outline is entitled The Extent of Inspiration,

that's probably misleading, it should probably be the properties of inspiration, because although the first two properties do deal with the properties of inspiration because although the first two properties

do deal with the extent of inspiration, the third one does not.

So with respect to inspiration, we've seen that inspiration being plenary means that the entire

scripture is inspired by God.

It is not as though there are simply some books or some portions of those books that are inspired,

but the entirety of Scripture is the bearer of God's inspiration. So inspiration is plenary. The second quality

has to do with the depth of inspiration, and that is that inspiration is verbal. It is not only

the breadth of Scripture in its entirety, but it goes down to the very words of Scripture

which are inspired. So the first two properties of inspiration speak to the extent of inspiration,

its breadth and its depth. But the third property is that inspiration is confluent.

And this comes from the word meaning to flow together.

And the idea here is that Scripture is the product of both human authors and a divine author.

God is the author of Scripture, but also the scriptures

are human products as well. People wrote scripture. And the books that they write

reflect their individual personalities, their vocabularies, their education and training, and so forth, so that these are very

much human products.

So a correct doctrine of inspiration needs to be confluent to allow the Scripture to be both

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