During the month of April, I am occasionally sharing some brief excerpts from my new book coming out May 3 about how encountering paradox helps us better experience the mystery of God. Today we touch on one of these mysteries–the Bible has both divine and human authors.

Not only does the Bible contain the paradoxes we have been discussing, but the Bible itself is a paradox. G. C. Berkouwer, among others, draws attention to this paradoxical nature in what has termed the “incarnational” character of Scripture. Just as God in Christ emptied himself and became human (Phil. 2:6–8), thus conditioned by the earthly and the historical, so Scripture is God’s own speech in human language. Just as we cannot strip a human veneer off Christ to reveal a divine inner substance, so we cannot strip away the humanity of Scripture. New Testament theologian George Ladd expressed it as “God’s Word in human words.”

This paradox of Scripture reminds me of the faces/vase drawing of Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin.

The Rubin drawing demonstrates figure-ground perception: our brains perceive either a white figure (vase) on a black background or a black figure (two human profiles facing each other) on a white background. Our perception can flick back and forth between the two images, but we cannot see both at the same time.

I find that this psychological quirk is also present in Scripture. If the divine authorship of Scripture is emphasized, the human side becomes the background; if the humanity of Scripture is in focus, its divine nature becomes the background. In like manner, I find that focusing on the divine and human sides of Scripture simultaneously is hard (perhaps impossible) to achieve; we flick back and forth, yet must keep both distinct and clear in our minds…

Frederick Schleiermacher, the nineteenth-century father of modern liberalism, believed that human reason must judge Scripture, separating the wheat of eternal concepts like the fatherhood of God or brotherhood of man from all the chaff the modern mindset could no longer accept, such as a virgin birth, Satan, or miracles.

In Fred Craddock’s piquant observation, “‘Modern man,’ whoever he was, seemed to be the measure of all things; he took his chair first, then the biblical furniture was arranged accordingly.” Schleiermacher collapsed the paradox by giving reason free rein to discard anything it found objectionable as it ferreted out the divine nuggets in what was essentially a human book…

The early twentieth-century fundamentalist movement reacted against this flood sweeping away divine authority by filling intellectual sandbags that ultimately (as with liberalism) also depended on human reason. They proposed that God plants cognitive statements directly into the minds of biblical authors. The Bible thus becomes a set of propositions (like a lawyer’s library of legal precepts) that reason can manipulate to set forth systematic truth.

As several have pointed out, what resulted does not square with the Bible we actually have. Scripture is not an abstract set of principles but a diverse, multifaceted body of literature including history, hymns, poetry, proverbs, parables, and, most of all, stories that show God in action with real people in real historical and cultural situations.

We are left with two inadequate views.

Liberals saw Scripture telling us little or nothing about God that is not conditioned by flawed and outdated human worldviews that modern reason could now confidently sweep aside; fundamentalists saw Scripture telling us a great deal about God through propositions dropped into authors’ minds like emails in an in-box that the authors then simply copied and pasted into Scripture.

Neither view adequately embraces the tension of Scripture’s paradoxical nature as God’s Word in human words.

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