The Encourager
“Inspiration and Memory - by Jeff Curtis”
Inspiration and Memory
By Jeff Curtis
Paul told Timothy that “all Scripture is inspired by God” (2Timothy 3:16). He had a sense of his own inspiration when he wrote 1Corinthians. He said in 1Cor.2:13, “These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” Because the Bible is inspired, Christians look to its words for direction in morality and doctrine. Questions of inspiration and canon have to with biblical authority. However, neither Paul nor any other writer of the Bible explained the mysterious process by which the Holy Spirit interacted with the minds of the authors in order to produce inspired documents. The nature of inspiration matters because biblical authority matters.
The apostle mentioned that he had baptized Crispus and Gaius in 1Cor.1:14 and then corrected himself to say that he had also baptized the household of Stephanus, allowing room for yet another lapse of memory in 1Cor.1:16, This shows that the Holy Spirit had not simply taken over Paul’s mind. No one would argue that the Holy Spirit has lapses of memory. Paul’s inspiration by the Holy Spirit was operative within the limitations of his own memory, the specific needs of the church, and the social and cultural setting of the world he lived in. All of this has important implications for the way we as readers today are to draw authority and guidance from 1Corinthians regarding doctrine and behavior.
Paul was the first party in the creation of the written document we call “1Corinthians.” The apostle’s contemporaries at Corinth were the second party who neither wrote the letter nor received it as correspondence directly addressed to them. In order for us, as third-party readers, we must try to understand what the first readers understood. Then we must determine what our world and the world of the first readers have in common and how the two worlds are different. As we seek authoritative guidance from the Scriptures, we need to acknowledge that the church today faces concerns that are varying in degrees like the concerns Paul addressed. For example, the concerns of unity in the church (1Cor.1:10; 11:18) and immoral behavior (1Cor.6:9-11) remain similar, while the concern about the head covering for women (1Cor.11:5-16) is considerably different.
Meditate on this:
1 Peter 3:15-16
15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear; 16 having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed.
