... But the question about whether the Book of Revelation or any book is inspired (or any world scripture for that matter) That's a fascinating question to me because I don't know how you can tell... Or are the decisions of the councils the only information we have regarding a text's inspired status? Modern people just knowing that the councils chose only inspired books?
Taking the last first ... it was not really the case of councils deciding which books were inspired or which were not. The history of the development of the canon is quite involved, and there were canonical lists before the first great Council (Nicaea, 325), and some books were dropped from the list, and some books added.
It's simply not possible to arrive at a scientific or definitive proposition by which we could deduce a 'litmus test' for inspiration.
And, by the same token, the very weakest argument for inspiration is something that boils down to 'because the magisterium says so'.
If there is any evidence at all, its in the communal experience of the engagement with the text, rather than certain words in a certain order, or indeed certain statements on the page. It's the effect in and on the community that determines whether it is inspired or not, but again, is there a bench-test for that? No. It's a much more nebulous thing, but then inspiration is itself an ineffable experience.
I mean some people read the text and get absolutely nothing from it whatsoever.
Let me offer a couple of examples:
One that I have spoken before is about sitting on the sofa at home, one Saturday afternoon, and a physicist explained that the heavy elements, carbon, etc., require certain conditions for their generation, and the only place we know where those conditions prevail is in the nuclear furnace that is a star. So these atoms are flung out from the star as part of its process, and then he laughed, and said, 'We really are made of the stuff that stars are made of; that's where we're from."
To be honest, I'm not sure I did not already know that, but in that moment, by some arcane process of alignments, his words resounded deep; it was ice-water between the shoulder blades, a hackle-raising moment ...
The other, also mentioned before, is an account I read somewhere of a Japanese nobleman who happened to be out riding and, as darkness fell, heard a fox barking on a mountainside. He was so moved in that moment that he erected a Torii (those double-beamed gates at the entrance to a Shinto shrine) – I carry the sense of that moment as very real with me, almost as if I experienced what he experienced, across time and space.
Both of those I classify as 'inspired moments'.
As ever, when I see a good question, I look to a couple of sources.
David Bentley Hart's
Leaves in the Wind substack:
Q: You mentioned the biblical text is inspired and authoritative, but I believe you said it is “only relatively privileged”. Could you elaborate on that point?
A: "I am not sure I recall the context in which I made that remark, but I can certainly take a stab at guessing what I meant. At least, I think my point might have been that the text is not in itself, in abstraction from its readership, an inerrant catalogue of divine oracles and instructions. Rather, it should be understood to be inspired only relative to the act of reading by the community of the faithful, in openness to the Spirit and as pointing toward Christ, who is the true substance of revelation."
David Armstrong's
A Perennial Digression substack:
There was, I recall vaguely, an ancient Christian tradition that regarded Scripture as a 'Body of Christ'; that to read Scripture was to read
with Christ; to read Scripture is a
dialogue with Christ ... that kind of thing ...
"... as all human literature stands in a web of intertextual relationships to other works, some more intimate, some more distant to the circumstances of the text’s own origin, curation, and reception, and as all literature as such is inevitably shaped by the specifics of human experience and life, it is thus the case that no firm distinction can be drawn between some texts as completely inspired and other texts as completely uninspired without reifying the false division between sacred and secular.
"... that the Priestly creation story (Gen 1:1-2:3) reuses images, terms, and ideas from the Babylonian theomachy of
Enuma Elish does not equivocate the two texts, but it does require that the divine inspiration we see in the work of the Priestly author is present at least potentially (and perhaps actually) already in his literary model or precedents. Otherwise, the allusions made would depreciate the value of the text we deem scriptural: and so, too, the logic holds for the Yahwist creation story (Gen 2:4-3:24) and the myths of Adapa and Atrahasis, so too for the flood myths of Genesis 6-9 and the latter tablets of Gilgamesh, so too for Psalm 104 and the Hymn to Aten, etc.
"Indeed, the deep parallelism, literary interrelationships, and cultural osmosis characterizing the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in their ancient Southwest Asian/Near Eastern and Mediterranean, Greco-Roman contexts require us to see the divinity of Scripture as concentrated in our texts of choice rather than wholly novel, for the authors that produced them are so humanly shaped by their cultural environments that there is no isolated literary space for the divine presence to alight upon where some “pagan” influence cannot be found.
"And insofar as those “pagan” influences themselves constitute middling interlocutors between the biblical corpus and the other primary texts of the great Central, South, and East Asian religious traditions—Zoroastrian (though this may have directly influenced at least some biblical authors), Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist literatures, and then later the Islamicate literary culture that served as a novel bridge between these and the biblical traditions that birthed it—the only logical conclusion that a Jew or Christian might come to is that their own Scriptures simply congregate streams of divinity that run through all such other texts as well, indeed, through text
qua text."
Something to chew on ...
