Divine Moral Inspiration: Unity in Biblical Theology

Spirit in Creation

The Biblical storyline in the book of Genesis begins with an enigmatic claim about divine creation and the Spirit of God: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters” (Gen 1:1–2, RSV). The role of God in creation, I suggest, is too central in the author’s mind to settle for the NRSV translation “a wind from God” instead of “the Spirit of God.” The author focuses on God as taking the initiative as the creator of the heavens and the earth, without digressing to how exactly God relates to the ultimate constituents of the heavens and the earth. Speculation about God akin to that from Plato and Greek thought thus does not emerge here. (For discussion of its absence, and of the relevance of the translation “Spirit of God,” see Westermann 1984: 100-10; cf. Fretheim 2005: 3–9.) God takes the initiative in creation in order to invite a human response to God, in keeping with the creation of humans in “the image of God” (Gen 1:27).

The author’s focus includes “the Spirit of God” as moving over the face of the waters, in parallel with “darkness” upon the face of the deep. The Spirit of God, according to the author, is in the vicinity of darkness and is mobile rather than static in that context. A natural question is: Mobile how? Some other questions are: Mobile in order to counter darkness? Perhaps by moving something from earth to a position beyond darkness to light? If so, to what end? The author thus prompts questions about the Spirit of God in relation to darkness and the context of divine creation. For current purposes, we can regard talk of “the Spirit of God,” at least in Genesis, as talk of God, including divine activity, in relation to creation (cf. Lampe 1977: 208; Schweizer 1980: 10–28).

An important lesson of the talk of the Spirit of God in Genesis is that God takes the initiative in creation. God does not wait for anyone else’s advice either to undertake creation or on how to present creation. (Famously, the concluding chapters of the book of Job confirm this lesson; see also Isaiah 45:9–12.) God’s initiative in creation results in God’s giving something, including life, to humans that they did not request. Such divine “giving” has mixed results in the Hebrew Bible owing to human failures. This leads to controversy about the goodness of what God has given in creation, or at least what God intends to give (as the book of Job illustrates).

The human failures include disobedience to God, as Genesis 3 reports, and God responds with a plan to counter this disobedience and thereby to restore humans to their creator. God thus shows mercy to the first humans by not destroying them for their disobedience: “The Lord God sent them forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which they were taken. He drove out the humans, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen 3:23–24, NRSV, here and in subsequent Biblical translations, unless otherwise noted). A key insight of this passage is that God protects the vital option for righteous life from corruption and distortion by humans. God does not allow them to gain approved life by their unrighteousness ways and means. This is a significant indicator of God’s perfectly righteous character and will.

Even so, God forces a decision from humans regarding righteousness without forcing how they decide. To that end, God puts trouble, including suffering, in human lives, whereby humans learn and show their genuine moral (or immoral) inclinations in the presence of divine challenges.

The book of (second) Isaiah represents a straightforward view of God’s role in creation:

It does not follow that God causes moral evil, the kind of evil antithetical to what is good in interpersonal relationships. God stirs up turbulence for humans, including in their moral lives, but that process falls short of divine evil. The turbulence, including suffering, is intended by God for the expansion and recognition of divine righteousness.

The writer of Deuteronomy endorses God’s impeccable goodness:

Even so, this good God can use evil for the sake of good, including in a case of God’s sending an evil spirit to certain people (1 Sam 16:14, 18:10, 19:9, Judges 9:23). The boundaries are set by God’s aim to bring about something good among humans, and the same is true for the evil that God allows (without causing it). If the book of Job is right, we humans are not in a position to judge those boundaries in all cases. Hence, Job offers his self-humbling confession that he is not qualified to advise God on cosmic matters (Job 42:1–6).

Even in our limited knowledge of divine ways, we should ask about purposes for the divine initiative in creation. What are the aims of this initiative? The question is pressing if only because the “good” pronounced on creation by God fast becomes mixed with considerable “bad” introduced by created humans. The book of Genesis portrays God’s response with divine moral re-creation for the sake of improved lives.

Spirit in Re-Creation

Just as God’s Spirit takes the initiative for creation of the heavens and the earth, that same God takes the initiative in the moral re-creation of humans, given the need of Genesis 3. A striking feature of the intended re-creation in Genesis is its universality, and it emerges with Abram:

The God of Abram is no mere ethnic or national God, given the stated aim to benefit “all the families of the earth.” Just as the opening creation story concerned all of the earth, so also the subsequent re-creation story aims to include all families of the earth. (For discussion of the role of Abraham here, see Levenson 2012.)

The intended re-creation is inherently moral because it stems from and delivers divine righteousness in interpersonal relationships. (For an overview of Biblical righteousness, see Hultgren (1985: 12–46).) The book of (second) Isaiah represents God as (re-)creating with righteousness and salvation among people needing such re-creating:

God again takes the initiative in creating, and here it aims at righteousness and salvation among humans. So, we may call this “moral re-creation.” It aims to redirect the faltering beneficiaries of the first creation with a new level of moral goodness characterized as “righteousness” and “salvation.”

The book of Isaiah grounds the needed re-creation in God’s “spirit from on high”:

The main idea is that God’s own Spirit takes the initiative to bring needed righteousness among humans in order to deliver peace and trust among them. This initiative is central to the needed moral re-creation by God for wayward humans.

The desired re-creation is a divine “inside” job among humans, with God’s “holy spirit” working at the deepest volitional and affective level of humans. The psalmist thus prays:

God’s Spirit thus supports a human spirit willing to obey God from within, that is, a “right spirit within me.” Language of divine “inspiration” of humans, courtesy of God’s Spirit, is thus fitting for “salvation” and a “willing spirit.” This divine Spirit, as the “presence” of God, searches humans for the sake of their moral renewal before God (Psalm 139:1–3, 7–8). Such renewal is at the center of divine re-creation and of a Biblical theology that captures the key Biblical storyline.

A divine promise of needed moral inspiration arises in the book of Ezekiel:

The key promise of suitable moral motivation is: “I will put my spirit within you.” Such inspiration, or enspiriting, by God is the needed inward power-source for obedience to God and thus for being the people of God.

God’s aim, then, is moral renewal from within for the people of Israel, in order that obedience to God will be from “their hearts.” (On the role of human “hearts” in the Jewish Bible, see Meadors (2006).) Ezekiel represents a similar promise with talk of a “new heart” from God’s Spirit for God’s people. This is the basis of divine moral inspiration for the people of God, courtesy of God’s inspiring Spirit. The divine project of moral re-creation is implicitly eschatological, awaiting completion in the fullness of time. As a result, the project is ongoing even now, moving toward its fulfillment.

The promise of renewal by God’s Spirit is explicit in the book of Joel. It begins with a call to a moral return to God:

Here, again, we see an emphasis on inward change, and not just a change in conduct or “clothing.” We also see that God has a “gracious and merciful” aim not to condemn wayward people but to renew them toward God’s unique moral character. This is therefore moral renewal, courtesy of divine inspiration.

Joel conveys a grand divine promise for renewal:

This promise extends to “all flesh” and thus goes beyond national Israel. It includes even the “slaves” of the people of Israel. So, the intended renewal by God’s Spirit has a universal scope. A full biblical theology would give careful attention to moral inspiration in a wider range of materials in the Jewish Bible, thus going beyond the limits of a single article. We have identified some passages that clearly set the focus on divine inspiration for sustained righteousness and its moral renewal among humans. We turn to such moral renewal in the new covenant initially promised by Jeremiah.

Inspiration in Jesus and Paul

Jesus talks little of God’s Spirit, but his ministry portrays the work of divine moral inspiration in himself and his followers. Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels draw from the book of Isaiah to set the baptism of Jesus in a context of God’s intervening Spirit (Mark 1:9–11, Matt 3:13–17; cf. Isa 42:1), after which Jesus is led by God’s Spirit into the wilderness to face evil (Mark 1:10, Matt 4:1). These events follow the prediction of John the Baptist that Jesus would baptize people with the Spirit of God (Mark 1:8, Matt 3:11–12).

Luke’s Gospel confirms the role of God’s Spirit in the ministry of Jesus and in its power of moral renewal. It portrays Jesus, after his baptism (Luke 3:22), as being “full of the Holy Spirit” as he is led by the Spirit into the wilderness for testing (Luke 4:1). It also represents Jesus, “filled with the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14), to announce God’s mission for him from the book of (second) Isaiah (61:1–3):

This is a mission of renewal in moral empowerment from God’s Spirit, as people are freed from what oppresses them, morally, spiritually, and otherwise. Given such empowerment from God’s Spirit, Jesus regards this Spirit as a divine gift to be received by humans: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). So, Jesus does not regard himself as the only beneficiary of God’s empowering Spirit of renewal.

Jesus’s closing earthly command to his disciples is to wait for empowerment by God’s Spirit: “I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49; cf. Acts 1:4–5). Luke’s second volume relates the fulfillment of this promise to Pentecost:

Luke connects this episode at Pentecost with the fulfillment of Joel’s aforementioned prophecy of the pouring out of God’s Spirit on humans (Acts 2:14–21). So, Luke thinks of Jesus as fulfilling the promise of John the Baptist that Jesus would baptize people with the Spirit of God (Luke 3:16).

John’s Gospel reiterates the promise of John the Baptist that Jesus would baptize people with the Spirit of God, after that Spirit descended and remained on him at his baptism (John 1:32–33). It characterizes the fulfillment of that promise in Jesus as follows:

This characterization directly relates the work of the Spirit to human moral standing before God, in relation to the forgiveness of human sins. Such forgiveness aims to reorient people to participate in the moral goodness, including the righteousness, of God. Once again, we see that renewal by divine inspiration is inherently moral.

John’s Gospel is explicit about the moral endeavor of God’s Spirit toward human renewal in righteousness. It represents Jesus to say:

We can understand the intended “convincing” here as being morally “convicting” (as in the ASV). God’s Spirit thus aims to motivate people, at their deepest level, toward participation in divine righteousness, the kind of righteousness characteristic of “the Father” of Jesus. So, this Spirit seeks divine moral inspiration for God’s people as they cooperate with God’s re-creative work of moral renewal.

The apostle Paul shares the emphasis on God’s Spirit aiming to inspire people toward a renewed life of righteousness with God. Indeed, he understands his gospel as a message of good news empowered by divine righteousness (Rom 1:16–17). He gives the Spirit of God a central role in establishing this good news through the resurrection of Jesus Christ (Rom 1:3–4) and through Jesus himself having become a “life-giving Spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45; see Dunn 1998: 260–64). The Spirit of God also empowers a spiritual resurrection to new life now (Rom 6:11, 13), while recipients await the Spirit’s resurrection of their bodies (Rom 8:11).

As a priority, Paul gives God’s Spirit a guiding role in a person’s being a child of God: “If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” (Rom 8:13–14). He adds regarding the Roman Christians: “You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you…. The Spirit is life because of righteousness” (Rom 8:9–10). God’s indwelling Spirit, according to Paul, supplies divine moral inspiration, and that inspiration is “life because of righteousness,” the kind of righteousness characteristic of God’s moral character and will.

Paul extends the role of divine inspiration to the teaching of humans by God’s Spirit: “We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God” (1 Cor. 2:12; cf. 1 Thess. 4:8–9). So, in Paul’s perspective, God’s Spirit aims to bring understanding to humans along with their moral renewal. That understanding includes awareness of God’s gifts on offer, including God’s inspiring Spirit. It inspires humans with what Paul calls “the fruit of the Spirit”: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things” (Gal 5:22–23). Paul sums up the Spirit’s fruitful work as follows: “Hope [in God] does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). Paul thinks of this Spirit as working inwardly in humans, to “circumcise” their hearts for righteous life with God (Rom 2:28–29). This work is inwardly inspirational with moral power for God’s purpose.

The fruit borne by God’s Spirit is not only morally relevant but is also representative and even constitutive of God’s morally perfect character and of the people sharing in it. It makes God worthy of worship and trust, and therefore it can self-manifest and self-authenticate God’s reality and goodness to humans. It also enables humans, courtesy of God’s Spirit, to reflect God’s moral character, including God’s “glory” (2 Cor 3:18). Paul would agree with the profound insight of the book of Exodus that divine glory is summed up in God’s goodness (Exodus 33:18–19).

We may regard the fruit of God’s character as the spiritual moral values characteristic of God. These values are filial in being integral to God’s familial plan: to bring all of the families of the earth into God’s family (a goal suggested initially, as noted, by Genesis 12:1–3 and reiterated subsequently). God self-reveals in these filial values of the Spirit, because they constitute God’s unique character and image and the corresponding plan for human renewal by God (cf. Rom 2:4). They take on an intentional, person-directed character when they exhibit an aim from God’s Spirit to lead people to conform to them and thereby to relate to God directly. They thus can represent a renewal effort of a personal God, that is, the active Spirit of God seeking to inspire people to agree, cooperate, and commune with God. This significance of the fruit of God’s Spirit as active divine values in human experience is widely neglected among Bible interpreters. Understanding of evidence for God suffers as a result.

The spiritual values in question stand in contrast and opposition to what Paul calls “the works of the flesh”: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these” (Gal 5:19–20; cf. Mark 7:20–23, on such works coming from the human “heart”). According to Paul, the latter works stand in such sharp opposition to God that persisting in them can block a person from “inheriting the kingdom of God” (Gal 5:21). Paul thus remarks that “what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh” (Gal 5:17), and he suggests that “living by the Spirit” and “being guided by the Spirit” will save a person from “the desires of the flesh” (Gal 5:16, 25). A similar contrast occurs in Matthew’s Gospel, bearing on God’s Spirit and the fate of person: “Whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit” (Matt 12:32–33). A person’s relation to God’s Spirit, then, bears on the fruit exhibited and human destiny, even if that person does not recognize that God is involved.

The inspiring and renewing work of the Spirit, according to Paul, is central to the “new covenant … of the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:6). Paul, under the influence of Jesus, thus confirms the storyline of divine inspiration presented above. He regards the intended renewal by divine inspiration to be universal: “God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all” (Rom 11:32). This mercy toward all stems from God’s being the God of Gentiles as well as Jews (Rom 3:29, 4:16–17). A full biblical theology would turn to the general epistles of the New Testament for further light on divine moral inspiration, be we cannot digress. Instead, we turn to the widespread failure of such intended inspiration in human lives.

Gambit for Divine Inspiration

A concise summary of our inquiry thus far for the unifier of Biblical theology is: “The Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). The story, however, is complicated. Humans have a voluntary response to the offer of God’s Spirit, and they do not always choose to cooperate with the inspiration, or the corresponding filial values, on offer. We now can understand such inspiration in terms of the following definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, 3d ed.: “Said of God or the Holy Spirit, or of a divinity or supernatural being: To influence or actuate by special divine or supernatural agency; used esp. in reference to the prophets, apostles, and Scripture writers.” We have seen, however, that various Biblical writers extend the intended scope of divine moral inspiration beyond “the prophets, apostles, and Scripture writers” to all receptive people. This broad goal raises the question of why such inspiration seems to be relatively rare among humans. (We need not digress to complexities about possible degrees of moral inspiration.)

Part of the answer lies behind Paul’s injunction to the Christians at Thessalonica: “Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thess 5:19; cf. Eph 4:30). This injunction assumes, in keeping with many Biblical writers, that humans can, and sometimes do, resist and frustrate divine moral inspiration. The book of (second) Isaiah portrays divine patience toward human resistance to God’s Spirit:

The divine concern here is moral goodness for people who “walk in a way that is not good.” So, the concern is not just about disobeying a command; it goes deeper to what is morally good for humans. God’s offer of divine inspiration can prompt human rebellion to divine goodness, and when it does, any divine fruit on offer will be blocked from coming to its intended fruition in righteous relationships. A gift offered is not automatically a gift received, especially when humans need to struggle to receive a demanding gift foreign to some of their tendencies.

We now can see how an adequate Biblical theology should face a history of human conflict with divine creation and re-creation. Even though God takes the initiative in creation and re-creation for human goodness, a human response can be resistant or complacent, at least on some matters. The Biblical history of Israel is not unique in illustrating this drama of divine–human conflict over goodness in righteous relationships. The illustration continues under the new covenant, despite the effort of God’s Spirit to extend the divine family to Gentiles in righteousness after the example of Abraham, “the father of us all.” God, then, faces a moral problem among humans, as their moral response frustrates God’s aim for a righteous community, and many Biblical writers are forthright about his. So, an adequate Biblical theology will be problem-oriented in morality, particularly toward the problem for divine moral inspiration among wayward humans. Neglect of this problem would undermine a key Biblical storyline and thus the unity of Biblical theology.

The storyline under consideration has God opting for a gambit, a move of known risk for the sake of overcoming a challenge: the challenge to build an all-inclusive commonwealth of righteousness anchored and motivated by Spirit-inspired filial values. (On the goal of a divine commonwealth, see Isa 60:1–6, 65:17–25; cf. Dodd 1970: 81–97, and Dodd 1920: 139–59.) The divine risk is the human rejection of the intended divine moral inspiration seeking a universal commonwealth. The universal divine blessing promised through Abraham thus can be frustrated and blocked by human recalcitrance.

Proposing the divine coercion of moral inspiration and filial values among humans would be, from the perspective of many Biblical writers, a non-starter. Such coercion would disable a role for humans as morally responsible participants in the formation of the desired commonwealth. They would then be blocked from exercising their own wills and thus from being morally responsible agents who decide for or against the commonwealth on offer. The moral formation of the commonwealth, resting on morally responsible persons interacting with God’s Spirit, would be lost. The Biblical storyline of moral inspiration, however, does not resort to making humans pawns of the divine will. If it did, the multitude of Biblical injunctions to righteousness, in cooperation with God’s Spirit, would simply be deceptive and beside the point.

By giving humans limited autonomy, for the sake of their being morally responsible persons, God self-limits divine power. As a result, God is not in full control of humans and does not cause their immoral ways. Therefore, at least according to various Biblical writers, God is not causally responsible for the failure of the divine moral inspiration of uncooperative humans. Autonomous humans, in contrast, are likely suspects for blocking or hindering, at least at times, divine moral inspiration on offer to them. God, however, would not be required to offer such inspiration to a person at all times, because God would be in a position to tell if a person would be fully uncooperative in response. In such a case of conflict, God could hide from a person for a time, until that person is ready for a cooperative response. Such hiding could be a way for God to avoid a person’s doing self-harm in a response by creating further alienation from God (cf. Isa 45:15–15, Matt 11:25–26, Luke 10:21). (For elaboration, see Moser 2020, 2022.)

Skeptics, among others, have wondered if the risk of the divine gambit is worthwhile. Is it worthwhile to create and re-create for divine inspiration among humans if they often block the desired effect toward a righteous commonwealth and opt for some opposing goal? This worry emerges in the book of Exodus, where Moses implores God, on the heels of the golden calf debacle, not to destroy the rebellious people of Israel: “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’ And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people” (Exodus 32:13–14). The answer is suggested by “you swore to them by your own self.” God made a promise, out of God’s own moral character, to Abraham for human redemption for all families of the earth, and God as faithful will not break that character-based promise. God thus will not extinguish the candidates for the life promised by God, even “for the sake of ten” candidates (Gen 18:32).

The distinctive character behind the divine grand promise of life with God is a unique moral character. God reveals this character to Moses on Mount Sinai:

This divine character-portrait identifies who God is, and it makes sense of God’s enduring effort toward building an all-inclusive community from divine moral inspiration in spiritual values.

God’s moral character is confirmed in connection with the promised new covenant in the book of Jeremiah, complete with a stated concern for inward work in God’s people, “in their hearts”:

The emphasis here is on God’s faithfulness in “doing good” for people, particularly at the level of their hearts. Divine moral inspiration is the goal of that effort, despite human resistance on many fronts.

Perhaps the best summary of the divine motive for universal benefit is: “God so loved the world” (John 3:16), where the divine love is set on “doing good,” even inwardly and even toward enemies of God, as a matter of God’s perfect moral character (Matt 5:43–48). So, the Biblical storyline of divine moral inspiration unites Biblical theology, because it captures the divine moral character behind the storyline. That moral character grounds and motivates the storyline, even in the midst of repeated human efforts to block both the character and the storyline. Biblical theology will give adequate illumination only if it focuses on that character and its resulting storyline in ongoing moral conflict. The divine gambit of moral inspiration thus has a divine foundation: in the moral character of the God of the gambit.

Reality Check in Moral Inspiration

Biblical theology should attend to the storyline identified above, but it should not stop there. It must separate itself from a purely fictional storyline if it is to have credibility for human life. So, it must attend to what its own literary source acknowledges: people who “say in their hearts, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1). Even if some of those people are “fools,” as the psalmist alleges, not all such people are. Some people are simply confused and bewildered, given the complexity of the topic, and they lean toward what seems to be a safe response in denial of God’s reality. They may, however, be volitionally akin to people who respond to moral inspiration in the right way, and deserve commendation, while failing to recognize that God is at work among them (see Matt 25:31–46). In any case, a Biblical theology about God needs a reality check about God’s existence and goodness. We now can see how it has one in moral inspiration.

Biblical theologians who settle for a strictly “narrative” approach will miss out on our needed reality check, given that they are satisfied with the literary coherence (and related literary significance) of their story relative to the Biblical narratives. The moral inspiration approach offered here values such coherence but goes further to evidence in human experience for the reality and the goodness of the God implicated in the Biblical storyline. I thus take exception to Walter Brueggemann’s exclusive claim that “the God of Old Testament theology as such lives in, with, and under the rhetorical enterprise of this text, and nowhere else and in no other way” (1997: 66). Parts of the Old Testament text itself affirm that its God acts (and to that extent lives) outside the text, including in human experience, even long before the text was written. We have noted abundant evidence of this fact regarding God’s Spirit in creation and re-creation.

The key factor now is that divine moral inspiration goes beyond literary coherence to religious experience, past and present. So, we should ask: Does our moral experience bear witness to the kind of divine moral inspiration promised and described by the central Biblical storyline? If it does not, we should wonder if we are dealing with fiction in the Biblical storyline identified, such as the kind assumed by Freud (1939). If, however, it does bear witness, we should look more closely at the relevant evidence from this experience. We also should attend to a key criterion: If the alleged intentional God works for moral inspiration via the aforementioned filial values, we will find goal-directed influence of those values in some suitably attentive moral experience. That is, those values will “come alive” with the intentionality of an inspiring Spirit aimed at instilling divine righteousness in at least some receptive humans. So, inquirers about God and Biblical theology should attend to their moral experiences with this prospect in mind.

We can make sense now of a “moral experiment” for the reality of a morally inspiring God and the veracity of a corresponding Biblical theology. Edgar Sheffield Brightman has characterized evidential testing for God in general:

I am proposing, more narrowly, a moral experiment that can receive confirmation (or disconfirmation) over time from the nature of a person’s moral experience in relation to the filial values in question. If those values show evidence of aiming to lead one into deeper righ-teousness, say via conscience, that person has a prospect for confirmation. Many inquirers testify that their moral experience is indeed intentional, or goal-directed, in that manner. They often cite the role of conscience in their being led to conform to some of the relevant filial values, toward righteousness in relationships. If, in addition, enemy-love is included in the values, it serves as a quality that is rare among humans and antithetical to what appear to be their natural tendencies. A deeper source merits consideration.

When moral inspiration occurs in a person’s moral experience, that person should ask what best explains that experience, in terms of its sources. Such an appeal to best explanation is familiar not only in the sciences but also in everyday inductive inference. It is integral to our many efforts to understand the sources of our experiences in a reasonable way, and from that perspective it is above reproach. An important factor in its relevance to questions about God and Biblical theology is its bearing on our experience, including our moral experience, and not just on a literary story. This factor fits with the sources of Biblical theology assuming that God can give self-evidence and thus self-authentication in inspired human experience, because God has the moral character and the intentional causal power to do so. The relevant causal power is a matter of intentional causal influence in moral inspiration, and not coercion of a human will.

Variability of evidence regarding God is understandable if, as many Biblical writers indicate, moral inspiration for wayward humans is a divine goal. We have noted that part of the variability is explainable by human resistance to such inspiration and divine desire not to solidify that resistance. So, we should not expect the moral inspiration of some people to be universally shared, even though a divine goal, as indicated, is a universal commonwealth of divine moral inspiration.

Conclusion

If we approach Biblical theology through divine moral inspiration, we get not only a unified storyline that has been neglected, but also a Biblical theology that admits of needed testing in moral experiment for God’s reality and goodness. God’s inspiring Spirit, in that approach, has a vital role throughout Biblical theology that is irreducible to the role of the Jewish Torah and the role of Gentile conscience. We thus get a distinctive and resilient basis for a unified Biblical theology and a vital check on its veracity.