This is the Word of the Lord: Nicholas Wolterstorff’s account of scripture, appropriated discourse, and divine authorship

Scripture has traditionally been held to be the Word of God, authored by God. This understanding is commonly linked with, and seen as undergirded by, the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture. Yet it has proved difficult for theologians to arrive at a theory of inspiration which adequately grounds the concept of God’s authorship, while also doing justice to the human characteristics of Scripture. A specific challenge relates to texts where it would be nonsensical for God to say what the human author says, such as confessions of sin in the Psalms.
Against this background, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s book Divine Discourse is significant, because it attempts to reformulate the concept of Scripture as divine word, or discourse, utilising the concepts of speech-act theory, and double agency discourse. This thesis describes, evaluates and builds upon Wolterstorff’s proposal. It concludes that Wolterstorff’s concept of God appropriating human discourse is particularly powerful.
Doctrinally, it is argued that Wolterstorff’s concept of divine authorship through appropriation, in which appropriation is broadly identified with canonisation, is a coherent one. The thesis departs from Wolterstorff, however, in seeing divine authorship as taking place through both inspiration and appropriation. In hermeneutics, the appropriation concept is identified as key to understanding the cases referred to above, where God cannot be understood to say what the human author is saying. Here, the thesis builds on Wolterstorff, drawing on the work of Kit Barker, to argue that in certain cases, God appropriates the illocutions of the human author at a higher generic level. In some cases, it is argued, canonical appropriation can generate new divine generic level illocutions.