"The evangelical intuition is correct: the Bible is what it says it is, namely, God’s word. The God of Scripture speaks, and Scripture is a result of that divine speaking. The grounding theological insight of an evangelical doctrine of Scripture is that God himself is doing things in and through the human discourse of the Bible in order personally to relate to his people. Indeed, God so invests and identifies himself in his words that to fail to respond to the word of God is to disobey God himself. The Bible, then, is itself one of God’s mighty acts, a form of God’s own communicative presence. Without these scriptural acts we would have no reliable means of interpreting god’s acts in history. According to the Scriptures, however, God’s revelatory words always accompany God’s redemptive deeds. We can go further: according to the Scriptures, God often acts in the world by speaking. When God speaks, he is also doing thing with words (e.g., commanding promising, warning etc.). It follows that Scripture is a medium of God’s communicative activity and thus an extension, as it were, of his personal presence. To view the Bible as composed of diverse divine speech acts is to overcome the long-standing dichotomy in evangelicalism between propositionalists, for whom the Bible is a book of divinely revealed information, and pietists, for whom the Bible is primarily a means of personal address and spiritual sustenance. The way out of this head vs. heart cul-de-sac is to recognize that God relates personally to his people precisely by doing various things with propositions beyond merely informing. The Bible is the God-ordained means of communicating the terms, and the reality of the covenant whose content is the God-ordained means of communicating the terms, and the reality, of the covenant whose content is Jesus Christ. What is God saying/doing in Scripture? He is administering his covenant: promising, commanding, exhorting comforting, and in general presenting himself (and his Son) while simultaneously soliciting our response. God is relating to his people as Savior and Lord via the medium of written words. God is as agree to do this as he was free to relate to the apostles via the medium of the living Word, the humanity of Jesus. As to the Bible’s humanity,” it is fully buy not merely a human product. Like the church, Scripture is a fully human phenomenon subject to the contingencies of language, culture and society. There is therefore a place for reason to examine what the authors likely meant given their historical context. Yet the discourse of the discourse of the Bible is also god’s communicative work: God-voices, God-worded, God-breathed. The Old Testament prophets were “moved by the Holy Spirit” and “spoke from God” (2 Pet. 1:21). Those who deny verbal inspiration typically have diluted view of divine providence. But is it harder to move an apostle to write an epistle than to raise a man from the dead? Evangelicals believe that this “moving” is not oppressive but organic, an instance of god’s providential ordering and preparation of both author and situation. The human discourse has integrity, but is ultimately commissioned, enabled, and authorized by the divine playwright who coordinates diverse voice into a rich harmonic canonical whole.”"