Me too Bob. This is not really, at least for me, about trying to convert each other to our respective views but perhaps it will provide some food for thought to others who are following the discussion.
It is not a simple binary of “inspired” vs “not inspired.” The self-revelation of God in the doing, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the fount of inspiration from which all inspiration flows. Some insights are very close to the source and others are further downstream in the flow of inspiration from the source. The Bible is, as your say, a progressive divine and human narrative of God acting in the world. It is in fact, a small library of distinct books rather than a monolith like the Koran. The Koran is claimed to be direct dictation passed through one man, Mohammed, in a cave. The Bible is a dynamic, collective narrative by a wide variety of writers spanning over a thousand years.
It is not about putting Jesus deeds over what he said. Much of what Jesus said before his resurrection was cryptic and not at all clear to his closest followers, the apostles. They were never clear about much of it. The fact that they scattered after his arrest and dared not be seen anywhere near Golgotha when he was crucified demonstrates this. They did not rush over to the tomb to see if his statements about his rising again (even after having witnessed Jesus resurrecting others) would be fulfilled until after some of Jesus’ female followers had gone there before them and discovered the empty tomb. The resurrection of Jesus is the key that unlocked the meaning of all that Jesus had previously said and did. Without the resurrection there would be no NT scriptures, there would be no believers and no Gospel at all to proclaim.
All there would be is the Jewish Tanakh, of interest to only a few million people at best. Orthodox and ultra Orthodox Jews who read the OT in the original Hebrew and understand the nuances of the Hebraism and Jewish thought do not conclude from that witness that Jesus of Nazareth is their long awaited Messiah. To the contrary, their reading of the scriptures concludes that Jesus does not meet any of the important criteria for identify the true Messiah. All the scriptures in the world will not lead to eternal life without the death and resurrection of Jesus, . The scriptures do not impart life, at best they are the witness to the Crucified and Resurrected One who is the Life
I do not assert that the Gospel cancels earlier themes in the biblical witness; no more than the relativity physics of Einstein and quantum physics negate the earlier Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics still has its place but it doesn’t go far and deep enough to illuminate the nature of physical reality. Likewise, the OT witness, for Christians at least, is a witness to the actual coming of the Living Word of God into the world. I do not confuse the witness with the object that is being witnessed.
So once again it is the object, Jesus Christ, of that witness that is determinative and not the other way around…
Quite frankly, I have used some exegesis in this thread by highlighting some critical texts and expounding on the etymology of certain key words both through consulting several translations and researching what Koine Greek and ancient Hebrew scholars have determined to be the original intended meaning of those words. But that approach has not been fruitful in this discussion and results in a merry go round effect. So that is why I emphasized the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be determinative and have identified its irreducible core: the death and resurrection of Jesus.
I find this all very ironic. Here we are two individuals who have the hope for the universal reconciliation and salvation of all things by God. We are both part of a very small minority on the fringe of what is considered Christian belief. Heretics even, by the reckoning of not an insignificant number of Christians. When you compare that to the entire human population of the planet our hope is held by almost a vanishingly small number of individuals. Do you really believe that through additional rigorous exegesis and debate that suddenly there will arise a general consensus, let alone a unanimous one, of the truth of universal salvation that will sweep the world before it all falls apart? The only event that will achieve such an effect will be the event of the Parousia itself, when the foundation (the slain Lamb)–the common ground upon which all things rest-- of the new creation will be beheld by all.
That understanding of judgment is found in the OT, it is the tsedeq (justice) of God as seen in the book of Judges and declared by the later Hebrew prophets like Isaiah. To judge is to save, to rescue; it is not the punitive justice of Rome or the present day “justice” dished out by the judicial systems of the world.
For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own choosing, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of the children of God. How are we set free from the bondage of decay? By being chastised and punished for being in a condition that God put us in? No, God takes full responsibility for all of it. How do we know this? Jesus, the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the cosmos hanging on a Roman cross for all the world to see. How do we become the Children of God? By the new birth of the resurrection. How can we hope for such an audacious and radical event as the resurrection of all–the very death of death itself that changes absolutely everything about everything? Because the Risen One is also the Crucified One who took upon Himself the full consequences of all the wrongs inflicted and suffered by all that have ever lived.