Perhaps you've come across this argumentative strategy that cautions that if evangelicals opt for any other articulation of biblical authority than traditional inerrancy than a slippery slope to "liberalism" and "unbelief" becomes unavoidable:
"But direct conflict with Scripture is not the only difficulty that limited inerrancy faces. It faces other difficulties due to the over-arching role of God’s words. One significant point made in the Bible is that other things besides the Bible are God’s words. God’s word includes (a) words of Jesus not recorded in the Bible (John 21:24–25), (b) the direct speech of God to Abraham, Moses, and others when he appeared to them (“personal address”), (c) God’s word of power by which he rules the universe (Heb. 1:3; cf. Ps. 33:6), and (d) the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity (John 1:1, Rev. 19:13). If the Bible, the word of God, contains muck, perhaps some of these other words contain muck too. How can we be sure that they don’t? Several positions are possible.
A. Muck (or the possibility of muck) is in fact introduced only when there is a human intermediary such as Moses or Paul. God’s words of personal address and God’s ruling word of power are always and infallibly free of muck.
B. Muck may occur even in God’s words of personal address to Abraham, Moses, etc.
C. Muck may occur even in God’s words in the intra-Trinitarian communication, and in God the Son.
All these positions have difficulties of a severe kind. The most serious is C. To be sure, we must remember that the muck consists only in complete nonessentials, in details of the minutest kind. But nevertheless, the conclusion is inescapable: God himself is mucked up. The Persons of the Trinity do not communicate exhaustively. Consequently, a separation is introduced in the Trinity, and one obtains incipient tritheism. If the Son alone has muck, one descends to a form of Arianism.
Let us see where position B leads. Can muck occur also in God’s words to other creatures besides men? Only men are fallen, it is true, but creation is under a curse. And one must remember the possibility that muck is introduced by man’s ignorance as well as by his sin. Other creatures are still more ignorant than man, so may we suppose that there is more muck? Perhaps, then, there is muck scattered through the word of power by which God upholds the universe. If the clear passages speaking of the purity of the Bible do not exclude muck, much less can we exclude muck from these other words, which are much less essential to salvation.
But see how disastrous this is. Nothing at all happens apart from God’s will (Eph. 1:11), or apart from God’s command (Lam. 3:37–38; cf. Ps. 147:15, Heb. 1:3). Hence everything gets contaminated with muck." (V. Poythress, "Problems For Limited Inerrancy,"JETS 18 [1975]: 93-102, http://www.frame-poythress.org/poythress_articles/1975Problems.htm)
Poythress takes two morals away from the discussion:
1) "[I]t is easy for the guns of criticism employed by limited inerrantists to be selectively aimed at the Bible, far more than at their modern environment, their own techniques, their own ethical standards, their own persons, or their own language. It is easy to imitate the bulk of critical scholarship that practices selective aim. But one wonders whether it is conducive to a healthy spiritual attitude."
2) "[M]uck can be conclusively found in the Bible only by those who have some source that is in some respect more free of muck than the Bible itself."
Regarding (1), there may very well be no objective set of criteria that I can articulate that works in every case to tell us when and when not to employ criticism. Such criteria may not be forthcoming. Yet I have found that using "the guns of criticism" to explode the inerrantist ultimatum to be highly conducive to a healthy spiritual attitude. I say with full assurance that gaining freedom from the inerrantists' reins can prove highly beneficial to a number of believers. Just because one finds some fault with the scriptures does not necessitate the full blown use of criticism on every part equally. If a friend makes a few mistakes, it is not always necessary now to question every single action and motive relentlessly. The non-inerrantists I write for are not interested in destroying the friendship; quite the contrary, we are trying to make it work!
Regarding (2), this idea of having an ultimate source of revelation is confused, I think. We all use our reason and experience to make judgments, even inerrantists do this. Everybody has to make genre judgments, everybody has to decide whether something in scripture is intended literally or figuratively, everybody has a decision to make with regard to whether some biblical stipulation applies today or not. We are all in the same boat. That's what my book tries to highlight: that oftentimes it's tradition that floats the boat not inerrancy. There is no gain in upholding an authoritative line of tradition under the pretenses of an inerrant Bible. Right now it seems to me that a non-inerrantist would have more critical freedom to admit this and less fear to see the Bible, warts and all, with a chance, perhaps, of better understanding what the Bible actually is as it has actually been given to us.
I think there is too much freedom in this position for inerrantists. Too much potential chaos, uncertainty, muck. But that seems to be the kind of life that Christians have been given. God is not waiting to strike every believer's muck with a bolt of lightning. We are free to talk about these things and investigate: figure out where to go from here. It's about time (isn't it?) that younger evangelicals be given some pointers on how they might begin living this kind of uncertain and chaotic life in Christ.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Inerrancy and academic personality types
During a connversation elsewhere, Kent Sparks (author of God's Words in Human Words) makes the following observation:
"My experience is that evangelicalism has in their midst at least four kinds of scholars. First, there are those who really don’t know the critical evidence (because they found a grad program in which they could avoid it) and so don’t teach it or, if they do teach it, they present the criticism as a straw man that’s easily bested by their fundamentalism. Second, there are scholars who know something about the evidence and recognize that it’s problematic, but their response is “Hey, we just don’t know everything.” These scholars don’t give much attention to the critical issues because for any number of reasons they don’t want to take the time to mess with it. I call these, the “Don’t worry be happy” scholars. In the Enns situation, they are the scholars who think its bad business that Pete’s in trouble, they realize why Pete thinks what he thinks, but they don’t have the courage to say something in his support. Third, there are evangelicals who know the critical evidence quite well and privately recognize the serious problems that it creates for standard evangelical theology, but in actual scholarship and discourse they handle themselves pretty much like those in category 2. One only knows their real views in private. Finally, we have what I’d now call the “Pete Enns” evangelicals. They recognize the problems and are ready to engage them for the sake of God and kingdom."
His observation is only the tip of the iceberg. For if Kent’s taxonomy of professors is helpful, then an analogous taxonomy can also be used to categorize students and the two can be juxtaposed. I’m interested to see what dynamics are set off by mixing and matching each type of professor with each type of student.
Professor: A B C D
Student: A B C D
This is probably the conservative ideal and how, incidentally it sometimes pans out at conservative schools–where there is a match, I mean, between what students expect and what teachers teach–because schools tend to hire and retain based on how well faculty can promote the institutional/denominational agenda they wish to pursue. Institutional tension tend to build over time, I imagine, when there’s a kind of cross-breeding between teachers and students.
Professor: A B C D
Student: D C B A
or
Professor: A B C D
Student: C D A B
and so forth.
There’s a potential for such disparity that both parties (teachers and students) are bound to frustrate both themselves and each other, and grievances to that effect can overflow to administrations. That might help explain why conservative schools tend to hire people who either graduated from that school or from a comparable institution. Westminster hire’s mostly WTS grads, PBU mostly PBU affiliates, and so forth.
Now when A’s and D’s teach at the same school, that takes a toll on students, especially the A’s and D’s among them. First, plenty of A’s don’t know that D’s exist, whenever they encounter them, they think they don’t care about the faith. Second, D’s get to see A’s “in the flesh.” They’d heard about A’s and can’t help but find them an embarrassment to the faith. Third, it’s very tempting for D’s to go around bursting peoples bubbles and take not a little satisfaction in doing so. Fourth, there’s a great temptation for A’s to publicly question D’s doctrinal integrity and take not a little satisfaction in doing that. Fifth, there is such a disparity between the A’s and D’s that sometimes they won’t even have the same values (or at least not order them the same way, which can have the same practical effect): preserve the tradition vs. engage critical scholarship, making it hard for them to work together: grades each others papers, hear each others lectures, etc. Sixth, a competition can ensue between the A’s and D’s to gain support from the B’s and C’s. Thus, a social insider-outsider dynamic develops. Seventh, the entire interface involving the different “types” of professor/student is interpreted cosmologically and soteriologically, making it very difficult to for anyone to get along and for productive conversations to take place.
I could keep going but I myself don’t see any satisfactory gesture of reconciliation on the horizon for any of this, given such a complex social, philosophical, psychological and theological matrix of relationships within which teacher-student interactions take place. A first step in the right direction would be for some well-known evangelical personae to convincingly introduce a new metaphor that has nothing to do with "error" and to have such cultural and scholarly influence as to make it stick within some demographic segment of evangelicalism. At least, that would be a start.
[Kent's remarks (as well as my response) were made during the course of a very long thread on
'Conn-versation': http://connversation.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/sparks-on-evangelical-objections-to-accomodation-in-scripture/#comments, comment 76]
"My experience is that evangelicalism has in their midst at least four kinds of scholars. First, there are those who really don’t know the critical evidence (because they found a grad program in which they could avoid it) and so don’t teach it or, if they do teach it, they present the criticism as a straw man that’s easily bested by their fundamentalism. Second, there are scholars who know something about the evidence and recognize that it’s problematic, but their response is “Hey, we just don’t know everything.” These scholars don’t give much attention to the critical issues because for any number of reasons they don’t want to take the time to mess with it. I call these, the “Don’t worry be happy” scholars. In the Enns situation, they are the scholars who think its bad business that Pete’s in trouble, they realize why Pete thinks what he thinks, but they don’t have the courage to say something in his support. Third, there are evangelicals who know the critical evidence quite well and privately recognize the serious problems that it creates for standard evangelical theology, but in actual scholarship and discourse they handle themselves pretty much like those in category 2. One only knows their real views in private. Finally, we have what I’d now call the “Pete Enns” evangelicals. They recognize the problems and are ready to engage them for the sake of God and kingdom."
His observation is only the tip of the iceberg. For if Kent’s taxonomy of professors is helpful, then an analogous taxonomy can also be used to categorize students and the two can be juxtaposed. I’m interested to see what dynamics are set off by mixing and matching each type of professor with each type of student.
Professor: A B C D
Student: A B C D
This is probably the conservative ideal and how, incidentally it sometimes pans out at conservative schools–where there is a match, I mean, between what students expect and what teachers teach–because schools tend to hire and retain based on how well faculty can promote the institutional/denominational agenda they wish to pursue. Institutional tension tend to build over time, I imagine, when there’s a kind of cross-breeding between teachers and students.
Professor: A B C D
Student: D C B A
or
Professor: A B C D
Student: C D A B
and so forth.
There’s a potential for such disparity that both parties (teachers and students) are bound to frustrate both themselves and each other, and grievances to that effect can overflow to administrations. That might help explain why conservative schools tend to hire people who either graduated from that school or from a comparable institution. Westminster hire’s mostly WTS grads, PBU mostly PBU affiliates, and so forth.
Now when A’s and D’s teach at the same school, that takes a toll on students, especially the A’s and D’s among them. First, plenty of A’s don’t know that D’s exist, whenever they encounter them, they think they don’t care about the faith. Second, D’s get to see A’s “in the flesh.” They’d heard about A’s and can’t help but find them an embarrassment to the faith. Third, it’s very tempting for D’s to go around bursting peoples bubbles and take not a little satisfaction in doing so. Fourth, there’s a great temptation for A’s to publicly question D’s doctrinal integrity and take not a little satisfaction in doing that. Fifth, there is such a disparity between the A’s and D’s that sometimes they won’t even have the same values (or at least not order them the same way, which can have the same practical effect): preserve the tradition vs. engage critical scholarship, making it hard for them to work together: grades each others papers, hear each others lectures, etc. Sixth, a competition can ensue between the A’s and D’s to gain support from the B’s and C’s. Thus, a social insider-outsider dynamic develops. Seventh, the entire interface involving the different “types” of professor/student is interpreted cosmologically and soteriologically, making it very difficult to for anyone to get along and for productive conversations to take place.
I could keep going but I myself don’t see any satisfactory gesture of reconciliation on the horizon for any of this, given such a complex social, philosophical, psychological and theological matrix of relationships within which teacher-student interactions take place. A first step in the right direction would be for some well-known evangelical personae to convincingly introduce a new metaphor that has nothing to do with "error" and to have such cultural and scholarly influence as to make it stick within some demographic segment of evangelicalism. At least, that would be a start.
[Kent's remarks (as well as my response) were made during the course of a very long thread on
'Conn-versation': http://connversation.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/sparks-on-evangelical-objections-to-accomodation-in-scripture/#comments, comment 76]
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Ehrman's significance
Last night at the NOBTS Ehrman-Wallace showdown, Bart spoke in a way to maximize his "shock" effect and Dan spoke in a way to minimize Bart's shock effect. Bart chided Dan for intellectualizing the problem and for trying to tell the audience (which was pretty packed and seemed to be mostly students) that everything's ok, to just put things in perspective. Bart kept coming back to the point that we do not have originals or anything close to it, e.g., our earliest copy of Galatians is 150 years after Paul wrote it. There is no way to tell if it is even close to what the original said. Given his experience in textual criticism, it probably isn't, but even if it is, there's no way to know that it is.
Bart remarked that people should stop worrying so much about their theology and try to hear what he's saying: theology should not be the only criterion used to judge whether textual variants are significant. Any way one slices things, we have copies of copies of copies and every copy has mistakes. [He even suggested that there were probably some mistakes in the originals where someone who was taking dictation didn't get some of Paul's words right, for example.] He explained that he has long since decided that it's time to stop talking about originals--textual critics have already accomplished the exceptional feat of establishing a version of the text that is as close to the the originals as humanly possible. Now it's time to fess up and say that scholars' best reconstruction of the NT (which is an amazing scholarly accomplishment) is still centuries away from the time of writing. What did the very first copies look like? We will never know, in fact, we should stop asking that question.
Bart was taken to task for being overly skeptic and for not taking inventory and comparing the situation of the NT with that of other ancient works. Yet Wallace was very careful to delineate just how much agreement there is between him and Ehrman and that if each of them were to reconstruct the NT independently, the end results would only differ in a dozen or so places. Wallace's question was, "so what?" So what if we can't have absolute certainly? So what if we'll never know what the original said? No major doctrine is effected. Bart's response was very illuminating: doctrine is not the point. I could take out Mark, Phillipians and Revelation and say these whole books are spurious and not a single doctrine would be effected, he remarked.
The point I take away from this is that people hold to doctrines for a host of different reasons, but if people were to examine why they believe, they would find that they do not hold to doctrines because of evidence. People should take a look and see if they've been fed a lie. Bart knows that there's enought that hasn't been disclosed to shake up his various audiences, who seem primarily to be Christian believers. Wallace, for his part, candidly countered that he himself finally changed his mind about the Majority Text after 17 years because of the evidence. That may be the case, but not everybody is as lucky as Wallace---to be able to work full-time for 17 years toward the resolution of a problem. The significance of Ehrman's work, whether his "we don't know what the Bible says" argument is right or wrong, is that he's making people see either what they've never been told about before or what they've never really taken the time to see and making them wonder why their teachers and tutors in the faith never told them about this stuff before. I commended Bart for his work when I talked with him and I wish him the best of success.
Bart remarked that people should stop worrying so much about their theology and try to hear what he's saying: theology should not be the only criterion used to judge whether textual variants are significant. Any way one slices things, we have copies of copies of copies and every copy has mistakes. [He even suggested that there were probably some mistakes in the originals where someone who was taking dictation didn't get some of Paul's words right, for example.] He explained that he has long since decided that it's time to stop talking about originals--textual critics have already accomplished the exceptional feat of establishing a version of the text that is as close to the the originals as humanly possible. Now it's time to fess up and say that scholars' best reconstruction of the NT (which is an amazing scholarly accomplishment) is still centuries away from the time of writing. What did the very first copies look like? We will never know, in fact, we should stop asking that question.
Bart was taken to task for being overly skeptic and for not taking inventory and comparing the situation of the NT with that of other ancient works. Yet Wallace was very careful to delineate just how much agreement there is between him and Ehrman and that if each of them were to reconstruct the NT independently, the end results would only differ in a dozen or so places. Wallace's question was, "so what?" So what if we can't have absolute certainly? So what if we'll never know what the original said? No major doctrine is effected. Bart's response was very illuminating: doctrine is not the point. I could take out Mark, Phillipians and Revelation and say these whole books are spurious and not a single doctrine would be effected, he remarked.
The point I take away from this is that people hold to doctrines for a host of different reasons, but if people were to examine why they believe, they would find that they do not hold to doctrines because of evidence. People should take a look and see if they've been fed a lie. Bart knows that there's enought that hasn't been disclosed to shake up his various audiences, who seem primarily to be Christian believers. Wallace, for his part, candidly countered that he himself finally changed his mind about the Majority Text after 17 years because of the evidence. That may be the case, but not everybody is as lucky as Wallace---to be able to work full-time for 17 years toward the resolution of a problem. The significance of Ehrman's work, whether his "we don't know what the Bible says" argument is right or wrong, is that he's making people see either what they've never been told about before or what they've never really taken the time to see and making them wonder why their teachers and tutors in the faith never told them about this stuff before. I commended Bart for his work when I talked with him and I wish him the best of success.
What? Inerrancy's not true? And you already knew?
I got to speak briefly to Bart Ehrman tonight. (I’m at the Ehrman-Wallace debate at NOBTS.) I asked Wallace a question during the Q&A: If scholars who are believers have known the kinds of things Bart writes about for a hundred years or more, why is it that people have to wait for someone like Bart to come around and be the one to tell them? Bart remarked when I talked with him afterwards that he thought that was a great question and that he has yet to hear a decent answer to it. Immediately James Barr’s insistence that evangelicals apologize to critical scholars came to mind (as I mention in the preface to my book).
I think there is this real and terrible feeling of being “had.” Teachers, in order to be perceived as “real” and “true” Christians, keep quiet about things they privately hold to be right. They keep quiet precisely because they’ll get in some trouble (like Pete Enns is in right now) if they say too much in public. It takes someone like Bart Ehrman to get believers to relate their dirty secrets to the rest of evangelicalism. That forces conservatives to speak up: we’ve known about this for a long time now, it’s just that we’ve been too “timid” (as Wallace put it in his answer to my question during Q&A) to talk about it up till now. Students feel “had” when they find out the truth, the truth that teachers knew all along. There’s a much lower sympathy for conservative theological systems when students feel like those enforcing them are pulling the wool over students’ eyes. Enforcers, too, disagree amongst themselves, but this tends to get hidden behind what one is allowed to say in public (which is not necessarily what one would like to say with regard to where one stands with regard to scripture).
Interestingly enough, Wallace mentioned that the first time a doctrine of preservation (of scripture) had ever been articulated was in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Both Ehrman and Wallace agreed that there’s no way a doctrine of preservation could withstand scrutiny given the overwhelming preponderance of NT manuscripts, translations and citations that have been studied. The OT offers even more of a problem since there are places in the OT that do not even have enough evidence to venture a plausible conjecture as to what the wording should be. No preservation? Why didn't they tell us sooner rather than later (when it really is too late)?
I think there is this real and terrible feeling of being “had.” Teachers, in order to be perceived as “real” and “true” Christians, keep quiet about things they privately hold to be right. They keep quiet precisely because they’ll get in some trouble (like Pete Enns is in right now) if they say too much in public. It takes someone like Bart Ehrman to get believers to relate their dirty secrets to the rest of evangelicalism. That forces conservatives to speak up: we’ve known about this for a long time now, it’s just that we’ve been too “timid” (as Wallace put it in his answer to my question during Q&A) to talk about it up till now. Students feel “had” when they find out the truth, the truth that teachers knew all along. There’s a much lower sympathy for conservative theological systems when students feel like those enforcing them are pulling the wool over students’ eyes. Enforcers, too, disagree amongst themselves, but this tends to get hidden behind what one is allowed to say in public (which is not necessarily what one would like to say with regard to where one stands with regard to scripture).
Interestingly enough, Wallace mentioned that the first time a doctrine of preservation (of scripture) had ever been articulated was in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Both Ehrman and Wallace agreed that there’s no way a doctrine of preservation could withstand scrutiny given the overwhelming preponderance of NT manuscripts, translations and citations that have been studied. The OT offers even more of a problem since there are places in the OT that do not even have enough evidence to venture a plausible conjecture as to what the wording should be. No preservation? Why didn't they tell us sooner rather than later (when it really is too late)?
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