evangelicalinerrancy.com

Eric David Bovell, May 10, 1982 - September 21, 2009

2009-09-29T23:29:00.006-04:00

On May 10, 1982, Eric was born out on Long Island. When Eric came into the world, his two older brothers already had two of the small bedrooms in a three bedroom ranch. So it was not long after Eric was born that we all had found our new home in Toms River. Growing up I remember the good-natured and mild-mannered kid that Eric was and that he always aspired to be. Being the youngest, Eric was always anxious to sort out where he fit in the pecking order. Six and eight years younger than his older brothers, at times he would remark to me, at least in his own way, that it was almost like being an only child. I recall while very young he was always content to be included in activities with his brothers and he also liked to play with the dog, Misty, and eat Ellios pizza. And as time went on, he formed new friendships at school. We’d all try to reconnect now and again by playing video games on Nintendo and we’d try to figure out which games were definitively ‘blawe.’

It did not take long for Eric to develop his love for music. When we used to talk about music many years ago, his tastes were generally rhythmic and consonant. It seemed like he was taking a liking to the more melodic tunes so long as they hadn’t become too popular, for there was nothing that Eric despised more than commercialized musicology. He changed his opinion frequently on songs when he felt they were played too widely. Eric was an underground kid at heart and the underground is no longer underground when the majority can enjoy it. So there had to be something to set the music apart. Eric was always looking for musical innovation, looking for musical cultures that either had not yet been recognized or perhaps had already received exposure but had been subsequently shunned. The underground is where Eric would go for relaxation, for his meditations and his contemplations. He loved engaging musical works from whatever genre he found and then would try his best to claim them spiritually as his own. Eric made sure that what music he had was really his own and not everyone else’s because that is how he began to define himself, over against the mainstream, over against everyone else. For if and when the music he liked got discovered by the mainstream, he would abandon it at once and search for something else, some other up-and-coming or maybe something older that had long since been forgotten.

With time, Eric became an exceptional drummer. I remember how he co-opted my first drum set that we had gone all the way to Sam Ash to buy. It was not being used anymore, sitting there collecting dust, but Eric touched them with his magical sticks and morphed them into a percussive orchestra. There were only five pieces in that old Pearl set but he made it sound like there might have been a hundred. Although he always kept his ear for rhythm, over time he became less interested in the melodic and began experimenting with drum loops, dissonance and drone. He took more of an “electric” turn, looking for newer, faster, and fresher sounds that he could try out. Eric gradually grew to become a coffee-loving, soy-eating musician who was always looking for something new, looking to try out new things and explore new looks and new sounds, even willing to go underground to find these things if he had to since the underground is typically where the action is when it comes to the things that he sought out.

Regarding redemption, I knew Eric to be authentically Christian, having genuinely talked and prayed with him many times about Christ and about religion. For a season, we explored some of the Christian music scene together, this was something like twelve years ago. Once we tried to get a mosh pit going at a church concert that we had driven two hours to get to. The ushers came over and told us to stop and decided that we needed to be watched the rest of the time from either side of the pew where we had been dancing. The name of the band that played was Clash of Symbols, an a propos description of Eric’s emotional struggle. Eric was an intense kid, intense in his search for meaning, intense in his search for understanding, intense in his search for peace. I think it bears repeating at the memorial of his death what Eric spent his life trying his best to learn in the midst of all his intensity:

“Wherever we may be in our search for healthy relationships, we have to begin where we are today. It may be painful to think how much better our relationships could have—or should have—been. There’s no point in criticizing ourselves when we did the best we could with what we had. We can gain peace of mind by putting aside what we could or should have done and by accepting who and where we are right now.”

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

Shalom, Eric, shalom.

(Citations: AL-ANON, Discovering Choices; Serenity Prayer.)

Inerrancy not the only way to submit to God

2009-09-20T12:33:00.003-04:00

Some conservative professors have related that they experienced the battle for the Bible back in the 70s and that although there were some extreme personalities who made inerrancy into an all-or-nothing type of crusade, there were still plenty of other more balanced writers who showed that evangelicals should still espouse inerrantism as the historic, orthodox position.

During some spare time (which has been very hard to come by these days), I reread a few such works. As a result, I do not agree with those who advise believers who are uneasy about inerrancy that they would benefit from tracking down sources from the 70s and 80s and see for themselves how more knowledgable inerrantists presented compelling cases for conservative inerrantism.

In my experience tracking down and rereading, Inerrancy and Common Sense, for example, I did not feel afterward that it was worth the time and effort (emphasis on time in my case) to engage the positions presented. To take one example, I was appreciative that Roger Nicole pointed out that inerrancy is neither a necessary nor sufficient "standard for evangelical truth." But Nicole goes on to explain what appears to him to be on the line when it comes to whether or not someone should adopt inerrantism:

"What is supremely at stake in this whole discussion is the recognition of the authority of God in the sacred oracles. Are we going to submit unconditionally to the voice of God who has spoken? Or, are we going to insist on screening the message of the Bible, accepting only what appears palatable and remaining free to reject what does not conform to our preconceived criteria? This is really the great divide, and those who stress inerrancy are simply aiming to maintain what they view as the consistent biblical stance on this issue" (R. Nicole, "The Nature of Inerrancy," in Inerrancy and Common Sense [1980], 94).

Not a few contemporary evangelicals who were originally on board with this line of thinking have decided to give up on inerrantism precisely because it has occurred to them that inerrancy has become the preconceived criterion that Nicole is talking about. In their view, non-inerrantist alternatives are unpalatable to inerrantists precisely because inerrantists are screening the phenomena of the Bible and accepting only those features that can be spun in an inerrantist way. They feel free to reject whatever does not fit into this mold and even count it a pious act to do so.

Someone like Nicole likely understands all this, but it does not impinge upon his promotion of inerrantism. Many evangelicals who disavow inerrancy do so precisely because they are trying to submit unconditionally to God. The difference is that, to them, inerrancy actually gets in the way of being able to do so. Scripture is said to be God-breathed, but for many inerrancy simply has not panned out as a spiritually fruitful way to articulate this kind of belief.

"It is more nearly correct": fideism, evolution, Hans Frei and resurrection

2009-08-21T21:02:00.005-04:00

I was recently thinking about the conundrum a believer may encounter if it turns out that events where God has truly acted look exactly like events where he has not acted. Now I'm not really sure what it would mean for God to "act." However, in this case, I am specifically trying to imagine a scenario where if there were some event that God wanted to use to "judge" his followers or "say" something to them, anything at all, and if Christians believe that that event will probably look just like any other event where God does not "mean" to "say" anything at all, then that seems to me to pose a big problem for talking about events in such a way that God would want to "say" anything through them. If there really is no difference, then there simply is no way to tell whether God is "saying" anything by way of some event--at least not by looking at the event. Where must we look then to make this kind of decision if we cannot look to the event? We have to look inside our heads and try to decide best we can how we want (ought?) to interpret what has happened and this seems to me to get kind of sticky and that very quickly.

Let me try to explain. This particular line of thinking--that if God works through some event, it will not look much different from when he does not work through an event--brings to mind how cognitive and neuro- scientists are saying that the human brain has evolved in such a way that it constantly joins together disparate events and endlessly tries to construe them into some coherent narrative. When it happens to do so in a salient way, the narrative keeps and informs our conscious reflection. In recently reading D. J. Linden's The Accidental Mind, for example, I came across the following: "Religious ideas are similarly formed by transforming everyday perceptions, by building coherent narratives that bridge otherwise disparate concepts and entities." (230) This is the brain doing this, according to Linden, it is "the left cortex's always-on narrative-constructing function" that doing this building of a narrative to join together disparate concepts, objects, and events. Interestingly enough, Linden's observations dovetail Justin Barrett's theory that human brains have evolved in such a way that we find agency over and over again where there simply is none. (See his Why Do People Believe in God? I did a synopsis piece on these views that ended up as an article in Theology Today, see my publications list for more info.) Our brains are always looking for "agency" in events and trying to construct narratives within which the identification of agency and a "theory of mind" would help make sense of things.

For example, I am convinced that the Bible is inspired to the effect that the Holy Spirit somehow reaches out to believers when they read it in a way that he does not reach out when they read other literature. But others might read the Bible and not think that this happens or they might read the Bible in such a way that the Holy Spirit does not relate himself to readers in any efficacious way. This might be an interesting thing to think about, but the inspiration of the Bible is a peripheral issue. So I set the issue of Bible reading aside and moved on to thinking about God acting in real space-time, that is, in actual history, specifically in the historical death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Presumably Jesus' death looked the same to everyone who watched it and some think God was at work there in a significant way and others do not. And even Jesus' resurrection, insofar as people who saw it believe that it happened, might have looked the same to everyone who saw it, but let's say for argument's sake that everyone who did see Jesus resurrected believed God to be at work in a special way, their narrative descriptions of what exactly God was doing might have still taken them in different directions.

But the question I still pose to myself every now and again is: what role would the evolution of the brain, a brain that actively seeks out agency and often gets it wrong, a brain that is always trying to make up some narrative to make sense of data, contribute to a resurrection account, especially to ones that ended up being written decades after the fact? And where does that leave us thousands of years after the fact (with our brains still (over-)actively looking for agency and desperately seeking to make up narratives to help us make sense of things)?

I'm not sure where that leaves us, but I tried to consider whether there are ways to faithfully conceive of the resurrection that might still leave room for all this brain-having-evolved-to-invent-religious-stories stuff and permit one to continue operating within something like a Christian world-view. I conducted a thought-experiment, as it were, and pretended that maybe my brain really did decide to take up the Christian story as my own precisely because of its (my brain's) evolutionary history and my (and my brain's?) cultural conditioning. In other words, I conceded, hypothetically at least, that this is what my brain might actually be doing, indeed what it has evolved to do, at least given the cultural moment within which it finds itself. My brain drew the conclusion that Christ rose from the dead and that's the main reason why I believe. But if this is how things panned out for me, that should still be fine, shouldn't it? (This is all hypothetical now.) Does it really matter if I believe for these seemingly natural reasons? Well, for the moment I am encouraged that an affirmative answer to this question is kind of like the conclusion (at least I think it's kind of like the conclusion) that is latent in the work of Hans Frei.

"What kinds of affirmation would be involved in belief in Jesus' resurrection? I think it would mean much more nearly a belief in the inspiredness of the accounts than that they reflected what 'actually took place'...The New Testament authors, especially Luke and Paul, were right in insisting that it is more nearly correct to think of Jesus as factually raised, bodily if you will, than not to think of him in this manner (even though the qualification 'more nearly...than not' is important in order to guard against speculative explanation of resurrection). The judgment that they were right is in part at any rate a matter of a particular understading of what identity means, what and where the identity of Jesus is to be found most directly in the Gospel accounts (i.e., in the crucifixion-resurrection sequence) and where the transition from the literary description to factual, historical, and theological judgment is to be made: precisely in that sequence. I think further that both because what is said to have happened here is, if true, beyond verification...and because the account we have and could most likely expect to have in testimony to it are more nearly like novels than like history writing, there is no historical evidence that counts in favor of the claim that Jesus was resurrected...On the other hand I believe that, because it is more nearly fact-like than not, reliable historical evidence against the resurrection would tend to falsify it decisively, and that the forthcoming of such evidence is conceivable." (The Identity of Jesus Christ, 44-45, emphasis mine, although "against" was italicized in the original)

So the resurrection might be falsified some day. That seems like a good thing, that it is always open to investigation. I mean Christianity might ultimately be a cultural meme that has proven salient enough that brains in 21st century America (and elsewhere) might easily adopt it. Would this disprove the resurrection? After all, Christianity is really supposed to be a fundamentally historical religion and as such should be modified according to any evidences that happen to impinge upon it. Yet Christianity does not appear to depend on evidence, does it? A non-evidentialist "foundation" for faith seems more in line with how Christians come to faith and how they end up doing theology. Faith seems to depend more on theological imagination and on inspired literary descriptions of the crucifixion-resurrection sequence than on historical evidence. Now this is a rather different way of looking at things than the way I have been taught to understand evangelical faith within evangelical churches. But I think Frei is more right than he is wrong when he says that some horribly wrong turn was taken "somewhere around the 18th century" (in my recent book I say it might have been during the 17th century).

Still, Frei says that "there is a kind of logic in the Christian's faith that forces him to say that disbelief in the resurrection of Jesus is rationally impossible." The faith is real and responds to data and evidence, but it does not depend on the evidence. It can be destroyed by evidence but not built up by evidence. This is an interesting way of putting it. I don't know whether it can withstand scrutiny, but more interestingly (at least to me in light of my recent series of posts), is this another kind of fideism that Sparks critiques in his book? I'm not sure, but even if it is, maybe it's a better kind of fideism. I mean at least it's one that tries to be as honest as it can in the face of evidence. And in the face of present evidences, perhaps we can say: it is still "more nearly correct" to believe that Jesus rose from the dead than it is to disbelieve it.

Critical scholarship as being more faithful to the Bible than conservative evangelicalism

2009-08-17T13:31:00.008-04:00

"It is often said that fundamentalists are 'people who take the Bible literally.' This however is a mistake. Fundamentalist interpretation concentrates not on taking the Bible literally, but on taking it so that it will appear inerrant, without error in point of fact. Far from insisting that interpretation should be literal, it veers back and forward between the literal sense and non-literal sense, in order to preserve the impression that the Bible is, especially in historical regards, always 'right'...It is the inerrancy of the Bible, especially its truth in historical regards, that is the fundamentalist position, and not the notion that it must always be interpreted literally. The contrary is the case. It is the critical interpretation of the Bible that has noticed, and given full value to, the literal sense. In this sense, as Ebeling and others have noted, the critical movement is the true heir of the Reformation with its emphasis on the plain sense of scripture. It is precisely because of its respect for the literal sense that critical scholarshp has concluded that different sources in (say) the Pentateuch, or the gospels, must be identified...My argument is simply and squarely that fundamentalist interpretation, because it insists that the Bible cannot err, not even in historical regards, has been forced to interpret the Bible wrongly; conversely, it is the critical analysis, and not the fundamentalist approach, that has taken the Bible for what it is and interpreted it accordingly. The problem of fundamentalism is that, far from being a biblical religion, an interpretation of scripture in its own terms, it has evaded the natural and literal sense of the Bible in order to imprison it within a particular tradition of human interpretation." --James Barr, The Scope and Authority of the Bible, 78-79.

An example of fideism, keeping biblical and canonical studies at bay

2009-08-08T10:43:00.006-04:00

Here a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has written an essay that purports to give the evangelical view on scripture. Basically, he takes the same position that many conservatives for some reason think they can credibly keep making. They keep digging their heels in and saying that Warfield has already said everything that needs to be said about scripture and if Warfield didn't ultimately mangage to do done that, at the very least he's said all there is to say in response to whatever critics of inerrancy can ever imagine to say.

Now considering my most recent post on Sparks' observations that conservatives consistently go into fideistic mode in their attempts to raise their views of scripture above anything biblical studies could ever say regarding scripture, this professor's essay serves as an excellent example of what Sparks is talking about.

After enlisting the standard conservative objection against critical scholarship--the one that objects that one should always listen to God (somehow God tells them the Bible is inerrant) rather than men (biblical scholars who point out that it's much more difficult than that)--the author of the above essay writes this: “In addition to this I would observe that a remarkable amount of confidence is necessary to declare the Bible to be in error.”

A remarkable amount of confidence? Kent Sparks says that there is "a veritable avalanche of data." Researchers like Sparks are not going out on a limb, they are being responsible practitioners in their fields of specialization. I'd say, in fact, that it is the inerrantist evangelical who is placing an undue amount of confidence on their inconclusive inductive case that they mustered for inerrantist position. That's what happens in many cases when young evangelicals go off to school, seminary, university. The avalanche of data to which Sparks refers gradually exposes itself to students in varying doses and manages to make students less confident about the way that inerrancy has been explained to them in the past and when they try to reconstruct the inductive case for themselves, its gaping holes become all too apparent to them. When they go back to try and look at the issue anew to see if they can make some progress from an inerrantist standpoint, they become more and more sure that the data is, in fact, increasing while the way that conservatives argue for their position is stuck in historical rut. And THEN they find believing critical scholars who are still in conversation with evangelicals who are lamenting that there is an all-too-willing passing-over of historically conscious exegetical considerations that should normally go into reading scripture, that conservatives are simply not doing. Eventually, students become more and more suspect of inerrantist scholarship generally.

This is why I'm taking the time to write about this essay by this professor from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. For some reason thinks that if one if one is going to challenge the popular inerrantist view, then one had better be sure that they are "absolutely certain that one is correct about so many things” (who would imagine that such a dilemma exists in biblical scholarship except for an inerrantist?). But this is presicely the fideistic ploy that Sparks is talking about that is supposed to keep people from engaging the data head on on its own terms. And it will not hold students off forever.

To similar effect, when the the author of the said essay engages scholarship on the matter of canon, he relies almost exclusively on the proposals of Beckwith with regard to the extent and dating of the canonical process of the OT (The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church). This is not a smart move if one bears in mind what Sparks says about how little credibility limited engagements with scholarship turn knowledgable readers off to evangelical scholarship generally. If I can use myself as an example here, I am not even a specialist in the field and I already know that L. M. MacDonald writes: “Beckwith’s view that Jude was not appealing to 1Enoch as sacred Scripture is confusing since it is especially in Jude’s appeal to and use of such literature that one can see how the author understood the book. Jude cites the passage as a prophetic text, that is, as a Spirit-led text. By most definitions of Scripture, this is a reference to sacred Scripture. If Jude thought that the passage was spoken through prophecy, then he clearly saw it as inspired and equal to the status of Scripture.” (The Biblical Canon, 106) In fact, MacDonald feels compelled to spend several pages critiquing Beckwith’s understanding of a closed canon, explaing that “Beckwith in particular largely ignores the many references in early Christian literature to the noncanonical literature and especially its significant place among the Dead Sea Scrolls.” (108) And MacDonald does not come across as some liberal scholar with a conservative axe to grind.

Furthermore, it is not hard for students to learn that MacDonald is not the only one who views Beckwith's position with suspicion. MacDonald is one of many specialists who see Beckwith’s proposal as anachronistic. VanderKam is another specialist, who finds Beckwith's suggestions impossible. According to MacDonald: “VanderKam argues that Beckwith and sometimes Leiman tend to read their texts anachronistically and try to make what later obtained in Judaism and later Protestant Christianity a reality before the time of Jesus.” (108) The essay under review is another attempt to see if one can find the sola scriptura dynamic operative in the 2nd century.

To make matters worse, the author of the present essay retreats to a curious polemical position that requires that Jude must explicitly say that the whole book (which redaction?) of 1 Enoch is scripture in order for us to understand that Jude accepted 1 Enoch as scripture. Yet by this criterion, one should by parity of reasoning inquire more critically into whether the Protestant canon explicitly refers to each of its individual components as scripture. It certainly does not. In like manner, the inductive case for inerrancy does not refer to each part of the Protestant canon and say in unequivocal terms that this corpus is inerrant. In fact, approaching the issue of canon in this way will never arrive at a definitive canon. Even Jenson (who was cited in my last post) reminds his readers that no matter what tradition one belongs to all parties have to concede that it is the believing communities who are the ones who eventually gathered their various books together into canons. Yet even a passing perusal of the literature of canonical studies will show that the Protestant canon is not the historical mainstay in the way that conservative evangelicals hoped it could be. I go more into this in my first book. Sexton, who our author invokes quite a bit, accuses me of not letting evangelicals answer the critical questions in my book, but even he concedes that my engagement of the literature is "good and substantial." Both Sexton and our author are wrong for thinking Grisanti's article is going to save the day. When Grisanti's insights are set within the context of critical canonical discussions, his observations will make much better sense in a non-inerrantist framework and inerrancy will seem a hindrance from properly understanding the canonical process.

One last observation. J. A. Sanders explains that “Most scholars took Lewis’s work to mean that release from the Jamnia mentality signified release from the neat three-stage scheme of the canonization of the Hebrew Bible as well. The terms of the debate were re-formulated, as it were.” ("The Issue of Closure in the Canonical Process,” in The Canon Debate, 254) Lewis' article published in 1964. But none of this matters to many conservatives because everything that has to be said on critical scholarship has already been said by Warfield and any developments since then are already anticipated in Warfield's remarks.

But Warfield had much to learn about canon as demonstrated by C. Allert, an evangelical on all counts. He decries the shortcomings of evangelical scholarship that treats the NT canon along Warfieldian lines, decrying a tendenz among evangelicals to keep wishing their contemporary (Warfieldian) understandings of canon upon the ancient church:

“Evangelicals seem to have a natural affinity with a closed second-century New Testament canon because of the assumption that, for most of their history, Christians had a Bible to which they could make sole appeal. This foundational presupposition that Christianity always had a Bible subsequently guides all investigation into New Testament canon formation. With this presupposition as a guide, it is only natural, therefore, to conclude that the closing of the New Testament canon must have occurred quite soon after the time of the apostles. But as we have seen, the understanding that the second century had a closed New Testament canon is difficult to maintain.” (A High View of Scripture?, 87.)

Even as I try to phase out of discussions about the Bible, I have this lingering concern about where students are supposed to turn when they have critical questions in this area? The ICBI's Chicago Statement? I'm afraid this document, that is, IF young evangelicals have even heard of it, will not be able to pull the wool over their eyes forever.

On the inerrantists' fideistic attempts to keep biblical studies at bay

2009-08-06T13:32:00.004-04:00

"First, and above all, historical-critical judgments are products of academic expertise, in which intellectually gifted scholars apply their respective trades to very complex linguistic and archaeological data from the ancient world. This means, of course, that in most cases the average person is in no position to evaluate, let alone criticize, the results of critical scholarship. Such a dictum applies not only to Assyriology but also to every academic discipline, both of the sciences and the humanities. Consequently, a certain humility is warranted when those outside a scholarly discipline wish to inquire about and evaluate the tried and tested conclusions of scholars in that discipline. " (K. Sparks, God's Word in Human Words, 70.)

Yet the average person often feels forced to the sidelines as they helplessly watch their sacred scripture be shred to pieces by those who have little to no sympathy for the Bible as scripture. In fact, it is not uncommon for communities of faith to convey their sense of helplessness by getting so bothered over the agnosticism that appears to them rampant in critical scholarship, agreeing with Jenson's remarks, for example:

"Where the church's calling to speak the gospel is not shared, the binding of these particular documents between one cover becomes a historical accident of no hermeneutical significance. The drasticially misnamed Society of Biblical Literature is not essentially more interested in the documents in the canon than in similar documents outside the canon. For them, the formation of the canon was the project of an ancient religious movement, through which these valuable objects of historical research and opportunities for hermeneutical virtuosity were luckily preserved for scholarly ex-Christians from which to make a living." (R. Jenson, "Hermeneutics and the Life of the Church," in Reclaiming the Bible for the Church, 89-90.)

Yet Sparks optimistically insists that there is a middle way available to believers between the two horns of "traditional" responses to biblical criticism and "secular" responses. Secular responses are the ones that Jenson refers to above; traditional responses are those that refuse critical findings simply because they upset traditional understandings of scripture. Ironically, it is the traditional response to biblical criticism that can drive many to secular responses. I think Sparks is rightly strident in his opposition to the fideistic response to biblical criticism. In my view, it is a number one culprit in turning thoughtful scripture readers away from the faith:

"The difficulties are broad and comprehensive, a veritable avalanche of data that is far too substantial to be swept aside with the flimsy theological broom [of insisting that everyone learn deductively what the Bible explicitly teaches about itself]. So far as I can tell, the only conclusion one can draw is that [Carl Henry, a prime example of the position Sparks is criticizing] was unwilling to allow the biblical data itself to seriously challenge his own beliefs about the Bible. His response to biblical criticism was essentially fideistic because he used his deductive theories about the Bible as a shield to exclude inductive insights based on the Bible's actual content." (Sparks, 139)

Repent over inerrancy?

2009-08-01T14:34:00.003-04:00

"If McGowan is right about inerrancy, dozens of North American colleges and seminaries, several thousand scholars, tens of thousands of pastors, and millions if not billions of Christians worldwide need to repent and change their doctrinal statements--and, so as not to be hypocrites, their beliefs." (R. W. Yarbrough, "The Embattled Bible," Themelios 34 [2009]: 11, emphasis mine)

Repent and change their doctrinal statements? Why so dramatic? Maybe inerrantists got it wrong and have to go back to the drawing board, what's the big deal? As if inerrantists aren't allowed to make mistakes and their doctrines have to be always right--especially when they try to articulate their beliefs regarding scripture.

It might be just me, but has not something gone awry when a broad cultural swath of Christianity understands faith in such a way that it becomes natural to say things like this: Repent and change your doctrinal statement? I've heard of repenting and changing one's ways, but repenting and changing one's doctrinal statement? I can't help but think that something's got to give!

Let us not get carried away when affirming scripture's authority

2009-07-14T02:30:00.014-04:00

"How scripture is to be brought into play to judge the authenticity of doctrine requires careful reflection. It will not do simply to suppose that if a doctrine is found in scripture, in the sense of being stated explicitly somewhere in the text, it is ipso facto authentic [something Christian communities should believe]. Among the doctrines whose authenticity scripture is to judge are the doctrines found within scripture itself; and it is altogether possible that some of these may be judged non-authentic. To say that scripture has normative authority does not imply that every individual unit of scripture--every assertion of fact, every moral judgment, commandment, etiological tale, psalm, or what have you--has normative authority. Particular elements of scripture may have a role to play in generating theological understanding without themselves being representative of that understanding. Of course, people may grant authority to verses of scripture simply because they are part of scripture just as people may grant authority to what celebrities say in product endorsements simply because they are celebrities. One function of a properly articulated understanding of scriptural authority is to correct such mistakes." (Charles M. Wood, Love that Rejoices in the Truth, 79.)

Warfield and the phenomena of scripture

2009-06-25T00:05:00.003-04:00

On the place of the phenomena of scripture, Warfield seems clearer than Hodge. But before we get to that, let us notice that he wrote:

"The Biblical doctrine of inspiration, therefore, has in its favor just this whole weight and amount of evidence. It follows on the one hand that it cannot rationally be rejected save on the ground of evidence which will outweigh the whole body of evidence which goes to authenticate the Biblical writers as trustworthy witnesses to and teachers of doctrine. And it follows, on the other hand, that if the Biblical doctrine of inspiration is rejected, our freedom from its trammels is bought logically at the somewhat serious cost of discrediting the evidence which goes to show that the Biblical writers are trustworthy as teachers of doctrine. In this sense, the fortunes of distinctive Christianity are bound up with those of the Biblical doctrine of inspiration." (all quotes from his essay, "The Real Problem of Inspiration")

"In this sense, we repeat, the cause of distinctive Christianity is bound up with the cause of the Biblical doctrine of inspiration. We accept Christianity in all its distinctive doctrines on no other ground than the credibility and trustworthiness of the Bible as a guide to truth; and on this same ground we must equally accept its doctrine of inspiration."

Yet he insists:

"The present writer, in order to prevent all misunderstanding, desires to repeat here what he has said on every proper occasion - that he is far from contending that without inspiration there could be no Christianity. "Without any inspiration," he added, when making this affirmation on his induction into the work of teaching the Bible- "without any inspiration we could have had Christianity; yea, and men could still have heard the truth and through it been awakened, and justified, and sanctified, and glorified. The verities of our faith would remain historically proven to us - so bountiful has God been in His fostering care - even had we no Bible; and through those verities, salvation."

These appear (at least at first) to be contradictory, or at the very least in serious tension with each other. One train of thought appears to be that

1) The Bible is trustworthy.
2) The Bible teaches various doctrines.
3) The Bible can be trusted in what doctrines it teaches.
4) Inspiration is a doctrine that the Bible teaches.
5) The Bible can be trusted when it teaches its own inspiration.

In an interesting move, Warfield concludes that 5) cannot be false without out 3) also becoming false. He reasons that if the Bible teaches its own inspiration, but that teaching turns out to be false then it can no long be trusted for what doctrines it teaches. The Bible proves potentially untrustworthy for every other doctrine.

Another train of thought appears to run:

1) The teachings of the Lord and the testimonies of the apostles are trustworthy.
2) The historical witness of the earliest churches passed these teachings along faithfully.
3) The various doctrines passed along in such a faithful manner over time are trustworthy.
4) No inspiration is needed to legitmate the trustworthiness of these teachings.

Warfield insists that these teachings can be accepted as true based on their sources without reference to inspiration. But he he goes on to say that inspiration happens to be one of the doctrines taught by the Lord and the apostles. Therefore, although it is contingently a part of the doctrines that are trustworthy, by the mere fact of being taught at all by the Lord and the apostles, there is nothing different about it that warrants our dismissal of that particular doctrine without also dismissing any number (all?) of other doctrines that have been taught by them.

How do the "phenomena" of scripture play into this picture?

Warfield writes:

"When we approach the Scriptures to ascertain their doctrine of inspiration, we proceed by collecting the whole body of relevant facts. Every claim they make to inspiration is a relevant fact; every statement they make concerning inspiration is a relevant fact; every allusion they make to the subject is a relevant fact; every fact indicative of the attitude they hold towards Scripture is a relevant fact. But the characteristics of their own writings are not facts relevant to the determination of their doctrine. Nor let it be said that we are desirous of determining the true, as distinguished from the Scriptural, doctrine of inspiration otherwise than inductively. We are averse, however, to supposing that in such an inquiry the relevant "phenomena" of Scripture are not first of all and before all the claims of Scripture and second only to them its use of previous Scripture. And we are averse to excluding these primary "phenomena" and building our doctrine solely or mainly upon the characteristics and structure of Scripture, especially as determined by some special school of modern research by critical methods certainly not infallible and to the best of our own judgment not even reasonable. And we are certainly averse to supposing that this induction, if it reaches results not absolutely consentaneous with the teachings of Scripture itself, has done anything other than discredit those teachings, or that in discrediting them, it has escaped discrediting the doctrinal authority of Scripture."

And in response to my last post on Hodge, he might say something like:

"[W]e approach the study of the so-called 'phenomena' of the Scriptures with a very strong presumption that these Scriptures contain no errors, and that any "phenomena" apparently inconsistent with their inerrancy are so in appearance only: a presumption the measure of which is just the whole amount and weight of evidence that the New Testament writers are trustworthy as teachers of doctrine. It seems to be often tacitly assumed that the Biblical doctrine of inspiration cannot be confidently ascertained until all the facts concerning the contents and structure and characteristics of Scripture are fully determined and allowed for. This is obviously fallacious."

Nevertheless, he concedes:

"[T]he assumption that we cannot confidently accept the Biblical doctrine of inspiration as true until criticism and exegesis have said their last word upon the structure, the text, and the characteristics of Scripture, even to the most minute fact, is more plausible. But it is far from obviously true."

He asks readers to consider which approach will ultimately prove more helpful to them:

"If we start from the Scripture doctrine of inspiration, we approach the phenomena with the question whether they will negative this doctrine, and we find none able to stand against it, commended to us as true, as it is, by the vast mass of evidence available to prove the trustworthiness of the Scriptural writers as teachers of doctrine. But if we start simply with a collection of the phenomena, classifying and reasoning from them, whether alone or in conjunction with the Scriptural statements, it may easily happen with us, as it happened with certain of old, that meeting with some things hard to be understood, we may be ignorant and unstable enough to wrest them to our own intellectual destruction, and so approach the Biblical doctrine of inspiration set upon explaining it away."

Warfield is clearly much more aggressive in his writing here than Hodge, pushing readers toward making a definite decision. He is forthright enough to admit that his own decision has already been made and that any "phenomena" under consideration has to be of such force (which it will obviously never be) that it must overwhelm his confidence already granted to scripture.

Yet the concession Warfield makes is the same that Hodge makes, indeed everyone has to make it during the course of trying to do theology. Warfield's concession lies at the very construction of the doctrine of inspiration. In a bold rhetorical move, Warfield defers to his detractors to define biblical inspiration for him:

"In the circumstances, however, we may venture to dispense with an argument drawn up from our own point of view, and content ourselves with an extract from the brief statement of the grounds of his decision given by another of those critical scholars who do not believe the doctrine of plenary inspiration, but yet find themselves constrained to allow that it is the doctrine of the New Testament writers."

And so he defers to a Richard Rothe who writes:

"We find in the New Testament authors the same theoretical view of the Old Testament and the same practice as to its use, as among the Jews of the time in general, although at the same time in the handling of the same conceptions and principles on both sides, the whole difference between the new Christian spirit and that of contemporary Judaism appears in sharp distinctness...The whole style and method of their treatment of the Old Testament text manifestly presupposes in them this view of this matter, which was at the time the usual one in the Jewish schools..."

Yet for all Warfield's polemical attempts to obscure the fact, he finds himself in the same place that Hodge was in: having to be informed by "the usage of antiquity, sacred and profane, and...the doctrine which the sacred writers and the men of their generation are known to have entertained on the subject.”

Although he more consciously guards himself against the need to ask some of the questions I wanted to ask Hodge in the previous post, recent developments in the study of second temple Judaism have forced some questions upon us with much more urgency than would have been the case during the time when Warfield was writing:

What was the understanding of inspiration had by the "men of their generation" (Hodge's phrase)? What were their expectations of scripture? What does it mean for scripture that the NT writers had much the same view of things as any other religious person of their time?

For there is now the consideration that "inspiration," now more acutely identified as the common assumption of the cultural milieu within which scripture was originally produced, may be what some of the apostles, or perhaps the Lord, really believed but not actually what scripture is teaching. This is a point of contention that might be said to be "new" to more recent generations (over against that of Warfield's), given the discovery of the DSS, for example. Warfield's language opens itself to precisely this kind of observation:

"It is based on the exegetical fact that our Lord and His apostles held this doctrine of Scripture, and everywhere deal with the Scriptures of the Old Testament in accordance with it, as the very Word of God, even in their narrative parts. This is a commonplace of exegetical science, the common possession of the critical schools of the left and of the right, a prominent and unmistakable deliverance of Biblical Theology."

The biblical writers may have held some dictation theory of inspiration, for example, but does that mean that they taught it? If they did teach it, a comparison with scripture's phenomena would cause us to modify scripture's teaching...

And if there is some diversity among the biblical tradents over how to conceive of inspiration, perhaps that means it is up to us to fill in the details as to how best describe inspiration. Here then there is room for some differences of opinion. By parity of reasoning, one might observe that there surely appear to be some minor (and some major) differences of opinion in the other doctrines that are taught in scripture. Why should this one (inspiration) be any different from the others (a variation of Warfield's own argument)?

As for the deductive arguments made by Warfield, some progressives might find themselves open to it, but again there is the very important matter of pinning down what "inspiration" means in the first place. Is there some equivocation with the term "inspiration" between assertions 4) and 5)? And what is the difference between being "believed" by the writers in question and being "taught"? What if the language of "incidental error" proves more helpful to some today?

The last thing I have time to say here (although I'm so busy right now I probably ended up spending more time on these last two posts than I have spent on this blog over the past few months combined!) is that Warfield's presumption in scripture's favor is not going to be as strong in every believer as Warfiled seems to suppose. Although he protests to the contrary, it can be difficult to tell whether Warfield's presumption is concomitant with his inductive efforts or whether it precedes it or whether it proceeds from it. Either way, I don't think it is realistic to suppose that this presumption in favor of scripture's inerrancy is going overtake every Christian in the same way that it apparently did Warfield. Warfield mentions that the probability is so high for him that the scriptures are inerrant that the probability counts for him as equivalent to demonstration. But this is going to differ from believer to believer. No doubt that Warfield's essay is extremely well-written, but I think it ultimately boils down to a pragmatic argument and the effectiveness of such arguments often depend on a number of factors, not least a host of cultural and psychological factors that may or may not effect every believer in their very constitution as historically-situated humans.

At the very least, I wish all inerrantists would follow Warfield and go out of their way to clarify:

"Let it not be said that thus we found the whole Christian system upon the doctrine of plenary inspiration. We found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of plenary inspiration as little as we found it upon the doctrine of angelic existences. Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us in the generally trustworthy reports of the teaching of our Lord and of His authoritative agents in founding the Church, preserved in the writings of the apostles and their first followers, and in the historical witness of the living Church...We are in entire sympathy in this matter, therefore, with the protest which Dr. Marcus Dods raised in his famous address at the meeting of the Alliance of the Reformed Churches at London, against representing that 'the infallibility of the Bible is the ground of the whole Christian faith.' We judge with him that it is very important indeed that such a misapprehension, if it is anywhere current, should be corrected. What we are at present arguing is something entirely different from such an overstrained view of the importance of inspiration to the very existence of Christian faith, and something which has no connection with it."

Phenomena or no, this latter matter is definitely something that needs to be made more clear to all believers.

Hodge and the phenomena of scripture

2009-06-24T20:04:00.003-04:00

A year ago on another site I argued that Hodge made allowance for the phenomena of scripture to inform his idea of inspiration. Apparently the observation made some headway because not soon after Paul Helm posted his understanding of Hodge's view. I still wonder, though, if Hodge is not a little more ambiguous than he is commonly said to be on this matter.

I am primarily interested in the places where Hodge writes:

“The nature of inspiration is to be learnt from the Scriptures; from their didactic statements, and from their phenomena.” (ST, 1.153)

“Our views of inspiration must be determined by the phenomena of the Bible as well as from its didactic statements.” (ST, 1.169)

While interpreting the passage that includes the second quote above, Helm explains that for Hodge there are two types of phenomena: "The first refers to apparent features of Scripture arising from internal consistency and the relationship between its teaching and established facts from elsewhere, which, if they are true, are relevant to the denying of inspiration and especially of infallibility." Helm concludes: "So there’s an important difference in method between saying ‘the phenomena must be taken into account’ and ‘the phenomena must be taken into account in a way that gives them parity with the teaching of Scripture respecting its own inspiration, or priority over that teaching’."

I don't think this is setting the stage quite right here. I think it is precisely the case that if the phenomena are relevant enough to the conception of inspiration that we are trying to understand in the first place then they must be attended to in a way that they will help mediate the meaning of inspiration for us. How could phenomena possibly be given priority over the teaching of scripture if scripture's teaching is precisely what we are in the process of constructing? How can a teaching that has yet to be distilled from scripture be given priority in its own construction?

Perhaps Hodge was trying to guard, insofar as possible given the conceptual tools available to him at the time, against the prospect of theologians constructing a theory of inspiration as they saw fit relying too heavily on passing fads in philosophy. But I'm not sure that he thought phenomena were off limits for the very construction of our understanding of inspiration. I mean that is the only way to try to understand what scripture is trying to say about itself in the first place. Even someone like Hodge, who is trying to defend conservative Reformed positions from naysayers, would have to concede that.

"Phenomena" has to open up for Hodge to go beyond merely genre and fact when it suits him. It has to refer to more than genre and fact at some point when theorizing. At least in one instance, he says that phenomena may also encompass what he refers to as "the usage of antiquity, sacred and profane" when it comes to formulating our understanding of the concept of inspiration. Helm's dichotomy of "phenomena" and "didactic statement" is apparent to me in the one quote that he exegetes (ST, 1.169), but the idea of phenomena broadens further in scope (as it must) in order to be relevant to the discussion at hand, namely the very construction of our understanding of scripture's teaching about inspiration. So Hodge explains:

“The idea of inspiration is therefore fixed. It is not to be arbitrarily determined. We must not interpret the word or the fact, according to our theories of the relation of God to the world, but according to the usage of antiquity, sacred and profane, and according to the doctrine which the sacred writers and the men of their generation are known to have entertained on the subject.” (ST, 1.158)

So here we seem to have another dichotomy suggested to us by Hodge, but this time during the course of the very construction of a doctrine of inspiration: phenomena (being an "umbrella-term" as Helm points out) referring to usage of antiquity of the concept in this case. There's also a mention of doctrine, namely that which was current in antiquity. Yet strangely enough, once an understanding of inspiration is eventually established with the help of these phenomena, the only questions Hodge wants critical persons to ask are: "Do the sacred writers contradict each other? Do the Scriptures teach what from any source can be proved not to be true? The question is not whether the views of the sacred writers were incorrect, but whether they taught error? For example, it is not the question Whether they thought that the earth is the centre of our system? But, Did they teach that it is?" (1.169) Now are these questions suggested to him by the didactic statements in scripture? By scripture's phenomena? Or perhaps his own cultural milieu?

I have a number of questions to ponder at this point:

Isn't there some diversity to be appreciated in the doctrines "entertained" in antiquity on the topic of inspiration?

Would not the phenomena of sacred writings from antiquity also have an important analagous role to play in the constructions of inspiration entertained by those generations?

Where did the "doctrine" which "the sacred writers and men of their generation" entertained come from?

How/what/where/when/who qualified as "scripture," "inspiration," "canon," "inerrant" in antiquity?

What's the criteria for identifying the difference between what a biblical writer believed and what he taught and how does that approach practically differ from saying there are incidental errors here and there and moving on?

Is the difference between what a biblical writer believed and what he taught suggested to Hodge by phenomena or didactic statements in scripture, or perhaps an urgent 19th century historical/cultural factor?

Even if Hodge in his historical context thought it prudent to try to stress "doctrine" over "phenomena," might it not make more sense for us today to focus a little more than he did on things like "usage of antiquity" since so much more data from antiquity is available to us now?

With all that has been learned since Hodge's time in biblical studies about conceptual , textual and hermeneutical practices in antiquity, for example, is it really adequate to simply do "word studies" to get the gist of inspiration (as Hodge appears to have done)? Can we not now be much more thorough than that? Couldn't the Old Princeton illuminaries have been more thorough than they were in this regard? Is that where people like Stonehouse, Kline, Silva, Dillard, etc. tried little by little to pick up the slack and be more thorough in their appreciation of scripture when refining their understanding of inspiration?

Because of the churches' ever-increasing knowledge of antiquity and progress made by the churches' biblical scholars (and others), is not "inspiration" necessarily a tentative construct, a theological work in progress? Should we understand Hodge's idea of "fixed" as meaning "derived from scripture as thoroughly as possible and less dependent on passing fads in philosophy"?

Either way, why are the only two questions one is permitted to ask when being critical: "Do the sacred writers contradict each other? Do the Scriptures teach what from any source can be proved not to be true?" Are not these kinds of questions prompted by passing fads in modern philosophy? Are we more culturally aware about this factor than Hodge was?

I have been thinking about these and other questions in recent days. Of course, it is not ultimately important to me if Hodge meant what Helm says he meant or something else. Yet upon reflection, I wonder if things are not a little more complex than supposed. In any event, I do find it interesting that many of these questions are "pre-" inspiration questions, meaning "it is important to keep ourselves reminded that the doctrine of inspiration which has become established in the Church, is open to all legitimate criticism, and is to continue to be held only as, and so far as, it is ever anew critically tested and approved." (Warfield, "The Real Problem of Inspiration") If some of the questions asked above are so fundamental that the doctrine in question (inspiration) turns out to be what we are attempting to construct anew in order to test and approve it, then it will help none to continue to invoke it, for it is precisely its very construction that is being revisited with a faithful, yet critical, eye.

On WCF and the misleading rhetoric of good and necessary deduction

2009-06-14T05:41:00.006-04:00

In Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic (Brazos, 2009), former ETS president Francis Beckwith writes:

"My Evangelical Protestant contemporarires seemed to treat the Bible as if it could be read as an authoritative depositary of orthodox doctrine apart from the historic church and the formation of Christian theology during the early centuries of its existence. The whole idea that, according to The Westminster Confession, one may 'deduce' necessary doctrines from 'scripture' treats theology as if it were a branch of mathematics." (p 80)

I find it very interesting that Mr. Beckwith has come to this conclusion. When I first made a similar observation in 2005/6, I thought it was such an important insight that I decided to begin writing a book about it. I am excited to say that my new book, By Good and Necessary Consequence: A Preliminary Genealogy of Biblicist Foundationalism, has just been released by Wipf and Stock. It is presently available through the publisher and will become available at amazon, barnesandnoble and other vendors in a few short weeks.

Although in my first book I argued that scripture could never practically be one's "ultimate" authority and, in my new book, that a good-and-necessary-consequence approach to theology is ill-advised, it wasn't until some time last year (when writing an article that that will appear in Theology and Science) that I began to realize that sola scriptura may be little more than a rhetorical rallying cry for Protestants or, in Beckwith's words, "more of a slogan than a standard."

Torn between two words of counsel regarding postmodernism

2009-06-04T22:22:00.005-04:00

"Insofar as the church (and mutatis mutandis, Christian theology and philosophy) has bought into key assumptions of modernity;

And insofar as these assumptions (for instance, regarding the nature of freedom, the model of the human person, the requirements for what counts as 'rational' or 'true,' or what can be admitted to the 'public' sphere of political or academic discourse) represent a rejection of biblical wisdom and the Christian theological heritage;

And insofar as postmodernism articulates a critique of just these assumptions;

Then the postmodern critique of modernity is something to be affirmed by Christians, not because it is postmodern, but because the postmodern critique of modernity can be a wake-up call for Christians to see their complicity with modernity, the inconsistency of this with a more integral understanding of discipleship, and thus actually be an occasion to retrieve ancient and premodern theological sources and litrugical practices with new eyes, as it were."
(James K. A. Smith, "The Logic of Incarnation: Towards a Catholic Postmodernism," in The Logic of Incarnation, [Wipf and Stock, 2009], 5-6.)

"Should Christians utilize postmodernist insights from time to time as they find helpful? I don't believe they should, and to see why, consider Nazi ideology. Surely, some aspects of Nazi thought--for example, a commitment to a strong national defense and to solid education for youth--are correct and appropriate. But for two reasons, it would be wrong to say that one was neutral or even favorable toward Nazi thought, rejecting its problems and embracing its advantages. First, Nazi thought is so horrible and its overall impact so harmful that its bad features far outweigh whatever relatively trivial advantages it offers. Thus, such an attitude is inappropriate toward Nazi thought. Second, neither of the advantages just cited (strong national defense and solid education) requires Nazi ideology for its justification.

The same points apply to postmodernism. Its harm to the cause of Christ and human flourishing far outweigh any advantages that may accrue to it, and whatever those advantages are, they do not require postmodernism for their justification...

...[P]ostmodernism is a form of intellectual pacifism that, at the end of the day, recommends backgammon while the barbarians are at the gate...However comforting it may be, postmodernism is the cure that kills the patient...As followers of the Lord Jesus, the postmodern option is a concession to our culture that goes too far, however well-intentioned it is. We can and must do better than this if we are to be up to the task of responding to the crisis of our age."
(J. P. Moreland, The Kingdom Triangle, [Zondervan, 2007], 86-87, 88.)

I have been wrestling with these two opinions existentially for some time now. On the one hand, I think the task at hand should be theological construction yet the insights provided by the acute spiral of hermeneutical suspicion, a spiral that is largely deconstructive to the point of being leery of the very possibility of theological construction, are hard to shrug off simply because one is anxious to get on with constructing in a context of crisis. Perhaps a way out of this dilemma is to say that there is a time and place for both construction and deconstruction depending on one's existential and cultural location. If it took some of the excesses of postmodernism to draw believers' attention to particular debilitating weaknesses in contemporary expressions of faith, what's so irresponsible about someone like Smith coming out and saying, "This is what my exposure to postmodernism has taught me"?

Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals said to be a "must-read"

2009-05-26T23:03:00.002-04:00

In the March 2009 issue of Religious Studies Review, James Beilby says of my book that "it is a very interesting volume. It is college-level appropriate and is a must-read for students at evangelical seminaries."

Much appreciated!

J. P. Moreland's veridical test for Christianity

2009-05-19T19:02:00.002-04:00

"The church should be able to produce people who are moral and spiritual saints who experience full, satisfying lives to a greater extent than they would if they were not Christians and to a greater extent than a random sampling of the population in general. Thus, the closer one gets to living according to mature, New Testament Christianity, the closer one should be toward the goal of uniting in one's self the traits of a morally and spiritually virtuous life and the joy of a satisfying form of living. Authentic Christianity should produce people who exemplify the summum bonum--the harmony of the right and the happy--in their lives."

(Scaling the Secular City, 132 n. 33)

Perhaps I'm becoming too cynical, but I wonder if evangelical Christianity would be able to pass this kind of test.

What's Chicago got to do with it?

2009-04-28T22:44:00.004-04:00

In an article in the April 2009 issue of Themelios, Jason Sexton urges all would-be revisionists of inerrancy to begin with the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/publications/34-1/how-far-beyond-chicago-assessing-recent-attempts-to-reframe-the-inerrancy-debate/

He complains that five recent critical studies on inerrancy (by McGowan, Oldfield, myself, Allert and Sparks) do not engage seriously with the CSBI and the extent to which they fail to do this is the extent they will not merit serious attention from inerrantists. Sexton upholds "CSBI as a relevant touchstone today and basis for any further conversation on inerrancy." He does give six reasons for this assessment, yet it seems to me there are other considerations that suggest that his selection of the CSBI is somewhat arbitrary.

First, Sexton reports on the basis of James Borland's recount that at the very ETS meeting that sought to clarify that CSBI as articulating the intent and meaning of inerrancy for ETS, so few were familiar with the CSBI that the executive committee decided they should hand out copies of it to every member in attendance! (n. 2) This shows that the CSBI has very little cultural currency within evangelicalism.

Second, insofar as Sexton defers to James Borland for clarification on how the CSBI bears on ETS and its academic ethos suggests that his taking up the mantle of the CSBI might be a little ad hoc.

Third, positing CSBI as the default inerrantist position flattens evangelicals considerable diversity prematurely and artificially. CSBI may not have as much cultural currency as is claimed.

Fourth, D. Treier has observed that the Chicago project did not trickle down to churches and pews well. This suggests that CSBI has little to no cultural currency among lay people.

Fifth, the five writers in question--all from differing sectors of evangelicalism--independently decided that it was not important to interact directly with the CSBI. This suggests that CSBI does not permeate evangelical scholarship enough to warrant that the writers in question engage it directly.

Sixth, ETS should not be given preeminence for there are plenty of evangelicals who do not belong to ETS.

Seventh, there is also the uncomfortable matter of how it is likely the case that a surprising number of ETS members only half-heartedly affirm their yearly doctrinal affirmations.

I do appreciate Sexton's efforts in his most timely article, but I question his attempt to establish CSBI as the evangelical statement with which every revisionist must come to terms. I question his suggestion that evangelicals centralize the inerrancy discussion around this document. For not only does the article play down how its choice of this document is arbitrary, but it carefully and deliberately places all future terms of discussion under the direct auspices of conservative inerrantism. How convenient for the inerrantists!

Online review of Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals

2009-04-26T00:34:00.003-04:00

I am thankful to James Merrick, who is pursuing a PhD in theology at King's College, University of Aberdeen, for taking the time to review my book on Theology Forum (here and here). James is of the opinion that the book does not treat spiritual formation at all but is more an exercise in philosophy--a philosophical engagement that amounts to an argument against inerrancy. Spiritual formation will mean different things to different people but in the Christian philosophical tradition, philosophy can be carried out in a such a way that it constitutes a spiritual exercise, and the same with its reading. That said, as I've tried to communicate to James in the comments section of his second post, if inerrancy is presented in such a way that it becomes the condition for the possibility for spiritual growth, then if one has to give up inerrancy there will be little to no possibility for spiritual growth. And this has everything to do with the spiritual formation of younger evangelicals in the States, at least as far as I can see.

There's an ironic pattern to discern here.

2009-04-07T21:26:00.002-04:00

I just read an older article by Donald Dayton responding to the publication of Harold Lindsell's Battle for the Bible. In it Dayton writes:

"Ironically, Lindsell’s book may very well prove to be a potent force for undermining the very position he defends. The superficiality of the book, combined with its timing in the midst of already swirling controversy, may provide the occasion for a wholesale repudiation of its stance. The rush of theologians and church leaders to dissociate themselves from The Battle for the Bible may indicate that this rejection is already taking place." (D. Dayton, "The Battle for the Bible: Renewing the Inerrancy Debate," http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1823)

This brought to mind Kent Sparks' remarks in God's Words in Human Words:

"Of course, I did not believe Van Seters. He was not any sort of evangelical Christian, and I had been warned about the deceptive and beguiling ways of the biblical critics. Paradoxically, it was Kitchen himself---not Van Seters---who convinced me that the critics were right...

At that moment, I began to doubt that evangelical scholars were really giving me the whole story when it came to the Bible and critical scholarship...

Only now are we witnessing the emergence of a new generation of evangelical scholars who are willing to admit that the standard critical arguments are often much better than the ill-advised apologetic that evangelicals have aimed at them. " (p. 11-12)

It is a great irony that reading conservatives' articulations of their "orthodox" positions can do more toward driving people away from their positions than reading any school of critical scholarship.

An old gem of a book

2009-03-30T22:09:00.002-04:00

Where were all these dissenting voices when I was being taught about the inerrancy of scripture? I guess they didn't get approved for the lists of recommended reading. I recently picked up Paul Seely's old gem of a book:

"When Norman Geisler admitted that 'the Scriptures do not clearly and formally teach their own inerrancy,' he was paralleling the confession of Ludwig Ott that the Roman Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary...'is not explicitly revealed in Scripture.' Yet it is evident that the absence of these doctrines from Scripture in no way inhibits the respective religious groups from believing in them. Rather the socio-ideological milieu of the religious group and its past religious conditioning guarantee that these doctrines will be received as necessary to true faith; and, any rationalizations developed to defend them will be received as ceratinly valid. Yet because these rationalizations are intrinsically invalid they are only convincing to those conditioned by the past and pressured by the present to believe in them. Thus rationalizations on behalf of Roman Catholic doctrines which leave conservative Evanglicals cold seem quite convincing when adduced mutatis mutandis on behalf of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The difference is not in the reasoning, but in the tradition and socio-ideological structure which they support." (P. Seely, Inerrant Wisdom, 168-169)

The real slippery slope

2009-03-28T23:26:00.004-04:00

The time could not be better for James Dunn to decide to publish a second edition of his The Living Word. Whoever did not get around to reading the first edition should make sure they get their hands on a copy of this updated work!

"...[T]hose who want to hear the word of God in and through scripture need to think long and hard about how they hear that word, before attitudes become hardened and decisions become irrevocable which do lasting damage to the church as the body of Christ, to the gospel as good news of liberation, and to a common concern for the truth of God. The crisis over scriptural authority within Christianity is a particular case of a more widespread malaise afflicting both religions and, because religions often affect poltics, also national and international politics. I refer to the fact of fundamentalism and to the often baleful effects fundamentalist views and fundamentalist-inspired policies have been having since the turn of the millenium...[A] primary feeder of fundamentalism is the lust of certainty and security. It is the certainty that God has spoken in particular words and formulations which are clear-cut and fixed for all time, which alone gives the fundamentalist the security (s)he craves for...

The ecumenical and political tragedy is that the craving for such certainty becomes itself a slippery slope which can quickly lead to disaster. The fundamentalist knows the truth in clear-cut terms. He or she sees issues in black-and-white terms...there is no room for disagreement or compromise. For the fundamentalist, I cannot be right unless you who disagree with me are wrong; those who compromise are blind and traitors...from a fundamentalist perspective, those who disagree with the fundamentalist position on any subject disagree with God. They are enemies of God. They are not simply wrong; they are evil. And if evil, opposed to God, then they are demonically motivated and should be opposed with the ruthlessness with which good must oppose evil. They can be treated with inhumanity because they have set themselves against God's truth for humankind. We don't have to go down that slippery slope before we come to the burning of heretics, the hanging of witches, and (who thought it possible in the twenty-first century) Guantanamo." (J. Dunn, The Living Word, vii-viii)

Is your conservative evangelical or Reformed school coming to mind?

Inerrancy is brought to the Bible

2009-03-24T22:36:00.002-04:00

"One is faced, in the end, with the question about the theological usefulness, as well as the validity, of the conservative doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture in its original autogrpahs. It is clear enough that such inerrancy is not a central, or even peripheral, concern of Scripture itself. No definition of the inerrancy of autographs is offered in the Bible, nor does any author deal with it in terms of his own work, or even hint at it. It is easier to find hints of fallibility on the part of biblical authors (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:14-16) than any indication that what they wrote is without the slightest error in the kind of detail that worries adherents of the theory of inerrancy. The idea of the inerrancy of scriptural autographs is therefore brought to Scripture, it is not derived from it, in itself a telling comment on the way this conservative doctrine has developed." (Paul J. Achtemeier, Inspiration and Authority, 61)

The enemy of my enemy is my friend / Beale replaces Enns at WTS

2009-03-14T10:26:00.006-04:00

So Enns is no longer at WTS but that does not seem enough to contain the damage that he did while there, at least according to the powers that be. There is also the matter of sending a powerful political message to anyone concerned for WTS's commitment to narrow, Reformed orthodoxy. The message is that WTS is so committed to narrow, Reformed orthodoxy and so against anything that Enns says in Inspiration and Incarnation that they have arranged to have Gregory Beale---who recently compiled his published objections against Enns into a book, The Errosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism---teach one of Enns' former classes. Beale will not be teaching OT Wisdom, a class on Exodus, or Old Testament Introduction, areas of specialization for Enns. Rather, in fall of 2009 he's scheduled to teach Enns' New Testament Use of the Old course, another of Enns' acadmic pursuits and a class he co-taught with NT professor Dan McCartney---who coincidentally is leaving WTS-Philadelphia after teaching there 25 years.

Lest anyone be worried that WTS has suffered a loss with respect to academic and scholarly standing by ousting Enns (Enns earned his PhD at Harvard University, was seen as an OT scholar who was obviously and fruitfully in contact with non-evangelical academia, and was also asked [and accepted the invitation--at least from what I remember] to teach a course at Princeton Seminary while at WTS), the write up on Beale emphasizes:

"Professor Beale is a respected evangelical leader and renowned scholar. He has published both for the evangelical constituency, with monographs for Baker, Crossway, InterVarsity Press, and Eerdmans, and for the mainstream academy, with a monograph for Sheffield Academic Press...Indeed, Dr. Beale is a scholar with a heart for the church and the desire and the ability to interact outside of the normal boundaries of broad evangelical discourse and publishing." (See http://www.wts.edu/stayinformed/view.html?id=395)

So there you have it: strict, narrow, Reformed orthodoxy and scholarly, academic respectability. Who could ask for anything more? I think the move is brilliant. Students who may have taken this class with Enns can take it again with Beale to have what he taught them corrected. Students who may not have taken the class with Enns but have nonetheless been exposed to I&I's "heresy" can take the class with Beale and undo any damage. Yet it seems to me that the most significant fallout of assigning Beale Enns' NT use of OT class is an undeniably clear public statement to the effect that the cancerous effects of the Inspiration and Incarnation era at WTS has not only come to a definitive end but has been furthermore put into absolute and permanent remission via this symbolic replacement of Enns with his congregationalist public disputant. Now people who may have had some reservations about WTS's claim to orthodoxy can feel a little better about giving them money again.

The only way the OT could be so cultural is that the devil gave the ANE a head start

2009-03-07T22:55:00.008-05:00

"But how are we then to understand the similar claims of divine guidance made by Thutmose III [to King David in 1Chron 28]? It would be most bizarre if an Egyptian who predated David by centuries made an almost identical claim to divine guidance for making temple furnishings for his god and made that claim by coincidence. Or, to put it another way, the true God just happened to do to David what Thutmose claimed his god did for him a few centuries earlier. The parallels we have explored in this book are of this sort. We have concluded that they cannot be explained as cases of biblical dependence on ancient Near Eastern theology. We also conclude that they cannot be explained as coincidences, if only because the accumulation of such coincidences sooner or later strains credibility. Our belief need not be strained, however, because the Bible itself gives us the reason for such parallels...Demonic inspiration of false religion (which produces the sort of parallels we have considered, including the major paradigm in its pagan articulations) is one of the things that the Bible teaches quite clearly in the passages noted." (J. Niehaus, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology, 179.)

I am sorry to say this but my belief is strained.

A word to the wise from Sparks' book

2009-03-04T15:02:00.002-05:00

Unfortunately, I haven't time for composing posts, but I have come across a number of excerpts that are relevant to the themes of this blog. So I will periodically post them for those who might be interested. Kent Sparks' book is beginning to make its rounds so I'll start there:

"More specifically, when it comes to biblical exegesis and theology, informed pastors and teachers will wisely avoid numerous errors. They should certainly avoid any rhetoric that hitches the Christian faith to a fundamentalistic notion of biblical inerrancy. It will be enough to teach that God does not err in Scripture and to show, by how we work, live, and do our theology, that we take the Bible seriously as the authroitative Word of God. But to insist on an inerrant Bible in a naive sense, which denies the full humanity of Scripture, will only paint the evangelical church and Christian scholarship into a corner..." K. Sparks, God's Word in Human Words, 362.

Music to my ears

2009-02-16T19:56:00.003-05:00

"It is my argument in this book that the Jewish spirit did not set out to develop a scripture; that during most of the biblical period a written scripture played no significant role; that the rabbis made prodigious efforts to mitigate the limiatations imposed by the existence of scripture; that the concept of an oral memorized law in part reflects these efforts; and that until the European centuries, Judaism more or less effectively escaped the limitations of scripture.

Judaism is not and never has been just the teachings of a set of authorized books. The text is not our homeland; life is. Commentary reads in as readily as it reads out. Our books were meant to become part of us, the living voice of God and tradition. Except under rare circumstances in Jewish history, the texts did not define life. Far more than has generally been recognized, life defined the texts." (D. J. Silver, The Story of Scripture: From Oral Tradition to the Written Word, 286.)

Or as I wrote in my book: "the Bible was made for man and not man for the Bible." (80)

Help my unbelief

2009-02-08T09:53:00.005-05:00

"[B]y adopting the inerrancy postulate, by arguing that the Bible is competely void of problematic passages, by insisting that others agree with them, inerrantists have trapped non-inerrantists into a corner not of their choosing...Many inerrantists, I've observed, have bully mentalities which compel them to impose their views on others. Thus non-inerrantists have no choice but to respond to inerrantists' aggressive tactics. Our behavior is motivated by a desire to deliver fellow believers from the ideological cul-de-sac down which inerrantists want everyone to travel. That's precisely what inerrantism is-- a hermeneutical dead end street which leads to intellectual dishonesty and to an ignoring of the phenomena of the text."

Clayton Sullivan, Toward a Mature Faith: Does Biblical Inerrancy Make Sense? (Decatur, GA: SBC Today, 1990), 56.

Trapped in a corner at Westminster Theological Seminary, I, too, felt the contradictory impulses of owning up to what the Bible really is and believing what inerrantists insist the Bible must be. At the time, the song "Blurry" helped me articulate the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing: the same community that instilled in me that "real" Christianity cannot survive without inerrancy also convinced me that if you take an honest look at it, inerrancy is false. What is one to do?

"Can you take it all away
Can you take it all away
When you shoved it in my face
Explain again to me

Nobody told me what to find
Nobody told me what to say
Noone showed you where to turn
Told you where to run away
Nobody told you where to hide
Nobody told you what to say
Noone showed you where to turn
Showed you where to run away

Can you take it all away..."

-Puddle of Mudd

We need a realistic view of scripture

2009-02-07T10:01:00.003-05:00

"Even for those with sufficient skills in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek , the problem remains that we still do not have an established authoritative text that all Christian biblical scholars have adopted. Likewise, we do not yet have one universally accepted set of books that all Christians acknowledge as divinely inspired, and there is no single text or translation of the Bible that garners the full support of the Christian community. The history of the Bible's development teaches us that it is very difficult to establish hard and fast rules that apply in every situation. That was true in antiquity and is still true today. In the midst of some of the uncertainty that we have shown, wherein lies authority for the church? Jesus himself said that all authority has been given to him (Matt. 28:18), and he did not speak of transferring this authority to a particular collection, text, or translation of books to rival his authority in the church...

...perhaps scholars and church leaders should consider statements of faith that are more reflective of the actual state of canonical inquiry, textual investigation, and translation practice."

-Lee Martin McDonald, "Wherein Lies Authority? A Discussion of Books, Texts, and Translations," in Exploring the Origins of the Bible: Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological Perspective, ed. C. A. Evans and E. Tov (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 238-239.

Time to say good-bye to inerrancy

2008-12-08T21:10:00.003-05:00

I started reading again a book that last time I did not get to finish and I came across the following paragraph: "The power of certain pictures, of certain visual representations, in the historical development of science will be the recurrent theme of this book. It is a power, in the early stages, to initiate progress, when the ideas it conveys are still creative and successful, and it becomes, later on, a power to obstruct, when the momentum is gone and repetition of old theories prevents the emergence of new ideas." (Ivar Ekeland, Mathematics and the Unexpected, 9)

There is no question in my mind that inerrancy has become such a picture for our conception of biblical authority. We have for some time been in inerrancy's "later on" phase, where its momentum is spent and its widespread usage has prevented the emergence of fresh thought and new ideas on how and why scripture should matter to Christians. Whenever one begins asking questions, the old theories are rehearsed, causing spiritual obstruction.

What is the Bible, and How?

2008-10-25T17:21:00.002-04:00

I have become much too busy to keep up the blog. For the next several months, I'll only be able to get in a few intermittent posts, likely sharing or commenting on pericopes from what I'm reading or regarding something I'm working on. For now, I wanted to share an excerpt from Charles Wood, The Formation of Christian Understanding (p 105, italics in original):

"The Bible is an assemblage of greatly differing strategies for recollecting, interpreting, and sharing the community's witness concerning God. They defy harmonization. They do clash. It is impossible--not simply an overwhelmingly difficult task, but, at times, a logically impossible one--to affirm them all simultaneously. The fact that the church can use this collection of material as its canon does not preclude the possibility and necessity of sifting through its individual components with a critical eye, and making some judgments, in the light of the canon itself, as to the Christianness of some of its components, individually considered. To put the point briefly. Scripture as canon must rule the Christian use of scripture as source. The biblical canon assists the critical appropriation of biblical tradition. How this happens remains to be considered."

Now that Enns is gone you can give us the moolah

2008-08-24T01:03:00.002-04:00

I was browsing WTS's website and found this interesting piece of advertising:

"Support Westminster Theological Seminary

Westminster Theological Seminary exists to serve Christ and His Kingdom by extending the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ until that knowledge "covers the earth as the waters cover the sea."

With a commitment to the Bible as our absolute and final authority, we believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be without error, the very Word of God written, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice.

Learn how you may give."

This last sentence is underlined and sends you to a page on giving. This appears on the home page as story #5 (at least at the time of this posting). Below this synopsis is the phrase, "full story," and it takes you here.

And they say it's not about money...

Ridderbos (again) supports Enns

2008-08-16T15:32:00.003-04:00

In dialogue elsewhere, I had occasion to take another look at Herman Ridderbos' other book on scripture, Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures (for my earlier reference, see here). Steve Taylor had us read the book when I took his NT Introduction course. I remember enjoying the book and seeing that it strongly supported what the biblical studies guys were trying to do as they set out, each in his own way, to relate biblical scholarship to the more existential concerns of confessional faith. As far as I can see, Pete Enns is as Dutch Reformed as Ridderbos and Ridderbos is widely accepted and promoted by WTS-styled scholars:

“Still, there can be no doubt that though Christians are bound to Scripture by authority that proceeds from it as God’s Word, this does not provide an exact *concept* of its canonicity or of the extent of its authority. The self-attestation of Scripture as understood by Christians through the witness of the Holy Spirit is related above all to the divine character of the central content of Scripture. Scripture’s self-attestation does not provide direct and infallible certainty about all the facts and data in the New Tesament…”

“Apart from the issue of the limits of the canon, the *nature* of canonical authority cannot be decided by a simple appeal to the authoritative impact Scripture makes or to the witness of the Holy Spirit. The witness of the Spirit teaches us that such authority exists and that it is a divine authority. But the way in which the New Testament canon embodies this authority and the qualitative and quantitative extent of such authority in the New Testament are questions that cannot be decded in terms of the impact that Scripture makes on the church and the individual believer. These questions must be dealt with in a broader context.” (Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures, 10)

Compare Pete Enns:

"What a study of Scripture’s humanity does do is help us see the manner in which the divine author speaks authoritatively into particular ancient cultures. How this authoritative Scripture translates to different times and places, in both its timeless affirmations and contextualized particularity is (I trust this is not too reductionistic) the task of theological study. It is my firm experience, however, that evangelical lay readers, those to whom the book is addressed, are not accustomed to understanding the nature of Scripture this way." (http://peterennsonline.com/ii/authority-of-scripture/)

Statement by Vice President for Academic Affairs of WTS

2008-08-10T02:47:00.003-04:00

I have been trying to take a break from posting and commenting online but I thought it might be good to note that Carl Trueman has written a statement on letting go of Enns (it can be read here). Carl's piece helps onlookers gain more of a big picture perspective on recent developments at WTS. He mentions that what is happening at WTS is and will be happening across evangelical institutions within the next decade. On this, it would appear he is dead on. For example, with regard to controversies arising from an administrator holding faculty to higher academic standards at Baylor, read here. For how Christian colleges across the United States are wrestling with similar issues as those at WTS with regard to academic freedom and confessionalism, read here. How should a school's understanding of confession on the one hand and academic freedom on the other interplay? How might institutional attempts to implement this interplay show themselves relevant to contemporary cultural and administrative considerations? These are not easy questions to answer. Still, perhaps Carl Trueman's idea of taking a stand could be a little more sensitive to the cultural milieu of the 21st century and not so ready to pattern itself after a bygone milieu, notwithstanding the ecclesial developments (however important) of generations past.

Enns no longer to teach at WTS

2008-07-24T07:01:00.002-04:00

Westminster Seminary has stood their ground and let go of Pete Enns. There are a host of issues surrounding Enns' dismissal. Out of them all, the main item is the direction the seminary wishes to take within the next forseeable future. Having graduated from Westminster myself, I think I can say that I understand the dilemma.

Westminster is a school that exists primarily to produce pastors for its constituency--and even if this is not its primary objective, it's likely how the school makes most its money. What is such a school to do when faculty begin teaching material that students cannot practically use while pursuing ordination? In other words, what responsibility does the school have when it turns out to be the case that if students parroted back its own faculty's teaching during the course of an ordination examination that those students would not be approved for ordination? WTS would then be failing in its primary objective and in effect cutting itself off from its primary source of income. Such a school would certainly be forced into some type of action and the action they took in this particular case makes quite a lot of sense when viewed from this vantage. I think all discussions surrounding Enns' book have diverted attention from the more fundamental aims that the seminary must continually focus upon such as: why does the seminary exist and is it doing its best to sustain its capacity for accomplishing its primary tasks?

Whether it is time for the culture of the school's church constituency to change is quite another matter. It goes without saying that I think it does, but I think WTS is saying here (among other things) that 1) it will certainly not be the arbiter of such change; 2) it does not (at least publicly) see that there is presently a need for such change; and 3) it will continue to serve the churches it services irrespective of directions taken in contemporary biblical scholarship.

Dust off your Mounce and Wallace

2008-07-21T15:39:00.003-04:00

According to the University of Leipzig, Codex Sinaiticus is about to become Cyber Sinaiticus over the next year or so.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080721/lf_nm_life/bible_internet_dc

Whose job is it to get us out of this mess?

2008-07-14T16:11:00.002-04:00

Carl Trueman observes: "Nonetheless the battle within evangelicalism today is once more focused on the divine authorship of scripture. It is not, I would suggest, the humanity of scripture which is generally being neglected by the guild of evangelical biblical scholars. Thus, while evangelical systematicians may need to think out their position on human authoriship more thoroughly, biblical scholars certainly need to be made to take account of divine authorship, and to do so sooner rather than later. The lack of critical reflection within evangelical biblical scholarship upon what the statement that scripture is God's Word actually means, what limits this places upon investigation, what implications it has for method is a worrying sign." (The Wages of Spin, [Christian Focus Publications, 2004], 100)

Whose job is it to get us out of this mess? Carl Trueman seems to say that it falls upon both systematicians and biblical scholars, but he also seems to come down especially hard on biblical scholars. Are biblical scholars in a position to do what Carl asks of them? Is the question, What does it mean for scripture to be God's Word? a systematic question or a biblical studies question? It would seem to me a theological question. So how explicitly involved in theology is biblical studies? Very, if biblical scholars are the ones who should answer this question. But there's a catch: only a restricted set of answers to this question will be accepted by the systematicians.

So now one might ask, How explicitly involved in biblical studies is theology? Considerably, but from whence does systematics get its primary materials for the work of systematizing? Biblical studies? Or is it already there in the theology itself? This is a dog chasing its tail. Each discipline apparently has its own set of tools and each discipline studies a very different sort of data set, yet somehow the systematic dimension is assumed to have priority (especially in the present context). Not only that, but Carl seems to imply that the discipline of biblical studies has not been holding its own and is now expected to fall back in line (with systematics, that is).

Yet biblical studies is theoretically what provides systematics with the materials for its theologizing. Without this data, the theology produced would not be scriptural, which is the ultimate goal. Theology also has as its resource all of what has come before in historical theology. Still, scripture is supposed to be given priority. But for the last 20 years or so the materials set forth by evangelical biblical scholars have increasingly become of such nature that suggests systematics should begin pondering whether it is in need of revision. But this is not what will happen, not in evangelicalism, that would go against evangelicalism's very raison d'etre. Instead, the biblical scholars will rather be told to go back and take another look at their work or they'll be pressured to sit on things awhile and keep things to themselves.

But in such a stalemate, who is the one who should go back and rethink things? Who is obligated to rework what it means to say that the Bible is the word of God? This has indeed really become some mess and it's only going to get worse with time. In fact, a new evangelical era is already upon us but culturally we're being forced to keep it under wraps.

Whose job is it to officially get us out of this mess?

It's up to the philosophers. Everybody's going to have to wait for them. I'm not sure if they've started yet, started thinking about a way out. I don't even know if they know about it, if they realize everyone's waiting for them.

Whose going to get us out of this mess? The philosophers. So if you know a philosopher whose still busy writing about material constitution, or the nature of universals, or the epistemological status of religious experience, or what it might mean to be an intelligent designer, go get their attention and tell them that we're waiting for them. Tell them that everyone needs them. Tell them there's an important job to do.

But there might be a small problem, though. The question we need them to answer is unabashedly parochial, it's not just religious, not just theological, but quintessentially evangelical. I'm not sure how in these kinds of questions are right now in evangelical philosophy, that is, conservative evangelical philosophy. So we might have to wait a bit for someone to give an answer. But hopefully it won't take too long to get their attention because I think they are the only ones who can get us out of this mess.

Evangelical scholars writing with kid gloves

2008-07-12T01:41:00.002-04:00

Kent Sparks observes: "First, it appears to me that many evangelical biblical scholars have not yet adequately synthesized their theological commitments with critical scholarship. Scripture's difficultites are clear enough to them, but so long as it is unclear how these difficulties relate to biblical authority, these scholars will be...tentative about the critical conclusions that they embrace. Second, a number of conservative scholars...have pastoral hearts and so wish to shield their readers from disruptive, faith-testing bouts with cognitive dissonance...A third reason for the rhetorical ambiguity of evangelical biblical scholarship is that evangelical scholars are often wedged uncomfortably between their desire to be good scholars and their desire to sell books to conservative readers...To put it baldly: it seems to me that serious scholarship does not sell among conservative Evangelicals. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, there are institutional issues at stake." (God's Word in Human Words, 167.)

There's a secret waiting to come out in conservative evangelical scholarship: the critics were right! Who will be the one who will begin telling their constituencies what they have found? When will that one be in a position where they can actually and finally tell?

Here a Briggs, there a Briggs, everywhere a Briggs

2008-07-11T17:07:00.002-04:00

Gary Johnson, in an essay that recounts some of the polemical exchanges that went down between Briggs and Warfield over inerrancy, makes the following contemporary assessment:

"Briggs is pretty much a forgotten figure today. Other than the famous A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament that he produced along with Francis Brown and Samuel Driver, his books are no longer in print, and his name rarely surfaces in today's theological discussions except in an occasional Ph.D. dissertation. However, even though Briggs might not be referenced as such, his views do have a following, and a significant one at that. In other words, views that were champioined by him in his lifetime are alive and well today. No doubt some of those I have linked to Briggs will protest that they have never heard of him, much less been influenced by his writings. But this is like the claim that we often hear today from well-meaning individuals who espouse an identical understanding to doctrines closely associated with Jacobus Arminius (i.e., libertarian free-will, conditional election, resistable grace), and yet protest that they have never read him and therefore should not be identified as Arminian. Nevertheless, in theological parlance they are classified as 'Arminian,' protest notwithstanding."("Warfield and Briggs: Their Polemics and Legacy," in B. B. Warfield: Essays on His Life and Thought, ed. G. L. W. Johnson [Presbyterian and Reformed, 2007], 217-218)

Then come the comparisons, but only after establishing one last time that Briggs exemplified an "overt rejection of the Old Princeton understanding of inerrancy." The implication is that anyone who is critical of Old Princeton in almost any way is by default "following" Briggs! Not only that, but since Briggs adopted so many different strategies during the course of his protracted dispute with Old Princeton and other inerrantists, it may not be the case that anyone differing with Old Princeton today will be able to come up with an original criticism. What's more, no thought is given by Johnson to the possibility that one or more of the specific criticisms against Old Princeton's inerrancy position might actually be right. One of the main objectives of his essay is to suggest that since Briggs voiced these several concerns so vociferously, anyone after Briggs who expresses any of the same concerns regarding inerrancy (or any other doctrine for that matter) can be said to be "following" Briggs.

To the extent that this explication is the one Johnson intends, I protest that I don't find this line of reasoning either compelling or helpful. It seems to me more of a rhetorical magic wand in the making, one that conveniently causes any contemporary anti-inerrantist --badda-bing-badda-boom-- to harmlessly be assimilated into inerrantist categories by the mere waving of a hand. All critics of inerrancy morph right into a modern day Briggs. Once the critic is successfully assimilated by the inerrantist, the response is predictable: You are a Briggs; Warfield already dealt with you definitively at the turn of the last century. Without much interaction and almost less work, the said assimilation translates contemporary challenges to inerrancy into tamer and more familiar terms for the inerrantist comprehend.

I should say that it would not bother me if anyone called me a follower of Briggs (Johnson already has), any more than if people called me a follower of Nietzsche, a follower of Aristotle, or a follower of Karl Marx. I do not consider myself any of these, but I am sure that among these posts on my site people could find ideas or trains of thought that these thinkers (and many others besides) have thought before me. So if I am a follower of so many varied thinkers, then that raises the question of what it takes to be a follower and whether the criteria employed by Johnson are practical and reasonable. For Johnson wants to make clear that it does not matter whether a critic has read Briggs or even heard of him; Johnson can still say that the critics are influenced by Briggs if he wants to.

Ok, so let's take for an example, as Johnson points out, how Briggs once wrote, "The antitheses of the sixteenth century are to a great extent antitheses of one-sidedness, which the modern world has outgrown. The world has moved since then. The world has learned many things. We have new views of God's universe. We have new scientific methods. We have an entirely different psychology and philosophy...All along the line of life, institution, dogma, morals new situations are emerging, new questions pressing for solution; the perspective is changed, the lights and shadows are differently distributed. We are in a state of enormous trasition, changes are taking place whose results it is impossible to foretell--reconstruction is in progress on the grandest scale..." (cited on 217)

Quantum physics, the Big Bang, general relativity, DNA, Dead Sea Scrolls, Second Temple Judaism, the fundamentalist/modernist controversies, the rise of postmodernism, developments in philosophy of science-- all cultural developments that happened after Briggs-- insofar as they are cultural developments at all will still put me in line with Briggs simply because I am a critic of inerrancy and there are similarities in argument. It would not serve me, in Johnson's view, to argue that the nature of these advances in knowledge since the time of Briggs are of such magnitude that when I say something similar to Briggs (without having read any of Briggs' writings!) I might actually be saying something qualitatively different. But I would still "following" Briggs so long as I am saying something similar to him with respect to my criticism of inerrancy.

Analogously, Grenz and Franke are "mak[ing] a very Briggs-like shift by following the lead of Schleiermacher in positing three sources or norms for theology: Scripture, tradition and culture." In fact, Stanley Grenz, Andrew Sandlin, John Armstrong, Peter Enns, C. Peter Wagner, Jack Deere, William DeArteaga, John Ruthven and many others can all be connected to Briggs. How? In short, because each of these have argued against Warfield either directly or by association on some point or other and, by arguing against Warfield, these varied Christian writers inevitably take on different semblances to Johnson's Warfield-nemesis, Charles Augustus Briggs.

I do not find Johnson's catch-all "Briggs" category to be very helpful. According to Johnson, Briggs was 1) critical of inerrancy, 2) critical of Reformed "scholasticism," 3) critical of a theology that emphasizes propositional truth, 4) critical of traditional Reformed understandings of justification, 5) critical of the way conservative Reformed circles privilege their specific creeds, 6) critical of others who do not seem to want developments in scholarship to inform one's theology, 7) critical of denominationalism and there are a few other areas of criticism mentioned. Now when a contemporary thinker is critical in one or more of these ways, he is said to be basking in Briggs' legacy. This way of defining the matter seems to me to confuse more than it clarifies and it seems to me an over-simplification at best.

Let us say I argue for a theological legacy, "Italian Sub," and enumerate seven identifying markers: 1) cappicola, 2) ham, 3) provolone, 4) lettuce, 5) tomato, 6) oregano/salt/pepper, 7) oil and vinegar. I then point out that the overall motivation for the Italian sub is to get eaten. What I see Johnson doing is pointing to a sub with turkey, roastbeef, provolone, lettuce and mayo, and emphasizing how this sub, too, was made to be eaten, and then reminding readers how both the progenitor Italian sub and this new contemporary sub both have provolone and lettuce. Thus we must conclude that they are both Italian subs, and since it is not the Italian sub that "stands fully in the Reformed tradition that traces itself back through the Westminster divines to the Protestant Reformers," the contemporary upstart surely cannot either. Thus at least two goals are easily and simultaneously accomplished: a) the inerrantists are reassured that the critics in question are not within the fold (on account of their association with Briggs); and b) the inerrantists are not obligated to engage the contemporary criticism as a new and potentially legitimate criticism but are rather encouraged to invoke Warfield and passively defer to his engagement with the errantists of his time (namely Briggs). Yet these appear to be rhetorical gains on Johnson's part, not theological or otherwise theoretical.

[That said, I can see how the Briggs-construct might help historical theologians identify past controversies with similitudes to current discussions about inerrancy in order to help them gain an initial understanding of what theological issues might ultimately be at stake. But I think Johnson is going further and trying to dismiss a whole swath of contemporary writers in one fell swoop.]

Now let's grant that the provolone and lettuce might be such significant theological criteria that the mere presence of either or both of these would be a paramount indication of this or that theological tendency. Then even here, it seems to me that the categories of interest would not be "Italian sub" or even "wanting to get eaten," but rather the "lettuce" and "provolone" individually, considered as a duo and also by themselves. In other words, I think Johnson is illegitimately leveling the conservative theological playing field, one with an uncomfortably unwieldy and variegated topography. In order to facilitate the grouping of an increasingly wide range of conservative writers into two distinct black-and-white categories (Briggs/Warfield), he's foreswearing not only provolone and lettuce, but subs of any kind-- except, of course, that one favorite sandwich that Johnson likes so much!

Gospels do not need to be historically reliable

2008-07-07T22:03:00.002-04:00

I was very happy to read about the connection between having historically reliable gospels and defending the resurrection in the "Preface to the Third Edition" of William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith. Craig explains:

"Keeping the book at approximately the same length was made possible by the deletion of the chapter on the historical reliability of the New Testament, a chapter which a former editor had insisted, depite my protestations, be inserted into the second edition. The inclusion of this chapter (itself a solid piece of work written at my invitation by Craig Blomberg) perpetuated the misimpression, all too common among evangelicals, that a historical case for Jesus' radical self-understanding and resurrection depends on showing that the Gospels are generally reliable historical documents. The overriding lesson of two centuries of biblical criticism is that such an assumption is false. Even documents which are generally unreliable may contain valuable historical nuggets, and it will be the historian's task to mine these documents in order to discover them. The Christian apologist seeking to establish, for example, the historicity of Jesus' empty tomb need not and should not be saddled with the task of first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically reliable documents." (11)

Preach it!

Ancient, pre-Christian tablet a prophecy of Christ?

2008-07-06T20:36:00.003-04:00

Assume for a moment that the tablet is real (see last post), what would this mean for the faith? Can the faith handle such a discovery? Can the faith accommodate the facts?

At First Things, Mary Rose Rybak writes, "Wow! Could this be prophesy of Christ’s resurrection? Could this be monumental, reinforcing evidence of Christian theology?" She then cites Knohl's interpretation of the tablet: "This should shake our basic view of Christianity. . . . Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story."

"That’s certainly an interesting interpretation," Rybak remarks. "But I’m not as convinced as Knohl that these findings rule out the possibility that the New Testament was not adopted but rather fulfilled by Jesus and his followers."

Knohl's interpretation may not rule out the prophesy possibility, but does such a possibility really need to be ruled out? I for one have been giving some serious thought as to how one might incorporate this finding (if it proves genuine) into their faith; I am mildly concerned about this finding. But claiming that this tablet was an anonymous prophesy that Christ happened to fulfill seems to me to be a perfect example of grasping at miraculous straws.

Have I succumbed to methodological naturalism? Perhaps. I have to be honest and say, though, that if I have to choose between Knohl's interpretation and Rybak's, Knohl's wins hands down. I'm very reluctant to begin claiming that there is some extra-biblical prophesy contained on an anonymous tablet that Jesus' death and resurrection happened to fulfill. This seems to me a case where a believer is all too ready to invoke a miracle to help save the faith: it sounds very much like special pleading to me. I know I would certainly raise my eyebrows if persons from other faiths (or denominations) resorted to this kind of strategy.

I much rather prefer an interpretation that says something like: "There is evidence for a specific interpretive tradition that was current during 1st cent BCE Judaism that Jesus and his followers may have received and then in turn promulgated." Does such an interpretation have negative implications for the faith, in terms of destroying the credibility of Christ's resurrection? Possibly, but I don't see why it necessarily would.

I think that Christians could always say something like: "The interpretive tradition that got it right--with regard to interpreting extant OT (and perhaps other extra-biblical) passages in terms of trying to discern the fate of the Messiah--is the one represented here on this tablet." This makes Christianity a very historical religion indeed, almost more historical than I'm comfortable dealing with. It's not a road so easily travelled. I can well understand why so many prefer to stay with their pie-in-the-sky theologies. The historical-critical alternative is so unsafe, so precarious, and ultimately out of one's hands.

I myself am hoping that Ridderbos (and others) is right (see two posts below) when he counsels, "[W]e can overcome the fear that we may be on a dangerous pathway if we view the ways of the Spirit in recording the word of God more historically, more critically, as more shaded, than along the way of an exclusively dogmatic reasoning.” I will confess: Christianity is not what I thought it was when I first believed, but like it or not, this seems to me the faith that God has decided to give. Thanks be to God.

1st cent BCE tablet: Messiah to rise in three days!

2008-07-05T20:26:00.006-04:00

So now as if to help us out with current discussions regarding how much extra-biblical data should inform our doctrine of scripture, there has been a discovery (or at least just now publicized) of a tablet that contains 87 lines in Hebrew that speaks of a Messiah-figure who will rise from the dead in three days:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/middleeast/06stone.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Ada Yardeni calls it "a Dead Sea Scroll on stone."

Ridderbos on extra-biblical data and authority

2008-07-05T10:26:00.003-04:00

Enns is in good conservative Reformed company in what he's doing in Inspiration and Incarnation, following Herman Ridderbos, for example:

“From the standpoint of faith, the nature of the Scripture and its authority can surely be more sharply, clearly, and precisely distinguished when we see the Bible against the background and in the light of the time in which it was written. Then we come to see on the one hand the incomparable otherness of Scripture, and on the other that which is bound up with and limited to the time.”

“…[R]emember that just those who have occasion to come to a more historical approach to the Bible and its authority will be able along the way to understand the unique and incomparable significance of Scripture. The world of the ancient Near East is being increasingly opened to us. We are discovering very ancient ‘literature’ in which the religious feelings of people who were contemporaries of the biblical writers are expressed. There is increasing Jewish background through the Talmud and through insights into the radical movements in the Judaism of Jesus’ time through the discover of the Qumran writings…All of this teaches us more strongly than ever to be mindful of the relationship between Scripture and the world out of which it arose..there is nothing that more clearly brings to the light the unique character of the Scriptures than the qualitiatve comparison between that which here and that which there steps out to meet us…

…in light of *this* authority authority, we can overcome the fear that we may be on a dangerous pathway if we view the ways of the Spirit in recording the word of God more historically, more critically, as more shaded, than along the way of an exclusively dogmatic reasoning.”
(Ridderbos, Studies in Scripture and Its Authority, 10, 35, 36)

Generally speaking, it seems to me that the Old Princeton concordist attitude toward biblical studies promotes this kind of approach to discerning what type of authority we should say that scripture actually has.

On the passing of an age

2008-07-03T22:45:00.003-04:00

If we are permitted to juxtapose the remarks of Jeffrey Stout regarding an exchange between William Alston and Frederick Will over foundationalism onto current exchanges involving those evangelicals who want to keep "inerrancy" but qualify its meaning and those evangelicals who think it's time to jettison the dogma, one can surmise that the exchanges themselves admit the passing of an age:

"Alston executes what Bloom would call a tessera, by so reading the precursor's work as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, 'as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.'...Minimal foundationalism is more like Tillichian theology: the former is to the philosophy of Descartes what the latter is to the Christianity of Aquinas. Both try so hard to say something unobjectionable that they become indistinguishable from their opponents. Both use traditional vocabulary now emptied of content. Both practice conversation by redefinition. Both signal the passing of an age." (The Flight from Authority, [University of Notre Dame Press, 1981], 35-36.)

Tipton and Jue Paper against Enns and HFC

2008-06-18T14:58:00.005-04:00

I was on another site trying to interact with others who support an argument being made by Lane Tipton and Jeff Jue against Enns' Inspiration and Incarnation. Only a "precis" of the paper referenced appears there but I did find a link that seems to provide the full text for those who might be interested.

McGowan part of Old Princeton/WTS?!

2008-05-31T21:52:00.005-04:00

"We must also note that confessional statements ought to be constantly subjected to scrutiny by careful exegetical work and should always be recognized as transient documents. Confessions should be written regularly so that the church always has a doctrinal statement that deals with the issues and concerns of the day. The fact that most of the confessions in use in Protestant churches were written in Western Europe in the seventeenth century is a strange phenomenon. Is it not remarkable that none of us has confessions that deal with the principal difficulties that have assailed and are assailing the church, namely liberalism, pluralism, relativism, postmodernism and so on?" (A.T.B. McGowan, The Divine Spiration of Scripture, 186.)

These are very interesting points that McGowan makes here; certainly ones that I think should be mulled over with all seriousness. What's even more interesting is that McGowan says straightaway that he's a conservative, Reformed vanTillian. In fact, the back cover of his book lists him as being (among other things) a visiting professor at "Westminster Theological Seminary, USA"!

He advises, "The inerrantist position was created in the heat of battle. Liberal theology was on the march and evangelicals struggled to find ways of defending a high view of Scripture. Unfortunately, in the heat of battle a hardening of positions often takes place, where people are forced into more and more extreme statements by their opponents, afraid to give any quarter lest the battle be lost. This is, I believe, what happened in the debate over the doctrine of Scripture." (121)

I wonder if similar things can be said about the formation and evolution of WTS itself: created in the heat of battle, finding ways to defend a high view of scripture, hardening of positions, forced into more and more extreme statements, afraid to give any quarter lest the battle be lost...

Without inerrancy, it's a matter of personal preference

2008-05-04T20:17:00.006-04:00

"If those who would thus judge the veracity of the Bible lack the necessary ingredient of personal inerrancy in judgment, they may come to a false and mistaken judgment—endorsing as true what is actually false. Or else they may condemn as erroneous what is actually correct in scripture. Thus the objective authority of the Bible is replaced by personal research, subjective intuition, or judicial faculty on the part of each believer, and it easily becomes a matter of mere
personal preference how much of Scripture teaching he or she may adopt as binding. This can lead us to a hopeless, almost cultic subjectivism where we pick and choose the word of God within the Bible as it suits our fancy, or vainly attempt to sift the revelational matter from the nonrevelational, or to find the Gospel within the Gospel, etc. Remember Dr. Davis’ statement cited in an earlier issue that the Bible is authoritative for every Christian until he encounters a passage he cannot accept “for good reason”? Where has such subjectivism led many biblical scholars to if not into either a quagmire of skepticism and uncertainty or a new papalism of higher critical “ex cathedras”? Scholars of the so-called Jesus Seminar, for example, are at best intellectual agnostics on the teachings of Jesus and at worst practical atheists." (J. Ankerberg and J. Weldon, "The Importance of Inerrancy, Part 1," http://www.ankerberg.org/Articles/_PDFArchives/editors-choice/EC3W1204B.pdf)

Everyone keeps bringing this up when they talk with me. If the Bible contains one error, then it's littered with errors and everyone's going to be able to pick and choose what to believe and what to reject. Then we're only left with human opinions. I initially had a big problem as well with this consequence of abandoning inerrancy until I realized that everyone's in the same boat here. Inerrantists can make mistakes, too, and they have made their fair share. But inerrantists may be less willing to reexamine their theological conclusions being convinced that that their conclusions have been inerrantly set down in scripture. That's a huge problem.

What's more, inerrantists disagree amongst themselves on a host of issues. An inerrant Bible is not sufficient to solve the disputes (as I argue in my book). Some inerrantists must be wrong--they cannot all be right. So they, too, "endors[e] as true what is actually false. Or else they may condemn as erroneous what is actually correct in Scripture." In addition, everyone, inerrantists and non-inerrantists alike, finds ways to explain away a passage or pericope that they do not like. Inerrantists only have to find a way to do so within an inerrantist framework and non-inerrantists can find ways to do so without an inerrantist framework. The same hermeneutical dynamics are in place. Inerrancy does not save one from them, if anything, it exacerbates the situation. It's always a matter of personal preference (as I also argue in my book), but the personal preference for the inerrantist is pawned off as an inerrant one!

As for introducing uncertainty, that's not such a bad thing, is it? (I don't see what the big deal is here with this myself.) I have found that introducing healthy doses of uncertainty into things theological can be very humbling. That helps one put faith in a much more healthy perspective, in a way that inerrancy may not encourage or allow for one to do. In fact, as far as I can see, there are times when there is more virtue to be had in being a practical atheist than in being a practical all-knowing, unerring God who can decree biblical truths faster than Quickdraw McGraw.

Systematic theology run amok

2008-05-01T05:55:00.004-04:00

"[Biblical theology] fences off from the Scriptures all the speculations, all the dogmatic elaborations, all the doctrinal adaptations that have been made in the history of doctrine in the Church. It does not deny their importance, but it insists upon the three-fold distinction as necessary to truth and theological honesty, that the theology of the Bible is one thing, the only infallible authority; the theology of the creeds is another thing, having simply ecclesiastical authority; and the theology of the theologians or Dogmatic Theology, is a third thing, which has no more authority than any other system of human construction. It is well known that until quite recent times, and even at present in some quarters, the creeds have lorded it over the Scriptures, and the dogmaticians have lorded it over the creeds, so that in its last analysis the authority in the Church has been, too often, the authority of certain theologians." (Charles Augustus Briggs, The Authority of Holy Scripture: An Inaugural Address, 5)

When does systematics over step its bounds and become the authority of the church? When does it get too big for its britches and usurp the authority of scripture? In my book, I claim that this has happened with regard to inerrancy, where inerrancy has been mandated among evangelicals by inerrantist theologians precisely on the authority of the theologians under the cover of being on the authority of scripture. I identify a canonical dialectic and try to show that a doctrine like inerrancy shuts the dialectic down to the effect that what becomes authoritative for inerrantist evangelicals is the systematic offering of inerrantist theologians. This would not be so bad if the inerrantist proposal proves useful for spiritual formation. But the inerrantist offering is simply not viable; it is time to replace it with something better.

Fear of the slippery slope

2008-04-22T06:01:00.004-04:00

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.

Inerrancy and academic personality types

2008-04-06T03:07:00.002-04:00

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]

Ehrman's significance

2008-04-05T09:19:00.003-04:00

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.

What? Inerrancy's not true? And you already knew?

2008-04-05T01:58:00.005-04:00

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)?

Firing him won't make the problems go away!

2008-03-30T15:38:00.002-04:00

"'Finally,' Burtchaell notes, 'in 1910 a loyalty oath against Modernism was imposed on all clerics whenever they received holy orders, applied for professional faculties, took papal degrees, began office as religious superiors, or taught in a seminary or pontifically approved faculty.' The real tragedy of such a pogrom is that nothing is really solved--the problems are merely postponed. 'The catastrophe of the Modernist purge was,' according to Burtcheall, 'that the exploration of this whole constellation of associated and perplexing problems was for half a century paralyzed. However irresponsible the discussion had become, one is tempted to think that it might have been dealt with more deftly.'" (Dewey Beegle, Scripture, Tradition and Infallibility, 293-294.)

Enns might be going, Taylor might be gone, but the issues are still there. These guys were trying to work through them. Maybe WTS thinks it can paralyze them, but the issues won't go away. They're bound to be raised again, and likely sooner than later.

What happened in America?

2008-03-27T00:38:00.002-04:00

"Nevertheless, British evangelicals manifest a greater flexibility in their approach to inerrancy...While American formulations vary in their insistence upon scientific and historical inerrancy, they generally reflect a greater anxiety over factual accuracy than has ever been present in the British evangelical heritage." (Harriet A. Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 87.) Why this specifically American evangelical anxiety? Is it because American evangelical theology became democratically decided and every person can see for themselves that the Bible is obviously and indeed the perfect word of God?

Damage control

2008-03-22T20:14:00.003-04:00

It feels like a scary time in evangelicalism. Inerrancy is seemingly under attack again. But this time it's not the liberals, it's the evangelical scholars themselves! They are suggesting to each other that they take another look at the doctrine and talk about why it now seems wanting. Yet in some ways not much seems to have changed in the last thirty years: Older conservative leadership is alarmed by change and wants to secure the fortress at all costs, controlling the damage that might be done by the younger believers. Thirty years later and it's the same old thing:

"Looking at the inerrancy debate sociologically we can see it as one manifestation of Fundamentalism in the process of change. Even conservative Protestantism is not a static phenomenon, and it is now having to face the question how it will respond to the pluralism of ideas, to the existence of fresh and novel insights. The process is a painful one, especially for Fundamentalism, because of its fortress mentality, its inability historically to view change in terms of creative possibility, while remaining serene and composed in the face of it. Although my wish may not be fulfilled, I sincerely hope evangelicalism will find room for a diversity of human opinion on the nature of biblical inspiration and discover rich and productive theological renewal as a result.

On the darker side, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that the struggle over a code-word like inerrancy has political implications as well. Pentecostal Old Testament scholar, Gerald T. Sheppard of Union Theological Seminary, sees the debate as an attempt by the northern evangelical establishment to impose technical language upon the evangelical coalition and maintain control and social cohesiveness by means of it. The older conservative leadership of evangelical institutions, alarmed at the uncertainties involved in the theological and social change visible in the movement, are moving to clamp down on unpredictable elements by means of inerrancy terminology, which, if strictly interpreted, is certain to ensure that evangelicalism will remain within fairly strict fundamentalist limits. There is surely truth in this analysis, though it omits some genuinely theological fears and focuses too exclusively on issues of power and control." (Clark Pinnock, "Evangelicals and Inerrancy: The Current Debate," Theology Today 35 [1978]: http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1978/v35-1-tabletalk1.htm#3)

Sure there's theology involved, but without acknowledging the instinct toward damage control by those presently in power, discussions will frequently seem to have gone nowhere--especially to those who suddenly find themselves institutionally disenfranchised, perpetually without a place to lay their heads.

Not just WTS, save our seminary part 3

2008-03-20T23:11:00.004-04:00

I tried to lay out some arguments in my last post for the importance of emphasizing the political aspect of recent developments at WTS. Since the matter seems already to be beyond the point of argument, I thought it might be helpful to draw attention to an analogous case involving another denominational seminary.

I found a blog post reminiscent of the last few posts that I've made here. The post deals with a "theological" controversy involving a faculty member at SBTS (see http://www.abpnews.com/1646.article). A relevant excerpt from the blog (not the article) appears below. Do you think the situation mentioned in it is comparable to the one we've been discussing? Might it shed light on the current discussion?

"Sheri Klouda was given a tenure-track position to teach Hebrew in Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s school of theology when she received her doctor of philosophy at the Fort Worth, Texas, campus in 2002. In 2004, she was told that, because she was a female, she was no longer on the tenure track because, according to Van McClain, chairman of Southwestern’s board of trustees, the seminary had returned to its “traditional, confessional and biblical position” that a woman should not instruct men in theology courses or in biblical languages.
Granted, the seminary allowed her to continue to teach a full 2 years after she was told that she would never make tenure and they supported her financially after they made her quit teaching, but their decision was wrong, both morally and Biblically...

The Real Issue in the “Conservative” Takeover was Power, not TheologyOf course, the real issue was not theology, as the conservatives claimed, but pure raw power. Anyone who dared call them on their power grab was immediately labeled a liberal. At a convention meeting, the “conservatives” kept “moderates” out of a meeting by enlisting the aid of guards with guns. They took over the Baptist Standard, the weekly Baptist magazine, and fired everyone on the staff suspected of having sympathy for the “moderates.” When they took over the seminary, all of my professor friends had their careers trashed and were fired while my friends were encouraged to attend another seminary — all because they attended a “moderate” church. It was a bloodbath.

When they tried to take over my alma mater, Baylor University, they managed to fire several professors who were not deemed appropriate, including a Spanish professor I had who happened to be a Mormon. Fortunately, the “moderates” retained control over Baylor and they rehired the Spanish professor and ultimately made him chairman of the department. Never once did the professor try to proselytize us. If my faith were so weak that it could be damaged by having a Mormon Spanish professor, then how would my faith withstand the real world?" http://www.mcculloughsite.net/stingray/2007/01/25/female-professor-at-baptist-seminary-fired-for-being-female.php

Is this what is happening behind closed doors at WTS? Has there been a regime change? Is that part of what gave impetus to this? Is there a pattern that might be discerned in these conservative executive tendencies from which all parties involved might learn something useful?

Power or theology? Save our seminary, part 2

2008-03-19T02:11:00.003-04:00

In an eariler post regarding the saveourseminary petition, I suggested that power and money are factors contributing to the political unrest at WTS and that a petition indicating a measure of disapproval from the wider WTS community would not accomplish much in terms of actually affecting what happens at the seminary. A discussion ensued in the comment section centering around whether the political developments at WTS is about power/money or theology. My intent in the earlier post was to point out that there is a bigger picture to assess. My contention is that although one can interpret the restructuring of the biblical studies department at WTS as a theological matter, there is also room for interpreting a forced change in faculty as a power play and that this may be a helpful perspective to consider.

For starters, it is not clear that the faculty members in question have (may) left (leave) of their own accord. It is not typical of theology alone to force faculty members to leave their place of employment against their will. That force is an external one to the faculty members in question; the force acting upon them is not theological, it is political and administrative (=power).

Second, the question of what theology will be allowed at WTS and what theology will not be allowed is not the only question on the table. There seems to also be the questions of who decides what theology will be allowed, how does WTS decide if a faculty member is not promoting that theology, what will WTS do with those faculty members who appear to challenge that theology and how to convince those who decide what theology is acceptable at WTS to take appropriate action against those who do not appear within bounds. These are not only (or even primarily) theological questions. I think they can be categorized as political and sociological. In fact, I struggle to understand the question of what kind of theology will be tolerated at WTS as a strictly theological question in the first place. It is at the very least meta-theological and might be reframed: In what ways will WTS relate the theologies of the faculty and the scholarship produced by the faculty to the official theology adopted by the institution? These seem to me to be politics of theological education issues.

Third, I have a relatively naive ideal when it comes to how theological matters are to be researched and discussed. I do not necessarily think that theology is a democratic undertaking yet I do have the expectation that there will be some measure of open academic discourse about a matter, including debates in journals and symposiums before scholars and other interested parties. Now these forums may have been provided and I remain ignorant of them, but the word on the streets is that no series of open deliberative forums has been granted to the theological issues under consideration. The situation has rather developed in such a way that POOF! one day one reads on the website that Steve Taylor is leaving WTS after a sabbatical and that (is this how it's going to happen?) POOF! hey, look, Pete Enns is leaving WTS.

Fourth, fighting for a sense of denominational identity at WTS is not the same as fighting for a sense of theological identity. Although theology might helpfully be thought of as a major part of denominational identity, there are also culural and sociological components. Perhaps there is an issue here, too, about what the relationship should be between a seminary and "the church," and, more specifically, between a seminary and "the denomination." My perspective on this is that in reality it is a complex cluster of relationships between the school and the churches, the school and the denominations. Theology by itself is not a big enough umbrella to encapsulate all of these. And "the denomination is not just "the denomination," but also "the supporting denomination(s)." Surely, this is an important factor.

I agree that the administration has a right to be the administration and has no obligation to pander to every constituency, but there's a sense among some within the extended WTS community that there are some clandestine operations being orchestrated in a concerted effort to halt progressive tendencies within the seminary. In these perons' opinion, the measures taken toward this end are inexplicably extreme. Whether desired or not, there are political aspects to this: WTS does not desire a progressive image and they will go to great lengths to prevent one from developing--that's one observation that is being made. Even if it's WTS's prerogative to decide what image it prefers and what lengths it will go to manage its public theological face perhaps WTS might help itself by stating up front that so-and-so was asked to leave because of such-and-such and that so-and-so is now under investigation because of such-and-such instead of letting people infer on their own what's going on (and what will happen) by reading blogs and emailing people they think are in the know, 0r even by being more of a tyrant, so to speak, WTS might better help itself by telling people that there are changes in the works that WTS has deemed beneficial to the work and mission of the seminary, end of discussion. As it stands, there is a perception of secrecy that seems to bother people to no end.

I myself am not interested in signing the petition. To be honest, I am not all that interested in what happens at WTS. I have uprooted myself from the place. I do think it's too bad that Steve Taylor had to move on and that Pete Enns might eventually do the same. I also understand that WTS has to do what WTS has to do. I am, however, interested in how this thing is falling out, faculty being booted behind closed doors--or at least this is how it is being recounted to me. There are some who are very upset about it. WTS is not adminstratively structured on a model that lets students have a say in these affairs. Still, there is a sense of betrayal in the air. I myself ponder why this has become so acute.

To sum up, I think to insist that theology is the primary issue is misleading. The implications are somewhat grander and seem to have broader ramifications for the direction of the seminary in general, not only theologically. I close this reflection with a quote from Anthony Diekema's Academic Freedom and Christian Scholarship:

Nothing is more destructive to the mainenance of morale in a faculty than the "chilling effect" that comes with the use of college authority to restrain or censor. Indeed, I believe that the most devastating threats to academic freedom come not from outside or from blatant tyranny but rather from well-meaning persons who have little or no understanding of the long-range negative effect of their actions to inhibit the essential freedoms of the academy. Well-meant but misguided concerns for the fact that the academy's freedom can or may offend some group or individual can have lethal effects on the long-term health of a college or university. When offensiveness is used as grounds for suppression, it opens the road to widespread censorship and restraint because almost everything of consequence in the life of the mind will be offensive to someone. (cited in Sparks, God's Word in Human Words, 367)

Scholarship makes church impossible

2008-03-17T22:06:00.005-04:00

"Even though it deeply damages the missionary credibility of the church, all the important themes of faith and of Christian ethics are watered down until two mutually opposed things are held to be true at once. Jesus was the preexistent son of God, was born of the virgin Mary and claimed to be the Messiah, and yet he certainly was not. He went to the cross on a mission from God for the sins of the many, and yet his own understanding of his death remains historically in the dark. Jesus rose from the dead on the third day and was exalted to the right hand of God, and yet the entire Easter tradition is only a projection of Christian faith. Christ is the Lord, Savior and Judge, whose message and ministry are necessary for the salvation of Jews and Gentiles, and yet there are considerable concessions to me bade today regarding the sole claims of Christ, while the contemporary missionary witness to Christ among Jews and Gentiles must be conceived entirely differently from how it was in NT times. Christ is coming to judge the living and the dead, and yet he will no longer come after two thousand years of church history, and Christianity can do without the whole notion of a final judgment. Jesus and the apostles called the church to sanctification, and their commands are to be obeyed, and yet the ethical standards laid down in the NT are hardly specifically Christian and are so antiquated that today's church must learn to exercise tolerance toward all possible lifestyles and behaviors of Christians and non-Christians alike. Finally...the Holy Scripture is the only rule and guiding principle for faith, doctrine and the life of the church, and yet it is about time to free ourselves from this outmoded and authoritarian Scripture principle." (P. Stuhlmacher, "My Experience with Biblical Theology" in Biblical Theology: Retrospect and Prospect. ed. S. J. Hafemann [InterVarsity Press, 2002], 190-191.)

I remember J. P Moreland writing that Christians should not be expected to leave their brains at the door. Well, this kind of contradictory juggling act that students are expected to carry out in varying degrees makes going to church an impossibility--no matter where one decides to leave their brains! The more one accepts the philosophical judgments that tend to accompany critical scholarship the more impossible church appears to become. Critical scholarship prompts one to reconsider the philosophical baggage that usually goes with inerrancy and has the potential to alter one's sense of church in an uncannily profound way.

ETS/EPS regional meeting

2008-03-14T22:01:00.003-04:00

I was able to give a paper today at the regional ETS/EPS meeting that suggested that Kuhn's theoretical proposals help show that inerrancy is a paradigm in crisis. Fittingly enough, this year's meeting was held at WTS. It seemed to me that the topic of my paper elicited a good deal of interest. In my session, every chair was occupied and some participants were sitting on the floor in order to listen. A recurring concern during the q&a seemed to me to be What are we supposed to tell the church while the younger evangelical scholars go about their business of doing extraordinary science? Everyone seemed to me to feel some measure of paralysis in regard to this predicament. I think there are plenty of cultural factors that play into this overwhelming sense of paralysis.

For starters, I think the metaphor of "no errors" contributes conceptually to the problem, especially given our postmodern condition. The Bible can never be wrong. No, never! Unhappily, a socially constructed belief is masquerading as if it were revealed eternally by God. God is saying Scripture is inerrant; God is saying that Scripture has to be perfectly right or the whole faith suffers. If it ever appears otherwise, that means the believer is off his spiritual rocker. The inerrantist culture promulgates beliefs such as these and drives home the meta-belief that God is allegedly saying all this. My observation is that a lot of people want to go back and talk about this with a critical eye, but the culture does not allow such talk, or if it does, the talk predetermines that the results of such conversation must land one back of the ETS/EPS side of the issue. My hope is that more scholars and students will find the strength to break through this sense of paralysis and help work toward the invention of a more progressive metaphor for the authoritative quality of scripture. "Having no errors," I believe, has lost (or is very, very close to losing) its anagogical staying power.

Save our seminary

2008-03-13T19:22:00.003-04:00

Some have drawn my attention to http://www.saveourseminary.com. Although at some level I empathize with what these believers would like to see happen in conservative seminaries across the United States and especially in the one they graduated from, I'd be understating the matter if I said I think it's too little too late. The time for this might have been 8-10 years ago or at least before the decision was made to expand the library. That date would put me still in college (not in a position to save much of anything, much less an 80 year old theological seminary), which suggests to me again that this may very well be a generational affair.

Inerrancy debates may seem like they are primarily about doctrine, but many times they are just as much about finances, finances that the older generation crucially depends on, battles that the older generation has financial interests in. If WTS's chief donors happen to be inerrantists and the school is almost entirely dependent on its donors for cash flow, then WTS would be foolish not to do what it is that they're doing to the faculty presently, especially if they want to keep its doors open: make sure that everyone on faculty understands inerrancy in the same terms that WTS's donors understand it (and it doesn't hurt to call that perspective the perspective of the WCF for rhetorical leverage). Perhaps then we should not petition to "save our seminary" but rather to "change the perspectives of the donors." (And good luck doing that!) I'm not sure the public will ever fully know just how many hands are tied at WTS, helpless to do anything at all. It's rarely about petition or no petition, it's more about paycheck or no paycheck.

If the petitioners are really interested in saving their seminary, they ought rather to set out to literally buy it back ($$$).

Generational differences

2008-03-09T16:32:00.003-04:00

"I believe that divisive inerrancy is being pushed on us by an older generation of evangelicals. Inerrancy is a doctrine whose attractiveness we can perhaps understand in the context of the battles these people once had to fight against modernism, but I feel no need to fight these battles again...I honor their commitment to God's word, but I feel no need to listen when they try to tell me what I must believe and the dire consequences that will follow if I don't." (Stephen T. Davis, The Debate about the Bible. [Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1977], 135.)

"At the moment I began to doubt that evangelical scholars were really giving me the whole story when it came to the Bible and biblical scholarship. Looking back on those events some years later, I can only say with regret that my early suspicioins have often been confirmed...Only now are we witnessing the emergence of a new generation of evangelical scholars who are willing to admit that the standard critical arguments are often much better than the ill-advised apologetic that evangelicals have aimed at them. If one cares at all about the truth, then this is a welcome development." (Kenton Sparks, God's Word in Human Words. [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008], 12.)

Inerrancy and the spiritual formation of younger evangelicals, that's what I'm talking about!

Regarding the darkness

2008-03-09T14:08:00.003-04:00

I thought it might help to say more about the darkness that I mentioned at the end of yesterday's post. There are many students who feel it quite acutely. It's for these Christians that I keep writing the posts. We don't need any more Edward Carnells.

"Although there is seldom a single, simple cause for psychological difficulties, a careful examination of the facts suggests that an important element of the problem was cognitive dissonance. Carnell's intensive and meticulous study of philosophy, theology, and Scripture had gradually uncovered problems that seemed incompatible with conventional evangelical ideas about the Bible, especially with the doctrine of inerrancy. This presented Carnell with obvious difficulties, since his entire life and identity were firmly situated within an evangelical world that was not very enthused about his new ideas. Although Carnell's public persona continued to reflect an evangelical identity, inside he struggled with the cognitive dissonance between the evangelical he wanted to preserve and his private, theological perspectives...[Fuller's Seminary's board chairman] Ockenga's message was clear: although he privately supported Carnell, he also wanted Carnell to avoid publishing materials that were a threat to the more conservative, fundamentalist elements of fuller's constituency....[Carnell] was often angry at the rigidity of creedal and moral codes in which he was trapped by his connection with Fuller Theological Seminary." (K. Sparks, God's Word in Human Words. [Baker, 2008], 368-369, containing a quote from Nelson's The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind.)

Trapped by the darkness--no thank you. God bless the non-inerrantists who still maneuver in these circles; I don't know how they do it. The fundamentalist and evangelical darkness of which I speak infiltrates the core of one's person and strangulates the soul.

A WTS graduate?

2008-03-08T14:19:00.007-05:00

I originally began this blog at the behest of others. I've become too busy to maintain it properly, but I will post as frequently as I can for the sake of those who might be benefitting from it. I have come across discussions where people are surpised to learn I'm a WTS grad and are wondering about who my main influence might have been at WTS. Well, that second question is a very easy question to answer: Prof. Oliphint.

I came to WTS after attending Liberty for a semester. There I took a semester of languages and apologetics. Before attending Liberty my apologetics diet was more or less restricted to healthy doses of Moreland and Craig. At Liberty, my teacher was Gary Habermas who knew these guys personally; we hit it off from the start. I did well in my classes, but after a semester of being down there, for a number of reasons (including to pursue the beautiful blonde who is the love of my life) I decided to move back to NJ.

An intense religious experience some years before initiated in me an awareness of Jesus Christ that I had not experienced before, after which I felt an irresistable compulsion to constantly read and memorize scripture and also to attend services regularly. The churches that I attended at the time emphasized inerrancy and used the doctrine to help distinguish themselves from the liberals. They weren't as interested in distinguishing themselves from non-Christians as they were in distinguishing themselves from other persons who called themselves Christians but were in spite of themselves working against the kingdom. [They were especially eager to distinguish themselves from the Catholics, many of them being ex-Catholics themselves.] The easiest way to identify these types of pseudo-Christians was to determine in each case how strongly they believed in God's Word, the Bible [preferrably the KJV of the Bible]. So anything that even smelled like evolution was a big deal, as was anything really that ever questioned the Bible in slightest detail. Emotionally and culturally I ate all this up, but intellectually I always had some reservations about it. Either way, door-knocking, tracts, homilies, teaching, the whole kit and kaboodle, whatever the church needed, I volunteered (I even wrote songs for junior church). The culmination of this very intense phase of my life was the time when I, at the advice of a mentoring pastor, gathered everything I owned (which wasn't much) in a small U-haul truck and drove down to Lynchburg to find a place to live while I learned to study God's Word in the original languages.

Ok, so now I'm admitted to WTS and they won't accept Habermas' apologetics course. I email Gary and ask him about it and he said that he was surprised to hear it because if the tables were turned he would certainly accept WTS's apologetics course from a WTS student transfering to Liberty. So I decided to investigate why WTS would not accept Habermas' course. (Gary has given approximately 1600 lectures at about 100 universities, colleges and seminaries in the States and abroad. Why in the world won't WTS accept one of his courses, especially a standard one like intro to apologetics?) So I looked around online and found at first that everyone who didn't think about the Christian faith the WTS did is an Arminian, or at least acting like one. As I searched around a little more, I found that it seems also to be the case that anyone who does not think about Christianity in the way that WTS does is an unbeliever, or at least acting like an unbeliever. Now the thing is, it is not so much that the rest of Christianity from its inception til now has gotten it all wrong that bothered me--I mean that would not have been so hard to swallow, for, interestingly enough, my fundamentalist surroundings had already opened me up to the idea. It was rather the spirit with which these claims were being made that troubled me--and the lengths to which some in the WTS crowd would go to argue on behalf of the presuppositionalist position.

Some WTS writers would claim that non-WTS believers were all acting like unbelievers. Not only that, but they seemed more than willing to go to the lengths of destroying one's faith to show they were right. For example, Greg Bahnsen had no problem pointing out to Christians that "Under cross-examination most of the considerations brought forth by evidentialists can be dismissed as overstated, gratuitous, or inconclusive." (See his "The Impropriety of Evidentially Arguing for the Resurrection.") The irony really, really bothered me. I found it very curious at the time that there were Christians here at this school, Christians who claimed that every other kind of Christian is a functional non-Christian, doing exactly what non-Christians really and actually do, what anti-Christians, especially, like to do: deliberately set out to tear down the arguments of the most prominent defenders of the faith regarding the existence of God and the resurrection. As far as I could see, these guys were not merely attempting to show flaws in arguments for some matter of tangential importance, either for the purpose of reconstructing it or for showing that the matter should be re-conceived. These guys were matter-of-factly declaring that the arguments for the resurrection of Christ do not hold water, period. They were essentially bullying people, almost exclusively fellow believers (who else would bother reading these guys except interested Christian inquirers?), into deciding between WTS presuppositionalism or no faith at all. "Ok," I thought to myself: "antithesis or no, now I know for myself, these WTS guys are not pastorally minded." Off to class I went.

So at WTS I was taking the standard fare of classes and I was especially excited to sign up as an audit for "Philosophy for Theologians," a ThM/PhD course that happened to be taught by Scot Oliphint. Louis P. Pojman's anthology was the text. One by one we discussed at length why the writer in question paled in comparison with van Til. I was disappointed to say the least. I stopped attending after the class where I complained about why we should content ourselves with doing each of the readings and hearing each of the presentations and have the main objective be, "Show how the writer in question does not meet the standard set by van Til." Who cares about van Til? Here we have the greatest minds to have ever written on these topics and we're going to keep going on and on about van Til? After all, Van Til didn't make it into the anthology, these guys did, and it seemed to me that the van Til argument as I understand it is a cosmological argument in disguise anyway. Well, the PhD students were intrigued by all that I said (not because they agreed, but because, ah! finally a different viewpoint!), but an animated Prof Oliphint turned to me and asked: "Do you believe in God?" I was taken by surprise and remained silent, not understanding the purpose of the question. "Do you believe in God?" he boomed again. "Yes...I cannot say no [I wanted to at this point, being extremely bothered by the class], something inside me prevents me." He then turned to the board and began an explanation to the effect that Aquinas' cosmological argument requires that God was not free to create, but rather that God had to create and that's not the kind of God we want.

I protested that the argument itself does not force such a position upon us and that he was importing other assumptions in. Furthermore, Van Til was pointing back to something to explain some facet of the universe, I argued. That's a cosmological argument he's groping for. He raised his voice and said that the cosmological argument is fallacious. If the cosmological argument is sound then God had to create and God did not have to create, so the argument is no good. I objected again that that did not follow. He told me that he had been teaching for many years and that logically the cosmological argument implies that God had to create and that heh could not not create. I deferred to him, saying that he was the expert and that he would know better than I whether what he was saying was logically necessary. I held my peace, but "Do I believe in God?" What kind of school is this?

I did not return to class the following week, but for the rest of my time there the PhD apologetics students--who always seemed to come out of the woodwork at the bookstore to see who they might proselytize for the mighty van Til--frequently wanted to strike up conversations with me, to practice their apologetic method. Every now and then, when they would make some argumentative mistake, they would say, you should talk with Oliphint, he is really good at this. At first, I tried to engage the PhD apologetics students. Lane, for example, had just gotten there from California and was trying to finish up his degree. [He was not in the class. The other students introduced me to him in the bookstore.] I remember citing Frame to Lane and he encouraged me to read Bahnsen instead, saying Bahnsen had a better grasp of van Til than Frame. [That was one thing that helped lose me as a conversation partner, any time I tried to reference van Til myself or even invoke an authority on him, they would say that I am misinterpreting him.]

Now during the course of the conversations with these other guys, I would often be called an unbeliever. One time to one of the bookstore workers I laughed and said, "So you sitting over there can somehow spiritually come over here into my soul and see whether I am saved or not. Don't you think that's a little arrogant?" He said that that's what Paul did and that that's what they can do. [Ironically enough, there was another group of students--and these guys had no relation (to my knowledge) with these PhD guys I'm talking about now, nor did they know of our conversations--who were very into Jonathan Edwards. One of them was insisting upon annointing me with the spirit of assurance of salvation that Jonathan Edwards talked about and said that once he did, I should be sure not to abuse it, because once I was annointed, I would never be able to doubt my eternal salvation. I remember this guy being very persistent, but I still refused. He approached me two more times during my time at WTS.] Another time, two PhD apologetics students were disagreeing with a point I was making and I decided to say to them that they were only disagreeing with me because they were unwilling to let go of their sin. Their eyes opened wide--and the look they gave me! I said, "How do you like it? It doesn't feel so good, does it, when someone all of a sudden says to you that the reason you disagree with him is because you're in rebellion against God and because you don't want to confess your sin!" Ah, those were the days; I'm glad they are behind me now. [You can imagine the impression that gave me of Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven when I moved on to ICS...]

In any event, the whole experience of those few weeks in Oliphint's class in the context of my cultural shock between two apologetic cultures gave me a brand new lease on the faith: Christians deny (and sometimes attack) what other Christians hold dearest--that's the way it's always been and that's the way it'll always be. As the semesters went by, my intellectual doubts were raging with regard to inerrancy while my cultural and emotional commitment to the doctrine and the communities that helped hold that doctrine together had all but eroded. Yet to my consternation, the same was happening to some of my friends at the seminary. While I was busy moving along on my own journey, they were moving along on theirs and began noticing an acute, spiritual dissonance between their expectations of scripture and the phenomena of scripture. The practice of reading scripture in Greek and Hebrew while still trying to theorize about scripture in terms of inerrancy and all the rest was proving more than difficult. When one experiences the phenomena first hand, they said, one cannot ignore the details they encounter. What's more, the theories were not encountered first hand in a similar manner, so the students were very interested in reexamining the theory in their classes in light of the scriptural phenomena.

But, unfortunately, the theorists were not budging and were quite unwilling to stand for any talk about phenomena. Their focus was on the tradition, the WCF tradition, that is, conjoined with van Til. I had some very painful conversations with students about how in the world they were ever going to get ordained, and once ordained, how were they to get along in that world. That's when I decided to approach the dean of students at WTS in order to gain permission to speak at chapel to try to encourage some of the students I had gotten to know. The dean of students informed me that you need to be ordained to speak at chapel and also did not think that a talk during chapel would be all that effective. So I did the only thing that came to mind as an alternative: I wrote an open letter to the faculty and administration at WTS and mailed it to the top three administrators at the school. I pinpointed van Til and inerrancy as the source of my acquaintances' troubles and asked if they were even aware that a number of students were experiencing such existential crises. My letter was suggesting that the seminary's foundational principles were askew. I even enumerated how many of the WTS faculty had been trained at WTS, an unhelpful pattern of spiritual incest, I said. In retrospect, I muse: Even on the off chance that some of them thought I was right (which is, of course, unlikely), who could ever publicly admit it? [What can one say publicly in conservative evangelicalism?] After ICS, I thought to publish a book on the subject of how inerrancy might be setting students up for a fall. [I bet those people who ask "How can he be a WTS grad?" and "Who was his main influence there at WTS?" have not bothered to read the book.] There's got to be more students out there wrestling with this stuff. As long as there are, I'll try to keep blogging.

In any event, I hope this helps answer the question, "Who was my main influence at WTS?" which I interpret to mean, "What happened to this guy at WTS?" To some, it may seem I have fallen to the dark side. They might be thinking, "It's nothing less than a shame that that guy graduated from WTS." I, of course, am persuaded that I have seen the light. Now, I had to give up my hope's of doing some kind of ministry in an official capacity and of teaching theology and scripture professionally in order to get to the point where I am now, but it's certainly much brighter here in terms of being able to ask honest questions and in terms of being able to look myself in the mirror. No dark clouds following me around. No fundamentalist enforcers itching to turn me in. I'll take that kind of light over darkness any day. Hell, even if it's darkness, I much prefer it to the light:

If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

There's much more to it than just the data

2008-02-20T02:02:00.002-05:00

Choosing non-inerrancy over inerrancy involves a number of factors that seems to have less to do with the data observed in scripture and more to do with the psychological and social location of the person doing the observing. Philosophy of science has helped us realize that more is involved in deciding which theory to adopt than simply observing the data at hand:

“The knower is seen as a kind of conquerer, like Julius Caesar winning his battles according to the formula ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ A person who wants to know something, so he makes his observation or experiment and then he knows. Even research workers who have won many a scientific battle may believe this naïve story when looking at their own work in retrospect.

At most they will admit that the first observation may have been a little imprecise, whereas the second and third were ‘adjusted to the facts.’ But the situation is not so simple, except in certain very limited fields, such as present-day mechanics, in which there are very ancient and widely known everyday facts to draw upon. In more modern, more remote, and still complicated fields, in which it is important first of all to learn to observe and ask questions properly, this situation does not obtain—and perhaps never does, originally, in any field—until tradition, education, and familiarity have produced a readiness for stylized (that is, directed and restricted) perception and action; until an answer becomes largely pre-formed in the question, and a decision is confined merely to ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ or perhaps to a numerical determination; until methods and apparatus automatically carry out the greatest part of our mental work for us.” (Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 84, italics in original)

Neo-evangelical apologetic theology

2008-02-18T01:43:00.006-05:00

I was reading Stanley Grenz's Renewing the Center and came across a chapter entitled, "The Shaping of Neo-Evangelical Apologetic Theology." C. F. Henry and B. Ramm are the stars of this chapter in evangelical history. Grenz recounts how both theologians lamented how evangelicalism had billed inerrancy as one of evangelicalisms core issues. But even so the theological culture that ensued became one such that theology was self-consciously done in an apologetic way. Millard Erickson and Clark Pinnock were students of Henry and Ramm respectively and carried the torch of apologetic theology. This seems emblematic of how conservative evangelical Protestantism has gotten caught up in an exaggerated sense of "protest" against perpetual modernist attacks from which it might never fully recover--always feeling compelled to do conservative theology that is self-consciously apologetic for the sake of the laity. (Compare Richard Lints, The Fabric of Theology, and Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture?)

Christology as the model for scripture?

2008-02-17T08:12:00.002-05:00

Someone explain again why Christ as totally divine and totally human is assumed to be a serviceable model for understanding what scripture is? Aside from there being a meeting of divine and human in both Christ and scripture, what warrant is there really for setting the terms of the discussion in terms of an incarnational analogy? I don't see why evangelicals feel compelled to defer to conciliar formulations of christology to help them articulate what kind of thing we think scripture is? Like I say in my book, evangelicals should not bind scripture to Christ. I thought you were supposed to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, not your doctrine of scripture!

Aside from the arguments I give in my book I might also suggest two further points. First, the council determined that Christ has one person and two natures. Where is that in scripture? Or what part of scripture can help us conclude that? The declaration that Christ has one person and two nature is a conciliar determination, plain and simple, a decision that has become a major part of the Christian tradition. This conciliar model--not biblical (which isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it does need to be stated)-- is setting the parameters within which all evangelical discussions of scripture can take place. Why allow this to be the case?

Second, an insistence on an incarnational analogy allows for a mood of discussion such that people can't help but suggest to each other that if one entertains such and such about scripture then one is like the so and so heretics during the christological controversies. Evangelicals can't seem to help themselves from saying, "Now that's a docetic view of scripture," "That's an Arian view of scripture," "That's an adoptionist view of scripture," and so on. I don't see how this kind of talk helps clarify anything. I think this kind of talk tacitly imposes a conceptual scheme on scripture that evangelicals who think of themselves as "orthodox" will not be willing to question. The incarnational analogy sociologically limits the range of options that can be entertained and may even force discussions about what scripture is in directions that scripture itself may not welcome. That scripture has the equivalent of one person and two natures is not a formulation that all evangelicals will be on board with--or they may want to think about it critically. Such evangelicals should not be regarded as heretics from the onset on account of the arbitrary terms in which the discussion has already been set. Talk about loading the questions!

Inerrancy and rebellion

2008-02-17T00:32:00.004-05:00

"The oneness of allegiance to God and faithfulness to Holy Scripture has been known to the community of faith from its very inception; the infallible authority of Scripture is indeed a first-order doctrine. To abandon the intellectual aspect of this authority--"inerrancy" in its broader terms--to make the transition from the reliability of Scripture to its unreliability, in Berkouwer's words, would be a step entirely inimical to all genuine Christian theology. It would constitute ethical, as well as intellectual, rebellion against the Lordship of Christ in his dialogical relationship with the Church." (Douglas Farrow, The Word of Truth and Disputes About Words, 77)

Although Farrow says that inerrancy does not necessarily mean total factual inerrancy, he places pretty high stakes on one's opinion regarding scripture. I think these terms of rebellion in the context of one's belief about scripture go too far. I'm also very wary about the allegiance to God = allegiance to scripture formula. The proposal sets forth what's spiritually at stake in the inerrancy discussion and the stamping of a formula for the evangelical ultimatum with church history's imprimatur implies that one has no right to see any continuity between themselves and what has come before if one falls on the wrong side of the debate. These are strong words indeed.

The history of science and Christianity shows up a number of scientific discoveries that were thought to be "inimical to all genuine Christian theology" and after a generation or two understood not to be so inimical. Surely the articulation of a doctrine describing the nature and authority of scripture comes further down the line than first order theoretical considerations, especially given the actual experience of most Christians, evangelical Christianity included.

Separation from non-inerrantists

2008-02-16T11:22:00.003-05:00

If an inerrantist is seen collaborating with a non-inerrantist, that inerrantist will likely get the business. I had forgotten all about fundamentalism's push for a strict separation from all things not fundamentalist. Not only that, but the idea of separation was elaborated along the lines that there are different degrees of separation that fundamentalists are required to observe, because the Bible says to do so. For example, a fundamentalist church might not have endorsed Billy Graham because he didn't mind sending people off to non-inerrantist churches, for example. But some fundamentalist churches went further and taught that the Bible inerrantly says that fundamentalist churches should also separate themselves from any other organization who did not feel the same about Billy Graham. And the really spiritual churches came up with the idea (from the Bible) that they should also separate themselves from churches who had not sufficiently separated themselves from churches/organizations who decided to host Billy Graham. I forgot just how powerful a social stigma associating with a non-inerrantist can be for a fundamentalist. In some cases, the pressure to separate remains a tacit cultural force in sectors of evangelicalism that are of fundamentalist descent. It will always be an uphill battle to get productive, non-apologetic conversations going about inerrancy with fundamentalist evangelicals.

[I know evangelicals generally don't like to think of themselves as fundamentalists. I myself have been called a fundamentalist a few times within the last year or so--my non-inerrantist leaning not being non-inerrantist enough. I always find it to be a curious accusation, but it clearly means that I am the bad guy, presumably because I was perceived by those interlocutors as being inexplicably close-minded and too interested in what scripture said.]

Fortunately, separation seems to be on the way out, even in fundamentalist circles. (See http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/octoberweb-only/143-52.0.html) Younger believers aren't buying into it, even if some older ones think it's crucial. If one is open to applying hermeneutics to one's own religiosity, it's the younger generations that can help facilitate this. It's the younger people who can help move things along. They haven't lived the controversies, they weren't there when the denominational lines were drawn. They weren't even there when the passing generation impressed upon us how important the fundamentals of the faith are (and have always been--meaning, of course, ever since they can remember). So maybe my effort to appeal to an older generation with respect to how they teach inerrancy to younger people is hopelessly misguided. Perhaps it's the younger believers who need to be reached directly. It's the younger ones who will change the world (that is, if it can [or wants to] be changed). So perhaps our kids will have an easier time talking about inerrancy than many evangelicals have at the present. But it will still depend on how the older generations teach them scripture in the first place and what voice the younger ones are given in their communities. That leaves me to wonder: how in the world will things ever change?

Inerrancy's social prototype

2008-02-14T19:32:00.004-05:00

On Wikipedia, I found this statement under the write-up for inerrancy: "Evangelical churches which hold to Biblical inerrancy will often make a prominent, unambiguous statement supporting this in a list of their beliefs." I already know that colleges, universities, seminaries, and other institutions that are inerrantist feel compelled to explicitly say so on their statements of faith--isn't that how one knows that the organization in question really takes the Bible seriously (and by extension, really taking Christianity seriously)? But to actually read a statement relating how evangelical establishments tend to explicitly declare their inerrantist status has caused me to reflect on why inerrantist culture tacitly expects that one make an explicit public statement on on scripture's inerrancy if one is really serious about scripture (and by extension, really serious about Christianity).

Accordingly, I was reminded of a summary of social identity that I read online, specifically, the following excerpt:

"The signaling examples from the world of biology have been simple mappings, with a direct
correspondence between signal and trait: big horns signal strength. With identity, the process is more complicated. We do not build up our impression of another trait by trait. Instead, we bring to the interpretation a number of pre-existing prototypes and our observations of people leads us to categorize them as being like one or another of these prototypes. Thus, from a limited set of interactions and observations we can create a richly detailed (if not always accurate) impression of another. Understanding how these prototypes are created and modified, how they are shared across a culture, and how we use them to categorize people is an essential part of understanding identity.

Interpretations of identity are subjective. The prototypes that populate one person’s cognitive map of the social world will be different from another’s, because their experiences are different. The more people share of a common culture, the more likely it is that their social prototypes will be similar."(http://smg.media.mit.edu/classes/IdentitySignals05/NotesOnSocialIdentity.1.pdf)

There is an ongoing debate within (and without) evangelicalism about whether inerrancy is a 19th century construct. Perhaps, it's not a concept that is being fought over here in this debate, but a social prototype. Maybe what the one side is trying to say is that although something like inerrancy may have been believed by various Christians throughout the churches' history, the social prototype of 'inerrantist evangelical' is entirely a 19th century cultural development.

If you really trusted God you'd be an inerrantist

2008-02-09T07:36:00.000-05:00

Disagreeing with inerrancy is often equated with a spiritual deformity to the effect that an errantist is simply unwilling to trust God:

"The difficulty some have in accepting inerrancy is no new trend in evangelicalism, nor is disregard for the the original text. But to dismiss a belief in inerrancy or to attack the original text because God’s people today do not possess the original papyri on which the biblical writers wrote shows a great lack of confidence in the God who has given His written Word. Such doubters show distrust in the God who inspired and gave the text for His people’s benefit, to be used in various settings besides that of the original audience (cf. Col 4:16; 2 Tim 2:2). They
may be ill-informed or simply uninformed. But ignorance is not always bliss, especially when it leads one to disregard the text of sacred Scripture or question the veracity of the Bible by doubting its inerrancy. The field of textual criticism is crucial for the life of the church, both for ascertaining the original text and for affirming the inerrancy of that text." (Jason Texton,
"NT Text Criticism and Inerrancy" TMSJ 17[2006]: 51-59)

This essay concludes with the following words:

"A careful implementation of textual criticism is the answer to those who would question the value, plausibility, or practicality of a doctrine of an inerrant New Testament. Warfield’s handling of the issue many years ago pointed out that God’s role in the inspiration of Scripture guaranteed its errorless content. That factor should be more than sufficient to erase doubts that any evangelical might have regarding the issue. Historical critical concerns over whether God has chosen to preserve His inerrant Word should not shake the confidence of a Bible scholar in the Bible’s accuracy. Through application of text critical principles, one may retrieve the
original text in spite of errors in its transmission."

"Don't underestimate God"--that's what I'm hearing, as if errantists inexplicably think that inerrantists are overestimating what God has affected in the scriptures. But perhaps it's time to turn the tables on this curious judgment. Could it be that inerrantists are the ones who are underestimating God?

Inerrancy, tradition and me

2008-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

Hermeneutical issues are inextricably bound up with inerrancy and inerrancy with hermeneutics. I try to bring this out in the most convincing way that I know how in my book, Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals. Recently, I came across an essay where the author claims that on top of all the run-of-the-mill hermeneutical concerns that attend reading Christian scripture, there is a special hermeneutic suggested to Bible readers by the scriptures themselves:

"There is another kind of hermeneutics common at least to some books, certainly peculiar to the Bible. Namely, that kind of hermeneutics in which the book itself gives you certain information about how you are to read it. It involves the kind of attitude and mindset you bring with you when you read the Scriptures." (Robert Preus, "Scripture: God's Word and God's Power" in Can We Trust the Bible? [ed. E. Radmacher], 68.)

Preus states that the testaments form a unity, that scripture has power to do certain things, that scripture is meant to have soteriological effects, that the entire Bible is a witness to Christ (even if portions of it do not at first appear to be), that scripture has a divine origin, that scripture is always useful and that it always bears God's authority--these are all hermeneutical principles that one can gather inductively as one reads the Bible and, as such, must be incorporated into all hermeneutical acts of scripture reading. It would be a great mistake to read scripture as if it is just like any other book when scripture itself tells readers not to read it as if it were any other piece of literature.

My question is, as it always has been: Is it really scripture that gives us this special set of biblical hermeneutical rules or is it our traditions (cultural and ecclesiastic) that tacitly recommend them to us? Is scripture informing our traditions or are traditions informing our scriptures? Which is it if we are honest with ourselves? In my book I say it's both; I call the canonical dialectic. But inerrancy doesn't make any sense to me at all in such a context. I can't seem to meaningfully separate the text from my tradition or the tradition from my text for that matter. When it comes down to it, all that is inerrant is me.

What do we expect the Bible to do for us?

2008-02-06T21:27:00.000-05:00

I have found that in my early Christian experience I had put too much hope in the Bible. What is it that evangelicals expect the Bible to do? What is it that evangelicals expect the Bible to be for them? We trust God, but there seems to be this implicit inference that one shows that they are trusting God precisely by trusting the Bible. Should this be? I don't think so. God is not the Bible, the Bible is not God. People say to me that the Bible does so much for them because the Bible is God's Word. I respond that it seems to me that they are acting as if the Bible is God. They rely on the Bible in the way that I try to rely on God. What historical development made this bait-and-switch possible and even plausible to begin with? Anti-clericalism drives people to individual Bible study, just Jesus and me via the Bible. That might have something to do with it. But lately I've had occasion to reflect on some of the Vollenhoven reading I did while at ICS. I wonder how influential that trajectory of thought is for modern conservative, inerrantist, American evangelicalism. The old theoretical vision of a "Calvinistic philosophy" may be what helps perpetuate the inerrantist expectation of the Bible, even to this day:

"Philosophy investigates the cosmos as a whole. But to grasp this object of knowledge as a whole and in its formal unity, one must be able to grasp it from the outside, i.e. transcendently. This truth is unfortunately not always acknowledged. As a member of a mob you cannot command a view of it, but the outsider, the bystander, can; human personality is unintelligible from the 'view-point' of a blood corpuscle, however much this corpuscle may have travelled through all parts of the human body; the beauty of a painting can never be 'enjoyed' by one of its paint-patches. Likewise the ultimate meaning, significance and unity of cosmic reality can never be understood from a mere human viewpoint, i.e. as long as man (as a part of it) views it 'from the inside', from a cosmically immanent standpoint. The whole is more than the sum of its parts—(this truth enjoys a widespread acknowledgment to-day)—and the whole cannot be understood from the viewpoint of one or of more of its parts. When, however, the whole is grasped from a transcendent point of view, the ultimate meaning of every part is revealed at the same time. To understand the cosmic universe as a unique whole as well as in its parts there must be a transcendent source of knowledge supplying the necessary transcendent point of view—the necessary (philosophical) point of Archimedes. Such a transcendent revelation can only be given by a transcendent Personality —by God. The Calvinist maintains that this necessary condition is fulfilled by the Bible, the genuine Verbum Dei." (H.G. Stoker, "The Possibility of a Calvinistic Philosophy,” The Evangelical Quarterly 7 (1935): 20, http://www.theologicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/eq/possibility_stoker.pdf)

The Bible paid it all, all to it I owe; Sin had left a crimson stain, it washed it white as snow.

Rationality of inerrancy again

2008-02-02T01:08:00.000-05:00

I have always been impressed by J. P. Moreland's article. He situates belief in inerrancy within a discussion of epistemology and considers issues within philosophy of science as he thinks they pertain to belief in inerrancy. Moreland mentions Plantinga's notion of an index of depth of regression where more central beliefs will take more evidence to dislodge than peripheral beliefs because the hold other beliefs together in an epistemically fundamental way and epistemologically supports a number of other beliefs. Moreland says that inerrancy is not a peripheral belief:

"I am not here using a domino argument and saying that if the Bible is not true in all points we cannot know that it is true in any point. I am simply making the point that inerrancy is clearly a belief which should be closer to the center of one’s noetic structure than to the periphery. This means that one is rationally justified in requiring a good deal of evidence before giving it up." (http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_inerrancy_moreland.html)

Is there a way to impress upon someone the authority of the Bible without making it closer to the center of one's noetic structure? Without making inerrancy closer to the center of one's noetic structure? Surely there must be a way. If a scriptural principle is not taught as peripheral, can it not be presented at least closer to the peripheral? There would be less spiritual fallout this way.

When to give up inerrancy

2008-02-01T17:35:00.000-05:00

Some writers want to hold onto inerrancy and redefine it. Others want to relinquish inerrancy to the inerrantists and commend "trustworthiness" and "faithfulness" in inerrancy's stead. When should one give up inerrancy? This reminds me of an even more basic philosophical problem: when can one say that an idea or belief has enough problems that it should be given up? There is an article that has always intrigued me that speaks briefly on this:

"It could be objected that nowhere have I stated any criteria for knowing when there would be enough problems with inerrancy to justify giving it up. Thus, I cannot rationally claim to know that inerrancy is true. I can only offer two brief but important responses. First, as has already been argued, there are no acceptable criteria in the philosophy of science that can be applied in a simple, algorithmic way to all or most cases of theory change in science. The simple fact is that the rationality of theory change is a very multifaceted affair. The same can be said of theological systems. No simple set of criteria can be given for when one theological construct should be given up and another believed. This is not to say that there are no cases where theological or scientific hypotheses should be abandoned. But determining when that point is reached and how one knows it has been reached is another matter. Theological constructs (first order or second order), inerrancy included, are no different from scientific theories in this regard. So I can offer no adequate criteria for when inerrancy should be abandoned. But this is not surprising, nor is it because I am engaging in a special pleading. This is just the way it often is with hypotheses.

Second, as Roderick Chrisholm has pointed out, there are many things one can know without having criteria for knowing them. If this were not the case, I would never know anything, since to know I would have to have criteria for knowledge. But to know my criteria, I would have to have criteria for my criteria. This is a vicious regress. So I can know some things without giving criteria for knowing them or for falsifying them.

As an example, consider a puzzle from the ancient Greeks, known as the sorites problem. Given a small heap of wheat, can I get a large heap by adding one grain? It seems not, for how could one go from a small to a large heap by merely adding one grain. But then it seems that one could add grains of wheat to a small heap and never reach a large heap. Consider another puzzle. If one gradually changes the shade of a color from red to orange, can one tell when the color changes from red to orange? Probably not. But in the absence of such a criterion, how can I know when I see red or orange? The problem with both puzzles is this: they assume that in the absence of clear criteria for borderline cases, one cannot have knowledge of clear cases. Without being able to judge when the heap becomes large, I can never know that it is large. Without being able to judge when the color changes to orange, I can never know that it is orange. But the fact is, I can know a large heap or an orange color even if I have no criteria.

I am not dismissing criteria altogether. Indeed, they are important in an overall theory of rationality. But I do not need criteria in all cases to know something. In the case of inerrancy, the issue is complicated enough that I do not think one needs to give criteria for knowing when to believe errancy or to accept the falsification of inerrancy. It does not follow from this that it would never be rational to give up belief in inerrancy. It may. But giving criteria for this is not easy." (J. P. Moreland, "The Rationality Of Belief In Inerrancy," Trinity Journal 7 (1986): http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_inerrancy_moreland.html)

I take from this that an inerrantist does not have to give an upper limit for the amount of "error" he or she will tolerate before giving up inerrancy. This may help explain why some non-inerrantists look at some of the more "liberal" inerrantists and say, "You're not really an inerrantist." Perhaps the inerrantist him/herself cannot tell whether he/she is an inerrantist as the shades of inerrantism have changed repeatedly in such small increments that there is no difference of category involved. Only others can tell for real; only others can judge rightly.

A question comes to mind: Can I really say, The fact is, I know an errant scripture when I 'see' one or I know an inerrant scripture when I 'see' one? These are things, it seems to me, that cannot be decided beforehand. Evangelicals are even now in the process of figuring these things out.

Why is Barth so bad?

2008-01-31T19:05:00.000-05:00

I recently read an article by John Morrison: "Scripture as word of God: Evangelical assumption or evangelical question?" Trinity Journal (1999): http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3803/is_199910/ai_n8873525/pg_1

Morrison disapproves of Barthian, evangelical attempts to reserve the term "word of God" for Christ, evangelical gestures to talk about scripture as being "a witness to Christ" and so forth. He says, "The theological result is not merely a Scripture that points to the Word of God (Christ), like John the Baptist in the Grunewald altarpiece, nor a Scripture that 'becomes' the Word and which the Word of God breaks through in order to meet us as 'I to Thou,' nor a Scripture that 'brings' or 'conveys' the Word of God to us; nor even a Scripture 'in which' the Word of God can be found somewhere." His conclusion is this:

"Given that Jesus Christ, incarnate, eternal Word of God, is said to be the utterly unique, supreme, objective self-giving of God to be known; that the scriptural data also speak of their own proper status as revelation or Word of God; that Scripture is distinguished from Christ as "witness" to Christ; and, finally, that God's revelation is one because God is one, then we must avoid a flat, blank, undifferentiated identity between Jesus Christ and Scripture as being Word of God in the same sense. We must also avoid dualistic, disjunctive thinking that finally separates Christ the Word and inscripturated Word, as though the latter were actually word of man and at best only functionally Word of God. The need is for unitary, interactive thinking, as reflected in twentieth century physics, which can think after the identity-in-difference inherent in our question.

For example, in Physics and Reality, Einstein accounts for different 'levels' or 'strata' of knowledge in a scientific system arising from natural cognition of ordinary experience. Scientific theory must be brought to 'logical' unity, and finally to a strict 'higher level' of logical unity, as each level of knowledge is related to and grounded in the 'higher' level. In this way, thinking penetrates more and more toward the interior connections of reality. Each level is 'open up' to the next higher level and 'disclosive' down. No level below has its whole truth in itself, but is true as it is interactively related to and 'open up' to the greater refinement at the next higher level. All is grounded finally beyond the contingent in that sufficient reason for the lower contingent order of rationality and intelligibility.

This model has been effectively related to the Nicene homoousion, reflecting unitary, interactive relatedness, identity-in-difference. And so too is such a stratified model reflective of the incarnate Word-inscripturated Word relationship. At the "lower level," historical Scripture is the written, preserved record of revelation, the "derivative" Word of God, by means of inspiration. As such, it stands in, under, of, and from Jesus Christ. Its truth is not simply in itself but, as "open up" unitarily in and under Christ by the Spirit, its truth is ultimately grounded in Christ the ontological Word, i.e., in the Logos, and so finally in the perichoretic relations of the triune Godhead. Then also the inscripturated Word is "disclosive down" and within the present historical space-time situation of humanity. "

There is a footnote in this pericope that points the reader to three works by T. F. Torrance. I decided to look up the reference to The Ground and Grammar of Theology. There Torrance boldly proclaims that this new relational way of thinking has already been achieved by Karl Barth, "when with herculean effort he brought together the ancient emphasis upon the acts of God in his being, and thus integrated in a remarkable way the whole history of Christian thought." (pp. 11-12) Torrance thinks that Barth is the epitome of this kind of thinking. Applied to scripture the relation looks like this:

"And it was in this way that under the creative impact of divine revelation there emerged the unique genre of literature handed down to us in the gospels and epistles of the New Testament upon which God's self-revelation as Father, Son and Holy Spirit has imprinted itself, so that they convey to us proclamation and teaching which are implicitly trinitarian. It is as such that the gospels and epistles continue under God to mediate his revelation to us in history, and to be the canonical vehicles of the living Word of God to mankind. They are to be uniquely revered and interpreted as Holy Scripture inspired by the Holy Spirit in the apostolic foundation of the Church to be the written form whereby the Word of God may be communicated to people in history through the preaching and teaching of the Church in such a way that it continues to generate faith in Jesus Christ and his Gospel...

In recent years, however, the New Testament has too often suffered from hermeneutical methods governed by damaging dualist and analytical epistemologies in which form and being, or structure and substance, have been torn apart, with the result that the gospels and epistles and other books that comprise it become severed from their deep roots in divine revelation and thereby lose the consistene substructure that holds them conceptually and meaninfully together. Here we have sadly breaking through the teaching of the Church once again the epistemological dualism that infected late Patristic, Medieval, and Enlightenment thought and disrupted the doctrine of the Trinity by driving a wedge between the historical and ontological factors or ingredients in God's triune self-revelation through Christ and in the Spirit, so that an understanding of what God is for us is severed from what God is in himself." (T. F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons. [T. & T. Clark Publishers, 2002], 35.)

Morrison warns against separating scripture from Christ, the Word of God, by disallowing the scriptures to be called the Word of God. He claims that it is not necessary to separate the two "words." In other words, theologians who do do it must give a good reason for doing so and in Morrison's article he tries to show that the reasons Barthian evangelicals give are not good ones. Aside from the fact that Morrison seems to be telling Barthian evangelicals that they are not being Barthian enough when it comes to Scripture, I am taken by a telling observation that Morrison makes in the context of an observation that Dan Wallace makes on another occasion. Morrison: "But, again, does this distinction of Christ the Word from Scripture's testimony necessarily alleviate its continuity and nuanced identity with the Word as Word of God? No. Indeed, the Holy Spirit, too, bears witness to Christ."

Dan Wallace relates in Whose Afraid of the Holy Spirit? "One lady in my church facetiously told me, 'I believe in the Trinity: the Father, Son and Holy Bible.' Sadly, too many cessationalists operate as though that were so." (p. 8) He goes on to chide evangelicals for being so hard on Barth's bibliological proposals and not paying more attention to his christocentrism: "[F]or in our zeal to show his deficiencies in his doctrine of the Bible we have become bibliolaters in the process." [This chapter is an address Wallace gave when he was president of the ETS-southwest region.]

Is one of the main reasons why Barth has become the whipping dog of evangelical cessationalists because they need the Bible to be their Holy Spirit?

Non-inerrantists and their inerrantist comrades

2008-01-30T00:45:00.000-05:00

I have had an exceptionally tough time with church since leaving inerrancy behind. Maybe it's all those times well-meaning laypeople have told me that there's something more vibrant and special about the inerrantist's faith that rarely appears in the faith of the non-inerrantist. Inerrancy to me is much more than a single doctrine, it's a whole mindset to religion that becomes a burden to the soul, a mindset, I might add, that non-inerrantist churches can very easily retain even if they happen to formally deny the doctrine of inerrancy. I have been trying to work through for a number of years now how a non-inerrantist mindset might get along in an evangelical church that conducts its services and other operations through the assumptions of the inerrantist mindset, whether or not inerrancy is explicitly part of the package. The ecclesial dynamic seems to me to be extremely complex and takes an exceptional amount of patience to functionally work through, an amount of patience, I regret to say, that I have not yet been able to muster.

"Non-inerrantists often assert that inerrantists betray a basic insecurity about a faith based solely on the Christ's word of promise. But if some inerrantists fearfully yearn for a greater certainty, the only adequate and faithful response is the proclamation of the Gospel's 'fear not' spoken in the name of Jesus. The 'fear not' cannot be addressed in the name of assured scholarship and surely it is inappropriate to respond with a barrage of 'difficult' passages. Secondly, if some inerrantists stifle the freedom of the Gospel, the response must be the continued proclamation--in word and deed--of the freedom of the Gospel. If that does not 'work,' then perhaps non-inerrantists should argue with God, not the inerrantists. Being a noninerrantist does not protect the freedom of the Gospel--that is the gift of the Holy Spirit and only the Spirit can maintain it.

Inerrantists ought not be dismissed as simply uninformed or sectarian. Many of their arguments present an occasion for non-inerrantists to ask hard questions of themselves. To adapt Karl Barth's comment on D. F. Strauss, inerrantists may simply be the bad conscience of modern theology." (Richard Nysse, "Inerrancy: Questions from Its Advocates," Word & World 7/3 [1987]: 301, http://www.luthersem.edu/word&world/Archives/7-3_Wisdom/7-3_Face_to_Face.pdf)

The non-inerrantist must still deal with the inerrantists' questions seems to be the pastoral wisdom coming from many quarters. But one of the main benefits of becoming a non-inerrantist in the first place is that the inerrantist problematic no longer bears upon the conscience as it once did. So how are non-inerrantists supposed to commune with their inerrantist partners-in-crime? By reliving the very problematic from which they resolved to become free? This doesn't make any sense. The grievance seems to me, then, to be chiefly with God in this matter of dealing with inerrantists in church and school and wherever in a diplomatic way, not primarily with the inerrantist (or with non-inerrantists for that matter). This really is quite a pickle, and not one that I'm happy to know about.

Questions and more questions

2008-01-29T19:07:00.000-05:00

I remember when I first read Bernard Ramm's A Christian View of Science and Scripture that I felt so relieved that I had finally found a book by a prominent evangelical that tells people what I had secretly thought had to be right all along. The six-day creation scheme has it all wrong and the NASA finding regarding the missing day in astrological time (that supposedly accounted for the extra day that resulted from God telling the sun to stand still in Josh 10) had no documented support. FINALLY, someone telling people openly what had become for many a spiritual crime of the highest degree to entertain in secret, much less express in words (forgot about actually publishing it).

But I also remember how I felt when I got to his recommendation for how to proceed in the future. He proposed theistic evolution as the way forward, and I remember thinking, "Oh no, you've got to be kidding me!" And with that I shut the book and re-entrenched myself in the six-day inerrantist tradition. Perhaps (if I am permitted to generalize on the basis of my own experience) people are quite willing to read about doubts that they harbor in secret, but they are not nearly as willing to concede where those doubts may lead if they are ever faced up to. It led Ramm to "concede too much to science" according to many a reviewer. I was not yet ready for Ramm's advice. That would take me many more years.

"In 1969 Ramm contributed the lead article to a JASA symposium issue on 'The Relationship Between the Bible and Science' (D 1969). Here his contextual approach is evident in a section entitled the 'Importance of Context' where he discusses problems related to biblical inerrancy. He notes that 'the special nature of a document means that error must be discussed within the context of the specialty of the document' (p. 100). He makes 'a distinction between the structural and cultural forms that revelation comes through, and the revelation itself. The revelation does not dignify the structure into the category of the revelational.' He concludes that 'when we make a distinction between the modality in which a revelation comes and the teaching of the revelation itself, there is no contradiction between modern scientific pictures or models and Biblical revelation' (p. 101).

The contextual view is applied to the Genesis account of creation in Ramm's summary of Barth's approach to the issue of Genesis and science in After Fundamentalism (1983:152-154). 'His first step is to let the Genesis record stand as it is, a product of the prescientific world with its prescientific cosmologies.' Barth is not concerned about the different cosmological perspectives in Genesis 1 and 2 or other cosmologies throughout scripture. His second point is 'that this multiplicity should not distress us. Christian theologians have used all kinds of cosmologies... There is no common cosmology behind sacred Scripture.' This point recognizes the shifting paradigms throughout the history of science, so that the world view of the biblical writers need no longer be an embarrassment.

His third point is 'that these texts (Genesis 1-3) are the Word of God. The Word of God is "in, with, and under" the cosmology. The cosmology is not the Word of God, but the message within the cosmology is the Word of God. Revelation does not intend to teach science, and therefore the Word of God is independent of the cosmology.' The fourth step is to remember that 'If scientists do their work in theory construction within the limits of the data themselves, scientists will never say anything contrary to the Word of God,' and 'If theologians restrict themselves to the Word of God and pure theological statements ...then theologians will never say anything contrary to science.' If science and theology are governed in their methodology by the nature and context of the subject matter they investigate 'the conflict between science and theology" would be removed.' (J. L. Spradley, "Changing Views of Science and Scripture: Bernard Ramm and the ASA" PSCF 44 (March 1992): 2-9, http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1992/PSCF3-92Spradley.html)

But what if the fourth step does not work? What if one cannot keep saying to himself, "Hey, we have to agree with Scripture (whatever that means) since not all the evidence is in yet"? What if one begins to wonder whether what one is really doing when he says, "All the evidence is not yet in," is a form of special pleading? What if one becomes convinced of things contrary to theology based on scholarship performed independently and on the evidence produced by it? Furthermore, what if one realizes that theology done on its own turf has yielded a plethora of theologies among which there is no prospect of a consensus in sight? What does one do then?

Under the shadow of inerrantist apologetics

2008-01-28T21:30:00.000-05:00

"Newman, after all, could argue his way to Rome without inviting real danger, since the Protestant tradition of liberty of interpretation gave ample freedom for a change of faith. The case was different with Renan and Loisy. They were members of an ecclesiastical institution insisting upon its divinely appointed authority in the realm of faith and morals and maintaining officially that the mere claim of reason to scrutinize its dogma constituted gross error...Their lives, until they made the break with Rome, were fulfilments of Renan's famous simile of the liberal theologian as a bird that has had its wings clipped...Both came to see, gradually, that the unfettered pursuit of scholarship was incompatible with the temper of organized Catholicism. 'My dream,' wrote Renan, 'was the peaceable life of a laborious ecclesiastic--Reid or Malebranche--attached to his duties, relieved from his parish work on account of the value of his researches. Not until later did I perceive--with that degree of certainty which soon was to leave my mind no room for choice--the essential contradiction between these metaphysical studies and the Christian religion.' A similar dream in Loisy was shattered by a similar recognition of contradiction. 'Being convinced,' he said, 'that theological orthodoxy could not in the long run prevail against scientific truth, but would be forced to reckon with it and acoomodate to it, I did not think that the fact of having lost confidence in the absolute value of traditional dogmas unfitted me for the teaching of exegesis in a Catholic faculty...The great--I might say only--difficulty, against which I was to be broken, was real, substantial and living; it was the authority, or rather the tyranny, which in Roman Catholicism has supplanted, not only the Scriptures, but even tradition, and which aims at the domination of thought, history and politics." (Gordon K. Lewis, "From Faith to Skepticism; A Note on Three Apologetics," The Journal of Politics 13 (1951): 185-186.)

I remember when I was at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary that the slogan for the school was: "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." But, as I argue in my book, it is a mission impossible to pursue scholarship under the shadow of inerrantist apologetics. Professors of religion have told me face to face at AAR meetings and elsewhere that the main reason they leave their variety of evangelicalism is that they eventually come to the realization that the only way they were ever really allowed to do scholarship of a serious kind was to research with surreptitious intentions of finding some new vantage from which to bolster the faith. That sounds like "aim[ing] at the domination of thought, history and politics" to me.

It's hard to pursue studies when one feels like he or she always has to remember to protect the faith from every noise in the wind. Inerrantism began to give me that Big Brother feeling: go ahead and pursue your studies, but be sure to perform the scholarship under the shadow of apologetics. It seems to me that if that mentality continues to be nourished in evangelical schools, then the forms of scholarship produced will differ little, each in their own way, from "thoughtful but semicritical paraphrase[s] of the biblical narrative." (Kenton Sparks description of Provan, et. al, A Biblical History of Israel. [Westminster John Knox, 2003], http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/5555_5849.pdf)

The structure of Pete Enns' doctrinal revolution

2008-01-27T21:19:00.000-05:00

In 2006 I exchanged some emails with Paul Helm regarding my book. He explained to me that he had serious misgivings about a "difficulties first" approach to constructing a doctrine of scripture. At first I thought this was the old contest between deductive and inductive approaches to scripture, but I think the dispute touches upon something more fundamental than that. It's not so much that I am imprudently opting for a problems first approach. It seems to me more helpful to say that I have bought into inerrantism as the dominant paradigm for understanding scripture for as long as I can remember and I have gradually and inevitably been driven to a state of crisis:

"Let us then assume that crises are a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel theories and ask next how scientists respond to their existence. Part of the answer, as obvious as it is important, can be discovered by noting first what scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies. Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis. They do not, that is, treat anomalies as counterinstances, though in the vocabulary of philosophy of science that is what they are...[O]nce it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place...The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other...

The reasons for doubt sketched above were purely factual; they were, that is, themselves counterinstances to a prevalent epistemological theory. As such, if my present point is correct, they can at best help to create a crisis or, more accurately, to reinforce one that is already very much in existence. By themselves they cannot and will not falsify that philosophical theory, for its defenders will do what we have already seen scientists doing when confronted by anomaly. They will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict...If, therefore, these epistemological counterinstances are to constitute more than a minor irritant, that will be because they help to permit the emergence of a new and different analysis of science within which they are no longer a source of trouble." Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 77-78, italics in original.

I am not starting with problems (and neither is Enns for that matter, whose book Helm has reviewed online in two installments). [I ultimately speak for myself here, but maybe, just maybe, what I say will apply to Enns' book as well.] I am starting with the received inerrantist tradition. A series of anomalies has driven me to various stages of crisis. Now I am in the process of searching for an alternative. I have already gone the route of defending the reigning paradigm, but I think there is a better alternative to be found. There is no problem of method here: this is a perfectly natural development for believers studying scripture within the context of a "normal" paradigm.

The stage in which I find myself now [and maybe Enns does, too] I think can be described as follows: "When...an anomaly comes to seem more than just another puzzle of normal science, the transition to crisis and to extraordinary science has begun. The anomaly itself now comes to be more generally recognized as such by the profession. More and more attention is devoted to it by more and more of the field's most eminent men. If it still continues to resist, as it usually does not, many of them may come to view its resolution as the subject matter of their discipline. For them the field will no longer look quite the same as it had earlier." Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 82-83, italics in original.

[Pete Enns is one of the most eminent men in his field. It is nothing less than a disgrace that he has to suffer the ignominy that his colleagues are currently putting him through.]

Helm writes: "The (consistently Christian) answer to these questions should be obvious. We formulate our doctrine from attending (no doubt fallibly) only to Scripture’s own explicit statements on the matter, returning time and again to check and modify our first thoughts by the data of Scripture in a never-ending iterative process. And then we wrestle with the problems in the light of our understanding of these statements. In the mercy of God, the doctrine (along with other doctrines) will illuminate the problems; the problems never control the doctrine." (http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2008/01/analysis-extra-inspiration-and.html)

This is precisely what I think Enns has done. I think Kuhn again explains well what is happening:
"Debates over theory-choice cannot be cast in a form that fully resembles logical or mathematical proof. In the latter, premises and rules of inference are stipulated from the start. If there is disagreement about conclusions, the parties to the ensuing debate can retrace their steps one by one, checking each against prior stipulation. At the end of that process one or the other must concede that he has made a mistake, violated a previously accepted rule. After that concession he has no recourse, and his opponent's proof is then compelling. Only if the two discover instead that they differ about the meaning or application of stipulated rules, that their prior agreement provides no sufficient basis for proof, does the debate continue in the form it inevitably takes during scientific revolutions. That debate is about premises, and its recourse is to persuasion as a prelude to the possibility of proof." Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 199.

In the present context, problems are illuminating the doctrine of inerrancy, not controlling it. One facet of the Enns predicament that Kuhn's study seems to describe quite well is this: "That process is persuasion, but it presents a deeper problem. Two men who perceive the same situation differently but nevertheless employ the same vocabulary in its discussion must be using words differently. They speak, that is, from what I have called incommensurable viewpoints." (p. 200)

OT specialists, NT specialists, theology specialists, philosophy specialists, trying to talk to each other. What a mess! I think Helm has every right to chime in on the debate, being a professional philosopher of exceptional caliber. WTS theologists also have a right, as do other NT specialists. That said, Enns' theorizing takes place in the OT specialist world and there is some distance to bridge to get to his work and "translate" it for someone who concedes he's "not an OT anything" (Helm's self-description, which would also describe the bulk of Enns' intended audience). The trick is to mediate the distance that separates the disciplines without imperialistic effects, for Enns appears to be doing some extraordinary science. So, yes, philosophy might profitably help lead the way toward a meaningful discussion (although the Helm-Enns exchange seems to question this), but if Kuhn is correct and ultimately the exchange is one of persuasion, it becomes much easier to understand why some at WTS feel compelled to use force to try to ensure that they eventually win the day.

On two common arguments for inerrancy

2008-01-27T00:50:00.000-05:00

A case for inerrancy is made in Stephen L. Andrew, "Biblical Inerrancy," Chafer Theological School Journal 8 (2002): 2-21, by marshalling an epistemological and a biblical argument.

"[I]f inerrantists argue deductively...(and, unfortunately, many have), then the argument is
indeed circular and fallacious.

What follows is a tricky and involved philosophical discussion, but we will try to be concise. We believe the philosophical problem can ultimately be solved on the basis of primary inductive historical investigation and subsequent deductive argumentation. That is to say, we first determine the likelihood that the historical Jesus of Nazareth made such statements as are recorded in Matthew 5:18 and John 10:35. This is a fundamentally inductive exercise.
The next step is to prove (once again, inductively, on the basis of historical investigation) the likelihood that Jesus of Nazareth both predicted His own death and resurrection, and that
He then in fact died and rose from the dead. On this inductively derived basis it is logical to conclude that He is who He claimed to be. For our purposes in this article, it is enough that He claimed to be authoritative in His teaching, and His teaching included the idea that the Hebrew Scriptures are inerrant and that the future ministry of the Holy Spirit would include the authoritative teaching of “all things” to Christ’s hand-picked apostles, who in turn wrote the
New Testament. Once these facts are established inductively, one can move to deductive arguments and ultimately prove that all of Scripture is inerrant." (p. 16)

This inerrantist argument forces inerrantists to insist upon apostolic connections to each book in scripture. This really paints inerrantists into a corner: they must continually fight evidence to the contrary with all their gusto, else the faith is lost. Hebrews, Revelation and Luke-Acts are not apostolic. 1-3 John are disputable. Several Pauline letters had co-authors; some are decidedly pseudonymous. There is also the matter that Christ was probably not in a cultural position to begin teaching limited inerrancy or some comparable position. Science was not yet developed enough, nor were people historically conscious. Another matter to consider is that Christ seems to have thought that the end of the world would happen within a generation. Without doubting that God the Son is omniscient, I think inerrantists are making too many presumptions regarding what Christ knew and how he knew what he knew.

How do inerrantists know that Christ had one person and two natures? Did scripture teach them that? I think not. How do they know that he knew everything there is to know? How does this knowing take place in the first place? All Christians should freely admit that when it comes down to it there's an awful lot of speculation when it comes to the incarnation, and also when we contemplate how God can know at all. I think inerrantists definitely go too far when filling in the blanks. It's not that they shouldn't try to fill in blanks, it's just that they so often do so with far more "certainty" than is reasonable given the amount of mystery that surrounds the incarnation.

"...[B]ecause inerrantists argue that Scripture will be found errorless when all the data is in, opponents have charged them with making an unfalsifiable claim. This is a false charge of fallacy, however. Inerrantists do not claim that inerrancy is unfalsifiable in principle—only that certain facts are missing in particular cases. In such cases, to argue (as some limited inerrantists do) that inerrancy has been proved false is an argument from silence. Third, opponents have zlaimed that inerrantists do not do justice to the human element of Scripture. Humans make mistakes, and since Scripture is co-authored by God and man, should we not expect minor human errors? To the contrary: a product of God ipso facto cannot contain error." (p. 18)

I argue in my book that there is no ipso facto reason that a product of God cannot contain error. In this case, I think, inerrantists presume too much. Consider the following possibilities: 1) A tact I take might be called theodicy (at least from a vantage that pays such a premium on "errors" in the Bible). God may have allowed "errors" in the Bible knowing that the good achieved by them (written witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ) outweighs the bad (false beliefs about the beginning of the universe, readers mistaking midrash for objective historical reports). 2) God might not view "errors" as an imperfection, maybe certain knowledge of historical and scientific truths do not rank high on his list of things to communicate to humans. 3) "True" accounts would not have been understood by thousands of years worth of human civilization, until modern science and other more modern academic developments. Even if these three don't sway inerrantists, they illustrate for present purposes that there's nothing ipso facto about errors in God's "product." Just because these three considerations don't convince inerrantists does not mean that they are not real possibilities.

(On the "inerrancy is falsifiable" argument, see yesterday's post.)

Follow the evidence wherever it leads?

2008-01-26T15:33:00.000-05:00

After writing the previous post I thought to add a remark about how one of the only books inerrantists are allowed to read regarding the historicity of the exodus is James Hoffmeier's Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (Oxford, 1999). There's a JETS review of the book that begins with the following words:

"Hoffmeier's new work is a necessary corrective to the current trend in Biblical scholarship characterized by the heavy use of anthropological and sociological models and by a hypercritical attitude toward the OT. His stated aim is to follow the evidence where it leads, and he concludes that there is no need for skepticism regarding the essential historicity of the rise of Joseph to power in Egypt, the sojourn and bondage of Israel in Egypt, and the accounts of the exodus." (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3817/is_199912/ai_n8853391)

I can't help but see a problem with the way all this is framed. I don't think inerrantists can ever really say that they will follow evidence wherever it leads. They can only pledge that they will make sure that the available evidence proves the Bible right (or is at least consistent with it). In fact, they are forced to do this; they cannot do otherwise. For inerrantists have been told in advance (by God himself through scripture) that evidence can never do anything negative, it can only show the Bible right.

When I read Hoffmeier a few years ago, I remember taking away from him that although there is not much evidence for the exodus tradition, an exodus cannot be ruled out on the basis of evidence we have. He did not have much constructive to say. I guess there's a fine line between following evidence wherever it leads and using the resources available to show where evidence does not lead: to the falsification of the scriptures. (Contrast Hoffmeier with D. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. [Princeton, 1993].)

If Jesus' bones were found in the Middle East, I mean undeniably traceable to the Jesus Christ of the Bible (say, by DNA or something), what would inerrantists do? Would they concede a point or devise an explanation? I presume the latter because the mindset's very strict: Don't concede a point. Scripture's always right. THE BIBLE NEVER FAILS.

Truth is a two-way street

2008-01-26T14:45:00.000-05:00

Dewey Beegle was the man inerrantists sought to beat a generation ago. His Scripture, Tradition and Infallibility was the book that all inerrantists wanted to prove wanting. Yet I have to say the concluding paragraph in his chapter, "Inerrancy and the Phenomena of Scripture," will likely ring true with a number of young evangelicals:

"Truth is a two-way street or a double-edged sword. Although facts confirm the biblical record in many instances, they also disprove it in other cases. In the last analysis, we must let the truth cut both ways. The true biblical view of inspiration must account for all the evidence of Scripture. The peril of the view of inerrancy is its rigidity and all-or-nothing character. If only one of the illustrations discussed in this chapter is correct, the doctrine is invalidated." (p. 197)

That is a lot of pressure (too much for many). Every new finding, every new discovery, every new theory is potentially a threat to the inerrantist faith--and not only a threat, but also a potential faith demolisher. One fell swoop the entire scripture comes crashing down because it's all or nothing. And many times with inerrancy also goes the faith. This in itself helps account for the insularity of a number of evangelical churches in the States. It's not just that every new discovery brings with it some new piece of information, it's that with every new finding the whole faith hangs in the balance, thanks to the inerrantist ultimatum. That's why we have to wait to hear what the evangelical biblical scholars have to say, what the evangelical archaeologists have to say, what the evangelical anthropologists have to say, and what the evangelical biologists have to say, etc., before accepting some new piece of information. (Inerrantists who don't like the Roman Catholic church because of their rigid, hierarchical authority network have a tantamount authority schema right in their backyards.)

On my copy of Beegle's book, there's an endorsement by F. F. Bruce that reads:

"Dr. Beegle has rearranged and amplified his material and struck a more positive note. I endorse as emphatically as I can his depreciating of a Maginot-line mentality where the doctrine of Scripture is concerned."

That's F. F. Bruce saying this...F. F. Bruce!

Religious experience not inerrancy

2008-01-25T03:22:00.000-05:00

The questions raised by yesterday's considerations trouble me to no end. What is the faith based on then, if it's not the Bible and apparently not on evidence? The only answer that I could come up with is "religious experience," that is, religious experience understood in the framework of the historic Christian tradition. That would mean that a sense of God or encounter with God interpreted culturally through the meta-narrative of the Christian story is what gets one to buy into Christianity. Although I am not entirely satisfied with this answer to the question, I am convinced that that has to be the only way one can proceed. I am relieved to see, though, that other prominent Christian thinkers have come to the same conclusion.

William Lane Craig:
"I received a fellowship from the German government to study the resurrection of Jesus under the direction of Wolfhart Pannenberg and Ferdinand Hahn at the University of Munich and at Cambridge University. As a result of my studies, I became even more convinced of the historical credibility of that event. Of course, ever since my conversion, I believed in the resurrection of Jesus on the basis of my personal experience, and I still think this experiential approach to the resurrection is a perfectly valid way to knowing that Christ has risen. It’s the way that most Christians today know that Jesus is risen and alive. But as a result of my studies, I came to see that a remarkably good case can be made for Jesus’ resurrection historically as well, and I hope to show tonight that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of certain well-established facts about Jesus. " (http://www.holycross.edu/departments/crec/website/resurrection-debate-transcript.pdf)

Experience, first, in the context of a Christian tradition. That is, God reaches out to us through the Christian lifeworld: other Christians, tradition, scripture, Holy Spirit. Next, we investigate the matter, the evidence proves not overwhelmingly against it: belief is able to withstand critical scrutiny. That means, faith comes first, and investigation second. That has to be how it goes. Not faith first, inerrancy second and then investigation third. That's where the problems start. Inerrancy can't come right after faith (as it does for a number of evangelicals) because inerrancy can't withstand the scrutiny, then the faith falls apart.

Infallible in faith and practice

2008-01-24T06:14:00.000-05:00

Once I dropped inerrancy I defaulted to a controversial position that holds that scripture is infallible in matters of faith and practice only. I thought to myself the Bible was given to tell the gospel story: it should only be considered authoritative insofar as what the Bible says deals with the gospel. This makes a lot of sense to me. But lately I've been having some doubts about this position; there is something about it that is deeply dissatisfying. Bibliology always has to be done, unfortunately, with one eye toward apologetics. If a non-inerrantist retreats to a position that says that the Bible is authoritative only in matters of faith and practice, that's like saying the Bible has been given to us by God, but it is only authoritative in those matters that are not empirically testable (matters of faith and practice). That seems to me like a BIG problem. I certainly would not accept such a position from any other religionist. I would think that they are only trying to save their religion at all costs by contriving their faith in such a way so that it is immune to criticism. What kind of faith is that? By parity of reasonning, why in the world should it be acceptable for a non-inerrantist to make such a move--deliberately exempting Christianity from all criticism? If I saw someone from another religion adjust his religious belief ad hoc in this way, I would certainly not be impressed. So the "infallible in faith and practice" position may have some serious problems associated with it that should be taken into consideration.

Inerrant traditions

2008-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

"We affirm that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture.

We deny the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizlng, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship." (The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Article XVIII)

Inerrantists frequently try to skirt the issue that to get to an allegedly originally inerrant text requires an inerrant biblical hermeneutics. Grammatico-historical exegesis is commonly proffered as the way to get to scripture, in order that the amount of eisegesis involved be somehow reduced to some acceptable minimum. (Let's not forget that evangelical bibliological construction is [must!] always done with one eye toward apologetics.)

In my book I try to show that the inerrant teachings in question never turn out to be the direct teachings of scripture. On the contrary, they turn out to be the rather arbitrary interpretive judgment calls of the leaders in the inerrantist evangelical tradition--it does not matter what part of that tradition in which one happens to find him(her)self. Catholics are a little more perceptive here (and much freer to raise the issue):

"In conclusion, there is no plain sense of Scripture as many Evangelicals understand the phrase. However, Scripture becomes more plain when read in the context of the Apostolic Church, but outside of this context, the true meaning may or may not be plain to the average reader. Unfortunately, usually when someone says 'just read Scripture and its plain meaning,' she means 'read the Bible like I read it, which is plain enough to me (obviously), and if your "plain reading" doesn't line up with my "plain reading," you are deceived or even stupid' even though the message is supposedly plain to begin with! This is the ultimate problem I have with appealing to the generic 'plain meaning' of Scripture." (http://www.ancient-future.net/plainmeaning.html)

And so what we have really is "inerrant" traditions fighting "inerrant" traditions, all putatively proclaiming what the Bible says plainly. This is not exactly what I signed up for when I first bought in to inerrantist Christianity. We are all catholics at heart when it comes down to it, standing on the promises of our traditions.

Not because of peer pressure

2008-01-22T10:33:00.000-05:00

After returning home from the conference in Mexico, it occurred to me just how off the mark those evangelicals are who accuse non-inerrantists of becoming non-inerrantists because of peer pressure. At least in my case, it certainly is not the case that a non-inerrantist position has become more acceptable to maintain, whether socially, academically, pastorally, or spiritually. If anything, a non-inerrantist evangelical position on scripture seems even harder to sustain because now not only does one have all the liberal "enemies" that one had when one was an inerrantist, but now one also has the inerrantists, too, who are adamantly against you. So whatever benefits there may be from becoming a non-inerrantist, freedom from peer pressure does not seem to me to be one of them.

It's a long slippery slope

2008-01-20T09:11:00.000-05:00

The slippery slope away from "true" Christianity and down toward outright unbelief is longer and much more complicated than many suppose. For inerrantist evangelicals, I have been told over and again that signs of trouble start as soon as one entertains the slightest doubt that scripture is not inerrant. It is interesting to note, though, that from the vantage of a person who is a rather long ways down the legendary slippery slope, entertaining that scripture might not be inerrant and still believing that the scripture is inerrant amount to the same thing--there is only a negligible difference, if any, between the two positions as far as they can see. The fact is that the slippery slope is much more involved than inerrantist evangelicals are willing to imagine. After denying inerrancy, there is only a very short time before one is no longer Christian, or, at the very least, one won't be as strong of a Christian--or so some inerrantist churches and seminaries tend to insinuate to their congregations and student bodies.

I gave a paper yesterday at an international conference on “The Re-Enchantment of Nature across Disciplines: Critical Intersections of Science, Ethics, and Metaphysics,” in Morelia, Mexico. My paper was on why religious people do not trust science. During the discussion time, one process theologian offered some thoughts on how academicians might make science more palatable to religious believers by trying to change the way people understand the divine. Another scholar's opinion was that my paper only raised a red herring and that people who know better will not be goaded into a supernatural vs. natural antithesis when thinking about the science and religion interface. He explained that my paper was a prime example of how American Christians preoccupy themselves with "problems" that others throughout the rest of the world have no interest in. Americans' view of the science and religion dialogue on the whole is quite skewed; many people get by just fine with their religious and scientific knowledge co-existing peacefully side by side. What happened next is what reminded me of just how long the slippery slope really is.

The discussion then moved on to how religion should be reconceptualized and understood as any sense of mystery that effects a distortion of time consciousness, altered states of reality, or some other awareness of transcendence. Then the discussion revisted a paper given earlier on how the origins of religion can be traced back to the neural reward system associated with the runner's high: running as religious experience. Attention was also drawn to a series of articles just published in the December issue of the JAAR. The articles consider whitewater kayaking, fly fishing, and surfing as religious experiences. I protested that what's missing in each of these examples is a notion of agency, a notion of mystery that has to do with the existence of a divine person(s)--an aspect of religion that is really non-negotiable for the majority of religious persons in the world. Why was it that such a salient feature of religion was being systematically avoided at a session at a conference that was supposed to be devoted to religion, nature, and culture?

Afterwards, a religious studies professor came over to me to explain that the reason why academia has no interest in the conflict model between science and religion--even if it is the model that is taken for granted at a grassroots level--is that academicians define their disciplines well and know precisely what each discipline is supposed to do. Theology takes as its data the religious experiences of a religious population and analyzes that data for trends and patterns in social relations and religious beliefs. I countered that I had always been taught that theology was a religious believer trying his or her best to think God's thoughts after him. The woman laughed.

The woman teaches at a religious school. She said that she thought a little more humility was in order. Academicians know the bounds of each of the disciplines and therefore do not see any need for a conflict model between science and religion. The idea of a divine agent acting in the world is not a proper part of theology, the academy already knows this--it's just that the people haven't come to that conclusion yet.

Well, I think this is a point on the journey down the slippery slope that certainly spells trouble. When the idea that one is trying to know what God wants seems laughable, when the idea that a divine agent has nothing to do with theology seems obvious (I'm talking about trying to discover these things personally, not about making sure that the whole world comports with one's ideas regarding what God wants and what kind of divine agent he is), one has reached a spot on the slippery slope that is very hard to reconcile with Christianity. But that's a long way off from questioning inerrancy and looking at the Bible for what it really is, whatever that may turn out to be.

When is enough enough?

2008-01-19T07:26:00.000-05:00

"It is a strange by-product of recent trends in biblical scholarship that opposing forces have now joined in the effort to crush so-called "radical" critical scholarship. Now it is common that traditionally minded (meaning accepting critical results of the past) scholars, who cannot accept recent ideas and trends in biblical studies because of their own critical opinion-an absolutely legitimate position-resort to the same kind of polemics as formerly found only in conservative literature.

There may be a number of explanations for this strange fact. One may be that the majority of critical scholars originate within a religious milieu and at the bottom of their hearts are conservatives without probably realizing this. Thus, critical scholarship represents a kind of breaking away from one's own background. The changing attitude towards even more critical scholars questioning, e.g., the very existence of King David, may have to do with the fear of totally losing the tradition-after all Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem so the new David could be born there! Somehow there seem to be questions that we are not allowed to ask...

...it is never understood that we did not start with ideology. On the contrary, as historical-critical scholars of the old school, we started with critical scholarship as it used to be-trained in the European academic tradition already described-but we did not stop when the results were disconcerting and bewildering. The demolition of the history of ancient Israel proceeded along a logical line of advance from the patriarchs, via the Exodus and the conquest, over the Period of the Judges to David and his time, and the center of discussion has now moved on to the late pre-exilic, the exilic, and the post-exilic periods. It is correct that havoc followed in the wake of progress, but it was certainly not because of a preconceived ideology different from the one shared by the majority of historical-critical scholars." (Niels Peter Lemche, "Conservative Scholarship-Critical Scholarship: Or How Did We Get Caught by This Bogus Discussion?" http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Conservative_Scholarship.htm

So let's say one finally finds the strength to confess, "Ok, inerrancy is not for me." How does one decide when enough is enough? For example, one might come to the judgment that six day creation schemes do not hold any water and that the appearance of humans in evolutionary history seems to have happened in more than one geographic place at about the same time (let's just say). Is one permitted to begin asking questions about whether there really was an Adam and Eve or whether there really was a Garden or even a Fall at all? And then what does one do with the gospel story that we have taken for granted since our first days in Sunday school that Christ came to repair the consequences of Adam's (=humanity's) sin?

We already know the ire inerrantists will raise about a legendary slippery slope. But among non-inerrantists, how does one decide when enough is enough, or perhaps more importantly, why would THAT enough be enough? Does it come down to one's personality or to some personal, arbitrary critical threshold that each of us will have at very different places? Or does it all boil down to one's historically-conditioned, sociological and political moment? How much do the evolutionary developments of our brains play a part? These are the frightening discussions that very few evangelicals are presently ready to have, but "When is enough enough? (and why?)" is the only one, I think, that will allow evangelicals to existentially be able to perceive, as if for the first time, what their faith is really made of.

When religion gets in the way

2008-01-18T10:32:00.000-05:00

"Subsequent studies by Jon H. Roberts, David N. Livingstone, and me have undermined Moore's sweeping claim about the uniqueness--or even the salience--of Calvinism, though none of us denies that distinctive theological convictions sometimes influenced how people viewed Darwin's theory. In a new introduction to his meticulously researched Darwinism and the Divine in America (1988), Roberts argues that 'the great majority of American Protestant thinkers who remained committed to orthodox formulations of Christian doctrine actually rejected Darwinism; indeed, they denounced the theory of organic evolution in any guise that described speciation in terms of naturalistic agencies.' The 'crucial determinant,' he maintains, 'was their conviction that the theory of organic evolution could not be reconciled with their views of the origin, nature, and 'fall' of man, the nature and basis of moral judgment, and a number of other doctrines--all based on their interpretation of the Scriptures.' My own research bears this out." Ronald Numbers, Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5.

I'm not necessarily putting a plug in here for Darwinian evolution and that it should force evangelicals to abandon inerrancy. Warfield, for example, famously bought into inerrancy and yet found that he could still be a proponent of theistic evolution. I'm simply wondering aloud, "How many times does a commitment to scripture get in the way of learning something important?"

"'Although we live in a very enlightened century, wherein all arts and sciences have been elevated nearly to their summit,' wrote a Dutch Copernican in 1772, 'one still finds many, even wise and prudent people, who cannot believe the motion of the earth...They feel that it is contrary to Scripture.'" (pp. 12-13)

How many times has inerrancy caused it to be the case that evangelicals could not even join in to a constructive conversation, much less learn some new truth?

On Reassuring the Inerrantists

2008-01-17T06:16:00.000-05:00

"With great themes such as these we may fairly hope for there to emerge a vital new expression of evangelical respect for the Bible. Even though the strict inerrancy assumption is lacking, there remains strong confidence in God speaking infallibly in the Scriptures, so that fears about unhindered drifting into heresy from this position should seldom be realized...I think we should respect this option as a possibility for evangelical believers and not surround it with dire predictions and sharp attacks...

The militant advocates of inerrancy are aware of this threat from the liberal side, and perceive the non-inerrancy evangelicals in collusion with the effort to undermine the Bible's authority. Of course this suspicion reveals a profound lack of trust and relationships between the protagonists and should provoke wounded and pained objection, but nevertheless it is incumbent upon the objects of this suspicion to clear away all doubt by coming forward with an unmistakably strong and enthusiastic doctrine of the unique authority of the Bible, so that our preoccupation with internal infighting can give way to a more united and profound reply to the real battle for the Bible. A polarized evangelicalism cannot fulfil her Godgiven mission in the world." (Clark Pinnock, "The Ongoing Struggle Over Biblical Inerrancy," http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1979/JASA6-79Pinnock.html)

Some time ago (and even today), Pinnock called for non-inerrantists to come up with an "unmistakably strong and enthusiastic doctrine of the unique authority of the Bible." I suggest in my book that once younger evangelicals find the strength to wheedle their way out of the straightjacket of inerrancy, they should reassess their beliefs and gradually try to pick up the pieces, as it were. Some inerrantists are eager to point out that no plausible God-honoring alternative to inerrancy has yet been set forth. I suggest that younger evangelicals can revisit the topic of scripture in the future when they are ready and try to sort out their options without feeling like God is now pressuring them to get it right or that he now disapproves of them. There may very well be some (or a lot of) social pressure that they feel to immediately replace inerrancy with something "better," yet I can't help but think that this pressure, whether real or imagined is an impossible trap, a sort of non-inerrantist, spiritual delusion that a non-inerrantist alternative in bibliology could ever be formulated to the inerrantists' satisfaction. Watch out for this!

Guilt Trips

2008-01-16T06:06:00.000-05:00

Scott Oliphint writes: "There are two and only two classes of people in the world. Such has always been the case. Such will always be the case. There are those who know God and love him because they have been called out of darkness into his marvelous light. There are those who know God and hate him because they refuse to acknowledge the truth that is known, and that worship and serve the creature (Rom. 1:18ff.). There is no third party, no 'honest seeker,' no 'confused questioner.'" ("Cornelius Van Til and the Reformation of Christian Apologetics," in Revelation and Reason, ed. K. S. Oliphint and L. G. Tipton [P&R Publishing, 2007], 281-282.)

Those who know and love God know he's sovereign.

Those who know and love God know he is the author of truth.

Those who know and love God know the Bible is God's Word (because it says so).

Those who know and love God know that the Bible MUST BE inerrant.

If you disagree with any of this, it's not the case that you don't know God. It's worse. You know God and you hate him. This, I think, is the mother of all guilt trips because anyone trying to get out from under it is doing nothing but demonstrating to everyone their will-to-autonomy (i.e., rebellion) against God.

The Divine Commission

2008-01-15T18:52:00.000-05:00

"To bear the reproach of Christ by standing up for His truth appears at the present day to be an upopular thing. But if it is unpopular, it is a very blessed thing. We who name His Name should pray that He will raise up men who will call this generation back to His infallible and inerrant Word and to the Christ of Whom that Word speaks. And in this task we have the assurance and the comfort that the battle is the Lord's." Edward J. Young, Thy Word is Truth, 7.

"Those who continue to hold that the Bible is without mistake because it is God's inspired Word and that God cannot lie or contradict himself have a responsiblitity before God to take advantage of the second opportunity he has given us--to pick up the pieces all the way back to the 1930s. By the grace of God we must do better in order to stand in our generation with love, but with total clarity, for a Bible 'not partly true and partly false, but all true, the blessed, holy Word of God--this warm and vital type of Christianity.'" Francis Schaeffer, "God Gives His People a Second Opportunity" in The Foundation of Biblical Authority (ed. J. M. Boice; Zondervan, 1978), 19.

"Does this not say something terribly important as to what is at stake in the inerrancy issue? In crisis, there is no alternative to proclamation that 'makes no odds.' Under such conditions, anything less than total assurance in Christian proclamation is betrayal of Christ and sure defeat. But how can one possibly say, 'it is written,' without a Scripture that is entirely trustworthy? We need to become aware that all of life is really crisis in a sinful world where the battle between Christ and the powers of evil never ceases for a moment. What is at stake? Your effectiveness in that battle, and mine. Let us not tarnish and corrode our only effectual weapon--'the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." John Warwick Montgomery, "Biblical Inerrancy: What is at Stake?" in God's Inerrant Word. (ed. J. W. Montgomery, Bethany,1974), 39-40.

"We affirm that a confession of the full authority, infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of the Christian faith. We further affirm that such a confession should lead to increasing conformity to the image of Christ.
We deny that such a confession is necessary for salvation. However, we further deny that inerrancy can be rejected without grave consequences, both to the individual and to the Church." The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Article, XIX.

If younger evangelicals grow up knowing that there is some implicit divine commission to uphold inerrancy, one that real Christians can't help but obey, it is no wonder that the evangelical ultimatum will come to mind as the only way to look at the matter.

Inerrantist Humanism

2008-01-12T23:56:00.001-05:00

Nicholas Gier remarks: "As far as I am concerned, the claims of special revelation are just as human as the claims of general revelation, and these claims must be tested by the same human methods. To argue otherwise would simply be indulging in the question begging of the highest order.

This means that there is a hidden humanism in evangelical rationalism. When Lewis claims that Christian apologetics is an attempt to see how far we can go 'on their own steam,' and when other evangelicals tell with great confidence what God has said and what he intends, we are observing a Promethean self-assertion as great as anything in the history of secular humanism." (God, Reason, and the Evangelicals, p. 5)

There is a latent humanistic facet to inerrantism: a tremendous faith in human powers to determine what God has said and what he wants, and then go on to proclaim it. Even the most negative assessment of the human capacity such as that which claims that humans do not have "the moral capacity to handle truth rightly" (P. K. Helseth, "Christ-Centered, Bible-Based, and Second Rate?" WTJ 69 [2007]: 397) displays a fundamental humanistic trust in the inerrantist hermeneutical enterprise. This a very great irony that powerfully upsets the naive "what the Bible says, God says" understanding that younger evangelicals live and breathe in their churches and classrooms.

Nineteenth century innovation?

2008-01-11T22:32:00.000-05:00

I have recently come across, "Don't You Believe in the Inerrancy of the Original Autographs or Have You Stopped Beating Your Wife Yet?" by Theodore Letis, (http://www.kuyper.org/main/publish/books_essays/article_67.shtml). The author suggests that the question, "Do you believe in the inerrancy of the autographs?" is a loaded question that presumes too much and goes on to argue two main points. First, Letis complains that the doctrine of inerrancy cannot possibly be the historic position of the church because the word "inerrancy" did not even come into existence until the nineteenth century. Second, he provides evidence that a preoccupation with autographs was Warfield's innovative attempt to dodge textual critical arguments that were being made by scholars who would denied verbal inspiration.

Although I am not an inerrantist, I cannot bring myself to agree with Letis' article. I have had occasion to think a little about the 19th century innovation thesis when Don Bloesch asked me my thoughts on the matter (in a letter). I think the thesis has some of it right, but it also has much of it wrong. Although the article by Letis sets out to articulate what's right about the thesis, it seems to me he widely misses the mark. Although Letis talks about inerrantists being illogical, his own argument contains a major flaw. For if there is no evidence for the word "inerrancy" before the nineteenth century, that does not mean that there is no evidence for the concept of inerrancy. Inerrancy is not tied to any word. There is a concept behind the word that any number of terms and phrases can connote. In any event, I think Craig Allert (A High View of Scripture?) has a better angle on inerrantist, begging-the-question questions. Allert responds to the query, "Do you have a high view of scripture?" by asking, "Why should inerrantists decide for everybody what a 'high' view of scripture is?"

I am not in a position to comment on Letis' point about Warfield's continuity with some of the Reformers with regard to focusing upon the inerrancy of the autographs. What I can say is that Warfield was not the first to argue for inerrancy (of the fundamentalist kind) with regard to the autographs. Ronald S. Satta's The Sacred Text: Biblical Authority in Nineteenth-Century America easily establishes that to my satisfaction.

What does "authoritative Bible" mean in a given historical context? That is the million dollar question. It will mean something (whether slightly or glaringly) different to every generation insofar as each generation will attempt answers (and attach meanings) to the question from within disparate cultural/ philosophical contexts and on the basis of disparate bodies of scientific knowledge. "Authoritative" is bound to mean one thing when the possibility of countervailing evidence to scriptural accounts is unthinkable and quite another when such evidence is present in overabundance.

Inerrancy's Spirit of Fear

2008-01-09T17:31:00.000-05:00

The God of inerrancy has many young evangelicals scared to ask questions about the Bible. The God of inerrancy reigns over a kingdom whose rules come across loud and clear: Don't challenge what inerrantists say about the Bible or there's a chance on that final day God will actually say to you, 'Depart from me, I never knew you.' For what happens on the final day does not depend upon how well you live your life or how good of a person you have become through the process of sanctification. It's all about one thing: what you believe. Do you believe in God--that he's all-powerful, all-knowing, and as good as good comes? Do you believe he has given his people a Scripture that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and as good as good comes (in fact, it's God's Word)?

If you have doubts about Scripture, then you have doubts about God [and inerrantists will quickly begin having doubts about you!]. That is the inerrantist spirit and what a stifling effect it has on young evangelicals (especially students)! Unless, of course, for whatever reasons, one cannot help but keep asking critical questions and more seriously probing Scripture, pushing it to its limits. Then something awful happens. You realize that Scripture cannot hold the weight that it's supposed to hold. Scripture is not God, but rather more like a book--in fact, uncannily similar to many books of its time. You realize, 'Scripture is not all-powerful, Scripture is not all-knowing, Scripture is not as good as good can be.' But the thing is, who can you tell? To whom could you possibly say, 'I'm not so sure the Bible's inerrant' or 'I'm not finding inerrancy to be helpful any more.' Who has ears to hear this? Your pastor? Your denomination? Your seminary professors?!

Well, if you're like me, it wouldn't matter even if there was someone you could tell because you may initially be too scared to tell anyone, afraid even to face the fact yourself. But I have some advice if you are wont to listen. Start by telling someone who already knows; start by telling God. He already knows about Scripture. In fact, he knows about your doubts. If God strikes you down after you tell him, it won't be because you told him. He already knows about your doubts regarding Scripture; he's learning nothing new from your confession. Many students are scared to tell God that they doubt; some suffer silently as their doubts gain in strength and severity. If the God of inerrancy is fading, what kind of god is left?

This might be a good time to ask a Bible trivia question: Do you know what the most frequent command in the Bible is? It's 'Don't be afraid.'* Is inerrancy helping you obey this command?

* According to N. T. Wright, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 66.

Not sola inerrancy

2008-01-08T06:47:00.000-05:00

After reading through some articles that recount 20th century attempts to purge schools and even entire denominations of non-inerrantists, it has become obvious to me that inerrancy alone cannot account for the degree of spiritual and psychological dysfunction that characterizes the cumulative set of incidents. In a book written back in the 80s (Daniel Sloat, The Dangers of Growing Up in a Christian Home), there is a personality rubric that delineates four main personality trajectories. The pertinent one for the present context is the one the author calls "high-D." This personality trajectory is characterized by the following tendencies (pp. 41-43):

-The person will tend to have a very high opinion of him/herself.

-The person will not tend to be able to stomach discussions that have to do with details.

-The person will tend to be impatient and want to "take action," making sure they are in charge.

-The person will tend to go on the offensive in order to maintain control of situations.

-The person will tend to want to change the way things presently are.

-The person will not likely be moved by others' existential pain and dissatisfaction.

-The person will likely be in a leadership position of some kind.

-The person will tend not to listen to lengthy explanations, preferring a direct answer.

Inerrancy contributes negatively to the spiritual formation of those who have hyper-D (really high D) personalities. Inerrancy will considerably magnify each of the traits listed above and intensify the hyper-D's greatest fear: being taken advantage of. The D-personalities who seem to lead evangelical institutions and congregations so capably have a deep-seated fear, according to Sloat: if they are not in charge, not only will things likely go wrong, but they themselves will somehow be taken advantage of. When this fear is interpreted in terms of evangelical spiritual warfare, the D-personality convinces himself that he must do everything in his power to purge his community of unbelief, lest spiritual enemies take advantage and finally get the better of him. Of course, this thought process is brought about naturally, in accord with the D-personality's emotional and psychological makeup. In fact, the thought process comes so naturally to a hyper-D, he may interpret his easily made decisions as God communicating his will in clear and uncertain terms--and this is an interpretation that others will have an incredibly hard time arguing against.

So it seems to me that it is not sola inerrancy that is killing evangelicalism, it is inerrancy-in-context, in this case, inerrancy in the context of high-D personalities. High-D's will do as they do, driven by their personalities, but the majority will often not be in agreement with their flagrant, self-serving actions. If high- [and especially hyper-] D's could somehow learn to stop and consider how their actions are effecting those around them (in this case, students ) evangelical Christianity would be much easier place to live.

Inerrantists like to purge

2008-01-06T21:54:00.000-05:00

The inerrantist mindset is very unhealthy for students in institutional settings, especially students at seminaries. Two faculty members from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, for example, have been trying to figure out how biblical scholars who accept teams of authors for certain of the Pauline epistles (as suggested in Paul and First Century Letter Writing by E. Randolph Richards) can get along with the theologians who promulgate the standard evangelical accounts of inspiration and inerrancy. But this is a positive example, a situation where the biblical studies faculty member and the theological faculty member are friends, friends who think the other is wrong regarding scripture in the most fundamental way, but friends who can talk to each other and even give a joint public report about it.

Yet there are also very negative examples, frightening examples, if you ask me. One that comes immediately to mind is Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Pete Enns' book, Inspiration and Incarnation, seems to have really upset some people. I am no longer at Westminster, but it is not difficult to deduce the present situation via a combination of what is being discussed online, what profs from other schools have said to me in passing and the posting I read the other day on Westminster's site about how Steve Taylor is leaving.(http://www.wts.edu/stayinformed/view.html?id=50)

What's it all about? Well even Don Carson admits that Pete has not revealed anything new in his book: "Appearances to the contrary, it advances no new theory or grand hypothesis." All of Enns' Old Testament "problems" are well-known. Vitriolic responses to Enns' book are a symptom of something deeper, some unhealthy underlying spiritual disease--the authority of inerrancy internalized, authoritarianism run amok. For Enns does nothing questionable in his book, he simply compiles a good number of ANE parallels, seemingly paradoxical scriptures, and examples of NT uses of the OT in one convenient place--a number of other conservative evangelicals have done the same separately. Accordingly, the acerbic response, I think, stems not from the substance of Enns' book, but from its pathos. Carson picks up on the same thing when he brings up how Blocher, Schaeffer, or Longman (to name a few) discuss some of the very same problems that Enns touches upon. One can read these authors and find much of the same material treated candidly. The difference is "with Blocher and Schaeffer, one does not feel 'got at'..."

"Got at"--here's the sticking point. Evangelicalism has been privately wrestling with inerrancy for decades, but publicly, well, that's another matter. Publicly, inerrancy has been touted as the belief that distinguishes true Christianity from unbelief. I think that if young evangelicals are even slightly familiar with how 20th century struggles over inerrancy often panned out, they can easily discern for themselves what will happen shortly at Westminster, that is, if it is not happening there already.

An excerpt from Time Magazine, July 26, 1971:

"The jockeying began two years ago, when a grass-roots revolt before the 1969 convention brought conservative Classicist J.A.O. ("Jack") Preus into the presidency of the denomination. But moderates remained in command of the Missouri Synod's respected Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, the largest Lutheran seminary in the U.S. Preus has since consolidated power with aggressive efficiency—moderates say with ruthlessness. Though a number of opponents stayed in untouchable jobs around him, he carefully nurtured grassroots support. The moderates' main complaint against their president stems from an investigation he launched last year at Concordia in response to charges that some seminary theologians were not hewing strictly to the doctrine of the Bible's "inerrancy."

The inerrancy doctrine is at the heart of the present strife. Preus and many other conservatives take the fundamentalist view, which holds that such biblical passages as the Adam and Eve account and even Jonah's journey inside the whale are historically true. For most moderates, however, inerrancy means rather that major doctrines, such as original sin, are divinely inspired truth, while specific stories like that of Adam and Eve or Jonah could be just illustrations of a larger truth.The fight is an old one in American Protestantism, but it has grown up anew in the Missouri Synod with Concordia's efforts to build a topflight Scripture faculty. When Preus' investigation team arrived on the Concordia campus, it was stacked with fundamentalists who see the more liberal position as heretical; a number of theologians feared a purge. At the convention, Preus saw to it that key committees were in the hands of allies. Then he opened the week by laying it on the line to the nearly 1,000 delegates in a dramatic, unflinching call for theological law and order. He asked that the convention require L.C.M.S. members to accept not only traditional Lutheran Confessions of Faith but also all statements on biblical doctrines passed by Synod conventions. The "absolutism" of the presidential wing, wrote the angriest of the opposition newspapers circulating on the convention floor, resembled nothing so much as "gang rape.""
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877037-1,00.html)

(In this particular schismatic development, it is interesting to note that "there were no real liberals in the Missouri Synod." [http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=785])

Excerpt from a New York Times article from December 21, 1892:

"'It is given to every man to proclaim from the housetop anything he may feel moved to utter, if it has the least tinge of decency about it. Dr. Briggs has the liberty to do this on his own responsibility. But he may not use this liberty at the expense of the rights of others. The Presbyterian Church has an equal right to be left free to say to what doctrines she will give her testimony and to refuse her imprimatur for the promulgation of opinions which she considers subversive of fundamental truth. As much as Dr. Briggs, the Presbyterian Church is on trial to-day.

Scholarship has been brought into the case to influence your decision, and for that reason a few words must be said here in reference to it. It has been stated that Dr. Briggs knows more about the Bible than all his co-Presbyters taken together. And it has also been boldly said that the Presbyterian Church, in prosecuting him for heresy, takes a position in favor of a narrow and superficial treatment of Scripture. No doubt some believe these statements. But they believe what is not true. There are many scholars as great as Dr. Briggs. And our Church is in hearty accord with the best scholarship.

But the Presbyterian Church places faith above mere scholarship. It recognizes the truth that the one supreme and distinguishing characteristic of Christian people is that they are believers. They are an army of believers, called of God to fight the good fight, in which, not learning, but faith itself gives them strength and courage, since by it they lay hold of the arm of the Lord and make real the help of heaven for the conflict on earth. The power of the Church is measured by its faith in the truth and promise of God. And so it has ever been the supreme duty of the Church to guard against that falling away which comes through a desire for new things, and above all to see to it that there shall be faith on the earth at the coming of her Lord...

It is not denied that Dr. Briggs has made many orthodox statements in the works which he has put in evidence. And it is not for these that he has been accused, but for utterances in the inaugural which are believed to be heretical.'

At this afternoon's session it is probable that a resolution will be adopted to exclude everybody but members of the Presbytery entitled to vote from the sessions at which the voting shall be done." (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9C00E7DA1F31E033A25752C2A9649D94639ED7CF&oref=slogin)

Lastly, an excerpt from an article in Christianity Today, February 3, 1984:

"As one of the five founders of the Evangelical Theological Society, with a heavy heart I officially request that Dr. Robert Gundry submit his resignation, unless he retracts his position on the historical trustworthiness of Matthew's Gospel."

Nicole's motion to request Gundry's resignation was the final stage in a controversy that has been developing ever since Gundry's earlier commentary on Matthew for the Expositor's Bible Commentary was rejected by its New Testament coeditors, Merrill C. Tenney and James M. Boice, despite years of revision. When his views became known, Gundry was asked to deliver a paper on Matthew's theology at a regional ETS meeting. A copy of that paper was sent to Harold Lindsell, conservative defender of biblical inerrancy, who raised the question of Gundry's ETS membership. At the urging of Richard Longenecker of Wycliffe College, Toronto, the ETS decided to take no action until the publication of Gundry's commentary.

In 1982, after publication of the commentary, the executive committee of the ETS under the leadership of Alan F. Johnson, professor of biblical studies at Wheaton College, reported that because Gundry affirmed the ETS doctrinal statement on inerrancy, no action was necessary. Applause followed, which seemed to some to end debate.

But Geisler, for example, was deeply upset by this action of the ETS executive board. Early in 1983 he circulated a letter requesting ETS action on Gundry's membership, and gathered some 59 signatures from faculty members at several theological seminaries. Louis Goldberg, professor of theology and Jewish studies at Moody Bible Institute and 1983 ETS president, responded to Geisler's petition by appointing an ad hoc committee to handle the matter...

The Saturday morning plenary business session that met to vote on the ad hoc committee's proposals was considerably better attended than any of the society's plenary or sectional sessions. Geisler had clearly done his homework carefully. The evening before, he circulated a document, "Why We Must Vote Now on Gundry's Membership, and Why We Must Vote No on Gundry's Membership." He hinted that if the ETS did not remove Gundry, a new "International Theological Society" would be formed to "take the doctrine of inerrancy seriously."
Every major step of the business meeting reflected the preparation of the Geisler forces. The three proposals of the ETS ad hoc committee were soundly defeated. George Knight III of Convenant Theological Seminary then promptly moved that "the ETS go on record as rejecting any position that states that Matthew or any other biblical writer materially altered and embellished historical tradition or departed from the actuality of events." Despite the efforts of Ward Gasque of Regent College to table Knight's motion, it passed 119 to 36, with many abstentions."
(http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/novemberweb-only/11-17-42.0.html?start=1)

Students are not helped when inerrantists purge. After all, students not only want to learn what inerrancy means, they want to know what it means to be an inerrantist. They learn this not so much from reading inerrantist theology and attending inerrantists' classes, but by watching what inerrantists do in response to the evangelicals who disagree with them.

I forgot about presuppositionalism

2008-01-05T22:13:00.000-05:00

(As I look over what I have written I have to say that no matter how carefully I write about presuppositionalism, there will be presuppositionalist readers who will surmise that I don't truly understand their position. My experience with presuppositionalists has been as follows: most of the time, either presuppositionalists will say that I am an unbeliever or they will say that it is obvious that I do not understand what they're trying to get at, because if I did, I would duly agree with them. Come to think of it, this all sounds very Barthian.)

In my last post I mentioned WTS without mentioning presuppositionalism. Presuppositionalism is a very big part of the Westminster tradition and unfortunately has the notorious distinction of impenetrably shielding Westminsterites from a critical examination of inerrancy. Inerrancy is one of the sacrosanct doctrines that is epistemologically presupposed at WTS (along with a good dose of the Dutch Calvinist tradition). That being the case, it becomes nigh-impossible to genuinely and critically engage a presuppositionalist about inerrancy. My understanding of presuppositionalism is that certain tenets of the faith are presupposed when engaging in apologetics and not practically in need of defense, for defenses will fall on deaf ears since sin is obscuring reason's ability to see the truth. [Christians also have deaf ears (to various degrees, the Reformed having better "hearing"). This belief explains Westminster's idiosyncratic view that every discipline is ultimately theology. It may also help account for the non-presuppositionalist charge that Westminster is not really interested in doing philosophy, for example, they only do theology.]

I talked with many of the PhD apologetics students during my time at WTS. (I audited a PhD level course, "Philosophy Useful for Theology" or something like that. I dropped the course after the professor began repeatedly asking me, "Do you believe in God? Do you believe in God?" when I complained that the class was primarily a "Let's compare famous philosophers with Cornelius Van Til" class. I also insisted to the professor that Van Til's apologetic was a cosmological argument in disguise and not transcendental.) I was told time and again that I am an unbeliever because of my willingness to subject inerrancy to an unhealthy dose of critical scrutiny. Inerrancy is one of the main tenets of the Christian faith and it can only properly be accepted by (Reformed) believers. It is a faith position that is presupposed by believers and can only properly be accepted by the (truly) Reformed. If the position is not presupposed by a believer then the believer in question is acting epistemologically like an unbeliever. It is ok to give arguments for inerrancy, but sin will prevent people from appreciating their true cogency. Calvin, for example, tried to argue for an authoritative scripture. But his types of arguments do not clinch the matter and the inerrancy of scripture is something one can (and must?) be certain of. To argue for the inerrancy of scripture, then, can never really accomplish what Christians need; presupposing inerrancy, therefore, is the way to go. What the Bible says of itself is true, we simply presuppose it. (In class at WTS, we were exposed to a deductive argument for inerrancy, but, as I try to argue in my book, these arguments do not at all help us understand what inerrancy is supposed to mean--a full-blown inductive study of scripture and the historical and cultural matrix within which it was composed and compiled is necessary for that. Not only that but our cultural contributions to theological formulations must also be taken into account. These kinds of investigations seem to me to necessitate a major revision of the doctrine.)

Thus inerrancy is established as being methodologically beyond critical discussion precisely because it is one of the things that is presupposed, which implies tacitly to the presuppositionalist that inerrancy has already been figured out; nothing radically new can be said of it. It can hardly pay to revisit it, especially with an eye toward radical criticism (say, by examining inner-biblical exegesis and musing whether present construals of inerrancy are way off the mark.) [And this can be especially unsettling because now professors whose job it is to actually look at and deal with the Bible's "problems" will have little reason not to examine them with incredible candor, since the problems in scripture should never theoretically pose a threat to inerrancy (because the doctrine is presupposed and not dependent upon evidence).] In fact, the "don't touch inerrancy" mindset becomes so entrenched in presuppositionalism and viewed as such a sacred postulate that I am persuaded only a momentous life circumstance (which could be something as minor as studying at an institution that is not presuppositionalist in its apologetic attitude) can existentially work to bring about a presuppositionalist change of mind. Consider Daniel Wallace's personal experience:

"Many today are uncomfortable with an inductive approach to bibliology. I have to wonder if perhaps one of the reasons they are is that it is simply easier to hold to a naïve fideism than it is to examine the data. I have to wonder if perhaps the presuppositionalism of Reformed epistemology has run amok in some circles. Yes, I am a presuppositionalist in my core beliefs, but I believe that there is a place for evidence. When I was a full-blown presuppositionalist years ago, I slipped into a kind of doctrinal arrogance. I didn’t distinguish which truths were grounds for others. This caused a certain smugness on my part, and allowed me the luxury of viewing all doctrines as created equal. But I learned a rather valuable lesson while in the master’s program. I came home to California for a Christmas vacation early on in the program. And I had lunch with my uncle, David Wallace. He was the first graduate from Fuller Seminary to earn a Ph.D. He earned it at Edinburgh University, under Matthew Black. But he also logged some time in various places in Europe—studying with Baumgartner, Barth, and others. He was not pleased with my choice to attend Dallas Seminary; I was clueless about what he really believed. During the lunch, I asked him what he thought about inerrancy. His response startled me, and changed my perspective for all time. He essentially said that he didn’t hold to the doctrine (though he said so much more colorfully than that!). I thought to myself, “Oh no! My uncle is going to hell!” I felt compelled to ask him what he thought about the bodily resurrection of Christ, fearing what I would hear next. After all, without inerrancy, we really can’t know anything about Christ, right? To my surprise, David said, “If Christ is not raised from the dead, then we’re all dead in our sins.” He was certain about the resurrection of Christ. But how could he be without a bibliological presupposition to back it up? I cannot tell you how great the existential crisis was for me at that moment. Up until this time, I had believed that inerrancy was an essential belief of the Christian faith, one that was indispensable to salvation. When David affirmed the central credo of salvation, I could not deny his spiritual status. I came to the sudden realization that one could be saved without embracing inerrancy." (http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=4200#P28_18261) [NB: Wallace maintains his belief in inerrancy; I am only drawing attention to his experience regarding presuppositionalism.]

Opponents of presuppositionalist apologetics almost always point to John Warwick Montgomery's classic refutation of presuppositionalism in Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Philosophy and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til, when they engage presuppositionalists, but that essay typically does not impress, for presuppositionalists insist that Montgomery does not truly understand presuppositionalism and that his critique accordingly misses the mark. Perhaps John Mark Reynolds has a better chance; his parody of presuppositionalism is the best I 've een. (http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/2007/12/20/santa-lives-a-presuppositional-defense-of-the-existence-of-santa-with-a-fisking-of-clement-moore/)

[NB--Craig does not make a connection between WTS and anti-scholarship--I'm the one who did that.]

Inerrancy's will to power

2008-01-05T15:13:00.000-05:00

I was excited to talk to William Lane Craig recently but he was not happy when I related to him my struggles in the faith and how I think that it all began with my doubts regarding inerrancy. He asked whether my experience had been similar to that of Bart Ehrman. I said that it was, and he inquired further into what precisely I thought was causing the problem. I told him that I think it's a clash of apologetic cultures that played a big part: I had first formally learned apologetics in a course with Gary Habermas (and informally from J. P. Moreland's Scaling the Secular City) and then went off to Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia to complete a degree. Westminster, to my astonishment (I knew nothing of presuppositionalism), was quite critical of the arguments I had learned and internalized in support of my faith. Some teachers there (and not a few students) were all-too-eager to point out that an argument for the resurrection does not imply the Christian faith. They seemed almost too happy to explain that the traditional arguments for God's existence are not all that compelling. In fact, my understanding after my first semester at WTS was clear: when Christian thinking is practiced by prominent Christian thinkers (not only by contemporary philosophers, but most intellectuals throughout Christian history) "a better recipe for error could hardly be imagined." (Lane Tipton and K. Scott Oliphint, "Introduction," in Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics. [Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2007], 3, n. 2.) I told Bill Craig that his (Craig's) apologetic did not seem too compatible with Westminster's "Reformed" apologetic and that that had been existentially jarring for me, especially in the area of bibliology. He said that the conflict was no big deal for him for the simple reason that he is not "Reformed."

Not "Reformed." Now there's a thought. Tipton and Oliphint, for example, can hardly believe that Craig would counsel his readers as follows: "Some readers of my study of divine omniscience, The Only Wise God, expressed surprise at my remark that someone desiring to learn more about God's attribute of omniscience would be better advised to read the works of Christian philosophers than of Christian theologians. Not only was that remark true, but the same holds for divine eternity." (This is a quote from Craig's Time and Eternity, p. 11, that appears in the Tipton and Oliphint book on page 2.) Craig has some pretty good reasons for saying this: "Today's theologians generally have next to no training in philosophy and science and so are ill-equipped to address in a substantive way the complex issues raised..." (p. 11) What does this have to do with Craig not being "Reformed"? Well, Tipton and Oliphint interpret "not Reformed" in terms of Craig's holding reason as principium; but Craig knows all about reason as principium (see the discussion in his Hard Questions, Real Answers, for example.) and does not accept considerations regarding reason as principium as an excuse for culturally forbidding the pursuit of rigorous scholarship.

Now I can't help but think that on an existential level I would not be wrong to interpret "not Reformed" in terms of "not being subject to Westminster's inerrantist will to power." In other words, I think Craig finds it so easy to argue against Westminster's anti-scholarship stance (Craig talks about the eclipse of scholarship in conservative churches) because he is not subject to the authority of Westminster's theology professors. That seems to be what "not being Reformed" practically boils down to. The only ones who can freely argue against Westminster's theology professors are those who are not subject to their professional and communal authority, i.e, those who are ecclesiastically immune from them. Those who are under their authority have, of course, ample liberty to say something critical, but they are fated to suffer social and institutional consequences. So professors leave and students graduate with very bad tastes in their mouths (and sometimes they just up and withdraw) as the powerful consolidate their power by polarizing the community in terms of individuals' purported views of scripture. Now this is a fearful development, one brought into existence by, among other things, an authoritarian, inerrantist mindset.

Yet I feel like that is all I've ever known when it comes to religion. People's questions discouraged, their doubts dismissed. And if I, God forbid, should prove not satisfied with the church communities' social discouragement and institutional dismissal of questions and doubts, then it was often the case tacitly and sometimes forthrightly and explicitly that I was accused of harboring unconfessed sin or "thinking as an unbeliever." During my twenties, for example--a crucial time of spiritual formation--I came to a mutual agreement with a pastor of a KJV-only, fundamentalist church that I should leave the church--but here's the rub, I could not tell my students that I was leaving (much less why), kids my wife and I had been teaching for just over two years! And most recently, we've been attending this other church--going on two years--and the youth pastor and his wife mysteriously stopped attending. A few months later a new youth leader was introduced, no explanation as to what happened to the old one--turns out he didn't want to leave, he was simply dismissed when the people who hold the real power in the church decided to let him go during a temporary power vacuum (no head rector) that had occurred this summer. My wife and I just saw this exiled youth leader on New Years Eve and there was a social awkwardness to the effect that we had to carry on our conversations as if nothing had ever happened. I'm sure this kind of stuff happens all around evangelicalism. I wonder how it might be related to the authoritarianism that tends to accompany inerrancy.

The new atheism is selling because of us

2008-01-04T13:14:00.000-05:00

Lately, I have come across and heard conference speakers talk about "the new atheism." Various concerns are raised about how Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and others have become best-selling authors and what that reveals about American culture. The Christian writers/speakers that I've heard are convinced that better philosophy training and better science training among the American public will help them see through the weaker arguments that the new atheists are making. But I see the thing differently. I think Harvey Cox (Harvard Divinity School) has a better understanding of this cultural tide:

"It always makes a comeback, I think, when religious people get too arrogant, when they begin to look as though or speak as though they know it all, when they begin to impose themselves in ways that are unwelcome to other people in the society. Then atheism is a kind of, for me, a welcome critique of this arrogance." (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1019/cover.html)

It seems to me that in the quote above Professor Cox has identified a primary reason why the new atheists are selling so well: people are tired of anything that smells of an inerrantist mindset. Come to think of it, if I am honest with myself, my own foray into the field, "If scientists can naturalize god, should philosophers re-supernaturalize him?", in Theology Today, 64 (3), 2007: 340-348, was probably (at least partially) motivated by how I saw in recent evolutionary and cognitive science accounts of religion a legitimate challenge to evangelicalism, a challenge that I could emotionally use to protest the imposing arrogance of my inerrantist theology professors.

After all, Sam Harris did not feel the need to publish a letter to "all Christians everywhere" (although he disavows Christianity of all stripes). He wrote a letter to evangelicals. Whether his letter has any merit really does not matter. (Taner Edis muses how in academic circles, "Harris's work is usually seen as popular polemic with little intellectual substance." See his Science and Nonbelief. [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008] p. xi.) What matters is that he wrote a letter to evangelicals and people can't wait to read it. They want somone to quell the arrogance, and at this point, they don't care if it's a militant atheist who does it.

Either my way or the highway

2008-01-02T16:16:00.000-05:00

I've often been told that I have to decide whether I want to follow God (i.e., the Bible) or the atheistic skepticism of scientism (or the anti-theistic spirit of secular humanism). One word comes to mind here, "bifurcation." Evangelical ultimatums are often invoked to help clarify the "real" issues that are at stake, but more often than not they actually obscure more than they elucidate because not only might a person give preference to the former rather than the latter (God, not skepticism) or to the latter rather than the former (skepticism, not God), one might also insist upon both together (God and skepticism) or neither (neither God nor skepticism).

Evangelical ultimatums are the most common argument strategy that I have encountered when talking with conservatives (both ministers and laypersons [and theology professors!]), but Os Guiness includes precisely this kind of rhetorical polarization in his list of weaknesses of evangelical thinking (see his Fit Bodies, Fat Minds). Evangelicals, time and again, like to dissolve critical inquiries by issuing pious ultimatums. Maybe that’s an effective way to keep students from asking hard questions, but it also has the unhealthy effect of constraining one's God-given ability to think. To prematurely and artificially close a student's line of inquiry is not only a disingenuous response to genuine questions but it comes back to haunt in undesirable ways. Students become disillusioned and may begin to hate and rage inside. They may even finally defect from the faith. Teachers and ministers must be more candid and thorough when dealing with their students' investigations of options.

This is precisely my point in my book, Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals. It was also one of the main points that Mark Noll drove home in his classic, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Anti-intellectualism is the least of the concerns. The very future of evangelicalism, I think, is at stake. For if the students begin to feel so spiritually groundless, how will the next generation feel? Evangelicals should beware not to let an acute and hyper sense of faithful Christian commitment work to their detriment. Maybe in some cases God's way is the highway.

For example, I've been told by some ministers and some ministerial students, "Either you believe in a young-earth, six 24-hr day or you're not a 'true' Christian." There it is again: either my way or the highway. Could not God have inspired a myth? Could not God have authenticated a folkloric narrative? For example, how might God have "told" Bible readers that they are not to take various portions of Scripture literally? Might he have inspired a story that is so unlike normal human experience that humans would be "forced" to conclude that the story is fictive? Is it really a sign of "true" faith to believe such stories? What does it take for a person to stop believing that a story really happened or what is the most unbelievable thing one might imagine in a story that would cause one to disbelieve it? I have to say that for me one of those things would have to be animals talking. If there is a story where an animal begins talking, the storyteller has just lost me, at least, with regard believing that the events being related actually happened. Why on earth should that sense of incredulity change because a story's found in the Bible? Does the Holy Spirit make one credulous? Is disbelief really a sign of apostasy? Is disbelief really indicative of naturalism run amok? If a student is at the point where he's intellectually forced to take the highway here (i.e., disbelieve a story with an animal talking in it), then he/she should not be threatened with the evangelical ultimatum. The evangelical must simply let that person be.

The worst thing that can happen is for the evangelical (or evangelical community) to covertly and overtly ostracize such a disbeliever and do all in their power so that that disbeliever has little or no contact with other believers, especially the students in their midst. When "my way" is internalized in such a way that it becomes the way, the highway is actually be the better place to be.

It's just a man up there

2007-12-31T08:29:00.000-05:00

Over the years I've attended various conservative churches and during the main part of the service there's typically a man up there in the pulpit pontificating about sin and how we live in a godless nation and how God's judgment is pending. Abortion often came up and sometimes evolution, depending on how conservative the place was. The preacher typically acknowledges that he is not God and that except by God's grace he would not be able to do any of what he does. At the same time there's the unmistakable claim that if one does not agree with or ultimately obey what is being promulgated from the pulpit then one is not disobeying and rebelling against a man but against God. So the preacher gets to disclaim his authority by telling his audience that he is not God and that he is just a man like every other that you see in the audience, yet his message is that of God and is not like that of a mere man (save perhaps those who are divinely appointed to similar positions of power and who promulgate compatible "biblical" messages).

John MacArthur, Jr. gives the following rationale for the totalitarian authority structure of an inerrantist church service:

"The only logical response to inerrant Scripture, then, is to preach it expositionally. By expositionally, I mean preaching in such a way that the meaning of the Bible passage is presented entirely and exactly as it was intended by God. Expository preaching is the proclamation of the truth of God as mediated through the preacher." (http://www.tms.edu/tmsj/tmsj1a.pdf, p. 3.)

So the preacher who is not God becomes God during the service. Even if it is not the preacher himself who is thought to personally undergo theosis (it's his message that does), the preacher is still thought of by the faithful as a man who can, in at least one important respect, be God for the people. It's not education or personality or intelligence that accomplishes the preacher's mediating capacity (although these traits would not hurt). The divine transformation of the preacher's words is made possible in the minds of many conservatives by the doctrine of inerrancy. And if one is convinced of a close connection between inerrancy and preaching, as MacArthur is, then to critically question a sermon is to ultimately question God, because to question the preacher is to question the Bible and to question the Bible is to question God. Now such a distinction between error and truth with regard to preaching may encourage a tendency to attribute all homiletic errors to the preacher and all homiletic truths to God. This reinforces the view that all human contributions to religion are bad and that only the divine contributions can be considered good. And if there's anything that a conservative evangelical does not want to be it's be based on merely human notions and traditions. I think this view contributes immensely to J.P. Moreland's "over-committment to the Bible" syndrome (on which see http://evangelicalinerrancy.blogspot.com/2007/12/fresh-start.html ).

MacArthur makes the following inferences a little later in the paper:

"[Liberals] err by a priori giving the critic a place of authority over the Scriptures. This assumes the critic himself is inerrant...Presuppositions are involved either way. Will men place their faith in the Scriptures or the critics?...If the Bible is unable to produce a sound doctrine of Scripture, then it
is thus incapable of producing, with any degree of believability or credibility, a doctrine about any other matter. If the human writers of Scripture have erred in their understanding of Holy Writ's purity, then they have disqualified themselves as writers for any other area of God's revealed truth. If they are so disqualified in all areas, then every preacher is thoroughly robbed of any confidence and conviction concerning the alleged true message he would be relaying for God." (p. 14)

Without inerrancy, preachers are unable to preach. No wonder they are unwilling to critically discuss the doctrine, much less give it up. With such dire consequences to giving up inerrancy and without any intermediate possibilities between inerrancy and "disqualified in all areas," it is no wonder that evangelicals fight for inerrancy as if they're fighting for their lives. At least in one regard, they seem convinced that they actually are fighting for their lives because without inerrancy, it's just a man up there on Sunday morning.

They are on their own

2007-12-30T09:42:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine a few years back complained to me that my concerns about inerrancy led to some real trouble for him as a preacher. He remarked that if we cast doubts on the Bible's inerrant authority then we would have to concede that it is "just him" up there in the pulpit (and not God) giving the sermon. He could not in good conscience concede that during his homilies he was simply preaching his own fallible interpretation of a fallible Bible; he could not concede this to himself, much less to his spiritually hungry congregation. They needed something more than that (and so did he). In fact, he saw it as an ethical matter of the greatest significance that he had to be preaching the Word of God to his congregants, else Christianity would be reduced to some kind of farce. John Frame illustrates the conservative fear when he offers the following surmise: "Liberals use Scripture in their theological work, to be sure. But they reserve the right to disagree with it. So, in the final analysis they are on their own, basing their thought on human wisdom, human tradition." (http://www.thirdmill.org/files/english/html/pt/PT.h.Frame.Traditionalism.1.html)

They are on their own, but we are not--that is the inerrantist mindset. True Christians are never on their own, they have Scripture; but fallibilists, and every other non-inerrantist Christian, are, when it comes down to it, on their own. This same line of thinking is what kept me an evangelical for 10 yrs or so, until finally, as I try to explain in my book, I was able to see for myself that evangelicals, too, are on their own. Very much to my surprise, I saw that inerrantist traditions are also based on human wisdom and human tradition, it's just that inerrantists are not encouraged to see this, much less admit it. Not only that, but inerrantists too are free to disagree with Scripture, they are simply socially bound to couch any disagreements as reinterpretations based on hermeneutical considerations. But it seems to me that inerrantists arbitrarily refuse to push the hermeneutical envelope as far as they might and that one of the main reasons they don't is a tacit fear that pluralism--the inevitable result of millions of Christians being on their own--seriously threatens the social tenability of inerrantist evangelicalism (a pluralism, I might add, that has developed in spite of, or perhaps even because of, inerrantist efforts to stop it).

Even so, evangelicals are just as on their own in the final analysis as "liberals." I argue in my book that the Bible is a cultural product that has an extended and very complex diachronic history. Biblical materials originated as part of a larger oral culture that circulated these materials in a broader cultural matrix comprised of various assumptions, interpretations and embellishments regarding the original souce material; in other words, the Bible was compiled in an inherently intertextual way such that it maintains a fundamental dialectical relationship with the culture within which it was produced. Inerrantist ways of looking at Scripture often prevent one from appreciating the diachronic history of the biblical materials and their cultural embeddedness. Not only that, but evangelicals, too, are embedded in their own cultural matrix of various assumptions, interpretations and religious embellishments to the effect that they cannot help but contribute culturally to the religious belief systems they construct. The difference between conservatives and liberals, then, is not that liberals are on their own and conservatives are not, but that conservatives tend not to be as open about how deeply constructivist theological speculation is whereas liberals give some lip service to trying to do theology a little more self-consciously. Now how well liberals actually go about doing this, of course, is another story.