Introduction
[1]. See Robert Woodberry and Christian Smith, “Fundamentalists, et al.,” in Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 24, 1998, ed. John Hagan (Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, 1998), 25–56; Christian Smith et al., American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Biblicism may also be found in certain more conservative sectors of mainline Protestantism, e.g., in evangelical United Methodist congregations.
[2]. Although neither am I here developing a position on what exactly inspiration means and implies. For a discussion of the matter, see Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 147–76.
[3]. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1923).
[4]. As Richard Lints observes, “The [evangelical] movement gained its theological unity as much from its common enemy as from a common theological heritage.” Lints, The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 40.
[5]. See, for example, http://www.borndigital.com/tcont.htm, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html, and http://www.ffrf.org/books/lfif/?t=contra. Of course, some earnest Christians take the bait: http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/bible.htm and http://contenderministries.org/discrepancies/contradictions.php.
[6]. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (1871–73; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), 1:184. Also see Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, ed. Samuel Craig (1894; repr., Philadelphia: P&R, 1948), 107.
[7]. Alternatively, one can fall back on what Enns calls the “be patient” and “it’s possible” approaches to difficult passages. Peter Enns, “Some Thoughts on Theological Exegesis of the Old Testament: Toward a Viable Model of Biblical Coherence and Relevance,” Reformation and Revival Journal 14, no. 4 (2005): 81–104.
[8]. The evangelical biblical scholar Kenton Sparks, who I do not personally know and to whom my remark here does not refer, similarly observes that “many evangelical theologians and biblical scholars . . . recognize that their carefully considered, private scholarly conclusions no longer fit into their old fundamentalistic wineskins demanded by their institutions.” Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 369.
[9]. Of course the Catholic Church itself professes a very high view of scripture and must reckon with the same interpretive challenges outlined in the following chapters, although it arguably brings to that task a fuller toolbox of resources.
Chapter 1 Biblicism and the Problem of Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism
[10]. John Frame, “In Defense of Something Close to Biblicism: Reflections on Sola Scriptura and History in Theological Method,” Westminster Theological Journal 59 (1997): 269–318. By biblicism, Frame means something even more objectionable than what I describe below.
[11]. J. I. Packer, e.g., defined the Reformation principle of sola scriptura in 1974 as “the view that Scripture, as the only Word of God in this world, is the only guide for conscience and the church, the only source of true knowledge of God and grace, and the only qualified judge of the church’s testimony and teaching, past and present.” Packer, “‘Sola Scriptura’ in History and Today,” in God’s Inerrant Word: An International Symposium on the Trustworthiness of Scripture, ed. John Warwick Montgomery (Calgary: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology & Public Policy, 1974), 48, italics added for emphasis. A further note on Packer, for whom I have much respect, since I quote him repeatedly here: he is obviously no simple-minded biblicist; however, some of his writings over time lean in clearly biblicist directions. He is thus an ambiguous case concerning the present topic. The reader should not assume that because I am quoting him in this context I consider him to be a straight-out, hard-core biblicist.
[12]. Reformed theologian and apologetics professor Cornelius Van Til, for instance, claimed that the Bible “speaks to everything either directly or indirectly. It tells us not only of the Christ and his work but it also tells us who God is and whence the universe has come. It gives us a philosophy of history as well as history. Moreover, the information on these subjects is woven into an inextricable whole.” Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: P&R, 1963), 8. More recently, J. I. Packer has written, “So all [the Bible’s] manifold contents—histories, prophecies, poems, songs, wisdom writings, sermons, statistics, letters, and whatever else—should be received as from God, and all that Bible writers teach should be revered as God’s authoritative instruction. Christians should be grateful to God for the gift of his written Word, and conscientious in basing their faith and life entirely and exclusively upon it. Otherwise, we cannot ever honor or please him as he calls us to do.” Packer, Concise Theology (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1993), 5, italics added for emphasis.
[13]. J. I. Packer, for instance, writes, “All Christians have a right and duty not only to learn from the church’s heritage of faith but also to interpret Scripture for themselves. The church of Rome doubts this, alleging that individuals easily misinterpret the Scriptures. This is true; but the following rules, faithfully observed, will help prevent that from happening.” The rules Packer then suggests include basic guides such as don’t allegorize, pray, don’t read meaning “on” to Scripture, etc. Packer, Concise Theology, 6. Three years later, Packer writes with Thomas Oden, “Anyone who engages seriously with the Bible, humbling asking God for light, will duly see . . . this great picture [of God and godliness] in all its divine glory.” Packer and Oden, One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 19.
[14]. I intentionally use the label Solo Scriptura, as distinct from Sola Scriptura, to distinguish a narrower view on the Bible associated with American biblicism from the arguably more sophisticated view of scripture developed by the original Protestant Reformers. See Anthony Lane, “Sola Scriptura? Making Sense of a Post-Reformation Slogan,” in A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, ed. Philip Satterthwaite and David Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 297–327; and Craig Allert, “What Are We Trying to Conserve? Evangelicalism and Sola Scriptura,” The Evangelical Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2004): 327–48. Note that some biblicists argue that creeds and confessions are not necessary but are nevertheless helpful for summarizing biblical truth. I could also have called this a belief in “nuda scriptura” or “solitaria scriptura,” following James Callahan, “The Bible Says: Evangelical and Postliberal Biblicism,” Theology Today 53, no. 4 (1997): 449–63. Among popular evangelical writers on the Internet, one can find explicit praisings of “nuda scriptura,” as with this gem offered by “Christian Fellowship Devotionals” (self-described as “a personal outreach of Webservants Ministries. We are a group of individuals who want only to share the gospel with the lost and equip the body of Christ in growing and reaching a lost world for Jesus Christ”): “I am sure that the term Sola Scriptura is familiar to most Christians, and it is an important aspect of our faith. However, I came upon the term Nuda Scriptura this week. It really drives the point home even more clearly. We take the Scripture undressed, as it were, by itself, and without all the trappings that can sometimes accompany it. . . . The more we can look at Scripture naked, the more we can gain a fuller comprehension of its contents.” http://www.cfdevotionals.org/devpg04/de041025.htm.
[15]. One of the common ways evangelicals view the Bible, according to Gary Meadors, Grand Rapids Theological Seminary professor of New Testament, is as “a reference manual for life in the sense that it is a book of codes that apply the same way throughout all time.” Meadors, “Introduction,” in Four Views on Moving beyond the Bible to Theology, ed. Gary Meadors (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 13. I take Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (which already in its title immediately conflates “biblical” with “systematic theology”) to be a good example of this bad view (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994).
[16]. See, for example, Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
[17]. Information on the General Social Survey can be found at www.norc.uchicago.edu/GSS+Website.
[18]. On folk Christianity, see Roger Olson, Questions to All Your Answers: A Journey from Folk Religion to Examined Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007); 75–90 deal especially with the Bible.
[23]. John F. MacArthur, “How Shall We Then Worship?” in The Coming Evangelical Crisis: Current Challenges to the Authority of Scripture and the Gospel, ed. John H. Armstrong (Chicago: Moody, 1996), 177.
[24]. Elmer Towns, Bible Answers for Almost All Your Questions (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003); Patrice Tsague, Biblical Principles for Starting and Operating a Business (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006); Alicia Walker, 100 Biblical Tips to Help You Live a More Peaceful and Prosperous Life (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2007); Anthony Chiffolo and Rayner Hesse, Cooking with the Bible: Recipes for Biblical Meals (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2009); Don Colbert, The Bible Cure for Cancer (Lake Mary, FL: Siloam, 1999); Greg Johnson, The World according to God: A Biblical View of Culture, Work, Science, Sex, and Everything Else (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002); Neil Anderson and Michael Jacobson, The Biblical Guide to Alternative Medicine (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 2003); Clarence Blasier, Bible Answers for Every Need (Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour, 2006); Bruce Bickel and Stan Jantz, Bible Prophecy 101: A Guide to End Times in Plain Language (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2004); What Does the Bible Say About . . . The Ultimate A to Z Resource to Contemporary Topics One Would Not Expect to Find in the Bible, Fully Illustrated—Discover What the Bible Says about 500 Real-Life Topics (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001); Kay Arthur, David Lawson, and B. J. Lawson, How to Make Choices You Won’t Regret, 40 Minute Bible Studies (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2003); Ginger Garrett, Queen Esther’s Secrets of Womanhood: A Biblical Rite of Passage for Your Daughter (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006); Charles Stanley, Handbook for Christian Living: Biblical Answers to Life’s Tough Questions (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008); Ray Comfort, Scientific Facts in the Bible: 100 Reasons to Believe the Bible Is Supernatural in Origin (Gainesville, FL: Bridge-Logos, 2001); Carol Lesser Baldwin, Friendship Counseling: Biblical Foundations for Helping Others (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988); Troy Reiner, Principles for Life: Using Biblical Principles to Bring Dynamic Psychological Healing (Enumclaw, WA: Pleasant Word, 2005); Larry Burkett, Business by the Book: The Complete Guide of Biblical Principles for the Workplace (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998); James Steele, Bible Solutions to Problems of Daily Living (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1983); Dennis Hurst, The Biblical Connection to the Stars and Stripes: A Nation’s Godly Principles Embodied in Its Flag (Lincoln: iUniverse, 2006); Davil Jackson, God’s Blueprint for Building Marital Intimacy (Lincoln: Writer’s Club, 2000); Kathleen Madigan, Crime and Community in Biblical Perspective (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1980); Rachel Zohar Dulin, A Crown of Glory: A Biblical View of Aging (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988); Wilma Roberts James, Gardening with Biblical Plants (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983); Oswald Chambers, Biblical Psychology (1921; repr., Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 1995); Ken Ham, Carl Wieland, and Don Batten, One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1999); Richard Stoppe, Leadership Communication: A Scriptural Perspective (Cleveland: Pathway, 1982); Emmet Fox, Diagrams for Living: The Bible Unveiled (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); John F. MacArthur, What the Bible Says about Parenting: God’s Plan for Raising Your Child (Nashville: Word, 2000); Philip Wilson, God Honoring Finances: What the Bible Tells You about Managing Your Money (Lincoln: iUniverse, 2007); Vicki Caruana, Success in School: Building on Biblical Principles (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1999); Samuele Bacchiocchi, Laurel Damsteegt, and Hedwig Jemison, Christian Dress and Adornment, Biblical Perspectives (Berrien Springs, MI: Biblical Perspectives, 1995); Barry Applewhite, Feeling Good about Your Feelings: How to Express Your Emotions in Harmony with Biblical Principles (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1980); Duke Clarke, Get the Skinny on Prosperity: Biblical Principles That Work for Everyone (Garden City, NY: Morgan James, 2006); Deborah Saathoff and Jane Jarrell, Off to Work We Go: Teaching Careers with Biblical Principles (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1999); Frederick C. Wootan, Incoming: Listening for God’s Messages—A Handbook for Life (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2005); Dustin LaPorte and Anissa LaPorte, Biblical Strategies to Financial Freedom (New York: Universe, 2004); Troy Reiner, Revelations That Will Set You Free: The Biblical Roadmap for Spiritual and Psychological Growth (Enumclaw, WA: Pleasant Word, 2005); Pat King, Scripture-Based Solutions to Handling Stress (Liguori, MO: Liguori, 1990); Liz Curtis Higgs, Bad Girls of the Bible and What We Can Learn from Them (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 1999); Peter Hirsch, Success by Design: Ten Biblical Secrets to Help You Achieve Your God-Given Potential (Grand Rapids: Bethany House, 2002); Sandy Silverthorne, The Awesome Book of Bible Facts (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1994); Chuck Missler, Learn the Bible in 24 Hours (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2002); Ben Lerner, Body by God: The Owner’s Manual for Maximized Living (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003); Wayne Grudem, Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2002); Jim Collins, Beyond Positive Thinking: Success and Motivation in the Scriptures (Kirkwood, MO: Impact Christian Books, 2002); R. C. Sproul, Biblical Economics: A Commonsense Guide to Our Daily Bread (Bristol, TN: Draught Horse, 2002); Richard Phillips and Sharon Phillips, Holding Hands, Holding Hearts: Recovering a Biblical View of Christian Dating (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2006); Dave Outar, Politics and the Christian: A Scriptural Treatise (Montgomery: E-BookTime, 2008); Toye Ademola, Seven Secrets of Bible-Made Millionaires (Surprise, AZ: Selah, 2007); Chuck Missler, Prophecy 20/20: Profiling the Future through the Lens of Scripture (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006); Donald DeYoung, Weather and the Bible: 100 Questions and Answers (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992). The inclusion of these titles here does not imply that the author of every listed book is definitely biblicist as defined above; rather, my intent is to portray through this list of titles the larger biblicist culture that does in fact pervade American evangelicalism, including its book-publishing industry, in relation to which most if not all of the titles here make sense.
[25]. Mark Noll rightly notes, “If Catholic interpretation gives a preeminent place to religious authority, and if mainline or liberal Protestantism does the same for technical expertise, evangelical interpretation assigns first place to popular approval.” Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1991; repr., Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004), 150–51. All citations are to the 2004 Regent edition.
[26]. http://www.examiner.com/x-4840–Orlando-Bible-Study-Examiner~y2009m7d3–Governor-Sanford-could-learn-from-King-David; http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/26/politics/main5116912.shtml; http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/sanford_king_david_didnt_resign_so_i_wont_either.php. This is reminiscent of Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626) arguing that the British monarchy should be modeled on Old Testament passages: “We have to take our example from the Old Testament, seeing that there is none for us in the New,” cited in Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 139–40.
[27]. Both quoted in James Callahan, “The Bible Says: Evangelical and Postliberal Biblicism,” Theology Today 53, no. 4 (1997): 455. Also see chapters by George Marsden (“Everyone One’s Own Interpreter? The Bible, Science, and Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America”) and Nathan Hatch (“Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum”) in Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll, The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
[33]. http://www.gordonconwell.edu/visitors/statement_faith, http://www.dts.edu/about/doctrinalstatement/, http://www.covenantseminary.edu/live/whatwebelieve/, http://www.talbot.edu/about/doctrinal_statement.cfm, http://www.csl.edu/about-us/why-were-here/, http://www.asburyseminary.edu/about/statement-of-faith. Anecdotal evidence from various personal sources also suggests, as I noted in the introduction, that more than a few faculty at different biblicist-oriented evangelical institutions actually personally do not subscribe to biblical inerrancy and other elements of biblicism advanced by these institutions, yet will not “come out of the closet” with those private disbeliefs for fear of losing their jobs and endangering their careers—which means that sustaining biblicism requires some “emperor-has-no-clothes” fear and duplicity within the evangelical institutional system (although I cannot empirically validate that for the very reason of the fear and duplicity itself). Thus, formal statements of faith—which I am not against in principle—ultimately fail to guard against such private defections since, as John Barton puts it, “It is always possible to produce a formula which all will accept. This is because people all produce their own exegesis of it so as to accommodate what they really believe within its terms.” Barton, People of the Book? The Authority of the Bible in Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1988), 80.
[35]. “Affirmations and Denials Regarding Recent Issues,” adopted by the Board of Trustees, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 3, 2008, italics added for emphasis. This statement was generated in response to a book published by a Westminster Seminary professor of Old Testament, Peter Enns, which, despite significant faculty disagreements, Westminster Seminary as an institution found biblically heterodox and because of which Enns was pressured to resign.
[36]. That is, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Westminster Larger Catechism, and the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
[37]. This kind of attitude is evident in most parts of American evangelicalism, as expressed, for instance, by the late Dr. D. James Kennedy of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church: “People . . . say, ‘Well, the Bible is full of contradictions and errors.’ I’m sure you have heard that many times. I would suggest a simple reply that I have used many times. I simply pull the New Testament out of my coat pocket and say to them, ‘That is very interesting. I’ve been studying the Bible for years, and I haven’t been able to find one. Would you be so kind as to show me where they are?’ I’m still waiting to be shown. No, the Bible is not full of contradictions and errors; and the people that most facilely make the claim are usually those who know the least about what the Bible teaches.” Kennedy, Truths That Transform: Christian Doctrines for Your Life Today (Grand Rapids: Revell, 1996), 164–65.
[38]. Covenant Seminary, for instance, states concerning the Westminster Confession of Faith: “we hold firmly to the following doctrinal beliefs and standards.”
[39]. http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html. Also see Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 4 (Waco: Word, 1979); Norman Geisler and William Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, rev. and expanded (Chicago: Moody, 1986); R. C. Sproul, Explaining Inerrancy: A Commentary (Oakland: ICBI, 1980); Norman Geisler, ed., Inerrancy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980).
[40]. This kind of position has then generated a cottage industry of publications devoted to explaining away the very many “hard,” “difficult,” and “seemingly contradictory” passages of scripture, including, for instance, William Arndt, Bible Difficulties and Seeming Contradictions, rev. ed. (St. Louis: Concordia, 1987); Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, The Big Book of Bible Difficulties: Clear and Concise Answers from Genesis to Revelation (1992; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008); Gleason Archer, The New International Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998); R. A. Torrey, Difficulties in the Bible, updated edition (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2003); Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982); Ralph Muncaster, Are There Contradictions in the Bible? (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2002); James Montgomery Boice, Dealing with Bible Problems: Alleged Errors and Contradictions in the Bible (Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1999); Ron Rhodes, Commonly Misunderstood Bible Verses: Clear Explanations for the Difficult Passages (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2008); Joe Crews, Answers to Difficult Bible Texts, rev. ed. (Roseville, CA: Amazing Facts, 1988); Walter Kaiser et al., Hard Sayings of the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996); Harold Lindsell, “Discrepancies in Scripture,” chap. 9 in The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976); E. E. DeWitt, Contradictions in the Bible—Examined! The God Who Loves Gave Us the Book We Can Trust (Bloomington, IN: Wordclay, 2008); M. R. Dehaan II, Studies in Contrasts: Resolving Alleged Contradictions in the Bible (1987; repr., Grand Rapids: RBC Ministries, 1999).
[45]. To assess the extent of biblicism in evangelical academic circles, I studied the textbooks, articles, and book chapters assigned in twenty-three introductory Bible and hermeneutics graduate courses taught at what are widely believed to be some of the top evangelical seminaries and divinity schools representing various theological traditions (Asbury Seminary, Bethel Seminary [St. Paul], Dallas Theological Seminary, Fuller Seminary School of Theology, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, Moody Bible Institute, Reformed Theological Seminary, Talbot Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Wheaton Graduate School of Theology). An examination of the most recent syllabi for those courses identified nineteen commonly assigned publications. A systematic review of those nineteen readings reveals a somewhat broad diversity of views concerning a variety of issues involved in biblical studies—ranging from very conservative and traditionalist approaches that emphasize the biblicist themes laid out above, to approaches that are much more moderate, sometimes ambiguous or equivocal, and occasionally engaged with new theoretical challenges, such as from speech-act theory and postmodernism. In several, though not all, readings, apparently biblicist ideas are nuanced or qualified by the recognition of relevant complexities. One or two of the readings even explicitly acknowledge the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism on which this book focuses, although the answers they provide strike me as inadequate. The intellectual adversaries that many of these readings critically engage, either implicitly or explicitly, are the “neo-orthodoxy” of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner (though much of the criticism of Barth appears to me to be ill-informed) and the Catholic Church’s teaching about authoritative tradition; other adversaries include skeptics about inerrancy, biblical higher critics, and postmodern relativists.
Taken as a whole, the evidence of these readings does not support the hypothesis that the kind of biblicism described above is being taught directly by most faculty at evangelical seminaries and divinity schools, at least through assigned readings by faculty who teach about the Bible—even when belief statements of those institutions seem to be more clearly biblicist (whether biblicist themes are taught by these faculty in class lectures and discussions or by other faculty at these institutions, I cannot say). At the same time, there is not much in most of the assigned readings that would clearly challenge students who are already predisposed to biblicism. In short, many of the relevant claims and arguments in the readings neither explicitly promote nor definitely oppose biblicism. That raises important empirical questions about the institutional sources of American evangelical biblicism, which are beyond the scope of this study to pursue. My own guess is that the evangelical book-publishing industry and a variety of popular pastors bear a lot of responsibility for sustaining the worst of biblicism. Suffice it to note here as a helpful empirical observation that biblicism in the evangelical subculture does not appear to be driven primarily by the assigned readings for pastors-in-training in Bible courses at evangelical seminaries and divinity schools.
The readings examined were: Millard Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1986); Kevin Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture, and Hermeneutics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48 (2005): 89–114; Kevin Vanhoozer, “The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms,” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986); D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1996); D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005); D. A. Carson, “Recent Developments in the Doctrine of Scripture,” in Carson and Woodbridge, eds., Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon; Geoffrey Bromiley, “The Authority of Scripture in Karl Barth,” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. Carson and Woodbridge; Darrell Bock and Buist Fanning, eds., Interpreting the New Testament Text: Introduction to the Art and Science of Exegesis (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006); Francis Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004); William Klein, Craig Blomberg, and Robert Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, rev. ed. (Nashville: Nelson, 2004); Joel Green, ed., Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); A. K. M. Adam, Stephen Fowl, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Francis Watson, Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006); Stephen Harris, The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009); J. I. Packer, God Has Spoken (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994); J. I. Packer, Concise Theology (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1993); Ned Stonehouse and Paul Woolley, eds., The Infallible Word (1946; repr., Philadelphia: P&R, 2003); Frank Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005); Jeannine Brown, Scripture as Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007); David deSilva, An Introduction to the New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004).
[46]. Joseph Lienhard, The Bible, the Church, and Authority: The Canon of the Christian Bible in History and Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 78.
[47]. Robert K. Johnston, Evangelicals at an Impasse: Biblical Authority in Practice (Atlanta: John Knox, 1979), vii–viii. For a status update five years later, see Robert Price, “Inerrant the Wind: The Troubled House of North American Evangelicals,” Evangelical Quarterly 55, no. 3 (July 1983): 129–44. For a strict biblicist critique of “liberal drift” evident in these debates from a fundamentalist perspective, see Donald McCune, Promise Unfulfilled: The Failed Strategy of Modern Evangelicalism (Greenville, SC: Ambassador International, 2004), 157–94.
[48]. Johnston, Evangelicals at an Impasse, 6, 7.
[49]. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, 166. In 1987, Westminster Theological Seminary professor of New Testament Moisés Silva likewise noted: “To say that the Scriptures are clear seems to fly in the face of the realities of contemporary church life. . . . Even those who share significant areas of doctrinal agreement find themselves at odds in the interpretation of important biblical passages. . . . If those who are wholeheartedly devoted to the authority of Scripture cannot agree on such questions, has the authority of the clarity of Scripture become meaningless?” Moisés Silva, Has the Church Misread the Bible? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), 79.
[50]. N. T. Wright, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” Vox Evangelica 21 (1991): 13.
[51]. Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation?” 97. Also see I. Howard Marshall, Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 28.
[52]. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, 18. Also note the wrestling with these issues in David Wright, “Scripture and Evangelical Diversity with Special Reference to the Baptismal Divide,” in A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, ed. Philip Satterthwaite and David Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 257–75.
[53]. Geoffrey Bromiley, The Unity and Disunity of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 68–69, italics added for emphasis.
[54]. John W. Nevin, “The Sect System,” Mercersburg Review 1 (1849): 482–507, quotes from 491–92.
[55]. Joseph Smith, The Pearl of Great Price: Being a Choice Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1891), 56–70, cited in Hatch, “Sola Scriptura.”
[56]. Richard McNemar, “The Mole’s Little Pathway,” ms. copy, Shaker Papers, Library of Congress, 1807, referenced in Mario De Pillis, “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (1966): 75, quoted in Hatch, “Sola Scriptura,” 73.
[57]. From “The Everlasting Gospel,” lines 13–14, quoted in Lienhard, The Bible, the Church, and Authority, 3.
[58]. Quoted in Hatch, “Sola Scriptura,” 61. Also see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), esp. 1–17, 68–86.
[59]. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory 2.5, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church, Series 2, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983–87), 11:132 (originally published circa 434).
[60]. Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics 3.16–19, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, trans. Peter Holmes, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/tertullian11.html.
[61]. Vern Poythress, Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (1987; repr., Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2001), 19, italics added for emphasis.
[62]. Michael Meiring rightly observes: “Many scholars have written on the subject of hermeneutics . . . and given us ‘rules’ for biblical interpretation. Reformed theologian Edward Gross cites three rules from Charles Hodge: ‘Scripture is to be interpreted in its grammatical historical sense, Scripture must interpret Scripture and cannot contradict itself, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit must be sought to interpret Scripture.’ . . . Gross concludes, ‘If Christians would constantly unite a thorough investigation with these simple rules, differences in interpretation would practically disappear.’ The problem with Gross’s concluding statement should be obvious. Christians have engaged in thorough investigations, applying these three rules of hermeneutics, and yet have still come up with differences of interpretation.” Michael Meiring, “Why There Is Disunity,” in Preserving Evangelical Unity, ed. Michael Meiring (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 3–10, italics in original.
[63]. Gregory Boyd and Paul Eddy, Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009). Thankfully, in the real world many of the positions tend to cluster around relatively coherent theological schools (e.g., Calvinism), significantly reducing the number of combinations actually believed, but the formal math on the different, unique, potential theological belief positions is: 210 × 34 × 43 = 5,308,416.
[64]. Craig Branch, “Unity and Purity in the Church,” in Preserving Evangelical Unity, ed. Meiring, 28.
[65]. Kenton Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 257–58, 327.
[66]. Disagreeing Bible readers thus may continue to assert a shared “high view” of scripture, as in the case of Gary Meadors’s introduction to his Four Views on Moving beyond the Bible to Theology: “The proponents of the variety of views within evangelicalism hold a high view of Scripture as God’s Word, although their views of how Scripture is relevant in the contemporary setting may vary widely. It is a mistake to assume that disagreement over how the Bible teaches signals a greater or lesser view of the authority of Scripture.” Meadors, “Introduction,” 14–15, italics in original. That may be well and good, but it fails to recognize the larger point here, namely, that, in the end, shared “high views” of scripture themselves cannot rescue the authority of scripture from being seriously undermined in functional practice by pervasive interpretive pluralism. Furthermore, Meadors reflects the highly individualistic principle of the right of individual “private judgment” in determining the truth of scripture and theology when he writes as the last sentence of his conclusion for this Four Views book that: “the remaining task is for each reader to determine when and how such an extension of the Bible [to theology] is appropriate” (347).
Chapter 2 The Extent and Source of Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism
[67]. I am focusing many of my examples here on issues that often divide biblicists. Broadening the scope of the investigation to all Christian groups across church history, including those who do not embrace a strictly biblicist viewpoint but who still consider the scriptures to be divinely inspired revelation and a definitive authority in doctrine and practice, would deepen the problem of interpretive pluralism. We could begin, e.g., with the “Judaizer” enemies of the apostle Paul within the early church, who read the Law and the Prophets and perhaps the writings of the Old Testament—which were the only sacred scripture of Paul’s day—as teaching the “biblical” need for Christians to continue observing the laws of the covenant, including circumcision. We could recall the many “biblical” arguments advanced by Arius and his numerous followers against the notion that the man Jesus of Nazareth could be fully God in nature. We might call to mind the “biblical” bases for the arguments of those who believed in christological “adoptionism.” We could remember how the Bible was used to support both sides of the East-West struggle over iconography and papal supremacy. And so on.
[68]. On a related matter, illustrating how social context shapes biblical reading, George Thomas has shown how the massive shift in the dominant American Protestantism away from the predestinarian Calvinism of the eighteenth century to a more individualistic, revivalistic, freewill gospel in the nineteenth century was significantly caused by the spread and penetration of the national market, which made a rereading of scripture as actually teaching a gospel emphasizing autonomous individual choice more plausible and consistent with new social structures than the old Calvinism. George Thomas, Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
[69]. Some Christian traditions (Lutheran and Catholic) believe that this is the third, not fourth, commandment, as most Orthodox, Reformed, Anglican, and other Christians by contrast believe.
[70]. Robert Miller, Both Prayed to the Same God: Religion and Faith in the American Civil War (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007); John Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002); Randall Miller, Harry Stout, and Charles Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Mason Lowance, ed., A House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776–1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
[71]. See, e.g., Molly Oshatz, “The Problem of Moral Progress: The Slavery Debates and the Development of Liberal Protestantism in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History 5 (2008): 225–50; Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 417–21; Willard Swartley, Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1983).
[72]. Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
[73]. Noll, America’s God, 365.
[74]. This transformation was, of course, not entirely due to the moral failure of biblicism, but that still played a significant factor. See Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001). It was also set against the backdrop of the crisis of Christian authority in the West provoked by the Reformation and subsequent religious wars, as Jeffrey Stout rightly observes: “In the wake of the Reformation, theism ceased to provide a vocabulary in terms of which matters of public importance could be debated and decided by Christians of various persuasions without resort to violence.” Stout, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 13. Also see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), esp. 1–17, 68–86; Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).
[75]. I will spare readers the very long list of citations, although those interested can search Amazon.com on combinations of the keywords “biblical,” “manhood,” “woman,” “church,” and “feminism,” keeping an eye out for names such as Wayne Grudem, Gilbert Bilezikian, John Piper, Stanley Grenz, Craig Keener, Aida Besancon Spencer, Stephen Clark, Bette Boersma, John Bristow, Alvera Mickelsen, Patricia Gundry, Elisabeth Elliot, Susan Foh, Peter Schemm, Loren Cunningham, Ronald Pierce, Rebecca Groothuis, Nancy DeMoss, Linda Belleville, Andreas Köstenberger, Bonnidell Clouse, Letha Scanzoni, Nancy Hardesty, and Stuart Scott, among others.
[76]. Ronald Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1977), now available in a fifth edition (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005).
[77]. David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald Sider (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1981).
[78]. Gregory Boyd and Paul Eddy, Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 235–48; Wayne Grudem, ed., Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996).
[79]. The following draws on these, among other, works: Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement (1951; repr., New York: Collier, 1969); Joel Green and Mark Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000); James Beilby and Paul Eddy, eds., The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006); Stephen Holmes, The Wondrous Cross: Atonement and Penal Substitution in the Bible and History (London: Paternoster, 2007); Derek Tidball, David Hilborn, and Justin Thacker, eds., The Atonement Debate (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008); John Driver, Understanding the Atonement for the Mission of the Church (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1986); Mark Baker, ed., Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross: Contemporary Images of the Atonement (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006); Stephen Finlan, Options on Atonement in Christian Thought (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007); Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007); J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005); Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin, eds., Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).
[80]. Among the large and contentious literature, see, e.g., John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007); N. T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009).
[81]. John Barber, “Luther and Calvin on Music and Worship,” Reformed Perspectives Magazine 8, no. 26 (2006): 1–16.
[82]. Such as the Reformed theologians John Murray and G. I. Williamson; see http://reformedonline.com/view/reformedonline/music.htm; http://reformedonline.com/view/reformedonline/sola.htm.
[83]. Such as Craig Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006); D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); Robert Webber, The Secular Saint: The Role of the Christian in the Secular World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979).
[84]. Mark Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1991; repr., Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004), 166.
[85]. Nathan Hatch, “Response to Carl F. H. Henry,” in Evangelical Affirmations, ed. Kenneth Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 97–98.
[86]. See Donald Dayton and Robert K. Johnston, eds., The Variety of American Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1991); Robert Webber distinguishes fourteen branches of evangelicalism in Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978), 25–35; also see Iain Murray, Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950 to 2000 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2000); Mark Ellingsen, The Evangelical Movement: Growth, Impact, Controversy, Dialog (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988).
[87]. J. I. Packer and Thomas Oden, One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 14–15.
[88]. Rob Warner, pastor of Queens Road Church, Wimbledon (UK), observes: “The fact that evangelicals have a high regard for truth brings with it a recurring danger. Our firmly held convictions can cause us to become highly fractious and prone to division. Of all the armies of the Christian church, the evangelicals have most often made a habit, or in some cases almost a virtue, of fighting one another. It has become a time-honoured evangelical custom to shoot ourselves in the foot.” After reviewing a long list of “fracture points” mirroring those mentioned above, Warner concludes (writing in 1996): “There is enough explosive stored up in this catalogue of controversies to make the eagerly anticipated fireworks display being planned to celebrate the year 2000 look like a bargain basement bonfire night. . . . [These are] thorny and irretractable [sic] differences . . . [tending toward] constant and destructive polarization. Any one of these fracture points has the potential to blow apart the evangelical movement.” Warner, “Fracture Points,” in Together We Stand, ed. Clive Calver and Rob Warner (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 60, 93.
[89]. Christian Smith et al., American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
[90]. One example of this “we are right and everyone else is wrong” attitude is expressed by Westminster Theological Seminary New Testament professor Richard Gaffin in his critical response to an article published by John Franke in the previous issue of the Westminster Theological Journal (“Reforming Theology: Toward a Postmodern Reformed Dogmatics”), in which Gaffin follows B. B. Warfield’s 1931 description of the Reformed theological tradition as a “perfectly developed representative” of Christianity by saying that the Reformed tradition is “the more perfectly developed representative” (adjusted by Gaffin to “put . . . less triumphalistically”). Gaffin approvingly quotes Warfield as saying that Calvinism, as mediated through the Westminster Standards, “is not merely the hope of true religion in the world; it is true religion in the world.” He then adds his own commentary: “All sound religion is Reformed in its essence and implications. Reformed distinctives are truth held in trust for the other traditions, and Reformed theology . . . is not so much working together with those traditions out of a common theological orientation, as it is seeking to correct them.” This, Gaffin (following Cornelius Van Til) notes, necessarily produces an “isolation” of Reformed theology, along with a “theological divide, with its resulting conflicts . . . with implications and not unimportant consequences for the faith, life, and mission of the church.” He then interrogates his rival’s perspective, asking, “How compatible are Franke’s proposals with this stance? What about ‘Reformed isolation’ in his view?” Gaffin, “Response to John Franke,” Westminster Theological Journal 65 (2003): 327–28.
[91]. Noetic means concerning the mind or intellect, from the Greek νοητικός “mental,” from νοεῖν “to think,” and from νοῦς “mind.”
[92]. See, as one model perhaps, John Franke, Manifold Witness: The Plurality of Truth (Nashville: Abingdon, 2009).
[93]. D. A. Carson’s 1996 book, Exegetical Fallacies, does not promise, but essentially implies, that most disagreement about what the Bible teaches among conservative Christians could be cleared up through better scriptural exegesis, stating, e.g., that “the importance of this sort of study cannot be overestimated if we are to move toward unanimity on those matters of interpretation that still divide us.” Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1996), see especially 17–20, quote at 18.
[94]. For a helpful historical examination of the role of scriptural perspicuity in Protestant hermeneutics, especially in the need for a theory of the full clarity of scripture to defend against the Catholic view of Christian authority, see James Callahan, “Claritas Scripturae: The Role of Perspicuity in Protestant Hermeneutics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 39, no. 3 (1996): 353–72.
[96]. St. Augustine, for instance, wrote, “Sometimes not just one meaning but two meanings are perceived in the same words of Scripture. Even if the writer’s meaning is obscure, there is no danger here, provided that it can be shown from other passages of the holy scriptures that each of these interpretations is consistent with the truth. . . . Perhaps the author too saw that very [double] meaning in the words that we are trying to understand. Certainly, the Spirit of God who worked through the author foresaw without any doubt that it would present itself to a reader or listener, or rather planned that it should present itself, because it too is based on the truth. Could God have built into the divine eloquence a more generous or bountiful gift than the possibility of understanding the same words in several ways, all of them deriving confirmation from other no less divinely inspired passages? When one unearths an equivocal meaning which cannot be verified by unequivocal support from holy scriptures, it remains for the meaning to be brought into the open by a process of reasoning, even if the writer whose words we are seeking to understand perhaps did not perceive it. But this practice is dangerous; it is much safer to operate within the divine scriptures.” Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 86–87 (originally published circa AD 395–97). This matter is discussed further in chapter 3.
[97]. The distinguished literary critic Northrop Frye described the Bible as “a mosaic: a pattern of commandments, aphorisms, epigrams, proverbs, parables, riddles, pericopes, parallel couplets, formulaic phrases, folktales, oracles, epiphanies, Gattungen, Logia, bits of occasional verse, marginal glosses, legends, snippets from historical documents, laws, letters, sermons, hymns, ecstatic visions, rituals, fables, genealogical lists, and so on almost indefinitely.” Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harvest, 1983), 206.
[98]. Following Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
[99]. Scot McKnight also uses this image in his book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), 49–52.
[100]. Recall, for instance—as only one blatant among very many other, usually more subtle examples—Martin Luther’s saying about the book of James—which he did not regard as an apostolic writing—that it “is really an epistle of straw, compared to [other New Testament books]; for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel in it.” Martin Luther, Works of Martin Luther, vol. 6, Preface to the New Testament, trans. C. M. Jacobs (Philadelphia: Holman, 1915; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982), 444. Luther also said of the book of Revelation, in a preface to his commentary on it, that he could “in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it. . . . Let everyone think of it as his own spirit leads him. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book.” Martin Luther, “The 1522 ‘Preface to the Revelation of St. John,’” in Luther’s Works, vol. 35, Word and Sacrament I, ed. E. Theodore Bachmann (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1960), 399.
[101]. Dispensational theology and Luther’s discounting of the authority of the book of James are two among other possible examples of this.
[102]. On the particular modernness of expecting single meanings of all scriptural texts based on literal intentions of authors, see David Steinmetz, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” Theology Today 37, no. 1 (1980): 27–38.
[103]. John Barton, People of the Book? The Authority of the Bible in Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1988), 19.
[104]. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 71–112. At the same time, Enns insists that “diversity in no way implies chaos or error. . . . The presence of theological diversity does not mean that it lacks integrity or trustworthiness. It means that we must recognize that the data of Scripture lead us to conceive differently of how Scripture has integrity or is worthy of trust. Scripture may indeed ‘lack integrity’ [only] if we impose upon it standards that have little in common with how the Bible itself behaves” (80, 169).
[105]. A sampling of some scholarly works in biblical studies that attempt, more or less well, to address some of this diversity, include Paul Hanson, The Diversity of Scripture: A Theological Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982); John Goldingay, Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987); John Goldingay, Models for Interpretation of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997); Timothy Ward, “The Diversity and Sufficiency of Scripture,” in The Trustworthiness of God: Perspectives on the Nature of Scripture, ed. Paul Helm and Carl Trueman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 192–218.
[106]. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976); Paul Ricoeur, “Creativity in Language: Word, Polysemy, Metaphor,” Philosophy Today 17 (1973): 79–111; Hans G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (1975; repr., New York: Crossroads, 1982).
[107]. Goldingay rightly observes that “texts, after all, cannot answer back (‘No, I didn’t mean that’) as people can.” Goldingay, Models for Interpretation of Scripture, 4.
[108]. Donald Bloesch, Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration, and Interpretation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 204.
[109]. John Goldingay, Models for Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994; repr., Toronto: Clements, 2004), 346.
[110]. P. B. Armstrong, Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
[111]. David Wells, “Word and World: Biblical Authority and the Quandary of Modernity,” in Evangelical Affirmations, ed. Kantzer and Henry, 161–62.
[112]. Kenton Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 121, 230, 244.
[113]. Christopher Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 444.
Chapter 3 Some Relevant History, Sociology, and Psychology
[114]. See George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. 16–28; Sidney Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” Church History 24 (1955): 257–72; Gary Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 24–28.
[115]. Kern Trembath, Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 19; also see Stanley Grenz, “Nurturing the Soul, Informing the Mind: The Genesis of the Evangelical Scripture Principle,” in Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics, ed. Vincent Bacote, Laura Miguélez, and Dennis Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 21–41.
[116]. Thomas Reid, Philosophical Works (Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967), 1:440.
[117]. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (1871–73; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 3, 11, 17.
[118]. Ibid., 183–84.
[119]. Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 317.
[120]. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, ed. Samuel Craig (1894; repr., Philadelphia: P&R, 1948), 115.
[121]. Ibid., 118, 210.
[122]. See Mark Noll, “Charles Hodge as an Expositor of the Spiritual Life,” in Charles Hodge Revisited, ed. John Stewart and James Moorhead (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 181–216.
[123]. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 21, 23.
[124]. G. K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 220, though, to be clear, I repeat that my concern here is not with the inerrancy debate per se but the impossibility of avoiding active scriptural interpretation by the reader.
[125]. Carlos Bovell, By Good and Necessary Consequence: A Preliminary Geneaology of Biblicist Foundationalism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009).
[126]. See, e.g., Christopher Scheitle and Amy Adamczyk, “It Takes Two: The Interplay of Individual and Group Theology on Social Embeddedness,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48, no. 1 (2009): 16–29; Daniel Olson, “Fellowship Ties and the Transmission of Religious Identity,” in Beyond Establishment: Protestant Identity in a Post-Protestant Age, ed. Jackson Carroll and Wade Clark Roof (Louisville: Westminster, 1993), 32–53; William Bainbridge and Rodney Stark, “Friendship, Religion, and the Occult: A Network Study,” Review of Religious Research 22 (1981): 313–27; Laurence Iannaccone, “A Formal Model of Church and Sect,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): 241–68; Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57–58; Bernice Pescosolido and Sharon Georgianna, “Durkheim, Religion and Suicide: Toward a Network Theory of Suicide,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 33–48; see Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 415–44.
[127]. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967; repr., New York: Anchor, 1990).
[128]. Christian Smith et al., American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
[129]. Thanks to Mark Regnerus for suggesting this point to me.
Chapter 4 Subsidiary Problems with Biblicism
[130]. To be clear, to suggest that the inerrancy debate is largely fruitless is not to say that inerrancy is either right or wrong. In either case, it seems to me that major differences exist within “the” (allegedly single) inerrancy “position”—between an unqualified, flat-footed version (popular among lay Bible readers and many pastors but not among most knowledgeable evangelical academic scholars) versus well-qualified, highly nuanced versions of “inerrancy” (to which many evangelical scholars subscribe, but which may be too tricky for many people at the popular level to work with). I hear both approaches in the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, for example, which on close reading reflects less consensus than at first glance. The devil, so to speak, is often in the details and qualifications, however the more visible political positioning around terminology is negotiated. My sense is that affirmations of the simple version of inerrancy provide reassurance to many constituents that evangelicalism is not getting “soft” on scripture, that it is resisting liberalism; while the nuances and qualifications in the fine print provide sufficient political “cover” and intellectual wiggle room for many evangelical scholars in academia who know better. It seems to me, however, that, at the very least, evangelicals categorically share a belief that it is wrong to attribute error to God. How exactly to express and sustain that belief, in view of the Bible as it is, is the challenge that often leads in divergent directions. For a more recent, fair-minded, nonliberal rethinking of inerrancy, see John Goldingay, Models for Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994; repr., Toronto: Clements, 2004), 261–83.
[131]. Some evangelical scholars do attempt to systematically sort through these issues (e.g., William J. Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001]; I. Howard Marshall, Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004]), but, however admirable and perhaps successful such attempts may be, evangelical biblicists generally cannot come to anything like agreement on them, so the differences continue and the larger problem remains unresolved—in part because other, more biblicist evangelical scholars (e.g., Wayne Grudem, “Should We Move beyond the New Testament to a Better Ethic? An Analysis of William J. Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 47, no. 2 [2003]: 299–346) remain unpersuaded. And so strategic attempts to overcome interpretive pluralism fail. Applied to roughly similar problems among mainline Protestant interpreters, see Charles Cosgrove, Appealing to Scripture in Moral Debate: Five Hermeneutical Rules (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); Charles Cosgrove, The Meanings We Choose: Hermeneutical Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Conflict of Interpretations (London: T&T Clark, 2004).
[132]. In the case of the Pauline Epistles, this is complicated by the “problem of particularity,” namely, “that Paul wrote mainly to particular congregations [unlike many other New Testament books] for specific reasons weighs against the understanding that these letters were relevant to the church as a whole.” Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 128; referencing N. A. Dahl, “The Particularity of the Pauline Epistles in the Ancient Church,” Novum Testamentum 7 (1962): 261–71. Biblicists take for granted as a default that a New Testament document that was written for someone else is also always written for them—except, as we’ve seen, in cases when an argument for cultural context or relativity is needed to distance the text from contemporary application.
[133]. The 1978 Chicago Declaration on Biblical Inerrancy attempted (unsuccessfully, in my view) to sustain universal applicability in the face of cultural relativity by distinguishing between “bound” and “conditioned”: “Holy Scripture is nowhere culture-bound in the sense that its teachings lack universal validity, [but] it is sometimes culturally conditioned by the customs and conventional views of a particular period, so that the application of its principles today calls for a different sort of action” (italics added for emphasis). See chap. 1, note 29 for the URL.
[134]. This, by the way, being a classic illustration of the philosophers’ “self-referential paradox” generally (coined specifically as the “Epimenides paradox,” since it was Epimenides’s statement), by virtue of its own asserted truth, has to be untrue because he himself was a Cretan.
[135]. Noted in Goldingay, Models for Scripture, 254.
[136]. William J. Webb, “A Redemptive-Movement Model,” in Four Views on Moving beyond the Bible to Theology, ed. Gary Meadors (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 218–19.
[137]. Brian Malley, How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004). Ted Jelen (“Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy: Does the Difference Make a Difference?” Sociological Analysis 49, no. 4 [1989]: 421–29) also shows that the difference between belief in biblical literalism and biblical inerrancy relevant in elite controversies over biblical authority appears to be fairly meaningless in effects on social attitudes among the United States mass public.
[138]. James Bielo, Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (New York: New York University Press, 2009); also see James Bielo, “On the Failure of ‘Meaning’: Bible Reading in the Anthropology of Christianity,” Culture and Religion 9, no. 1 (2008): 1–21.
[139]. John Bartkowski, “Beyond Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Hermeneutic Interpretation of Scripture,” Sociology of Religion 57, no. 3 (1996): 259–72, quote at 266.
[140]. Ibid., 269. A large literature in the sociology of religion also shows that, while evangelicals are highly likely to profess to believe that the Bible teaches the “spiritual headship” of husbands, in actual practice they live out relatively egalitarian marriages—see, e.g., Sally K. Gallagher and Christian Smith, “Symbolic Traditionalism and Pragmatic Egalitarianism: Contemporary Evangelicals, Family, and Gender,” Gender and Society 13, no. 2 (1999): 211–33.
[141]. Webb, “A Redemptive Movement Model,” 228–41, quote at 234–35, italics added for emphasis.
[142]. James Bielo, ed., The Social Life of Scriptures (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). Also see Vincent Wimbush, ed., Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008). These are the first two titles in a book series on “Signifying (on) Scripture” developed by the Institute for Signifying Scriptures, http://www.signifyingscriptures.org/. Also see Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Kathleen Boone, The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Fenella Cannell, ed., The Anthropology of Christianity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. 273–94.
[143]. To borrow a word from Maurice Wiles, “Scriptural Authority and Theological Construction: The Limitations of Narrative Interpretation,” in Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. G. Green (Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress, 1987), 43.
[144]. But, again, see Carlos Bovell, By Good and Necessary Consequence: A Preliminary Geneaology of Biblicist Foundationalism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009).
[145]. See Paul Seely, Inerrant Wisdom: Science and Inerrancy in Biblical Perspective (Portland, OR: Evangelical Reform, 1989).
[146]. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
[147]. Goldingay explains: “There is force to the deductive argument from dictation to inerrancy. What God says is without error, so if God dictated scripture, then scripture is without error. But the claims that inspiration implies inerrancy rests on the prior identification of inspiration with dictation, which [most] inerrantists do not maintain. . . . They are inspired but not dictated, and therefore their inspiration is not an argument for being inerrant.” Goldingay, Models for Scripture, 275–76. Also see Brian Rosner, “‘Written for Us’: Paul’s View of Scripture,” in A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, ed. Philip Satterthwaite and David Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 81–105.
[148]. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy also adds these qualifications: “We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage and purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations. . . . Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: Since, for instance, nonchronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers.” These provisos are needed, of course, to be realistic and honest, but they do begin to kill the strong meaning of “inerrancy” with the proverbial “death of a thousand qualifications”—inerrantists begin by taking a very strong stand but then inevitably have to back off into a much more compromising position. See chap. 1, note 29 for the Chicago Statement URL.
[149]. On this point, also see George Mavrodes, “The Bible Buyer,” The Reformed Journal (July/August 1968): 12–14.
[150]. David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 205.
[151]. David Yeago, “The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis,” in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture, ed. Stephen Fowl (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 88, quoted in Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 60.
[152]. Gerhard May, Creation Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation Out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). The only other possible evidence for ex nihilo is Heb. 11:3.
[153]. Nathan Hatch, “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” in Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll, The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 62.
[154]. Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 373, italics added for emphasis; also see Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Starr King, 1955), 187, 194, 209. More generally, see Mark Noll, “Evangelicals, Creation, and Scripture: An Overview,” BioLogos Foundation paper, presented at “In Search of a Theology of Celebration,” Harvard Club, New York City, 2009, http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/Noll_scholarly_essay.pdf.
[155]. Noll, America’s God, 140.
[156]. D. H. Williams, Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 98.
[157]. Thomas Worcester, Divine Testimony Received without Any Addition or Diminution (Hanover, NH: Charles Spear, 1813).
[158]. Charles Beecher, The Bible, a Sufficient Creed (1846; repr., Boston: Himes, 1850), 24, 26.
[159]. Roger Lundin, “Interpreting Orphans: Hermeneutics in the Cartesian Tradition,” in The Promise of Hermeneutics, ed. Roger Lundin, Clarence Walhout, and Anthony Thiselton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 34–35; also see John Franke, “Scripture, Tradition, and Authority: Reconstructing the Evangelical Conception of Sola Scriptura,” in Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics, ed. Vincent Bacote, Laura Miguélez, and Dennis Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 192–210.
[160]. Reprinted in 2003 by Eerdmans.
[161]. Jim Wallis, Agenda for Biblical People, new ed. (Harper and Row, 1984); Stephen Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); James Skillen and Rockne McCarthy, eds., Political Order and the Plural Structure of Society (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991); also see James Skillen, In Pursuit of Justice: Christian-Democratic Explorations (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, NJ: Craig, 1973); Gary North and Gary DeMar, Christian Reconstructionism (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991); Gary DeMar, The Debate over Christian Reconstruction (Atlanta, GA: American Vision Press, 1988); Greg Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, 3rd ed. (Nacogdoches, TX: Covenant Media, 2002); Greg Bahnsen, By This Standard: The Authority of God’s Law Today (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985). Also see David Gushee, The Future of Faith in American Politics (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008).
[162]. See Carlos Bovell, Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007); Bovell, By Good and Necessary Consequence, 126–37. Also see Scot McKnight and Hauna Ondrey, Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008).
[163]. Goldingay, Models for Scripture, 278.
[164]. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 172.
Chapter 5 The Christocentric Hermeneutical Key
[165]. Joseph Lienhard, The Bible, the Church, and Authority: The Canon of the Christian Bible in History and Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 80.
[166]. This term is Peter Enns’s, which he prefers because he thinks it conveys a clear sense that scripture is always approached from the start with Christ as the end in mind. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 154–55. For present purposes, I am treating these three terms as interchangeable, even though conceptually they are not identical.
[167]. Quoted in Donald Bloesch, Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration, and Interpretation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 171. Spurgeon also rightly pressed out this Christocentric belief in preaching, insisting, “That sermon which does not lead to Christ, or of which Jesus Christ is not the top and the bottom, is a sort of sermon that will make the devils in hell to laugh, but might make the angel of God to weep, if they were capable of such emotion. . . . This is the way to preach. From every little village in England—it does not matter where it is—there is sure to be a road to London. Though there may not be a road to certain other places, there is certain to be a road to London. Now, from every text in the Bible there is a road to Jesus Christ, and the way to preach is just to say, ‘How can I get from this text to Jesus Christ?’ and then go preaching all the way along it. . . . Suppose I find a text that has not got a road to Jesus Christ? . . . I will go over hedge and ditch but what I will get to him, for I will never finish without bringing in my Master. . . . You must not think of reading [Scripture] without feeling that he is there who is Lord and Master of everything that you are reading, and who shall make these things precious to you if you realize him in them. If you do not find Jesus in the Scriptures they will be of small service to you.” Spurgeon, “How to Read the Bible,” Sermon #1503, delivered at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington (London), England, 1879.
[168]. Keith Ward, What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge for Fundamentalists (London: SPCK, 2004), 27.
[169]. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, ed. Edwin H. Robertson, trans. Edwin H. Robertson and John Bowden (1965; repr., London: Fontana, 1970), 312.
[170]. John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12.
[171]. Ibid., 12.
[172]. Which Merold Westphal correctly notes is a backfiring strategy in any case, since “The quest for certainty is the mother of skepticism.” Merold Westphal, “Post-Kantian Reflections on the Importance of Hermeneutics,” in Disciplining Hermeneutics: Interpretation in Christian Perspective, ed. Roger Lundin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 61.
[173]. Webster, Holy Scripture, 13, 16.
[174]. Ibid., 16–17.
[175]. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 110. Again, Enns writes about the Old Testament: “There is a coherence between the parts, but that coherence transcends the level of simple statements or propositions. It is to be found precisely in the unfolding drama of Israel and the world, where the nature of Israel’s relationship to the Gentiles develops over time. . . . We must step back and view the big picture” (96–97).
[176]. This approach seems very closely related to that of the current movement for a “theological interpretation of scripture.” See Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); also see John Goldingay, Models for Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994; repr., Toronto: Clements, 2004), 21–82.
[177]. John Stott, Understanding the Bible, exp. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 14. Elsewhere, Stott approvingly quotes the Anglican archbishop Christopher Chavasee in saying, “The Bible . . . is the portrait of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Gospels are the Figure itself in the portrait. The Old Testament is the background, leading up to the divine Figure, pointing toward it, and absolutely necessary for the composition as a whole. The Epistles serve as the dress and accoutrements of the Figure, explaining and describing it. . . . And, stepping from the canvas of the written word, the everlasting Christ of the Emmaus Story becomes Himself our Bible teacher to interpret to us in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.” Stott, Christ the Controversialist (1970; repr., Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1972), 104.
[178]. Stott, Understanding the Bible, 16, 18–19, 20.
[179]. Ibid., 28.
[180]. G. C. Berkouwer, Holy Scripture, trans. and ed. Jack B. Rogers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 123, 125, 126. Another Reformed thinker, J. Gresham Machen, who many associate with biblicist Reformed fundamentalism, actually insisted on this Christocentric point: “Almost nineteen hundred years ago, outside the walls of Jerusalem, the eternal Son was offered as a sacrifice for the sins of men. To that one great event the whole Old Testament looks forward, and in that one event the whole of the New Testament finds its center and core. . . . Christianity depends, not upon a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of [that] event.” Unfortunately, however, Machen then draws this misguided conclusion: “Christianity is founded upon the Bible” (J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1923], 70, 79). In fact, Christianity is founded upon Christ, to whom the Bible is a witness.
[181]. Berkouwer, Holy Scripture, 165, 166, 178.
[182]. Ibid., 180.
[183]. Ibid., 179, 184, italics added for emphasis.
[184]. Ibid., 166, 179, italics added for emphasis.
[185]. Geoffrey Bromiley, The Unity and Disunity of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 69–71.
[186]. Bloesch, Holy Scripture, 37–38.
[187]. Ibid., 38, 39.
[188]. Ibid., 180, 181–82, 194.
[189]. Ibid., 193. Luther, quoted in Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers (Nashville: Broadman, 1988), 83, 193. Richard Muller also points out that Luther was firmly Christocentric about scripture, including in his view of what even belonged in scripture, citing Luther’s remarks in his “Preface to the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude”: “All the genuine sacred books agree in this, that all of them preach and inculcate Christ. And that is the true test by which to judge all books, when we see whether or not they inculcate Christ. For all the Scriptures show us Christ, Romans 3[:21]; and St. Paul will know nothing but Christ, 1 Cor. 2[:2]. Whatever does not teach Christ is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul does the teaching. Again, whatever preaches Christ would be apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate and Herod were doing it.” Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2, Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1993), 213. Nevertheless, Muller cautions, “the Reformation era christocentrism that identified Christ as the scopus Scripturae never intended that Christ be understood as the interpretive principle of all points of doctrine, the heuristic key to the entire range or extent of doctrinal meaning. . . . [It] simply placed Christ at the doctrinal center of Scripture and, therefore, at the doctrinal and specifically soteriological center of Christian theology” (218, italics added for emphasis). If so, then the Christocentric approach advanced here carries the Reformation principle even further than some of the Reformers did.
[190]. Luther, quoted in R. Newton Flew and Rupert Davies, The Catholicity of Protestantism (London: Lutterworth, 1951), 118–19, 120.
[191]. Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 46.
[192]. Ibid., 195, 249. This christological hermeneutic Vanhoozer extends to all of life and history: “The focus of divine action is the history of Jesus Christ. The history of Jesus is thus the hermeneutical key not only of the history of Israel but to the history of the whole world, and hence to the meaning of life” (223).
[193]. The last quote comes from Kevin Vanhoozer, “A Response to William J. Webb,” in Four Views on Moving beyond the Bible to Theology, ed. Gary Meadors (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 267.
[194]. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, 297.
[195]. D. H. Williams, Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 155; Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture, 57–63.
[196]. John Barton, People of the Book? The Authority of the Bible in Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1988), 30–31, italics in original. Also see Lienhard, The Bible, the Church, and Authority, 95–100.
[197]. Paul Gavrilyuk, “Scripture and the Regula Fidei: Two Interlocking Components of the Canonical Heritage,” in Canonical Theism: A Proposal for Theology and the Church, ed. William Abraham, Jason Vickers, and Natalie Van Kirk (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 27–42.
[198]. Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 54–55, 79–80, 82–84, 121–26.
[199]. John Armstrong, “Introduction: Two Vital Truths,” in The Coming Evangelical Crisis: Current Challenges to the Authority of Scripture and the Gospel, ed. John Armstrong (Chicago: Moody, 1996), 23. However, much of the rest of Armstrong’s book does not stay consistently with this Christocentric focus but, as so often happens, shifts into what I have called a “handbook model” of the Bible.
[200]. J. I. Packer and Thomas Oden, One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 17.
[201]. At the same time, many evangelical denominational statements of faith say nothing about Jesus Christ in their beliefs about the Bible. The Presbyterian Church in America’s “What We Believe” statement on the Bible, for instance, states only this: “We believe the Bible is the written word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit and without error in the original manuscripts. The Bible is the revelation of God’s truth and is infallible and authoritative in all matters of faith and practice.” The Evangelical Free Church’s “Statement of Faith” says only the following: “We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. Therefore, it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.” The Church of the Nazarene “Articles of Faith” state simply that, “We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, by which we understand the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith.” And the Assemblies of God document, “Our 16 Fundamental Truths,” says of the Bible merely that “The Scriptures, both the Old and New Testaments, are verbally inspired of God and are the revelation of God to man, the infallible, authoritative rule of faith and conduct.” Clearly, the priorities in these and many other similar evangelical statements on the Bible are divine inspiration, inerrancy, and Bible-only authority for belief and practice—Jesus Christ, unfortunately, is nowhere to be found in such doctrinal statements about the Bible.
[202]. Vern Poythress, Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (1987; repr., Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2001), all quotations in this paragraph are from page 18.
[203]. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.
[204]. Goldingay, Models for Scripture, 78.
[205]. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 67. Elsewhere Enns writes, “The primary purpose of Scripture is for the church to eat and drink its contents in order to understand better who God is, and what he has done, and what it means to be his people, redeemed in the crucified and risen son” (170).
[206]. G. K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 220. The related objection in the inerrancy debate, furthermore, asserts that “If even only one error can be found in scripture, then the truthfulness and reliability of the entire Bible is destroyed,” which I also think is untrue, or, rather, only true within a particular presupposed theory of inspiration, language, truth, error, and so on, which we should not presuppose—but inerrancy is not really the issue I am addressing here. See Goldingay, Models for Scripture, 280.
[207]. That no doubt also unintentionally helps to promote the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism that I describe in my books Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 118–71; and Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 154–56.
[208]. John Goldingay, Models for Interpretation of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 10.
[209]. Barton, People of the Book? 26.
[210]. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 170.
[211]. C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, rev. and enlarged ed., ed. Walter Hooper (1993; repr., Harvest Books, 2003), 247.
[212]. Ignatius, “Philadelphians 8,” in Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, trans. M. Stanifort; rev. translation by A. Louth (London: Penguin, 1987), 95.
[213]. Jeffrey McSwain, “Jesus Is the Gospel” (2007), unpublished paper.
[214]. Matthew 24:35 notwithstanding, since “my words” and the Bible are not identical.
[215]. James Barr, “Bibelkritik als Theologische Aufklärung,” in Glaube und Toleranz: Das Theologische Erbe der Aufklärung, ed. T. Rendtorff (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1982), 41, quoted in Barton, People of the Book? 33–34. Also see Bloesch, Holy Scripture, 25–28, 127–29, 204; Donald Bloesch, The Ground of Certainty (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 74.
[216]. Webster, Holy Scripture, 36, italics added for emphasis.
[217]. Allert, A High View of Scripture? 145.
[218]. In N. T. Wright’s words, the issue is not so much “the authority of Scripture” but rather “the authority of God exercised through Scripture.” Wright, The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 23–25.
[219]. George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); also note the kind of reactions to events at Fuller Seminary, documented in George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987). Also see Doug Frank, Less than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986).
[220]. Mark Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1991; repr., Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004), 92. See Gary Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 107–10, 113, 126.
[221]. Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (Philadelphia: P&R, 1946). For a full history, see Phillip Thorne, Evangelicalism and Karl Barth: His Reception and Influence in North American Evangelical Theology (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1995).
[222]. A comprehensive list that fits this description would be very long, but two examples are Poythress, Symphonic Theology, 72–74; and G. K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 281–83.
[223]. One among many examples is Richard Gaffin, “Biblical Theology and the Westminster Standards,” Westminster Theological Journal 65 (2003): 168–69.
[224]. Wheaton College professor of theology Daniel J. Treier names Barth as the key Protestant catalyst for the renewed current movement for a “theological interpretation of scripture” (Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture, 14–20).
[225]. Bloesch rightly notes: “Plenary inspiration means that all of Scripture is inspired. It does not imply that all of Scripture has equal value. . . . I oppose a ‘flat view of Scripture’ that does not make a distinction between what is essential and what is marginal, what is in the foreground and what is background material.” Bloesch, Holy Scripture, 121.
[226]. T. F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 17, 18.
[227]. The best starting points for learning Barth, besides Church Dogmatics, is Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); John Webster, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1976; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005); also see Bruce McCormack, “The Being of Holy Scripture Is in Becoming: Karl Barth in Conversation with American Evangelical Criticism,” in Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics, ed. Vincent Bacote, Laura Miguélez, and Dennis Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 55–75. For a neo-Barthian view of scripture, see Webster, Holy Scripture, esp. 5–41.
Chapter 6 Accepting Complexity and Ambiguity
[228]. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 108.
[229]. John Goldingay, Models for Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994; repr., Toronto: Clements, 2004), 274.
[230]. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 15, 169.
[231]. Gordon Fee, “Hermeneutics and the Gender Debate,” in Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity without Hierarchy, ed. Ronald Pierce, Rebecca Groothuis, and Gordon Fee (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005), 370.
[232]. The following draws heavily from Kenton Sparks’s work on accommodation, in Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 229–59; Sparks, “The Sun Also Rises: Accommodation in Inscripturation and Interpretation,” in Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), ed. Vincent Bacote, Laura Miguélez, and Dennis Okholm, 112–32. Also see G. C. Berkouwer, Holy Scripture, trans. and ed. Jack B. Rogers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 174–78; Jon Balserak, Divinity Compromised: A Study of Divine Accommodation in the Thought of John Calvin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006); Ford Lewis Battles, “God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,” Interpretation 31 (1977): 19–38.
[233]. Michael Tinker, “John Calvin’s Concept of Divine Accommodation,” Churchman 118, no. 4 (2004): 332–33.
[234]. Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words; Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 56, 109, 132.
[235]. D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 130. I should note, however, that while I quote Carson here, I do not believe that he would endorse my larger argument in this book.
[236]. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 32–33 (originally published circa AD 395–97).
[237]. Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 168–69.
[238]. John Barton, People of the Book? The Authority of the Bible in Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1988), 85.
[239]. Keith Ward, What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge for Fundamentalists (London: SPCK, 2004), 25.
[240]. G. C. Berkouwer, Holy Scripture, 275.
[241]. Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 162.
[242]. Vern Poythress, Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (1987; repr., Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2001), 9–21, 43, italics added for emphasis.
[243]. In the second century, a Syrian Christian named Tatian actually proposed replacing the four Gospels of the New Testament with a single, harmonized gospel that he composed, named the Diatessaron—a proposal that was firmly rejected by the church, even though the Christian church in Syria read this book for more than two centuries. At issue in the West were both Tatian’s orthodoxy and a right-minded shying away from harmonizations. Joseph Lienhard, The Bible, the Church, and Authority: The Canon of the Christian Bible in History and Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 34–35.
[244]. Roger Olson, Reformed and Always Reforming (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 95–98; also see Michael Meiring, “Toward a Biblical Unity,” in Preserving Evangelical Unity, ed. Michael Meiring (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 11–25; Rob Warner, “Disagreement and Evangelical Unity,” in Together We Stand, ed. Clive Calver and Rob Warner (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 139–50.
[245]. Double predestination as a particular way of reading Augustine was explicitly condemned by the Council of Orange in 529.
[246]. See Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
[247]. See, e.g., http://www.gospelway.com/salvation/baptism_action.php.
[248]. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 170.
[249]. Thanks to Douglas Campbell for first suggesting to me this “need to know” language as related to what is and is not in the Bible.
[250]. Christian Smith, Michael Emerson, and Patricia Snell, Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[251]. Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).
[252]. Augustine, Sermons 52.16 (PL 38:360). Many translations of the New Testament Greek word mysterion (e.g., Rom. 11:25; 16:25; 1 Cor. 15:51–52; Eph. 1:9–10; 3:1–9; 5:25–33; 6:19; Col. 1:25–27; 2:2–3; 4:3; 1 Tim. 3:16; Rev. 1:20; 10:7; 17:5, 7) render the word in English as “mystery,” when the better meaning for contemporary English speakers would be something like “revealed secret”—so those are different matters than what I speak of in this section. Thanks to Douglas Campbell for pointing out this distinction to me.
[253]. See Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (1983; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); William Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).
[254]. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book II (1594; repr. London: J. M. Dent, 1964), 8.
Chapter 7 Rethinking Human Knowledge, Authority, and Understanding
[255]. The literature on critical realism is vast, though still largely unknown in American church circles. For starters, see Christian Smith, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), and the many references therein.
[256]. “Alethic” comes from the Greek aletheia, meaning “truth.” Regarding the particular alethic theory of truth to which I refer, see William Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1996; Smith, What Is a Person? 207–19.
[257]. “The modern dispute [over inspiration] is just that—modern. The Fathers of the Church made many incidental comments about inspiration, but never reflected on it as such, and certainly never wrote books about it. . . . Theological speculation on inspiration, among both Protestants and Catholics, began only after the first waves of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.” Joseph Lienhard, The Bible, the Church, and Authority: The Canon of the Christian Bible in History and Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 79.
[258]. But see Paul Seely, Inerrant Wisdom: Science and Inerrancy in Biblical Perspective (Portland, OR: Evangelical Reform, 1989).
[259]. More thoughtful versions are then forced to qualify the argument by acknowledging having to take into account “ancient thought forms,” etc., but the more serious those qualifications become, the more they undermine and compromise the original logic. Note that, according to Greene-McCreight’s study of Augustine, Calvin, and Barth’s reading of Genesis 1–3, “the pursuit of the text’s ‘plain sense’ did not imply belief in ‘single meaning’ according to the modern sense of that concept: ‘One cannot conclude that the plain sense of scripture is an objective, static “given” to be mined from the text like a diamond from the river bed.’” Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram: How Augustine, Calvin, and Barth Read the “Plain Sense” of Genesis 1–3 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 243, quoted in Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 60.
[260]. John Goldingay, Models for Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994, repr., Toronto: Clements, 2004), 10.
[261]. Interpreters who want to use this passage to establish the supremacy of scriptural authority have to (but usually do not) grapple with the fact that it more broadly argues that the teachings of other reliable people, including Timothy’s mother and grandmother (1:5) “from infancy” (3:15), and Paul (3:14), in whom Timothy rightly places confidence, do and should function as authority for Timothy.
[262]. See, e.g., H. Y. Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985); L. M. McDonald, The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, rev. and expanded ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995); Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origins, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); John Barton, Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997); Hans von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible, trans. J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972).
[263]. Craig Allert provides an excellent review of the relevant issues in A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 37–145.
[264]. See Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Times and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
[265]. See, e.g., D. H. Williams, Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005); Bryan Litfin, Getting to Know the Church Fathers (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007); Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1999); D. H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); D. H. Williams, Tradition, Scripture, and Interpretation: A Sourcebook of the Ancient Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006); Ronald Heine, Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007); Christopher Hall, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1998); James Cutsinger, ed., Reclaiming the Great Tradition: Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox in Dialogue (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997); William Abraham, Jason Vickers, and Natalie Van Kirk, eds., Canonical Theism: A Proposal for Theology and the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).
[266]. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 169.
[267]. See George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 97–116. Vassady was a Hungarian evangelical theologian of international renown and unimpeachable credentials hired by Fuller Theological Seminary in 1949, only in great controversy to be dismissed soon thereafter as a result of intense pressures put on Fuller by a constituency of strict conservative evangelicals.
[268]. Here I draw on and slightly adjust J. L. Austin’s landmark book on speech-act theory, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). Nicholas Wolterstorff makes much of Austin’s distinctions in his book, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), which I find helpful for thinking through present concerns, even though I do not necessarily accept all of Wolterstorff’s conclusions. Concerning the latter, see, e.g., I. Howard Marshall, “‘To Find Out What God Is Saying’: Reflections on the Authorizing of Scripture,” in Disciplining Hermeneutics: Interpretation in Christian Perspective, ed. Roger Lundin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 49–55.
[269]. Donald Bloesch, Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration, and Interpretation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 127–28.
[270]. Some of the clauses that go into making up promises certainly may entail error, though. For instance, if I were to make you the promise, “If you read this entire book I will give you the million-dollar house that I own,” that promise as a promise would only be empty, not in error; yet the clause “million-dollar house that I own” in the promise would be a factual aspect of it that would in fact be in error, since I do not own a house of such value.
[271]. To be clear, I am not here somehow recommending the jettisoning of propositionally formulated truth claims, which are indispensable in human knowledge systems. Evangelicals notably overemphasize theology as biblical propositions, but that itself does not make propositions from or about the Bible useless or illegitimate. As noted above, the person of Jesus Christ is of supreme importance, more so than propositions about him. But even persons, including Christ, cannot finally be really known or understood apart from some truthful propositional descriptions and representations of them. Whatever else changes in a postbiblicist world, in short, propositions stay and maintain their rightful, though limited, place.
[272]. See John Barton, People of the Book? The Authority of the Bible in History and Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 74.
[273]. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947; repr., New York: Free Press, 1964), 152.
[274]. Colin Campbell, “Distinguishing Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the ‘Black Box’ of Personal Agency,” Sociological Theory 27, no. 4 (2009): 407–18, esp. 409; Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method (London: Hutchinson, 1976), 110; Talcott Parsons and Neil Smelser, Economy and Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956), 181.
[275]. This approach may comport with Walter Brueggemann’s “compost pile” metaphor for biblical authority (as providing material for new life) in his book Texts under Negotiation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993); and perhaps with N. T. Wright’s “five-act play” image in his article, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” Vox Evangelica 21 (1991): 7–32.
[276]. Having said this, I do think it is possible to begin with a number of traditional statements about biblical authority without either falling into the biblicist trap or heading down avenues that generate pervasive interpretive pluralism. Many Christians, for example, find helpful the idea that scripture is the “norming norm.” A norm is that by which something else is measured, evaluated, and perhaps corrected. Many authorities in life and the church, not only the Bible, can and do function as norms. But, in this view, the Bible—again, read Christocentrically—entails an authority over other norms, by which they are to be evaluated and perhaps revised when necessary. A postbiblicist evangelical can and ought to be able to affirm that idea.
[277]. We know that the apostle Paul wrote other letters that were lost, which we do not possess, yet that were likely treated in some early churches as “scriptural” before they were lost, and that perhaps were divinely inspired; if, hypothetically, one or more of them were to be discovered today, that would raise interesting questions about the possibility of adding them to the biblical canon.
[278]. I draw here particularly on the approach of William J. Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001); also see a similar approach modeled in Gilbert Bilezikian, Beyond Sex Roles, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006); Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 85–97, 107–11.
[279]. For a similar argument, see Kenton Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 289–93.
[280]. See David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (London: Sheed and Ward, 1950; repr., Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1991); also see, with some caution, Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005); Rodney Stark, The One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
[281]. Following this point, I am tempted to include among my proposals in this chapter the idea of progressive revelation within scripture. However, enough reservations present themselves about this idea that I opt not to actively suggest it here. Still, because the issues involved are significant enough and at least some evangelical biblical scholars are friendly to the idea, a review is perhaps warranted. Had I chosen to propose the idea of progressive revelation in scripture in the main body of this chapter, it would sound something like the following, stated in the form of a proposal argued with conviction: Recognize that scripture itself reflects a progressive clarifying, sharpening, and intensifying of God’s purposes in human history and must be read with that progressive or teleological frame in mind. This insight about theological and moral development in scripture would require an entire book to explore and understand well. Here I will be able to suggest only the basic idea for present purposes. To do so, I will focus on two points of illustration. The first, which is obvious, is God’s progressive unfolding in history of his plan of redemption. The second concerns the morality of marriage relationships. These are not the only two ways in which the progressive clarifying, sharpening, and intensifying of God’s purposes in history are evident in scripture, but they suffice for now to make the point. Once we see the basic principle at work, we can extend our understanding of it in ways that might help address biblicism’s problems, particularly pervasive interpretive pluralism.
God did not lay out his plan for the salvation of the world on the final day of creation or on the same day of the first sin. For innumerable years, millennia in fact, God slowly unfolded his redemptive intentions. In his original curse on sin, God (rather cryptically) promised to crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). With Noah and Abraham, God established covenants of love, fidelity, and care—yet God also explained relatively little and only asked them to live in faith in his promises. Centuries upon centuries passed—with the lives of Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Saul, Boaz, David, Solomon, Josiah, Daniel, Isaiah, and many, many more, up until Mary and Joseph—as God gradually worked in history toward the decisive redemptive event of the incarnate coming of Jesus Christ. Along the way, God gave many promises, visions, and prophesies. Divine event by divine event, the picture of what was coming by way of salvation grew gradually less murky. Yet during most of the old covenant period, God’s people had only a dim awareness of what was to come in Christ. Even during Jesus’s own lifetime on earth, the disciples were often clueless about the larger significance of the person they were following. Not until Christ’s resurrection and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost did more of the fullness of God’s redemptive plan become evident. Even so, there was and is much about salvation and its completion that the church in history—which sees only “a poor reflection as in a mirror” (1 Cor. 13:12)—still does not know or understand. Across much of the narrative of scripture, in short, the mystery of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ had been hidden “for ages and generations” (Col. 1:26) and “for long ages past” (Rom. 16:25). It was only with the coming of Jesus that believers could “make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God,” namely, “the unsearchable riches of Christ.” With the coming of Christ, God’s “intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known” (Eph. 3:8–10). Consequently, what anyone today has to learn about salvation from the Bible must be conditioned by an understanding of any given scripture passage’s particular place in this unfolding historical story. Not every biblical text is “equal” to every other in this regard. So, once again, the Bible cannot be read as a “flat” text. The discerning reader must perceive internal theological development within scripture. For this reason, Sparks argues, “It seems to me that if God does reveal himself to us in written, historically contingent textual installments, then the result will be progressive. That is, to say that revelation is progressive is merely to notice how revelation necessarily works” (Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words, 246; also see Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals, 30–66; I. Howard Marshall, Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004], 33–54; Walter Kaiser, “A Principlizing Model,” in Four Views on Moving beyond the Bible to Theology, ed. Gary Meadors [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009], 45–50). And, read evangelically, that progressive development always anticipates, references, and culminates in Jesus Christ.
The big picture of salvation history is not the only thing in the Bible reflecting an unfolding of revelation and understanding. Within that, God also works a more specific, progressively clarifying, sharpening, and intensifying process of (at least some) religious and moral teachings and expectations. Take marriage, for instance. Genesis 2:20–25 and Jesus’s teachings on it (Matt. 19:4–6) seem to make clear that God originally intended marriage to be a lifelong monogamous relationship between a man and a woman. Sin introduced a distorting and damaging power into marriage, as with all relationships, unfortunately, producing shame, domination, unfaithfulness, polygamy, and divorce. In God’s larger economy of salvation, however, God accommodated some of the destructive effects of sin, for a time, which were present in the cultures of his people. God, for instance, clearly allowed and tolerated men of his people having multiple wives and concubines (e.g., Gen. 32:22; Deut. 21:15; 2 Sam. 5:13; 2 Chron. 11:20–21). And Jesus acknowledged that “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard” (Matt. 19:8). Even so, God sometimes advised against multiple wives (e.g., Deut. 17:17) and condemned divorce (Mal. 2:16). In the course of time, however, in part through the natural workings of cultural evolution and partly through explicit teaching, God led his people back to the creation standard of marriage as faithful, lifelong monogamy between men and women. About this Jesus was clear (Matt. 5:31–32; 19:9), as were apostolic teachings (1 Cor. 7:10–13; Eph. 5:33; 1 Tim. 3:2, 12; Titus 1:6). In brief, what was morally acceptable for God’s people regarding marriage varied and developed at different stages of salvation history. Any reading of scripture seeking to understand a Christian view of marriage must therefore take seriously those changes across time. Again, that means that the Bible cannot be read for moral instruction as a “flat” document containing a set of instructively equal pieces on various topics that readers simply need to fit together into a single, noncontradictory picture. God’s leading his people along in moral development complicates the picture. Not, however, that I think it leads to a clear and rigid dispensationalism. It demands a more theologically sophisticated reading of the Bible that understands all of God’s doings in history as leading to and pivoting on salvation in Jesus Christ. And that realization itself creates problems for the kind of simple biblicism described in chapter 1.
I, of course, am not the only Bible reader who has recognized this theological and moral development in scripture. It would be hard for any serious reader to ignore it. So, e.g., the evangelical biblical scholar Peter Enns has noted the developmentally dynamic nature of the law, morality, and theological understanding in the Old Testament: “God seems to be perfectly willing to allow his law to be adjusted over time. . . . Within the Old Testament there is a dynamic quality.” And again, speaking of the early Israelites, Enns observes that “they were taking their first baby steps toward knowledge of God that later generations came to understand and we perhaps take for granted. [That was a specific] point in the process of redemption” (Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 87, 94, 102). Somewhat similarly, Keith Ward points to instances of “sublation” in scripture (the etymology of which is Latin, sublatus, the past participle of tollere, to take away, lift up; from sub- up + latus, past participle of ferre, to carry), in which something taught prior is later negated and fulfilled at the same time. Jesus, e.g., says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). Thus, “eye for eye and tooth for tooth” is in time fulfilled and displaced by “do not resist an evil person” (Matt. 5:38–39). Likewise, the hatred of those who hate God in Ps. 139:21–22 is in time sublated by Jesus’s command to love our enemies (Matt. 5:43). Ward observes, “The Law has been negated in its obvious sense, but only because its inner meaning has been fulfilled by a ‘higher law.’ That is what sublation is, cancelling an obvious or literal meaning by discovering a deeper spiritual meaning that can be seen to be the fulfillment to which the literal meaning points.” And so what then are the implications of this recognition? According to Ward, for starters, “we must be very cautious when we claim, ‘The Bible says . . .’” (Ward, What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge for Fundamentalists [London: SPCK], 23).
Beyond that, one might suggest that evangelicals should appreciate the relevance of this kind of progressive clarifying, sharpening, and intensifying of God’s purposes in human history when it is evident in scripture. Such an appreciation complicates the simple practices of biblicism. It might also contribute to a frame of biblical understanding and interpretation that holds some promise for reducing pervasive interpretive pluralism by suggesting a coherent approach for making sense of apparently conflicting passages in different parts of scripture that have at times generated disagreement and conflict. This will itself hardly be a panacea for all interpretive problems. But, again, some believe that it promises to make one contribution to a larger, more constructive rethinking of biblicism and its alternatives.
The problems with this kind of argument—which is why I am not including it in this chapter’s constructive proposals—are at least threefold. One is that it is in fact not consistently true about moral development in scripture. It may arguably be true about marriage. But it is also arguably not true when it comes to issues like distributive justice and private property, e.g., where the Old Testament laws about the Year of Jubilee (Lev. 25 and 27) might be considered more progressively moral than some of the assumptions and teachings about property in the latter Old Testament and in the New Testament. Progressive revelation might also arguably not be true when it comes to gender relations, where the “moral progress” evident in Gal. 3:28 (see also 1 Cor. 11:5 and 14:1–33 regarding women praying and prophesying) seems to be lost by, say, the injunctions of 1 Tim. 2:11–15—which, to the best of our knowledge, was written later—for women to be silent in church. Second, this kind of progressive-revelation thinking is highly vulnerable to self-congratulating, quasi-Hegelian, liberal assumptions about progress in history (see Goldingay, Models for Scripture, 241–42; Charles Cosgrove, Appealing to Scripture in Moral Debate: Five Hermeneutical Rules [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002], 104–9; Edgar McKnight, Postmodern Use of the Bible [Nashville: Abingdon, 1988], 67–69; Kevin Vanhoozer, “Into the Great ‘Beyond’: A Theologian’s Response to the Marshall Plan,” in I. Howard Marshall, Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004], 81–95). I am not convinced that this is a necessary and fatal problem. But very strong is the modern temptation to believe the self-affirming story that the closer history and the world get to us, the better, smarter, and more moral both get. In some ways that may be true, but in other ways it is not. At the very least we should be extremely cautious about applying such a progress-driven hermeneutical notion to scripture for fear of projecting onto scripture misguided modern notions. Third, the Christocentric approach advanced at the start of this chapter trumps the need to argue for progressive revelation in scripture. Sparks points out: “The height of divine revelation was and is in Jesus Christ himself, who came to humanity in an historical context that lay chronologically between the two Testaments” (Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words, 246). When we understand Christ as the center and purpose of the Bible, there is less need for the interpretive lens of progressive unfolding to address scripture’s multivocality. Given these concerns, then, I suggest foregrounding the christological reading of the Bible and being very cautious about progressive-revelation perspectives.
Conclusion
[282]. Mark Twain, when once asked if he believed in infant baptism, is reported to have replied, “Believe in it? Hell, I’ve seen it!” My case in this book is something like the reverse of that answer. Do I believe in the practice of evangelical biblicism? “How could I? It doesn’t exist!”
[283]. This, again, is a clearly Barthian move, about which Jeff McSwain never ceases to remind his friends.
[284]. Again, merely for starters, see Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008); William J. Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001); Willard Swartley, Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1983); also see Ellen Davis and Richard Hayes, eds., The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); and Timothy Geddert, All Right Now: Finding Consensus on Ethical Questions (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2008); Charles Cosgrove, Appealing to Scripture in Moral Debate: Five Hermeneutical Rules (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). There is also the answer of (evangelical) Catholicism, see Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011).
Afterword
[285]. One pastor, for instance, wrote to tell me about how a few years ago his wife expressed a concern, based on a mere intuition, that something did not feel right about a good family friend who was an elder in their church. However, applying the biblicist logic of his theological education to 1 Timothy 5:19—“Do not entertain an accusation against an elder unless it is brought by two or three witnesses”—this pastor advised her to set her intuitive concerns aside. Later the couple discovered that this elder and friend had been sexually abusing their daughter for years, a fact which split their church, ruined their lives for a long time, and forced this pastor to rethink everything he had learned about the use of the Bible: a journey to which, he said, my book has made an invaluable contribution.
[286]. Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
[287]. Quotations in this paragraph from Robert H. Gundry, “Smithereens!,” review of The Bible Made Impossible, by Christian Smith, Books & Culture, September/October 2011, 9–11.