Author Archive for: Admin

I go beyond Karl Giberson’s disapproval of the inerrancy doctrine: I can’t even understand how the argument can exist, if we are to see the Bible as a divine gift and a divine creation. Granted, however, my perspective is unusual.

I have spent the past few years trekking to denominational, parachurch, and college archives across the country, trying to map the relationships between different wings of the American evangelical tradition.  My research took me from the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College to the archives of the Assemblies of God in Missouri; from Mennonite Church records in Indiana to the Southern Baptists in Nashville; from Biola University outside Los Angeles to Switzerland, where I pawed through Francis Schaeffer’s old lecture files at L’Abri—and beyond. I learned a great deal along the way, but one discovery surprised me the most. A vast number of Christians in the enormous, and enormously varied, evangelical world have allowed a rather small number of leaders—who share a strikingly narrow background—to tell them how to read the Bible.

There are at least two sides to this question about the relationship between evangelicalism and the modern study of scripture. On the one hand, how to navigate the fine line between historical-grammatical approaches and historical-critical perspectives? Most evangelicals are comfortable with the former while some are concerned about the latter because it leads to skepticism and presumes to undermine the authority of scripture. The posture of faith suggests that Christian readers and interpreters, no matter how learned, ought to approach the Bible in a submissive rather than critical stance. The historical-grammatical study of scripture is helpful for such servant-readings of the Bible since it helps the community of faith understand the world behind the text better, which in turn illuminates the world of the text by providing assistance in discerning an original intent of the scriptural authors. Thereby, readers are edified when they understand the biblical text in its original context.

Inerrancy strikes me as so thoroughly refuted that we need to be done with it. It has been crushed with a mountain of examples, small and large—and small ones, like getting the value of “pi” wrong, are just as troubling as large ones, like Matthew misquoting Isaiah.