Contextualized Interpretation

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Christian faith is essentially connected to the understanding of the Scriptures. As Christian believers try to understand the things of God, reading the Bible is essential in that discovery.  Most students of the Bible in the United States realize that the Bible was written in a very different time, location and cultural context.  As a result, many Christians appreciate learning about figures of speech, common phrases and cultural practices in ancient Middle East, as this will increase their comprehension of the biblical text and its message.  But we must not ignore that all readers will also bring their own cultural lenses to the interpretation of the biblical text.  So, those who seek understanding of the things of God through the Scriptures need to be aware of the limitations imposed by that fact, realizing that since we are living in a different location and culture, we may be missing some important aspects of the message in interpreting the biblical text. 

As an observer of different groups of evangelicals in the United States, I think that many believers do not realize how much contextualization they apply in their interpretation of the Bible.  It should be noted that the relevant question here is not whether we should contextualize the Scriptures (we all do it), but whether we are able to contextualize it well enough. Many middle class evangelical believers I have met in the United States approach the Scriptures from the context of a relatively comfortable life experience and a predominantly individualistic cultural mindset. The message of the gospel tends to be reduced, through contextualization, to an understanding of God’s relation to human beings in individual, and rather isolated, ways.  Christianity tends to be interpreted by many as God relating to the individual separated from his or her community. 

As a result, the references to certain biblical themes such as the promise of liberation, the quest for justice and the need to end or minimize oppression, among other relevant ones, are simply reduced to purely spiritual or mystical expectations.  Understanding the Bible in this way diminishes the profound meaning of the Bible in all areas of life and our understanding of what God’s demands of Christians in a very unjust world.

The evangelical world in the global South is much more diverse than that of the United States.  While American Christian literature tends to be predominant in most evangelical circles around the world, there is an increasing number of approaches that attempt to contextualize the Scriptures from the perspective of the harsh realities Christians experience as a result of living in poverty and/or systematic injustice.       

Significant voices from Africa and Latin America in particular are inviting Christians to consider new perspectives in the interpretation of the Bible.  It is clearly not the case that the message of the Scriptures has changed, but its living message is highlighted in the different context or setting of the believers that seek to understand God’s message.

The ethical values that are inherent to the Kingdom of God that Jesus introduced in this world can be better understood when we are willing to hear what the message means to those who suffer oppression and/or marginalization.  Listening to biblical interpretations from more community-oriented believers can help us discover the depth of the message of the gospel beyond the terms of an individual relationship with God.  The Kingdom of God is not only a future reality, or a reality in a different cosmic dimension, the Kingdom has come in the person of Jesus Christ and he inaugurated a new era for human beings, bringing down the barriers of separation that human beings tend to build.  In the American context, believers need to be aware of the barriers that excessive individualism can build.  

For example, too many American Christians expect the Church to be only a place where they can get their private “spiritual” needs met.  The Church, however, should be a family where members are in communion with God and with each other.  Like believers within the first Christian communities, believers in the global South understand that strangers who meet only at weekly church services do not make a community.  Community requires that the members know each other and have significant relationships with each other.  That is so easy to miss if we assume an uncritical contextualization of church and the things of God to the American culture.

Believers in other parts of the world also need to be aware of the risks of uncritical contextualization, of course.  All cultures need to be tested and judged by the Scriptures. However, we must always remember that our understanding of God’s Word is heavily influenced by our own cultural lenses and life experience through which we read it.  This is why we need to remind ourselves to listen to each other as we approach the Scriptures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evangelicals’ date with history

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The reception of Scripture involves many stages of faith seeking understanding. This reception includes critical reasoning in the process of doing exposition, theological formulation, and, above all, worshipful reflection. Faith and critical reasoning are held together through a hermeneutical model that is bi-focal, that is at once “from above” and “from below”. This model hearkens to Jesus’ conversation with Nichodemus early in the Gospel of John (3:1-15; cf., 8:23). Jesus speaks of the knowledge of God as “from above” and as “from below”. Paul can also say that he is speaking of revelation “according to the flesh” and “according to the Spirit” (Ro 1:3-4; cf.; 9:5; 4:1). Paul makes a related Christological distinction of titles: “Son of Man” (the historical Jesus) and “Son of God” (the Christ of faith). Jesus alone embodies both realities (above and below) in one person (Jo 3:13) since he is the Word of God incarnate. The hermeneutic “from above” and “from below” is not dualist, but an attempt to account for the demands of historicity and divine action. What is the meaning of the historicity of the gospels for Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah? What does the revelation by the Spirit in the same Gospels provide for Jesus Christ as Lord?

We can also speak of the inspiration of scripture “from above” and “from below”. Historically and theologically, we refer to “the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith”. We also may speak of “the scripture of history and the Bible of faith” – same book, but read according to this bi-focal perspective. The Spirit is the sole source of the Bible’s inspiration but understanding it requires both historical awareness and faith in the revelation.  This truth of scripture is a miracle claim that the history of the text begins with special revelation and inspiration producing a scripture which providentially conveys its unique truth in the world and to the church. This is what makes the Bible “the Word of God”. Although Jesus Christ is the unique incarnation of the Word of God and the measure of all scripture, scripture is the one book which conveys this truth within the flow of ancient events out of which it came to be written and transmitted to us.

Sola scriptura is that distinctively evangelical principle connoting two measurements: one long and short.  The short, is because the extensive Christian tradition is not equal in authority to the prophets and the apostles. The long, is because scripture establishes itself the sole text with divine authority. Scripture’s measure of tradition is itself, all else, the traditions of the particular churches, however vast they may be. When posed this way, one can see the fissure between Reformed and Roman since the former could not lay claim to divine institution as the latter does. Christ is indeed present to the world through the church but there is a challenge of historical consciousness. But scripture is not entirely dependent upon the traditions to be understood. We would claim that the text of the Bible is perspicacious, that is, sufficiently clear to any literate person as to its basic message of salvation. The perspicacity of scripture came to be understood by the Reformation as exposing a duality of correspondent meaning: the inspired external word of the scripture (written, read, proclaimed) becomes the internal word of the gospel in the fullest sense (the same Spirit illumining a person’s heart and mind for trust in this Word). This is essentially what Calvin meant by “the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit”. In the Christian traditions, early on the question of the internalized scripture (its message embraced by faith) was contrasted by the external word of the printed page. Inherited from ancient Greek hermeneutics, there was an “inner word” (λόγος ἐνδιάθετος) and “external“ (προφοροκός) one that by the Reformation would become a common place notion in its understanding of sola scriptura.

The historical critical method, whether applied to scripture or any other text for that matter, is said to arise from modern historical consciousness. Descriptions of historical consciousness include a public awareness that everything human beings know and experience is part of a continuum of events that are contingent to time and place. These include all artifacts of history, and therefore also the scriptures. A famous early instance of the salutary use of historical criticism is the exposé by the Renaissance scholar, Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1407-1457) of the Donation of Constantine as a monumental forgery. For many, the method became attached unnecessarily to a materialist cosmology that nothing happens in history other than physically determined events. No matter that some have offered persuasive philosophical arguments for the possibility of miracles – history does not allow for any! But arguments for the possibility of miracles do not an actual miracle demonstrate. Any reasonable consideration of miraculous events first acknowledge that they are utterly unique, unrepeatable and therefore not accessible or compliant to every day rules of evidence.

For the miraculous, including scripture, historical critical method has been seen to relegate scripture to the category of “myth” or the only slightly better, “saga”. There may be a great deal of material in scripture that would be recognized as “ancient history” but scripture is far more than that. It is, however, not other than ancient and that is where we need to be historically conscious. This is not easy since being revelation and the very grammar of Christian worship, the text is never reducible to history. The measures of scripture lead its readers to heed its message, nothing less, but also nothing more. It does this sufficiently. It may do so always with tradition in some way present, but it still does so sufficiently by not claiming that any particular tradition is itself infallible.

I titled an article once:  “Blessed rage for a supernatural Text” – asking about both the supernatural in origin of scripture as well as its supernaturality at all times and places? Like “inerrancy” the term “supernatural” has been used to express the revelatory sense of scriptural authority – along with others: reliability, veracity, The God who created and sustains the world by his almighty Word has imparted that same Word through the texts of the prophets and the apostles. The divine authorship entailed in the claim of inspiration is nothing other thatn a supernatural claim. Warfield argued along these lines. If God is infallible so is his Word, including its inscripturated form. But what about scripture’s canonization, transmission and translation? Some kind of very special providence must be superintending scripture at all times and places so that its essential message can be received and internalized. But what is the instrument that maintains this within the world? If one were to think of the creation as very much like (homoiosis) God, with all the divine perfections mirrored in creation, the uncorrupted original according to the imago Dei. This is how the patristic theologians saw homoiosis as the original human condition before the fall. If one accords supernaturality to the scripture, God’s truthfulness is seen to be secured by his sovereignty over the revelatory medium  so that it possesses, in some sense, the perfections of his co-eternal Word. The problem of course is at least found at the point of the human fall and its noetic effects. The human being requires supernatural aid to achieve uptake of a supernatural text. Many medievals believed, together with Aquinas, that when human beings truly know something, it is due to their participation in the Logos, the divine rationality that is ever knowable by the human. Knowledge, actual knowledge, was infallible by definition. And since knowledge was like beholding reality in a mirror, the image, if perceived with utter clarity, impressed itself as a perfection and indeed perfectly so in the receptacle of the mind. This is often forgotten even among theologians –  since we are so epistemologically distant from their world. Today, very few would espouse an account of knowledge as such.

The attribution of infallibility or inerrancy to the scriptures in their original autographs has particular consequences. It says nothing about canonization, transmission and translation, let alone exposition. Nevertheless, it is overwhelmingly the majority view of Catholic, Orthodox and Evangelical traditions. Inerrancy of scripture is promulgated in documents of Vatican II. Indeed, one aspect of claiming ecclesial infallibility in Orthodox and Catholic traditions is the securing of the infallibility of scripture continuously through time into the present moment and beyond.

The history of modern biblical studies is one where Christian scholars have been attempting to demonstrate that historical consciousness is not antithetical to doxological consciousness. The thoughtful human being can be both historically and believingly oriented to reality. Various hermeneutical strategies of reading have been developed to express this. Some of them borrow heavily from anthropological or literary perspectives on myth. Although the two perspectives are rarely combined, the common approach is the mythic narration of reality. Allegorical, but sometimes not, as in the case of typological interpretation. These are ways of appropriating the mythical text, seeking a metaphysics of the text. I would say, somewhat abruptly, that perhaps the long term effect that C.S. Lewis has had on contemporary reading of the Bible, particularly the gospels, with his “mythopoeic” hermeneutic, is to provide a way “inspired” myth, through the back door. We should really take our cue from Barth on this: “myth” is not viable category for Christian theology.

What it precisely means is another question. When it came to something of a crisis in the 1970’s, Fuller Seminary was viewed as having failed the community by permitting the historical critical method to be practiced by its scholars according to a hermeneutic of faithfulness. The hyper-sensitivity of those theologians who still remembered the Fundamentalist / Modernist controversies which split the denominations along lines, not pertaining to slavery (as they had half a century earlier) but now over the supernatural origins of the Bible. Profound fixation was exhibited over technicalities inherent in German terms: “historie” (straightforward narratives of historical fact) and “geschichte” (the interpretations of this facts by religion and culture) which contained as more meta-history than what modern historians were supposedly doing by achieving von Ranke had declared must be the standard reporting of “as it actually happened”. But what does it mean to claim a supernatural exception to history that otherwise displays only tell tale signs of the supernatural? And what does it mean, after all, to affirm the supernatural?

As understood by the three great traditions, it was by divine supervenience, the authors of scripture had accomplished two things: 1) preserved from error in all that scripture affirmed and 2) transmitting a fully reliable account of all that “actually happened” in its many narratives. And by divine providence, scripture is sufficiently preserved through canonization and epistemological faithfulness according to the divine purpose for history itself.  At least one could by the completion of epistemic functioning through the call to faith by revelation and become something more than the camp song: “God said, I believe it and that’s good enough for me!” (But a more ironical quip would be, inerrant, infallible and unread – biblical illiteracy is a whole other problem!)

The historical critical method itself can be subjected to its own critique of how neutral it might be about revelation claims. Since the Enlightenment, although methodology merely required historians to demur about divine knowledge claims: there is no evidence either for or against them, inspiration and authority of scripture on all matters to which it speaks its truth, sets a very tall order indeed. The dominant tendency has been historiographically therefore not only to remain agnostic about revelation, but to subject “revelatory content” to every manner of scrutiny.

We think there was a time when church / state authorities, like the Inquisition, could immunize scripture from critical scrutiny. As the work of Reventlow shows, much of the groundwork for historical criticism began in the Middle Ages, among the copyists and commentarists themselves. When empirically based scientific methods took hold in the 17th century, Christian apologists attempted to maintain the epistemological superiority of scripture over all knowledge while hoping to substantiate it message on the basis of science itself. As Michael Buckley, in his great study of modern atheism has shown, overblown claims by apologists created a whole new kind of skepticism.

There is in the American evangelical environment a strong tendency to discredit science in favor of the Bible – as if this were necessary. Although many orthodox evangelical theologians of the 19th were not perturbed by the implications of evolutionary science vis-à-vis the Bible, profound anti-evolutionary sentiment sprang up in the first quarter of the 20th century. Immense segments of the population believe in young earth creationism. By the end of the 20th century young earth narratives of geological and cosmological history could no longer be squared with scientific ones. Beyond this, both Jewish and Christian interpreters were faced with pressing arguments that basically all the narratives of the Bible prior to late exilic Judaism are tribal – nationalistic fabrications. What is the truth of the Tanakh (the Hebrew canon) if only a scant few passages are historically true? If this is what scientific history is going to supply “biblical historians” many see nothing helpful there. Many would have liked to see the Bible reign supreme over all human sciences and just saying that the ancient text must not be expected to speak with scientific precision, this touches very deeply the attendant problem of biblical authority and what it could mean.

Certainly, no one can provide an immunized Bible with regard to critical inquiry. The only alternative is something like medieval morality codes enforced by religious orders or church appointed morality police. There is a continuing battle within the Muslim faith as to the application of Sharia, and how strictly behaviour is to be prescribed.  Where everything is designed to secure the protection of the Qur’an and in many respects causing the loss of respect for it among its elites. 

Untangling Inerrancy from Scripture’s Authority

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Our colleagues have bravely waded into troubled waters, where wave upon wave of discussions and disagreements swirl around these related topics of Scripture’s authority and inerrancy, and the particular challenges presented by the “modern study” of Scripture which evangelicals, for the most part, have mostly embraced in our own scientific approaches to “prove” the truthfulness of Scripture. After my hermeneutics professor in seminary railed against Bultmann, the remaining 14 weeks of the term were spent mastering the historical-grammatical method of interpreting the Bible. This systematic technique, quite scientific in its own approach, would guarantee a right interpretation of a passage, or so it was assumed.  A test case for this method was our exegetical papers on Paul’s “difficult teachings” on women in ministry found in 1 Timothy 2:8-15. And not surprising, students didn’t come out at the same place in their understanding of this passage even though the same method was used by each one (and insisted upon for grading).  In evangelical contexts, this means that “someone else’s” interpretation of the Bible was laden with presuppositions, and therefore, wrong.  Thankfully, as Amos notes, we can (and must) affirm that a presuppositionless stance to the Scripture is impossible.  I would suggest, as a person of faith, it is also undesirable.                                                                                           

Underlying these posts and responses are larger theological questions and issues that are interesting to me:  What exactly is Scripture?  What is Scripture’s purpose?  What gives Scripture its authority?  

I am sympathetic with the critiques of inerrancy represented in these posts.  I agree with Karl Giberson:  inerrancy seems to create more problems than it is worth defending given it doesn’t really solve much when it comes to Scripture’s authority, which is the primary commitment that most evangelicals hold when it comes to the Bible. In her post, Molly Worthen has given us important historical reminders about inerrancy as a recent idea in certain segments of American evangelicalism. Inerrancy is a limited discussion among the wings of evangelicalism that emerged out of the modernist/fundamentalist controversies, with a focus on the status of the Bible’s authority in areas beyond even what the Reformers suggested: Scripture is sufficient for salvation, Christian faith, practice, worship, devotion and piety. This affirmation was made without an appeal to inerrancy. Unfortunately today, more important questions on Scripture’s functional authority are subsumed under inerrancy as if inerrancy solves questions of authority. They are two different things.  In my own Wesleyan context, Scripture’s authority never rested in a particular idea about the Bible but in the Scripture’s capacity to act as a means of grace connecting one with God, others, and with God’s purposes in the world.  Scripture’s power and authority was in what it affects in the life of a believer. It is a functional authority, received by faith.                                          

This is why I appreciate the questions which Christopher Hays raised in his post.  His post gets at the more fundamental questions that are deeply theological about Scripture.  I do not think we can talk about Scripture’s authority (or purpose) without talking about God which is what NT Wright does in his book, Scripture and the Authority of God (HarperCollins, 2011).  I realize this is a “chicken and egg” kind of dilemma.  What comes first?  God?  Scripture?  Why not Jesus? I experience this each time I put together a syllabus for a basic theology course. How can I talk about a theology of Scripture without talking about all of the other frameworks typically used in a systematic theology course? Scripture cannot hang out there, as some kind of independent, self-justifying object apart from other theological claims we make.  Scripture both forms our theological claims (a trickier task than we think as rightly noted by Christopher Hays) and is informed by how we understand God, the story of Israel, the Living Word Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the life and ministry of the Church, the purpose of Christian discipleship, the means of grace and growth, and our role as humans in God’s creative and redemptive purposes. Yes, these do shape what we understand Scripture to be and what we expect God to do in and through Scripture. Making Scripture itself an object of study, which the tools of modern historical research tend to do (but not always) may displace the subjects of Scripture, primarily God and a worshipping faith community whose lives are shaped and whose mission is propelled forward by the story found in Scripture.

I heard in these various reflections an appreciation for the tools of modern historical study, along with an acknowledgement of the ambivalence this has created for evangelicals whose beloved book is placed under a microscopic lens.  This scrutiny, for some, creates fear that the very essence of faith will be eroded if the Bible is not what we thought it to be.  Which takes me back to my questions:  What exactly is Scripture?  What is Scripture’s purpose?  What gives Scripture its authority?  And why are these questions important for evangelicals in spite of what we think we already know and believe about the Bible?

 

 

 

A Mad Evangelical Tea-Party

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No, not that tea-party, with Sarah Palin pouring. I’m thinking rather of the tea-party presided over by the March Hare and the Hatter. The postings on “Evangelicalism and the Modern Study of Scripture” brought Lewis Carroll’s scenario to mind: a tea-party in which everyone is talking at cross-purposes. Of course the exchanges between Alice and her interlocutors are mostly quite rude, whereas the postings in our conversation are mostly respectful. But they do nevertheless induce vertigo.

The piece by my good friend Karl Giberson, for instance, is titled “Inerrancy Is Theological Flat-Earthism.” Presumably this is intended to make us blanch. We don’t want to be associated with flat-earthers! How embarrassing that would be! But if we’ve read, say, Jeffrey Burton Russell’s excellent little book Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, we might instead wonder why Karl has trotted out this bogey-man in the first place.

Things don’t get any better after the title. Karl writes, for example, that “even dyed-in-the-wool fully pedigreed inerrantists can’t agree on what their inerrant Bible says.” But this criticism doesn’t apply only to figures such as the egregious Ken Ham: it applies to all Christians (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Pentecostal, and any others across the board) who believe that the Bible is God’s word. Throughout his piece, Karl conflates issues that arise specifically in connection with claims of “inerrancy” with issues that have to do with the authority of Scripture more broadly, along with issues of biblical interpretation which, again, are by no means peculiar to that subset of evangelical Christians who thump the pulpit for “inerrancy.”

And what of those stories about Karl’s students? The evangelical students he had at Eastern Nazarene were biblically literate but in thrall to wrong-headed notions about how Scripture should be read and understood: “Snippets from Daniel, Peter and Revelation could be combined to argue that the United Nations was the power base from which the anti-Christ would come.” What’s more, their misreading followed a predictable political script: “Many of my first-year evangelical students actually believed that universal healthcare, progressive tax structures, and social justice were unbiblical positions.” And most of them firmly believed that “evolution was the devil’s lie.” On the other hand, Karl’s students at Stonehill College, a liberal Catholic institution, “know almost nothing about the Bible. . . . But not a one of them reject[s] evolution and all of them learned somewhere along the way that Christians should promote social justice. None of them bring implausible biblical notions to class that interfere with the learning of new ideas.” Whew! That’s a relief.

It’s hard to know how to respond to this cartoonish contrast. We could play dueling stories. I could talk about a young (evangelical) man, who works as I do under the Christianity Today umbrella, who is moving with his wife to an apartment building in West Chicago where almost all the residents are refugees or immigrants. His wife works in refugee resettlement, and they decided to live among some of the people she has helped to place. And so on. But really, Karl’s caricature doesn’t invite this sort of response.

Then there is the post by the historian Molly Worthen, whose forthcoming book Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism will be widely noticed. (We will certainly be reviewing it in Books & Culture.)  Some of what she says in her post seems right on target to me: for instance, “evangelicals have never been inclined to think of themselves as historical creatures.” Too true, alas. But she mixes up the discourse of “inerrancy” with broader claims to be reading Scripture “literally” (which is impossible, of course, but that doesn’t keep many people who know better from claiming to do so). As a result, she overemphasizes the influence of Reformed thinkers on contemporary evangelicalism. It’s not that they haven’t had a significant influence—of course they have!—but the picture, as she acknowledges without modifying her argument, is much messier and more diverse.

It’s always hard to gauge the degree to which one’s personal experience is representative. Since the late 1970s, my wife and I have been members of the Evangelical Covenant Church. The first of the six core “Covenant Affirmations” reads as follows: “We affirm the centrality of the word of God.” That affirmation has been reflected in our experience of the Covenant Church over the decades—and we have not heard, in that entire time, a single sermon on “inerrancy.”

I know that there are swathes of American evangelicalism where things are different. But the impression given by Karl’s and Molly’s posts differs sharply from my own experience. I’ll leave it to readers what to make of that.

Sharper than a Two-Edged Sword

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My fellow essayists this month have raised some interesting questions. What are the logical limitations of inerrancy? Are these important? What makes many evangelicals skittish about modern biblical scholarship? Are there valuable lessons to learn? What does it mean to “stand under” the text? Why is understanding original language important? How do we recognize the role of culture in biblical text while guarding against the tendency to read scripture only through our own cultural lenses?

This essay will explore the ways in which many evangelicals use scripture as a rhetorical weapon. In short, scripture is too often used as a conversation-ender and not a means of hearing God speak to all listeners. This rhetorical stance is relatively new in Church history and has distorted the meaning of scriptural authority. In the process, the scripture has become a tool to use on behalf of a position rather than allowing the Holy Spirit to lead us to deeper understandings.

The title of my post comes from Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart (NASB).” This verse, along with others I’ll explore, provides insights into how evangelicals USE the scripture. I have often heard people quote this verse as a declaration of the Bible’s authority. Never mind that commentaries describe the broader Hebrews 4 passage as being about sabbath-keeping as instructed in the Law. The phase “word of God” become synonymous with the Bible and any verse is then a tool used to divide soul and spirit or judge hearts.

Yesterday, Christianity Today posted this story announcing that YouVersion had achieved the 100 million mark in downloads of this popular bible-based mobile app. They also released their newest list of the most popular verses sent via text or twitter or posted as a Facebook status. CT expressed concern that John 3:16 didn’t make the list. The most popular verses were Philippians 4:13 and Jeremiah 29:11.

First of all, the very idea of something called YouVersion is the absolute epitome of the Extreme Individualism which has so colored American Evangelicalism. The scriptures thereby become MY possession, readily available for me to use as necessary. It is just that much easier for my to take these verses and make them about promises TO ME.

Jeremiah 29:11 reads “For I know the plans I have for you … plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future (NIV).”  In spite of all the gifts we give to high school graduates anticipating college and beyond, this verse is written to the people of Israel collectively. Too often, we take the verse as a stand-alone tool to give comfort in anxiety or to somehow make prosper into a guarantee of riches to those who are obedient.

Biblical scholarship would have us recognize the specific role Jeremiah’s words of comfort played to the exiled Israelites. It’s a promise to God’s people collectively not to me individually. As Andre the Giant says in The Princess Bride, “I do not think that means what you think it means.“

The YouVersion list illustrates something very important about evangelicals’ use of scripture. We really don’t know much about the Bible at all. That has been regularly demonstrated in research by Stephen Prothero and many others. Modern biblical scholarship that looks for the context of the biblical narrative isn’t particularly interesting to the folks who’d be attracted to YouVersion.

I’ve often joked that it would be interesting to put together the list of verses most often repeated by evangelicals (so I guess I should thank the YouVersion people). It’s an easy list — Proverbs 3:4-5 (used by Nic Wallenda in walking across the Grand Canyon), Psalm 139:13, Romans 8:28, Romans 5:23, 1 Corinthians 13, Ephesians 5:22, Isaiah 6, Revelation 3:20, and many others including the verses mentioned above. I figure I could publish the Real Evangelical Version is about 22 pages!

So where does this approach to scripture come from? I think it’s based on a misunderstanding of biblical authority combined with a utilitarian view of evangelistic argument.

The latter is a direct expression of enlightenment era rationality. It’s caught up in the phrases”evidence that demands a verdict” and “God said it, I believe it, and that’s good enough for me.” In this sense, scripture is a tool to use. Because it’s God’s Word, it automatically trumps any other appeals. A sword is valuable when it is used, either offensively or defensively.

Fundamentalism has reset definitions so that the only view of biblical authority seems to require a belief in inerrancy. This was a point of conflict at one of my colleges when we thought we’d done a good thing by emphasizing the commitment to the authority of scripture as core institutional values. The immediate response from students and other conservative critics was that we ought to immediately fire the non-creationist faculty members because that’s what authority demands.

Justin Barnard’s post makes great use of C. S. Lewis. I was already thinking about how different Lewis’ rhetorical style in Mere Christianity is from the style of modern apologists. How many scriptures are cited in MC? Why doesn’t his argument include the obvious top ten list from YouVersion?

Not to make C.S. Lewis the model for evangelical rhetoric. Many others have observed his own limitations. But it’s striking that we use that sword as a tool that makes folks in Game of Thrones seem passive.

John’s gospel recounts how Peter responded at the point of Jesus’s arrest. Peter draws a sword and attacks the guard. Jesus rebukes Peter and restores the ear. Shortly thereafter, as he is being interrogated by Pilate, Jesus says “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place (John 1:36 NIV).”

As Amos Young observes, maybe attentiveness to the Spirit can lead to a new rhetorical style, one that seeks to engage the other rather than winning argument. I’m reminded of the two disciples walking the road to Emmaus. They knew their scriptures and had a means of understanding them leading them to believe their side was winning. Now Jesus was dead and their understanding was shattered. When they encounter Jesus on the road, they stop worrying about what they thought. He leads them to understand all of scripture in a new way. Not only are they restored, but they reverse course and return to the scary place that was Jerusalem.

As they follow the Spirit’s lead, the wind up not needing a sword after all. Because Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, they don’t have a need to fight. Modern biblical scholarship, in this view, is not a threat but another means through which the Holy Spirit bears witness.

Inerrancy Is Nonsense

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Evangelical inerrantists are in the apostle Paul’s camp.  They’re sinners (I Timothy 1:15).  But contra Giberson, pointing out the mote in the inerrantist’s eye hardly constitutes a refutation of inerrancy.  (A college student’s failure to find the derivative of a function doesn’t entail that calculus is a “gigantic anchor holding mathematicians back.”)  So, what’s the real concern here?

Inerrancy is all about epistemology.  Giberson knows this.  He rejects “the ‘hypothesis’ of inerrancy [because it] has proven to be ‘degenerate’ because it is too difficult to apply, leads nowhere helpful, has to be propped up with all sorts of ad hoc additional assumptions . . . [and] turns out to lead to error.”  It prevents Christians from holding “sensible positions” [emphasis mine] on many matters.  

Giberson is probably right in thinking that his epistemology of sensibleness is incompatible with his understanding of inerrancy.  Many inerrantists believe that Scripture teaches all sorts of nonsense, often on the basis of their commitment to the Bible’s being without error.  It’s better to believe “sensible” things than nonsense.  Therefore, inerrancy must go.

Whether evangelicals should pull up the anchor of inerrancy and set sail with Giberson turns on whether the epistemology of sensibleness should govern one’s approach to Scripture.  Here’s why it shouldn’t.  

Christianity is fundamentally a religion of nonsense.  Does it make any sense to believe that the death of a first-century rabbi has any bearing on the resurrection of my body to eternal life?  (Does it make any sense to believe in the resurrection of the body to eternal life, period!?)  It is precisely the utterly fantastic nature of the “word of the cross” that led the apostle Paul to call it “foolishness” to the Greeks (I Corinthians 1:18-25).  And as heirs of the disenchanted world of the Enlightenment, we are all, denizens of 21st century West, thoroughly Greek.  

Giberson may be right in claiming that a commitment to inerrancy “requires the rejection and distortion of so much generally accepted knowledge that embracing it forces one onto an ideological Fantasy Island.”  But aside from taking the epistemology of sensibleness as axiomatic, it does not follow from this observation that “Fantasy Island” is uninhabitable.  

C.S. Lewis illustrates the logic of this point delightfully in a marvelous scene in The Silver Chair.  Having been captured by the Lady of the Green Kirtle, the nefarious enchantchress of Underworld, Jill Pole, Eustace Scrubb, and Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle find themselves on the brink of falling under her epistemological spell.  She tries to persuade them that Narnia, Aslan, and life above the surface in “Overland” is all illusory – not real, merely a fantasy.  In a moment of fragile clarity, Puddleglum responds:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

Of course, Giberson is undoubtedly right in pointing out that far too many self-professed inerrantists lack the humility of Puddleglum in their quests to set out in the darkness of inerrancy looking for a young earth, or the anti-Christ, or a biblical worldview.  Far too many are just downright arrogant and mean-spirited.  

But vice is no respecter of epistemological frameworks.  Thus, the epistemology of sensibleness lends itself to being defended with as much “obnoxious vigor” as inerrancy.  So, why favor inerrancy?  

Besides the fact that Christianity is built on the rock of folly, inerrancy matters because at its best, it is designed to posture the reader in precisely the stance that Brown and Roberts so eloquently describe – standing “under” the text.  At its core, inerrancy is a commitment to the idea that the Bible is truthful in all that it says.  It is the spirit of the Psalmist who rejoices, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” (Psalm 19:7).  One could almost think of inerrancy as an epistemological prayer: “Lord, help me to be faithful to understand all and only those truths expressed herein.”  

In practice, this means that perceived errors (or conflicts between revealed and natural knowledge) should be treated neither as occasions for rejecting Scripture or nature nor as mere puzzles to be solved through interpretation and systematicity.  Rather, perceived errors in the Bible should, first and foremost, drive readers to root out error in themselves (Psalm 139:23-24).  In other words, the perception of error in Scripture (or of conflicts between revealed and natural knowledge) primarily signals that something is wrong with me.  

Sadly, too many inerrantists lack the piety that is built into their epistemological stance – a piety that Augustine himself expressed in a letter to Jerome:

“For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honor only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the MS. is faulty or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it . . .”

To the extent that such piety has been lost among evangelicals in their clamor to defend  the veracity of the Bible, rejection is not the remedy.  Remedy rests in remembrance and recovery.  

Perhaps it’s still premature to weigh anchor and “learn to sail” from the Fantasy Isle of Inerrancy.  After all, there’s no assurance of better lands across the Ocean of Disenchantment.

Taming Tigers, Taming Texts

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From Jeannine Brown and Kyle Roberts 

Given that at least 200 years of modern study of the Bible has encouraged disciplinary silos, we thought it would be pleasantly subversive to write a combined, interdisciplinary response to this month’s topic.

Theoretical questions of inerrancy or errancy aside, a question that interests us and might be highly relevant to this conversation is: What does a specific view lead a person to do with the Bible?”

We hear from a number of this month’s contributors that inerrancy can produce readings that push toward the universal and abstract rather than the particular and concrete—producing generalizing platitudes. Ben Mitchell notes, “Inattention to context sometimes leads us to universalize texts that were meant to apply in particular times and places.” Molly Worthen reflects on the (false) sense of security that can come from “Reformed fundamentalists’ promises that one ‘common-sense’ interpretation of the Bible was perfect and timeless.” And Karl Giberson bemoans that “[v]ery few evangelicals ascribe any meaningful human dimension to Scripture.”

Neglect of the human context—the strange, lovely, and sometimes perplexing particularities—of the Bible by evangelical Christians is disturbing. And if inerrancy leads to a view of the text as a storehouse of facts and abstract principles to be extracted from the narrative contexts, then the reading it produces will be impoverished. In fact, once those facts and propositional doctrines are abstracted, there is hardly any use for the Bible at all. We’d just need systematic theologies. As Kevin Vanhoozer notes, such views of Scripture seem to prefer the abstract principles to Scripture itself—what Beverly Gaventa calls the “blessed messiness” of the text.

Inerrancy can produce such readings—readings that “tame the text” rather than acknowledge its mystery and inexhaustibility (Sarah Ruden’s point), as well as the differences arising from its distinct human authors and contexts. The doctrine of inerrancy can assuage our anxieties when wrestling with the text—it can be a way of avoiding the real, living God rather than meeting that God in the “strange, new world” of the Bible (Barth). As N.T. Wright has pointed out, the doctrine of inerrancy can also be a way of exchanging the authority of God for our own authority. What becomes authoritative, then, are our inherited, cherished interpretations of the Bible. Our assertions about the Bible’s “nature” can play right into the game of power politics. Of course, this is true of any belief structure or presupposition—religious or otherwise. To borrow from that famous animated philosopher, we can be the most “wascally wabbits.” Nonetheless, our convictions about our sacred texts are especially amenable to promoting our most cherished, engrained, or deeply valued interpretations.

But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Those who discard inerrancy are surely also at times guilty of taming the text. For example, some perspectives that view the text as errant discard certain parts of the Bible as irrelevant, ethnocentric, patriarchal, and even dangerous. The ever-incisive Kierkegaard, who was not a fan of historical criticism insofar as it blunted Scripture’s prophetic voice and undermined its divine origin, warned against any too-quick and easy dismissal of the Bible’s perplexing passages, or tough texts:

. . . is it not a self-contradiction on your part that you accept Holy Scripture to be the word of God, accept Christianity as divine teaching—and then when you bump up against something which you cannot square with your ideas and feelings—then you say that it is a self-contradiction on the part of God, rather than that it is self-contradiction on your part, inasmuch as you must either dismiss entirely this divine doctrine or take it just as it is” (Journals and Papers 3, 2888).

A hermeneutics of suspicion is not required to do this selective preferencing with the biblical text, but it can lend itself toward such choices. And historical criticism that aims to analyze the world behind the text often reveals its preference for that world rather than for the text itself (take, for example, historical Jesus reconstructions that become more important than the particularized portraits offered by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John). We suggest this axiom: Whatever one’s view of Scripture, our tendency and our constant temptation is to tame the text.

What would it look like to cultivate particular ways of reading that don’t tame the text? Since we do not have space here to develop specific examples, we will simply suggest a few, brief approaches that might cultivate reading the Bible in ways that, rather than suppress the text, unleash its creative, transformational, salvific, and sanctifying power.

Reading the Bible to Meet God

It seems to us that when it comes to reading the Bible in accordance with the purpose of the Bible—which is to reveal the living God to the people of God—it is important to recognize that the Bible’s nature and its function are tied up together: the Bible reveals God—the specific God of Father, Jesus and Holy Spirit. The Bible also facilitates the occasions for readers/hearers to listen to the voice of that God—and to respond. To not tame the text means to read, or hear, the Bible in anticipation of hearing the voice of God and meeting the Spirit of God.

Reading the Bible to Under-stand

When an approach that focuses on the world behind the text (whether of the “conservative” grammatical-historical or the “liberal” higher critical kind) becomes the tail that wags the dog, it is all-too-easy for the interpreter to stand-over the Bible. But the Bible’s divine origin suggests that the reader always stand under it. This means hermeneutics is a matter of under-standing the text as the Spirit illumines it for us today in all its historical, contextual particularity (and even oddities and perplexities). We ought not solely rely on the Spirit for understanding, but to use the best tools of interpretation we have available. Nonetheless, the disposition of learner and disciple is the place to start—and to end.

There is a human and a divine dimension to the Bible. This means that faithful, proper interpretation of it will call for both human tools and for a reliance on God’s illuminating presence. This explains, in part, why there will always be a tension or a challenging ambiguity when the Bible is read, and interpreted, and submitted to in the context of the church. If we want to avoid taming the text, we must embrace this tension and live together in it.

 

The Bible and the Tyger

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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 see the Bible from the direction of a literary translator, so for me the text in the original languages is an object of desire. I hope that doesn’t sound trendy or irreverent, because that’s not how I mean it; I mean that I don’t see the form and the meaning as separate things—all my work in ancient literature says they aren’t. I long for the sounds and structures as a means of insight into what the original authors intended and what they can teach me; but of course I have to accept the limits of what I can know.

It all reminds me of William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.” This creature is “burning bright” and possesses a “fearful symmetry”—and (Blake doesn’t need to add this) it hunts down terrified, innocent prey, tears them to pieces, and eats them raw, not even sharing with its own kin during hard times. The speaker feels fear and wonder, but intellectually is left with mainly the question “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

A tiger is (like ourselves) a mysterious and marvelous creation, so the complexities and paradoxes of its existence can do little more than add to our awe concerning its provenance and purpose, and should reduce certain preoccupations to laughter. Is the natural world here to prove something to our triumph and to our intellectual rivals’ discomfiture? Is the story of the tiger a story about God only if we can understand it in easy human terms such as “seven” and “days”? Because the tiger is part of divine creation, should we think like him, or should he think like us?

I’m in the early stages of a book called The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible. I’ve realized that, to avoid losing three quarters of my prospective readers at the Table of Contents, I have to include a long preface on the Bible’s historical origins; most young people, and a great many people my age, don’t know what kind of a document the Bible is, as in the geographical areas it comes from and the era during which it emerged in a form we would more or less recognize. I knew little about the history myself and had to read up, cringing the whole time, because I really didn’t want to know about the Bible as a product of pragmatic forces.

But things quickly began to look rather unpragmatic. Jewish scripture is, in context, less nationalistic, less paternalistic, less materialistic, less superstitious than simply bewildered. An edited compilation attesting to—for the ancient world—unique monotheism and a uniquely punctilious set of laws seemed to me to grow mostly from questions of why. “Why didn’t the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Persians crush us? Why did the Persians actually send us back our elite and help rebuild our Temple? But if we’re so special, why does the trouble keep coming? What are we doing here?” It was under the demand for convincing answers that the various priestly and scholarly schools contested what was truly important and how it should be expressed—again, not two separate categories—and what should be set aside and what kept.

And imagine the early followers of Jesus, as they faced the task of formulating what had happened and for what reason. It was about a crucified criminal who had shown a particular interest in outcasts, and any ordinary political or religious program that might have been claimed for him dissolved in the catastrophic end of the Jewish Wars, just forty years after his death. But the idea of God’s Son suffering and dying for degraded humanity had an irresistible life of its own: it just had to be systematized, explained—somehow.

Here is my draft for the passage that sums up my preface:

“For these reasons, I see absolutely no conflict between acknowledging that the production of scripture is a fallible (if not pathetic) human process, and believing that, over time, scripture reveals God’s ineffable will. Abraham Lincoln held that God works slowly through history, no matter how tragic, and I believe also that God works slowly through speaking, listening, reading and writing, no matter how faulty. I have a special esteem for the Bible in part because God has had the longest time to work on it: to allow various documents and collections to come and go, to funnel the survivors to populous conferences for final vetting, and—in the great fullness of time—to release the texts to a common readership, which stubbornly loves what it loves—certain passages, but not others—and interprets as it feels compelled.”

An important change in interpretation happening now concerns hell as a lake of fire. Paul, the earliest extant writer about the new religion, shows no sign of having heard of such punishment—a fact more and more modern believers notice as they contemplate misuses, past and present, of the threat of hell.

I think Martin Luther’ s attitude at the Diet of Worms is important. He likely didn’t say, “Here I stand; I can’t do otherwise.” which would not have been characteristic of him. He probably did say, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God,” meaning that his deep involvement with the Bible, not any independent notions of right and wrong, had brought him to where he was. If this is the case, his “God help me” isn’t so much a personal plea for protection as a grim hope of being right, given what being wrong would do to the Bible and to other people depending on its guidance. The man and the Book were in a frighteningly dynamic relationship with each other. The relationship—like all earthy things—produced good and evil; Luther’s Bible-bolstered anti-Semitism can’t be called anything but the latter. But time belongs to God; it discards evil.

The Bible is, like the natural world as a testament to God’s power and goodness, still only a created thing—or, as I prefer, a thing still in the process of creation.

 

Evangelicals and the Flat Text Society

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Evangelicals and the Flat Text Society

One of the most helpful books I read during graduate school was Jeffrey Burton Russell’s incisive, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Praeger, 1991).  In it, Russell refutes once for all the earlier consensus view that Aquinas, Columbus, and other medievals believed in a flat earth. Not even Russell, however, can rescue evangelicals from the charge of treating the canon of Scripture as a flat text.

This should not be entirely surprising, given our treatment of words in general. As Marilyn Chandler McEntyre has put it in Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies:

Precision of expression is neither taught nor appreciated in a culture that has prostituted language in the service of propaganda. To the degree that we consent to cheap hyperbole, flip slogans, and comfortably unexamined claims, we deprive ourselves of the felicity of expression that brings things worth looking at into focus—things like happiness, for instance, which comes so much clearer and seems so much richer when we see it displayed in an array of colors: merriment, blitheness, gaiety, delight, contentment, joy, bliss, felicity itself.

More often than not, words are stripped of their brilliance and turned monochrome by our decontextualization. They are flattened by our isolation from their surroundings.  The sheer ubiquity of words in our culture tends to strip them of their texture.

This reality has led many of my students to read the words of the Bible the same way they read the words of a blog or the words of a text message on their cell phones.  Words are words.  Not long ago I assigned a student an essay by a famous Marxist moral philosopher. The assignment included both elucidating the text and submitting it to critical reflection—a standard academic project. When he offered his considerations to the seminar class, he completely ignored the date, location, and background of the essay, not to mention neglecting to read a single biographical sketch of the author. He read this text just like any other text he had read. Consequently, he utterly missed every code word of Marxism in the essay, along with other important features of the argument.  In other words, he failed to contextualize the words on the page and by doing so missed the force of the author’s argument. Worse, because he did not understand what the author was saying, he was at a loss to respond critically. 

If this were only an undergraduate mistake it would be tragic enough. But one of the most crippling practices of evangelical culture is the flattening of the biblical text. Sola scriptura was never meant to suggest that all scripture was identical in every way. The slogan does not justify ripping the biblical witness from its context or detaching it from its genre.

Before we can accurately understand what the Word means today, we must first understand what the words meant to their hearers. Our inattention to context sometimes leads us to universalize texts that were meant only to apply in particular times and places. Putting ourselves in the political, cultural, and even geographical context of those who first heard or read the text is not always easy, but it is necessary to being good stewards of the Word of the Lord. Happily, much of the hard work has been done for us in reliable biblical commentaries. They can be a great asset—if we avail ourselves of them.

Our inattention to genre has led some people to misunderstand what we mean by a “literal interpretation of the text.” To say I believe the Bible is literally true does not mean I believe that rivers have hands when the Psalmist says “Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy” (Psalm 98:8 NIV). But I do believe that the salvation of the Lord makes his people jubilant!  It just so happens, by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that the author uses the literary device of a psalm to communicate that truth.

Prefatory statements in sermons like “the Bible says,” or even that vexing expression heard far too often, “it says,” level the exquisite relief of the deeply contoured Word of God. No, “God said to Moses” or “Jesus replied to the Pharisees” or “Paul said to Timothy.” The words of the Bible are situated because those words were first meant for those who received them in a given social, cultural, geographical, and economic context. That, rightly interpreted, they also apply to God’s people across the centuries is a testimony to the supernatural character of God’s written revelation.

Unless evangelicals are willing to do the hard work of biblical exegesis, hermeneutics, and application, there is little reason anyone should take us seriously.

A Case of Theological Amnesia

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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.

For centuries, evangelicals have drawn upon a wide range of methods and assumptions to interpret scripture. Wesleyans have their “quadrilateral” of theological contemplation: church tradition, human reason, and personal experience should supplement scripture in understanding God’s will and cultivating a relationship with Christ. The Mennonites have long stressed the role of the community, the gathered saints, in discerning together the meaning of scripture, and have worried more about discipleship than squabbling over “literal” interpretation. Pentecostals and charismatics read scripture with the voice of God speaking audibly in their ears, telling them how to apply holy writ to their own lives.

The theologians, pastors, and church officials whose letters I found read deeply and proudly in their own strand of evangelicalism’s expansive heritage. However, many fretted that their communities had been infected with what we might call the Reformed contagion: a virus that has compelled them to forget their own past. Over the last century, Reformed evangelicals have honed and popularized their version of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, and it has penetrated almost all branches of American evangelicalism.

The essence of this doctrine—the claim that scripture has no error—is very old. Christians have always been eager to defend the Bible as a perfect source of truth. But inerrancy, as most American evangelicals now understand the term, has a more recent history.

 The first generation of Reformers defended the authority of the Bible as a whole—against the authority of Rome—but were less inclined to haggle over scripture’s many apparent discrepancies. Their followers encountered a new set of challenges: the schoolmen of the Counter-Reformation pressed in from one side, and disciples of the Enlightenment hurled skepticism from the other. These Protestant scholastics earned their title for developing a theological method every bit as logical (or casuistic, depending on your point of view) as their Catholic counterparts—while also pushing back against science’s threat to biblical authority by trying to out-­rationalize the scientists.

They took as their starting point a principle that may owe more to philosophy than to scripture: God is perfect and unchanging. It follows, therefore, that his revelation must be perfect and unchanging too. While Enlightenment thinkers insisted that the Bible is no authority on the natural world, these evangelicals (some Lutherans, mostly Reformed) were at great pains to hold faith and reason together, to prove that modern inquiry bows to premodern revelation.

This understanding of inerrancy matured in the nineteenth century at the great Reformed think tank, Princeton Theological Seminary. The Princetonians insisted that scripture is a “storehouse of facts,” as Charles Hodge put it.1 According to the precepts of Common Sense Realism, the philosophy that pervaded Protestant intellectual life at the time, those facts were accessible to every layman by dint of his God-given common sense. Hodge and his colleagues were sophisticated thinkers who stayed abreast of the latest scholarship. Some were open to reconciling Genesis with a theistic view of evolution. However, a generation later the heat of the fundamentalist-modernist battles melted away all nuance. Inerrancy became a shibboleth for the faithful, a promise to defend Adam and Eve against Darwin’s predations and to protect Paul from the acids of cultural relativism.

The fundamentalist-modernist fights began in Reformed churches in the North, but soon spread throughout the country. Each tradition’s fundamentalists had their own unique worries, but nearly all latched onto the slogan of biblical inerrancy. Denominational leaders like the Church of the Nazarene’s Henry Orton Wiley watched with sadness as fellow believers abandoned their traditional approach to scripture for Reformed fundamentalism. “Our danger is rationalism, which exalts the intellect to the detriment of the affections and the will,” he wrote.2

After World War II, the Reformed understanding of inerrancy received a boost from the neo-evangelicals who gathered to “reform fundamentalism,” as George Marsden put it.3 Men like Carl Henry and Harold Lindsell aimed to rehabilitate conservative Protestantism’s intellectual reputation, rescue Western civilization, and win the world for Christ. Almost to a man, this circle of writers, scholars, and evangelists subscribed to the same hyper-rationalistic school of Reformed theology. They read or studied under Reformed thinkers like Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til, who taught them to reason relentlessly from the assumption that science and history can never contradict the inerrant Bible; to defend their understanding of the “Christian worldview;” and to expose their enemies’ godless presuppositions.

Despite their achievements—the neo-evangelicals founded Christianity Today, Fuller Theological Seminary, and the Evangelical Theological Society—most of them did not have terrific political savvy or popular appeal. In the 1960s and 1970s other thinkers and activists, particularly Francis Schaeffer, realized that this idea of the Christian worldview, grounded in a Reformed understanding of inerrancy, was a powerful weapon in the culture wars. He taught evangelicals all over the country—ranging from Mennonites to Moody Bible Institute students—that if your founding assumption is that the Bible is free from error, that the same literal interpretation of every jot and tittle holds true no matter time or place or experience, you have certain obligations to act on God’s commands in the public sphere.  You must picket abortion clinics. You must be on high alert for secular-humanist propaganda in your child’s classroom. You must not get carried away with Anabaptist ideas of counter-cultural discipleship or Wesleyan notions that God intended us to sanctify the world and overcome some of Paul’s prohibitions.

I tell this story at greater length in my forthcoming book, and I have grossly oversimplified it here. The upshot is this: evangelicals have never been inclined to think of themselves as historical creatures. They prefer to believe that their faith and worship is that of the Apostles. When they felt the shadow of secular modernity upon them, many found a lot to like in Reformed fundamentalists’ promises that one “common-sense” interpretation of the Bible was perfect and timeless, that faith and reason could remain one, that the inerrant Bible could refute the jeers of secular-humanists on their own terms. In recent years, some theologians and colleges have worked to recover their own heritage, but in today’s competitive evangelical marketplace they feel pressure to stick to the Reformed lingua franca in order to broaden their appeal beyond their own denominations. Charismatic churches, such as the Vineyard, often emphasize heart religion over cerebral discussions of inerrancy—but when push comes to shove, inerrancy is usually there in their statement of faith: neat, deceptively simple, and ready for deployment against any intellectual threat.

I write as a sympathetic observer, not as an evangelical insider (and for the record, I have an unfashionable admiration for John Calvin). But my research has impressed upon me the tragedy of evangelicals’ theological amnesia. The poverty of their conversations about how to read the Bible and understand its power belies the bounty of their own heritage.

 

 

1 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999 [1873]), 10.

2 H. Orton Wiley, “Christian Education,” address delivered at the Third Educational Conference, Church of the Nazarene, Pasadena College, Pasadena, CA, October 17–19, 1951 (qtd. in J. Matthew Price, We Teach Holiness: The Life and Work of H. Orton Wiley (Holiness Data Ministry, 2006, online edition), 173).

3 George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987).