I understand why many evangelicals regard the inerrancy of the Bible as important, but they need to think hard about this doctrine before (in Roger Olson's words) it dies the death of a thousand qualifications. What Olson means is this: there was a time when inerrancy was defended in a straightforward and full-blooded way. As evangelicals began to take modern biblical scholarship more seriously, they gradually began to qualify inerrancy and make it more realistic. To cut a long story short, evangelical theologians who defend inerrancy today often see it as entirely compatible with biblical phenomena like the following:
(1) Lack of precision.
(2) Spelling errors.
(3) Grammatical irregularities.
(4) The topical arrangement of material.
(5) Variant selections of material in parallel accounts.
(6) The use of exaggeration (hyperbole) and round numbers.
(7) Popular and observational descriptions of nature e.g. the four corners of the earth.
(8) The accurate reporting of falsehoods e.g. the author of Chronicles infallibly reported erroneous statements which he faithfully reproduced from the sources that he used.
(9) The use of free citations e.g. the fact that the New Testament often quotes the Old Testament in inexact ways (and also sometimes interprets the Old Testament in unexpected and unusual ways).
A brief comment on the fourth item above (topical arrangement of material). Many modern evangelicals, seeing that the synoptic gospels locate the Cleansing of the Temple at the end of Jesus' ministry and that John's gospel locates it at the start of his ministry, are happy to say that there was one Temple-cleansing event which different writers located in different contexts for topical or thematic (or perhaps even theological) reasons. Many of the earlier evangelicals would have been outraged at this suggestion; as far as they were concerned, there were two separate Temple-cleansings, end of story... Similarly with Peter's denial of Christ. A number of earlier evangelicals, in order to resolve the anomalies in the four gospels' accounts about the incident, concluded that the cock crowed more than twice and that Peter denied Christ more than three times.
Let's be generous and concede that the modern evangelical view of inerrancy is still tolerably coherent. But I think that Olson is right; if inerrancy is modified any further, then terms which evangelicals like to apply to their theological opponents (fuzzy, equivocal, compromise, doubletalk) will begin to fit the evangelical doctrine of the Bible.
One of the things that challenges evangelicals to examine and clarify the doctrine of inerrancy is debates about GENRE in the biblical writings. Every evangelical Christian (even the most literalistic Dispensationalist) has always admitted freely that one can identify a variety of genres (e.g. history, narrative, prophecy, apocalyptic, poetry, psalmody, parable) in the Bible. What makes the subject of genre potentially controversial is that some evangelical scholars have recently begun to do two things that mark a departure from the longstanding (and familiar) evangelical approaches to genre:
(a) They argue that the genre of certain biblical passages has hitherto been misunderstood by mainstream evangelicals; what was previously classified as "historical" or "narrative" can now rightly be classified as something else.
(b) They have begun to extend the range of genre to include things in the Bible like religious fiction and midrash.
Please don't misunderstand me; I am not assuming that these unconventional evangelicals are correct in their various diagnoses. What I am saying is that their arguments and discussions cannot simply be dismissed as "liberal Christian betrayals of biblical truth". The unconventional evangelicals are not playing the tiresome liberal card of reinterpeting and updating the Bible to make it say something congenial to modern ears (e.g. "Jesus would have approved of marxist philosophy or multiculturalism or homosexual lifestyles", or whatever). The evangelical renegades are claiming to do what responsible evangelical biblical studies has always done: to study biblical passages in a way that is faithful to things like the author's intention and the literary genre of the particular passage under discussion.
Disagreement about genre is not something new in evangelical Christian circles; it has been around for centuries. Long before Darwin ever put pen to paper and long before modern Israel was established as a nation, evangelicals debated with each other (and with Matthew Henry!) about the proper interpretation of Genesis 1-3 or about the meanings of the term "Israel" in the O.T. prophets and in Paul's letters, and some of these disagreements have always depended on different verdicts about the genre of certain biblical passages.
One cannot short-circuit the whole debate by taking your stand on biblical infallibility; no amount of pondering about infallibility can guarantee that your understanding of Ezekiel chapters 40-48 is right and everyone else's is up the pole.
In 1959, there were probably not more than four hundred Christians in the world who supported young-earth creationism. Today, there are probably at least thirty million young-earth creationists in North America alone. In a climate where an evangelical can be bitterly attacked for defending a hallowed old position like old-earth creationism (let alone that satanic invention known as theistic evolution), the young evangelical scholar who dares to publish his unconventional thoughts about the genre of Genesis 1-3 had better have a thick skin and a robust constitution.
UPDATE: In a blog post on 7 December (entitled "Getting Inerrancy Wrong"), Michael Patton defended "reasoned inerrancy" and argued that "technically precise inerrancy" is a misleading and unnecessary modern distraction. He also supported the view that the Gospels recorded the ipsissima vox of Jesus rather than his ipsissima verba (i.e. his authentic voice rather than his actual words).
23 November 2011
22 November 2011
Post-Christendom Evangelicals
Andrew Perriman has a blog called P.OST, in which he pleads for a new evangelical way. He says: "I regard myself as an evangelical, but the social and intellectual structures that have sustained and made sense of modern evangelicalism are disintegrating, and it is not at all clear that modern evangelicalism can or should survive their collapse... How much of our sense of what the New Testament is, how it speaks, how it hangs together, how it is authoritative, is bound up with the Christendom-modern paradigm? And how much of that can survive the collapse of the Christian-modern paradigm?"
Perriman's vision for evangelical Christianity is that it will free itself from the following constraints:
(1) The stifling framework of European Christendom, which (happily) is now disintegrating. The evangelicalism of the future needs to be post-Christendom evangelicalism.
(2) The restricting legacy of the sixteenth century Reformation.
(3) The negative and claustrophobic effects of conservative Reformed Christianity.
To rescue authentic Christianity from these problematic things, says Perriman, will need courage and determination (and creative imagination). Christians will need to borrow from the New Perspective on Paul and from the Emerging movement, both of which have recast Christianity in ways that are (in Perriman's estimate) new, fresh, innovative, down-to-earth, enterprising, risk-taking, and incarnational. However, we are told that we need to be even MORE radical than these two initiatives. Evangelical Christianity does not merely need to change its theological orientation; Perriman wants evangelicals to de-theologise and deconstruct their evangelical understandings to a significant extent and view the New Testament more dialogically and historically than they have ever done. Perriman complains: "The modern gospel is the product of an excessive theological preoccupation with the salvation of the individual. It has led generally to the eclipse of scripture as historical narrative".
In a post made on 17 April 2010, Perriman said: "The Western Christian tradition, which is the contextualization of the biblical narrative under the conditions of European imperialism and rationalism, is disintegrating rapidly. We are having to repent not only of a geographical imperialism but also of a historical complacency; and we are having to ask just how much of what we have taken to be self-evidently true is really just the final clamshell packaged consumer product at the end of a long Christendom manufacturing process. This is why it is so important right now to go back and look at the unprocessed raw material again. What did the 'faith' of the re-emerging people of God look and feel and taste like before it got funneled into the Christendom machine?"
In a post made on 12 November 2011, Perriman said: "I would suggest that the church is having to - or will have to - let go of the notion that we are a religion of a text whose authority is theologically constructed. I suggest that we are having to - or will have to - work with the notion instead that the New Testament is a collection of historical texts, bound up in the messy contingencies of history, much more narrowly confined in its outlook than theology has understood it to be. And I would also suggest that by imaginatively re-entering the dialogue, we will discover how the narrative is inherently authoritative and formative."
Notice in the last sentence of the above paragraph the words "inherently authoritative". Dear me. What a curiously conventional, traditional, hidebound, backward-looking expression for a courageous and forward-looking radical like Perriman to use! That is the sort of language that belongs to stodgy old dinosaurs like James White and Al Mohler and Jason Stellman...
Further, Perriman uses words like "contingent" (and sometimes even "accidental") to describe the formation of the Bible and its relation to Israel's history (in a post made on 6 January this year, he commented as follows: "the biblical story cannot be reduced to the myth-like dimensions of the modern evangelical gospel - not without losing touch with the reality of the thing. It is a historical story and suffers from all the complexity, particularity, ambiguity, and short-sightedness that are part-and-parcel of historical existence"). Whereas traditional views of the Bible are entirely compatible with conclusions about its authoritativeness, I am not sure how Perriman's account of the Bible can consistently lead to any sort of meaningful "authority" for Christian readers.
If you are excited by Perriman's program (which I emphatically am not), you can read all the articles on his blog here. The good thing is that Perriman writes SHORT articles, so he will not take up much of your time. The unfortunate thing is that Perriman's articles are mostly too short to allow him to explain in any detail or with any clarity what his program really involves, which is convenient for Perriman but frustrating for us...
To be fair to Perriman, you can always buy and read his books, especially his latest one: The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom, Wipf and Stock, 2010. (Somewhere on his blog, Perriman sums up one of the purposes of this book with the words: "How to rescue Romans from the fish tank of Reformed theology and return it to the sea of history".)
P.S. The comment below is by Andrew Perriman...
17 November 2011
Olson's Principle
Roger Olson has written a new book called Against Calvinism: rescuing God's reputation from radical Reformed theology (Zondervan, 2011). In this book Olson comes close to saying that one can decide against Calvinism regardless of disagreements about the exegesis of controversial biblical passages. There is a now-famous passage in Olson's book where he says that if it was shown to him beyond doubt that the Bible clearly teaches Calvinism, then he himself would reject Calvinism on moral-theological grounds, as the God of the Calvinist Bible would be unworthy of worship (and would indeed be a cold and unloving and morally repugnant deity). Here is the passage:
One day, at the end of a class session on Calvinism's doctrine of God's sovereignty, a student asked me a question I had put off considering. He asked: "If it was revealed to you in a way you couldn't question or deny that the true God actually is as Calvinism says and rules as Calvinism affirms, would you still worship him?" I knew the only possible answer without a moment's thought, even though I knew it would shock many people. I said no, that I would not because I could not. Such a God would be a moral monster. Of course, I realize Calvinists do not think their view of God's sovereignty makes him a moral monster, but I can only conclude they have not thought it through to its logical conclusion or even taken sufficiently seriously the things they say about God and evil and innocent suffering in the world. [Against Calvinism, Kindle edition, p.85]
According to Olson, a developed Christian conscience and sanctified common sense leave you no option but to reject Calvinism and its deterministic God.
Many non-Calvinists will sympathise with Olson's stance. Nonetheless, regardless of your theological orientation, surely what Olson is doing is a dangerous step for an evangelical Christian to take (note that Olson still describes himself as "an evangelical" and he confesses the authority of the Bible). Once you accept that moral-theological verdicts can override exegetical decisions and conclusions, then why should Calvinism be the only thing to fall by the wayside? Other eligible targets that could easily come under attack from Olson's principle include hell, divine wrath, propitiation, and a penal-substitutionary view of the atonement.
Olson is not a liberal Christian, and he may never see himself as one. But I think he has taken the decisive step that makes him a fellow-traveller of liberal Christianity, whether he likes it or not.
P.S. The title of Roger Olson's book is Against Calvinism; Michael Horton wrote a contrasting volume entitled For Calvinism. Yesterday, Horton made some comments on Olson's claim that Calvinism makes God a moral monster; Horton said on the White Horse Inn blog (16 November 2011): "...everyone who affirms God's exhaustive foreknowledge [and this includes traditional Arminians] has exactly the same problem as any Calvinist".
Horton's point is simply this: Calvinists and Arminians both agree that God has infallible and exhaustive foreknowledge. If God knows that something negative will happen and God does not prevent it from happening, then the negative occurrence is just as certain as if God had predestined it.
Olson admitted long ago that God is sovereign in the sense that nothing at all can ever happen without God's permission, i.e. nothing at all can happen that God does not allow. Olson sometimes speaks of God "reluctantly" permitting certain things, but he [Olson] does not agree with the Calvinist teaching that God DECREES to permit things.
Horton's response to this is to accuse Olson of nitpicking, for two reasons:
(a) It sounds peculiar to speak of a perfect God "reluctantly" doing anything!
(b) Once Olson has conceded that God intentionally permits negative things to happen that he exhaustively foreknows, Olson cannot accuse the Calvinist God of being morally problematic without Olson's Arminian God being in some way vulnerable to the same charge.
What do you think?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)