The Upper Register Blog

As a Ph.D. student in biblical studies, I’ll admit that I struggle with the desire for academic respectability. When it comes to deciding, for example, what your position is on something like the Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles, it is tempting to want to burnish your respectability by taking the view deemed credible by the consensus of NT scholars.  No one wants to be labeled an obscurantist or a fundamentalist. So you try it on for size, and you ask, “What difference does it make if one or more disciples of Paul, after his death, wrote the Pastorals in his name based on what they had heard Paul himself say in his lifetime? Would this cause us to rethink any important theological points?” (It probably would not, except for the obvious problem that the claim of the Pastorals to have been written by Paul would then be less than the whole truth.) Let me hasten to add that I affirm Pauline authorship of the Pastorals. I’m simply giving an example of the way the craving for academic respectability can play with your mind and perhaps even your integrity.

David Gibson (himself a grad student at Aberdeen) has some good words of advice on this point:

In the book Letters Along the Way: A Novel of the Christian Life, the senior scholar Professor Paul Woodson writes to the young Timothy Journeyman who has just embarked on theological study:

I doubt very much that evangelicals are wise to pursue academic respectability. What we need is academic responsibility. There is a world of difference. Elevating academic respectability to the level of controlling desideratum is an invitation to theological and spiritual compromise.

Academic respectability and academic responsibility adopt different approaches to the matter of biblical authority. Respectability will often simply assume that the Bible is truthful and authoritative but realises that to draw attention to this in the academy will often bring scorn and derision. One practical outcome of this is that evangelicals then set out to study Scripture using accepted critical tools, while all along quietly assuming that the Bible is also a product of the divine mind and therefore authoritative. What this leads to, however, is an explicitly non-theological approach to the Bible which ultimately leaves the Bible answerable to all the latest critical theories. In reality, the divine and human aspects of Scripture present themselves to us together as ‘the very words of God’ (Rom. 3:2; Acts 7:38) and this means that any study of those words, in their human-ness and with critical tools, must be guided by that theological presupposition. Responsibility, on the other hand, recognises this as our evangelical starting point and accepts that it is not a presupposition shared by the academic world at large. Striving to be responsible though, means that the students work to the best of their ability, weighs all the options, thinks openly and creatively, and reads widely - but is governed by the desire to remain faithful to the Bible and not the academy.

In fact, wouldn’t it be academically irresponsible to suppress one’s core theological convictions concerning the inspired character of Scripture and to pretend that one is on the same naturalistic page with the rest of academia? Perhaps we evangelicals would gain more respect if we admitted our precommitment to Scripture as God’s word and simply engaged in scholarship from that point of view.

This relates to another interesting point:  Dare we, as evangelical scholars committed to the inspiration and authority of Scripture, appeal to inspiration in our scholarly arguments?  In the world of academic biblical studies, such an appeal is off-limits. The scientific, historical-critical method demands that all of our arguments appeal to empirical evidence and historical reasoning using a naturalistic set of assumptions. At the very least we must operate from a standpoint of methodological naturalism if we hope to “make an impact” or “gain a hearing” for our scholarship in the wider world of academia.  

John Frame points out this flaw in his review of Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns:

In regard to the “non-uniqueness” of biblical laws, institutions, and literary genres, I think the “problems” are artificially created by Enns. Most sophisticated readers of the Bible understand that it is not unique in these ways, but to my knowledge very few of these, if any, see that as posing a problem for biblical authority or interpretation. So I could simply agree with Enns on the data and then move on.

But in this section he shows an unwillingness, curious for an evangelical, to say anything about the relation of inspiration to historical factuality. When he speaks about “evidence” for this or that event, the evidence is always inductive, never an appeal to divine inspiration as evidence. Perhaps Enns thinks that inspiration is such an event that we may never appeal to it as evidence. I think that position is inconsistent with Scripture’s own view of itself.

This applies in a myriad of ways in biblical studies. For example, there are many apparent discrepancies between/among parallel accounts in the Gospels and other biblical historical narratives, or between the biblical account and non-inspired historical accounts (e.g., Josephus). Do we allow the doctrine of inspiration to play a hermeneutical role, however slight, in our interpretation, at least at the level of encouraging us to attempt some sort of harmonistic approach? Academic respectability would demand that we not allow our commitment to inspiration play such a role. But if the Scriptures are in fact inspired, how can we not? 

It is more important to be loyal to Christ (whose authority is expressed through his word) than to receive the praise, accolades, and promotion of mere humans and human institutions. One day we will stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of our lives, including our scholarship. His honor and praise will be worth far more than whatever fleeting honors one may receive from the scholarly world of AAR or SBL. And the truth is, they know you’re an evangelical anyway, so they’re not likely to shower you with accolades and glory.

In view of the recent controversy concerning Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns, I found some great quotes by B. B. Warfield in his article on Inspiration (in the old ISBE edited by James Orr). Note that this is in the sub-section titled “Human element in Scripture.” 

No ‘prophecy,’ Peter tells us (2 Pet. 1:21), ‘ever came by the will of man; but as borne by the Holy Ghost, men spake from God.’ Here the whole initiative is assigned to God, and such complete control of the human agents that the product is truly God’s work. The men who speak in this “prophecy of scripture” speak not of themselves or out of themselves, but from “God”: they speak only as they are “borne by the Holy Ghost.” But it is they, after all, who speak. Scripture is the product of man, but only of man speaking from God and under such a control of the Holy Spirit as that in their speaking they are “borne” by Him. 

It seems to me that Enns argues for a different theory of divine authorship than the organic theory of Warfield. For Enns, divine authorship consists merely in God’s providence in sovereignly developing the cultural horizons of the human authors and guiding them to write down what they wrote, with all of their enculturated foibles, messiness, non-historical myths, diversity, and bizarre second temple hermeneutical behavior. Due to the sovereignty of God, the end-product is what God wants us to have, warts and all. The Bible is therefore God’s “gift” to the church. How do we get divine “revelation” out of this thoroughly human document? Well, the church has to take this “gift” and perform some sophisticated hermeneutical operations — e.g., non-harmonistically comparing the theological diversity, separating the kernel of theological truth from the chaff of mythical story-telling, discerning how the whole narrative fits together via a first naive reading followed by a second Christotelic reading, and so on. Once we’ve done all that, then somehow this messy book can function as a rule of faith and practice, although our theological formulations will always be provisional and constantly changing as we engage in various enculturated missional contexts. 

For Warfield, by contrast, divine authorship consists in a most intimate, active, and internal divine concursus, working in and with the human authors, so that God himself is speaking, addressing, and revealing truth to us, by taking up, using, controlling, and cleansing from error the human authors’ will, thoughts, cultural upbringing and experiences. The Bible is thus much more than a gift to us that we then use as a tool for doing missions and theology. It is divine speech directly addressing us to which we must submit. It is the words of God in and through the words of men, words that God himself has taken up as an instrument in order to become a vehicle of his own direct revelation and communication.

Note how the NT writers often say that God or the Holy Spirit spoke through the mouth of the prophets (all quotes from NASB):

“… as He spoke by [dia] the mouth of His holy prophets from of old” (Lk 1:70)

“… the period of restoration of all things about which God spoke by [dia] the mouth of His holy prophets from ancient time” (Acts 3:21)

“… who [= the Lord who made the earth and sea and all that is in them] by the Holy Spirit, [through] the mouth of our father David Your servant, said …” (Acts 4:25 - although the preposition dia is lacking in the second clause, it is probably to be supplied from the previous clause, “by [dia] the Holy Spirit”)

“He [the One who swore in His wrath that they would never enter His rest] again fixes a certain day, ‘Today,’ saying through [en] David after so long a time …” (Heb 4:7 - Semitic instrumental en)

In addition, Matthew often uses a similar construction albeit with divine agency implied by the use of the divine passive, e.g., “Then what had been spoken [sc. by God] through [dia] Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled” (Matt 2:17; cp. 4:14; 8:17; 12:17; etc.).

Passages such as these support Warfield’s organic theory because they bring together both the human and the divine element, but place the accent on the divine element — it is God who is speaking, but he is doing so “through” (dia) the human authors.

Now it’s important to point out that this is not a dictation theory of inspiration, as if the will, mind, experience, and culture of the human authors are totally bypassed. There are actually three theories on the table here (at least in this discussion):  the dictation theory, the organic theory (Warfield), and Enns’s theory. Enns’s critics — whether Greg Beale or some of the faculty at WTS – are not fundamentalists. They do not deny the human element of Scripture nor do they wish to defend a dictation theory of inspiration. Their concern, rather, is to uphold the precious truth that Warfield articulates here (same article):

The gift of Scripture through its human authors took place by a process much more intimate than can be expressed by the term “dictation,” and that it took place in a process in which the control of the Holy Spirit was too complete and pervasive to permit the human qualities of the secondary authors in any way to condition the purity of the product as the word of God. The Scriptures, in other words, are conceived by the writers of the New Testament as through and through God’s book, in every part expressive of His mind, given through men after a fashion which does no violence to their nature as men, and constitutes the book also men’s book as well as God’s, in every part expressive of the mind of its human authors.

Can Enns say that? In view of his argument that large swaths of biblical history are essentially ANE myth and that the NT writers engaged in strange second temple hermeneutical practices, Enns seems unable to affirm that “the control of the Holy Spirit was too complete and pervasive to permit the human qualities of the secondary authors in any way to condition the purity of the product as the word of God” (what a great sentence!). On Enns’s view, the product is impure. It is thoroughly enculturated into its own milieu, even to the point of containing myths presented as if they were straightforward history.

Later in the article, Warfield speaks of God’s providence in preparing the human authors to do their work. It would seem that Enns would go along with that section. But in a subsequent section titled, “‘Inspiration’ More than Mere ’Providence’,” Warfield explains that providence is not enough and that there was an additional divine operation called “inspiration” which elevated the words of the human authors beyond their mere human capacity:

This is the reason for the superinduction, at the end of the long process of the production of Scripture, of the additional Divine operation which we call technically “inspiration.” By it, the Spirit of God, flowing confluently in with the providentially and graciously determined work of men, spontaneously producing under the Divine directions the writings appointed to them, gives the product a Divine quality unattainable by human powers alone. Thus, these books become not merely the word of godly men, but the immediate word of God Himself, speaking directly as such to the minds and hearts of every reader. The value of “inspiration” emerges, thus, as twofold. It gives to the books written under its “bearing” a quality which is truly superhuman; a trustworthiness, an authority, a searchingness, a profundity, a profitableness which is altogether Divine. And it speaks this Divine word immediately to each reader’s heart and conscience; so that he does not require to make his way to God, painfully, perhaps even uncertainly [sounds like Enns!], through the words of His servants, the human instruments in writing the Scriptures, but can listen directly to the Divine voice itself speaking immediately in the Scriptural word to him.

One does not come away from reading Inspiration and Incarnation with the sense that Enns would be able to say that we “can listen directly to the Divine voice itself speaking immediately in the Scriptural word to [us].”

Justin Taylor has a good interview with Craig Blomberg today. (The timing is funny because just the other day I was thumbing through his very helpful book The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.) I particularly enjoyed Blomberg’s answer to this excellent question by Justin:

Are there certain mistaken hermeneutical presuppositions made by conservative evangelicals that play into the hands of liberal critics?

Absolutely. And one of them follows directly from the last part of my answer to your last question. The approach, famously supported back in 1976 by Harold Lindsell in his Battle for the Bible (Zondervan), that it is an all-or-nothing approach to Scripture that we must hold, is both profoundly mistaken and deeply dangerous. No historian worth his or her salt functions that way. I personally believe that if inerrancy means “without error according to what most people in a given culture would have called an error” then the biblical books are inerrant in view of the standards of the cultures in which they were written. But, despite inerrancy being the touchstone of the largely American organization called the Evangelical Theological Society, there are countless evangelicals in the States and especially in other parts of the world who hold that the Scriptures are inspired and authoritative, even if not inerrant, and they are not sliding down any slippery slope of any kind. I can’t help but wonder if inerrantist evangelicals making inerrancy the watershed for so much has not, unintentionally, contributed to pilgrimages like Ehrman’s. Once someone finds one apparent mistake or contradiction that they cannot resolve, then they believe the Lindsells of the world and figure they have to chuck it all. What a tragedy!

One of the things I appreciate about my training at Westminster Seminary California was that they taught inerrancy in a way that avoids the Lindsell problem. For example, John Frame (he was still on the WSC faculty in my day) strongly emphasized what Blomberg says here, namely, that inerrancy means “without error according to what most people in a given culture would have called an error.” In other words, we must define “error” not according to the conventions of modern science or modern historiography, but according to the standards of the pre-modern world.

Another qualification, not mentioned by Blomberg, is that we affirm that the Scriptures are inerrant in all that they affirm. This qualification can be abused, of course, but it is still a valid one nonetheless. For example, the Scriptures do not affirm that there is a literal solid crystal dome overhead, even though it does speak of something called the raqia or firmament.  

Qualifications such as these provide some important hermeneutical wiggle room that goes a long way toward alleviating many of the apparent difficulties raised by the opponents of inerrancy.

That’s the title of an article by Denny R. Burk, Jr. and Ray Van Neste in the latest (Fall 2007) issue of the Criswell Theological Review. The subtitle is: “A Proposal to Amend the Doctrinal Basis of the Evangelical Theological Society.” The authors, members of ETS, argue that its current doctrinal basis is a theological “bikini” leaving the Society exposed and in need of a more adequate covering. The current doctrinal basis reads:

The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs. God is a Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory.

Burk and Van Neste are rightly concerned that this statement is inadequate given that it could be affirmed by many who do not fit within any historically responsible definition of “evangelical.” Van Neste says that he has corresponded with Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and even a self-confessed Pelagian, all of whom said they could sign the above statement. Even granting the most generous definition of “evangelical,” most would agree that Catholics, Orthodox, and Pelagians don’t fall within it.

Two relatively recent events seem to have sparked this concern:  (1) the membership challenge over Clark Pinnock and John Sanders due to their embrace of Open Theism, and (2) the recent resignation of Francis Beckwith from ETS leadership due to his rejoining the Catholic Church, or, more accurately, due to his statement as he resigned that he felt he could still sign the ETS doctrinal basis in good conscience even as a Roman Catholic.

The expanded doctrinal basis proposed by Burk and Van Neste is a slightly revised version of the doctrinal basis of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) based in the UK. Here is the UCCF statement:

1. There is one God in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
2. God is sovereign in creation, revelation, redemption and final judgement.
3. The Bible, as originally given, is the inspired and infallible Word of God. It is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behaviour.
4. Since the fall, the whole of humankind is sinful and guilty, so that everyone is subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.
5. The Lord Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Son, is fully God; he was born of a virgin; his humanity is real and sinless; he died on the cross, was raised bodily from death and is now reigning over heaven and earth.
6. Sinful human beings are redeemed from the guilt, penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death once and for all time of their representative and substitute, Jesus Christ, the only mediator between them and God.
7. Those who believe in Christ are pardoned all their sins and accepted in God’s sight only because of the righteousness of Christ credited to them; this justification is God’s act of undeserved mercy, received solely by trust in him and not by their own efforts.
8. The Holy Spirit alone makes the work of Christ effective to individual sinners, enabling them to turn to God from their sin and to trust in Jesus Christ.
9. The Holy Spirit lives in all those he has regenerated. He makes them increasingly Christlike in character and behaviour and gives them power for their witness in the world.
10. The one holy universal church is the Body of Christ, to which all true believers belong.
11. The Lord Jesus Christ will return in person, to judge everyone, to execute God’s just condemnation on those who have not repented and to receive the redeemed to eternal glory.

Burk and Van Neste want to make several changes to the UCCF statement (with UCCF’s approval) in order to incorporate the ETS doctrinal basis. The changes only affect 1-3. Proposition 1 would be replaced by the second sentence of the ETS doctrinal basis and made number 2. Proposition 2 would remain unchanged but be moved to become number 3. And proposition 3 would be modified to affirm inerrancy and a Protestant canon and made number 1. Thus:

1. The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs. This written word of God consists of the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments and is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behavior.
2. God is a Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory.
3. God is sovereign in creation, revelation, redemption and final judgement.
4. …

The rest would remain the same. The italicized parts are the two sentences from the current ETS doctrinal basis. There is also a key qualifier in the first proposition, found neither in the UCCF statement nor in the current ETS statement, that defines the canon as consisting of 66 books. The intention here is to exclude those who have larger canons, such as Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and others.

I am not a member of ETS, but if these changes go through I might consider joining. If the doctrinal basis remains unchanged, I would have a harder time joining because the current doctrinal basis seems to imply that inerrancy is in and of itself a sufficient guarantee of evangelical orthodoxy. The implication is that inerrancy is a foundational doctrine in the logical sense of being an axiom from which all orthodox propositions could be derived. I call it ”the foundationalist model of inerrancy,” using “foundationalist” in the philosophical sense of an epistemology that pictures knowledge as a pyramid built up from certain foundational truths, whether they be certain bedrock logical axioms or empirical facts or both. The implication is that anyone who denies inerrancy but affirms orthodox evangelical Christian doctrine (of the sort summarized in the UCCF doctrinal basis) must be suspected of having a hairline in his foundation that will eventually crack all the way up to the top and lead to open liberalism. Sure, I realize that you don’t have to believe this to be a member of ETS, but when you look at some of the founding fathers of ETS — e.g., Gordon Clark and Norm Geisler — it seems that they really believed this. I worry that it continues to be part of the ethos of the Society, or least segments of it. 

This way of thinking about inerrancy is just so alien to me. I affirm inerrancy but I don’t view it as the end-all and the be-all of orthodoxy. I just don’t see how you can view inerrancy as a logically secure foundation or axiom for all of theology. And I think the Open Theism debate and the departure of Beckwith have had the salutary effect of getting ETS, or at least some in ETS, to realize this. As shocking as this may be to those who espouse the foundationalist model of inerrancy, one can hold to inerrancy and be a heretic! Conversely, one can hold to orthodox evangelical theology and yet not be convinced that inerrancy is necessary. My own mentor, Donald Hagner, falls into this category. In fact, the UCCF doctrinal basis itself does not affirm inerrancy! There are many evangelicals who hold to orthodoxy as defined by Nicea and Chalcedon and who are evangelical in their soteriology, who affirm that the Scriptures are inspired and are the infallible rule of belief and behavior, but who think that the Scriptures may contain minor errors regarding geography, history, and so on (limited inerrancy).

So I think this proposed change is good, because if it passes it will put some distance between the current ETS and its foundationalist roots. It is a recognition that being evangelical in one’s theology is just as important if not more important than a naked affirmation of inerrancy as if it were a self-sufficient epistemological guarantee of orthodoxy.  The UCCF basis includes some good and necessary statements about the sovereignty of God in creation, revelation, and redemption. It affirms the concepts of divine wrath, final judgment, personal guilt, and the need for the atoning work of Christ. In other words, it affirms the heart of the gospel. And without deciding the Arminian-Calvinist debate, it affirms that the Holy Spirit enables people to turn from their sin and trust in Christ. An evangelical Arminian from the Wesleyan tradition could affirm that in the sense of prevenient grace, thus ruling out the raw Pelagianism implied by Open Theism. I also like the fact that the UCCF statement says that Christ in his sacrificial death was our “representative and substitute,” thus proscribing the Morna Hooker-N.T. Wright emphasis on “representative” (often at the expense of ”substitution”) and, by the same token, making clear that Christ’s substitution was also representative in nature (he did not die merely to take our place so that we do not have to; rather, he died in our place with the result that we too died in forensic union with him). 

Of course, the modified UCCF doctrinal basis is not to be understood as a complete confession of faith as would be adopted by a congregation or denomination. It is not called a “doctrinal statement” but a “doctrinal basis.” The difference is that a doctrinal basis provides a set of essentials for evangelicals from different theological traditions within the evangelical umbrella to engage in theological scholarship together. It is not a full-orbed confessional statement of the sort that is more desirable in an ecclesiastical context. The ETS is a scholarly society for evangelical theologians and biblical scholars, not a church or a denomination. Burk and Van Neste address this issue in their article and speak of the doctrinal basis as “a matrix from which a certain kind of scholarship can proceed” (p. 75):

Within the ETS, the doctrinal basis has functioned (and we hope it will continue to function) as a summary of essential principles for doing scholarship in the various theological disciplines. In other words, the doctrinal basis functions as a matrix from which a certain kind of scholarship can proceed. In this case, the kind of scholarship that our Society aims to nurture is evangelical scholarship. 

ETS meets this week in San Diego and will consider the proposed change. It can’t be adopted this week, but they can set the revision in motion and adopt it next year. Hopefully, ETS will realize just how skimpy their theological bikini is. By adopting the UCCF doctrinal basis and incorporating inerrancy and an explicit Protestant canon into the UCCF basis, the ETS will have a fuller basis for doing evangelical scholarship within the inerrantist tradition. In that case, maybe I’ll consider joining ETS. I’m glad ETS may be coming to the realization that inerrancy is not enough.