Worthen: A Form of Intellectualism... (9)

Chapter 8 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. 

Reviews of previous chapters include:

Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)

And now, chapter 9, "Evangelicals' Great Matter."  I lament that this book has taken so much of my time. I would rather be reading something else. But I believe it is important for someone with my particular skill set to be engaging the whims of religious culture. I view my engagement with these sorts of issues a ministry to evangelicalism and to my own faith community.

Those who control the story, control the future. Most people aren't interested in nuance--slogans and simple narratives win the day. Scholars, who usually deal in nuance and are often boring communicators, are thus easily and often lynched by the masses. I feel like someone needs to be carefully wading in these historical waters and offering simple but accurate counter-narratives.

1. Two names basically sum up this chapter. The first is Harold Lindsell, known for his incendiary 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible. His slogan? Inerrancy.

Simple. An easy idea to rally around. How could a scholar compete, full of nuance and knowledge of ancient genres unfamiliar to the person in the pew or the wealthy donor? Even to make a counter-argument sounds like you are against the Bible. As one Southern Baptist leader at the time put it, "it is no easy matter to bridge the gap between the scholarly historical approach and the views of the Bible which some people hold" (199).

Lindsell would have his revenge on Fuller, where he left in protest in 1962. He would paint a picture in his book of them as liberals abandoning Scripture--a narrative I heard from someone even last week. Here is Fuller's evil statement on the Bible: "All the books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, are the written word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice"

Lindsell wanted more and was instrumental in getting the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy written in 1978. Such a tool would help fight off trends like women in ministry and the way the church growth movement was contextualizing the gospel in new contexts. It would stem the tide of the charismatic movement with its emphasis on the Spirit speaking through Scripture.

"To argue that [his] inerrantist position represented the original view of the early Church Fathers and Protestant Reformers, Lindsell began with a string of quotations plucked from church history and shorn of context" (201). The meaning of words is not merely in quoting them (locution). It is in knowing what they meant within the context where they were spoken (illocution). Lindsell quoted the words, but gave them subtly different meanings, because he had quite different assumptions from a different time and place.

Yes, Christians have never thought of the Bible as having errors. But what is an error? And what meaning to the Bible were they saying did not have error?" Even the Reformers were not reading the text as a science or history book but as a book about faith and practice. Even Lindsell's old roommate and friend, Carl Henry, lamented that Lindsell had "shifted the public perception of the evangelical movement from its role as a dynamic life-growing force to a cult squabbling over inerrancy" (202).

Worse, he basically set conservative Christians on a warpath to devour each other, which made no one more godly, did great harm to the church internally, and turned lost souls off to Christ.

2.  The second name in this chapter is Francis Schaeffer. Mark Noll, then the darling evangelical historian of Wheaton, had this to say about Francis Schaeffer to Newsweek: "the danger is that people will take [Schaeffer] for a scholar, which he is not. Evangelical historians are especially bothered by his simplified myth of America's Christian past" (218).

Worthen sums up his historiography in this way: "Schaeffer wowed audiences by explaining 500 years of intellectual history in a paragraph and a casual chalkboard diagram--but he did so with exaggeration, oversimplifications, and misinformation that would make a specialist cry" (216).

What was this grand narrative? It was one of decline. It was Schaeffer that made abortion the climax of a Western decline that he said started with Thomas Aquinas in the 1100s. Interestingly, it was Schaeffer who made abortion the centerpiece of conservative American Christian politics, to where even today many Christians can't even imagine a Christian voting for a Democratic candidate.

His book, How Should We Then Live?, was more than influential in ideas. It was a multi-media presentation. Evangelicals would now begin to enter the entertainment world to try to influence the popular imagination. He would revive the slogan, "Ideas have consequences" (from a 1948 book that instead looked to William of Ockham instead of Aquinas as the beginning of the end).

Schaeffer created a battle for civilization based in ideas. After all, Schaeffer had dabbled in the fundamentalist Calvinist world of Kuyper and Van Til. So it is predictable that he would see a decline of ideas at the root of civilization's decline, starting with the ridiculous notion that Aquinas stood at the fountainhead.

True decline, from a biblical standpoint, has to do with submission to God and love of our neighbor. Has love of neighbor declined in our world? I seriously doubt it. There was as much hatred and prejudice in the Middle Ages down to the civil rights era as ever. In fact, if anything, the Western world is more loving than ever toward the other.

Submission to God appears to be in decline, especially if you filter it through a question of what people believe. But are less people truly in submission to God than before? In truth, people who call themselves Christians have always used the name of God, even the Bible as a cover to do hateful things opposed to God! Were the fundamentalists pastors who rallied with the KKK more in submission to God than Bill Nye the science guy, even though he is an atheist?

I don't want to push too hard on Schaeffer's ideas here. I think he even influenced some of my early thinking on the last 500 years, at least indirectly. I believe that Schaeffer was a wonderful man and I wish I could have met him. I believe L'Abri must have been a wonderful place for people to find Christ. I think I would have enjoyed the warmth of this man, who believed in taking care of God's creation and helping those in need.

I have only pushed back because, as you know, ideas have consequences.

3. I also push back because these forces so easily capture popular imagination, so much so that my own tradition is infected. I didn't think much of it at the time, but what business did Wesleyans have going to Bill Gothard's seminars in the 70s, when his sentiments are vastly different from those of historical Wesleyanism?

In 1978, Nazarene scholar Mildred Wynkoop summed up my feelings well: young Nazarenes "are being drawn in to the many 'cultish' movements in our religious world, today... These include groups with a very strong Calvinist ground, often camouflaged by social activity or flashy philosophy... A one-man (or woman) operation... 'Un-Christianizes' all those who question or reject some theory of Scripture... Claiming to be a Shepherd over others (only Christ is Shepherd) rather than Servanthood, as Jesus and Paul indicated" (209).

Finally, this chapter covered the switch to the NIV that took place in the 70s. Interestingly, it was facilitated in reaction to The Living Bible. Next to the KJV, the NIV looked like a liberal force. But next to the Living Bible, it seemed conservative.

The bottom line of the NIV debate is that many people can't tell the difference between what is a matter of faith and what is a matter of tradition. A person's faith inevitably gets formed around whatever form of faith they grow up with. Accordingly, when a person says something about there not just being three wise men, they take that as an attack on faith rather than as a refining of faith.

So it was with the NIV. If you grew up with the ending of Mark, it seemed like an attack on faith to suggest it wasn't original. In reality, it was just a refining of the form of faith. Ironically, when the TNIV and then NIV2011 came out, those who had formed their faith around the old NIV made the same KJV complaints again and came up with the ESV.

Hear the conclusion of the matter: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again!

A History of Inerrancy

A few quick thoughts on how I think the Bible's truthfulness has been conceived over time and has changed throughout church history.

Phase 1: Pre-Reformation
From the New Testament authors to the Reformation, there was an assumption that the Bible was the very words of God and that it was obviously truthful in everything it said. However, there was no restriction that would limit that truthfulness to the literal. If a passage seemed problematic from a literal standpoint, it could be interpreted allegorically.

Basically, the meaning of the Bible was tethered to the "rule of faith" rather than to history. Passages perceived to be difficult in relation to orthodoxy or their sense of the world were interpreted in a different way. We see this still in the church today in the pew, as church members who were not trained to read the Bible in context search for interpretations that fit with what they have already been taught to believe.

Phase 2: Reformation
The Reformation untethered the meaning of the Bible from orthodox tradition and forbid figural interpretation. Sola scriptura in effect retethered the meaning of the Bible to history rather than to the rule of faith. The moment this change of meaning orientation happened, Protestant liberalism and higher criticism immediately became one likely eventuality.

The orientation of meaning shifted from being a premodern mirror of common Christian understanding to an individual quest to "get back" to what it meant. The operating mode became one of pealing back, which would lead eventually to the quest for the historical Jesus and the pealing away of historical layers in the gospels.

It would take a few centuries for this to take its course. Luther, Calvin, Wesley continued to some extent to read the Bible in a premodern way, as a big picture mirror of their own theologies. They continued to read a single theology into the biblical texts taken as a whole. And of course they believed the Bible (meaning their own theologies which they saw in the Bible) was completely truthful.

Phase 3: The Princeton Calvinists
The modern doctrine of inerrancy was arguably born of Charles Hodges' support of slavery. (By the way, few people know that the Southern Baptist Church itself was also formed in defense of slavery.) Hodge's doctrine of inerrancy pushed the locus of meaning down to the verse level rather than the overall, big picture theological level as before. So since individual verses in Colossians, 1 Peter, etc. told slaves to obey their masters, Hodge argued that the abolitionist movement was going against the details of the Bible. Meanwhile, abolitionists such as my Wesleyan forebears argued from the big principles of Scripture.

We see this same hermeneutic in play today with the question of women in ministry. Rather than an overall theology informing the whole meaning of the Bible as before, individual, "inerrant" trump verses are brought to play in debates. This was a shift in the way the Bible's truthfulness is approached.

In the late 1800s, B. B. Warfield continued to push Hodge's approach to Scripture at Princeton. He argued literal interpretation of the Bible against my holiness, revivalist ancestors. It was during his time that historical criticism and evolution were coming into play, and he made some early responses. He did not completely rule out evolution (it's hard for us to "feel" that there was ever a time when emotions weren't as polarized as ours are now).  Warfield also accepted a kind of dual authorship of the biblical texts, with the personalities of the authors being involved.

My key take-away here is that modern inerrancy originated in direct opposition to the values of the Wesleyan tradition of which I am a part.

Phase 4: Fundamentalist Inerrancy
The form that inerrancy took in the mid-twentieth century was a defensive mechanism against developments in science and biblical studies. It set down assumptions that created a wall against these perceived threats. No matter what science says, you can't believe in evolution. No matter what Bible scholars say, you have to believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is the codification of these fences. The CSBI assumes an evidentiary, modernist approach but only within certain boundaries.  If the evidence seems to be pointing in a direction that crosses one of the boundary lines, the evidence must be reinterpreted. This is analogous to the way the patristic fathers reinterpreted biblical texts but now it is the historical and scientific evidence that is reinterpreted rather than the meaning of the biblical text.

Phase 5: Evangelical Inerrancy Today
As the new book, Five Views of Inerrancy, reflects, evangelical scholars today have resorted to more complex understandings of inerrancy in an attempt to be faithful to the biblical texts themselves. Kevin Vanhoozer reflects the complications of genre (the Bible does much more than affirm propositional truths). Michael Bird points to the cultural-embeddedness of the whole American debate and pushes us in some ways back toward the ways the truthfulness of the Bible was understood before Hodge. John Franke reminds us of the "plurivocity" of the biblical texts.

Some thoughts after walking through the book...

Inerrancy Book Review (Part 2)

Yesterday, I largely looked at the critiques of Al Mohler's understanding of inerrancy in Zondervan's new Five Views of Inerrancy.  I had three major take-aways:

• Christians throughout the centuries have always affirmed the complete truthfulness of Scripture. When the Bible speaks, God speaks.
• However, the way in which Christians have affirmed the truthfulness of Scripture throughout the centuries is not exactly the same as the way the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI) affirms it.  Most of the authors in this book affirm inerrancy without equating it exactly with CSBI.
• The CSBI is a product of twentieth century American evangelical culture. It has cultural features.

I wish I had time to delve into the intricacies of each author's thought in this book, as well as the responses of each author. Alas!  I will go ahead and stretch out the review one more day, so that I can at least give a little more brain space to Kevin Vanhoozer and Mike Bird today. So my hope is to finish up tomorrow with Enns and Franke.

Kevin Vanhoozer
Vanhoozer is a class act. Like Franke, I don't think he goes far enough with the polyvalence of the biblical text. But V's version of inerrancy is brilliant in relation to the original meaning of the biblical text.

His fundamental insight seems completely indisputable: God did not just speak in the Bible to convey information. He spoke to communicate in several different ways (215). He is worth quoting: "God's Word can be relied upon to accomplish the purpose for which it has been sent, and when this purpose is making affirmations, it does so inerrantly" (223, italics his).

For V, infallibility is the broader category into which inerrancy fits. Inerrancy relates to those instances when God's purpose in the biblical text is to affirm cognitive truths. But God has many other purposes--commands, promises, perhaps even to give us an opportunity to lament or vent. Other words are more suitable to those purposes. Commands are authoritative. Promises are infallible. Laments are cathartic. Assertions are inerrant.

Vanhoozer here is appropriating the insights of speech-act theory. V advocates a "well-versed" approach to Scripture that "acknowledges that what is said is not always an affirmation" (220). Again, this seems beyond dispute. To limit, as C. F. H. Henry did, the basic function of language more or less to the cognitive and to making propositional assertions (214-15) seems almost an incomprehensible position today. Henry may have had a Spock-like personality, but he is clearly the exception among us mortals rather than the rule.

V quotes with approval David Dockery's 1986 definition, which presumably stands behind the wording of inerrancy that Asbury Seminary seminary uses: "The Bible, in the original autographs, properly interpreted, will be found to be truthful and faithful in all that it affirms concerning all areas of life, faith, and practice" (207).

Dockery and Vanhoozer are making a crucial distinction here.  Not everything "mentioned" in the Bible is the point, what was being affirmed. Let me provide my own example. The point of Paul saying he was taken up into the third heaven was not to make a statement about the structure of the universe. Frankly, the point was not even to say that Paul was taken into the presence of God. What the passage was affirming was that no one has the right to boast before God, and though Paul could boast more than his opponents, even he was nothing next to God.

To me, this is a far more defensible version of inerrancy than Mohler's. I'll leave V there. He has some other valid clarifications to make. For example, to take the Bible literally is not the same as literalism. To read the Bible literally, to V, is to read it in terms of what the author was actually doing with the text, which might not actually be literal.

Michael Bird
I think one of the biggest purposes Bird had in mind in his chapter was to put American cultural myopia in its place. His basic point is that global Christianity has been doing just fine with its own affirmations of the Bible's truthfulness and doesn't need to import America's baggage to become more informed and holy.

He spends a couple pages going through a host of affirmations about the Bible used in global Christianity.  None of them use the word inerrant. Even the Westminster Confession, the cornerstone of Reformed faith, affirms the "infallible truth and divine authority" of Scripture (161). The Lausanne Conference comes closest, "without error in all that it affirms" (162). Most, he says, use words like "infallible" and "authoritative."

He does not consider "infallible" a retreat from confidence in the Bible's truthfulness any more than Vanhoozer does. Rather, it takes "a view to the purpose for which God has revealed himself" (163). For Bird, that focus of revelation primarily has to do with Christ and God the Father. "The Bible was intended to impart knowledge of God as Creator and Redeemer, and under that premise, the Bible is completely true in all that it says" (163).

The actual word, "inerrancy" is a relative latecomer on the theological scene. J. I. Packer suggests it was not regularly used in this connection until the 1800s (162-63). Bird can live with it, although he agrees with Donald Bloesch that it is not the preferable word (172). He doesn't see a material difference between it and infallibility (163).

He clearly considers it rife with Americanism and takes a few opportunities to mock us for peculiarities we don't know we have. "Only American evangelicals use Scripture to argue against gun control, against environmental care, and against universal healthcare" (156).

He notes that we have transported our myopia here and there around the world with our enculturated missionaries: "I have met some peculiar Christians from Africa and Europe with oddly American beliefs about taxation, end-times theology, the King James Bible, and prescribed styles of worship" (145 n.2). He excludes these transplants from his description of the global church.

He has no interest in our debates over inerrancy. He sees it used primarily as a weapon in American circles, "a way of forcing conformity to certain biblical interpretations, and to weed out dissenters in denominational politics" (157). "Inerrancy is primarily a weapon of religious politics to define who is in and who is out."

In the end, like John Stott, he is not so much interested in formulas of subscription as in practical submission (165). "How we live under the Bible is the ultimate test of what we believe about God and the Bible."  By the way, elsewhere in the book, Vanhoozer notes that Stott, a British evangelical, was uncomfortable with the word inerrancy because it seemed to reduce the Bible to a set of propositions (200 n.2).

I hope to finish up tomorrow with Enns and Franke.

Five Views of Inerrancy (Book Review Part 1)

Zondervan was kind enough to give me an advanced copy of the new, Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy.  This is the first of two posts in review.

1. About ten years ago, before 9-11 had sunk in, I saw things exactly as Robbert Webber observed in The Younger Evangelicals:

Traditional evangelicals had fought to the death over inerrancy in the 70s. The boomer, pragmatic evangelicals, had largely not been interested in the subject because they were focused on church growth. Webber wrote of the "younger evangelicals" at the turn of the millennium, whom he believed were not interested in fighting over propositions but in focusing on the person of Jesus Christ and in making a concrete difference in people's lives in the world.

Since 9-11 we have seen a conservative backlash in America. The young, restless, and Reformed are on the rise, typified by the Gospel Coalition. It is no surprise that the debates of the 70s are resurfacing. Indeed, for good or ill, the Christian generation that was just coming to consciousness after 9-11 and during the Iraq War may eventually spit Webber's younger evangelicals out of their mouth.

Ironically, this Fall is also the 30th anniversary of the year Norm Geisler effectively pushed Robert Gundry out of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) over this issue, even though Gundry affirmed inerrancy. Gundry had written a fine commentary on Matthew but one that did not fit with Geisler's sense of inerrancy. The debate was not over the evidence. Geisler never contested the details of Gundry's interpretation! He simply believed an evangelical couldn't believe that there was Jewish midrash in the New Testament, a priori.

2. Of the authors in this book, I suspect only Al Mohler thinks that was the right decision. In general, Gundry's ouster is usually referenced as a blight on ETS and the low point of its history. Mohler is of course one of the ringleaders of the neo-Reformed movement. He is also the only one of the authors in this book who thinks the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI) is anything like a sufficient definition of inerrancy.

This is an important point. Three of the evangelical writers in this book, all benchmark evangelicals who believe in inerrancy, do not think the CSBI is the best standard by which to define it. A fourth author, Peter Enns, thinks the word "inerrancy" must be so qualified that it is ultimately counterproductive to reading the books of the Bible on their own terms. The take-away from these five authors is thus important because it means no one can assume that inerrancy = CSBI.

Four of the five authors believe that CSBI is a reflection of twentieth century American cultural categories. For example, Mike Bird, who strongly affirms inerrancy, is a stalwart evangelical. But he is also an Australian who taught for a time in Scotland. As an outsider to American culture, he finds the Americanism of Mohler's position all too obvious. This brings up a very important point.

Mohler's perspective may seem like common sense to many of us because we are American Christians. That is to say, the cultural dimensions of Mohler's approach are seen most easily from the standpoint of evangelicals outside North America.

3. Mohler's perspective on inerrancy requires us 1) to see his version of inerrancy as the only legitimate position for a Christian (believe it or effectively distrust God), 2) to see his interpretation of Genesis 1 as the only possible interpretation for a true Christian, 3) to read the stories of the Bible with the same general parameters with which we read historical texts today, and 4) to allow only for readings of authorial references in the New Testament that take them as part of the revealed point.

All four of the other authors in this book consider one or more of these presuppositions to be potentially problematic. All of the critiques of Mohler are quite strongly made, and here are a few of them.

Vanhoozer
Kevin Vanhoozer teaches at Trinity and has taught at Wheaton. He is an evangelical's evangelical. His critique of Mohler, however, sounds much like what we will hear from the others. "The Chicago statement is not quite the same proposition that the early church affirmed" (72). It reflects a development of understanding.

A second critique of Vanhoozer is that Mohler runs the risk of confusing his interpretation of the Bible for the Bible itself. The CSBI actually relates to a particular interpretation of the text and is thus open to dispute and scrutiny.

Bird
Mike Bird is an Australian evangelical. By the way, all the writers in this book are also Calvinists, reflecting the origins of modern inerrantism. (It is worth noting that the forebears of this modern form of inerrancy used a different hermeneutic than my church's abolitionist forebears, and they used their hermeneutic to argue anti-abolitionism from Scripture, just as Mohler uses a similar hermeneutic today to argue against women in ministry).

Bird agrees strongly with Vanhoozer that the inerrancy before the CSBI, ETS, and even the Princeton Calvinists of the 1800s was different from modern inerrantism, even if analogous. It is thus only a half-truth for Mohler to say that "inerrancy was the affirmation and theological reflex of the church until the most recent centuries" (56).

Bird has a problem with Mohler's "line in the sand," when Calvin and the Westminster Confession do not use the words "without error" any more than Fuller's doctrinal statement. "As a global evangelical, I could not find the enthusiasm to denounce as dangerous to the evangelical faith a person whose doctrine of Scripture is at its essence the same as my own."  The options are not as black and white as Mohler makes them out to be.

Franke
The unanimity with which all the other evangelical voices in this book critique Mohler is striking. Franke also notes that the sort of inerrancy affirmed throughout church history "was not that of the historical-grammatical interpretation, a literal reading of the Bible, and the CSBI" (77). This is part of the cultural myopia of Mohler. Throughout history, the truthfulness of Scripture often involved non-literal interpretations, which Mohler eschews.

For example, Clement of Alexandria considered the truthfulness of Scripture to come in part through allegorical meaning. (I have also pointed out that 2 Timothy 3:16 included non-literal understandings of the OT.) Franke's closing words in his critique mirror those of the others: "Might it be that the CSBI is more reflective of a particular set of North American hermeneutical and theological assumptions than is appropriate in light of the biblical narrative?" (81).

Enns
Enns is the only one in this book who has stopped using the word inerrancy, although he used to. His main critiques of Mohler have to do with his tone and the a priori nature of his assumptions. Mohler simply assumes that a true Christian will have the same views as he does. All evidence must be shoved into that mould, no matter what.  It is, according to Enns, a "strategy designed to insulate Mohler and his views from criticism" (60).

Enns has a couple other critiques of Mohler. One is that God revealed himself in the cultural categories of the biblical audiences. Thus the truth of the Bible was culturally embedded. Accordingly, there is a greater degree of progressive revelation in the pages of the Bible than Mohler would allow.

4. So what is good in Mohler's position?  Christians throughout the centuries have affirmed the complete truthfulness of Scripture.  When the Bible speaks, God speaks!  The debate is thus over how God has spoken that truth in Scripture.

Conclusion: One Wesleyan View of the Chicago Statement

It occurred to me that the somewhat scattered nature of my run through the Chicago Statement didn't really leave you with any real positive sense of what inerrancy might mean if one is not defining it narrowly in the manner of the Chicago Statement.

Here are the previous entries running through the Statement from a broader Wesleyan, rather than Calvino-Wesleyan perspective. Both perspectives can legitimately claim to be Wesleyan, although I would argue that a more open ended sense of inerrancy is more in keeping with the Wesleyan tradition in general.

1. Preface and Summary Statements
2. Articles 1-10
3. Articles 11-13
4. Articles 14-19

Where does this leave us?

The more general approach to inerrancy admits of degrees. One might, for example, allow for a little more looseness on the precise historicity of biblical stories. Yet one might still pretty much accept the biblical narratives as historical. To allow more room does not mean one will allow much more. Frankly, although most Wesleyans do not pay much attention to harmonizing accounts. I suspect most Wesleyans pretty much take the biblical accounts as they are.

And I suspect most Wesleyans, even though they don't focus much on the Bible in relation to science, probably have serious questions about evolution. And there are very few Wesleyan scholars who would see some biblical writings as pseudonymous, written under the authority of a dead figure from the past like Paul, Peter, or Daniel.

I suppose the biggest difference is the emphasis or attention. The Chicagoan tends to focus on these sorts of issues. They become defining issues. Most Wesleyans, as Wesley, the nineteenth century holiness writers, and indeed Christians throughout the centuries, have assumed these things. But there is a significant difference between assuming them and orienting one's approach to the Bible around them.

But let me tell you where I am at as a tracker of things hermeneutic. The very issue of inerrancy to some extent leaves me a bit speechless, because I think the very issue is raised on the basis of some fundamental confusion over how meaning works, particularly in relation to the library we call the Bible. I can think of three distinct ways in which the meaning of the Bible is inerrant and infallible.

1. There were the individual, distinct meanings of each book of the Bible, written at a time and place, addressing particular contexts, taking on meaning in a socio-cultural matrix of the past, in a flow of revelation.

So Genesis was written at a time and place. It seems likely that it was not simply written from beginning to end, but that sources were used, were edited. Were those sources inspired? Who used Genesis initially? If the book of the Law lay dormant in the temple for years, then I find myself wondering when books like Genesis became inspired Scripture. Was it at a point centuries after the writing? Was it when God led Jews to use it? The meanings it would have had from its inception to the time when Jews began to consider it Scripture are bound to have changed.

So when did Genesis first take on an inspired meaning, inerrant for God's purposes for a particular audience? We can say it was when it was first edited, but if it wasn't used for a few centuries later, when it would have taken on slightly different meanings, that inspired, inerrant, "original" meaning would have been directed at virtually no one. So was the first inspired meaning when it started to be used as Scripture?

Or was it the meaning it took on as Genesis became part of the Law, the Pentateuch, if indeed it was at a different time? Or was it the significance Genesis took on in the late intertestamental period? Was the meaning Genesis had as interpreted in the book of Jubilees (ca. 160BC) inspired for the Essenes of that day?

Or is the inspired meaning of Genesis the meaning it had for the New Testament authors, which is quite different from its original meaning at some points. Paul's allegory of Hagar and Sarah would have been unrecognizable to any Jew from Genesis' writing to the time of Christ.

Can you see why the question, "Is the Bible inerrant?" leaves me with a puzzled look on my face. It presumes, Moses sat down one day and wrote Genesis and was thinking the same things that Paul was when he read Genesis, which is what my pastor preached this morning. The question of whether the Bible is inerrant must yield to the question of what meaning of the Bible is inerrant.

Certainly, in God's hands, Scripture always accomplishes what God wants it to do (it is infallible) and anything God wants to communicate through it is true (it is inerrant). But the question of the Chicagoan seems a question founded on such a vast misunderstanding of the situation that I hardly know what to say. "Yes," I answer, like if my son asked me whether a touchdown is better than striking out.

2. The Christian meaning
This is where we are in Christian hermeneutics, the recognition that there is a Christian way of reading the Bible as a whole. Many evangelicals are moving in this direction, although Protestant baggage makes it hard for many to go the whole way. As a child of the nineteenth century holiness movement, I'm already there knowing where it's headed.

The problem with the canonical approach of a person like Brevard Childs or Kevin Vanhoozer is that they have difficulty recognizing that the organizing principle of a canonical reading of the Bible as a whole cannot ultimately come from the texts themselves. The texts in themselves are diverse and thus are susceptible to multiple canonical readings. What this means is that we cannot read the Bible as a unified whole without some "control" outside the biblical texts themselves.

And for this, we must look to the Christian lenses that developed in reading Scripture in the centuries following the writing of the New Testament itself. This is the bridge evangelicals find so hard to cross. But it is a hermeneutical necessity. You can either acknowledge that you read the Bible in the light of Christian glasses, as I do, or you can pretend you do not--and of course read the Bible this way anyway. Those of us who read the Bible as a unified book have a "rule of faith" that we use to organize its material.

Evangelicals and Protestants do not get their theology from the Bible alone and never have. There are rules, as we saw in relation to the NIV translation. In short, there is a reading of the Bible that Christians have actualized on the basis of common Christian tradition throughout the centuries.

Have there been variations? Certainly. Does there seem to be a commonly agreed core including things like the Trinity, creation ex nihilo, the Fall of Satan, etc? Yes. There is a Christian way to read the Bible as a whole. It is different from the original meaning of any one passage, although hopefully there is a strong degree of continuity with various parts.

Is this Christian meaning infallible, insofar as God uses it in His Church? Absolutely! Is this Christian meaning inerrant, insofar as God communicates through it to His Church? Absolutely!

You can see how far removed this "more than literal" use of Scripture is from the minutia of the Chicagoan, who is worried about jots and tittles of the original meaning of verse x. In that sense, the Chicagoan focus is worried about moss at the base of some tree in a forest over which the canonicist is flying in a helicopter.

3. Personal and Group Inspiration
And the Holy Spirit can and does speak to us as individuals, groups, and even denominations. He quickens the text, makes it become the word of God to you and me personally. Whatever He does with the text, it will not fail to be done (infallible). And whatever He communicates to you and I, it will be true (inerrant).

In short, Scripture is a sacrament of revelation, a divinely appointed meeting place between God and us. God can speak through anything, including a street sign. But He has set these words of Scripture aside especially as a place to meet with us, to make the ordinary words--like the ordinary water of baptism or the ordinary bread and wine of communion--to become the word of God.

So Scripture was the unfailing word of God to the varied contexts to which God has spoken through it in the past, and it becomes the unfailing word of God as God speaks to us through it today.

One Wesleyan view of Chicago Inerrancy Statement 4

I'm glad this is almost over, trying to contrast a broad Wesleyan understanding of inerrancy in contrast to a narrower, more Calvinist Chicago Statement of inerrancy. There are some Wesleyans who are happy with the Chicago Statement, and they are legitimately Wesleyan. There are others for whom the word inerrancy should not be specified too much, because there are many specifics we can disagree on while still affirming the authority and truthfulness of Scripture.

Here we are so far:

1. Preface and Summary Statements
2. Articles 1-10
3. Articles 11-13

Getting very close now...

Article 18: Grammatico-historical exegesis is the bomb... no treatment or quest for sources that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching or rejecting its claims to authorship.
I've decided to go slightly out of order today. Article 18 is, in my opinion, is another potential example where Chicagoans say one thing and seem to do another. There is lip service given to "grammatico-historical exegesis," which at least aims at the original meaning. But whenever the pursuit of the original meaning hits a bump, the normal rules of exegesis are suspended and a clean up crew is called in.

What is grammatico-historical exegesis? It's a name I frankly didn't hear at Asbury or at Southern Wesleyan. I must have read it somewhere during my Wesleyan education, although I couldn't tell you where. I first really heard it used as a polemical term in a blog debate I had with a Reformed pastor from Michigan who called himself, "Once a Wesleyan." In other words, as a lifelong Wesleyan who went to a Wesleyan college and seminary, got a PhD in New Testament, and taught for about 8 years at a Wesleyan college--then I first really heard this Calvinist term.

I can use the term if you want me too. In my mind the phrase means interpreting passages using a knowledge of grammar and historical backgound. It is a phrase, again, with a fundamentalist Calvinist ethos surrounding it. Those who use it, as we might expect, mean more than what I just said, just as they mean more when they use the word inerrant.

In my mind, it should differ not at all from the "historical critical method," which is often blasted as filled with heinous "higher criticism." OK, fine, I'll call the method "historical-cultural method" then. In the end, those who use these phrases all claim to mean the same thing--trying to read biblical texts in their literary and historical contexts.

The phrase reminds me of a quote from Melanchthon, which says that exegesis is nothing more than the application of grammar to the biblical text. And of course Melanchthon is absolutely wrong! Exegesis does involve grammatical analysis, but words only have meanings in contexts. "Context is everything." Take away the "historical" part and you inevitably are substituting yourself and your traditions.

And thus so many of those who use this method, John Piper or Wayne Grudem, for example, are really practicing grammatico-fundamentalist-tradition exegesis. Piper makes this clear in his critique of Tom Wright's view of justification. It is not historical background but Reformation tradition that he uses as the context of his exegesis.

You can tell from Article 18, that "grammatico-historical" is meant to distance exegesis from "source criticism." Source criticism is the investigation of sources behind certain biblical documents. The word "criticism" is unfortunate, for all it means as far as I'm concerned is that you are making decisions (kritikos) about things.

Source criticism of the gospels does not seem to be too controversial a thing, where the dominant hypothesis is that Mark was written first and then Matthew and Luke used it as a skeleton, along with some other source of Jesus' sayings. For the Chicagoan, source analysis of the gospel cannot be used to "dehistorize" anything. This seems to me a straight jacket for a gospel scholar, and I don't think I am smart enough to pull it off if I were at a Wheaton or Moody.

Let me just give a small example. Mark 6:1-6 tells of Jesus' rejection at Nazareth. It has the key line, "What is this wisdom... Is not this ... the son of Mary, brother of..." In Mark, the incidence is narrated after the healing of Jairus' daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage and before the sending of the 12 and the telling of John the Baptist's death.

In Matthew 13, the setting is slightly different, although the same elements are all nearby. We have similar key words, "Where did this man get wisdom... Isn't this the son of the carpenter? Isn't Mary his mother...," which tells us we are looking at the same story. As in Mark, the telling of John the Baptist's death follows.

But in Matthew it comes right after Jesus talks about parables (which in Mark is chapter 4) and material on the mission has come further back in Matthew 10 (instead of just after in Mark). The healing of the daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage are back in Matthew 9.

It boggles the mind to suggest that these are different events where the chronology is not quite the same as Mark. I'm sure there have been extreme Chicagoans who have suggested such, but we have the inescapable conclusion for anyone interested in truth that Matthew and Mark simply do not narrate Jesus events in quite the same order--which means at least one of them is less historical at certain points than the other.

I doubt most of us care. Most Wesleyans don't. I doubt most Chicagoans do in terms of this story, although the Calvinist Lindsell might have back in the day.

The real questions come then when we get to Luke. In Luke, Jesus begins his ministry in Nazareth. It's the "inauguration" scene where he picks of the scroll and reads, "The Spirit of the Lord is on me." If I remember correctly, my NIV Study Bible doesn't list Luke 4 as a parallel to Mark 6. Why? Because it is significantly different from Matthew and Mark in its historical setting.

Let me play this out a little so you can see that "higher criticism" was not just a bunch of anti-supernaturalist, evil kooks ripping up the Bible. Luke 4 has very similar key lines to Matthew and Mark. They are amazed at his gracious words (i.e., his wisdom) and say, "Isn't this Joseph's son?" So we have in Luke 4, as in Matthew 11 and Mark 6, an initial contact of Jesus with Nazareth and an initial reaction to Jesus of amazement because he grew up there and a rejection of him.

Source criticism would say that these are three versions of the same event, especially since the general conclusion is that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke used it. But there are a number of potential "dehistorizations" in pursuing this line of thought. Luke has a rather expanded scene that he uses to set the tone for Jesus' entire ministry. Did Matthew and Mark not know this? Or was Luke novelizing the story a bit to bring out the essential nature of Jesus' ministry, putting it as the first event as a kind of keynote message?

All that is to explain the "dehistorizing" potential of looking at sources and supposed oral traditions behind the gospels. The Chicagoan says you just can't go there, even if normal reasoning makes a bee line for a certain conclusion. The Chicagoan insists on this because truthfulness to this person is connected to historicity. I believe this is a faulty standard. Who said that truth equals historicity? I don't know the answer to the Luke 4 question for sure, but the story stands true as one summary of Jesus' good news either way, even if Luke novelized what in his sources was a very bare bones event.

Source analysis of the gospels has generally been more allowed than source analysis of the Pentateuch. I can only think of two reasons: 1) the fact that Jesus refers to Moses material and thus raises the question of Mosaic authorship and 2) because Pentateuchal criticism hit the fan first. This gets us to Article 16 where we indeed will argue that fundamentalism and the inerrancy movement of the mid-twentieth century was a reactionary response to negative higher criticism.

So the suggestion that there are strands of sources behind the Pentateuch, wielded by German hands not experienced as faith-full, was experienced as a challenge to Christianity in the 1800s. Today it wouldn't have to be. I see the negative reaction to it largely a product of the circumstances in which it was introduced, including the shock of Christian thinkers who were caught completely off guard.

But again, when you place the Abraham stories that use Yahweh in one column and the Abraham stories that use Elohim next to each other, it's awefully easy to wonder if these are different versions of the same story. I was more than happy to go into New Testament--and to spend my time in Paul and Hebrews--so I didn't have to worry about these sorts of things.

Maybe there are reasonable answers to such questions from the Chicagoan side. I used to insist that there had to be. But I wasn't smart enough to figure them out. And though many smarter than I have suggested ingenious walk arounds these sorts of things, their suggestions often seem more in the category of possible rather than probable.

What I'm about here is openness. I'm not insisting anyone change their conclusions on the specifics above. But I wonder if the Chicago statement shuts down legitimate discussions and potentially negates any claims we have to being people of truth. The stories of Genesis, in my opinion, can be poetic and true, and God can speak through them no matter how poetic they are. Parables are not historical and they are true. As I've said before, error is a question of standard and target. What was God aiming at? Certainly He hits the target every time.

Article 15: Jesus' teaching of Scripture cannot be dismissed...
Absolutely. But what did the Chicagoans mean by this statement? Did not Jesus speak in the language and categories of his audience? If not, how would they have understood him?

I read recently of the Wesleyan expectation of righteous living. In a brilliant analysis, someone said that we 1) have a lower sense of what God's standard is but 2) have a higher sense of His expectation that we keep it. This plays itself out in relation to Jesus. We as Wesleyans believe that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can be "tempted in every way, and yet be without sin" (Heb. 4:15), just as Jesus.

These words, of course, are used in Hebrews of Jesus. But because we believe Jesus was truly and fully human, we do not believe that the life he lived, also under the power of the Holy Spirit, is a life that we cannot live also, by the power of the Holy Spirit. The implication with regard to Jesus is as I have just shared: 1) we potentially have a lower sense of Jesus' earthly perfection and yet 2) have a higher sense of the potential for us to keep it.

This dynamic might consistently play itself in our understanding of Jesus' knowledge on earth. Clearly he was not omniscient on earth, for he did not know the day or the hour of his return (Mark 13). Presumably Jesus did not know he was the second person of the Trinity at the age of 12, perhaps not even that he was the Messiah until his baptism. In order to be fully human, he had to submerge his omniscience somewhere that his conscious mind would not choose to access it. It is hard at least for me to imagine that Jesus in his human understanding did not come to knowledge of such things as he walked through life in communion with the Father.

The purpose of this small thought on Wesleyan Christology is to argue that we would not need to suggest that Jesus' knowledge of the world was absolute in order for him to be completely sinless. Indeed, it is hard for us to believe that Jesus was fully human if he was not capable of forgetting where he left his car keys from time to time. These are thought experiments and I do not put them forth as anything but thoughts--they may be wrong and I welcome being shown that they are. But as the Calvinist has an incorrect standard for sin--anything short of absolute perfection (cf. the faulty NLT translation of Rom. 3:23)--so I would argue the Calvinist Chicagoan might have an incorrect standard for Jesus' earthly knowing.

Article 16: Inerrancy has been integral to the Church's faith forever, not invented by scholastic Protestantism or a reactionary position in response to negative higher criticism.
Here we get at an incredibly crucial point and a sore spot for the Chicagoan. I have heard strong reactions to the idea that fundamentalism was a historical reaction to late 1800s higher criticism and early 20th century modernism. The Chicagoan sees himself preserving what the Church has always taught.

And they can make a superficial case because Christians over the centuries have indeed tended to assume that the details of the text were historical. But here's where I wonder these thoughts involve a faulty understanding of how meaning and language work. Let's call it the picture theory of language.

In the picture theory of language, words tend to correspond to things, like a picture in a bubble above your head when you hear the word. In that sense, words are tied down to specific meanings in a rather simple way. Translation becomes correlating sounds to the bubbles above your head. You think that Greek or Hebrew simply give you different words for the same bubbles.

In my opinion, this is Newtonian semantics and it underlies a lot of the Chicago statement. We basically then expect that the New Testament reads the Old Testament with the same bubbles over their heads, that the Christians of the ages did, and that we today do.

The quantum revolution for me here came from Wittgenstein. His basic understanding of meaning is far too obvious to question. Meaning is a function of the way words and sequences of words are used. In other words, they take on meanings in specific concrete contexts, cultures, and symbolic universes. These meanings aren't keyed to some Platonic bubble, and words rarely translate from one language to another with the same precise connotations.

The Chicagoan sense of meaning thus seems flat, two-dimensional. This is true no less of its sense of 1) what the words meant in contrast to what they mean to us, 2) what words in one part of the Bible mean in contrast to what words in another part mean, and 3) in what the word inerrancy means to them in contrast to what similar words throughout church history might have meant. More on #2 in the next article.

What I am saying is that it doesn't matter whether you can find words in Wesley where he talks about errors in the Bible or if you can find places in Christian writers where they assume the historicity of various details. The real question is whether these statements "did" the same things in those contexts that the word "inerrancy" did in the mid-twentieth century.

Certainly the flavor of the Chicagoan seems colored by the fundamentalist modernist controversy. I raised this question at the symposium. Clearly the late nineteenth century holiness authors operated with a different hermeneutic from Stephen Paine. I'm not qualified at this point to say exactly what all the differences are. But I raised the question to point to at least one conclusion we will certainly draw from the comparison--whatever sense of error they might have had, it wasn't the same.

I thus find myself shaking my head at the Calvinist Harold Lindsell when he protests that Christians have always believed in inerrancy, even though the word comes from nineteenth century Reformed thinkers who themselves arguably used the word differently than Lindsell himself. I shake my head like a modern physicist reacting to someone insisting that Democritus knew about the atom in the 400s BC because he used the word atomos in relation to a fundamental building block of the world.

Article 14: Affirmation of the unity and internal consistency of Scripture.
Here is another point of contradiction, I believe, within the Chicagoan hermeneutic, enabled by a faulty view of language. It says it wants to read individual passages in historical context. Yet it wants to read individual passages in a canonical context.

Kevin Vanhoozer has been on a pilgrimage from a focus on the original meaning of the Bible toward seeing the Christian meaning of Scripture as a matter of the whole of the Bible as a divine speech-act. I think I know where this line of thought will end, although I wonder if Vanhoozer will ever take the final step.

I as a child of the nineteenth century holiness movement was easily able to take the final step long before Vanhoozer as a Reformed evangelical. The final step is to recognize that there is necessarily a discontinuity between the meaning of the words of the Bible when read canonically--in the light of the whole--and the meaning of the individual books read in their historical-cultural context. This follows naturally from the fact that meaning is a function of context, and a canonical context is simply a different context from the varied original ones.

But the long and short of it is that the Christian reading of Scripture is really the canonical one and it seems to me light years away from the Chicago Statement and its priorities. Reading the Bible as a whole with Christian glasses is such a fundamentally different way of reading it than the Chicagoan preoccupation with precise authorship, correlation to specific scientific positions, and questions of authorship. It seems such a monumental step backwards to focus on these things at this point. A canonical reading of the Bible allows us truly to read the Bible the way Christians really have throughout the centuries and yet without ignoring genuine issues raised by historical criticism. Read canonically, those issues don't go away. They just become largely irrelevant.

Article 17: The Holy Spirit does not operate in isolation from or against Scriptures.
I've already pointed out that the Wesleyan tradition is more open to pneumatic exegesis than the Calvinist Chigagoan would ever be. There's a great quote in Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text that well fits this article of the Statement--the Spirit can blow when He wills but He cannot blow wherever He wills. In other words, the Spirit can't make the text mean something it didn't mean before.

Poppycock. The Spirit can do whatever He wants, including making the biblical text mean things it never did before. The word "against" is pretty strong and I would not use it of such new meanings. But certainly contexts can differ enough to where Holy Spirit inspirations can appear to go against biblical teaching.

In general, the Spirit is first a matter for the Church at large and only secondarily for the individual. In that sense, drastically novel leadings I would expect to be confirmed on a massive scale. I think the Spirit did that with slavery where, although not exactly in contradiction to Scripture, but going beyond it, the Spirit led not only Christendom but the world to abolish it. The same movement is underway in relation to the empowerment of women. Such things do not go against Scripture although they go beyond where it ended (I would argue they are still on its kingdom trajectory nonetheless).

Article 19: Signing is not necessary for salvation but it is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of Christian faith.
Not necessary for salvation, absolutely. Vital to a sound understanding? Some Wesleyans will say yes. Some Wesleyans like myself will say that it focuses on issues that, at best, are tangential to what is important (which is hearing God speak through His word) and at worst skew the very nature of the Bible, set up our children for faith crisis, and (possibly) reflect poorly on God as a God of truth.

One Wesleyan view of Chicago Inerrancy Statement 3

Previous posts looked at:

1. The Preface and Summary Statements
2. The first ten articles

This morning I want to look at 3 more articles of the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. My purpose is mostly "in house" for my church, The Wesleyan Church, although I am glad to dialog with others. My claim has been that some Wesleyans legitimately understand our affirmation of inerrancy to be defined in relation to the kinds of things the Chicago Statement affirms and denies.

At the same time, I argue that many Wesleyans, including most of our Bible scholars and denominational leaders, legitimately have a more general sense of inerrancy, not limited to the specifics of the Chicago Statement. My argument has been

1) that the very term "inerrancy" entered into our tradition from the outside as somewhat of a foreign (Reformed) body in our tradition, a cultural artifact of the mid-twentieth century largely at the urging of a single individual. Of course Wesley was only a "hair's breadth" from Calvin, so there can be such a thing as a Calvino-Wesleyan. I'm just not one of them :-)

2) that The Wesleyan Church has never connected its use of the word to the Chicago Statement, a statement that, again, is primarily a product of Calvinist circles (who have emphasized it, who signed it, where its original is kept, etc...) and that the vast majority of Wesleyans have never heard of it, and

3) that from my perspective it is a good thing we aren't limited to it, because the statement itself functions on the basis of a number of oversimplifications that at least seem debatable.

Wesleyans affirm that the Bible is inerrant, but there are those for whom this is a technical term and there is the vast majority where this is a general affirmation of the authority and truthfulness of God's word. I am not an "errantist," nor am I a "pick and choose-ist," nor am I a "only becomes the word-ist."

But I am a hermeneutist. Error is a function of intent and purpose, not of measurement against some supposed absolute, timeless, and universal framework of truth, not least that of a collection of mid-twentieth century white males in defensive mode against encroaching cultural threats. And every part of the Bible--including its statements on faith and practice, on things pertaining to salvation--was revealed within the categories of its original audiences at a particular point in the flow of history. And we cannot be fully evangelical in our beliefs unless we allow for the continued outworking of the significance of Christ in the church beyond the pages of the New Testament.

Articles 11-12
The 11th reiterates the truthfulness of Scripture and has nothing really objectionable in what it explicitly says. It is in what it specifically implied for these individuals, as I've said. Similarly, #12 distinguishes infallible and inerrant but does not consider them incompatible. OK, fine.

Here let me do a rare thing and compliment Kevin Vanhoozer for his distinction between what the terms inerrant and infallible might mean. "Infallible" for him means that divine speech acts in the Bible accomplish what they set to do. "Inerrant" then is restricted to those instances where the purpose of the divine speech act is to communicate truth, in which case such claims are true.

I think these are fine definitions that Wesleyans can adopt. They are sufficiently broad that they allow for us to have a discussion about what exactly the function of various Scriptures are as divine speech-acts, as well as of what communicative speech-acts are meant to affirm. These definitions thus allow for the sophistication of a quantum discussion, while also accommodating the Newtonians among us.

The problem in my opinion is that such breadth of possible meaning undermines the very purposes of raising these terms by the "Chicagoan." The Chicagoan wanted nothing of this sort left open for vagueness or discussion. Indeed, the very purpose of these 19 articles was to nail down the boundaries of what is allowed so that we can tell clearly who is in and who is out, what is true and what is not.

And so no doubt among Wesleyans there are those who think we already know the answers to all the key questions and that allowing for discussion of those questions will only bring harm. And there are Wesleyans who wonder if the answers are more profound than previous generations anticipated and, in any case, see closing off our minds to the questions--especially in our current context--to be a grave mistake for the faith of our children and for our witness to the world around us.

Article 13
This article affirms the "complete truthfulness" of Scripture and then says what it is not worried about in this regard. I don't find anything to object to in this statement except what these authors were thinking when they said "complete truthfulness." The lawyer like mentality of the article's writers shows up here:

"Complete truthfulness" for them is not negated by 1) lack of modern technical precision, 2) grammatical or spelling irregularities, 3) observational descriptions like sun rise, 4) reporting about falsehoods, 5) hyperbole and round numbers, 6) arranging material in a topical fashion, 7) varying selections of material in parallel accounts and 8) free citations.

See what fascinating attention to detail these scholars had! But you can also read between the lines to what they did not think would be "completely" truthful. Here are the issues they had in mind:

1. historicity
#7 above allows that the gospels have "selected" different material from the life of Jesus. But it would be very clear from the Calvinist Harold Lindsell's Battle for the Bible that it was important for these signatories that you be able to harmonize the four gospels on the level of historical detail. By the way, Paul Rees--son of one of the founders of the Pilgrim Holiness Church--wrote the Preface to the evangelical Jack Rogers' response to Lindsell's fundamentalist approach.

You've heard no doubt the old story of four people on different street corners describing an accident and conflicting a little on the details. I haven't found that analogy very helpful for a long time now, not least because only one of the gospels claims that it comes more or less directly from an eyewitness (John; Luke claims indirectly). Even if we go with traditional authorships (the first three gospels are anonymous and John never tells us who the Beloved Disciple was), only Matthew and John would be eyewitnesses.

But more to the point, it is not clear to me, from comparing the gospels themselves, that their primary function was to relate history, although certainly in my mind this was one of their purposes. Their primary functions were to proclaim and teach Christian faith (Matthew, Mark), to defend Christianity in relation to despisers and doubters (Luke-Acts), and to bolster the faith of a particular Christian community (John 20:31). They engage with history to do these things, but they are not written primarily to document history.

Here is where the Chicago Statement says something very profound that I do not believe it carries out. It says, "We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose." Ironic--that's exactly what I would say. The problem is that, when it comes to specifics, we differ on what that "usage and purpose" was in some cases. I would say the standards of truth and error they largely brought to bear on the Bible were modern standards.

I do not think that precise historicity, to where we need to worry about harmonizing the details of material relating to history, is an appropriate standard. Indeed, such harmonizations almost always create "fifth" accounts that differ from the actual accounts more than they differ from each other. This is typically (that is, in the hands of a Chicagoan) an ironic practice that ends up disregarding what the individual accounts say in deference to someone's idea of what they should say.

Here is the bottom line for me and most: I have found it impossible in my pea brain mind to accommodate the historical standard of the Chicagoan and to listen to each gospel, to Acts and Paul, to Kings and Chronicles, etc. So I have chosen to listen to the Bible rather than to this cultural artifact of the mid-twentieth century. I listen to the Gospel of John when it seems to say Jesus was crucified the morning before Passover. And I listen to Matthew, Mark, and Luke when they seem to say Jesus was crucified the morning after. The Chicago Statement, ironically, would require me to ignore one or the other and find some ingenious and far fetched, usually hilarious scenario that, in the end, would do violence to all the gospel accounts.

Thus, in my opinion, far from respecting Scripture, in practice the Chicago Statement will consistently require me to do violence to Scripture, to rip it, to rape it, to cut things out--all ironically in the name of a high idea of the Bible. The approach deconstructs itself because it requires me 1) to ignore Scripture to sustain it and 2) it makes a mockery of our claims to be interested in truth. You tell me which approach truly loves the Bible more! Is it the one that is willing to listen to its most likely interpretation or the one that frequently forbids you to let it say what it seems to say in the name of some "high idea" of it?

2. scientific matters
The topic of evolution seems to have been a driving force in the origins of fundamentalism. As I've mentioned before, the problem for many at that time was not so much the question of Genesis as 1) the outworking of social Darwinism in society and 2) the fact that evolution was a tool used against Christianity. Nevertheless, I don't want to pretend that I do not find it hard to fit evolution with my faith. There are real issues here, I think.

The problem for me on the other side is that the overwhelming majority of those who know the evidence and the history of the scientific discussion are united on the topic from a scientific standpoint. And as far as bias is concerned, it seems overwhelmingly clear to me that it is we Christians who have a clear presupposition influencing our conclusion far more than that of the evolutionists themselves. Evolutionists come from incredibly diverse contexts and thus can't be lumped together into some monolithic conspiracy theory or anti-supernaturalist framework. They operate in a conflictual world and thus might actually be motivated to disprove each other on this issue if they could to make a name for themselves. And evolutionists include among their number a good many Christians who have a vibrant faith.

I'm simply not qualified to pass judgment on such issues scientifically. But I find it deeply problematic to tell a Christian scientist that he or she simply cannot go there because of a particular reading of Genesis 1--and one that seems to divorce it from its near eastern context at that. I've said before that the real biblical problem with evolution is not Genesis 1 but Genesis 2 and 3, as Romans understands them. I've heard some ingenious suggestions by theistic evolutionists here. But my basic point is that, if we are really interested in truth like we say we are, we had better be very careful about what discussions we close off here out of hand. How many grad students in biology, genetics, paleontology, geology, etc. do we consign to potentially irresolvable faith crises in the process--especially when you and I are not qualified to judge the evidence scientifically?

I wonder if the view of Genesis 1 that arose in the 1970s by Calvinists like Henry Morris and Duane Gish (yes, they signed this statement) would have looked familiar to generations of Christians before them, let alone to ancient Israel. Yes, I went to their debates in the 70s and 80s. Yes, I was cheering them on. I was somewhat disappointed--even though I was rooting them on. Even as a high school student longing for them to go in for the kill (against Kenneth Miller), I found them surprisingly unconvincing (kept quoting philosophical statements of evolutionist rather than getting down to the evidence). I wanted to get up and take over for them because I thought they were messing it up.

My grandfather--who was almost certainly more conservative than anyone reading this blog--was sympathetic to the gap theory, which the Calvinist group of Chicago signers would find abhorrent in their literalness. The gap theory is the idea that Satan fell between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 and that then God started all over again in 1:3. He might have put the dinosaurs in between the first two verses. My point is that Morris' approach is not the only conservative Christian or Wesleyan one. It is one, just not the only one.

A literal reading of Genesis 1 has God separating the waters above from the waters beneath and then putting the sun, moon, and stars in between. Is that what we must believe? You go straight up past the sun and stars before finally getting to primordial waters at the top of the creation? It certainly isn't the pretty picture on the cover of Henry Morris' Scientific Creationism! At the very least, we must surely consider Genesis 1 to be somewhat poetic.

My point is not to argue for evolution, not at all. My point is to leave this question open for scientists of faith and theologians of faith to continue to explore. Are we really so sure we know what God thinks on these issues and intended to say in these biblical texts? If so, on what basis? On the basis of an interpretation that doesn't even try to read what these texts would have likely meant at the time they were written but blindly reads them as if they were written today in the context of an evolution debate?

3. genre matters
A key issue for the Chicagoans was that when Jesus referred to the books of Moses, or said "Isaiah says," or when 2 Peter says "Peter to x, y, z," that we must take these as literal attributions in order for the Bible to be truthful. In other words, we must conclude that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, that Isaiah wrote chapters 40-66, and that Peter literally wrote 2 Peter.

In my opinion, the first two issues are more significant than the third, although probably more people get bent out of shape over the third. In class I privilege literal authorship, but I have a hard time understanding why it would contradict inerrancy to say that, for example, Ephesians is an inspired encapsulation of Paul's thinking on the unity of the church directed at the churches of Asia a couple decades after his death. What if everyone knew this at the time? How would that be lying or untruthful? It would be a genre thing.

But them's fighting words. Fair enough. I don't understand. Inerrancy is not a matter of how something looks to us but of how it looked to them when it was inspired. Anyway, not something I'm interested in fighting for.

I understand the Moses and Isaiah issue better, because of how Jesus refers to them. The question is whether this was just the way people referenced these books and Jesus was following suit. Or is it necessary for us to assume that Jesus would not have spoken in the categories of the audience in a way that was not actually the way it happened?

In terms of the books themselves, however, we can understand why the issue came up. The Pentateuch itself does not say Moses wrote it. Genesis doesn't mention him, and Exodus through Deuteronomy refer to him in the third person, not as if he was writing it. It even narrates his death. In terms of listening to the Pentateuch itself, it is not telling us that Moses was its author any more than Jesus is the author of the gospels because he is the main person they are about.

In Isaiah, the prophet is not mentioned after chapter 35. Chapters 36-39 are almost word for word identical to four chapters in 2 Kings. The last 26 chapters picture a time several centuries after Isaiah. These chapters themselves--which would have been on a different scroll from the first chapters--are not worded as prophecies of the distant future. They do not present themselves as prophecies from Isaiah about two centuries later. The issue is the packaging (that the book as we find it in our Bibles has the heading, the vision of Isaiah) and the fact that Jews at the time of Christ referred to Isaiah as the author, including Jesus.

I consider this a very serious question, because it has to do with Jesus. So do we ignore the very rules the Chicago Statement itself endorses--the "grammatico-historical method"--when it comes to situations where one part of Scripture refers to another part in a certain way? From the standpoint of inductive Bible study, we would not conclude that Moses authored the Pentateuch. But the Chicagoan assumes that if Jesus referred to this material as from Moses or Isaiah, they must have been the author.

The difference between them and me is that I'm not sure I want to assume Jesus would not have used the conventions of his day in referring to these books. It is a question of whether we, in the name of truth and the Bible, are willing to allow for a broader range of intent by God rather than restricting it to a more narrow literality. Again, the Chicagoan wishes to end the discussion. In my opinion, the broader inerrantist is more interested in what is true. He or she does not preclude the position of the Chicagoan on a particular issue--indeed, because we are interested in the truth we must be open to them. But I personally think it does little to say we are about the truth if we aren't open to the evidence at hand.

Well, that's too much already so I'll have to do one more post. Sorry. I don't really enjoy the topic. I just thought this was an appropriate time to clarify yet another thing I appreciate about my church and its wisdom in not closing down discussions like this one. We don't specify how to baptize or what end time view you have to have. We insist you live a righteous life by the power of the Holy Spirit, that you truly love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, that you do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with your God, that you fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the all of humanity.

Nope, nothing in there about the 5 points or the Westminster Confession or the 39 articles.

One Wesleyan view of Chicago Inerrancy Statement 2

In the previous post I mentioned the Preface and Summary parts of the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. I think all Wesleyans can wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of the Preface and most of the summary statements. The point of debate has more to do with the concrete playing out of the summary statements into concrete specifics. Some Wesleyans will agree with the specifics. Others such as myself think they have too superficial an understanding of meaning, culture, and genre. Both can be venerable Wesleyan perspectives.

The third part of the Statement is where it gets into specifics. 19 affirmations and denials. Today I want to start looking at them.

1. The first is an affirmation that the Scriptures are the authoritative Word of God and a denial that they receive their authority from the Church, tradition, or any human source.

I agree. I do pick up the subtle assumption that the text has had a relatively constant meaning from its origins till now. From my perspective, that is a Newtonian assumption in a quantum world. The question of whether the Bible is authoritative really pales before the really hard question, namely, what meaning of these texts is authoritative.

2. Scriptures are supreme. The authority of the Church is subordinate. Creeds, councils, declarations are of lesser authority.

Given the assumptions of the authors, I agree. I think the "Church" here is understood in a political sense--the political bodies of church history, not least the "Catholic church." I certainly do not think any political church holds such authority, and the creeds and councils are still political statements. In my opinion, however, when these authors say "Scriptures," they really mean the Bible read Christianly, the Bible read as Christian Scripture. They would disagree that they meant this, but in my opinion they cannot see their own glasses and how those glasses color their perspective.

From my point of view, these sorts of statements involve subtle but significant misunderstandings of language. It poses as contradictory options things that, on deeper examination, I believe are virtually the same. I'll agree to it in the same way I agree when my son says something like, "So it's better to score a touchdown than strike out, right Dad?" What I'm thinking, though, is that he's a little confused.

In my opinion, so many of the meanings these signatories themselves found so authoritative in the text of Scripture were themselves products of their own Christian tradition. The signatories would deny that this is the case, but they do not properly see themselves, in my opinion.

The NIV is a wonderful example of the "say one thing, do another" dynamic I see necessary for this hermeneutic to sustain itself.

Say: We are listening to the Bible. Our interpretations come from the plain sense of the text. We are under the authority of the text and not letting the Church have a higher authority.

Do: Let's translate "form of God" as "very nature God" so the full divinity of Christ is not in question (Phil. 2:6)--is "shape" really the same as "very nature"?! Let's translate "firstborn of creation" with "firstborn over creation" (Col. 1:15) so there is no question of whether Jesus is created or not. Let's add a word out of nowhere to "did not give" so it reads "did not just give" (Jer. 7:22), even though there is no such word in the Hebrew--we don't want to leave any question about whether Leviticus was written at the time of the exodus. Let's add another word out of the blue so that "to the dead" reads "to those now dead" so there is no room for the dead being saved (1 Pet. 4:6)--Protestants don't believe such Catholic ideas. Again, let's take the word "entirely" out so that we give no room for a completely allegorical interpretation in 1 Cor 9:9-10.

Most of these moves have no clear basis in the text and seems in each case to be motivated overwhelmingly to maintain the perspective of the neo-evangelical tradition, thus deconstructing the fundamental claims of this hermeneutic. When push comes to shove, those of the Chicago Statement approach consistently trump the most obvious meaning of the Bible with evangelical tradition, in my opinion.

The Church is something more profound and Spiritual than any of the specific creeds or councils... and the Church led by the Spirit is already assumed in much of what the crafters of this Statement call the "Scriptures."

3. ... is directed against those who only consider the Bible a "witness" to revelation or who are Barthian saying it only "becomes" revelation or that it depends on human response for its validity.

I don't maintain any of these things in the form attacked. I believe each book was a moment of inspiration to its original audiences. I believe that the Bible was the word of God, even though the Holy Spirit does make it "become" the word of God regularly beyond the original meaning (they were attacking Barth in this one). So I won't spend any time on this one.

4. God uses language for revelation. Our creatureliness/fallenness does not "thwart" it or make it inadequate.

I agree. However, I see no way that our creatureliness and enculturatedness does not make revelation relative to a particular framework. The authors of the Chicago Statement might have denied this. I see no way around it. All language is cultural, even though some elements might appear in every culture.

5. We affirm progressive revelation... but later revelation does not correct or contradict it... and no normative revelation since the Bible.

But what about the "eye for an eye" rule that Jesus rejects or the allowance for divorce that Jesus says was a concession to Israel's sinfulness and not God's plan. What about Jesus' sacrifice as the end of the sacrificial system--I personally can't see that Leviticus was expecting this at all. Look at what Paul does with the Sabbath Law. And I think Arius had a pretty good bibilical case for a view of Christ a little less than Athanasius was looking for. The debate was not settled on the basis of the Bible alone.

I just don't think things are as nice and neat as the Statement makes them out and I'm really worried about a paradigm that, rather than trying to follow the most likely interpretation, expends its energies and ingenuity trying to explain away difficulties.

6. Total inspiration. OK, but let's see what they meant.
7. Not just human insight. Indeed!
8. God used their personalities, didn't override them. Yep.

9. Inspiration did not confer omniscience on the authors, but enabled them to speak trustworthy. Their finitude or falleness did not introduce distortion or falsehood.

Yes, trustworthy to the target of what God was trying to say to their particular audiences at a particular time and place. But such revelation at a time and place will rarely apply to many other times and places with equal directness or poignancy.

10. inspiration a matter of autographs, but it has been transmitted faithfully.

Yep. Not an issue... although, I would not preclude the possibility that God at some times and places has spoken through texts that were not the original text. The Chicago paradigm finds this idea problematic. The Wesleyan, because of our affirmation of the Spirit, should be quite comfortable with this possibility.

The Chicago paradigm would find this lying on God's part. Surely He could not be a truthful God and speak as if a particular verse or wording were in the original. But this is such a misguided understanding of truth. When we humans always believe many things about the world that are not correct, God could hardly speak to us at all if He did not start with our understandings, even though He knows they often aren't quite right.

This distinction gets at the heart of the difference between the two understandings of inerrancy I am discussing here.

One Wesleyan view of Chicago Inerrancy Statement 1

The recent symposium on a Wesleyan hermeneutic at our church headquarters confirmed what I have said here before. The Wesleyan use of the word inerrancy is not limited to the way that word is used in other circles, like the Evangelical Theological Society, which is tied to a statement made in the late seventies called the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy.

I suspect most Wesleyans have never heard of it and would be pretty unaware of those discussions that were a really big deal for a few Wesleyans at Houghton and Asbury from the 1950s to the late 70s. Bob Black argued at the recent symposium that the term itself is somewhat of a foreign body of Reformed influence in our polity (see symposium site above and where I easily found the Chicago Statement online :-). But it was vigorously and successfully pursued politically by one key individual of the day, Stephen Paine of Houghton. And of course everyone voted with him each time he brought it up. After all, whether you had a clue about what he was wrestling with in his world, who in their right mind would vote for the idea that the Bible has errors?!!

But the Wesleyan Church has mostly been focused on church growth, health, and multiplication these last 30 years rather than on ideological matters. This of course is true of broader evangelicalism as well, as Webber tracks in The Young Evangelicals. There are of course a few Wesleyan scholars who still track this debate and for whom the more narrow definitions are important. Their understanding of inerrancy is clearly one venerable Wesleyan option. But I suspect that the Calvinist Greg Beale, formerly of Calvinist Wheaton and now of Calvinist Westminster Theological Seminary, is way too late in his attempt to turn twenty-first century evangelicalism back to mid-twentieth century evangelicalism.

I thought I might take a couple posts to look at the Chicago Statement from another venerable Wesleyan perspective, one that I would argue fits better with the spirit of the Wesleyan tradition historically. I think all Wesleyans will pretty much agree with the summary points of the statement in general. The Devil is in the details and in the specifics of how this particular group of first generation neo-evangelicals understood them. In other words, we may disagree some on the way they unpacked their basic points.

As far as I can tell, there was only one Wesleyan out of the some 360 who signed the statement in 1979 (the original is kept at Dallas Theological Seminary, again, a Calvinist institution :-). That was Wilbur Dayton, who taught at Asbury at the time, I believe. By that time the Wesleyan Theological Society had already taken the term inerrancy out of its bylaws because of the kinds of details it was usually taken to imply.

Those Wesleyan Methodists in 1950 and Pilgrims in 1968 who agreed to the term "inerrant," I would argue, would have affirmed the basic sentiments as I do. But they did not get into the weeds of the concrete issues that these signatories were concerned with. Our denomination has never had those debates because they are off focus from what is central to our tradition, and our denomination has never connected its use of the term inerrancy to the Chicago Statement.

Preface
There were several comments I think are great in the Preface:

1. "We acknowledge the limitations of a document prepared in a brief, intensive conference and do not propose that this Statement be given creedal weight"

2. "We offer this Statement in a spirit, not of contention, but of humility and love"

3. "We invite response to this statement from any who see reason to amend its affirmations about Scripture by the light of Scripture itself"

I appreciate the deep spiritual motivation of this preface and the kind spirit with which it was offered. Take this comment: "We gladly acknowledge that many who deny the inerrancy of Scripture do not display the consequences of this denial in the rest of their belief and behavior, and we are conscious that we who confess this doctrine often deny it in life by failing to bring our thoughts and deeds, our traditions and habits, into true subjection to the divine Word."

I think this comment gives some good insight into the thinking of this group. They were concerned about the slippery slope to faithlessness that they thought would happen if they did not take a strong stance on these particular issues. Of course the practicalities of slippery slopes are a different issue than what is actually true.

Short Statements
Here are my thoughts on the five short summary statements:

1. God inspired Holy Scripture... Holy Scripture is God's witness to Himself.

Yes, certainly. The complication is that it was God's witness to Himself so that the Thessalonians could know Him in their categories, to various settings of ancient Israel so that they could know Him in their categories, etc. I believe that the second and third generation of evangelicals have matured over time in understanding the implications of context in a way that the first generation did not fully appreciate. The greater sophistication of the TNIV over the NIV is a nice embodiment of this maturation.

In a theme I will no doubt express throughout this series, the problem with the Chicago Statement is neither its spirit nor its basic affirmations. It is that it underestimates the profundity and complexity of God's Truth. God is smarter than it accounts for, in my opinion. It is a statement of arithmetic in a glorious God-created world of calculus. It was a group of faithful white men (I spotted maybe 5 women in the 360 signatories and of course Edwin Yamauchi represented non-North Americans ;-) doing their best to keep faith in a world where things which at one time had been assumed, were being seriously undermined by the scholars of various fields.

2. The second summary says something very similar to what Asbury's statement of faith currently says. The Bible is to be believed in all that it affirms, obeyed in all that it requires, and embraced in all that it promises.

Absolutely. The point of potential disagreement is in what the Bible affirms, commands, and promises. The Chicago Statement goes on to define these things rather narrowly. In my opinion, it still has a rather simplistic understanding of meaning and context and thus continues to assume more or less that instructions to one time and place might easily transfer to all other times and places with an equal relevancy and poignancy.

Asbury decided in the 80s that it was not going to fight over the finer points of inerrancy and adopted a broad statement that, in my opinion, fits the ethos of the Wesleyan Church on this issue. In other words, Asbury's understanding of inerrancy is not tied to the Chicago Statement either. And since Asbury was the primary Wesleyan seminary up until the founding of a new seminary at IWU, its position clearly fits within the Wesleyan umbrella.

3. The Holy Spirit authenticates Scripture by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

Absolutely! Indeed, this statement sounds characteristically Wesleyan in terms of our holiness tradition. The problem of course is that the Chicago statement does not understand this statement in a characteristically Wesleyan way. The nineteenth century holiness interpreters understood the Spirit's speaking potentially to be a "more than literal," spiritual meaning the text could take on. Similarly, Wesley understood the Spirit to inspire understandings of the text for us in a way similar to how He did the original inspiration.

The Chicago Statement means nothing of this sort. In fact, all the signatories would have soundly rejected this characteristically Wesleyan hermeneutic. Here we must insist that the Pilgrims were a product of the holiness revivals where this hermeneutic dominated. And the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Church returned to Methodism after the Civil War. The Wesleyan Methodist Church would have ceased to exist in the late 1800s if it had not reformulated its identity around the holiness revivals of the late 1800s, using its hermeneutic.

We have not John Wesley for our father, but Phoebe Palmer for our mother! I do have a fundamentalist/old school evangelical older brother that I love, but my personality is closer to my parents than his is (and I use the word his intentionally).

John Calvin's illumination of the reader of Scripture is not quite the same as John Wesley's inspiration of the reader of Scripture. The Chicago Statement is built on Calvin's model and does not allow for as much as Wesley's or that of the nineteenth century holiness revivalists. In the same way, the Wesleyan view of inerrancy has more room in it than the fundamentalist or old school evangelical approach does.

This is a crucial point. Clearly any spiritual interpretation God breathes through the text of Scripture is inerrant. But that's hardly what Stephen Paine was talking about or would have affirmed at Houghton in the mid-twentieth century. He was thinking historical meaning of the texts in their original contexts

4. The basic sentiment of the fourth summary statement is to affirm Scripture to be without error in its statements about God's acts in creation, the events of world history, and its own literary origins--in addition to its statements about God's saving grace.

Here we get to the crux of the matter. What exactly was God doing when He revealed the books of the Bible? Did God speak in absolute disclosure in the manner of a work of philosophy or science? Or did God sometimes speak poetically or poignantly to its original audiences? If God spoke poignantly to the original audiences, He would no doubt have spoken in the light of their assumptions, many of which would not be our assumptions today about reality.

This is the heart of the debate. Nobody would accuse the Parable of the Prodigal Son of error because it is a fictional story. Are there other places where the "genre" of biblical literature, taken broadly in a somewhat metaphorical sense, has left us with texts that surely should not be said to be in error (for they hit God's intended mark) but that work on the basis of assumptions that we would not affirm today (like the sun going round the earth or the dead being under the earth).

5. ... is basically the same as #4. "The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded."

The word "total" as they meant it is is highly problematic, for it assumes that there is such a thing as statements in human language that can be removed from human categories, can still be understood by humans who only can think in human categories, and can still be relevant and poignant to day to day life. In that sense, the Chicago Statement is just as modernist as the modernism it sought to cope with... and is ill equipped to speak to the Bible's authority in a twenty-first century context.

Next post--the specifics the 1979 signatories understood by these general statements.