as part of the deposit of faith.”44 In short, worldview philosophy can and should be supplemented, allowing younger evangelicals a broader horizon for their evangelical theorizing and greater latitude in intellectual discourse generally.
Younger evangelicals should not be dismayed if there ever comes a time or an occasion during which they happen to espouse a “worldview” that raises questions that are precluded by more accepted paradigms for conceiving Scripture. It is merely part of the course of wrestling with the mysteries of the faith and stretching oneself to conceive how they might impinge upon everyday living. Religious worldviews will have fuzzy bounds on account of their religious nature and a common way for evangelicals to work through them is by shoring up their faith in Scripture by introducing equivocal connotations to the word “Bible.”45 To help us better see this, let us expound upon the case of the believing biblical scholar which was considered only cursorily in the present chapter.
1 Please recall that “evangelicals” in this work refers to those evangelicals of whatever denomination (or non-denomination) who align themselves according to their views of Scripture with the Evangelical Theological Society, the Evangelical Philosophical Society and other like-minded affiliations.
2 As Gregory A. Clark calls it in “The Nature of Conversion: How the Rhetoric of Worldview Philosophy Can Betray Evangelicals” in The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation. (ed. T. R. Phillips and D. L. Okholm; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), 201–218. Though worldview emphases in non-evangelical philosophy have for the most part run their course, evangelical worldview philosophy, though initially posited about a century ago, has only recently taken root within evangelicalism-at-large.
3 Chuck Colson, “Prison Ministry and Worldview: A Match Made in Heaven” Jubilee Extra (June 2004): 7.
4 That is, giving them bad advice or leading them astray. See Plato’s The Apology of Socrates.
5 James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog. 3rd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997), back cover.
6 Sire, Universe, 16.
7 Chuck Colson, “Prison Ministry and Worldview: A Match Made in Heaven” Jubilee Extra (June 2004): 7.
8 J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003), 13.
9 Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 2.
10 Note the rhetorical appeal in the idea of the Christian worldview, for example, in the apologetic work, To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview (ed. F. J. Beckwith, W. L. Craig and J. P. Moreland; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004). Much better is Moreland and Craig’s Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. An observation that cannot be pursued here is that it is often assumed that a biblical worldview (or the biblical worldview) and a Christian worldview (or the Christian worldview) are identical. Not only can it be a tenuous road that connects the former to the latter, it is sometimes an unbelievably arduous task to establish the former in the first place. I set out to illustrate in upcoming chapters that biblical studies is not so easily domesticated.
11 How to relate the divine and human, as we shall see in chapters three and four, is a basic dilemma that perpetually plagues evangelical views of Scripture.
12 Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
13 See chapter V of the Westminster Confession (1646) in Creeds of the Churches: A reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present. (ed. John H. Leith; Louisville: John Knox, 1982), 200.
14 As did Amyrald. Quote is from Philip Schaff’s exposition, Creeds of Christendom, 1.481.
15 Ben Witherington III has found occasions to fault Calvinism, Dispensationalism and Wesleyanism for not being able to satisfactorily account for the diversity of biblical data in The Problem with Evangelical Theology: Testing the Exegetical Foundations of Calvinism, Dispensationalism, and Wesleyanism. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005). Compare Trevor Hart, “Systematic—In What Sense?” in Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation. Scripture and Hermeneutics 5. (ed. C. Bartholomew, M. Healy, K. Möller, and R. Parry; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 341–351.
16 William Dembski, for instance, actually counsels readers to cry, “Perplexity!” when faced with an irresolvable error in Scripture. See his essay, “The Problem of Error in Scripture” in Unapologetic Apologetics: Meeting the Challenges of Theological Studies. (ed. W. A. Dembski and J. W. Richards; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), 79–94, 93–94.
17 W. V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. Rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 9.
18 Quine, Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 9.
19 William Hasker, “The Antinomies of Divine Providence” Philosophi Christi 4.2 (2002): 361–375; Kenny, The God of the Philosophers, 121.
20 Quine, Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 9.
21 See S. Reiss, “The Sixteen Strivings for God” Zygon 39.2 (2004): 303–320.
22 Perhaps in an analogous way to that in which “[a]rithmetic is not sufficient to prove its own consistency.” (J. N. Crossey, et. al., “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems” in What is Mathematical Logic? [ed. J. N. Crossley, et. al.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1972; repr. New York: Dover, 1990], 45–58, 57.) Compare John Webster’s diagnosis in Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11. The conclusion that Christianity is unable to solve its own problems reaches at least as far back as Nietzsche.
23 Cited in W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), 181.
24 Donald A. Crosby, “The Character of Pragmatic Historicist
