what God is doing (and has done) among his people. As the power of these cases grew over time, in a recognizably Kuhnian fashion, a sense of unease impressed upon me until finally a cumulative case obtained and the inerrancy paradigm came crashing down. I surmise that my initial adoption of the inerrancy paradigm has had severely deleterious effects upon my personal spiritual formation.
My notion of spiritual formation involves that continual growth in faith that propels “baby Christians” from being infants to becoming more developed spiritual and intellectual beings. I have in mind especially that time when one is undergoing that formative intellectual moment that spans a Christian’s educational pursuits. It is during these times that inerrancy faces its darkest hours. Being challenged from every quarter, open to friendly and unfriendly fire, how devastating to watch the holy book go down in flames without event! The Word of God, “errors” and all, burns to a lifeless heap of ashes before one’s very eyes. If that were not bad enough, the faith, in its entirety, is often presented in such a way that without an inerrant Scripture, there is no faith at all. And without faith—especially now that it has been tasted (Heb 6.4–6)—there are very few places of refuge for a younger evangelical in this condition.
But these younger evangelicals should be spared! I, personally, found myself woefully ill-prepared for engagement with critical scholarship during my biblical and theological training—and that at conservative schools. All but a spiritual degenerate I became as I bungled each encounter with biblical criticism. Retrospectively, I candidly reckon that the experience could not be wholly explained by some unacknowledged, unconfessed sin(s) on my part; much rather it was the inerrant view of Scripture that caused those intensely painful days of spiritual confusion.11 The real motivation behind this book is that it took me ten years of searching simply to recognize this; two years and counting to consider what to do next. There is no reason for anyone or anyone’s students to endure those same ten years, or longer, in existential purgatory. In fact, it is precisely so that others who are in (or will soon find themselves in) similar circumstances might be spared that extended sense of existential angst that I offer the present treatise.
In what follows I seek to illustrate why the dogma of inerrancy is unhelpful to younger evangelicals and why evangelical leaders should either discontinue its dissemination or begin supplementing it with acceptable, alternate theories. I realize that the paradigm of inerrancy is one that reigns sociologically and psychologically in both conspicuous and latent ways in evangelicalism-at-large. Nevertheless, conservative evangelicalism, in particular, would be (especially in the long run) immeasurably helped by its decline or, at the very least, its supplementation. Adapting Noll’s observations, made some fifteen years ago for the purposes of expressing the younger evangelical’s contemporary plight: evangelical scholarship’s failure to “[make] plain the ramifications of narrow academic questions for larger matters of belief” has proven “especially damaging [for younger evangelicals] because their community combines high expectations in regard to the Bible’s divine character with relatively little appreciation for the study of the Bible’s human phenomena.”12
Among conservatives there persists the widespread perception of the Bible as the errorless Word of God. Admittedly, there is great spiritual comfort to be taken in a Bible that is inerrant, yet I have experienced firsthand that if and when this comfort is shaken, it feels as if the faith is irretrievably lost. This sense of lost-ness is so great that evangelical leaders and teachers should be taken to task for not better preparing younger evangelicals for its contingency as part of their spiritual responsibilities. Noll once warned that “[e]vangelical scholars . . . need to take more pains, not less, in showing the relation of their research to larger issues of belief.”13 Fifteen years and hundreds of thousands of pages later, very little progress has been made in this area. If the requisite skills for “the ordering of research within larger intellectual contexts”14 have not yet been acquired by evangelical leaders and teachers, then for the sake of the spiritual welfare of the younger generation of believers, inerrancy views of Scripture should not be inculcated to them as a foundational issue or, at the very least, presented as but one of several acceptably orthodox views. Perhaps, other views of Scripture are not affected by the six recognitions that follow, but the Evangelical Theological and Philosophical Societies’ dogma of an inerrant, original Bible will too often fail younger evangelicals when they are in need of it most.15 Evangelical leaders and teachers should begin taking more responsibility for the possibility that if and when a younger evangelical disavows inerrancy he or she may see no choice but to lose faith entirely.16
I do not suppose that my experience can be wholly blamed upon the acceptance of methodological naturalism or any comparable, non-Christian worldview.17 I have heard remarks to this effect on many occasions. My response to the worldview strategy is given in Recognition 1: “Evangelical Worldview Philosophy Is ‘Corrupting’ Youths.” This opening section is an attempt to loosen the hold that worldview philosophy seems to have on evangelical leaders, teachers, and students. It is based on a paper that was presented at the 2004 Civitas Conference, “After Worldview: An Interdisciplinary Conference” at Cornerstone University, Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am very grateful for the positive feedback that I received from several evangelicals who appreciated the suggestion that evangelicalism may be suffering from worldview addiction. Since evangelical apologetic efforts tend to begin immediately with worldview considerations, I thought it best to open this work with a reflection on the limits of worldview philosophy. For sometime now it has been said that what one pre-understands will influence one’s reading of Scripture, but cannot the act of reading the Bible itself and trying to discover what it in fact is—especially in light of what scholarship has found regarding the Bible, its history and its cultural milieu—cause the already ETS/EPS pre-understanding of a younger evangelical to change to an un-ETS/EPS understanding? Although the debate has been ongoing for the better of one hundred years, evangelical leaders and teachers have still not prepared themselves (or much less admitted to themselves that it can and does happen among their students) for this pastoral contingency.
Recognition 2 is a philosophical deliberation on the prevalent expression of the inerrancy doctrine of Scripture and its effects on how younger evangelicals envisage that evangelical scholarship should be done. In this chapter, I specifically exegete the EPS doctrinal affirmation. I argue that intrinsic to this evangelical understanding of “the Bible” lurks an ambiguity, an ambiguity that leads to equivocation in EPS-type formulations of Scriptural authority. The ambiguity is then exploded in light of Second Temple hermeneutical practices. I conclude that evangelical teachers and leaders should provide alternate images of evangelical believing criticism.
The main argument of this chapter was presented as a talk given at the 2005 Civitas Conference: “After Evangelicalism” at Cornerstone University. After the talk, two professors from different evangelical institutions commented to me that they could not imagine raising these potentially critical questions about inerrancy—or publicly taking any steps whatever to critically examine the doctrine. Considering that evangelical churches and institutions hold to inerrancy tooth and nail or at least something very close to it18 and that there would very likely be some negative repercussions for evangelical leaders and teachers in their respective universities/seminaries/organizations for raising questions in the first place, how were they to even broach the subject? Perhaps the broader pragmatic argument of this book can help encourage more candid discussion. An earlier version of the second chapter was published online as “Scriptural Authority and Believing Criticism: The Seriousness of the Evangelical Predicament,” The Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 3.1 (2005): http://www.philosophyandscripture.org/Issue3-1/Bovell/Bovell.html.
Following
