Theology Today - Vol 37, No. 1 - April 1980 - ARTICLE - 'The Battle for the Bible' Rages On

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"The Battle for the Bible" Rages On
By Donald W. Dayton

"Evangelical" and "fundamentalist" controversies over scriptural authority and biblical inerrancy seem endless. The issues that recently split the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod are now surfacing in the Southern Baptist Convention. Fuller Theological Seminary seeks to throw off the yoke of older fundamentalist categories and incurs the wrath of former faculty member Harold Lindsell, until recently the editor of Christianity Today (the mouth-piece of the post-World War II "neo-evangelical" coalition). And most ominously, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy has launched a decade-long program of "education" and "consciousness raising." Under such pressures, purges are being initiated, and the struggles go on.

Harold Lindsell, first in The Battle for the Bible (Zondervan, 1976) and now in his sequel The Bible in the Balance (Zondervan, 1979), would have us believe that the issue is clear and simple-a basic struggle between an orthodox Christianity affirming the inerrancy of Scripture and an heretical capitulation to modernity accepting biblical criticism. He sees his own feud with the new Fuller as the third in a series of great struggles over biblical authority that began with the heresy trials of Charles Briggs in the late nineteenth century, and includes the conflicts at Princeton that produced Westminster Theological Seminary at the height of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. Lindsell clearly points to issues still troubling the church, as is evidenced by the ferment in contemporary biblical studies and the variety of recently proposed "post-critical" methodologies. But Lindsell's analysis is highly simplistic, and one of the most hopeful signs that the impasse of this dicussion may sometime be transcended is the shift in recent evangelical writing to questions of historical development, philosophical assumptions, and issues of hermeneutics.

Lindsell bases his argument on two historical assertions. He insists, first, that his understanding of biblical inerrancy has until the rise of criticism been the normative doctrine of the church, and secondly, that any departure from that concept inevitably leads to gross transforma-

Donald W. Dayton is Librarian and Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Lombard, Illinois. He is finishing his doctorate in the theology department of the University of Chicago Divinity School and is the author of Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (Harper & Row, 1976), as well as other books and articles

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tion of Christian faith, for him symbolized by the Unitarian/Universalist tradition.

The dominant emerging response to Lindsell goes after the first assumption and concentrates on the impact of the old "Princeton Theology" best represented by Charles Hodge whose doctrine of biblical inerrancy was most influentially articulated by B. B. Warfield at the turn of the century. Other traditions have articulated parallel doctrines of inerrancy, but none has had such wide impact. In his Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 1972), Claude Welch comments that this theology "became a haven sought (properly or not) by all sorts of conservative revivalists and fundamentalists in the face of the threats of biology and biblical criticism." In that development may be found the roots of the recent "neo-evangelical" coalition and the theological tradition in which Lindsell stands.

Some evangelicals have long questioned the claim of this theology to represent the "church doctrine" of biblical authority, but this objection to Lindsell has now been given definitive statement in The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (Harper and Row, 1979) by Fuller theologian Jack Rogers and his student Donald McKim. Drawing on Rogers' earlier work on Scripture in the Westminster Confession (Eerdmans, 1967) and doctoral work by McKim at Pittsburgh Seminary, the authors challenge the claim of the old Princeton theology to have grasped the spirit of the "central Christian tradition" on Scripture, whether the early church, the classical Reformation, or even the Westminster Confession of Faith. They suggest that early Princeton was led astray by over-dependence on Turretin and his brand of Reformed scholasticism.

Only time will tell what Rogers and McKim have actually achieved. Their book is so organized around the discrediting of the old Princeton theology that it will probably not serve as a fully nuanced and balanced history of the question after present debates fade into the background. Its positive proposals are limited, emphasizing a recovery of the proper scopus of Scripture (its salvific intent), a renewed emphasis on the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit rather than external evidences, and the reassertion of a doctrine of divine "accommodation" in the inspiration of Scripture. Thus the book will likely provide primarily a stepping stone on which certain evangelicals will rest and gather courage before plunging into deeper waters. But if it does that-and gives pause to those sharing Lindsell's historical reading-it will have made a contribution.

The challenge to Lindsell's second assumption-the inevitable and progressive decline into apostasy of all who forsake inerrancy-is being challenged from a different quarter: those conservative revivalists who in some cases sought refuge in Princeton during the last century. Various groups, especially descendants of the Pietist protest against post-reformation scholasticism, are rediscovering and reaffirming their own pre-fundamentalist traditions of a strong conviction of the authority

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and power of the Scriptures without the characteristic scholastic themes. Gerald Sheppard of Union Seminary in New York has attempted to make this case for Pentecostalism in recent issues of Agora. Even more to the point was the installation address of New Testament Professor Alex R. G. Deasley at the Nazarene Theological Seminary a couple of years ago. He attempted to disassociate his church from Lindsell by tracing a consistent century-long polemic against inerrancy, which predated the beginning of Lindsell's history of struggles. Other groups are doing the historical spade work that will provide more counter-examples that show, contra Lindsell, the maintenance of orthodoxy without the inerrancy doctrines, at least in their fundamentalist form.

As these historical questions are being discussed, it is becoming increasingly clear that the issue is not so much the authority of Scripture itself as the particular conceptual framework through which it is being defended. As advocates of inerrancy hone their formulations in response to growing defections, they reveal that the fight is really over a series of theological claims: that biblical authority (and issues like canon) depend on a strong doctrine of inspiration; that in inspiration the divine action is so determinitive as to insure a flawless product; that human language is capable of conveying divine revelation unqualified by either finitude or human sin; that revelation is primarily propositional; that the Scriptures are a collection of propositions awaiting systematization; that the Bible is so directly a product of a single divine mind that any form of inconsistency is precluded.

These assumptions are all extracted from the "Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy" (1978), soon to be fully defended in a series of papers edited by Norman Geisler as Inerrancy: The Extent of Biblical Authority (Zondervan, 1980). But even more moderate advocates reveal similar assumptions. Though he has attempted to disassociate himself from Lindsell and the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, Carl F. H. Henry, founding editor of Christianity Today, carries some of the claims to an extreme in his five-volume theology entitled God, Revelation and Authority (Word, 1976-1983?). Rather than the traditional form of a sytematic theology, this work takes the shape of a philosophical defense of fifteen theses central to the position. Indeed, his just-published third and fourth volumes (1979) treating these questions articulate a worldview in which the fundamental category is "propositional revelation." Henry quotes approvingly his mentor Gordon Clark to the effect that "the word truth can only be used metaphorically or incorrectly when applied to anything other than a proposition" (III, p. 429) and reveals the ahistorical character of his position in concluding that "the Bible is a propositional revelation of the unchanging Truth of God" (III, p. 457). Increasingly the debate will center on the appropriateness of such statements.

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At the same time, increasing attention is being given to the philosophical conditioning of more classical defenses of inerrancy. Rogers and McKim suggest in their book the distorting influence of Scottish Common Sense Realism on Hodge and his followers. A similar case is made by John C. Vander Stelt in Philosophy and Scripture (Mack, 1978), his dissertation at the Free University of Amsterdam. Among the theses prepared for his defense and examination, the first was: "Implied in the Old Princeton view of Scripture is an uncritical acceptance of Common Sense Philosophy."

In a related development, Tim Phillips, a doctoral student at Vanderbilt, has suggested in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation (June, 1979) that most inerrancy advocates assume an "epistemological foundationalism" that sees "genuine knowledge" obtainable only from a "foundation of apodictic certitudes." Phillips finds this position indefensible-exegetically, theologically, and philosophically, but clearly something like this is at work when the Evangelical Theological Society maintains discipline by requiring annual subscription to only one article of faith: "the Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written, and is therefore inerrant in the autographs." The point is not so much the statement itself as the way it functions in a larger worldview-one that is being increasingly called into question.

III

Accentuating the growing unrest is the increasing awareness that commitment to the position of the Evangelical Theological Society does not help much in discerning the meaning of Scripture. In Evangelicals at an Impasse (John Knox, 1979), Fuller graduate Robert Johnston agonizes over the lack of evangelical agreement on such basic issues as biblical authority, the role of women in the church, social ethics, and homosexuality. Johnston's book is not only a good survey of the present diversity of evangelical opinion but in a curious way reveals the strange ambivalence of evangelicalism itself. He defines "evangelicalism" at the beginning of the book by its commitment to sola Scriptura authority, but by the end argues for a plurality of theological sources, though all, of course, subject to Scripture. Unwilling to break with older paradigms of biblical authority and obviously fearful that lack of strict consensus will discredit biblical authority itself, he suggests that theology is an "art" that will find a variety of forms expressed by persons of different sensitivities in a variety of cultural contexts.

Evangelicals at an Impasse thus indirectly suggests that the issues in the future will increasingly be seen as hermeneutical. From one perspective, post-fundamentalist evangelicalism arises out of an ahistorical mode of thought that attempted to hold off in the nineteenth century the relativizing impact of the rise of historical, psychological and sociological ways of thinking. As endless concern over "situation ethics" reveals, a basic issue has been the fear generated by the erosion of "absolutes." But it has been the debates over the role of women especially that have

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pushed evangelicals toward a new understanding of the historically conditioned character of the Scriptures and the problems of application across millennia of social change.

Real struggle with these issues is emerging in what might be regarded as an unexpected place, the Fuller School of World Mission. There the insights of the social sciences (especially anthropology) are being most fully incorporated into theological reflection on "indigenization" and related missiological issues. Thus it is in a book like Christianity in Culture: A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Orbis, 1979) by Fuller anthropologist Charles Kraft that the assumptions of Henry or the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy are being challenged most radically. For Kraft the Bible is the "divine casebook" or standard by which God's continuing process of revelation is discerned. While Henry argues that human language was created to enable divine communication, Kraft finds it "increasingly obvious from a study of the actual form in which the Scriptures have come to us that God has not perfected the form of the linguistic vehicles in which his Word is presented to us." Thus Kraft rejects the common analogy to the sinlessness of Christ, arguing that "imperfection is to scriptural language as sin is to Spirit-led human beings � neither is perfect. "

The future shape of discussion is not entirely clear, but such questions will no doubt push evangelicals closer to mainstream hermeneutical debates. One early sign of such movement is a work by British New Testament scholar Anthony Thiselton entitled The Two Horizons (Eerdmans, 1980), an eagerly awaited consideration of the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics from Heidegger and Bultmann to Gadamer and Wittgenstein that appears to be the most significant wrestling with this tradition by an evangelical. Thiselton is perhaps less radical in his innovations than Kraft, who at times appears theologically naive, but he does use Wittgenstein's "language games" formulation to argue that such biblical concepts as "faith" and "truth" are polymorphous and that no one paradigm (such as the "propositional") can handle all cases. I expect that Thiselton will help shape the future discussions of evangelicals to a striking degree.

What does all of this mean for the future of the American church? Primarily, it means a crisis point in the development of American evangelicalism and the collapse of the post-World War II evangelical coalition. As Martin Marty commented on the publication of the first of Carl Henry's recent volumes, such a Summa often marks the end of an era. For many, the old intellectual paradigms are dead, and the search is on in neglected traditions and new sources for more adequate models of biblical authority. Many are bemoaning the threats to evangelical unity. I am more inclined to celebrate tensions that will lead to a new period of creativity and vitality that will not only produce new theological

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proposals but also permit the emergence of new theological and eeclesiastical alignments.

The attacks on Fuller are, in effect, accelerating its movement toward a more centrist position that will blur the older lines of debate. Similarly, innovative evangelical scholars pushed out of the Evangelical Theological Society are being forced to find new arenas for their work. In recent years the Institute for Biblical Research has been founded, consisting of evangelical biblical scholars who find the ETS too confining and who wish to work in close conjunction with their colleagues in the Society for Biblical Literature. Likewise, the new Evangelical Theology Consultation (1979) within the American Academy of Religion serves a similar function for theologians and historians no longer at home in the ETS.

Such developments in evangelical academia foreshadow the future in the life of the church. Such mixing up and diluting of older polarizations will help erode what is left of the old "two-party" system in American Protestantism bequeathed us by the fundamentalist/modernist controversy-especially as we see rethinking in such other areas as the social witness of the church. Dialogue may become easier across old lines as the evangelical search for new paradigms of biblical authority becomes more genuine, creating a greater mutuality that may make evangelical contributions more palatable. At any rate, the current discussions bear watching by all. The landscape will at least be radically altered, and we may be able to see intimations of a more profoundly ecumenical future ahead for the American church.