Читать книгу Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals - Carlos R. Bovell - Страница 5

For all the hype over the interface between postmodernism and evangelicalism and over the advent of “post-evangelicalism,”1 there remains a sizable constituency within evangelicalism that continues to affirm that the Bible is the Word of God and is therefore inerrant in its autographs. Within this broad slice of conservative evangelicalism I have observed a sort of disconnect among evangelical teachers and leaders between a desire to be doctrinally faithful and a desire to responsibly look after the spiritual formation of the youth under their care.2 Too often, evangelicals presume that by striving after the former they automatically achieve the latter; however, in some cases, this could not be further from the truth. Although it would not be fair to assume that all conservative evangelicals fit this mold, certain strands of conservative evangelical theology and philosophy contain insidious doctrines that hamper and, in some cases, stunt the spiritual formation of younger evangelicals. The term, “younger evangelicals,” was recently used by Robert E. Webber to describe primarily those evangelicals born after 1975. The present work focuses upon contemporary tensions associated with biblical inerrancy that Webber could only mention in passing.3 For some younger evangelicals the tension has proven existentially unbearable and the absence of an alternative, acceptably orthodox position on biblical authority has unnecessarily exacerbated the pains of spiritual development.4 In response, evangelical leaders might consider providing an alternate doctrinal refuge.

Over twenty years ago Raymond Brown had these words to say of the state of Roman Catholic theological training: “. . . [A]nd only now are we encountering a generation of Catholic theologians who were nurtured in their first studies on a critical approach to the Bible, rather than appropriating it late in life and having to unlearn some of their early formation.”5 As Brown pointed out then, to critically engage what it means for the Bible to be the word of God only after early spiritual formation is over can result in a loss of faith. Having attended, however briefly, at least three evangelical schools over the last ten years, I can attest to how penetrating Brown’s insight really is. In fact, my own experience suggests that this critical engagement with Scripture should begin in high school youth groups and other teenaged religious forums in order to help curtail future loss of faith.

Countless ecclesiastical, parachurch, and professional organizations such as the Evangelical Theological Society and the Evangelical Philosophical Society (ETS/EPS) continue to teach up-and-coming evangelical leaders that the Bible alone is the Word of God and, for this reason, is and will always be “inerrant” in the originals. What is not generally shared is that many leaders and teachers who belong to these and other like-minded organizations insist upon this high view of the Bible while they are still in the process of investigating and reflecting upon what the Bible really is and how it came to be. D. A. Carson has made mention in different contexts of “reflective” and “more thoughtful” Christians who “have always” been nuanced in their beliefs about the Bible and “not very well informed believers” who “understand so little about the humanness of the Bible.”6 Well, this book is written for evangelical leaders and teachers, reflective or not, who are concerned about the spiritual formation of their students and how they are affected by failures in their attempts to make sense of an ETS/EPS-like statement in the context of historical and psychological factors that not only comprise our human experience but so fundamentally contributed to Scripture’s own composition and compilation.

Younger evangelicals quickly figure out that although the investigation into what the Bible really is is perpetually underway, the verdict is inexplicably always already out that it is without “errors.” To wit, the implicit message is: no matter what we should find by way of scholarly research, the Bible will always be the Word of God, which means, if it is to mean anything at all, without error in the originals. In addition, younger evangelicals are implicitly and explicitly taught that inerrancy is the watershed doctrine of historic, orthodox Christianity. Yet few evangelicals in positions of leadership (scholarly writers, professors, youth leaders, etc.) who inculcate an ETS/EPS doctrine of Scripture have acknowledged the potential and actual damage they are spiritually inflicting upon younger evangelicals by insisting on the paramount import of this particular dogma of Scripture.

In the face of a broader evangelical predilection for certainty and a faith that was given once and for all, younger evangelicals are never given the opportunity to critically ask, “What is Scripture?” Evangelicals are trained to have an innate sense that the formal battle for the Bible is never over and to explicitly watch for unbelief in other writings that they read. Amazingly, the smoldering legacy of an older era has not necessarily yielded a clarification of the issues. If “How can we wed our traditions with modernity?” is the question that non-Christian religions are still asking, “How can we wed the Bible with modernity?” is still the question that evangelicals of all stripes, young and old, are asking scholarly and churchly leaders.7 The information network of conservative evangelicalism is such that evangelical church and para-church leaders turn to evangelical theologians and philosophers for answers and the answers that these leaders give are presently couched in terms of the development of a biblical “worldview.”

A worldview, or a pre-reflective story with its set of presuppositions, always shapes the way that the world is interpreted by humans. Contemporary evangelical wisdom holds that instead of interpreting the Bible in terms of modernity, a believer is to strive to interpret modernity (or “postmodernity” for that matter8) in terms of the biblical story. In other words, a believer should try to set the biblical system of beliefs (or, others would say, story) against modernity’s system of beliefs (or story), but this patented evangelical response tends to preclude an adequate appreciation for the specific examples and situations that give rise to the critical examination of Scripture in the first place. From the vantage of historical-criticism, for example, neglected contributions of biblical studies come to mind. Interestingly enough, non-evangelical biblical scholars have reached the limits of historical investigation and have begun to subsume historical criticism into larger theological and philosophical investigations—so much so that scholarly circles, evangelical and otherwise, are presently witnessing a backlash against historical criticism, arguing for the return of theological hermeneutics and the like. Among critical scholars, there is the post-critical turn; in conservative circles of “not very well informed believers,” however, it does not seem that the careful observations of historical and biblical scholars were ever really appreciated at all but rather perpetually gainsaid by policing evangelical philosophers and evangelical systematic theologians.

Conservative evangelicals have taken solace in the fact that critical scholarship is itself informed by a worldview. Perhaps, it is time to question whether the place of worldviews in evangelical circles has become too privileged. Perhaps, a pattern has been psychologically and spiritually set such that it is no longer possible for conservative leaders to see the trees on account of the forest. My argument in this book is that there is a paradigmatic need for a counterbalance: more care should be taken in allowing specific critical problems their due consideration by younger evangelicals. One way to accomplish this is to insist that historical and biblical scholarship should more openly and critically inform evangelical philosophy and theology. My present concern is that the conversation between the disciplines has gone in the other direction for too long; the spiritual formation of many younger evangelicals is unnecessarily being put at risk.

Perhaps, a fundamental complaint regarding the spiritual formation of younger evangelicals can be tersely summarized by (of all people!) Aristotle:

[W]e see the experienced compassing their objects more effectually than those who profess a theory without the experience . . . [E]xperience, indeed, is a knowledge of singulars, whereas art, of universals . . . If, therefore, anyone without the experience is furnished with principle, and is acquainted with the universal, but is ignorant of the singular that is involved therein, he will frequently fall into error . . .9

Theology and philosophy are geared toward generalizing and universalizing theories whereas historical and biblical scholarship tends to examine individual cases. A predilection for theory and system on the part of many evangelical leaders, it seems, is driving evangelical youths to “frequently fall into error,” as Aristotle puts it. What’s more, inerrancy, time and again, has proven an unhelpful purview from which to attempt to systematically account for individual critical cases. The result is often to habitually turn a blind eye toward many of the critical cases in question.10

What a profound existential toll to take on a young believer! Surely this will immediately affect spiritual development and that in successively negative ways. I suggest that in an attempt to keep evangelical youths on a positive spiritually formative trajectory, evangelical leaders should bear in mind that theology and philosophy should not produce theories or systems that ignore or neglect the critical data. Countervailing data will eventually be found out or even personally experienced by our young people and it will then be too late to recover the dialogue with them. Nothing less than the spiritual welfare of the next generation of evangelicals is at stake.

It is commonly held today that the very collection of data is inherently theory-laden and one can readily accede this. Nevertheless, when an evangelical theory that purports to describe the divine nature of the Bible grounds Christian existence (not only doctrines) to a high view of Scripture in such a way that Scripture has to constantly find the strength to hold a young person’s “being-in-the-world” together, the theory endangers evangelical youths to the extent that they are not given resources versatile enough for handling the intellectual and existential vicissitudes that are part and parcel of being a younger evangelical in the modern world.

The young person I have in mind is any believer between whatever ages correspond to those phases of life that extend from the later high school years to the (sometimes extended) periods that cover undergraduate, graduate and, perhaps, early doctoral study. In other words, that long stretch of time during which a person is formatively and gradually working out a firmer sense of who he or she is as a person and what his or her place is in the world. I suppose the terminal point could arbitrarily be set at about thirty years of age, the time at which an individual typically has a more or less enduring sense of identity to which he or she cleaves throughout the course of his or her life.

In what follows, I proffer some of the critical discoveries that have caused me during these very years to realize how badly I myself had fallen into error by accepting the dogma of inerrancy before encountering any of the critical details. On account of swallowing evangelical systematizing tendencies “feathers and all” I found myself unable to deal with the fruits of my own historical-critical studies (to say nothing of the work of other scholars in these and other areas). As a help to evangelical leaders and to other younger evangelicals, I present six academic investigations that collectively caused me to recognize that it simply is not helpful to Christian thinking to affirm something like the ETS/EPS dogma of inerrancy.

These critical recognitions are not presented in chronological order and they are not intended as a comprehensive account. I simply aim to muster a handful of individual cases wherein my own construal of inerrancy, received as it was from my tutors of the faith, failed to prove serviceable for understanding 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 the second recognition, I digress from the main argument in order to provide an illustration of the hopelessly paradoxical position in which critical believing scholarship finds itself. The case in point is the contemporary application of I Tim 2.11–15. The issue of women’s ordination is a paradigmatic instance of how conservative evangelicals can so deeply disagree over what Scripture teaches, suggesting to younger evangelicals (among other things to be sure) that inerrancy may not be as sufficient a norm for faith and practice as previously imagined.

The third Recognition investigates the similarities between a fully divine and fully human Savior and a fully divine and fully human Scriptures. After a brief engagement with Norman Geisler’s syllogistic argument for inerrancy, I suggest that the tension between the divine and human is not always fairly presented in such analogies and that evangelical interpretations of divine standards for the Bible and Christ are categorically disparate, rendering the comparison between them impertinent to younger evangelicals. I attempt to draw an analogy between Christ’s sinlessness and Scripture’s errorlessness and conclude that the analogy is not only not necessary, but only vaguely helpful.

Chapter four presents the fourth Recognition and was previously published in slightly modified form as “Eucharist Then, Scripture Now: How Evangelicals can Learn from an Old Controversy” in Evangelical Review of Theology 30 (2006): 322–338.19 Recognition 4 works to allow for a clearer perspective on the evangelical preoccupation with Scripture. In my own classroom experience, I have noticed how it is usually much easier to acknowledge tacit motivations that egg disputants on in historical controversies, especially those that are seemingly unrelated to one’s own theological agenda. For example, if a conservative evangelical student were to study, say, a heated dispute over the meaning of a Catholic sacrament, chances are that a young evangelical would approach the issue in a more objective manner. In order to shed light on some of the implicit factors that contribute to the anxiety over the trustworthiness of the Bible, I set out to draw a comparison between contemporary controversies amongst evangelicals regarding the Bible and sixteenth century disputes over the Eucharist. The parallels between the existential, ecclesial and social factors that contributed to Luther’s position on the Eucharist, in particular, and those that influence present day evangelicals can help bring to the fore some of the historically situated-ness of evangelical doctrines of Scripture. Though it is very common to give lip service to the historicity of doctrinal constructions, comparing one of Luther’s controversies with present day battles for the Bible can help show how there is more to formulating doctrine and living the Christian life than simply defending what one happens to think that the Bible teaches.

Nevertheless, even in the face of these recognitions I was for some time able to continue trusting in inerrancy. Irrespective of the difficulties experienced in articulating a doctrine of Scripture, I was convinced that on account of the concept and phenomenon of a biblical canon, evangelicals always had a safe place of retreat where they could go back to the drawing board as it were. The last two Recognitions purpose to demonstrate that neither Scripture nor “Tradition” (nor any other aspect of the faith) can be said to have “ultimate authority” for the believer. The nature of the case is more adequately apprehended by understanding that each aspect of authority creates and sustains the other. Or as a recent statement by Catholics and Evangelicals puts it: “We affirm together the coinherence of Scripture and tradition.”20 To absolutize one particular of the formative and constitutive factors that eventuated in the biblical canon, as rhetorically effective and psychologically reassuring as it may be, is not practically or historically commensurate with what seems to actually have taken place during the formation of the Bible. God’s people are always creatively developing concepts and contexts with which to facilitate a faithful and meaningful interaction between the divine and a given cultural milieu.

A final chapter draws the Recognitions together in a brief, but candid, discussion that reiterates that dogmas of inerrancy should only be promulgated if those bits and pieces of historical and biblical data that do not necessarily cohere with the inerrancy dogma are also considered with integrity and not explained away. If evangelical teachers continue with a pietistic optimism with respect to the strength of the inerrancy doctrine for the demands of the 21st century, considerable portions of the upcoming generation of evangelicals will not be able to stand against the cultural tides. Who can tell what their reactions will be to the recognition that the actual nature of the Bible does not agree with what they were initially told by their trusted leaders, their original defenders of the faith?

This book is only secondarily written with younger evangelicals in mind, though I certainly hope that they will take the time to wrestle with the material presented here. (I have appended an Afterword for any who venture to do so.) The book is primarily intended for evangelical teachers and leaders, whoever they may be, who are interested in learning more of the tensions that younger evangelicals can experience when burdened with an inerrancy dogma of the ETS/EPS type. The book need not be read from cover to cover. Philosophers, for example, might take some interest in Recognitions One and Two; theologians in Recognitions One, Three, and Four; historians in Recognitions Four, Five, and Six; and biblical scholars in Recognitions Two (along with the discursus), Five, and Six. It goes without saying, though, that readers are encouraged to read the entire book. One advantage to reading the whole is that it brings to light the interdisciplinary nature of the recognitions and reveals in one volume how the inerrancy dogma fares from different vantages. The details that accrue in multiple disciplines are not so easily reconciled.

I make no pretense of providing knockdown arguments for the positions taken below. What follows can only nudge readers to respond in appropriate ways. After all, entire books could easily be written for each of the chapters below. Hence, only the contours of possible trajectories of younger evangelical thought are presented here: some in more detailed fashion (chapters 5 and 6); others with broader strokes (chapters 1 and 3). Nevertheless, it is sincerely hoped that some will pause to consider the possibility that inerrancy can be antithetical to the spiritual formation of younger evangelicals and that, unless new evangelical dogmas of Scripture are also presented as acceptably orthodox, there will be little peace for younger evangelicals who wish to remain faithful “people of the book.” For what Francis Collins says of intelligent design applies with much more force to the dogma of inerrancy: “The disproof of an unnecessary theory like ID can shake the faith of those who are asked to equate their belief in God with their belief in the theory.”21

1 The market is currently flooded with books on postmodernity and Christianity. Three of the more balanced works are Roger Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993); Anthony C. Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation, and Promise. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); and William J. Wainwright, ed., God, Philosophy, and Academic Culture: A Discussion between Scholars in the AAR and the APA. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996). Bruce Ellis Benson, Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion on Modern Idolatry. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002) views postmodernity very positively; Brian Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) absolutely negatively.

2 “Evangelicals” in this work refers to those Christian believers of whatever denomination (or non-denomination) who affirm the views of Scripture associated with the Evangelical Theological Society, the Evangelical Philosophical Society, and other like-minded affiliations.

3 The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002).

4 In some circles, inerrancy has unhappily been identified as the only doctrine necessary for describing what is minimally required to consider oneself an evangelical Christian. See, for example, D. G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 131–151.

5 Raymond E. Brown, The Critical Meaning of the Bible: How a Modern Reading of the Bible Challenges Christians, the Church, and the Churches. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 2.

6 See, for example, D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 167, 365, for the former and his “Three Books on the Bible: A Critical Review” in Reformation 21: The Online Magazine of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Source: http://www.reformation21.org/Past_Issues/May_2006/Shelf_Life/Shelf_Life/181/vobId__2926/pm__434/ for the latter.

7 “Modernity” in this instance refers to the intellectual and industrial effects of the Enlightenment. For example, how is an African woman who believed that a witchdoctor’s curse had been cast on her that prevented her from becoming pregnant to respond when it dawns on her that a relatively routine technological procedure allowed her to conceive soon after it was performed? Or how is a Christian parent to respond when she realizes that pills and not prayer are what is keeping her child from extreme emotional episodes?

8 John Caputo explains that “[p]ostmodernity is a continuation of modernity by another means, a kind of hyperbolic modernity or hypermodernity, a way of being ungrateful, a way of moving on with modernity.” See John Caputo, “Metanoetics: Elements of a Postmodern Christian Philosophy” in The Question of Christian Philosophy Today. (ed. F. J. Ambrosio; New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 189–223. See also Lee Hardy, “Postmodernism as a Kind of Modernism” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought. (ed. M. Westphal; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 28–43.

9 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Book I, 981a. (trans. J. H. McMahon; Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1991). Might one simplistically describe the problem as preferring Plato over Aristotle?

10 Compare John J. Brogan’s objection in “Can I Have Your Autographs? Uses and Abuses of Textual Criticism in Formulating an Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture” in Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority and Hermeneutics. (ed. V. Bacote, L. C. Miguelez, and D. L. Okholm; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 93–111, 108.

11 Whereas Kevin Vanhoozer attributes a “hermeneutics of procrastination” to untoward spiritual conditions in one’s heart, I decry the contributions of the stultifying burdens placed upon the heart by inerrancy in the first place. See Kevin Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture, and Hermeneutics” in Whatever Happened to Truth? (ed. A. Köstenberger; Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 93–129.

12 Mark A. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America. 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 170.

13 Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, 170.

14 Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, 170.

15 Compare John Webster’s suggested pattern of a simultaneous unworkability and necessity in Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11.

16 I was appalled to learn that some evangelical apologists of a previous generation publicly argued that the only sensible alternative to Christian belief is suicide. (See Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind, 211–214.) Inerrantists should take more seriously the analogous psychological effects of all-or-nothing rhetoric on younger evangelicals. If they deliberately contrive inerrancy apologetic so that its disbelief is equated or directly associated with outright apostasy, perhaps the present work can help redirect attention to more pastoral considerations.

17 Or modernism for that matter. Carl Raschke’s juxtaposition of inerrancy and postmodernism, for example, misses the mark as far as I can see. His alternate construal of scriptural truth as a progressive, sacred “troth” that begins with Abraham can be rejected as sheer fantasy once one becomes convinced that Abraham never existed, that the exodus never took place, that Moses had very little to do with composing the Pentateuch, etc. More importantly, no inerrantist worth his salt will agree to framing discussions about biblical authority in terms of either inerrancy or authenticity for the two are seen as concomitants. See Carl Raschke, The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004).

18 Compare Harriet A. Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

19 I am grateful to the editor for permission to incorporate the article into the present work.

20 “Your Word Is Truth: A Statement by Evangelicals and Catholics Together” in Your Word is Truth: A Project of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. (ed. C. Colson and R. J. Neuhaus; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 1–8, 5.

21 Francis S. Collins, “Faith and the Human Genome” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 55 (2003): 142–153, 151–152.