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Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals
Carlos R. Bovell
Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation
of Younger Evangelicals
Copyright © 2007 Carlos R. Bovell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.
ISBN 10: 1-59752-861-7
ISBN 13: 978-1-59752-861-0
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7098-4
Chapter four contains a slightly modified form of “Eucharist Then, Scripture Now: How Evangelicals can Learn from an Old Controversy.” Evangelical Review of Theology 30 (2006): 322–338. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)
Scripture quotations marked REB are taken from the Revised English Bible. Copyright © Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press 1989.
Unless marked otherwise, Scripture references are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Extracts from The Book of Common Prayer, the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge University Press.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Preface
“Biblical authority—as manifest in the discursive practice of framing one’s speech in relation to the Bible—is one of the foundational assumptions of evangelical communities, one of the practices in which community members, in order to be community members, participate.”
—Brian Malley1
“The Bible alone could not carry all the freight of born-again Protestantism because many mainline Protestants also believed in the Bible alone. Therefore, the Bible inerrant became evangelicalism’s creed.”
—Daryl G. Hart2
“While it was relatively easy for the rank and file to believe in inerrancy, it was nearly impossible for most of them to prove it. It was enough to know that there were trusted teachers who could.”
—Timothy P. Weber3
“The entire experience of opening the windows just a little bit and letting the fresh breezes of honest doubt blow through the musty dogma of biblical inerrancy had proved to be profoundly unsettling.”
—Rudolph Nelson4
Many younger evangelicals5 bombarded by the vicissitudes of being spiritually-developing, existentially-sensitive Christians in the twenty-first century are no longer holding out for inerrancy. Still, a good number of evangelical leaders and teachers formatively pressure their students toward inerrancy, implicitly or otherwise, in such a way that it has become “a psychological necessity of membership in the fundamentalist [read conservative evangelical] organizations that one should be convinced that everyone outside is completely ‘liberal’ in theology, or at least that he has no stable defences against the adoption of a totally liberal position.”6 The tragedy is that many evangelical leaders and teachers themselves have doubts about inerrancy but are sociologically—ecclesiastically and institutionally—condemned to silence. To take an extreme case, when the brother of a famous twentieth century Christian apologist was asked about the apologist’s breakdown, he immediately explained that “his brother’s breakdown resulted from building a whole career on something he did not really believe.”7 It does not take long for a younger evangelical to come to the realization that many of her evangelical leaders and teachers are much like Carnell, knowing deep down that critics are right but unable to publicly admit it.
Younger evangelicals are almost singularly dependent upon their leaders and teachers for their formative understanding of the Bible. Many are brought up on inerrancy by their families, in churches and elsewhere. Malley calls the evangelical understanding of biblical authority a “sacred postulate” and claims that “[t]his identification captures the fact that interviewees not only didn’t understand it but also were relatively unconcerned about not understanding it—it is regarded as unquestionable, a fundamental postulate within the community, and so there is no practical need for them to have a well-developed theory of biblical authority.”8 Weber’s quotation above pertains with much more force to younger evangelicals. Although they really are not sure how inerrancy is proven, younger evangelicals take solace in the fact that their leaders and teachers do. Nelson provides a perfect example: admitting he had never even read any of Carnell’s apologetic works, he rationalized, “Knowing he had those credentials, who needed actually to read his books?”9
The popular argument developed by Weber’s “rank and file” believers seems to go something like this:
Suppose someone says some item of divine revelation is incoherent or leads to a contradiction. Either we have misinterpreted the divine revelation and need to backtrack and rework the interpretation, or there is something wrong with the argument that led us to posit incoherence or a contradiction . . . [I]f divine inspiration secures the inerrancy of scripture, then any argument that appears to show error in scripture must be false, or the argument merely shows that we have misunderstood the scripture.10
Younger evangelicals, however, are increasingly flirting with a third option: perhaps inerrancy itself has been misunderstood. After all, they do not have the financial, ecclesiastical and institutional stakes of their professors and pastors. However, they still suffer many of the same existential and communal risks as their leaders. I have written this book to help urge evangelical leaders and teachers to more actively support the fledgling disbelievers among them in their search for ways out of wholesale liberalism or even total unbelief. Leaders and teachers play an important role in the spiritual development of their students. In fact, many times it becomes their spiritual responsibility to engage candidly with those who are struggling.
Younger evangelicals are wondering whether the dogmatic argument for inerrancy is forced. Some have even surmised that the maximal-conservative argument is not only a major liberal concession but possibly also a disingenuous way to save evangelical face.11 Barr has been forthright enough to suggest that conservatives owe critics an apology. Unfortunately, they probably owe their students one, too. But, alas, in the grown-up and public world of conservative evangelicalism, where searching out the mysteries of the faith must almost always be done to the constituents’ satisfaction, all offended parties will simplify have to exercise the privilege of forgiving their debtors.12
The “recognitions” that follow are presented for the benefit of evangelical teachers and leaders who insist upon teaching their students that the Bible is the word of God written and, as such, contains no errors in the originals. As