hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (06/17/91)
Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D.A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, Academie (Zondervan), 1986. This is a review of a book with which I don't entirely agree, but which I think is well worth reading. It deals with a number of the intellectual issues raised by Biblical inerrancy, from a position that accepts inerrancy. It represents a scholarly approach that I find very interesting. Frankly I find a lot of defenses of inerrancy intellectually bankrupt. Traditional approaches tend to involve harmonizing the unharmonizable. However there is a new generation of conservative scholars that are much more dangerous (from my liberal perspective). They have taken account of the critical literature. Their literary and philosophical approaches are far more sophisticated than the rather naive ones that are so easy to dismiss. They are also extremely sharp. Some time ago I reviewed a book where one of them took on a well-known logician (Flew) on the issue of the reality of the Resurrection. Flew was completely outclassed -- not that there are no answers to the arguments, but he was obviously unprepared for the degree of sophistication and amount of careful preparation he was going to be confronted with. You don't want to meet these guys in a dark alley. Interestingly, I find the positions of these authors just epsilon way from my own. I'll comment more about that later. In Chapter 1, D. A. Carson (one of the editors) provides an overview of many of the issues. In Chapter 2, Kevin J. Vanhoozer deals with what it means to say that the Bible is inerrant. It's surprisingly hard to define. You can't just say that every statement it makes is true, because that doesn't take account of metaphor, parables, or the fact that things are quoted from speakers who are wrong. He reviews a number of philosophical approaches to semantics, and various evangelical statements on the issue. He ends up using Searle's speech act theory, and saying the inerrancy means that none of the illocutionary acts misfires. Very interesting stuff. Moises Silva contributed an essay on historical reconstruction, i.e. trying to figure out what actually happened. This is an attempt to show that you can accept many of the conclusions of "nonconservative" scholars without threatening inerrancy. As he points out, many scholars use words that raise hackles among conservatives, but a proper understanding of what they are doing will show that there's some point to a lot of it. He gives a few illustrations. The most interesting is an examination of the Pharisees and an analysis of what about them Jesus doesn't like. He notes that scholars rightly point out that the NT gives the Pharisees a "bum rap". He notes that this is not necessarily a challenge to the NT's accuracy. You simply have to realize that the NT is not a historical work whose goal is to give a fair portrait of the Pharisees. Its readers are assumed to know who the Pharisees are. While the NT criticizes them for being "hypocrites", more careful analysis makes it clear that they cannot have been generally hypocritical in the modern sense. Several of Jesus' sayings depend for their force on a popular judgement that the Pharisees are in fact righteous people. Silva deals with the common Christian belief that the problem with the Pharisees is legalism. He points out that the attempt to put God's will into effect can hardly be considered a bad thing. "It is not farfetched to suggest an analogy between the rabbinical debates and the current controversy among Evangelicals about the ordination of women. We fool ourselves if we think that this sensitive issue is not a legal question." He also criticizes the common accusation that the Pharisees taught a system of salvation by works that ignores grace. He believes that Jesus does criticize some Pharisees for legalism, but legalism of a very specific kind. He believes Jesus' objection was to interpretations of the law that relaxed requirements. Hillel the Elder constructed a legal fiction that in effect did away with the requirement that debts be forgiven every seven years. Silva notes that there were good humanitarian reasons for doing this. He claims that the Pharisees in many ways came up with interpretations that made the Law practical to carry out. He cites Mk 7:1-13 as the key passage to understanding Jesus' objections. He believes that Jesus saw this as producing a muted consciousness of sin. While Jesus does not impose the Pharisees' oral Law, he actually intensifies the requirements of the written Law. Craig Blomberg has a chapter on harmonization. He notes that all too often conservatives deal with apparent contradictions in the Bible by trying to harmonize the passages. By this he means constructing an account that merges all of the features of the different accounts. He acknowledges that often these harmonizations are completely unconvincing. He suggests that there are a number of other ways of dealing with problem passages, and that generally harmonization should be the last resort. The approaches he discusses are textual criticism, linguistics, historical context, form criticism, audience criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, and harmonization. He gives a few examples. What I find interesting is his acceptance of methods that normally give conservatives big problems. He admits that stories were changed during transmission. This need not be considered errors. The order of events in a parable could be changed to create a climactic order. "Matthew's omission of the Capernaum centurion's Jewish embassy" is in accordance with known tendencies of oral transmission "to simplify the story so that no more than two characters engage in conversation at any one time." On the question of whether Jesus commanded his disciples to take a staff and sandals or not (Mt 10:10/Mk 6:8-9/Lk 9:3), he adopts a source-critical solution. "Luke 10:1-12 describes Jesus' subsequent sending of the seventy(-two), which contains some closer parallels to Matthew 9:37-10:16 than does Luke 9:1-6. Matthew has consequently conflated Mark's account of the sending of the twelve with Luke's account of the seventy (whether from Q or from some other source), while Luke has assimilated some of his material from chapter 10 into his account in chapter 9. In other words, the prohibitions against staff and sandals originally stemmed only from the latter mission; in the former Jesus did permit these two items. Is this reconstruction compatible with a doctrine of inerrancy? Indiscriminate conflation and assimilation certainly is not, but in this case Osborne's solution works, precisely because the twelve were most likely part of the seventy. ... Neither Matthew nor Luke expected his readers to compare his Gospel with Mark's; taken on its own, Matthew and Luke each presents entirely factual reports of what Jesus told His disciples... even if they do not spell out the number and nature of these missions as clearly as modern readers might have wished." I don't want to make this review longer by quoting more examples. However as you can see, he is adopted methods which have traditionally been regarded as unacceptable in conservative circles, arguing in each case that there are no actual historical errors (for some definition of error). Douglas Moo deals with the problem of NT citations of the OT. It is clear that in a number of cases the meaning of the passage in the NT is not what one would normally take from the OT passage in its original context. He describes a number of different approaches, and shows various reasons that the NT authors could have cited passages without necessarily intending to depend upon their original meaning. John Frame deals with the meaning of inspiration. He reviews a number of different proposals, traditional and modern. I find it hard to provide a meaningful summary of what he says. John Woodbridge deals with the history of Scriptural authority. At least part of his motivation is to respond to the claim that inerrancy as it is currently being argued is a recent creation. He shows that there were precursors to 20th Cent. critical scholarship in earlier time periods, and that something rather like modern inerrancy was used to respond to them. Geoffrey Bromiley deals with the authority of Scripture in Karl Barth's thought. This is an attempt to show both the strengths and weaknesses of Barth's position. David Dunbar has a very interesting presentation on the development of the canon, both OT and NT. It reviews both the Jewish and patristic historical sources, and several modern theological approaches to the implications for Biblical authority. It's hard to pin down the conclusion. His historical judgement is that the concept of canon should be separated from the concept of Scripture. That is, the church quite early recognized the authority of certain documents, but only later dealt with the question of exactly which documents were authoritative. He sees it as critical to Protestant theology to see that Scripture has its authority from God, and not from decisions of the church. But he is also realistic in his judgements on the relevant historical issues. The result is rather difficult to summarize. In effect, he sees the authority of Scripture as coming from God, because they carry on the responsibility that Christ gave to the apostles (though this doesn't necessarily mean that apostles actually wrote them). The church is not free to decide arbitrarily what documents it wants to use. It simply acknowledges that these are the documents that contain the apostolic testimony. ---------------------------------------------------- I see a lot to like in these essays, though I didn't agree with everything in them. My own approach to Scripture is, as I commented before, just epsilon away from the approach followed by most of the scholars here. I do not regard it as in principle inerrant. However I do regard it as generally reliable, and I note the tendency for sections that one generation of scholars think have no historical content to be vindicated by later discoveries. I have commented in the past that they are accurate history when you take into account what ancient historians thought they were doing. That is, you can't take quotations from Jesus as being transcripts of tape recordings. Blomberg seems to agree, since his idea of inerrancy allows for editorial rearrangement of a parable, modernizing references (e.g. using the term Levite to refer to people who weren't Levites, but would have been at the time the text was edited) and various other editorial changes in narratives. I might even be willing to agree to inerrancy if you define it as follows: 1) that none of the historical accounts are made up out of whole cloth 2) that changes did occur as traditions were passed on, but none of the changes were intended to mispresent anything. They were stylistic improvements, changes in emphasis, rearrangements to fit the author's theological scheme, updates to fit more recent terminology, simplications, etc. 3) that occassional errors in numbers, names, etc., occurred due to typos (or the oral equivalent). I think I might disagree with Blomberg only in that he would probably limit the third kind of error to transmission of the text after it was officiallly "Scripture", so that the "autographs" are inerrant. I think that is an artificial distinction. Indeed for the OT it's unclear at what point in transmission you say "this document is now official Scripture, so any errors in transmission beyond this point don't count". It's also unclear what difference it makes, either to us or to God, at what date a bit gets flipped. But I should point out that almost any kind of change (except simply factual blunders, which fall under 3) that happens in oral transmission can probably be regarded as acceptable under point 2. My primary remaining differences are likely to be 1) that I believe the early parts of the Torah (principally Gen 1-11, though I'm not willing to give an exact definition at this point) cannot rest on Hebrew historical tradition, because the Hebrews didn't exist then. Thus I believe the editors of the OT quite reasonably supplied the account of primeval history that was current among their people, which is based on the mythology of the people from which they came. I see the double creation account in Gen 1 and 2 as an indication that the editor knew (and assumed we would know) that he was dealing not with simple history, but with a range of traditions current among his people. 2) that I am more critical of interpretations than some people are. E.g. while I do not doubt that the Israelites killed many people in the name of God, and that they believed he had asked them to, I am sceptical that he actually did. I believe the Bible reports correctly what the people at the time thought happened, but I think they were wrong. Similarly in the NT, although I believe there is a general agreement on what the Gospel is, much of the NT is letters giving advice on how to apply it in specific situations. I see differing approaches. Now the best Christian interpreters try to take into account the emphases of, say Paul, James, and the author of the Pastorals (whether you think of it as one of Paul's followers or a Paul who found himself in a situation where he had to adopt rather different emphases). But it's hard to avoid noticing that if you are going to use the NT as a source of laws, you're going to get somewhat different ones. (Examples: differences in roles of women in Paul and the Pastorals, differences between Acts 15 and Paul's advice on eating meat -- Paul makes no attempt to enforce the prohibition of eating meat that was strangled.) I don't think that's what the NT was intended to be used for, so I don't see these differences as a defect.