Re: [asa] Glenn's views

Don, I think there are any number of good arguments about whether inerrancy
is a helpful concept, and perhaps some even better arguments about whether
it should occupy the central place it does in evangelical thinking, and
perhaps even better arguments still about the merits of detailed statements
concerning inerrancy, particularly the Chicago Statement. Your arguments
below, however, strike me as kind of dangerous and strange.

Concerning "why should anyone believe it" -- well, it's scripture. A
central affirmation of our faith is that scripture is God's truthful and
authoritative revelation to the Church. *If* we were to conclude that
Revelation or some other scripture clearly taught inerrancy, that would be
reason enough to believe it, if we accept the epistemic presuppositions of
our faith. You seem to assume that it is not epistemically warranted to
take scripture as a foundation for knowledge claims -- an assumption that
IMHO is unsound.

I think you are right that the Bible doesn't expressly affirm inerrancy. As
you've noted, though, Rev. 22:1 says that "these words" are "pistoi"
(faithful, trustworthy) and "alethenoi" (true, authentic). This seems to be
referring specifically to "the words of the prophecy of this book" (Rev
22:7), i.e., John's Apocalypse in particular, but I'd agree that this
affirmation reflects what scripture at least implicity generally affirms
about itself, and also reflects what the Church has historically affirmed
about scripture. The foundational affirmations that scripture is
trustworthy and true are important, I think, for building an authentically
Christian epistemology. If you *start* from a stance of rationalist
skepticism, that's probably also where you'll end up.

Now, whether affirming the positive -- that scripture is trustworthy and
true -- requires affirmation of the negative -- that scripture is inerrant,
particularly inerrant as defined in the Chicago Statement -- seems to me to
be a different matter. I would say that my wife is pistoi and alethenoi
when she makes promises of fidelity to me, but I wouldn't necessarily be
thereby claiming that every incidental fact she mentions relating to her
promises is "without error" in some highly precise, technical sense. So, if
my wife said to me, "for as long as the sun travels across the sky, my love
for you will never fail," I'd affirm that her statement is pistoi and
alethenoi, even though the sun doesn't technically travel across the sky.
(Of course, this sort of literary / phenomenological device is accounted for
in a nuanced view of inerrancy, even in the Chicago Statement).

Or maybe a better illustration is this: when I was a litigation attorney, I
handled complex commercial cases. I learned quickly that no single witness
is ever 100% error-free. The criteria for whether a witness could be
regarded as trustworthy and truthful wasn't the complete absence of error --
it was that the witness, within the context of his or her own perspective,
purposes, and limitations, was presenting information that was fundamentally
in accordance with the broader truth of the whole case-story, and was not
intentionally misrepresenting anything. So, even if an individual witness
were to err on some incidental details, or even if the witness' perspective
on some events relating to the case were naive, I might still regard that
witness as pistoi and alethenoi with regard to the testimony that witness
was offering.

Concerning your comment about inerrancy being the protestant Pope, that
strikes me as strange, and perhaps reflective of some latent
anti-Catholicism. A genuinely Catholic understanding of the Papal office
wouldn't represent the Pope as some sort of pathetic security blanket
against modern sophistication. Though it's fair to say that inerrancy might
represent that kind of security blanket in popular evangelicalism, I also
don't think a real understanding of how inerrancy developed is that simple.

The "battle for the Bible" that made inerrancy a central evangelical issue
was about how evangelical protestant Christianity would distinguish itself
from liberal protestantism. Evangelicalism ended up trying to occupy a
shaky middle ground between protestant fundamentalism and protestant
liberalism, which led to the somewhat cumbersome formulation of inerrancy
with all its highly specific qualifications and nuances. IMHO, it's good
that evangelicalism came to regard as central an affirmation of scripture's
truthfulness and trustworthiness, but it's deeply unfortunate that this
became mired in the highly technical formulation of the negative secondary
affirmation of inerrancy. I still think Fuller Seminary's statement on this
issue is one of the better ones out there (
http://www.fuller.edu/provost/aboutfuller/believe_teach.asp).

On 1/18/07, Don Winterstein <dfwinterstein@msn.com> wrote:
>
> Inerrancy has weak support in Scripture itself; and even if scriptures
> claimed themselves to be inerrant (as Revelation in effect does), why should
> anyone believe it? Revelation was among the most vigorously disputed
> books of the canon, so Christian leaders questioned its authority right from
> the start despite its own bold assertions.
>
> I see the teaching of inerrancy as a result of the Protestant need for a
> pope after they rejected the real thing. Scriptures have the very
> important function among Protestants of serving as the ultimate reference
> for doctrine. Scriptures have this authority whether or not the given
> Protestants believe they are inerrant. Ultimately what gives the writings
> authority is whether or not they are spiritually valuable, not whether the
> original author got all the words right in what must have been some kind of
> pipeline dictation.
>
> The fact that interpretations of scriptures have varied widely whenever
> Christians have consulted them indicates that there are uncertainties about
> doctrine that are far weightier than whether or not the manuscripts at one
> time were inerrant. Claiming the texts are inerrant IMO just creates
> another arena for doctrinal conflict.
>
> Don
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
> *To:* David Campbell <pleuronaia@gmail.com>
> *Cc:* asa <asa@calvin.edu>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, January 17, 2007 3:36 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [asa] Glenn's views
>
>
> I think it's a mistake to argue for or against inerrancy based on
> hermeneutics. After all, you could argue against *any* doctrine of
> scripture as trustworthy and authoritative based on the fact that
> interpretations can reasonably differ with respect to many passages. If we
> affirm that scripture is trustworthy and authoritative for the faith and
> practice of the Church, as the Church has done throughout history, it seems
> to me that we must also affirm that scripture is capable of being understood
> and applied by/within the Church, at least to the degree necessary for the
> Church to carry out the mission God assigns to it. The Reformed
> understanding of the perpiscuity of scripture, it seems to me, captures this
> pretty well, while acknowledging that matters not central to salvation might
> be less clear.
>
> I prefer to think of inerrancy, as John Stott and Millard Erickson do, as
> a secondary affirmation to the primary affirmations that God is truthful and
> that scripture is God's authoritative revelation to the Church given for
> instruction, correction, etc. We expect scripture to be perpiscuous on
> central matters because of the primary affirmations about God's truthfulness
> and scripture's authority and purpose, not because of the secondary
> affirmation of inerrancy.
>
>
>
> On 1/17/07, David Campbell <pleuronaia@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > > Inerrancy would be important only if the messages were always so clear
> > that
> > > diverging interpretations would be an exception rather than the
> > rule. That
> > > is, what good is inerrancy if you don't really know what the text
> > means?
> > > The notion of total inerrancy IMO betrays too strong an emphasis on
> > the text
> > > relative to the relationship.
> >
> > Inerrancy can be important if the important messages are clear, even
> > if not all messages are clear. Divergent interpretations can reflect
> > unclear messages or clear messages that we don't want to heed. In the
> > case of unclear messages, inerrancy establishes the principle that
> > agreement with Scripture as a whole should guide interpretation.
> > Inerrancy many not be a sufficient principle to figure everything out,
> > but it is relevant in figuring things out.
> >
> > --
> > Dr. David Campbell
> > 425 Scientific Collections
> > University of Alabama
> > "I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
> >
> > To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
> > "unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
> >
>
>
>
> --
> David W. Opderbeck
> Web: http://www.davidopderbeck.com
> Blog: http://www.davidopderbeck.com/throughaglass.html
> MySpace (Music): http://www.myspace.com/davidbecke
>
>

-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Web:  http://www.davidopderbeck.com
Blog:  http://www.davidopderbeck.com/throughaglass.html
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