The Embattled Bible: Four More Books

Robert W. Yarbrough

Robert Yarbrough is chair of the New Testament department, professor of New Testament, and editor of Trinity Journal at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.

Quite apart from commentaries and hermeneutical textbooks, books on the Bible—its nature and ultimately its authority—have been appearing with daunting frequency of late. To list just some of the titles from the last few years:

Published 2005:

1. Donald Bloesch, Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration, and Interpretation
2. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament
3. Walter Brueggemann, The Book That Breathes New Life: Scriptural Authority and Biblical Theology
4. Kevin Vanhoozer, ed., Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible
5. N. T. Wright, The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture

Published 2006:

1. A. K. M. Adam, Faithful Interpretation: Reading the Bible in a Postmodern World
2. Roland Boer, Rescuing the Bible
3. Hoi Chee An and Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, eds., Engaging the Bible: Critical Readings from Contemporary Women
4. Linda Day and Carolyn Pressler, eds., Engaging the Bible in a Gendered World: An Introduction to Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Katharine Doob Sakenfeld
5. John Douglas Morrison, Has God Said? Scripture, The Word of God, and the Crisis of Theological Authority
6. Clark H. Pinnock with Barry L. Callen, The Scripture Principle: Reclaiming the Full Authority of the Bible, 2nd ed.

Published 2007:

1. Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon
2. William P. Brown, Engaging Biblical Authority: Perspectives on the Bible As Scripture
3. Joel B. Green, Seized by Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture

Published 2008:

1. G. K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority
2. Marcus Bockmuehl and Alan Torrance, eds., Scripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics
3. Craig Evans and Emanuel Tov, eds., Exploring the Origins of the Bible: Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological Perspective

Clearly it would be impossible in brief compass even to summarize this wide-ranging discussion (and more books could be listed). It is also being carried on, of course, in scores of journal articles, not just in English and in North America but around the world in numerous languages. It will be years before the dust settles (assuming it does) and we gain the distance necessary fully to assess developments currently unfolding. It seems everyone is weighing in. A sea change may be underway.

This essay will attempt to highlight and reflect on four additional studies that add their voices to this spirited and sometimes contentious conversation. The first two appeared in 2007. The other two were published in 2008. Since all four authors are or have been faculty at evangelical universities or seminaries, the witness of these books affords, among other things, an informative snapshot of how the Bible is understood at present in circles traditionally associated with a high view of Scripture.

1. Mark Alan Bowald, Rendering the Word in Theological Hermeneutics1

Bowald writes from within the community of scholarship associated with what has come to be called the theological interpretation of Scripture.2 He teaches at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario. He seeks to address “weakness in the contemporary perception of the event of reading the Bible” (ix). In particular, he seeks to make room for more robust attention to the role of divine agency in Scripture reading. To this end, the book seeks “to lay bare in a more comprehensive manner the basic dynamics of the reading of Scripture that underwrite any and all hermeneutical proposals” (x). Bowald hopes to foment “new ways of joining together to listen to God’s gracious Word and reading and responding together in faith” (x).

This book renders two major services. Firstly, it furnishes a useful taxonomy of three different ways Scripture is read currently among the scholars engaged in theological interpretation of Scripture. The taxonomy is visually depicted in over a dozen charts scattered throughout the book. The first way of reading Scripture, Bowald argues, focuses on human agency in the “text.” Leading advocates are the early Hans Frei, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Francis Watson. The second way focuses on human agency in the “reading,” or on what is commonly called reader response. Bowald interacts here with David Kelsey, the later Hans Frei, Werner Jeanrond, and Stephen Fowl. Leading spokesmen for the third way, which Bowald favors and for which this book serves as an apologetic, are Karl Barth, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and James K. A. Smith. This way, unlike the others, is said to prioritize divine agency in the reading of Scripture. It would be going too far to say that the first and second ways culpably neglect God, while the third way, Bowald’s, is the only way possible to affirm and hear God. But that seems to be a logical entailment of how Bowald sets up the taxonomy. Whatever the limitations of these schematics, the charts and informing discussion serve to make tolerable sense of various positions in a complex discussion. This in itself is a worthwhile achievement, though the discussion plotted is more reminiscent of the 1990s than of the present hour.

Secondly, Bowald devotes his opening chapter (1–23) to “The Eclipsing and Usurping of Divine Agency in Enlightenment Epistemology and Their Influence on Scriptural Hermeneutics.” In this he offers a useful exposition of portions of the Kant corpus to show that Kant “imposes immanent limits on both the knowing agent as well as the object in the epistemological action of creating or building knowledge” (4). In short, for Kant humans can never attain knowledge of God; they can at best—even with the help of Scripture—attain a state of “faith,” which is inferior to knowledge (7). In addition, the interpreter is forbidden to entertain input from other knowing agents or opinions in any attempted act of understanding, including the interpretation of Scripture. Church teaching, for example, must be rigidly excluded from consideration. The same is true for one’s own intuition. Suppose one felt from the totality of personal experience (of religion, of nature, of historical events, of incidents in one’s own life) that God exists and operates in our lives somewhat the way he is said to be present in Scripture— we cannot flee his presence (Ps 139:7); he numbers the hairs of our heads (Matt 10:30). All of this is inadmissible, in a Kantian interpretive world, from corroboration by or even discovery in Scripture unless it can be validated in advance by coldly rational means apart from the Bible. Bowald rightly and helpfully shows how this mentality was “an unnatural impediment to theological undertakings and especially to the reading of Scripture” (8). He also sketches how this outlook first trickled, then poured, into biblical scholarship, investing it with a de facto agnostic if not outright atheistic cast and agenda.3

This gave rise to what came to be called historical criticism and derivative methods. Bowald notes, “The investment in historical critical methods, underwritten by the immanent epistemological preferences and limitations of the Enlightenment, was unanimous across the theological and denominational spectrum at this point” (15).

It is understandable that Bowald is filled with zeal to drive home this insight, though it is only partly true. It is the main plank in the raison d’être for “theological interpretation” in the current depiction of its practitioners: Enlightenment biblical scholarship banned the God of Scripture from any active role in the reading of Scripture (and from its writing, for that matter), resulting in an atheological aridity in biblical scholarship from which theological interpretation (which for many seems to mean especially Karl Barth as understood by some) must rescue the Bible. There is a key point, however, at which this account of matters is a distortion.

Bowald lumps together all “biblical scholars of a conservative stripe” (15) with their non-conservative cohorts. This effectively demonizes all scholarly interpretation of the Bible since the Enlightenment. If true, this does establish the need for interpretation’s rescue by Bowald’s (and others’) “theological interpretation.” But it is not true. Bowald is either unaware of or simply misconstrues a host of interpreters who took part in the discussion dominated by Kantian (or later neo-Kantian) loyalties but who did so in their capacity as scholars attentive to the ground rules of professional interaction in the academy. That is, they spoke and wrote, not as mindless adherents to every point of the interpretive agenda that eventually emerged in the increasingly post- and anti-Christian hermeneutical systems associated with names like F. C. Baur, Julius Wellhausen, Ernst Troeltsch, and Rudolf Bultmann, but as an increasingly marginalized remnant seeking to get a hearing for Christian testimony in an intellectual marketplace that cruelly and often dishonestly proscribed what they claimed to have shown in their scholarship, which was in turn a corroboration of their personal knowledge of God confessed in their lives and churchmanship. I have in mind here people like J. C. K. von Hofmann, B. F. Westcott, J. B. Lightfoot, Bernhard Weiss, B. B. Warfield, Theodor Zahn, Otto Procksch, Adolf Schlatter, J. Gresham Machen, Martin Albertz, Oscar Cullmann, Joseph Bonsirven, George Ladd, and many others. Participating in historical-critical discussions and making use of historical-critical methods, they did not bow the knee to the dogmas of the historical-critical worldview—in fact they explicitly worked against them on both historical and theological grounds, agreeing with Bowald in his critique of Kantian thought.

This same zeal on Bowald’s part causes him to misconstrue even an ally of his cause like Kevin Vanhoozer. Using a curious method, as well as argument from silence, he makes much of one essay written by Vanhoozer in the mid-1980s on “The Semantics of Biblical Literature.”4 Since “the issue of divine agency is not addressed anywhere in this early piece” (60), Bowald associates Vanhoozer with Kantian understanding of divine agency in interpretation. This is a low blow from which Bowald has to back away on the next page (61) and in analysis of Vanhoozer’s subsequent work, which Bowald treats as a development in Bowald’s direction but which actually, I would argue, simply articulates the hermeneutical convictions latent in Vanhoozer’s outlook all along. He finally admits that Vanhoozer is one of the few today who “attempts to fully account for all three aspects” of biblical interpretation that comprise Bowald’s taxonomy: the text, the reader, and God (73). But he asks provocatively “whether Evangelicals [will] follow his lead or dismiss him as a prodigal son” (ibid.), as if these “Evangelicals” stand against privileging God in biblical interpretation and might whack any of their number who does this. Bowald’s innuendo here rightly reflects that he favors decoupling written Scripture from the transcendent Word of God in ways that Christians through the ages, as well as many recent evangelicals, have not felt to be warranted or wise.

The almost complete lack of interaction with German-language sources may be felt by some to be a weakness in a book so dependent on issues and figures rooted in that land and its hermeneutical history. On a stylistic note, some will tire of sentences with semi-colons but only one independent clause; dozens of times I thought I was reading a second sentence set off from a first one, only to realize I was digesting a sentence fragment. Finally, I felt the ending was naïve. So we can all “talk about God” à la Barth, “the most significant modern example of an attempt in this direction” (183 with n. 33). Many of us are not convinced that Barth himself (however plausible neo-Barthian strategies may prove) permits a high enough view of Scripture for us to know that the words we find in Scripture are sufficiently congruent with the Word on whom his theology seeks to center.

In the end, Bowald furnishes a bracing rebuke of Kant as he was appropriated in subsequent generations of theological interpreters. I found chapter one to be the high point. But the overall thrust of the book amounts to a hard break between text (= the Bible) and God, which seems to invite Kant’s dualism right back in.

2. A. T. B. McGowan, The Divine Authenticity of Scripture5

The subtitle of this book is promising: Retrieving an Evangelical Heritage. But that is the North American edition. The British title is different, The Divine Spiration of Scripture, and the subtitle is more honest: Challenging Evangelical Perspectives.6 McGowan is not so much “retrieving” a heritage but seeking to correct it. As far as I can tell, the two editions are identical apart from their titles, covers, and purely incidental matters. McGowan was until recently principal of Highland Theological College in Dingwall, Scotland. He is now pastor of Inverness East Church, a Church of Scotland congregation.

At one level this is a straightforward study. McGowan wants to reconsider the doctrine of Scripture. But whereas he started out to write a broad study of the doctrine (possibly thinking of Jude 3 here?), he decided rather to limit his focus more to how other evangelicals have got the doctrine wrong (9). Many of these evangelicals are actually fundamentalists who fail “to engage with biblical scholarship” and due to “sheer obscurantism and anti-intellectual approaches” damage “the case for a high view of Scripture” (ibid.). McGowan proposes to correct the misguided with four moves (12–16).

1. Rather than place Scripture at the head of Christian doctrine à la the Westminster Confession, we should subsume it under the doctrine of God.
2. We should replace the word “inspiration” with the expression “divine spiration.” Likewise the words “illumination” and “perspicuity” are to be replaced with “recognition” and “comprehension,” respectively. McGowan thus clears the deck to reconfigure things pretty much from scratch: “we must recast the vocabulary of the doctrine of Scripture” (17). McGowan’s case for 1 and 2 is contained primarily in chapter two.
3. We should cease using the word “inerrancy.” “Infallibility” is to be preferred. And rather than so much stress on divine speaking, which was fine back when liberal theology was a threat but has become outmoded in the current climate, “it is time to redress the balance by saying more about the human authors of Scripture” (13). Arguments for these claims are really the substance of the book, occupying chapters three through five, or nearly half the volume.
4. We should adopt a better “evangelical theology of tradition.” This is the focus of chapter six. “As evangelicals we do give creeds and confessions an important place in our theology and in our churches but often without any carefully worked out theology of tradition to justify and regulate this” (210). Evangelicals should neither demonize nor divinize classic confessions that have arisen in church history but learn from them in the light of Scripture—or rather, “the voice of God speaking in Scripture” (185); as the book progresses, a slight gap seems to open between that voice/Spirit and the Book, possibly because McGowan cannot be sure it might not be errant at some given juncture. We should learn from Karl Barth that the Westminster Confession of Faith is flawed because it is concerned more with man than with God (187). Or in McGowan’s own formulation, to approach theology like the Reformed confessions with “Scripture at the beginning of the theological system takes the primary focus away from God” (28). One marvels that the Westminster divines could have been so spiritually blind. Or was their sense of what honoring God necessarily entails different from ours?

Chapter seven gives a defense of preaching that opens up the Scripture using Calvin as a template. The brief concluding chapter eight summarizes the whole book and anticipates three criticisms. 1) McGowan pleads he is not arguing for “errancy” (210), though the ground between rejecting “inerrancy” and affirming “errancy” is a pretty narrow spit of terrain, if indeed logically speaking it can exist at all. 2) He defends his reading of Warfield (an inerrantist and therefore in error by McGowan’s lights) vis-à-vis Kuyper and Bavinck (who upheld “infallibility” rather than inerrancy). 3) He argues that there can be “fundamental unity as evangelicals” between “members of the Evangelical Theological Society in the USA who affirm ‘inerrancy’ and members of the Fellowship of European Evangelical Theologians who affirm ‘infallibility’” (212).7 As many of us belong or have belonged to both groups, this goes without saying. But it is an olive branch that might have been better placed at the beginning. After 200 pages of sometimes vigorous critique of what many see as the historic Christian view of Scripture (except among Protestant liberals, neo-orthodox, and an increasing number of evangelicals of various stripes today), it is a little disingenuous to say right at the end that there is no cause here for “condemnation and recriminations” (212).

If McGowan is right about inerrancy, dozens of North American colleges and seminaries, several thousand scholars, tens of thousands of pastors, and millions if not billions of Christians worldwide need to repent and change their doctrinal statements—and, so as not to be hypocrites, their beliefs. Granted there is a long tradition of viewing the Bible as without error. This is not part of the ecclesial tradition, evidently, that McGowan in chapter seven argues that evangelicals should respect.

McGowan’s study has much to commend it as a spirited critique of people for whom “the word ‘inerrancy’ has become something of a sacred talisman” (14). But who are these people? One senses they are anyone who does not agree that inerrancy has now simply become an unworkable term. The book thus forces the question: should we abandon inerrancy? There are several reasons why some may not find the book’s main thrust persuasive.

1. The central argument that the “inerrantist” views of Warfield should yield to the softer “infallibilist” view of Kuyper and Bavinck is suspect. See the book by Richard B. Gaffin Jr. reviewed below. Kuyper and Bavinck did not believe in an errant Bible.
2. The assertion that liberal theology is passé is unconvincing and not even consistently upheld in the book. Perhaps narrowly defined as the historical movement associated with Adolf von Harnack (see 10n2, 61) there is merit to the claim. But defined as the theology of the Western Protestant mainline, its central tenets are quite alive in churches, seminaries, and graduate schools in North America and Europe and indeed around the world. In fact, classic liberalism with its stress on the “fatherhood of God” looks biblicistic and conservative in much of the mainline now, which does not allow God to be spoken of using masculine pronouns, let alone imaged robustly as “Father.” McGowan knows that “many hold to broadly the same position concerning Scripture” that liberals always have, naming John Barton and the late James Barr (57–61). But in the end he seems to think it is more important to correct inerrantists by appeal to various human authorities than by returning to Scripture to be reminded of what it says about itself. This raises a primary deficit of the book.
3. The book says little regarding Scripture’s teaching about Scripture. This helps explain McGowan’s mystification regarding “why Warfield preferred to speak of ‘inerrancy,’ rather than follow his European colleagues in speaking of ‘infallibility’” (211). Warfield was a NT scholar whose views were rooted deeply in inductive study of the biblical text. McGowan wants a looser if not indeed lower view of Scripture than the old “high” view, but he does not justify this in any sustained way from the way biblical writers use Scripture. Before we follow his reading of figures like Orr, Kuyper, Bavinck, and Berkouwer, it would be helpful to establish the inspired (or should we say “spirated”?) outlook of figures like Peter, John, Paul, and Christ himself. Many think that Warfield got things right because he showed that it is precisely the Bible that teaches us that “inerrant” is an appropriate representation of Scripture’s nature and content. His studies on Scripture’s self-understanding seem more compelling than Barth’s alternate accounts that McGowan favors.
4. There is confusion about the origin of inerrancy. McGowan says that it arose in response to liberalism (50) and relates it especially to American tradition (214). Yet he quotes without comment Mark Noll’s observation that “Most Christians in most churches since the founding of Christianity have believed in the inerrancy of the Bible . . . . [This] has always been the common belief of most Catholics, most Protestants, most Orthodox, and even most of the sects of the fringe of Christianity” (85). McGowan’s book is vitiated by the tension between Scripture and ecclesial tradition, which he says he wants to treasure but which on the whole affirm inerrancy, and certain modern writers whom he feels we must follow so we can focus on God rather than Scripture. This leads to a further reservation.
5. It is debatable whether it is either possible or necessary to vest authority “in God rather than in the Scriptures themselves” (43). In Scripture, God in his essence is Spirit and invisible.

His people know him savingly through his divinely inscripturated words to them as the Holy Spirit interprets and applies their truth. The highest privilege of Israel was to have “the oracles of God” (Rom 3:2).8 “You shall walk after the LORD your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice, and you shall serve him and hold fast to him” (Deut 13:4). Yahweh was inseparable from his word. Peter says that the prophetic word of Scripture given to the church is “more sure” than what he witnessed on the Mount of Transfiguration (2 Pet 1:19). Jesus calls for allegiance to him and his words, not one apart from the other (Mark 8:38). His mission was to confirm and fulfill Scripture, not to reveal a God who is known apart from it. This is not proof-texting but the overt thrust of the Bible’s hundreds of “thus says the Lord” statements as well as the clear implications of Jesus’ claim to have come directly and uniquely from God, to “declare to the world what I have heard from [the Father]” (John 8:26) and to have appointed apostles to crystallize his self-disclosure in the NT writings.9 We can no more separate God and his words to us, if that is what Scripture is, than we can separate human friends and family from the words we exchange with each other. Neither God nor people we know are sphinxes whose identity we ultimately intuit by solely spiritual (or even Spiritual) means. To separate knowledge of persons’ identity, human or divine, from their verbal self-disclosure would in the end be both unproductive and perverse.

Can biblical inerrancy be misunderstood, misrepresented, and misguided? Yes, without a doubt, and McGowan’s point is well taken that the doctrine is always subject to review, because human appropriation of it is always subject to imperfect execution. There are and likely always will be apparent discrepancies in the Bible that await definitive solution this side of glory—a fact openly conceded in the Chicago Statements cited below. Inerrantists as a group could certainly do with personal and corporate repentance and renewed humility as we attempt to interpret and apply the Bible and reflect God’s loving and peaceable presence in the world. Kyrie eleison!

But his book might have been more balanced in acknowledging inerrancy’s considerable upsides. To cite just one: while writing this, like millions of others I was saddened to hear of Rev. Dr. Fred Winter’s murder in the pulpit of First Baptist Church of Maryville, Illinois, on Sunday, March 8, 2009. Daily headlines document how religions elsewhere in the world may respond to threats, real or perceived.10 How would First Baptist members respond? Their website faith statement on Scripture is explicitly inerrantist,11 in keeping with this church’s membership in the Southern Baptist Convention, North America’s largest Protestant denomination. Having learned the dangers of inerrancy from McGowan, one might well fear the worst from this mid-American, conservative enclave.

Here is how their faith in the Bible played out. At a prayer vigil on the very day of the murder, a capacity crowd met in a nearby church (with “cradled Bibles” according to a news report) and heard their surviving pastor reassure them from Scripture that “Pastor Fred is in that place that we call heaven.” Scant hours following the murder, the church website posted a call to prayer—including prayer “for the assailant himself and his family.” In the sort of area where Barack Obama noted that people cling to their guns and religion, Jesus’ teaching to love and pray for enemies is front and center. The anguish and uncertainty of the hour were palpable in the statement. Yet,

. . . one thing is certain, we, as human beings need a foundation upon which we can live our lives. We at First Baptist Maryville, along with other Christian believers, share this conviction: that foundation is God’s Word. In the pages of the Book we call the Bible, we find the pathway for peace, hope, and a quality of living life despite what circumstances we find ourselves in.12

Before evangelicals jettison inerrancy as McGowan calls for, there needs to be careful recollection of why the faithful have clung to the notion so doggedly through the centuries, how it functions in the lives of saved sinners in this world of frequent grief and loss, and whether an ethereal God who speaks in Scripture, but whose voice is not congruent with Scripture, will prove to be the God of Jesus Christ, who stated, “I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me” (John 12:49–50). The primary access we have to Jesus and to God through him is Scripture’s testimony (and other means of grace testified to by Scripture: the Holy Spirit, prayer, the sacraments, and so forth). On whose authority do we conclude that this Scripture may not be free from material error? (There is a ready reply to this, of course: see comments on Sparks’s book below.)

Many will likely continue to conclude that nuanced arguments favoring inerrancy—and here the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics deserves attention alongside the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy that McGowan at least mentions (103–4)—are tenable if indeed not biblically and pastorally compelling for the gospel to continue to be heard, lived, and spread in a world where the Bible’s saving claims are perennially being undermined, whether by enemies or well-intentioned friends. At the very least, groups that uphold inerrancy can afford to abide in their time-tested convictions for now while they serve Christ and wait and see. Will those presently opting to abandon inerrancy fare better than the Protestant mainline and others who have been conducting the experiment of decoupling a more sacrosanct God from a less sacrosanct Scripture for many generations, thus far with ominous results?

It should be readily admitted that the future of “evangelicals,” including inerrantists, is not secure in itself.13 I agree with McGowan that it is God, not a view of Scripture howsoever correct, who upholds all things. To the extent McGowan reminds us of that fact—and confesses the Bible’s “infallibility,” itself a radical position in many quarters—his book is a worthy addition to the current discussion, even if its central thesis remains unconvincing.

3. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., God’s Word in Servant-Form: Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck on the Doctrine of Scripture14

The biggest share of this slender volume (107 pages) is not new. Much of the material first appeared in the form of a pair of articles published in the Westminster Theological Journal in 1982 and 1983. The occasion was, first, the one hundredth anniversary of J. Gresham Machen’s birth (1881), and, second, the appearance of Jack Rogers and Donald McKim’s The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible.15 Back then Gaffin penned two articles to respond to the Rogers-McKim claim that Kuyper and Bavinck represent the more centrist, historical view of Scripture—and that they were not inerrantists. John Woodbridge had already shown the limited accuracy of the Rogers-McKim thesis in terms of both method and result.16 Gaffin entered the discussion to test whether Rogers and McKim were correct in their depiction of the Dutch or European Reformed view, which they claimed was distinct and different from the Old Princeton inerrantist view of Scripture.

The book under review consists of these two essays, introduced by a substantial statement from Dr. Peter A. Lillback, president of Westminster Theological Seminary (v–xvi). The essays are corrected and augmented lightly at points. At the end Gaffin adds a fresh postscript (105–7).

Gaffin proceeds by posing six questions that he thinks the Rogers-McKim handling of Kuyper and Bavinck raises (see 4–5): 1) How did Kuyper and Bavinck situate themselves with respect to post-Reformation orthodoxy? Related to this, how faithfully did this orthodoxy represent the Reformation? 2) How did Kuyper and Bavinck view the Holy Spirit’s role in human recognition of Scripture and its authority? 3) How did Kuyper and Bavinck assess the relation between Scripture’s form and its content? 4) Did Kuyper and Bavinck see an analogy between the divine-human Christ and the divine and human elements of Scripture? If so how was the relation understood? 5) How did Kuyper and Bavinck view biblical criticism and mainstream biblical scholarship of their era? 6) How did Kuyper and Bavinck view biblical inerrancy? Did they believe that Scripture contains errors? These are the questions Gaffin seeks to answer from the (largely Dutch) sources in some one hundred pages of carefully argued analysis.

There are three reasons why Gaffin’s study is if anything more pertinent today than it was when it first appeared as journal articles. First, he shows decisively that Rogers and McKim tended to misrepresent Kuyper and Bavinck. Far from propounding a view of Scripture that was inimical to Warfield or other Princetonians, they on the whole expressed views that comported with Warfield. Around 1900 Bavinck lamented the directions being charted by liberal Presbyterians in the US:

Thus the Reformed church and theology in America are in a serious crisis. The doctrines of the infallibility of Holy Scripture, of the trinity, of the fall and inability of man, of particular atonement, of election and reprobation, of eternal punishment are secretly denied or even openly rejected. (105)

In contrast to this lament, Bavinck extols Princeton Seminary and Warfield in particular. In the end, Rogers and McKim largely misrepresent Kuyper and Bavinck and their views on inerrancy and the Princeton heritage.

Second, Gaffin’s study is important because it sets a question mark next to McGowan’s reading of Bavinck, a central segment of McGowan’s whole argument (see McGowan,Divine Authenticity of Scripture, 138–64). McGowan agrees with Woodbridge and Gaffin that Rogers and McKim cannot adduce Kuyper and Bavinck in favor of their view of Scripture, and McGowan concedes that Gaffin demonstrates that Kuyper and Bavinck “held a high view of Scripture very close to that of Warfield” (ibid., 138). But McGowan, taking inspiration from James Orr, claims that Kuyper and Bavinck “were not inerrantists” (ibid., 139). McGowan leaves Kuyper to the side at this point, focuses on Bavinck for some twenty-five pages, and gives an unconvincing response to Gaffin.

The problem here is that Gaffin appears to demonstrate two things that McGowan wants to deny. McGowan wants to deny that there is much continuity between Princeton/Warfield and the “European Reformed” heritage championed by Kuyper and Bavinck, and he wants to deny that Kuyper and Bavinck held to inerrancy. Against McGowan’s contentions, Gaffin appears to show that for both, “The Bible is without error” (102; cf. 46). For Kuyper, if Scripture contains error, then “God is guilty of error” (46). “The truth of Scripture, appropriate to its unique divine authorship, is impressionistic, not notarially precise or scientifically exact” (ibid.). It is nonetheless inerrant. Bavinck was a more inductive thinker and more reserved in his characterization of Scripture’s full truthfulness. Yet, Gaffin concludes, “every consideration leads us to suppose that he would not object nor find it inappropriate to speak of the inerrancy of Scripture, provided that, like Kuyper, we understand that in an impressionistic, nontechnical sense” (102). Since McGowan’s reading of Bavinck so solidly diverges from Gaffin’s, it is not clear why he did not take the time to show where Gaffin went wrong. I do not find in McGowan’s treatment clear indication that Bavinck had a view of Scripture that differed essentially from that of Warfield, so at this point I remain convinced by Gaffin. This is all the more true since Gaffin works with the Dutch sources, often correcting faulty translations, while McGowan seems dependent on those translations.

A third reason why Gaffin’s book is important is stated by the author in his postscript (105–7). We find ourselves in ongoing battles over the Bible and proper understanding of it today, as the titles at the head of this essay remind us. There is no easy way out of this. “But,” Gaffin notes, “one thing is certain.” Progress will be possible in agreement on the doctrine of Scripture only “when we share at least a common mind-set concerning the past and what in fact the central church doctrine is” (107). Warfield is among many to have shown that something like what he calls “inerrancy” is the view of Christ and Scripture writers themselves. Woodbridge has shown that “inerrancy” is appropriate to characterize the “central church doctrine” from patristic times forward. Donald Bloesch has noted that inerrabilis (roughly “inerrant”) is used to describe Scripture by Augustine, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, while both Luther and Calvin “described the Bible as being infallible and without error,” Calvin calling Scripture an “unerring rule” for Christian faith and life.17 Gaffin’s reconstruction of Kuyper’s and Bavinck’s views—not essentially different from the inerrantist position of Warfield—ensures that their respective (and quite compatible) doctrines of Scripture can be accurately grasped by any with ears to hear as discussions currently underway run their course in days ahead.

4. Kenton L. Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship18

The aim of this book is “to help shape the intellectual contours of the church” so that it can “assimilate the fruits of academic endeavors to its faith in Christ” (18). The book’s “agenda” is “the church’s careful reevaluation of its relationship to historical-critical readings of Scripture” (21). Specifically, “critical biblical scholarship will be accepted only when a new paradigm explains how the criticism can fit into a life of faith. This book was written to advance that cause, and I hope and pray that in some small way it will succeed in doing so” (372). Yet Sparks is not merely a promoter of historical critical methods and findings. He states, “I am an evangelical, committed fully to the Bible as God’s authoritative Word, to the doctrines of historic creedal orthodoxy, to the unique significance of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, and to the hope of his return” (21). He states that he could join with Calvin in signing an inerrancy statement (256).

4.1. Argument of the Book

Before commenting on strengths and weaknesses of this wide-ranging and demanding book, it will be helpful to summarize, with minimal comment, the book’s ten chapters and conclusion.

Chapter one, “Epistemology and Hermeneutics,” seeks to characterize the current hermeneutical setting. Sparks concludes that the limitation of human knowledge is not really a bane; we can have adequate even if not perfect knowledge of most things. He also concludes that interpreters are radically limited to the time and place they inhabit. This is true not only for “Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin” but also for “Jesus, Paul, and Luke” (55). Sparks supports “a doctrine of inerrancy when it comes to Scripture,” but not as traditionally understood. He opts for a “practical realism” that “accentuates the validity and adequacy of human discourse” for mediating what we ought to understand and do (ibid.). “Human discourse,” it will turn out, is how we should first of all conceive of the Bible. That is why historical criticism is so necessary: its analytic power to interpret human discourse is unparalleled.

Chapter two, “Historical Criticism and Assyriology,” demonstrates how historical criticism yields positive results when applied to artifacts of ancient Mesopotamia. Sparks concludes that the “negative aura that often surrounds” the terms historical criticism, biblical criticism, modern criticism, and the like, is “unnecessary and unwarranted” (72). All historical criticism means, for Sparks, is “reading texts contextually” (ibid.). It may therefore be safely applied to Scripture.

Chapter three, “The Problem of Biblical Criticism,” illustrates this. Sparks walks the reader through the findings of historical criticism in a number of areas: the Pentateuch (Moses wrote little if any of it), Israelite historiography (much is not historical), the authorship of Isaiah (there were multiple authors, not one), the four Gospels (they take considerable historical liberties), the authorship of the Pastorals (Paul did not write them), and more. Key historical events of the Bible must be questioned. Moreover, “at face value, Scripture does not seem to furnish us with one divine theology” but “gives us numerous theologies” (121; Sparks’s emphasis).19 God may have informed biblical writers, but “their ideas and perspectives were historically contingent, being radically shaped by the particular cultural settings in which they lived and worked” (ibid.). The Bible is primarily and pervasively a human book.

Chapter four, “‘Traditional’ Responses to Biblical Criticism,” faults numerous assessments of biblical criticism that fall short of Sparks’s own “believing criticism” (133). “Traditional” responses fail across the board. Some traditionalists (Billy Graham, Gleason Archer, Carl F. H. Henry) are fideistic. Others mount “philosophical critiques” of biblical criticism that are flawed (Iain Provan, Alvin Plantinga, V. Philips Long). Others are “critical anti-critics” who use specious means to dismiss criticism’s inexorable findings (Kenneth Kitchen, Gleason Archer, Duane Garrett, R. K. Harrison, Derek Kidner, Herbert Wolf, Richard Schulz, Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, Tremper Longman III, James Hoffmeier, T. Desmond Alexander, Brian Kelly, Craig Blomberg, D. A. Carson, Douglas Moo). Part of the problem is that lots of these people are poorly trained because they went to evangelical schools, Jewish schools, or British universities (168). Sparks’s doctorate is from the University of North Carolina, which presumably furnishes a higher vantage point. But there have been scattered good guys like Sparks out there, “progressive evangelicals” including John Goldingay, Carl Armerding, Ray Dillard, Leslie Allen, George Beasley-Murray, F. F. Bruce, Peter Enns, N. T. Wright, Bernard Ramm, and many others who are not chained to traditionalism’s rigid constraints.

Given the abysmal failure of apparently most evangelicals to do justice to the findings of historical criticism, chapter five, “Constructive Responses to Biblical Criticism,” surveys numerous non-evangelical strategies for theological appropriation of Scripture. The assumption seems to be that if there is light to be found, it will not come from an evangelical. Sparks surveys works and proposals by Karl Barth, Gerhard von Rad, the Biblical Theology movement, Brevard Childs, Walter Wink, David Steinmetz, narrative theology (Hans Frei, George Lindbeck), Stephen Fowl, the Catholic Church, James Barr, and others. He terms all this cumulatively a “long-standing and intellectually vigorous tradition in scholarship” (200) that sheds light on integrating criticism and theology. Specifically, from this discussion we may recognize that 1) “some biblical errors are illusions,” 2) “some biblical errors are accommodations to the human horizon,” 3) extrabiblical sources may furnish resources for theology, and 4) the Holy Spirit may aid productive interpretation (203). Based on this, Sparks culls out insights and themes to explore in subsequent chapters.

Chapter six takes its cue from Karl Barth (205) and deals with the human dimension of Scripture. “When we sensibly employ analytic generic categories to read Scripture, treating it as the ancient document that it is rather than as an instance of modern discourse, many of the theological difficulties implied by historical criticism are adequately resolved” (227). Humans err, the Bible is written by humans, so its statements often reflect “human limitations and foibles” (226), which is to say, mistakes. Appeals to progressive revelation here are “only half-baked” (226n24). In fact Sparks agrees with Edgar McKnight that “progressive revelation depends conceptually upon Enlightenment notions of ‘progress’” (246n52), a curious claim since it is found in the Bible as well as in church fathers like Irenaeus. But less than full veracity in Scripture is not a problem, as we do not need “perfect language” in Scripture, “only language that is adequate as a bearer of truth . . . God’s truth” (226). Apparently human limitation in Scripture is not so pervasive as to prevent Sparks from ascertaining what parts of it are actually true and reflective of God’s wisdom and will among so much that criticism determines to be false.

Chapter seven focuses on “The Genres of Divine Discourse.” Sparks sets forth “accommodation” as the major solution for acknowledging the divine in Scripture despite its lack of theological unity and the presence of human error. He points out how church fathers, Calvin, and even Gleason Archer allow that “Scripture does accommodate human error in its discourse” (255) without imperiling its status as a medium of divine self-disclosure.

Chapter eight takes up “The Context of the Whole and Biblical Interpretation.” Here the argument is that many things addressed in Scripture take on their right and fuller meaning when augmented by knowledge from outside of Scripture, whether the created order generally or from disciplined study of that order like we find in astronomy, biology, literature, or physics. For example, “God tells us through our pursuit of the biological sciences how life developed; he tells us through Scripture that he’s the one responsible for that biological miracle” (278). Christians should take the wisdom of other religions very seriously, just as they should accept the wisdom of secular biblical scholars. “We are wise to embrace the truth in whatever way that God brings it to us” (278).

Chapter nine, “Negotiating the Context of the Whole,” takes a surprising turn. Sparks affirms the relevance and indeed authority of “the whole” of what Scripture affirms theologically as articulated by Christian traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant) through the centuries. This “whole” should be brought to bear in interpreting the parts of Scripture, no mean feat since much in the traditions as they understand themselves is diametrically opposed—most Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants would not think it easy to combine the three strands and regard the result as a harmonious “whole.” Sparks’s “practical realism” is adept at resolving apparent logical contradictions: they are simply ignored. The “whole” also consists of “the created order and any special revelation that God has provided to humanity” (326). So Scripture is not a lens through which to view all reality (327–28). It is rather “like a good virus that gradually spreads and infuses its wisdom into the entire network of our worldview” (328). “The result is not so much a biblical worldview as a biblically informed worldview” (ibid.). Not only the Bible but human knowledge of it is only human all the way down.

Chapter ten applies the method Sparks has worked out in chapters one through nine to various texts and problems: the story of David in 1–2 Samuel; the imminent eschatology of Daniel and Revelation; the question of women’s ordination. He arrives at conclusions, he notes, “fairly close to the standard conclusions of church tradition,” though he accepts women’s ordination despite its non-traditional nature (354–55). On the other hand, “the divine decree that husbands shall have authority in the home still stands and is still needed” (352). It is important that Sparks, by using historical criticism, arrives at his convictions in ways superior to the approach of “very conservative evangelicalism” (355). He concludes by restating that his purpose in the whole book has been “to preserve a place at the evangelical table for genuine critical study of the Bible” (356). The outstanding question remains: “How and to what extent should modern biblical criticism be embraced in the life of the church?” (356).

In “Conclusions: Biblical Criticism and Christian Institutions” (357–74), Sparks takes up this question. The answer is, basically, that it must be embraced judiciously but maximally. As questions arise in a church setting and as parishioners can bear the truth, it should be shared with them. This will take time, perhaps generations. But it is a vital mission, as Sparks shows by adapting terms from William Carey—so vital, to note one contrast, that nothing is said here or in the whole book about missions in the more usual sense. This mission to promote criticism is the particular responsibility of the Christian college. While this has the effect of giving professors like Sparks their way with impressionable students away from any guidance by their pastors and parents, that is not his point. He rather seeks to implement a merciful protective measure: taking care of this business in the Christian college classroom means “rank-and-file church members are better insulated from the potentially destructive effects of intense academic inquiry and debate” (364). It is not clear why these members should be spared but their children (likely funded by the members) fully exposed to this inquiry and debate. Nor is it clear why the results of criticism that Sparks promotes as so salubrious throughout the book must now suddenly be hidden from the view of people in churches.

Sparks quotes Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College, but totally rejects his conception of “revelation and creation, or of faith and reason” (365), because it is too narrow and biblicistic. What happens at places like Wheaton is that leaders cater to “uninformed constituencies,” whether because they agree with them or “because they wish to attract their tuition dollars” (366). Instead, there must be academic freedom; otherwise “ill-guided fundamentalist populism” will continue to drive schools like Duke, Emory, and Southern Methodist University “further away from their traditional Christian roots” (367). Sparks does not document how this populism drives the direction of these institutions.

He likens “many evangelical theologians and biblical scholars” today to Edward Carnell (191 9–67), who died from overdose and possibly suicide because rigid evangelical institutional expectations at Fuller Seminary were so repressive that he cracked under the strain (368–69). There need to be changes and adjustments in institutional models so that full academic freedom can flourish even when this “flies in the face of external, populist constituencies” (369). The implication seems to be that otherwise evangelicalism can expect further tragedies among its psychologically victimized leaders.

“Students schooled in biblical criticism” should be cautious about airing what they know from college or seminary—Noah’s flood did not occur, nor (probably) the exodus, Nineveh did not repent, the Gospels disagree, Revelation errs in predicting Christ’s return, and so forth (371). So students should be careful where and how they say what they now know, not because the facts are in question (historical criticism assures that) but because people in the pew are not yet ready for these historical critical insights, the church will recoil, the Christian academy that taught these things will be criticized, and Sparks’s mission of seeing historical criticism accepted in the church will be set back (371).

While Sparks sounds a conciliatory note at the very end—“The evangelical scholars that I know are wonderful people, and in many cases their scholarship is excellent” (373)—the grim truth is that “the evangelical tradition” is “equally culpable” with “Enlightenment rationalism and post-Enlightenment relativism” in destroying faith and fomenting apostasies (374). “A more robust faith” like Spark’s “believing criticism” “would chart a different course, one that is at the same time critical in its disposition and wholly committed to the theological and ethical demands of Christian orthodoxy” (ibid.).

4.2. Evaluation

So much for a summary of the book. A preliminary comment is in order before moving to strengths and weaknesses.

Sparks describes himself as a member of a “new generation of evangelical scholars” unlike the “old school evangelicals” whose convictions about the Bible this book aims to discredit. Coming in the wake of Peter Enns’s Inspiration and Incarnation, there is reason to think that Sparks, like Enns, might become a rallying point for students and others eager to depart from “traditional” views that they may or may not fully grasp. A pair of contrasting reviews of Sparks’s book in Review of Biblical Literature confirms this. The first, by seasoned NT scholar Jeffrey Gibbs, is kind and appreciative but wisely critical.20 The second, by a seminary student who hopes to have an M.A.R. in biblical studies by May 2009, is completely laudatory and shares fully in Sparks’s condemnation of evangelical scholarship and views of Scripture.21

Precisely if we find ourselves in more or less utter sympathy with Sparks, we should note his clear and persistent conviction about the biblical writers and indeed all historical sources: “Every human person is inescapably located within, and shaped by, a social and cultural context” (126; cf. 121). To the extent we accept that about (even) biblical figures like Jesus and writers like Isaiah and Paul, we must apply it to Sparks as well. His views, by his own rules, are largely determined by his social and cultural context. If they are imbibed without the kind of critical scrutiny that intellectually responsible reading calls for, we are not paying him the respect his book requires from its readers but according his words an ahistorical, docetic quality that does not even inhere in Scripture, according to Sparks.

4.2.1. Strengths

In the interest of paying that respect, I note the following plusses to this book. First, it takes up a perennially important topic. I suppose the first book I read along this line was George Ladd’s The New Testament and Criticism, which was much shorter and less ambitious but made similar points.22 The genre goes back into the nineteenth century at least. Many books and essays have sought to address issues related to those Sparks takes up. He was well-advised to devote his energy and learning to this fresh breakdown of key problems along with attempted constructive proposals.

Second, behind this book stands impressively wide reading. Much of it is in areas most familiar to Sparks: the OT in its ancient Near Eastern setting. But as the summary above indicated, he has read in many historical, hermeneutical, theological, philosophical, and other areas. In fact, he probably covered more ancillary ground for this book than some OT scholars will cover outside their fields in their entire careers. This range and command of information is admirable and beneficial.

Third, Sparks is moved by justified concerns regarding hyper-conservative anti-intellectual approaches to Scripture. Where evangelical scholars do in fact “marry that great doctrine of inerrancy to a docetic view of Scripture, which imagines that its discourse was hermetically sealed from the diversity of human ideas and viewpoints” (373–74), or insist on unattainable certainty, or commit the sins of “critical anti-realism” (144–68), such errors need uncovering and correcting. I am not convinced by all of Sparks’s examples—in fact, he commits the same error of “selective and illegitimate appeals to critical scholarship” that he denounces (see below)—but to the extent his darts find their mark, his concerns are well-placed.

Fourth, I found it daring and creative that a biblical scholar committed to historical criticism would try to articulate exegetical findings in the light of both “the created order and any special revelation that God has provided to humanity” (326). There is much in this chapter that critical method often omits by definition, and I commend Sparks for going behind disciplinary constraints as conceived by many to arrive even at “theological interpretation” that is “a process that hears God’s univocal Word by listening to his many words” (327).

Finally, I commend Sparks’s patience in wrestling with and assimilating the views of so many scholars who would in all frankness see no legitimacy in the post-traditional Christian faith he espouses. This goes beyond my praise voiced above for the volume of his reading. Any number of the works he has waded through were penned by figures who are no friends of confessional Christianity in any form. In that sense Sparks has in many cases modeled the openness to criticism he calls for, albeit generally only toward people to the left of him theologically.

4.2.2. Weaknesses

On the negative side, this book is practically bereft of mention of Jesus Christ in ways one might have expected given the focus, sweep, and authorial confession found in the book. There is a single reference to the “scandal of the cross” (13), but Sparks relates this to Noll’s scandal of the evangelical mind (13n1), which is surely far removed from Paul’s reference. He is “God’s great remedy for our troubled human condition” (73). But Sparks takes pains to deny close ties between Christ’s two natures and Scripture’s humanity and divinity (252–53). In one spot he agrees that “Christians will want to consider seriously what Jesus and the New Testament writers said about the Old Testament” (164). But in the very next sentence, what we learn is that Jesus Christ was “human and finite” (164), and subsequently that “modern critical research makes it likely . . . that Jesus has not told us who really wrote the Pentateuch, Isaiah, or Daniel” (165). Modern critical research simply trumps Jesus—end of discussion. We hear nothing here or elsewhere about either Jesus or other New Testament writers in terms of their view of Scripture. “Inspiration,” a significant category in ancient thought, is not addressed; 2 Tim 3:16 and 2 Pet 1:20–21 and the meaning of graphe in biblical writings are not discussed. The implications of “thus says the Lord” in the prophets receive no attention, nor Moses receiving tablets on Sinai and communing with Yahweh face to face. Sparks’s approach here may be “critical,” but it simply ignores the historical. Perhaps this is because he knows these things are not historical based on historical critical authorities.

Second, while Sparks dips into the fathers or the Reformers here and there to make key points—and his treatment on Calvin and accommodation (232–36, 245, 249–51, etc.) while not extensive is insightful—his presentation of the history of biblical interpretation is not up to the weight he places on it. Origen (ca. AD 185–254) wrote in the third century, not the second (143). Sparks thinks that Porphyry (ca. AD 232–ca. 304) and Augustine (AD 354–430) wrote “at about the same time” (ibid.); figures writing in the third and fifth centuries are farther removed temporally than were Paul and Irenaeus.

Sparks uses a quote from Augustine to answer the question of when to broach “a difficult subject like historical criticism with the local church” (360), but when Augustine speaks of “some great passages which are not understood . . . or are understood with great difficulty . . . and these should never be brought before the people at all, or only on rare occasions when there is some urgent reason,”23 he is talking about Scripture passages, not “the standard results of biblical criticism” (359) of which Sparks is speaking. Similarly, Sparks claims Augustine’s authority for the view that the Gospel of John’s divine insights “can go no farther than the man himself can bear” (246)—so Augustine, like Sparks, affirms a radical human limitation to John and the other Gospel writers.

But it is not so simple. Augustine’s Harmony of the Gospels 35.54 gives a fuller picture of this Latin father’s view. Jesus appointed disciples. These he used in writing the Gospels “as if they were his own hands.” The image is almost grotesque: the reader who

apprehends this correspondence of unity and this concordant service of the members [i.e., the hands, the disciples], all in harmony in the discharge of diverse offices under the Head [i.e., Christ], will receive the account which he gets in the Gospel through the narratives constructed by the disciples, in the same kind of spirit in which he might look upon the actual hand of the Lord Himself, which He bore in that body which was made His own, were he to see it engaged in the act of writing.

To look upon the written Gospels is to see de facto the hand of Jesus Christ himself engaged in writing it! This gives rise to Augustine’s direct response to the claim (made repeatedly by Sparks) that the Gospels materially contradict (italics added below):

For this reason let us now rather proceed to examine into the real character of those passages in which these critics suppose the evangelists to have given contradictory accounts (a thing which only those who fail to understand the matter aright can fancy to be the case); so that, when these problems are solved, it may also be made apparent that the members in that body have preserved a befitting harmony in the unity of the body itself, not only by identity in sentiment, but also by constructing records consonant with that identity.

Augustine does not support Sparks’s view of the Gospels on this point.

Moving to more recent times, any defense of historical criticism requires a fuller account of the move from pre-Kantian interpretation to postmodernity than Sparks’s chapter one furnishes. It is fair enough to speak of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, but the precipitous leap (40) from these figures to today leaves almost all of the doyens and developments of historical criticism untouched. Particularly vital here is the nineteenth century, as it set the stage for discussion still underway today. But Sparks deals with few to no scholars from this era. This lack of background makes it impossible for the untrained reader to get historical perspective on the topics concerning which he accuses evangelicals of being so mistaken, while praising “critical” scholars for possessing such sagacity. It is precisely the missing history that is required to make the debates intelligible.24

A third weakness is that Sparks finds almost all ill and nearly no good on the “evangelical” side of the ledger, and the opposite on the side of historical criticism (which he depicts as a monolithic whole, though it is manifestly not). In a lucid moment he concedes that “large swaths of the church have been almost decimated by” it (58). Yet he insists that “the negative aura that often surrounds” the words “historical criticism” is “unnecessary and unwarranted” (72). Does the decimation of “large swaths of the church” count for so little? Do the empty churches of Europe signify nothing, where state university educational monopolies taught historical criticism to theology students for generations until it is now mainly only Muslims who believe in God there? Do mainline centers of theological study in North America that are dismissive of biblical Christianity, and that send out pastors who do not preach the saving Christian message, merit none of the censure that this book dishes out to evangelical Christians so liberally? To his credit he is able to raise a red flag against the “minimalist school” (169n80; cf. 131) and anti-realists (131). But he rarely finds fault with a “historical critical” scholar or outlook. Meanwhile, this review has already intimated how sweeping and scathing is the book’s dismissal of hundreds of evangelical colleagues, many of whom he readily cites by name.

A fourth weakness is that there is no serious acknowledgment of how many of Sparks’s concerns are actually addressed by the Chicago Statements. Granted, these documents articulate a conception of inerrancy that he sees fit consistently to pillory. One reason for this, though, is that he depicts them (when they come into view at all) as wooden, unreflective, and intellectually dishonest. Since so many bright and productive colleagues in dozens of Christian colleges and seminaries have cheerfully affirmed these statements, this might have alerted him to the possibility that they are more serviceable as articulations of warranted belief than this book gives credit. Let us concede that they are a generation old and bear revisiting and rephrasing today.25

Nevertheless, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics agrees with Sparks, e.g., that “Scripture communicates God’s truth to us verbally through a wide variety of literary forms” (Article X), that “awareness of the literary categories, formal and stylistic, of the various parts of Scripture is essential for proper exegesis, and hence we value genre criticism as one of the many disciplines of biblical study” (Article XIII), that “legitimate critical techniques should be used in determining the canonical text and its meaning” (Article XVI), that “any preunderstandings which the interpreter brings to Scripture should be in harmony with scriptural teaching and subject to correction by it” (Article XIX), and that “in some cases extra-biblical data have value for clarifying what Scripture teaches, and for prompting correction of faulty interpretations” (Article XX). To avoid the appearance of an Elijah complex (“Lord, I alone am left”), Sparks might have been less binary and more inclusive in affirming such common grounds of concern.

Fifth, the book is deceptive in casting evangelical views as traditional but historical-critical views as invariably current and fresh. In fact, nothing is more traditional than historical-critical findings. Few of them, by now, are truly new; many were established in the nineteenth century or even earlier; some are as ancient as anti-Christian apologists like Celsus (ca. AD 180). Once these “critical” beliefs get established, they get passed from professor to student with the same apodictic authority Sparks associates with evangelical dogma. Luke Timothy Johnson showed this in the history of scholarship of 1–2 Timothy.26 I have shown it in the history of NT (and to some extent OT) theology going back to the 1830s.27Charles Hill has made a similar point with regards to Johannine studies over the last half century.28 Sparks typically casts the matter like this: “Traditional interpreters accept the Bible’s ostensible claims that the books are written by Paul, while most modern scholars believe that the Pastorals are certainly not Pauline” (113; italics added). Johnson paints a truer picture. After tracing the generations of Pastoral Epistles scholarship in Germany going back to Schleiermacher (ca. 1810), who first asserted their non-Pauline authorship, Johnson observes that by the twentieth century in North American universities,

no one could any longer truly read them as Pauline. Having the majority position enunciated authoritatively in standard scholarship, having it assumed by all studies of the life and thought of Paul, and having it taught as self-evident in college and seminaryclassrooms for the past ninety years means that many generations of readers have been shaped by this view, which has come to be seen as a fact of nature rather than a scholarly hypothesis.29

This could be said about most of the “flashpoint” issues Sparks raises. He presents a historical-critical position as if it is virtually revelatory, self-evident to critical reason, while evangelical convictions are at best the result of tradition. The fact is that “critical” solutions all have their history, too, and given the millions of students who are taught “historical critical” views in tax-supported universities and post-Christian colleges in North America, there is more uncritical traditionalism taught and accepted there than in all “conservative” schools put together. But since Sparks hypes historical-critical solutions and can only look down his nose at “traditional evangelical” ones, the reader never learns this. Given the second weakness above (i.e., the book’s deficiency in awareness of the history of biblical interpretation since the Enlightenment), perhaps Sparks was not in a position to impart it.

Space does not suffice to air a number of other points bearing comment. For example, I wonder about the ethics of concealing historical criticism from “populist constituencies” in the church but then unloading it on the 18–22-year-old sons and daughters of those churches who send their teens to a Christian school with a faith statement that affirms, “We recognize the Bible, composed of the Old and New Testaments, as inspired of God and as the supreme and final authority in faith and life. We submit ourselves to carrying out our mission under its authority . . . .”30 I simply cannot square Sparks’s book with that statement. As I read this book I kept recalling J. Gresham Machen’s suggestion in the 1920s that people who had departed from historic Christian beliefs should simply move to institutions more compatible with their views.31

Again, I wonder how valid it is to accuse evangelicals (here going back to the Reformers, actually) of an illegitimate quest for indubitable certainty (32–33), a culpable enmeshment in “the Cartesian tradition” (55). Evangelicals have been guilty of many things, but it is doubtful that much of it is rooted directly enough in the legacy of René Descartes to make this association. And I wonder how coherent, really, Sparks’s “practical realism” is as the key “essential element in the church’s healthy response to biblical criticism” (55). He wields it as an alternative to an alleged Cartesian certitude, but the result is hard to distinguish from neofoundationalist certainty that one camp gets almost nothing right and the other gets almost nothing wrong.

A final and poignant shortcoming of the book is that its vaunted center, historical criticism, is actually not amenable to Sparks’s deployment of it. He may try to Christianize it, but it is much bigger than he is and will recognize him as a scholar only to the extent that he bends the knee to its rules and internal logic. I say this only somewhat tongue-in-cheek. In terms of the argument of the book, for me the segment on which everything else turns is “Miracles, History, and Historical Criticism” (313–22). Here Sparks takes on Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923). Troeltsch, who was a Kant scholar, Baden neo-Kantian, and systematician of the so-called History of Religion school,32 did not invent historical criticism. But he codified its rules— criticism, analogy, correlation—and articulated its worldview. Historical criticism as generally affirmed by biblical scholars worldwide assumes those rules and requires that worldview. Otherwise, it is not “historical criticism” in the sense that nearly all of the “historical critical” scholars whose authority Sparks adduces would affirm. It is totalitarian in its conception, claims, and demands, all of which completely and utterly rule out the intellectual validity of historic Christianity as in any sense a revealed religion.33

Sparks valiantly tries to argue around Troeltsch. He even resorts to calling on help from evangelical scholars who are in this discussion suddenly useful to him: C. Stephen Evans, missiologist Don Richardson, David K. Clark, even Alvin Plantinga, who earlier in the book is cited as an example of someone guilty of a flawed “traditional” response to historical criticism (142–43). I think Sparks is resourceful and correct in his refutation of Troeltsch and applaud his efforts here. The problem is that Troeltschian historiography rules the roost in mainstream biblical scholarship. That is what “historical critical” means, or even “historical” when used by “historical critical” scholars (Bart Ehrman is an excellent example). It means radical doubt of the (biblical) source, analysis using the tool of analogy, and reconstruction under the principle of correlation. It is a radically immanent enterprise—divine causation is not allowed. I think Sparks is instinctively sensitive to this; it may be a reason (see the first weakness above) why the concept “Jesus is Lord,” the most fundamental of all cognitive Christian affirmations, plays no active role that I can recall in the formation of knowledge in this book. Jesus’ lordship is irrelevant and must remain so for historical criticism to operate. Believe it privately as you wish, but the moment it affects your scholarship, you have left the nurturing bosom of historical criticism. (Here it is a loss for Sparks that he was not able to reflect on chapter one of Bowald’s book reviewed above.)

Christian thinkers can and do use modified versions of the historical-critical method; that is how Christian biblical scholarship has operated in the Western academy since Enlightenment convictions generally spread, crystallized, and attained prescriptive status. That is precisely why, too, it is often not recognized as “scholarship” at all by the academic hegemony. Now Sparks, for his part, wants “historical critical” first, not “evangelical.” His book is a proud credo that he retains the latter while privileging the former. His book also teaches that as an evangelical, I can brook nothing but indubitable certainty. But on this matter, at least, I do harbor doubt.34