(Part Three)

(Adapted from chapter one of 'Recent Trends Among Evangelicals' by Rowland C.Croucher, John Mark Ministries 1986/1995.

Authority and our view of scripture

This leads us to the most contentious issue within evangelicalism today: the question of biblical inerrancy.

In 1976 a book appeared which did more than any other in the last thirty years to polarise evangelicals: Harold Lindsell's 'The Battle for the Bible' (Zondervan). Lindsell had just concluded as editor of Christianity Today, the world's most widely-read evangelical magazine. In that same year 'Newsweek' (October 25, 1976) had a cover story entitled 'Born Again' and said evangelical Christianity was 'the most significant - and overlooked - phenomenon of the '70s'. Evangelical Christianity had emerged 'into a position of respect and power'. Also in 1976 a US Gallup Poll revealed that nearly half of all Protestants and a third of all Americans said they had been 'born again'. The most famous of those Americans, Jimmy Carter, was running for President. Carter's opponent, president Gerald Ford, also declared himself to be an evangelical Christian. 'The Christian Century' (December) stated: In terms of public attention and news coverage, 1976 was unmistakably the Year of the Evangelical.'

Then that book appeared!

Lindsell branded many evangelical people, churches and seminaries as 'false evangelicals'. As Jack Rogers of Fuller Theological Seminary put it: 'Lindsell's criterion was a single one. He refused to grant "the evangelical label" to those who failed to conform to his particular theory of the inerrancy of the Bible. Those who advocated interpretations of the Bible with which Lindsell disagreed, for example the ordination of women, were charged with denying the authority of the Bible.

Of the three canons of authority - reason, tradition and scripture - evangelicals have always affirmed that scripture is 'God's word in our words' and therefore is always our primary and supreme authority for all matters of faith and conduct. Although reason and tradition may have been illumined and guided by the Holy Spirit, they have a secondary and subordinate place to scripture. Why? Because this was Christ's view of scripture. John Stott puts it simply in various writings: 'The conservative view of scripture... is Christ's view of scripture. He endorsed the Old Testament, made provision for the New Testament, and because of Christ we accept the authority of the book.'

But as Reformed theologian G.C. Berkouwer expressed it somewhere: 'To confess holy scripture and its authority is to be aware of the command to understand and to interpret it. It always places us at the beginning of a road that we can only travel in fear and trepidation.' If God has yet more light and truth to break forth from his holy word, then we must face the hard questions and continue to wrestle with them.

If the Bible is 'God's word in our words', we are immediately presented with two dangers: biblical docetism, which to varying degrees denies the real humanness of the written documents; and biblical Arianism, which denies that scripture is truly the word of God.

But if scripture is truly the word of God, what do we mean by 'truly'? The founder of L'Abri, Francis Schaeffer, used to ask: 'Is the Bible true truth? The issue is whether the Bible gives propositional truth where it touches history and the cosmos ... or whether it is only meaningful where it touches that which is considered religious.' For Schaeffer this was the watershed issue: 'we draw the line here with love and tears, even if evangelicals have to separate from one another.'

Then, too, it's a question of priority. For James Boice and Harold Lindsell, the authority of the Bible is an outcome of its inerrancy: 'If you don't have an inerrant Bible, you don't have an authoritative Bible' (Boice). Carl Henry objects to this elevation of inerrancy over authority as the first claim to be made for the Bible: 'To concentrate on inerrancy as the sole decisive issue is to wage the battle on too narrow a front.'

Billy Graham's position is similar to his mentor, Carl Henry's: 'I believe the Bible is the inspired, authoritative word of God, but I don't use the word "inerrant" because it's become a brittle, divisive word.' It certainly has, but Graham went on to say something truly prophetic: 'The issue [of the '80s] is going to be hermeneutics, or how to interpret scripture properly and apply it to personal and social life.'

The inerrantist view assumes that unless the Bible can be shown to give trustworthy information on non-religious matters, then it can't be trusted in the more important religious realm. The neo-orthodox view says the Bible is a witness to God's primary revelation in Christ, but as all human words are fallible it is not helpful to speak of the Bible as being in itself the word of God. It may become the word of God as we encounter God himself in Jesus Christ through its preaching.

A third model we might call 'progressive evangelical'. We find an exposition of it in John Stott's chapter, 'The Authority and Power of the Bible', in Rene Padilla (ed.), 'The New Face of Evangelicalism (Hodder and Stoughton, 1976). Commenting on the Lausanne Covenant phrase 'without error in all that it affirms', Stott writes: 'Not everything included in scripture is true, because not everything recorded in scripture is affirmed by scripture.' It would be naive, he argues, to declare that 'every word in the Bible is true'. Consider, for example, the Book of Job. Of the speeches recorded there God says, 'You have not spoken of me what is right' (42:7). So in declaring that the scripture is 'without error in all that it affirms', we are committed to 'the responsible work of biblical interpretation, so that we may discern the intention of each author and grasp what is being affirmed'.

Jack Rogers has a helpful comment on these three models. He says all three are useful inasmuch as they are seeking to answer different questions. The first model asks the question: Is the Bible an authoritative and trustworthy revelation for all of life? We can answer with the inerrantists: 'Yes!' The second model asks: In whom is God most fully revealed? We should answer with the neo-orthodox: 'Jesus Christ, to whom scripture bears unique and authoritative witness.' The third model asks yet another question: How is the Bible most helpfully to be interpreted? Answer: 'It is a divine message given in human words which are best understood in their various historical and cultural contexts.'

Rogers goes on to illustrate the three models by analogies. The first model is like the President of the US dictating a letter to his personal secretary. Thus the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy's Chicago Statement, Article VIII, states: 'God, in causing these writers to use the very words that he chose ... ', thereby asserting a notion of dictation. However, in affirming that 'what scripture says, God says', this declaration also denies that in choosing the words, God overrode their [the writers']

personalities.

The metaphor suggested by the second model, says Rogers, is that of an incumbent President running for re-election, with editorial writers who report on and interpret his sayings and doings. These biblical editorialists encourage the readers to meet the candidate in person and give him their allegiance.

The metaphor suggested by the third model is that of the President's press secretary speaking to the public. Such a person has been with the President and knows his inmost thoughts. When the press secretary speaks, he carries the authority of the President. But he uses his own words and adapts them to the questions being asked by the public.

'The issue', says Rogers, 'among evangelicals is not whether there is transcendent truth in the biblical revelation, but how that truth is incarnated in human, literary forms. The problem is not one of authority, but of interpretation' (J. Rogers, 'Mixed Metaphors, Misunderstood Models, and Puzzling Paradigms', unpublished paper, Fuller Seminary, 1981).

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