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The Bible in the Balance
Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso
- GenresTheology
384 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1979
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November 14, 2014
This book is Harold Lindsell’s 1979 follow-up to his more famous “The Battle for the Bible,” published in 1976 in which he argued that the denial of inerrancy, like a virus, had infected evangelical seminaries which previously had stood for this doctrine. He caused quite a stir because he named names and institutions, primarily Fuller Theological Seminary as exhibit ‘A’. His purpose was to wake up the people in the pew in conservative denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention, most of whom still held to an inerrant Bible, to the reality that their own seminaries were quietly moving away from such a view. One of the strengths of this book is we get to read, in their own words, the often quite energetic and indignant responses of his critics.
Critics sometimes claim that inerrancy is an artifact of modernism, of the Renaissance, and that nobody talked about it before that time. Lindsell responds in two ways. First, he carefully argues that inerrancy is in fact the position of the historic church, and indeed was the position of Jesus himself. To strengthen his conclusion he enlists the support of several “hostile witnesses,” scholars who though they personally rejected inerrancy, nevertheless conceded that such had been the consensus of church history.
Second, he argues that the subject became more prominent and was articulated more clearly after the Renaissance, not as a product of this kind of rationalist thinking, but precisely in response to the rationalist thinking of the Renaissance, which enthroned reason and placed revelation under suspicion. It was at this time that we started to witness an increasingly vocal opposition to the inerrancy of the Bible, something which had previously gone unchallenged. And so the denial of inerrancy forced a more precise formulation of a doctrine which nevertheless was not new.
Lindsell examines the broad sweep of church history and identifies several watershed periods. A watershed period would be one where the question at issue was so important that the side that one chose would have radical consequences for one’s entire theology. The first watershed issue was the question of Christ’s divinity as it was fought and settled at Nicaea. Another was the Protestant Reformation with its question of justification by faith alone. And Lindsell identifies the current question of inerrancy as an issue of such importance that it qualifies as a watershed.
The reason he identifies it as such is because “once anyone departs from a commitment to biblical inerrancy he opens the door to a disavowal either in principle or in practice of other important doctrines of the Christian faith. In other words, it is virtually impossible for anyone who, in the beginning, limits biblical inerrancy or infallibility to matters of faith and practice, to hold this view consistently or persistently over a period of time.”
What is at issue is whether one is willing to stand under the authority of Scripture, or whether one is going to stand in judgement over Scripture. The latter position begins with the conclusion that there are errors in the Bible because such is the “assured result of critical scholarship.” Even though he may readily admit that many of the alleged contradictions can be resolved, he is not interested in doing the work because in his mind it misses the point which is that God’s truth gets through even in the midst of the human aspect of Scripture (i.e. its errors).
Thus many who would identify themselves as evangelicals have recently begun to attempt to distinguish the word “infallible” from the word “inerrant,” even though historically they have been synonymous. They would say that the Bible is “infallible” in that in matters of faith and practice it is without error, but it is not “inerrant” because it has errors in “incidental” details of science and history.
Lindsell quotes Gleason Archer who responds to this approach with the warning “that it assumes a logical impossibility. That is to say, it suggests that even though Scripture may err in ‘factual’ matters in its various parts, and make mistakes in matters of history or science which serve as the frame work or matrix of its theological teaching, nevertheless the Bible taken as a whole is without error. Thus we are given to understand that a concatenation of errors adds up to sublime, over-arching truth. This view is so seriously beset with self-contradiction that it lacks all power to maintain itself for very long.”
Archer continues: “If there were so much as a single mistake in Scripture, it would inevitably follow that the Bible is capable of mistake, and it would therefore require infallible human verification to certify it as valid. We would then be left to the mercy of mere opinion and conjecture, and we would have no genuine certainty as to the great issues of life and death.”
Liberals have for over a century denied Biblical inerrancy, there is no question about that. But why are evangelicals starting to do so too? It is due, says Lindsell, to the introduction of the historical-critical method of Biblical interpretation into evangelical seminaries. This method begins with the assumption that Scripture and the Word of God are not synonymous, that there are errors in Scripture and the scholar must therefore find the canon within the canon, that is to say, he must find the Word of God in Scripture. What is intrinsic to this method is the distinction between “salvation history” and straight history, the facts or the nuts and bolts of history. The liberals, using this methodology, de-supernaturalized the Bible, denied the deity of Christ, his substitutionary atonement and his coming in judgement at the end of time.
Well, objects the non-inerrantist evangelical, we are not liberals. Nevertheless, Lindsell warns that “orthodoxy and the historical-critical method are deadly enemies that are antithetical and cannot be reconciled without the destruction of one or the other.” This methodology is “the Bible’s greatest enemy,” because one who adopts it does not believe what the Scripture says until he has convinced himself that there is good reason to believe it. Evangelicals who adopt this hermeneutic, the first step of which is a denial of inerrancy, are not immediately in the liberal camp but have placed themselves on a slippery slope that inevitably leads to liberalism. Liberalism is, after all, not anti-supernaturalism per se, but the idea that all claims to truth must be made on the basis of reason and experience, not by appeal to external authority.
And sure enough, even in 1979 Lindsell could detect that among non-inerrantist evangelicals “their evangelicalism looks more like a call to social justice and discipleship than the traditional call to conversion. One can even discern among them a subtle shift in the direction of belief in universal salvation.” Thus the shift from a belief in inerrancy to one in “limited inerrancy” is no small shift because it doesn’t stop there, but spills over to affect other biblical doctrines and eventually leads to a redefinition of the meaning of salvation itself. This doesn’t necessarily happen in one generation with the evangelical practitioners of the historical-critical method teaching in the seminaries. According to Lindsell, “externally they give the appearance of solid orthodoxy. [Nevertheless] of one thing we can be sure. Sooner or later many of their students will follow through on their principles, arrive at conclusions their mentors would not accept, and become theological shipwrecks as a consequence.”
Notice the contrast in the posture of the historic evangelical who still believes in inerrancy. Here are the words of B.H. Carroll, the founder of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, written a century ago:
“When I was a boy I thought I had found a thousand contradictions in the Bible. In the old Bible of my young manhood I marked them. Well, I had then nearly a thousand more contradictions than I have now. I do not see them now; they are not there. There are perhaps a half dozen in the Bible that I cannot explain satisfactorily to myself. I don’t say that my explanations of all the others would satisfy everybody…..but since I have seen nine hundred and ninety-four out of the thousand coalesce and harmonize like two streams mingling, I am disposed to think that if I had more sense I could harmonize those other six; and even if I forever fail to harmonize them, God knows better than I know, and that when I know perfectly just as I now know only in part, and only a very small part, I will be able to understand that…..”
Here we see a recognition that though there are Bible difficulties, because God is the ultimate author of Scripture, it is worth our time to try to resolve them the best we can. But even in the few that we cannot, it is a reasonable conclusion that the fault lies with us and not with the Scripture. The number of Bible difficulties that have been resolved in the last hundred or so years due to advances in textual criticism and archeology means that God has earned the benefit of the doubt in the remaining cases.
Inerrancy is the watershed issue of our time, and though it can be discouraging to see both opposition and sheer indifference to this doctrine, nevertheless we have reason to be positive, for the fight is not ultimately ours. “God is sovereign,” Lindsell reminds us. “In the midst of the moving and conflicting tides and currents which swirl around men everywhere, the people of God maintain their optimism as well as their confidence that God will be victorious….even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus!”
Critics sometimes claim that inerrancy is an artifact of modernism, of the Renaissance, and that nobody talked about it before that time. Lindsell responds in two ways. First, he carefully argues that inerrancy is in fact the position of the historic church, and indeed was the position of Jesus himself. To strengthen his conclusion he enlists the support of several “hostile witnesses,” scholars who though they personally rejected inerrancy, nevertheless conceded that such had been the consensus of church history.
Second, he argues that the subject became more prominent and was articulated more clearly after the Renaissance, not as a product of this kind of rationalist thinking, but precisely in response to the rationalist thinking of the Renaissance, which enthroned reason and placed revelation under suspicion. It was at this time that we started to witness an increasingly vocal opposition to the inerrancy of the Bible, something which had previously gone unchallenged. And so the denial of inerrancy forced a more precise formulation of a doctrine which nevertheless was not new.
Lindsell examines the broad sweep of church history and identifies several watershed periods. A watershed period would be one where the question at issue was so important that the side that one chose would have radical consequences for one’s entire theology. The first watershed issue was the question of Christ’s divinity as it was fought and settled at Nicaea. Another was the Protestant Reformation with its question of justification by faith alone. And Lindsell identifies the current question of inerrancy as an issue of such importance that it qualifies as a watershed.
The reason he identifies it as such is because “once anyone departs from a commitment to biblical inerrancy he opens the door to a disavowal either in principle or in practice of other important doctrines of the Christian faith. In other words, it is virtually impossible for anyone who, in the beginning, limits biblical inerrancy or infallibility to matters of faith and practice, to hold this view consistently or persistently over a period of time.”
What is at issue is whether one is willing to stand under the authority of Scripture, or whether one is going to stand in judgement over Scripture. The latter position begins with the conclusion that there are errors in the Bible because such is the “assured result of critical scholarship.” Even though he may readily admit that many of the alleged contradictions can be resolved, he is not interested in doing the work because in his mind it misses the point which is that God’s truth gets through even in the midst of the human aspect of Scripture (i.e. its errors).
Thus many who would identify themselves as evangelicals have recently begun to attempt to distinguish the word “infallible” from the word “inerrant,” even though historically they have been synonymous. They would say that the Bible is “infallible” in that in matters of faith and practice it is without error, but it is not “inerrant” because it has errors in “incidental” details of science and history.
Lindsell quotes Gleason Archer who responds to this approach with the warning “that it assumes a logical impossibility. That is to say, it suggests that even though Scripture may err in ‘factual’ matters in its various parts, and make mistakes in matters of history or science which serve as the frame work or matrix of its theological teaching, nevertheless the Bible taken as a whole is without error. Thus we are given to understand that a concatenation of errors adds up to sublime, over-arching truth. This view is so seriously beset with self-contradiction that it lacks all power to maintain itself for very long.”
Archer continues: “If there were so much as a single mistake in Scripture, it would inevitably follow that the Bible is capable of mistake, and it would therefore require infallible human verification to certify it as valid. We would then be left to the mercy of mere opinion and conjecture, and we would have no genuine certainty as to the great issues of life and death.”
Liberals have for over a century denied Biblical inerrancy, there is no question about that. But why are evangelicals starting to do so too? It is due, says Lindsell, to the introduction of the historical-critical method of Biblical interpretation into evangelical seminaries. This method begins with the assumption that Scripture and the Word of God are not synonymous, that there are errors in Scripture and the scholar must therefore find the canon within the canon, that is to say, he must find the Word of God in Scripture. What is intrinsic to this method is the distinction between “salvation history” and straight history, the facts or the nuts and bolts of history. The liberals, using this methodology, de-supernaturalized the Bible, denied the deity of Christ, his substitutionary atonement and his coming in judgement at the end of time.
Well, objects the non-inerrantist evangelical, we are not liberals. Nevertheless, Lindsell warns that “orthodoxy and the historical-critical method are deadly enemies that are antithetical and cannot be reconciled without the destruction of one or the other.” This methodology is “the Bible’s greatest enemy,” because one who adopts it does not believe what the Scripture says until he has convinced himself that there is good reason to believe it. Evangelicals who adopt this hermeneutic, the first step of which is a denial of inerrancy, are not immediately in the liberal camp but have placed themselves on a slippery slope that inevitably leads to liberalism. Liberalism is, after all, not anti-supernaturalism per se, but the idea that all claims to truth must be made on the basis of reason and experience, not by appeal to external authority.
And sure enough, even in 1979 Lindsell could detect that among non-inerrantist evangelicals “their evangelicalism looks more like a call to social justice and discipleship than the traditional call to conversion. One can even discern among them a subtle shift in the direction of belief in universal salvation.” Thus the shift from a belief in inerrancy to one in “limited inerrancy” is no small shift because it doesn’t stop there, but spills over to affect other biblical doctrines and eventually leads to a redefinition of the meaning of salvation itself. This doesn’t necessarily happen in one generation with the evangelical practitioners of the historical-critical method teaching in the seminaries. According to Lindsell, “externally they give the appearance of solid orthodoxy. [Nevertheless] of one thing we can be sure. Sooner or later many of their students will follow through on their principles, arrive at conclusions their mentors would not accept, and become theological shipwrecks as a consequence.”
Notice the contrast in the posture of the historic evangelical who still believes in inerrancy. Here are the words of B.H. Carroll, the founder of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, written a century ago:
“When I was a boy I thought I had found a thousand contradictions in the Bible. In the old Bible of my young manhood I marked them. Well, I had then nearly a thousand more contradictions than I have now. I do not see them now; they are not there. There are perhaps a half dozen in the Bible that I cannot explain satisfactorily to myself. I don’t say that my explanations of all the others would satisfy everybody…..but since I have seen nine hundred and ninety-four out of the thousand coalesce and harmonize like two streams mingling, I am disposed to think that if I had more sense I could harmonize those other six; and even if I forever fail to harmonize them, God knows better than I know, and that when I know perfectly just as I now know only in part, and only a very small part, I will be able to understand that…..”
Here we see a recognition that though there are Bible difficulties, because God is the ultimate author of Scripture, it is worth our time to try to resolve them the best we can. But even in the few that we cannot, it is a reasonable conclusion that the fault lies with us and not with the Scripture. The number of Bible difficulties that have been resolved in the last hundred or so years due to advances in textual criticism and archeology means that God has earned the benefit of the doubt in the remaining cases.
Inerrancy is the watershed issue of our time, and though it can be discouraging to see both opposition and sheer indifference to this doctrine, nevertheless we have reason to be positive, for the fight is not ultimately ours. “God is sovereign,” Lindsell reminds us. “In the midst of the moving and conflicting tides and currents which swirl around men everywhere, the people of God maintain their optimism as well as their confidence that God will be victorious….even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus!”
May 19, 2015
Lindsell writes a follow-up to his famous work, Battle for the Bible. These books were huge in the 70s for saving the doctrine of inerrancy from an increasing presence of liberalism in seminaries.
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August 21, 20120211
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