Who are the Evangelicals? - Carl F.H.
Henry
A missionary home on furlough was asked recently what had changed most during his five-year absence from America. When he left, he replied, the general public used the term "evangelical" with respect; when he returned, it was used with derision. The term "evangelical" had become a symbol for confrontational politics; worse yet, it was linked to religious exploitation and manipulation akin to Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry.
Little more than a dozen years ago, Newsweek magazine in a 1976 cover story heralded "The Year of the Evangelical." "The religious phenomenon of the '70s," reported Newsweek, was "the emergence of evangelical Christianity into a position of respect and power." But in a decade or so, the evangelical movement has squandered much of its moral and spiritual initiative, and secular society has placed a large question mark over its motives, its goals, and even its integrity.
Although a few fraudulent ministers and scandalous televangelists have lent undeserved credence to this graceless calumny and defamation of evangelical religion, we should never forget that secular modernity routinely doubts the intellectual legitimacy of even the most elemental historic Christian beliefs and has little regard for its moral principles. The largely humanistic media treat any and all religion merely as a private concern, an optional commitment, and view biblical theism in particular as cognitively outmoded.
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What specially offends the secular mind is not lust for money, or luxurious lifestyle, or pursuit of sexual gratification. To these evils, contemporary society is no less vulnerable than are televangelists and the rest of us. Secular modernity is in fact the very lifeline of cultural hedonism and other temptations that have embarrassingly ensnared elements of the evangelical movement.
But when religious spokesmen publicly inveigh against such vices and seek sacrificial gifts for holy causes while they privately transgress what they preach, one can hardly blame secular society for its condemnation of hypocrisy. Had they been morally alert, evangelical leaders would have led the way in calling spiritual renegades to account, instead of forfeiting to the secular media the opportunity (more importantly, the duty) of judging religious spokesmen by the lofty ethical standards that biblical theism addresses to the pagan West. Moral criticism is a necessary part of what it means for all of us — church and world, including the media — to square our lives with the scriptural plumbline by which all humanity will one day be finally judged.
Yet deep down, secular modernity is playing games with us. What it is really saying about evangelical lust and greed is "welcome to the club", and not "back to the Bible!" What really offends the secular mentality about evangelical religion is our belief that God has public importance. What disturbs the media about periodic Washington-for-Jesus rallies, for example — to which the press generally devotes no more space than to a hundred reactionary atheists demonstrating nearby — is the evangelical conviction that personal repentance and spiritual renewal actually impact on a nation's historical destinies. What seems to the media ridiculous about Pat Robertson's over-publicized effort to redirect
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a hurricane by prayer are the theistic beliefs that God preserves and controls the world of nature and that prayer affects the external course of events. Televangelistic improprieties and charismatic or pentecostal nuances aside, what is most at stake in the current caricature of evangelicals is a philosophical struggle that pits modern naturalism against biblical supernaturalism and ranges in colossal conflict the theistic and materialistic views of man and the cosmos.
Whatever may be one's academic stature, political role, corporate leadership, cultural achievement or contribution to societal well-being, the secular media are prone to catalogue as cultic survivors from a now antiquated past all who dare to be evangelical Christians. An unbelieving press subtly tends to caricature Bible-believing church-goers as a group, and our secular neighbors more and more secretly revel in this amusing satire. In the midst of an unprecedented information explosion, much of the secular media deploys its technological genius and resources in a manner that obscures the factual realities of the Judeo-Christian heritage. Television as a public entertainment enterprise even stoops at times to handle religion simply for its amusement value.
The deeper question arises whether in these circumstances we can any longer effectively mass-communicate the Gospel of Christ to an entertainment-hungry society that would prefer to throw aggressive Christians to the lions. Do hard core naturalists any longer comprehend the Gospel in the terminology most televangelists currently use? What does the contemporary mind understand by the testimony that "I was saved in June, 1933" and that "you too need to be saved?" Are we like Jesus now speaking
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in parables, not to religionists but to professional secularists for whom spiritual truth remains impenetrable while the ordinary people readily grasp it? Are the media masters too culturally biased to get it right? Ask today's scribes who evangelicals are, and some will prattle about bizarre born-againers, fundamentalist ignoramuses and snake-handlers.
Dare we put sole blame upon the media for their confusion? Expository preaching and doctrinal teaching have been at low ebb in a generation that has pitched evangelism at an experiential high. Many professing evangelicals themselves seem somewhat unsure of their religious identity. The transition to "political evangelism" has become a synonym for the conservative right's confrontational politics, even if much of the evangelical mainstream has a considerably broader agenda. Televangelism improprieties rendered the term even more ambiguous; while specially embarrassing to the fast-growing Pentecostal wing, they nonetheless cut deeply into marginal support for evangelical enterprises in general and adverse publicity slowed evangelistic penetration by biblically-oriented churches.
For all that, the theologically conservative churches continue to grow. A recent Gallup report numbers evangelicals at more than 66 million in the United States, and George Gallup, Jr. himself has become one of them.
Yet confusion persists over precisely what "being an evangelical" means. In the face of external and internal stresses, some people wonder whether the movement ought to abandon the term "evangelical," gently administering euthanasia to it just as some
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worldlings now dispose of their unwanted aging. Shall we doom the descriptive "evangelicalism" to the same transitory fate that earlier overtook the term "fundamentalism"?
Or shall we join Jerry Falwell's projection of a revitalized fundamentalism in The Fundamentalist Phenomenon (Doubleday, 1981), and concede his claim that the fundamentalists have now permanently hijacked the evangelical jumbo-jet? In The Bible in the Balance (Zondervan, 1979), Harold Lindsell opts for the term "fundamentalist" on the ground that self-styled progressive neoevangelicals have so debased the term "evangelical" that "it has lost its usefulness" (ibid., pp. 319 f.). Or shall we follow Edward John Carnell's lead when he deplored and disowned fundamentalism as cultic and wrote instead of The Case for Orthodox Christianity (Westminster, 1959)? Shall we rally instead to those who now stress a doctrinally definitive "Reformed" Christianity and who reject diversity as subtly leading to an uncritically diluted evangelicalism and to theological pluralism? Yet George Marsden links the prestige of the Reformers instead to Fuller Theological Seminary's modified evangelicalism when in Reforming Fundamentalism (Eerdmans, 1987) he discusses a critical view of Scripture and ecumenical openness.
Shall we designate ourselves as Pentecostalists who trace their distinctiveness to the Azusa Street Revival (1906-09), and whose emphasis on tongues and healing marks the fastest-growing segment of North American and South American Christianity? Or instead fly the banner of denominationally-transcending charismatics who emphasize the present availability of the apostolic gifts? Shall we instead affirm a more specifically "Wesleyan" identity that traces evangelical roots, as does David L. McKenna,
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to a Wesleyan Holiness heritage ("Evangelicalism: An Alternative Perspective", The Asbury Herald, Spring, 1988, pp. 8-10)? Shall we rally rather to what Richard John Neuhaus calls the "Catholic moment in America", one that proposes to transcend the sporadic and theonomous nature of much evangelical political involvement through a Catholic shaping of public philosophy that outflanks both the liberal Protestant left and the Catholic left (The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World, Harper & Row, 1987)?
Or shall we follow many American black Christians who prefer the simple unpretentious expression "Bible believers"? Shall we opt for the label "Jesus-people", or has that term now also acquired associations that render it only problematically serviceable? Shall we ignore the disdain of secular humanists and unprotestingly bear the full reproach of being "Christers" or "Gospelizers" or "Jesus-freaks"? Or shall we return to the term "Christian", by which Jesus' followers were first designated in Antioch (Acts 11:26), or is that descriptive now too blurred by Christendom's competing ecumenical branches and obscured by cults like Christian Science? Shall we bow to the ecumenical plea for a unity and mission "apostolic, catholic, and evangelical" yet which postpones a further definition or redefinition of all three terms? Shall we dissolve the term "evangelical" into a "history of religions" framework, abandon the distinction of true / false religion, and accommodate the secular humanist bias that all religions are functionally useful yet that none has cognitive authority to tell us how the real world is truly structured?
Or do we face a kairos, a providential moment in the historical course of Christianity, one that challenges contemporary
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Christian multiformity and offers us an opportunity for clearer self-identification? Can we rise above the pervasive secular confusion about religious realities, wrench ourselves free of a lust for statistical bigness, and clarify the propriety or impropriety of unsure designations like Anglican evangelical, Catholic evangelical, charismatic evangelical, pentecostal evangelical, fundamentalist evangelical or evangelical fundamentalist, neo-evangelical, neo-orthodox evangelical, or even liberal evangelical? "What's in a name?" asks Shakespeare. "That which we call a rose," he adds, "by any other name would smell as sweet." In an age of revisionary empiricism that resists finalities, can we make clear that there is more to the name "evangelical" than meets the senses?
The term "evangelical" has its roots deep in the bedrock of the Greek New Testament. Euangellion means "good tidings" or Gospel. The evangel is the momentous biblically-attested good news that God justifies sinners who for spiritual and moral salvation rely on the substitutionary person and work of Jesus Christ.
The good news or evangel is not, simply as such, the dramatic death of Jesus of Nazareth the veritable Son of God. What good news marks the ghastly crucifixion of the godly Nazarene whose holy life all who knew him intimately affirmed, and in whom not even Pilate could find fault? Nor is the incarnation per se good news, nor the sinless life of Jesus per se, nor the Lord's return per se in final judgment of men and nations, nor the truthfulness of the Bible per se. For humanity in the grip of sin, all such realities are terrifying.
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The good news is the scripturally anticipated-and-fulfilled promise that God's sinless Messiah died in the place of otherwise doomed sinners, and moreover, that the crucified Redeemer arose bodily from the dead to resurrection life as helmsman of the eternal moral and spiritual world.
Some pulpiteers may experientially dilute the good news into the personal realization of self-fulfillment, or into the promise of a repentance-conditioned new birth, or into the prospect of an inner fullness of the Holy Spirit, or into a capacity to speak in strange tongues or to work miracles, or into a prospect of material enhancement or physical well-being. But in 1 Corinthians 15:3 ff. the Apostle Paul headlines the good news not in terms of effusive inner experience, but in terms of divinely revealed truths and redemptive acts. Without these core beliefs, evangelicalism emasculates the evangel and is not worth the space it takes to print its six syllables, or the time it takes to utter them.
The evangel, Paul affirms, is "that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and was seen." Paul is talking primarily not about your religious experience or my religious experience, but about revelatory truths and historical events the bedrock on which human salvation rests for its very possibility, and without which there is no prospect of salvation for sinners. He does not confuse the good news with an unscratchable tickle in one's heart, with an incomparably delightful tingle. The good news has nothing to do with internal effervescence, nor is it a matter of speaking in exotic languages or of doing miracles. It is not a matter of our doing at all, for our works even at their best are too tawdry to survive divine scrutiny. Scripture
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applauds not your works or mine, but rather Jesus Christ's saving work in our stead, and inspired Scripture itself as the truthful and trustworthy source of this good news.
It is on the miracle of Jesus Christ, on his atoning death and resurrection, that Paul focuses; it is the Word of God he emphasizes, not human tongues and worldly wisdom. Apart from Christ's substitutionary death and bodily resurrection we are all doomed; apart from the scripturally-attested evangel we are condemned all the more; that in human flesh God himself came, that in our human nature Jesus lived a sinless life. Apart from that good news, what solace is borne by assurance that Christ will return in cataclysmic judgment on men and nations? To be sure, the divine incarnation and sinlessness of Jesus, and the Lord's final righteous judgment all become joyous affirmations through the grand tidings that the God-man died for the sins of the penitent and, as the revelatory Scriptures foretell and attest, that he lives even now as our risen Redeemer.
In less than two dozen Greek words the Apostle Paul epitomizes this incomparable good news. Remarkably, more than a fourth of that total word-count he devotes to the fact that Scripture vouchsafes this good news; twice, in fact, he declares the evangel to be "according to the Scriptures". The good news is scripturally-identified, scripturally-based, scripturally validated; inspired Scripture is its verifying principle. Without authoritatively true Scripture the good news might be garbled a hundred ways, as indeed it now often inexcusably is by those who stray from scriptural revelation.
Some reference is needed to concessive scholars who contend that by kata tas graphas Paul means to indicate not the
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unqualified reliability of Scripture, but rather the general trustworthiness of the biblical witness. This distinction has the aura of a 20th century novelty. For one thing, in 2 Corinthians 4:13 Paul uses a somewhat similar construction (kata to gegramenon), literally "according to the thing having been written", an expression that points to the very specifics of the writings and not merely to their testimony in general. The perfect passive tense implies that divine inspiration is a fixed quality of the text itself, not merely a matter of the reader's conceptual inferences. This is the point also of 2 Timothy 3:16, where the writer stresses that Scripture — whether every part or the whole — is divinely inspired and profitable. One may recall also numerous references that equate the phrase "Scripture says" with what "God says", the presupposition being that Scripture as a textual phenomenon is plenarily inspired. For that reason Paul elsewhere argues even from the very minutiae of Scripture: "The Scripture does not say 'and to seeds' ...but to...seed" (Gal. 3:16).
It is unjustifiable therefore to broaden the definition of evangelical identity in a way that excludes a specific view of Scripture. The reduction of evangelical authenticity to the affirmation of a "minimal gospel" (salvation solely on the ground of Christ's substitutionary work appropriated by faith) therefore obscures the inviolable truth of Scripture, which the Apostle Paul affirms. Evangelicals as a body of believers have stood traditionally not for a truncated definition of the good news, but provide an overwhelming precedent for the view that a consistent and complete statement of the Gospel embraces also the truthfulness of the Scripture.
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The Protestant Reformers summarized the enduring good news in two maxims: sola scriptura and sola fide — Scripture alone and faith alone! The Reformers promoted evangelical trust in Christ's redemptive work over against both a pagan reliance on the adequacy of human works and against an ecclesiastical reliance on the efficacy of sacraments, and they contrasted the truthfulness of God's Word with both world-gnosis and ecclesial tradition. Any attack upon either the revelatory character of Scripture or the salvific significance of Christ they deplored as a dilution and defamation of the good news.
The biblically-accredited good news, the evangel of the atoning death and bodily resurrection of the crucified Jesus, obliges us above all else to be heralds of the evangel, or, if you wish, "evangelicals." Just as the Apostle Paul relayed the evangel to the Corinthians, so we who are its modern beneficiaries are to "pass it on" to our generation. In a society skeptical of absolute truth and distrustful of words, the Evangelical Theological Society clearly focused the evangelical epistemic affirmation: "The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs."
Yet something remains to be said for a more positive statement that focuses on the truthfulness and trustworthiness of Scripture consonant with its diverse genres, rather than defensively on inerrancy. The problem with the term inerrancy is not simply that its very prefix conveys a negative meaning, but that it too readily accommodates a shift of emphasis from the comprehensive truth of Scripture to the defense of isolated components supposedly on empirical grounds. In consequence, a deductive derivation of inspiration and inerrancy from the living God as the
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primary theological axiom is replaced by an inductive approach to Scripture. The inerrancy of Scripture — and not its divine authority and inspiration — then is declared the first and most important statement to be made about Scripture.
The positive regard for Scripture as God's Word is found in the Old Testament prophets and in Jesus' teaching and that of the apostles; they considered Scripture wholly reliable and dependable.
But in our age of Orwellian "double-speak", concessive critics often affirm the divine authority and inspiration of Scripture while they speak simultaneously of scriptural error. It is no tribute to theological lucidity or integrity when religious double-talk requires orthodox believers to reinforce the self-evident meaning of the truthfulness of Scripture by appending the clarification that truth means "truth without any admixture of error."
As destructive higher criticism gained ground, some evangelicals reoriented their presentation of the truthfulness of Scripture from its traditional theological foundations to the empirical vindication of specific textual phenomena. The integrity of Scripture as God's Word was earlier deduced from God's authoritative self-revelation and from the divine inspiration of the canonical writings. But the case for the Bible's truthfulness was now shifted to a defense of critically-disputed passages, a defense that appealed to the same historical methodology that critics invoked in a venture that conservatives themselves characterized as a vindication of inerrancy.
To be sure, some churchmen championed the case for inerrancy by stressing Jesus' high regard for Scripture, thereby connecting the debate over the Bible not only with empirical compatibility,
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but also with christological considerations. But others appealed mainly to historical precedent, notably the teaching of the church fathers, and / or the Protestant Reformers, and / or the consensus of contemporary evangelical scholarship. If we examine such considerations, we must recognize frankly that despite the importance of tradition, what evangelicals affirm in any generation is not per se definitive of what they ought to believe. Church tradition is not a self-sufficient norm, and sociological statistics do not decisively establish the standard of doctrine. The appeal to majority approval can always be manipulated to reflect changing winds of doctrine, or can be reconnected with the opinions of elitists holding contrary views, but regarded as having superior wisdom.
Yet, for all that, the appeal to tradition is not by any means worthless and, in fact, is significantly impressive in acclaiming the truthfulness and trustworthiness of Scripture.
Nowhere does a biblical prophet or apostle as much as hint that scriptural teaching is untrue. The entire biblical heritage concurs with the stance of Jesus, who regarded Scripture as inviolable (John 10:35) and attributed error to those who disregard its teaching (Matthew 22:29). The early church was not embarrassed by Jesus' insistence that "not a letter, not a stroke" (N.E.B.) of God's scripturally-given law would remain unfulfilled (Matt. 5:18). The Christian apostles view Scripture as "God-breathed" (2 Tim. 3:16) and as divinely-imparted wisdom (2 peter 3:15). Frederick C. Grant acknowledges that the New Testament everywhere "takes for granted that what is written in Scripture is trustworthy, infallible and inerrant. No New Testament writer would ever dream of questioning a statement contained in the Old
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Testament...." (Introduction to New Testament Thought, New York, Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950, p. 75).
The church fathers nowhere attribute error to inspired Scripture, whether Old Testament or New; the truthfulness of the sacred writings is regarded as implicit in their divine authority and inspiration. Irenaeus explicitly declares that, as inspired, the biblical writers were "incapable of false statement" (Against Heresies, iii.16).
The medieval theological greats unhesitatingly affirm the inerrancy of inspired Scripture. Augustine writes: "Only those books of Scripture which are called canonical have I learned to hold in such honor as to believe their authors have not erred in any way in writing them" (Epistolas, XXXII, i[Pt.33.277]). Thomas Aquinas declares: "...It is plain that nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense of Holy Scripture" ("The Nature of Sacred Doctrine", Summa Theologica, Article 10).
The Roman Catholic Church has historically affirmed that Scripture is inerrant. The New Catholic Encyclopedia (ed. Catholic University of America, New York, McGraw Hill, 1967) avers that "the inerrancy of Scripture has been the constant teaching of the Fathers, the theologians, and recent Popes in their encyclicals on Biblical studies" (Vol. II, p. 384). The Protestant Reformers maintain a commitment to the uncompromising truthfulness of Scripture. Luther commends Augustine's axiom "that only Holy Scripture is to be considered inerrant" (Weimar Ausgabe, 24:i, 347). M. Reu, in his classic study Luther and the Scriptures (Columbus, Ohio, Wartburg Press, 1944) confirms that this is in fact Luther's view also. Calvin's stance is that of biblical inerrancy, as James Packer affirms ("Calvin and the Scriptures", in John
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Warwick Montgomery, God's Inerrant Word, Minneapolis, Bethany Fellowship, 1974), and as even James Barr concedes (Fundamentalism, London, SCM Press, 1977, pp. 137 f.), and Emil Brunner also (Revelation and Reason, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1946, p.275) — even if now and then Calvin inconsistently applies this principle.
The notion that the doctrine of inerrancy is a recent modern artifice — and more expressly that American fundamentalists invented it during the last half of the 19th century — is therefore discredited by the facts. The comprehensive truthfulness of Scripture is the historic Christian view. Frances Turretin insisted in his Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (1674) that the "words" of the divinely inspired biblical writings were "kept free from error." Rationalistic efforts to weaken the doctrine of inspiration were resisted from the late 16th century onward. Christian Pesch avers that "the very first softening of the doctrine of inspiration proceeded from the professors in the Academy of Saumur among whom [John] Cameron [1578-1625] introduces a difference between the Word of God and the books which contain it. He teaches that the substance is inspired but not the words.... Nevertheless the students of Cameron did not apply this distinction but rather stated that God is the author of the whole Scripture but all things including details which are contained in it were written by men moved by the Holy Spirit and were stated by God to men" (De Inspiratione Sacrae Scripturae, Freiberg: Herder, 1906, pp. 250 f.). In the latter quarter of the 17th century, it was the Remonstrant church historian Jean LeClerc (1657-1736) who argued against the inerrancy and inspiration of some parts of the Bible. But before LeClerc affirmed mistakes in Scripture, even critical scholars—
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whether Protestant or Catholic — were extremely reluctant to suggest the possibility that the inspired Bible contains errors.
During the latter part of the 17th century, English churchmen characterized the Bible as "infallible truth." The founder of Methodism, John Wesley (1703-91), wrote of the Scriptures: "Every part thereof is worthy of God; and all together are one entire body wherein is no defect, no excess" (The Works of John Wesley, Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1949, pp. 402 f.). The theologian who first told the English-speaking world that one can be a Christian while repudiating the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, Stephen Neill affirms, was the Cambridge divinity professor Herbert Marsh (1757-1839) who, as Bishop of Peterborough, "had an intense dislike of Evangelicals, and was determined to have none in his diocese, if he could possibly prevent it," and in fact, "none were licensed to serve" (The Interpretation of the New Testament, London, Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 4 f.). Insistence on biblical inerrancy is found from the 1820s onward. Edward Bickersteth (1825-1906) declared the Bible "altogether true... without any admixture of error." Britain's Inter-Varsity Fellowship, founded in 1927, championed "the infallibility of Holy Scripture as originally given."
But the enthronement of higher criticism in the universities and the fascination it increasingly held for influential ecclesiastical leaders led to a diminished emphasis on biblical authority and encouraged an attitude of empirical openness. In David Bebbington's words: "A deductive approach to biblical inspiration, the belief that since the Bible is the Word of God and cannot err, the Bible is inerrant... has been a current in [British] Evangelicalism since the 1820s, but it never became unanimous and was
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weak in the early twentieth century. Its greater popularity in the post-war period has been associated primarily with the esteem of the Reformed wing of Evangelicalism... and it has been treated with reserve by others." As critical views of the Bible gained force, British proponents of scriptural inerrancy championed it less and less openly, and strict adherence to biblical teachings increasingly gave way among so-called "liberal evangelicals." (Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Winchester, Mass: Unwin Hyman, 1989.)
In America, by contrast, many influential 20th century evangelical theologians maintained biblical inerrancy, among them A.A. Hodge, B.B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, J. Oliver Buswell, Jr., William Childs Robinson, Roger Nicole, Kenneth S. Kantzer, Millard Erickson, Allan Coppedge, and also James Packer who had earlier championed the view in England. The inerrancy of the biblical autographs was affirmed by the Evangelical Theological Society and was reaffirmed by the International Council for Biblical Inerrancy. The view is reflected in the doctrinal statement of the National Association of Evangelicals as well as by all the major fundamentalist movements, and remains the commitment of the vast majority of American evangelicals. The term "infallibility" used in the National Association of Evangelicals' statement was not projected as a disavowal of inerrancy.
In summary, the comprehensive truthfulness of Scripture is the view of Jesus of Nazareth and of the Bible itself; the church fathers and medieval theologians affirm it; the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformers maintain it; and it remains normative for evangelical believers in our own time as well.
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At the same time, such conservative commendation of Scripture on the ground of apostolic and church tradition readily accommodates the notion that the doctrine of the truthfulness of Scripture is not intrinsic to Scripture. Even the appeal to Scripture's self-testimony, however important, gains a certain defensive cast if Scripture is not antecedently deduced from God in his authoritative disclosure and his consequent divine purpose and provision of Scripture as a revelatory instrument.
Some evangelicals focused readily on textual phenomena without reference to interpretative presuppositions, and hence engaged in conflict with radical critics by adopting a methodology to which such critics had already attached a naturalistic bias. In such debate, as Nigel M. de S. Cameron remarks, neither side lent importance to the fact that Scripture finds its necessary presupposition in the supernatural conveyance of rational truths to chosen prophets and apostles, and the consequent accurate inscription of that truth in human language (Biblical Higher Criticism and the Defense of Infallibilism in 19th Century Britain, Lewiston, N.Y., The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987). Destructive criticism meanwhile concealed its anti-supernatural or anti-miraculous bias. Insisting that the supposed inspiration of Scripture supplies no basis for treating Scripture differently from any other literature, and claiming to be philosophically neutral, it professed to derive its verdicts solely from the textual phenomena. In this way, Religionsgeschichte presuppositions subtly displaced divine inspiration as the overarching canopy within which the textual teaching was approached.
The normative theological view is that the Bible is revelatory because divine inspiration is a predicate of the text, and not
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merely because the Bible is a pious record of anterior divine self-disclosure or of anterior historical redemptive acts, or merely because it reflects a devout prophetic consciousness, and far less merely because of venerable church tradition. But the critically-altered approach to Scripture reflects a rationalistically transformed view of the supernatural and of the world, one whose presuppositions readily control the methodology. The probability or improbability of a miraculous event that somehow breaches "ordinary history" is not independent of the interpreter's cognitive approach to the data. The critical interpretations of the text depend for their validity upon a pejoratively qualified metaphysics, one that favors explanation by natural causes and is skeptical of the miraculous. The verdict on the reliability of the bible is not unrelated to a prior judgment about the existence, nature and activity of a supernatural self-revealing God.
To be sure, biblical redemptive history does not differ from ordinary history in respect to its historicity, and the criteria for establishing historical factuality do not require a special evaluative canon. One might be tempted to say that what distinguishes revelatory redemptive acts from ordinary history is that redemptive acts are supernatural. But the limits of empirical historical method are such that it cannot in any case establish whether any act is supernatural. All historical acts — redemptive and non-redemptive — might in some sense be supernatural, but historical method is incompetent in any case to decide the matter. But if a historian is skeptical about the supernatural, he will be skeptical as well about the historicity of acts that are overtly declared to be supernatural.
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Historical method can provide initial help in interpreting the text, unless it is ventured on a conception that judges outcomes in advance and superimposes a preliminary bias that precludes hearing the text. If the interpreter channels the text's revelatory claims through reductionistic categories, he strips the text of its very capacity to speak a transcendent Word of God.
In defending scriptural inerrancy without stressing the limits of critical methodology, "mediating" evangelicals obscured the theological supports of the truthfulness of God's inscripturated disclosure of his nature and purposes, and they unwittingly yielded the initiative to negative critics who viewed textual phenomena through Religionsgeschichte premises. A precedent was thereby established that would later serve the subversion of the supernatural through a merging of form-criticism with existential philosophy, and through the acceptance of the historicist perspective based on Martin Heidegger's rejection of a creator-God for a supposedly "neutralist" attitude toward God's existence.
Many exegetes first yielded ground to the assault on scriptural reliability simply on the basis of historical criticism. Neoorthodox scholars deflected this attack on the costly ground that historical argumentation was wholly irrelevant to the content of faith. Other mediating conservatives defended Scripture by appealing to extra-theological factors, such as evangelical consensus, yet allied themselves with anti-inerrantists who despite their forfeiture of the unbroken truthfulness of Scripture still claimed evangelical credentials because they retained most of the core beliefs. Still other conservative scholars, caught up in the debate over textual phenomena, all but abandoned or reinterpreted theological
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warrants, such as the teaching of the apostles or of Jesus of Nazareth, and apologetics replaced dogmatics as a forefront interest. Instead of affirming the integrity of Scripture as the comprehensive Word of God, their disclaimer of biblical error became the primary statement about Scripture. This reflected a defensive posture in which evangelical epistemology yielded and responded to the initiative of those who questioned the Bible's reliability.
The insistence that Scripture is inerrant is no doubt appropriate to an embattled and beleaguered church, one that seeks to stave off retreat by resisting aggressive higher criticism. But thereby it condemns itself to the task of apologetics as its main activity, and moves from admittedly flawed texts to unavailable autographs rather than divinely-given originals to dependent copies; it leaves revealed theology and its implications too far in the background and, worse yet, encourages a recasting of dogmatics itself along empirico-inductive lines. As the ensuing apologetic debate proceeded, evangelical countermoves dwarfed the basic connection of the supernatural with the revelatory status of Scripture. Defense of scriptural inerrancy has an unfruitful prospect if interpretation leaves unchallenged the organic unity of all history grasped only in terms of anti-miraculous relationships. For contemporary history — and a particular view of contemporary history at that — then becomes determinative for all past possibility. The temptation arises to continue to speak of Scripture as the Word of God while avoiding the unabashed affirmation that Scripture is God's Word; thus a distinction is made between revelation and the Bible that prizes revelation while it accommodates an errant Bible.
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To be an evangelical is therefore not simply to champion biblical inerrancy rather than papal infallibility or empirical finality. It is to have a theistic mega-view that yields a distinctive role for the Bible as the literary corpus in which the self-revealing God of Judeo-Christian theology expounds his nature and plan for humanity and the nations. An abstracted emphasis on inerrancy readily sacrifices an awareness that two competing world views underlie the conflict over the Bible. Its attempt to rescue particular disputed passages may even unwittingly obscure a necessary challenge to anti-supernaturalist presuppositions that already implicitly assure critical victory by correlating literary analysis with disbelief in the miraculous. An anti-supernatural bias inevitably involves a secular misperception of inspiration and accommodates a devaluation of the text.
The tenuous nature of empirical argument concerning the text is graphically indicated by the growing skepticism of biblical scholars over what was perhaps the most deeply entrenched critical dogma of this century, namely the documentary hypothesis. The theory assumes that behind the Bible there exists an earlier more reliable text which the biblical writers revise by incorporating myths and legends that promote Hebrew-Christian religion. Despite its critical acclaim for several generations, many scholars now greet that theory with great skepticism, and others firmly disavow it. What was long held to be incontrovertible textual evidence, is acknowledged at last to have been only speculative reconstruction rooted in arbitrary assumptions. Yet even so-called mediating evangelical scholars approached Scripture under the documentary theory's influence as if its permanent victory was assured. Critical assumptions were made decisive for
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the nature of the text and for the status of miracles, and adverse inferences were drawn from Genesis through the Gospels.
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1970) has familiarized our generation with the importance of paradigm shifts in the history of science. These shifts, involving the acceptance of once incongruous principles and axioms, provide strikingly different ways of accounting for observed data and constitute major turning-times in the history of thought. Kuhn likens such "transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm" to "a conversion experience that cannot be forced." The naturalist sees the Bible through conceptual lenses adjusted only to impersonal processes and quantum events. This presuppositional framework adjusts all probabilities to its own premises, and espouses non-supernatural explanations. The interpreter greets any incompatible phenomena with assurance that "given enough time" all the data will prove to be congruent with his controlling assumptions.
The credibility of Christianity's claim for scriptural authority does not rest on the acceptability of biblical teaching to champions of contemporary empirical observation. Evangelical confidence in the truthfulness of the Bible derives not from empirically-limited observation but from Scripture's theologically-given status as God's supernaturally inspired Word, and its consequent status as the rule of faith and practice by which the living Christ through the Spirit exercises headship over the regenerate church.
For evangelical thought, a verdict on Scripture is a verdict on the nature of Christian revelation. Debate over this or that disputed text will inevitably occur when an empirically-oriented
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culture deals with supra-empirical phenomena or historical phenomena that cannot be reduplicated for laboratory observation, or empirical evaluations that are by nature incomplete and revisable. To be intimidating, problems must carry sufficient weight to threaten an entire system, that is, must comprise a menace to the undergirding postulates of Christian theism. The evangelical asks whether there is greater probability that Scripture is wrong or that a particular interpretation is wrong. Evangelical theology affirms the fallibility of all biblical expositors or critics — popes and theologians included — and reserves inerrancy for the divinely inspired scriptural autographs.
Among non-evangelicals the object of religious knowledge is more obscure, and religious language is necessarily more ambiguous and imprecise, than for evangelicals. The reason for these differences lies in the evangelical insistence that God has revealed himself intelligibly and can be rationally known, and moreover, that divine disclosure in sentences — to put it more technically, in propositional revelation — means that true information about God is available. Much as evangelicals insist on the incomprehensibility of God — that is, that God is knowable only in his self-revelation is not exhaustive — they do not glory in divine mystery but in God as revealed in his scriptural disclosure. To be sure, intellectual apprehension is not per se salvific, for personal faith is a gift of the Spirit, but faith is the whole self's appropriation of knowledge, for the Spirit uses truth as a means of persuasion.
Evangelical theologians consider theology an intellectual enterprise and shun claims that God can only be imagined or felt,
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or spoken of only in symbolic, metaphorical and figurative images. God's revelation is unfolded in the universally-sharable truths of inspired Scripture; and Scripture, not religious experience, remains the trustworthy source of valid information about God and his will. The Bible identifies God's redemptive acts and also states the divine interpretation and significance of those acts.
What the canon of Scripture teaches therefore conveys the comprehensive revelatory message, and christological truth — Jesus crucified for sinners and risen as Lord — is the dramatic focal center to which all the core beliefs are integral. The biblically-embedded gospel of Jesus' atoning death and bodily resurrection crowns the theological doctrines that divinely inspired Scripture authorizes. The kerygma, or apostolic preaching, was not confined to an agenda of selective doctrines specially useful for polemical purposes. Important as is Jesus' virgin birth, apostolic preaching did not make an obsession of it; important as is the inerrancy of Scripture, apostolic preaching proclaimed Scripture more than inerrancy. The apostles did not isolate certain fundamentals, but rather proclaimed the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27).
Any abridgement of the complete cononical context threatens to put the redemptive message at risk. Not even a five-fold doctrinal test — or, if you prefer, a ten-fold test — will do. The core is Christ's salvific death for penitent sinners and the crucified Christ's resurrection from death; the context is God's complete counsel, the entire biblical disclosure. What do we hope to gain if we protest the critical dilution of biblical authority and then distill the essence of the whole into some five-fold fundamentalist test or ten-fold evangelical affirmation over and above the evangel, so
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that the evangel as such becomes in effect merely one plank among many, or if we elaborate some supposedly relevant modern credal confession that deliberately veils scriptural authority? In forging contemporary confessions of faith, the temptation is always present, and seldom resisted, selectively to disengage the Christian community from unwelcome doctrines and to applaud preferred aspects of Scripture that through such detachment from the whole become tendential.
Christianity is unapologetically a supernaturally-grounded religion. It gains nothing through a process of chipping and chopping that presumes to make it more acceptable by emphasizing only what least offends a naturalistic mindset.
Evangelicals, in summary, are spiritually regenerated sinners who worship the supernatural self-revealing God as the sovereign source, support and judge of all creaturely life. They affirm that on the ground of the substitutionary life and work of Jesus Christ, the holy Lord mercifully delivers the penitent from spiritual death and its dire consequences, and restores them to fellowship and service. This God does, moreover, in accord with the inspired Scriptures that comprise his authoritative Word and Truth and constitute the rule of faith and doctrine by which the risen Christ through the Holy Spirit governs the regenerate church. Evangelicals are a people of the Bible and of the risen Redeemer; historically speaking, consistent evangelicals have never been cognitively constrained either to demean the Saviour or to demean the Book in order to be wholly faithful to one or both.
