Evangelical or Liberal?
2 THE AUTHORITY OF THE SCRIPTURES
The Bible in the Modem World
What is the authority of the Bible for Christians living at the end of the twentieth century? The question fully deserves the importance given to it in innumerable sermons, talks, articles and books, for some of the answers have greatly damaged Christianity. There are some liberal' or 'modernist' Christians who appear to have decided that apart from some favourite passages the Bible has no authority for them. In practice they may neglect humble Bible study, even if they are professional preachers or theologians. They may attempt to construct a version of Christianity, or a post-Christian philosophy, which has little or no connection with the Bible's message about a real, living, active, creative, loving and saving God. And there are some 'conservative' or 'fundamentalist' Christians who go to the opposite extreme. They appear to believe that God dictated all the words, more than two million in number, in the original manuscripts (now lost) of the sixty-six books accepted by Protestants as the Holy Bible. Like Harold Lindsell in his alarming book of 1976, they wage a Battle for the Bible against those who in their judgement are not 'Bible believers'. Their attitude is in keeping with the belief of Philo of Alexandria in the first century ad, and of many of the 'fathers' of the ancient Church, that God used the authors of the Scriptures as a musician uses his instrument, but it does not seem to be in touch with modern knowledge about how the Bible was actually written. However, even these two extreme positions - both of which would be rejected by most Christians nowadays - can be helpful if they remind us that the most important question about the Bible is whether it speaks the truth.
We can also learn from the courage with which the 'liberals' and 'conservatives' whom we may regard as extremists have refused to answer that question untruthfully, whatever unpopularity they may incur. Many modernists have apparently given up wrestling with the Bible because they have despaired of ever being able to find truth in it. So much of it seems to belong to fairyland. Here, it seems, are legends which contradict what can be known scientifically and historically. Such fables are, it seems, accompanied by arguments appealing to authorities which are not truly authoritative. To leave the Bible behind is, they think, to leave behind tall stories and bad logic - and their consciences compel them to move forward into cleaner air. And many fundamentalists have apparently given up wrestling with modem knowledge because they have despaired of ever finding the true God in it. In the Bible they do find him - but that truth is, it seems, destroyed once any 'biblical criticism' is accepted. To leave modem knowledge behind is, they think, to submit to God's own truth. They, too, have consciences - and they, too, are prepared to sacrifice much for the sake of the truth as they see it. We can profitably learn from both these movements of 'extremists' how fundamental is the inquiry on which we have embarked. The truth is at stake.
But what is 'truth'? I am one of those who want from the Bible nothing but the truth, but who mean by 'the truth' at least two things. We mean something of what the 'liberals' have meant. We want to know, so far as we can, what actually took place, who really said what, who wrote what, how the tradition developed - for that is the scientific method and the light of science is one of the weapons which humanity has against the darkness of ignorance and error. But we also mean by 'the truth' something of what the 'Bible believers' have meant. We want to know what these books mean for today, teaching truth on the topics which basically concern them and us - man, God, evil, salvation, justice, death, life. To study the books of the Bible 'like any other book' - to study them critically as a varied collection of ancient literature - is essential to intellectual integrity nowadays. But not to know that these ancient books are more relevant than the newspaper is to miss their message. In 1970 an American scholar, James D. Smart, wrote a book called The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church. He drew attention to the fact that while in this century there had been a spectacular expansion of literary and historical 'biblical science' in the universities and in the colleges training pastors and teachers, in the mainline Protestant churches there had been an equally spectacular decline of interest in the Bible, in pew and pulpit alike. Since then the situation has not altered enough, although the Roman Catholic Church has liberated biblical scholars and rediscovered the Bible with some excitement (Professor Smart's farewell survey of The Past, Present and Future of Biblical Theology said as much in 1979). The explanation is that in many colleges literary and historical studies have been thought to be all that is intellectually respectable, while in many chinches it has been thought that to be passionately concerned about 'what the Bible says' is to be something dreadful - a 'fundamentalist'. But now many of us want to know the Bible's truth, which is historical and existential. We want to read the Bible both critically and humbly. For when we read the books of the Bible 'like any other book', these books read us.
What, then, is the Bible? Obviously it is not one book whose only author is God. The books (in Greek ta biblia) need to be interpreted by using the mind with all the aids that are accessible, including the aid of prayer for guidance by God. And that takes time. The exponent of the Bible who deserves attention is 'a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth' (2 Timothy 2:15). But the message of God does come through, and the attempt to hear and obey the Bible's message is one of the things that has made Christianity Christian. For all Christians the Bible, in some sense, is or becomes or conveys 'the word of God'. Its history is, in some sense, 'salvation history'. Its great images are signs pointing to our salvation, from the Garden of Eden to the final City of God. That seems - to understate its value in our salvation -sufficient. The Bible can still be treasured as unique, supreme and more precious than any jewel if we agree with Professor Barr in The Bible in the Modern World (1973, p. 119): 'The status of the Bible is one of sufficiency rather than of perfection'. And so I hope that the days are past, or are rapidly passing, when it was thought necessary to take an extremely and exclusively 'liberal' or an extremely and exclusively 'conservative' position about the Bible. The Bible as it actually exists is truer than either position.
The war between 'Genesis and Geology' is, I reckon, over - or it ought to be over. Christians who accept science surely have no need to pretend that only science can give us reliable knowledge about our world. There is no need to claim that the study (or the contemplation) of 'nature' (or of evolution or of human history) can by itself teach us that our world is made and controlled by the God who is love. What has been called 'natural religion' turns out to say very little when tested. We can and we should turn to the Bible for a revelation, the self-revelation of God, after which the mysteries surrounding our short and feeble lives amid an ambiguous 'nature' become a little clearer. And there is no need for Christians who accept the Bible to pretend that the first chapter of Genesis (for example) is an accurate account of the origins of the universe, as if it covered the same field as science - only more authoritatively. That chapter is one of the most magnificent and most instructive pictures ever painted of man's place in the created universe. It sings aloud that 'nature' is good because of God. Triumphantly it takes Babylonian and other myths and it says about everything: 'In the beginning God created. . .' Thus the sun and moon, which people have often worshipped, are seen as mere lights in the sky which conveniently 'separate the day from the night' and 'mark seasons and days and years'. But it is not necessary to sweat over the ingenious attempts of the fundamentalist 'creationists' to reconcile the six working 'days' of that chapter with the thousands of millions of years known to science. Nor does it need to be explained tortuously how day and night could be created before sun and moon, plants and trees before sunshine and insects, birds before reptiles, and so forth.
Some readers may doubt whether I can take the Bible seriously enough since I do not take an extremely and exclusively liberal or conservative attitude to its truth. It may help if I say that I have studied the Bible for about fifty years and based sermons on it for about thirty. Although I have never been a professional biblical scholar I have had many friends in that profession; one of them, Professor C. F. D. Moule, has been so extraordinarily kind and patient as to comment on my bits of this book in draft, although he must not be blamed for my amateurish opinions. While I was Editor of the SCM Press in London in the 1960s I published many biblical studies by leading scholars. Later on I wrote my own shorter books, trying to share my enthusiasm - A Key to the Old Testament, Jesus for Modem Man and The Last Things Now.
I greatly admire John Stott's dedication and skill as an expositor of the Bible. Although he has been primarily a preacher and conference speaker, his teaching is now on record in many books. When I read his The Bible: Book for Today (B), I am in emphatic and grateful agreement with him for most of the time. I accept his points that 'the major function of Scripture is to bear witness to Christ' and that 'we do not worship the Bible'. But I also applaud his stress on the necessity of revelation ('unless God takes the initiative to disclose what is in his mind, we shall never be able to find out'). I agree with his insistence that God is revealed through words as well as deeds but that the word of God is spoken through the words of men ('divine inspiration was not a mechanical process reducing the human authors of the Bible to machines, whether dictating-machines or tape-recorders'). I share his recognition 'that not every word in the Bible is literally true, and that not everything contained in the Bible is affirmed by the Bible'. 'The biblical authors', he rightly says, 'used many different literary genres, each of which must be interpreted according to its own rules -history as history, poetry as poetry, parable as parable, etc.'
A typical example of his balance is to be found on pages 49-50 of The Bible: Book for Today. When interpreting the Bible, we have, he says, to seek 'both the original sense according to the biblical author's intention and the natural sense, which may be literal or figurative'. Yet 'we must come to the biblical text with a recognition of our cultural prejudices and with a willingness to have them challenged and changed'. If the Church comes to the Bible in that humility, it will find that the Bible sustains it, directs it, reforms it, unites it and revives it. Ί do not hesitate to say that the Bible is indispensable to every Christian's health and growth' - although in fact he does charitably hesitate to say that about people unable to read the Bible for themselves.
I welcome much in the Willowbank Report which Dr Stott drafted after an international conference on 'Gospel and Culture' in 1978. This recognises that 'the biblical writers made critical use of whatever cultural material was available to them for the expression of their message'. They referred several times to a creature of Babylonian mythology, a sea monster named Leviathan, for example. When they used the imagery of a 'three-tiered' universe (heaven above earth, earth above Sheol) 'they did not thereby affirm a pre-Copernican cosmology'. 'Similarly, New Testament language and thought-forms are steeped in both Jewish and Hellenistic cultures.' But 'out of the context in which his word was originally given, we hear God speaking to us in our contemporary context, and it is a transforming experience.' That seems to me a neat summary of points made also in Tony Thiselton's persuasive essay on 'Understanding God's Word Today' in the first volume of Obeying Christ in a Changing World, which Dr Stott edited in 1977. That essay, later expanded into a book on The Two Horizons (1980), did something to popularise the word 'hermeneutics' for the art of interpreting texts and to enrol Evangelicals as students of it. Hermeneutics can never be entirely free of problems and controversies, for it was well defined by one of its most eminent and controversial recent practitioners (Rudolf Bultmann) as 'the technique of understanding expressions of life set in written form'. But anyone who seriously tries to interpret the Bible is doing hermeneutics.
I also welcome the 1979 lecture in which Dr Stott discussed The Authority and Relevance of the Bible in the Modem World. To say 'the Bible is the word of God is true', he declared, 'but it is only a half-truth, even a dangerous half-truth. For the Bible is also the word and witness of men . . . Normally he seems to have revealed his truth to them and through them in such a way that they were not conscious of divine inspiration, so fully were their own minds involved in this process'. The correct principles of interpretation are given as these: 'the true meaning of Scripture is the natural and obvious meaning'; 'a text means what its author meant' (a definition by E. D. Hirsch which John Stott quotes in several of his books); 'we shall seek to interpret the text in its context, and each Scripture in the light of all. God's message given in one culture must be allowed to impinge on us who live in another culture', and the judicious way is 'to preserve the inner substance of what God is teaching or commanding, while claiming the liberty to reclothe it in modem dress'. Yet 'if we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God's, then indeed he will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices'. Thus although Dr Stott rightly concentrates on the translation of the Bible's message so that it challenges a hearer in another culture, he says some important things about the Bible in its original setting. He urges us to attend to what the human author of a biblical passage meant originally. He rejects the idea that God inspired not the original, natural meaning but the 'fuller' or 'spiritual' meaning discerned by Christians. Without referring in detail to recent controversies between biblical scholars, he tackles a task which is essential in the construction of any 'biblical' theology: he builds a bridge between the Testaments. And because he insists on the original, natural meaning of the words in both Testaments, his bridge rests on foundations which are firmer than the rubble beneath some other bridges.
This account of the authority of the Scriptures has I think, many merits. It rightly rebukes the 'liberal' extremists who have virtually abandoned the Bible. But it also corrects the extreme conservatism which has still marked many Evangelical scholars (not merely the uneducated) in our own time. A convenient collection of illustrations of this conservatism was made by James Barr in his Fundamentalism (1977, revised 1981). Although Professor Barr tended to suggest - and to lament bitterly - that Evangelicals would always remain fundamentalists at heart, in fact Dr Stott has here laid down principles of hermeneutics, some of which would be passionately rejected by (for example) those American fundamentalists who support institutions such as Bob Jones University, the Moody Bible Institute and Dallas Theological Seminary; who applaud evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and Harold Lindsell, and suspect Billy Graham as a liberal; and who ignore the magazine Christianity Today in the conviction that it has sold out to the liberals. Some of Dr Stott's teachings would also have dismayed many previous Evangelical spokesmen. Some would have been rejected by those two great professors at Princeton in the USA, Charles Hodge and Benjamin Warfield, who were for long regarded as the defenders of the faith of modem (or anti-modem) Evangelicalism. Professor James Dunn is being more unkind than untrue when he describes Warfield's position as 'exegetically improbable, hermeneutically defective, theologically dangerous, and educationally disastrous' (The Living Word, 1987, p. 107) and Dr Stott's own much more cautious teaching healthily reflects the facts that Hodge died in 1878 and Warfield in 1921.
But I still ask whether other parts of Dr Stott's account of the authority of the Scriptures are as fully satisfactory as the teaching I have just quoted. I read this as his explanation of what the phrase 'verbal inspiration' means: 'what the Holy Spirit has spoken and still speaks through the human authors understood according to the plain, natural meaning of the words used, is true and without error'. The Holy Spirit, he maintains, spoke through persons 'in such a way that his words were theirs, and their words were his, simultaneously' (B, pp. 44, 55). 'The principle', he has written, 'should be clear: what Scripture affirms God affirms and what God affirms is true' (UB, p. 48). I ask: do such expressions take enough account of the human or cultural element in the Scriptures? And I ask this question expecting a sympathetic reply. For one of the things I admire about John Stott is his courage in criticising the Evangelical tradition from within. 'We have the highest doctrine of Scripture of anybody in the Church', he wrote when introducing Obeying Christ in a Changing World. 'We must therefore acknowledge with deep shame that our treatment of Scripture seldom coincides with our view of it. We are much better at asserting its authority than at wrestling with its interpretation. We are sometimes slovenly, sometimes simplistic, sometimes highly selective and sometimes downright dishonest7 (OC, vol. 1, p. 21).
Dr Stott has himself explained that we need not take as the word of God passages in the Bible which are said within the Bible not to be spoken according to God's will. He mentions the speeches of Job's comforters but presumably would include much of what Job himself says. He also teaches that we need not take as history what is plainly poetry; for example, despite Revelation 7:14 we should not think that robes washed in blood can come out white (UB, p. 170). But a careful reading of Dr Stott's teaching shows that he still has a great deal of ground in common with those who affirm without any such qualifications that the Bible is 'infallible' or 'inerrant7, leaving the impression on unsophisticated minds that it is believed to be flawless.
The plain, natural meaning of 'infallible' is 'not liable to be deceived or mistaken' and the plain, natural meaning of 'inerrant' is 'that does not err' (I quote the Oxford English Dictionary). Many Christians object to calling the Pope infallible and deny that popes in their teaching ex cathedra have been inerrant. Those who criticise the use of such words in connection with human beings nowadays include some vigorous Roman Catholics, as Hans Kung showed in his book Infallible? (in English, 1971). But these words have remained in the doctrinal standards or official declarations of many Evangelical societies. In his Preface to a collection of papers sponsored by the Evangelical Theological Society in the USA (Evangelicals and Inerrancy, 1984), Ronald Youngblood declared that the issue was: 'Given an inerrant and inspired Scripture, how shall we most accurately and faithfully interpret it in all its parts?' The translators of the New International Version of the Bible, in their Preface revised in 1983, were 'united in their commitment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God's Word in written form'. The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 affirmed 'the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety as the only written Word of God, without error in all that it affirms, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice'. Commenting on the Covenant, Dr Stott has written: 'It is important in all our Bible study to consider the intention of the author, and what is being asserted. It is this, whatever the subject of the assertion may be, which is true and inerrant'. Another commentary on the words from Lausanne came in The Willowbank Report, after Dr Stott's chairmanship of an international consultation in 1978. The report draws back from admitting that anything in the Bible may be out of date or irrelevant:
The essential meaning of the biblical message must at all costs be retained. Though some of the original forms in which this meaning was expressed may be changed for the sake of cross-cultural communication, we believe that they too have a certain normative quality. For God himself chose them as wholly appropriate vehicles of his revelation. So each fresh formulation and explanation in every generation and culture must be checked for faithfulness by referring back to the original. (WR, p. 9)
The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology edited by Walter A. Elwell (published in the USA in 1984 and in the UK in 1985), which I have often consulted, defines and defends 'inerrancy' as 'the view that when all the facts become known, they will demonstrate that the Bible in its original autographs and correctly interpreted is entirely true and never false in all it affirms, whether that relates to doctrine or ethics or to the social, physical, or life sciences' (p. 142). And Dr Stott has described as 'extremely judicious' (ARBMW, p. 6) the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy made after a conference in 1978. This included (Article ΧΙΠ) the denial 'that generic categories which negate historicity may rightly be imposed on biblical narratives which present themselves as factual'.
The statement was summarised in five propositions:
1. God, who is himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God's witness to himself.
2. Holy Scripture, being God's own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by his Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it teaches: it is to be believed, as God's instruction, in all that it affirms; it is to be obeyed as God's command in all that it requires; embraced, as God's pledge, in all that it promises.
3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture's divine Author, both authenticates it to us by his inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.
4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.
5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible's own; and such lapses bring serious loss both to the individual and the Church.
I want to ask whether Dr Stott has remained too sympathetic with the spirit behind these propositions. For that spirit sometimes makes him feel qualified to damage good expositions of the Bible with claims which sound like fundamentalism.
I give only two examples. His exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (CCC) began by protesting against the tendency of most modem scholars. As W. D. Davies says, 'the impact of recent criticism in all its forms' has been 'to cast doubt on the propriety of seeking to understand this section ... as an interrelated totality derived from the actual teaching of Jesus'. Dr Stott's own view is that the Sermon on the Mount does come totally from Jesus although it is a summary of teaching given over a period. He acknowledges that Luke 'condensed' this material differently from Matthew. Yet he writes: Ί find it hard to accept any view of the Sermon which attributes its contents rather to the early Church than to Jesus, or even regards it as an amalgam of sayings drawn from various occasions' (CCC, pp. 23-4). This approach seems to damage his exposition. It suggests that almost two thousand years before the invention of tape-recorders there must have been an absolutely accurate record of the teaching of Jesus available to Matthew and Luke; that the obvious differences between the gospels (for example, the different wording of the Beatitudes) are no more than different condensations; and that it matters vitally that the material 'condensed' by Matthew (5:1-7:29) and Luke (6:17-49) should not have been changed by them in any detail. I find all these claims incredible. And I ask why, if Matthew or his source was able to recall with total accuracy what Jesus said and did, he incorporated nine tenths of Mark's gospel in his own - but with alterations often different from the alterations which Luke made. I shall return to the Sermon on the Mount later, because even when literary criticism supplies the binoculars through which we view it this mountain remains sublime. The only point I am trying to make here is that Dr Stott is unrealistic in minimising the editorial element in Matthew's gospel.
For the sake of brevity I refer only to one other example of Dr Stott's lingering inclination towards fundamentalism -his summary of the Old Testament in his Understanding the Bible, published for the Scripture Union and 'fully revised' in 1984. Although he accepts that 'scientific discovery appears to contradict a six-day creation', and although he suggests 'tentatively' that 'some kind of purposive evolutionary development may have been the mode which God employed in creating', he believes in 'the historicity of Adam and Eve, as the original couple from whom the human race is descended' (UB, pp. 48-9) because Paul said so (UB, p. 178). Although 'today I am not so sure that we were ever meant to take literally the statement about the finger of God writing the law' (UB, p. 179), he believes that the regulations for the tabernacle in the wilderness which are generally regarded by scholars as belonging to the late, 'priestly' strand in the composition of the Pentateuch go back to the time of Moses (UB, p. 55). He believes that God commanded the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites and that 'there is no need for us to be offended by this divine decree' (UB, p. 59). Although he quotes Isaiah 40-55 in the context of the restoration from Babylonian captivity, he too cautiously says that 'there is a continuing debate among biblical scholars whether these chapters were really written 150 or 200 years previously by Isaiah' (UB, p. 77). Perhaps none of these statements matters vitally. But I am bound to say that they all show a lamentable hesitation in accepting the fruits of scientific research into nature and into the Bible itself.
I do not think that a Christian has any duty to be so hesitant, for I cannot believe that all that the Bible's authors asserted was without mistake either in principle ('infallible') or in practice ('inerranf). With due respect to the claims made in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology and many similar places, I cannot discuss the alleged inerrancy of the original autographs of the Bible, now lost, in the light of facts not yet known - because I am one of those who have to base any discussion on the Bible which we now hold in our hands and on the facts to which we now have access. And on this basis 'infallibility' seems to be an obvious error and 'to impute inerrancy to the Bible is simply to mistake the sort of book it is', as James Barr wrote bluntly in Escaping from Fundamentalism (1984, p. 129). But we need not be merely negative and destructive.
Dr Stott has allowed himself to lament 'the extreme gravity of liberal theology. By undermining public confidence in the reliability of the Bible, it makes Christian discipleship all but impossible' (B, pp. 75-6). Of course I recognise - and regret - that some biblical scholarship in the hands of 'liberals' has helped to destroy Christian faith. There was no way, it seems, of avoiding such casualties if arguments based on evidence were to be allowed to lead where reason and conscience thought they should go; and there was no honest way of concealing the arguments of scholars from the public. But much biblical scholarship, for which Christians are indebted to liberals as well as to conservatives, has helped modem people to do precisely those things which Dr Stott goes on to say are desirable. Christians who accept all sound scholarship (in so far as they are aware of it) can be helped to worship God, to believe and trust in him, and to obey him. And they can do this because the heart of the Bible's message, given by the Bible as it truly exists, seems compatible with the rest of truth. At the end of a spirited defence of the spiritual and intellectual basis of modem biblical research, James Barr has quoted a younger scholar. 'Theological truths,' Sean McEvenue wrote,
are not reached by deduction or dialectic or any other form of reasoning restricted to the Canon or a deposit of faith. They are determined in judgements which have reflected on what scripture says and also on whatever other clearly relevant knowledge the theologian may process. There is no simple point of departure and no single final norm. Theological truths are discovered by open minds passionately hungry for contemporary, true understanding of God. (James Barr, Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism, 1983, p. 126)
Jesus and the Scriptures
The most important argument offered in favour of Dr Stott's position is the suggestion that it was the position of Jesus. 'We claim that he was inerrant/ he has written, 'that all his teaching was true, including his endorsement of the authority of Scripture' (UB, p. 153). And 'the major reason why we desire to submit to the authority of the Bible is that Jesus Christ authenticated it as possessing the authority of God' (B, p. 27). Warming to this theme in his 1981 essay on Freedom, Authority and Scripture written at the request of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, Jim Packer has declared:
the New Testament view of the Old is consistent and dear. Authority was seen ... as divine, the absolute, oracular authority of God telling truth about his work and will, and about the worship and obedience that we owe him. Not all that was said whether by the Old Testament or by the apostles was equally important, but all was part of the rule of faith and life since it came from God. (p. 41)
The surviving evidence shows what we should expect -that Jesus knew and loved the Hebrew Scriptures. He is said to have quoted them as the 'word of God' spoken 'by the Holy Spirit' (Mark 7:13; 12:36). It is reported that he accepted the opinions commonly held in his time about their authorship; thus his teaching in the gospels includes quotations from 'Moses', 'David' and 'Isaiah' which few modem scholars would attribute to those historical persons. He assumed that what appeared in the Scriptures as history was historical; thus his teaching includes references to the stories of Abel, Noah, Abraham and Lot and treats the books of Jonah and Daniel as history. Above all it seems that Jesus expressed his understanding of his own mission by combining passages in the Scriptures which together taught that in the 'day of the Lord', through the vindicated suffering of his servant, God would create a new people for himself. None of that is in the least unlikely, for Jesus was a devout Jew and the knowledge of the Scriptures which he gained from his parents and through the synagogue of Nazareth was his only formal education. The gospels agree that as an adult he kept up the custom of worship in a synagogue every Sabbath. The complaints made about his behaviour as being unconventional for a religious teacher -he and his disciples were willing to heal on the Sabbath, did not fast, did not wash their hands before meals, and ate meals with 'sinners' - did not refer to acts which were technically illegal under the written 'law of Moses'. It is significant that his brother James, who became a Christian, is said to have observed that law piously throughout his life.
But Dr Stott goes too far, I reckon, in his description of the dependence of Jesus on the Hebrew Scriptures. If, as he claims, there is no example in the gospels of Jesus disagreeing with the doctrinal or ethical teaching in the Old Testament (B, p. 29), it is indeed difficult to see why there is so much evidence that Jesus was in dispute with the Jewish religious authorities or why the movement which he founded split from Judaism so thoroughly and so completely. Dr Stott claims that 'he adopted towards the Scriptures of the Old Testament an attitude of reverent submission ... He accepted the statements of Scripture without question, believing them to be true . . . The word gegraptai ("it stands written") was enough to settle any issue for him' (CtC, pp. 93-4). But we have to account for the frequent references in the gospels to both the followers and the enemies of Jesus as agreeing that his teaching and behaviour were controversially new. In the fourth gospel Jesus is presented as a conservative, as in his saying that "the Scripture cannot be broken' (John 10:35) - but the tradition that he was a radical reaches a climax in what can be interpreted as a dismissal of the entire religious history of Israel: 'All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them' (John 10:8). According to the whole of the New Testament the criticism of the novelty of the life of Jesus culminated in the part played by some of the Jewish leadership in bringing about his execution. As A. E. Harvey has observed in a summary which wisely does not exaggerate the contrast between Jesus and Judaism,
it is hardly conceivable that the whole picture of an ongoing controversy between Jesus and the sages of his time is fictional. There must surely have been enough common ground between them for their differences to have come so sharply into focus and to have left such a mark on the gospel tradition. (Jesus and the Constraints of History, 1982, pp. 51-2)
I have the impression that Dr Stott is, like myself, a man with a sizeable private library who often consults books for information and guidance and who takes a pride in quoting them accurately. His knowledge of the Bible is vast and precise. And many Christians study their own Bibles daily. But one preliminary point which we need to keep in mind throughout this discussion is that Jesus did not live in a society full of books. The bookish monks of Qumran and scholars such as Philo of Alexandria were exceptional in having ready access to libraries. No doubt the 'scribes' who were legal experts had copies of the Scriptures or of considerable portions of them, but it seems highly unlikely that Jesus owned a complete copy of the Hebrew Scriptures, which was expensive and bulky. It is said that on the cross he quoted Psalm 22:1 in the Aramaic translation, not in Hebrew. It is even improbable that Paul carried a Bible around with him - and he was content to quote Scripture in Greek. Usually people quoted from memory or from single books or from edited collections of proof texts. Their dependence on the exact meaning of the Scriptures was inevitably less than would be expected of Jews or Christians who are able to check biblical references and to compare biblical translations. Another, connected, point has been well stated recently by Bruce Chilton (A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible, 1984, pp. 187-8). The chosen role of Jesus was
as a popular teacher rather than a professional academic. He used Scripture as a starting point in his preaching, and therefore as a vehicle of his vision of God, but understanding Scripture was not for him the goal of preaching. His task as he understood it was not essentially interpretative . . . From the beginning, we must acknowledge that no account of the use of the Bible can be held to be consistent with the preaching of Jesus which stops with the mere question of what a text means.
We have to banish from our minds any picture of Jesus of Nazareth as a theologian in a book-lined study. And we have to open our minds fully to the fact that the early Christians used the Hebrew Scriptures with freedom, as did their Teacher and Lord.
It is instructive to examine the references to these Scriptures in Matthew's gospel. This is usually agreed to be the most Jewish of the four canonical gospels, repeatedly claiming that 'all this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet', although the Scriptures are quoted mainly from the main Greek translation, the Septuagint. This gospel begins with a 'record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ' back to Abraham, largely based on the Scriptures but quite often deviating from them as well as from the genealogy given by Luke. It quotes the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:14, 'the virgin will be with child', not the Hebrew original, which says merely that a 'young woman' will give birth; and it uses it as a prediction of the virginal conception of Jesus, although in the book of Isaiah it was a prophecy that better times were coming for Israel within that child's childhood. It alters a quotation from Micah 5:2 so that it now refers to the 'rulers' not the 'clans' of Judah, presumably in order to increase the significance of Bethlehem. (Of the twenty-two words in this passage in the Septuagint, only eight are reproduced by Matthew.) It says that 'out of Egypt I called my son' (Hosea 11:1) predicts the return of the child Jesus from exile, whereas the original referred to the exodus from Egypt in history. It turns the poetic statement by Jeremiah that the lamentation in the village of Ramah sounded like the weeping of the bereaved Rachel into a prediction of a massacre in Bethlehem (2:18). It ignores Jeremiah's message that 'Rachel' was to stop weeping. It quotes 'He will be called Nazarios' as a prophetic utterance although it does not appear in the Scriptures (2:23). The scholars have puzzled over what Matthew meant. Possibly he linked the name of Nazareth, a village of no significance for the Scriptures, with Naser or 'Branch' of the House of David (i.e. the Messiah) or Nazir or 'consecrated man'. A little later comes the quotation of a prophet's understanding of God's call to his people (Isaiah 40:3), used as a prediction of the coming of John the Baptist (3:3).
As Matthew recounts the baptism and subsequent temptations of Jesus, he shows that Jesus regarded words of Scripture as expressions of God's will for him. But in the story of the temptations real decisions are made, so that it is strange that Dr Stott claims that 'Jesus had no need to debate or argue with the devil' (CMMW, p. 78). The devil can quote Psalm 91 as promising a miraculous deliverance from danger (4:6). Then three straightforward scriptural quotations are followed by an apparently decisive endorsement of the 248 positive commandments and 365 prohibitions in the 'Law of Moses'. 'Until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished' (5:18). This Dr Stott interprets to mean that 'the law is as enduring as the universe', since 'what Jesus is contradicting is not the law itself but certain perversions of the law of which the scribes and Pharisees were guilty'. His opinion of the Pharisees is that 'they thought an external conformity to the law would be righteousness enough', but that so far from strictly adhering to the law they added interpretations which were in fact distortions; for example, they added 'and hate your enemy' to the command 'Love your neighbour7 (Leviticus 19:18). The idea that Jesus was 'setting himself against Moses' is 'untenable' (CMMW, pp. 73-7). This idea is, however, held tenaciously by many scholars and there is much in the gospels that supports them.
The Sermon on the Mount's own plain, natural meaning is that what 'was said to the people long ago' (not only by recent scribes and Pharisees) is sometimes being replaced by what Ί tell you'. The 'Law of Moses' is not being merely reproduced without any addition or distortion when anger is said to be 'subject to judgement' no less than murder, and lustful looks no less than adultery; when divorce and the taking of oaths are condemned despite the clear provisions for them in the Scriptures; and when the disciples are told to reply to an evil person not by demanding 'eye for eye and tooth for tooth' according to the law but by offering the other cheek to strike and by an invitation to take the cloak as well as the tunic. There seems no good reason to doubt the tradition that Jesus rejected the Pharisees' belief that many regulations in addition to these found in the Scriptures (the 'oral law') went back to Moses and so belonged to the 'Law of Moses'. That was why he could be asked: 'Why do your disciples reject the tradition of the elders?' Instead of accepting this as criticism, he summoned his hearers to consider the written 'word of God' and its deep meaning (15:1-9). But had he merely been a conservative strictly adhering to the text of the Scriptures, he would have been close to the doctrinal position of the Sadducees, 'who say there is no resurrection' (Matthew 22:23) 'and that there are neither angels nor spirits' (Acts 23:8) because, they claimed, such things were not written in the Scriptures. In fact the gospels represent Jesus as being in dispute with the Sad-ducees no less than with the Pharisees, even before he signed his own death warrant by cleansing the Sadducees' headquarters, the temple. He was attacked both by those who accepted 'the tradition of the elders' and by those who accepted only the Scriptures. He was attacked, it seems, because he so often claimed direct access to God. Implicitly or explicitly he spoke or acted as the Father's unique representative. And he challenged his hearers to respond with a quite extraordinary urgency - in one case, not even delaying in order to bury a human father decently (Luke 9:57-60).
In Matthew 23 'the teachers of the law and the Pharisees' who 'sit in Moses' seat' are condemned for two basic reasons. They are hypocrites who do everything for show while really being full of 'greed and self-indulgence'. And they are bad pastors, for 'they tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders'. In contrast with these hypocritical prigs, Jesus was the honest friend of sinners and could be criticised as a glutton and a drunkard (11:19). Most scholars agree that this is not a complete account either of the teachers of the Jewish religious law in the time of Jesus or of the attitude of Jesus to them. Other passages in the gospels present Jesus as agreeing with scribes and Pharisees that the essential teaching of the law is the love of God and of neighbour. Luke says that Jesus dined with Pharisees (7:36-50; 14:1) and that some of them warned him of a plot to kill him (13:31). In the Acts of the Apostles 'a Pharisee named Gamaliel' saves the apostles from death (5:33-40) and other Pharisees rescue Paul when he has called out: 'My brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee' (23:6-10). The first Christian council included 'believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees' (15:5).
It is therefore believed by most scholars that these denunciations in Matthew 23 do not entirely reproduce the teaching of Jesus. They have been influenced by the final and bitter breach between Jews and Christians in the period immediately before the writing of the gospel. But whatever exactly Jesus may have said in condemnation of the hypocrisy and harshness of some experts in the Jewish religious law, his basic confrontation with that law cannot have been solely a rejection of additions to it. Nor can it have been solely a rejection of the idea that 'an external conformity to it would be righteousness enough' - an idea frequently condemned in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves as well as in the rabbinic literature. The tension between Jesus and the legal experts must have gone deeper than Dr Stott allows. There have been many studies of that tension by Jewish and Christian scholars, for example the books on Jesus and Judaism (1985) and Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) by E. P. Sanders, and much of the scholarly debate has had its storm centre in disagreements about The Interpretation of Matthew (well introduced by Graham Stanton's collection of essays under that title in 1983). But the wisest summary known to me was contributed by Michael Ramsey to Peake's Commentary on the Bible (1962 edn, p. 3):
As to the law, Jesus Christ came to fulfil it. This he did by teaching and practising a more radical obedience to the divine demand which the law had set forth... It involves (a) the right dispositions of the heart in matters where the law had enjoined right actions, (b) positive actions of righteousness in matters where the law had condemned actions of unrighteousness.
That basic tension between Jesus and the legal experts comes out in Matthew 12:1-13. In the 'Law of Moses' complete rest on the Sabbath (Saturday) was one of the ten commandments and the infringement of this law was punishable by death (Exodus 31:14). The commandment was understood in the Scriptures to prohibit activities such as gathering wood (Numbers 15:32-36) or lighting a fire (Exodus 35:3). The official Jewish commentary (the Mishnah) deduced thirty-nine specific prohibitions from Scripture. Saving life was not prohibited, but acts of healing which involved activity for healer and patient and which could be postponed for a day without harm were held to be contrary to the spirit of Scripture. Matthew's gospel repeats from Mark's the story that Jesus defended his disciples who picked and ate some ears of com on the Sabbath and on the same day himself healed a man with a shrivelled hand. This defiance of the law of the Sabbath as it was commonly understood evidently troubled Matthew, for he does not repeat from Mark (2:27) the very radical saying that 'the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath'. But Matthew does enable us to glimpse the reality that the message of Jesus was no mere repetition of the teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Later, Matthew repeatedly shows that biblical quotations spring naturally to the mind of a devout Jew but that the Hebrew text as later accepted by Jews and Christians need not be quoted accurately - and that the original meaning can be altered. Thus in Matthew 13 passages which did not have this meaning originally are cited in support of the strange theory that Jesus taught in parables in order to conceal his message from his hearers. The claim that the Creator said something which was in fact a comment by the human author of Genesis (19:5) seems to be a slip. The claim that two animals, 'the donkey and the colt', were used in the entry into Jerusalem (21:7) seems to result from misunderstanding a Hebrew poetic convention, 'parallelism' or the repetition of an idea. Zechariah 9:9 refers to only one animal, 'a donkey, a colt the foal of a donkey'. A reference to 'praise' coming from the mouths of children (21:16) is made by quoting Psalm 8:2 in the Septuagint translation into Greek, whereas the New English Bible's translation of the obscure Hebrew is 'thou hast rebuked the mighty'. The reference to the king in Jerusalem as 'my lord' at the beginning of Psalm 110 is used to show that King David called the future Messiah 'my lord', whereas it is far more probable that the reference shows that David, who would not have called any man 'lord' (apart from Saul for a period), did not compose Psalm 110 (22:44). Dr Stott teaches that the denial of Davidic authorship is 'inadmissible', but does admit that 'such a direct address to the future Messiah would indeed be unique in the Psalter' (CSP, p. 131). The reference to the Zechariah who was reckoned as the last martyr in the Scriptures as 'the son of Berakiah' (23:35) seems to be a confusion between the martyred son of Jehoiada (2 Chronicles 24:20-22) and the earlier Zechariah whose father was indeed Berakiah. Another loose quotation from Zechariah (11:12-13) is wrongly ascribed to Jeremiah and, taken completely out of its context, it is said to be a prediction about Judas Iscariot (27:9).
Most scholars do not hesitate to say that these are examples of a 'free' use of the Hebrew Scriptures, like the little mistake ('Isaiah' for Malachi) which begins Mark's gospel or Mark's wrong reference to 'the days of Abiathar the high priest' (2:26, the correct name being given in 1 Samuel 21:1-6). In the time when Jesus lived and the New Testament was written everyone seems to have treated the Scriptures in this 'free' way - as is documented in, for example, John Barton's The Oracles of God (1986). And Christians who highly value the treatment of the Hebrew Scriptures by Jesus and his followers have no need to pretend that none of these references contained any error. Even if it could be shown that the historical Jesus made all these mistakes himself, it would not matter crucially. The truth of his gospel did not depend on his inerrancy as a biblical scholar. 'He taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law' (Matthew 7:29). His teaching sowed the seeds of abundant and eternal life -although despite Matthew 13:32 the mustard seed is not 'the smallest of all your seeds'. He was the Saviour, not a botanist.
I ought also to consider briefly the passage in Mark's gospel where Jesus abrogates the Old Testament's legislation by declaring all foods 'clean' (7:14-23). If this is an authentic piece of his teaching, it constitutes his most dramatic contradiction of the Hebrew Scriptures. But I am one of these students of the New Testament who prefer the extensive evidence of Paul's letters and of the Acts of the Apostles that there were many controversies between the early Christians about what food they might eat. These disputes would have been settled far more quickly, had the apostles been able to remember and cite the clear teaching of the Lord on this very point. It therefore seems probable that in this passage Mark is stating a tradition developed within the Church.
Dr Stott, having wrongly claimed that the New Testament always treats the Old Testament in its original Hebrew as the inerrant word of God with the authority of God, also claims that 'Jesus made provision for the writing of the New Testament' (CtC, p. 95; B, p. 29) with a similar character. But if the reference is to the historical Jesus (I have no doubt that in the Spirit the authors of the New Testament were inspired to write), that is not a claim which can be based on the instructions to the apostles given in the gospels. There Jesus is not said to have repeated the command to write which was given by, for example, Jeremiah in the Old Testament; and one probable explanation is that he hoped that the time would be short before the kingdom of God came fully. Indeed, he is not said to have had any interest in any book outside the Hebrew Scriptures. The only instance of writing in the gospels comes when he writes on the sand when discouraging the imposition of the 'Law of Moses' on the woman taken in adultery at John 8:6,8 — and we are not told what he wrote. Nor is the New Testament a miraculously perfect record of what Jesus said and did. On the contrary, the four gospels leave many historical questions about Jesus unanswered and unanswerable. John's gospel, which is the one which tells us of promises that the Spirit would make the disciples remember what Jesus had said to them (14:26; 17:7), is also the one which pays no explicit attention to the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke.
On such problems I can do no more than to refer to the magisterial summary of critical scholarship in W. G. Kummel's trilogy, Introduction to the New Testament, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems and The Theology of the New Testament,available in English since the 1970s.
Although the writers of the letters in the New Testament make strong claims to authority, it is surely an oversimplification to say that (for example) 'what is Pauline is apostolic and therefore authoritative' (CoC, p. 183). C. H. Dodd may have put the matter indelicately when he wrote, to Dr Stott's indignation (OOW, p. 15), that 'sometimes I think Paul is wrong and I have ventured to say so'. But it seems right to remember that Paul did not hesitate to contradict his fellow-apostles, 'those who seemed to be important . . . those reputed to be pillars'. 'When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong7 (Galatians 2:6-11). And the Paul who claimed to speak 'not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words', also wrote that 'my conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent', and that 'no-one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ' (1 Corinthians 2:13; 4:4; 3:11). Dr Stott himself sometimes reckons with the human and cultural, and therefore changeable, element in Paul's teaching, as when he considers the instructions that no woman should pray with her head unveiled or speak in the congregation. About these instructions Paul says: 'what I am writing to you is the Lord's command' (1 Corinthians 14:37). But Dr Stott says that the 'inner reality of the apostolic instruction' is that male and female are equal but 'complementary rather than identical', so that 'veils and silence seem to me cultural symbols which belong to the past7 (ARBMW, p. 9; WR, p. 9). The position to which I adhere is that the 'apostolic gospel' - the good news about Christ in which the apostles agreed - certainly has authority. But it should not be identified with all the teaching attributed to the apostles. What is permanently authoritative is, surely, the 'inner reality'.
The two texts in the New Testament to which many 'conservative' theologians, including Dr Stott, appeal do not support any claim that the New Testament or the Old is infallible or inerrant. A Christian is reminded (according to the New International Version) that 'from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed [in Greek theopneustos] and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work' (2 Timothy 3:15-17). Since the Greek sentence has no main verb, some of the meaning is not clear. Thus the New English Bible's translation teaches us merely that 'every inspired scripture is useful.. .' But plainly this text declares that the Hebrew Scriptures as known to Timothy were inspired by God in order to be used in the making the 'man of God' a wise teacher. It is a statement with which no devout Jew or Christian would disagree. Elsewhere Christians are told (according to the New International Version) that 'you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit' (2 Peter 1:20-21). The meaning here, too, is to some extent uncertain. The New English Bible's translation of the Greek teaches a far more modest lesson: 'no one can interpret any prophecy of Scripture by himself'. But it may well be that what is said here is that the true prophets of Israel were inspired by the Holy Spirit, although 'there were also false prophets among the people' (2:1). That claim also is non-controversial among devout Jews and Christians. And neither passage, however translated, claims that 'the original Hebrew or Greek text as it came from the authors' hands' (UB, p. 142) was infallible or inerrant. If Evangelicals claim that, they are going far beyond what these texts affirm.
On the contrary, the New Testament provides abundant evidence, outside the gospels as well as in them, that the Christians often gave new meanings to the Hebrew text of the Scriptures or quoted versions of the text which differed from the text preferred in later versions of the Bible. In this they were like many devoutly orthodox Jewish students of the Scriptures. What was of absorbing interest was not the original, natural meaning of Scripture but the meaning of a passage as 'typology' or 'allegory' - referring mysteriously to some person, event or idea belonging to the reader's own time. Thus the promise of Moses that God would 'raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers' was taken to refer not to Joshua (as it did originally) but to someone alive or expected in the commentator's own time. The 'Teacher of Righteousness' who according to the Dead Sea scrolls was the hero of the Qumran monastery, or some other contemporary, might be 'the Prophet who is to come into the world' (John 6:14). Philo of Alexandria, who held such a high view of the inspiration of the Scriptures that he can sometimes sound like an extreme fundamentalist, did not hesitate to find in the sacred books 'allegories' whose most important meaning was philosophical and could be stated in terms familiar to the educated Jews who had settled in Egypt under much Greek influence. For Philo as for the Qumran monks, the tune played by God's biblical orchestra was a time which they could sing as their own song.
The Christians thus had many predecessors when they interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures freely. They combined many texts to form a portrait of 'the Messiah', a royal figure bringing salvation and a new age. Some of these passages referred originally to the future success of a prince of the house of David. Others looked forward in other ways to good times coming. Surviving Jewish literature shows that some of the Christians' contemporaries were making a similar synthesis of 'messianic' hopes in the Scriptures in order to draw a single portrait of the Messiah. (But two Messiahs, one priestly and the other lay, were expected by the Qumran community.) So the Christians' general method of using the Scriptures was not, it seems, disputed although their identification of a crucified carpenter of Nazareth as the Messiah was rejected. Paul, pursuing this familiar method of interpretation, told the Galatians that 'the Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles through faith and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham'. He argued that in God's promise to Abraham 'your seed' must mean 'one person, who is Christ' (3:8,16). He interpreted another story about Abraham 'figuratively', so that 'Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds with the present city of Jerusalem' (4:24-25). His first letter to the Corinthians claimed that a law about not muzzling an ox was meant to command the payment of the apostles (9:7-12) and that a rock which was believed to have accompanied the people of Israel through the wilderness 'was Christ' (10:4). And he twice quoted 'the righteous will live by his faith' (Habakkuk 2:4) as the supremely illuminating text in the Scriptures (to the Galatians at 3:11 and to the Romans at 1:17) - although this was originally an unexplained aside, translated in the New English Bible as 'the righteous will live by being faithful'.
In the Acts of the Apostles Psalm 16, which is a prayer about a recovery from illness, is quoted as a prediction of the Messiah's resurrection from death (2:25-28). Amos 9:12, which in the Hebrew is a promise of territorial expansion by Israel ('that they may possess the remnant of Edom'), is quoted in its Septuagint translation ('that the remnant of men may seek the Lord') as a prediction of the admission of the Gentiles into the Church (Acts 15:17). Near the beginning of the letter to Hebrews one text (Deuteronomy 32:43) is quoted from the Septuagint ('and let all God's angels worship him') to show the superiority of Jesus over the angels and a psalmist's prayer to the eternal God is said to have been addressed to Jesus as the Son. In Hebrews 7 the comparison of Christ with Melchizedek depends on a forced reading of the few references to that ancient king in Genesis. It was certainly not the meaning of the original author that the obscure Melchizedek was king of righteousness and peace, 'without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, like the Son of God he remains a priest for ever' (7:3). In the letter to the Ephesians (4:8) Psalm 68:18, which in the Hebrew is a prayer to God,
When you ascended on high,
you led captives in your train;
you received gifts from men,
even from the rebellious . . .,
is used to introduce a list of the various ministries given to the Church by the ascended Christ. This is done by quoting the psalm to read 'gave gifts to men'. The conclusion seems irresistible that the early Christians either quoted the version of Scripture which most suited their purpose, or altered it in text or meaning, in a way that often does not suggest that they believed the original and natural meaning of the Hebrew text later received as authoritative to be the infallible and inerrant word of God. Their consistent style of hermeneutics might be called non-Evangelical.
Partly because they combined great reverence for 'the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms' (Luke 24:44) with considerable freedom in quoting and using them, these early Christians seem to have found it natural to treat the teaching of Jesus in the same way. The letters of John name Jesus and Cain but otherwise do not contain a single reference to Scripture. Paul's letters repeatedly show how he combined a passionate devotion to Jesus with a disinclination to quote the exact words of his teaching. He directly quotes only three sayings of Jesus (1 Thessalonians 4:15; 1 Corinthians 7:10; 9:14) in addition to the Last Supper material. His letter to the Galatians shows that after his conversion as a Christian he did not regard it as a duty to find out precisely what Jesus had said. As Dr Stott comments, 'Paul's first visit to Jerusalem was only after three years, it lasted only two weeks, and he saw only two apostles. It was, therefore, ludicrous to suggest that he obtained his gospel from the Jerusalem apostles' (OOW, p. 35). If a record of the teaching of Jesus was preserved in the original Aramaic, it was later lost. It seems almost certain that at least one collection of sayings was compiled in Greek and certainly gospels were written in that language, the first (or the first to survive) being Mark's. But when Matthew and Luke used Mark they edited his gospel extensively and they treated any collection of sayings in the same way. It is uncertain whether John used any previous gospel; if he did, he used it very freely.
In this freedom the writers of the New Testament resembled many of the authors of the Old. When the law code which came to be called Deuteronomy was made public in 622-621 bc, the Jews started to become what Muslims call them - a 'people of the book'. The process was intensified during their exile and as a result of Ezra's mission (probably at the end of the fourth century bc). In the book called Ecclesiasticus, a teacher of 'wisdom', Jesus the son of Sirach, meditates on the Hebrew Bible approximately as we have it, about 180 bc. But the earlier material which came to be collected and edited in 'the Scriptures' does not leave the impression that its authors took much trouble to harmonise one law with another, one narrative with another, one prophecy with another, or one psalm or proverb with another. They based their own writing not on what was already written but on their own experience or on the tradition of their group. The fact that the authors of Ecclesiastes and the book of Job look at life with their own eyes, and do not rely on Scripture, is not entirely out of keeping with the general character of the Hebrew Bible. They felt 'carried along by the Holy Spirit', as is said in 2 Peter 1:21. They would share Paul's own impatience with what is merely written: 'the letter kills, but the spirit gives life' (2 Corinthians 3:6). In his The Interpretation of Scripture (1961, p. 188), James D. Smart summed up the truth of the matter: 'Paul's relation to the letter of Jesus' teaching is similar to Jesus' relation to the Old Testament and the relation of the Old Testament prophets to each other.'
It was a consequence of this widespread attitude that there was for long no great anxiety to know exactly what 'the Scriptures' were. The exact text of the Hebrew Scriptures was often uncertain, particularly until the vowels were added to the consonants in the period ad 600-900. That is one reason why the Greek translation often used by the early Christians differed in places from the Hebrew texts known to us - although it may have agreed with Hebrew texts now lost. The 'canon' or list of books constituting the Hebrew Scriptures was not finally agreed by the rabbis in Palestine before the middle of the first century ad. Probably that canon was not treated as authoritative when Timothy was a child being taught 'the Scriptures' for the letter of Jude in the New Testament shows the continuing uncertainty by quoting (in verse 14) a book attributed to Enoch which was excluded from the rabbinic canon. We know that in the Western Church a larger canon, including some books which came to be called the Apocrypha, was generally accepted despite some protests. The acceptance of these extra books was made formal at the Council of Florence in 1441, and confirmed by the Council of Trent more than a century later, although it was rejected by the Protestant Reformers including Luther in favour of the rabbinic canon. The longer canon may have originated among the Jews of Alexandria although that is far from certain.
2 Peter 3:16 refers to the letters of Paul among 'other Scriptures' and 'Scripture says' in 1 Timothy 5:18 may refer not only to Deuteronomy 25:4 but also to a quotation from Luke's gospel. Evidently towards the end of the first century ad the Church's formation of its own canon of Scripture (the New Testament) was beginning. But that process was not complete until the fourth century. The list of twenty-seven books was never settled by a formal council and the first official publication of it to have survived was the Easter Letter of Athanasius in 367. Until about that date, it was not certain exactly what the New Testament was.
The reference to Paul's letters as 'Scripture' in 2 Peter is among the factors which persuade most scholars that this document dates from a late period, perhaps a hundred years after the deaths of Peter and Paul. (2 Peter incorporates most of the letter of Jude and is not quoted in any other surviving document earlier than the third century. Disagreement about its authenticity helped to delay the finalisation of the canon of the New Testament.) The sense that 2 Timothy is also written to a situation where the Church already has a long tradition is one of the reasons why most scholars think that the whole of it is not authentically Pauline. But whether or not these teachings are genuinely apostolic, they do not support the idea that a carefully agreed list of books constituting the Old Testament was regarded as infallible or inerrant in detail and was being matched by a New Testament of the same character.
I do not think that I need spend much of my precious space on explaining why most modem scholars think that the Bible includes errors. Innumerable passages are asserted by their authors, either implicitly or explicitly, to be law, history, etc., and are therefore according to Dr Stott to be accepted as 'inerrant' as law, history, etc. - yet are contradicted either by other passages in the Christian Bible or by the proofs or probabilities of modem historical knowledge. It seems to me a wholly inadequate response to this laboriously accumulated body of knowledge, one of the most splendid achievements of the human mind inspired by the Spirit of truth, to say, as Dr Stott says, that if 'the seeming discrepancy remains, whether between science and the Bible, or between two parts of the Bible, or between our theological understanding of the Bible and our historical critical methods of studying it', the wise Christian 'suspends judgement and goes on looking for harmony rather than giving up in despair' (ARBMW, p. 8).
Here I confine myself to repeating briefly some standard critical comments on John's gospel, choosing that document because it is of central importance. As Dr Stott notes, 'every reader of John's gospel is immediately struck by the differences between it and the synoptic gospels in subject matter, theological emphasis, literary style and vocabulary' (UB, p. 89). It is no accident that I do not quote it as providing the actual words of Jesus, although Dr Stott frequently does. I do not doubt that the fourth gospel contains some historical material; for example, it supplies the most probable date for the crucifixion (7 April 30). But I am equally sure (having learned it from many better scholars) that this gospel is in the main a meditation on the meaning of Jesus by a Christian saint with a group and a tradition behind him. It often seems impossible to separate the history from the meditation, the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith. Some of the most striking sayings of 'Jesus' come in the narrative when he is alone with Pilate, out of the hearing of any disciple. In the course of a long prayer by 'Jesus' - the great 'high priestly' prayer at the Last Supper - we read the words: 'Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent7 (17:3). The best comparison seems to be with Plato's reconstruction of the teaching of his master, Socrates. Plato's Dialogues give not the words but the spirit.
It is spiritually important to see that John's gospel is only partly historical. Many readers of John Stott's Basic Christianity must have been puzzled by the contrast between the claims that 'Jesus was sinless because he was selfless' (BC1, p. 45) and that 'the most striking feature of the teaching of Jesus is that he was constantly talking about himself' (BC1, p. 23). But the second claim is based upon John's gospel alone. Dr Stott immediately quotes some of the seven great Ί am' sayings in that gospel - very striking sayings which, however, are not included in any other gospels. In John's gospel Jesus uses T in self-reference 118 times and refers to God as 'the Father' or 'my Father' 173 times. The kingdom of God is mentioned only five times. It is the message of the whole gospel that Jesus is the Son of the Father. That certainly agrees with the message of Mark that he is the Son of God. But in Mark's gospel Jesus talks mainly not about himself (there are only nine T references) or about his Father (the word is used only four times), but about the kingdom of God (the phrase is used eighteen times). In Matthew's gospel there are seventeen T references and forty-seven references to the 'kingdom of heaven'; in Luke's, ten T references and thirty-seven references to the 'kingdom of God'. The teaching about who Ί am' in John's gospel is, it seems clear, the expression of Christian devotion to Christ as the Son of the Father. The historical Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, not himself - except as God's agent in the arrival of that kingdom. According to Mark, when Peter had privately greeted him as Messiah 'Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him' (8:30). Unless Mark 9:41 really was spoken by Jesus, it was only when on trial that Jesus accepted the title of Messiah (14:62). Although the evidence is fragmentary and does not enable us to understand at all fully the self-consciousness of Jesus, it seems clear not only that he did not encourage use of this title (which was dangerously political) but also that he did not welcome all other compliments. Mark (10:17-18) has a story, toned down by Matthew and Luke, that he rebuked a young man who called him 'good teacher' with the words: 'Why do you call me good? No-one is good -except God alone.' But in John's gospel Andrew tells his brother Peter that Jesus is the Messiah before Peter has met him (1:41) and Jesus himself tells the Samaritan woman (4:25-26). And that is only the beginning of the claims of Jesus, which are coupled with warnings that 'if you do not believe that I am the one I claim to be, you will indeed die in your sins' (8:24). A few days before his death, according to three of the gospels, Jesus exercised a messianic (or almost messianic) authority by cleansing the temple, driving out the moneychangers - an intensely dramatic challenge to the Jewish authorities which sealed his fate. Because John puts the cleansing near the beginning (2:13-25), Dr Stott feels compelled to claim that Jesus cleansed the temple amid general consternation twice (UB, p. 100)! This seems to be an example of the difficulties which beset any attempt to harmonise all the gospels.
Many readers who are assured that Jesus utterly disregarded self in order to serve 'the will of God and the welfare of mankind' (BC1, p. 44) must have been puzzled to notice that in John's gospel and letters the 'love' which is commanded seems to be the love which the disciples are to have for each other ('the brethren') while mankind as a whole (the world) lies in darkness. In particular readers conscious of the terrible history of antisemitism must have been puzzled to read what Jesus says to a group called 'the Jews' - for example, 'you belong to your father, the devil' (8:44). In John's gospel there is outright hostility between 'the Jews' who are thus condemned and Jesus and his disciples. Already by 9:22 'the Jews had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ would be put out of the synagogue'. But it seems clear from the other gospels that the historical Jesus, who was a Jew, preached and practised love for all including other Jews, even if sometimes it had to be a stem love. And it seems clear from Paul's letters and the Acts of the Apostles (as well as from other evidence) that the total separation of Church and synagogue was a slow process. In Acts, the apostles and other Christians regularly worship in the temple in Jerusalem.
Very gladly and very gratefully I count myself among the many millions who have been given light by John's gospel. But its whole character counts against the theory that the Scriptures contain no contradictions because they contain no errors. 'The Scripture cannot be broken' (10:35) is often quoted from this gospel by conservative writers. But it is significant that the context of this text is a citation of Psalm 82 (curiously described as 'your law'): Ί have said you are gods'. In John's gospel it is used to show that men can rightly be called gods. But that was probably not the original meaning of the psalm, which seems to be ironic in this verse. The New International Version, for example, translates the Hebrew to mean that rulers who 'defend the unjust' may be called 'gods' but 'will die like mere men; you will fall like every other ruler' (verses 2,6-7). It seems clear that John did not think it necessary to base his gospel on a Scripture which was inerrant in its original meaning. For him as for countless Christians after him, it was the Christian meaning of the Scriptures that could not be broken.
After Fundamentalism
That, I have learned, is the character of the Bible. It is not truly expounded when fundamentalists feel obliged to claim that it contains no contradictions. In a presentation of The Scripture Principle (1985) which is on the whole scholarly, Professor Clark Pinnock declares that 'if contradiction exists our doctrine of Scripture is overthrown' (p. 147). He considers that this is the necessary consequence of a belief in the Bible's inerrancy, for 'inerrancy simply means that the Bible can be trusted in what it teaches and affirms'. Another result is that it is necessary to hold that even a piece of fiction is somehow inerrant, for 'the inerrant truth of a parable is of course parabolic and the inerrant truth of a fable is fabulous' (p. 78). But on the same page he commends a much more carefully qualified statement by Millard Erickson: The Bible, when correctly interpreted in the light of the level to which culture and the means of communication had developed at the time it was written, and in view of the purposes for which it was given, is fully truthful in all that it affirms'. And Jim Packer, in his Under God's Word (1982, p. 53), ends up with a similar set of qualifications. He says that the two words 'infallibility' and 'inerrancy' express
no advance commitment of any kind in the field of biblical interpretation, save that whatever Scripture, interpreted with linguistic correctness, in terms of each book's discernible literary character, against its own historical and cultural background, and in the light of its topical relation to other books, proves to be saying should be reverently received, as from God.
Qualifications such as these, which take account of the Bible's true character, empty words such as 'infallibility'
and 'inerrancy' of their plain meaning. Yet these or similar qualifications are increasingly seen by conservative scholars to be necessary, despite many dire warnings by the ultraconservatives. Thus Clark Pinnock has modified the position which he adopted in an earlier book, A Defense of Biblical Infallibility (1967). The leading Calvinist theologian in the Netherlands, G. C. Berkouwer, is even more cautious than Erickson, Packer and Pinnock. Bernard Ramm, whose earlier work on the Bible and science was pilloried by Professor Barr, has since written a book aptly called After Fundamentalism (1983). And what might come after it, theologically, has been outlined in, for example, two brave books by William J. Abraham on The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (1981) and Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism (1982). He is an American Evangelical who shows a perceptive sensitivity to recent British theology, which he might have been expected to find repulsive. Professor I. Howard Marshall in his Biblical Inspiration (1983) says that 'it is arguable that the Bible does contain what may be regarded as errors and contradictions by modem standards but which are not in fact contrary to its own standards and purpose' (p. 71). He quotes the Chicago Statement:
When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed, (p. 60)
His conclusion is: "'Infallible" means that the Bible is entirely trustworthy for the purposes for which God has inspired it' (p. 53).
Here these theologians come close to the words of the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Divine Revelation (III.ll) that
since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation.
In previous sentences the council had come closer to fundamentalism, teaching that both Testaments 'in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit . . . they have God as their author', their human authors having 'consigned to writing everything, and only those things, which God wanted'. But the bishops rejected the first draft schema which proposed that 'since divine inspiration extends to all things in the Bible, it follows directly and necessarily that the entire Sacred Scripture is absolutely immune from error'.
Do such admissions of the possibility of what is by modem standards error in the Bible destroy the Bible's authority? Many Evangelicals are fairly confident that even after such admissions the Bible can still be said to be authoritative, even 'infallible'. S. T. Davis documented this in The Debate about the Bible: Inerrancy versus Infallibility (1977) and P. J. Achtemeier in The Inspiration of Scripture (1980). But there has been much alarm. Commenting on the Second Vatican Council, a very conservative Evangelical scholar has written: 'Everyone from a Fundamentalist to a "Christian atheist" could assent to this formulation' (D. A. Carson in Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon, which he edited with J. D. Woodbridge in 1986, p. 9). I recognise that it may say very little to say that one believes in 'that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation'. So I shall end this chapter by stating briefly what I understand to be the saving truth which is affirmed by the Bible. And I shall also mention a few things which are in the Bible but not, I think, God-breathed.
God's purpose in inspiring the composition of the Bible which Christians hold in their hands today was 'severely practical'. (So Dr Stott wisely teaches, UB, p. 23.) It was to tell us that we and the rest of the universe are wonderfully his creation - not to propose that science is corrected by either Genesis 1 or Genesis 2 (the myths in these two chapters, which come from different sources and dates, contradict each other in some details). It was to tell us that we are sinners - not to instruct us how the serpent who was already wicked could speak to Eve or how the murderous Cain, so primitive that he was Adam's firstborn son, found a woman to be a farmer's wife, or how a flood covered the earth (including the mountains) without leaving any worldwide traces. It was to assure us that, although we are sinners, we are loved and delivered by God - not to inform us that the children of Israel included no fewer than 603,550 adult males plus families during the journey to Canaan (Numbers 1:46). It was to command us to live as God's children - not to persuade us that he dictated the law of Moses 430 years after his promise to Abraham (Galatians 3:17) although the time spent by the people of Israel in Egypt before the exodus had also been 430 years (Exodus 12:40). It was to tell us how he used a unique people, Israel, 'people who live apart and do not consider themselves one of the nations' - not to inform us that Balaam prophesied this having held conversations with a donkey and an angel (Numbers 22:21-35). It was to teach us, through his selfrevelation to the Israelites, that we must worship God alone - not to complain that the genocide of the Canaanites was incomplete. It was to show that the holy God demands holiness - not to tell us that the number of wicked Israelites killed off by the plague in Shittim was twenty-four thousand (Numbers 25:9) or twenty-three thousand (1 Corinthians 10:8). It was to reveal his holy love through Israel's great prophets - not to provide fully accurate predictions of coming events. It was to proclaim his demand for justice - not to give us a completely coherent account of the origins of the Israelite monarchy. It was to reveal himself in the whole bitter-sweet history of Israel - not to recount that history with complete accuracy (somehow reconciling the books of Samuel and the Kings with the later Chronicles). It was to show how when swallowed up into victorious empires amid the storms of history, when exiled and deprived of all political identity, the Jews reached a better understanding of God's holiness and mercy - not to tell us how a whale could swallow and regurgitate Dove (in Hebrew Jonah). It was to give us spiritual strength, whether the Philistine giant Goliath was killed by the boy David (1 Samuel 17) or by Elhanan (2 Samuel 21:19), who is elsewhere said to have killed Goliath's brother (1 Chronicles 20:5). It was to give us spiritual light - not to affirm that the sun once halted its journey across the sky for 'about a full day' (Joshua 10:13) or went backwards (Isaiah 38:8).
God's purpose was to proclaim that Jesus is 'a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel' - not to tell us whether Joseph's father was called Jacob (Matthew 1:16) or Eli (Luke 3:23). It was to say that the love of God was embodied in the carpenter of Nazareth -not to argue with the historians about the dates when Quirinius took a census in Judea (Luke 2:2) and when Judas and Theudas led their rebellions (Acts 5:36-37). It was to give us the message of Jesus which was like new wine - not to assert that it never contradicted the Hebrew Scriptures. It was to preserve enough of that message to make us feel its force - not to persuade us that different versions of the sayings of Jesus must have been spoken on different occasions, for example, one set of Beatitudes on a hill (Matthew 5:1), another on level ground (Luke 6:17). It was to tell us that Jesus heals - not to inform us whether the daughter of Jairus was dead (Matthew 9:18) or only dying (Mark 5:23) when Jesus was summoned, or whether blind Bartimeus was cured before (Luke 18:35) or after (Mark 10:46) entering Jericho, or whether the centurion who begged for the healing of his servant addressed Jesus personally (Matthew 8:5) or not (Luke 7:3). It was to tell us that Jesus died for us (whether he died on the day of the Passover feast, as in three of the gospels, or on the day before as related by John) and was raised from the dead (whatever may have been the details of his resurrection, which the gospels report differently). It was to send us out into the world with that good news - whether Jesus allowed his apostles to take a staff and wear sandals on their first missionary journey (Mark 6:8-9) or not (Matthew 10:10). It was to promise us the Holy Spirit - whatever may have been the nature of the charismatic event on the Day of Pentecost. It was to inspire the mission of Paul to the Gentiles - although the author of the Acts of the Apostles does not seem to have had available to him either the chronology, or the theology, which we can read in Paul's surviving letters. It was to proclaim that 'the life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me' (Galatians 2:20) -whether the apostles insisted that Gentile converts must 'abstain . . . from the meat of strangled animals and from blood' (Acts 15:20) or 'added nothing' to Paul's message (Galatians 2:6). It was to speak with converting and sustaining power about ourselves and our salvation. 'For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart' (Hebrews 4:12).
JOHN STOTT'S RESPONSE TO CHAPTER 2
My dear David,
You have certainly done a magnificent demolition job! This little Evangelical peanut lies bruised, battered and broken beneath the Mighty Liberal Steamroller! But (to wrench a text out of its context in a way of which neither you nor I would approve) I am 'hard pressed . . . but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; . . . struck down, but not destroyed' (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). So I pick myself up from the ground, shake off the dust, adjust my dishevelled hair and clothing, take a few deep breaths, lift my heart to heaven, and rally to the defence of the Evangelical cause.
First, I am very glad that you can so firmly endorse what I have written about divine revelation and its indispensability. The old Deist attempt to replace revelation by reason was wrong-headed from the beginning. Reason has a vital role in the understanding and application of revelation, but it can never be a substitute for it. Without revelation reason gropes in the dark and flounders in the deep.
Can we not go a step further than this together and agree that what we need is more than a revelation in general; it is a reliable revelation? Indeed, we have strong Christian reasons for expecting God to have given us one. We both believe that God said and did something through Jesus Christ which was unique in itself and decisive for the salvation of the world. Is it not inconceivable, therefore, that God should first have spoken and acted in Christ and then have allowed his saving word and deed to be lost in the mists of antiquity? If God's good news was meant for everybody, which it was and is, then he must have made provision for its reliable preservation, so that all people in all places at all times could have beneficial access to it. This is an a priori deduction from our basic Christian beliefs about God, Christ and salvation.
But can this saving revelation be equated with the Bible? And is it legitimate to regard the Bible as a reliable, let alone 'inerrant', guide? It is entirely proper that you should have put these questions to me, although you buttress your case with such a mass of detail that I cannot hope within the compass of this response to attend to it all. So where shall I begin?
I could begin by reminding you that the doctrine of biblical inspiration and authority held by Evangelicals was for centuries the universal Church's doctrine, and still is the official position of the Roman Catholic Church and of some Protestant churches. If, then, we were to consult the total Christian Church, triumphant as well as militant, this doctrine would be seen to be the majority view. That is why Harry Blamires in his book Where Do We Stand? (1980) bids us beware of innovators. He quotes G. K. Chesterton's definition of tradition as 'an extension of the franchise', namely 'giving votes to that most obscure of all classes, our ancestors'. Mr Blamires continues: 'If you accept the “one man, one vote" principle for the Christian church, the pollsters will have to do most of their opinion sampling in heaven ... If you extend the franchise fully . . . you can never put the traditionalists in a minority. They have a built-in majority from the past* (pp. 79-80). But that argument will not weigh with you, David, since it ignores the last two centuries of biblical criticism.
Alternatively, I could underline the elaborate internal cross-attestation of Scripture and take you to task for accepting the neb interpretation of 2 Timothy 3:16, that the word theopneustos ('God-breathed') applies only to some Scriptures. It is true, of course, that the Greek sentence has no main verb, but (according to the best reading) it includes the word kai ('and'), indicating that two assertions are being made, not one, namely that 'all Scripture is God-breathed and useful. . .'
Instead of pursuing these approaches, however, I will go straight to what you call my 'most important argument'.
The Example of Jesus Christ
Since you tell me that you are yourself not convinced by this reasoning, and since our readers will probably not have read my attempted expositions of it, I need to develop it a little. Submission to Scripture is for us Evangelicals a sign of our submission to Christ, a test of our loyalty to him. We find it extremely impressive that our incarnate Lord, whose own authority amazed his contemporaries, should have subordinated himself to the authority of the Old Testament Scriptures as he did, regarding them as his Father's written word. You urge us to banish from our mind pictures of Jesus either as 'a theologian in a book-lined study' or even as possessing his own complete copy of the Hebrew Bible. Quite so. But we may not conclude from this that he could not have known it intimately. For his local synagogue, where he both studied and worshipped, will almost certainly have had an accessible copy.
When I have pointed out that in Jesus' temptations in the Judean desert each issue was settled by an apt quotation from Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 8, and that he had 'no need to debate or argue with the devil', I was not intending to imply that he did not have to make 'real decisions'. He did. The temptations were insidious enough to call in question both his identity ('if you are the Son of God') and his vocation (whether to achieve his ends by compromise or by the cross). My point was to draw attention to the way in which his decisions were made, namely by reference to Scripture: gegrasptai gar ('for it stands written') was for him the conclusive argument.
The same loyalty to Scripture was apparent as his public ministry unfolded. We do not know (for we are not told) by what process he came to understand who he was and what he had been sent into the world to do. But it seems probable that the revelation was given him through Scripture, since it was according to Scripture that he came to define his mission. In particular, by applying to himself both the designation 'son of man' (Daniel 7) and the prophecies relating to the suffering servant (Isaiah 53), he fused two Old Testament images which in Judaism represented respectively 'the highest conceivable declaration of exaltation' and 'the expression of deepest humiliation'. These are Oscar Cullmann's expressions, taken from his The Christology of the New Testament (1959). He continues: 'This is the unheard-of new act of Jesus, that he united these two apparently contradictory tasks in his self-consciousness, and that he expressed that union in his life and teaching' (p. 161). He would enter into his glory only through suffering and death. Hence his sense of compulsion, so often repeated, that he 'must' go to Jerusalem and be rejected and suffer and die. Why must he? Because of what stood written in Scripture. This was the reason he would not call for angels to rescue him from arrest in the garden: 'how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?' (Matthew 26:54).
Then there were his public controversies with the religious authorities. You allude to their opposition to him as if it were evidence that he disagreed with the Old Testament. But it was with their traditions that he disagreed, I must insist, not with the Scriptures, for in nearly every debate with them he appealed to Scripture to support his position against theirs. Indeed, it was the true interpretation of the Old Testament Scriptures which was at stake in his quarrel with both the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who, incidentally, were not the simple Bible believers that you suggest. He criticised the former for adding to Scripture (their traditions) and the latter for subtracting from it (the supernatural).
Thus Jesus' determination to resist the devil, to fulfil his costly messianic role and to oppose the authorities all stemmed from his prior determination to obey his Father's will as he discerned it in Scripture. The evidence has been thoroughly set out by Richard T. France in his Jesus and the Old Testament (1971) and by John W. Wenham in his Christ and the Bible (1973). Certainly Jesus went beyond the Old Testament, but he did not go against it. Even in the debate over divorce, which we will consider at greater length in chapter 5, what Jesus criticised was not Moses but the hardness of human hearts, and the direction in which he led his hearers was not away from the Pentateuch but back to the creation narrative. Again, in 'declaring all foods clean' (Mk 7:19), he was not saying that the law's dietary regulations had never been God's will, but that they were a temporary divine arrangement, which was now 'fulfilled in the purity of heart demanded in the Kingdom of God.
In criticising this Evangelical position, you make two points which do not appear to be compatible with each other, since one assumes that Jesus did hold this high view of Scripture, while the other argues that he did not. First, you write that it was 'natural' and not in the least 'unlikely' that Jesus believed in the authority of Scripture, since he was 'a devout Jew7 who accepted the views commonly held in his day. The implication seems to be that you think he was mistaken, which I find intolerably derogatory to him. Your other argument is that he did not hold this doctrine of Scripture, but dissented from it, for his views were 'controversially new7, so that he was not a conservative but a radical. These are not alternatives, however, for surely he was both - conservative in his attitude to Scripture, and radical in his interpretations of it which challenged the accepted wisdom of his day. I am convinced that his radicalism was not directed towards the Old Testament itself. Do you seriously believe that his words 'all who ever came before me were thieves and robbers' (John 10:8) were a rejection of 'the entire religious history of Israel'? William Temple was clear that he was referring to 'false Messiahs'. As for the six antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount ('you have heard that it was said. . . but I say to you . . .'), it is certain that Matthew did not understand them as contradictions of the Old Testament, since they are immediately preceded by the strong statement that Jesus had not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them. In this way Jesus stated the principle first (Matthew 5:17-20) and then gave a series of examples to illustrate it (5:21-56), which is exactly how the rabbis taught, as David Daube has shown in his The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (1956).
What Jesus was rejecting, then, was not the law itself but interpretations of it which were either too literal, or too superficial, or thoroughly perverted. In place of such distortions he substituted his own radical interpretation, which belonged to the ethic of the kingdom. It was the same in the controversies over Sabbath observance and his fraternisation with the outcasts of Jewish society. Jesus was not rejecting Old Testament teaching, but giving his own authoritative application of it, which was in conflict with the scribes and Pharisees. And his use of Hosea 6:6 (Ί desire mercy, not sacrifice') in relation to both these controversies (Matthew 9:13; 12:7), is a good example of his creative application of a biblical principle.
It is, I believe, to a similar radical conservatism that the disciples of Jesus are called today. The disciple is not above his master. If submission to Scripture was right for him, as it was, it must be right for us also. Not a wooden conformity to its letter, however, but a profound penetration into its demanding implications for the life of the kingdom. For the supremacy of Scripture carries with it a radical calling into question of all human traditions and conventions, however ancient and sacred. That's why I personally do not like the label 'conservative Evangelical'. It conjures up the wrong image, an image of stubborn resistance to challenge and change. 'Evangelical' should be enough on its own; but if you insist on the addition of a qualification, then please make it a 'radical conservative Evangelical'. Thanks!
I have concentrated on Jesus' attitude to the Old Testament, and have room only for the briefest allusion to the New Testament. You are right to take me up on my assertion that Jesus 'made provision for the writing of the New Testament'. Understood as a statement of his deliberate intention, this claimed too much, for indeed there is no evidence that he envisaged New Testament documents or that he commissioned his apostles to write them. But he did commission them to teach in his name; he did call them to be with him so that they might bear witness to what they heard and saw; and he did promise them the illumination of the Spirit of truth, both to remind them of his teaching and to lead them into all the truth which they had not yet been able to receive. And these privileges uniquely equipped them to teach, whether by the spoken or by the written word. Moreover, his use of the vocabulary of 'sending' - he designated them 'apostles', 'sent them out to preach', (Mark 3:14) and told them Ί am sending you out like sheep among wolves' (Matthew 10:16) - must have been a deliberate parallel to the 'sending' of the prophets. The prophets and the apostles were 'sent' to exercise the same basic ministry: to see, record and interpret the mighty acts of God.
Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism
For thirty-five years now I have felt it right to repudiate the label 'fundamentalist', and in my second book Fundamentalism and Evangelism (1956) I attempted to make some distinctions between Evangelicals and fundamentalists. In an exchange of letters with Professor James Barr in 1978, after the publication of his book Fundamentalism, I complained that he seemed to lump us all together. He denied this, but added that 'the overlap was very great'. Now you write, David, that I make claims which 'sound like fundamentalism', that I have a 'lingering inclination towards fundamentalism', and that you hope to wean me away from my 'near-fundamentalism'.
In desiring to dissociate myself from fundamentalists, I shall try neither to caricature them (for I do not know that they have ever delineated themselves over against Evangelicals), nor to repudiate them (for they are true — even if sometimes embarrassing - brothers and sisters in Christ). At first the word 'fundamentalist' (coined in 1920) had an entirely honourable connotation.2 Although its antecedents may be traced back to the nineteenth century, it really owed its origin to the publication in the United States of a series of twelve paperback books entitled The Fundamentals, beginning in 1910. Their sixty-five topics included, in addition to aspects of biblical authority, such basic doctrines as the deity, virgin birth, atoning death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus. And their authors included such well-known scholars as Dyson Hague, James Orr, W. H. Griffith Thomas, B. B. Warfield, and Bishops Handley Moule and J. C. Ryle. At that time 'fundamentalism' was seen as a defence of the fundamentals of the faith, in opposition to 'modernism', which was seen as a denial of them. But gradually all words change their meaning, and today 'fundamentalism' is associated in many minds with certain extremes and extravagances which Evangelicals reject. Refraining from naming any names of people or institutions (they are in any case more numerous in America than in Europe), I list eight tendencies of the mind-set styled 'fundamentalism', although of course not all 'fundamentalists' exhibit all of them:
(1) A general suspicion of scholarship and science, which sometimes degenerates into a thoroughgoing anti-intellectualism;
(2) a mechanical view or 'dictation theory' of biblical inspiration, with a consequent denial of the human, cultural element in Scripture and therefore of the need for 'biblical criticism' and careful hermeneutics;
(3) a naive, almost superstitious, reverence for the Authorised (King James') Version of the Bible, warts and all, as if it were quasi-inspired, which leads to a neglect of textual criticism;
(4) a literalistic interpretation of all Scripture ('the interpretation of every word of the Bible as literal truth' - Collins English Dictionary), leading to an insufficient recognition of the place of poetry, metaphor and symbol;
(5) a separatist ecclesiology, together with a blanket repudiation of the Ecumenical Movement and the World Council of Churches;
(6) a cultural imprisonment, whose evil consequences have included racial prejudice and prosperity teaching;
(7) a denial of the social implications of the gospel, except for philanthropy and some extreme right-wing political concerns; and
(8) an insistence on premillennial eschatology, with a rather dogmatic contemporary interpretation of prophecy, including an uncritical espousal of Zionism.
Of these tendencies, the second is the most germane to our discussion. You rightly reject as an extreme position the notion that God 'dictated all the words' of Scripture and treated the biblical writers 'as a musician uses his instrument'. Moslems believe that Allah dictated the Koran in Arabic to Muhammad, and Christian fundamentalists tend to believe that the Bible had a somewhat comparable origin, although its diversity of authorship makes the comparison inexact. Evangelicals, however, affirm the double authorship of the Bible, since the Bible's own account of itself is both that 'God spoke' to and through men, and that 'men spoke from God' (Hebrews 1:1; 2 Peter 1:21). I enlarged on the human element of Scripture in my 1979 Olivier Beguin lecture in Australia (ARBMW), pointing out that the process of divine inspiration was not incompatible with the researches of the biblical historians, the reflections of the wise men (e.g. Proverbs 24:30-34), the crafted poetry of the psalmists, or (in the New Testament letters) the pastoral concerns of the apostles. Nor did inspiration iron out the biblical writers' different literary styles or theological emphases. How, then, were the divine and human elements related to each other? Both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians, ancient and modem, have suggested an analogy (however imperfect) between the two authorships of Scripture and the two natures of Christ. Just as we must emphasise neither the deity of Jesus at the expense of his humanity, nor his humanity at the expense of his deity, so we must equally affirm the human and divine origins of Scripture. On the one hand God spoke, deciding himself what he intended to say, yet not in such a way as to distort the personality of the human authors. On the other hand men spoke, using their faculties freely, yet not in such a way as to distort the message of the divine author. We have no basis for saying that because the origin of Scripture was human as well as divine, it must therefore contain error, any more than we have for saying that because Jesus was human as well as divine he must therefore have sinned. Further, we have no right to say that the conjunction of the divine and the human in the production of Scripture is impossible. As Dr J. I. Packer has said in his Fundamentalism and the Word of God (1958), such a denial
assumes that God and man stand in such a relation to each other that they cannot both be free agents in the same action. If man acts freely (i.e. voluntarily and spontaneously), God does not, and vice versa. The two freedoms are mutually exclusive. But the affinities of this idea are with Deism, not Christian Theism, (p. 81)
Again, 'the cure for such fallacious reasoning is to grasp the biblical idea of God's concursive operation in, with and through the free working of man's own mind' (p. 82).3
The double authorship of Scripture has practical as well as theological implications. For the two authorships demand two distinct and appropriate approaches. Because the Bible is the word of God, we should read it like no other book, on our knees in great humility before him. But because the Bible is also the words of men, we should read it like every other book, applying our minds diligently to its study. As you rightly say, we should read it 'both critically and humbly', though I would prefer to reverse the adverbs! This, then, is the justification of biblical criticism, indeed the necessity of it. 'Criticism' in this context, as we know, means 'investigation' or 'analysis', and does not necessarily imply a destructive judgement. Textual criticism (establishing the original text), historical criticism (enquiring into the circumstances of the composition), source criticism (determining the literary sources), form criticism (studying the structures in which the tradition was preserved and why) and redaction criticism (understanding the theological concerns behind the editor's use of his sources) are all indispensable tools for comprehending and applying the Scriptures.
There are several reasons, however, why Evangelicals have been suspicious of biblical criticism as it has developed.
(1) Many of its exponents have been so preoccupied with the mechanics of a book's composition that they have overlooked, and even shown no interest in, its message.
(2) The earliest critics were products of the Enlightenment, imbued with secular or unbelieving presuppositions. Being rationalistic in their approach, they were consistently destructive in their conclusions. Reimarus of Hamburg in the middle of the eighteenth century, for instance, who could almost be called the 'father' of biblical criticism, was a thoroughgoing Deist, outspoken in his rejection of revelation and miracle, and of the deity, atonement and resurrection of Jesus. Contemporary liberal scholars are, of course, much more moderate than he. Yet many seem to us to be controlled by their sceptical presuppositions. Having decided against miracles, for example, they naturally conclude that all material containing miracle is secondary, i.e. legendary. Again, on the widely held (but unproved) assumption that evolution applies as much to the development of ideas as of forms, they reject the biblical picture of an original, revealed monotheism, from which Israel declined, and reconstruct the history of religion as a slow and painful rise from animism through polytheism to mono-latry and finally monotheism. They then declare every expression of monotheistic faith before the eighth- and seventh-century prophets an anachronism and therefore a later interpolation. A third example is the rejection of the possibility of predictive prophecy, so that whatever claims to be a forecast of the future is immediately dismissed as a vaticinium ex eventu, a description of what has happened in the guise of a prophecy of what will. But the a priori denial of miracle, revelation and prediction betrays a secular not a Christian mind. It is a safer and sounder principle - even if an oversimplification - that biblical criticism requires biblical presuppositions.
(3) Many of the early claims to 'assured results', which were made by some of the more negative biblical critics, have proved to be premature. Still today, the opinions of liberal commentators, especially when based on subjective criteria, are often in conflict with each other, and even cancel each other out.
(4) The fairly recent development of redaction criticism (the term was coined by Willi Marxsen only in 1954) has on the whole been welcomed by Evangelicals because it credits the biblical authors (especially of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles) with being theologians in their own right. That is, instead of passing on the tradition they have received (from their sources) uncritically and unimaginatively, they reflected on its significance in relation to their readers, and selected, shaped and arranged their material in order to suit their theological purpose. It is a strange assumption, however, adopted by some leading redaction critics that, because an author has theological interests, his tendenz must inevitably have overridden his tradition, and his teaching must be unhistorical. But there is no a priori reason why a theologian should not also be a historian and vice versa. On the contrary, since biblical history is salvation history, history and theology are inseparable.
This is not to denigrate the practice of biblical criticism, which I have already declared to be essential. It is rather to explain why the scepticism of some critics arouses the scepticism of many Evangelicals who read them. Even you, David, seem to me to repeat rather uncritically the critics' conventional conclusions, as if they were established fact. A more critical examination of their (and our) presuppositions would be a healthy exercise for us both.
The Inerrancy Debate
I confess that I have never myself been greatly enamoured of the word 'inerrancy', mainly because I prefer a single positive ('true' or 'trustworthy') to a double negative ('in-errant', or for that matter 'infallible', which is its historic British equivalent). These words could even obscure what you rightly call 'the most important question about the Bible', which is 'whether it speaks the truth'.
Nevertheless, negatives are sometimes necessary in order to strengthen and clarify the corresponding positive. Thus, the apostle Peter's way of emphasising the eternal nature of our heavenly inheritance is to say that it 'can never perish, spoil or fade' ( aphth, and tos, 1 Peter 1:4). Similarly, the fifth-century Chalcedonian definition safeguarded its affirmation that Jesus Christ was one person in two perfect natures by adding the four adverbs 'unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly and inseparably'.
In your judgement, however, the presence of (alleged) errors in the Bible makes the assertion of inerrancy untenable. Evangelicals are, of course, as familiar with these problems as anyone else. They have been discussed at least since Jerome and Augustine. We don't read the Bible with our eyes shut or our minds inert! Broadly speaking, they fall into two categories of apparent discrepancy - on the one hand between Scripture and science, and on the other between different biblical books (e.g. Kings and Chronicles, the four gospels, the Acts and the epistles).
I take Scripture and science first. You and I are agreed that God has revealed himself both through the created universe and through Scripture; that nature and Scripture, or science (the study of nature) and theology (the study of Scripture), cannot ultimately be in conflict with one another, since all truth is God's truth; and that, although science and theology belong to some extent to different spheres, and ask different questions, we can confidently expect them to prove complementary and not contradictory to one another. We also agree that the Bible is prescientific in time and non-scientific in purpose. Many biblical references to the natural order - the heavens as 'the work of your fingers' (Psalm 8:3), the sun as 'like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion' (Psalm 19:5), God 'wrapping himself in light as with a garment' (Psalm 104:2) and 'opening his hand' to feed the animals (Psalm 104:28) etc. - are poetry not science. As for Genesis 1,1 could echo all your eloquent allusions to its teaching. Although I affirm the right of six-day creationists to continue their investigation into origins and dates, so long as they see their task as marshalling scientific arguments to corroborate their belief, I reject their exegetical insistence that faithfulness to the biblical text absolutely requires belief in a young earth. They have misunderstood the genre of Genesis 1, which is evidently a highly stylised literary and theological, not scientific, statement.
Moving on to Genesis 2 and 3, I have long held and taught that they contain figurative or symbolic elements, so that we should not dogmatise about the snake and the trees. But I cannot agree with you that the Adam and Eve story is a myth, whose truth is purely symbolical, not historical. The important theological statement in the second half of Romans 5, by the parallels it draws between the first and second Adams, depends for its truth on an act of disobedience by Adam as historical as Jesus' act of obedience, and all who deny the historicity of the fall find themselves in grave theological difficulty regarding the good creation and the origins of evil. The fall really cannot be reconstructed in evolutionary terms. Moreover, the anatomical, physiological, genetic and psychological unity of the human race as one species points straight to our common origins. Writing as a physical anthropologist, Dr Ashley Montagu stated: 'All varieties of man belong to the same species and have the same remote ancestry. This is a conclusion to which all the relevant evidence of comparative anatomy, palaeontology, serology and genetics points' (Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 1974, p. 74). I understand that among scientists there is no disagreement about this.
Of course there are still problems, not least about the dating of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. The Genesis story seems to put them in the Neolithic Age, the cultural period marked by crop-cultivation, stock-rearing, and settled communities (cf. the 'dty' of Genesis 4:17). The forging of tools of bronze and iron, and the making of musical instruments, are clearly placed several generations later (Genesis 4:21-22). In this case, the hominids which date from several hundreds of thousands of years earlier, though some are named homo habilis and homo erectus, were not fully human in the biblical sense, but pre-Adamic creatures. It all depends on how we define 'human'; all Christians agree that to be human is to bear the image of God, and that this consists at least of a moral, social and spiritual awareness. This kind of reconstruction is not incompatible with evolution, although, theologically speaking, it has to be stated in terms of creation. Adam's body may well have evolved from hominids. But alongside this continuity with the animal creation, he enjoyed a radical discontinuity, owing to his having been created in God's image.
This raises another problem. If the first true man Adam (according to Scripture 'made in the image of God') lived about 10,000 bc, and if the most developed pre-Adamic hominids (according to science homo sapiens) preceded him by hundreds of thousands of years, were culturally advanced, had populated much of the earth and were now Adam's contemporaries, what was the relationship between him and them? Some Christians argue (though with insufficient evidence) that they remained sub-human and later became extinct, either unaccountably like australopithe-cus a million or two years previously or through a universal flood. Others suggest that they came to share in Adam's createdness and fallenness not by heredity but by solidarity. Derek Kidner puts it in this way in his Tyndale Commentary on Genesis (1967). After the special creation had 'established the first human pair' and had
clinched the fact that there is no natural bridge from animal to man, God may have now conferred his image on Adam's collaterals, to bring them into the same realm of being. Adam's 'federal' headship of humanity extended, if that was the case, outwards to his contemporaries as well as onwards to his offspring, and his disobedience disinherited both alike, (p. 29)
If, as you chide me, I have been guilty of 'a lamentable hesitation' in accepting the fruits of scientific research, it is due in the main to a necessary caution (in view of the mistakes of the past, not to mention the over-confident liberalism of the present!). Incidentally, the best popular yet scholarly Evangelical book I know, which handles the exegetical questions posed by Genesis 1-3, is Henri Blocher's exposition of these chapters entitled In The Beginning (1984); it judiciously combines faithfulness to Scripture with openness to science.
Turning to the synoptic gospels, I begin by saying that most Evangelicals probably still accept the documentary hypothesis that Matthew and Luke used two main sources, namely Mark and Q, although some hold the priority of Matthew. The material which is unique to Matthew and Luke is generally attributed either to two further literary sources (M and L) or simply to independent information to which each had access. Evangelicals also welcome the emphasis of redaction criticism that the evangelists selected and shaped (though did not invent) their material to suit their theological purpose, perhaps making more editorial changes than we have sometimes thought. The resulting discrepancies certainly pose problems, as do apparent 'slips' or 'mistakes' (like one of those you mention, namely the identity of 'Zechariah the son of Berakiah'). But what you seem reluctant to acknowledge is that possible - in many cases plausible - explanations have been proposed in the commentaries and other studies which competent Evangelical scholars have now written. Among these are Dick France's Matthew and Alan Cole's Mark in the Tyndale New Testament Commentary Series, D. A. Carson's commentary on Matthew in volume 8 of the Expositor's Bible Commentary, Ralph Martin's Mark: Evangelist and Theologian, Howard Marshall's Luke: Historian and Theologian and The Gospel of Luke, and Stephen Smalley's John: Evangelist and Interpreter, all published by Paternoster and Eerdmans, together with William Lane's The Gospel of Mark and Leon Morris's John in the New International Commentary on the New Testament series. Many problems of composition and interpretation are also debated in New Testament Interpretation (1977), edited by Howard Marshall. In addition, the 'Gospels Research Project' team, sponsored by Tyndale House, Cambridge, has now published six volumes of Gospel Perspectives (1980-1986), whose findings have been admirably summarised by Dr Craig Blomberg in The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (1987). In supplying this list of Evangelical works, I do not wish to give a false impression. I am not claiming that between them they provide adequate or even agreed answers to all the problems you raise, but rather that they are responsible explorations into the areas of debate, in the course of which many traditional problems have either fallen into place or received fresh light.
Among many points which Evangelicals would want to make, in regard to alleged discrepancies in the gospels, are the following, which all relate to the intention of the author and the unfairness of criticising him for not doing what he never set out to do. Thus, it is possible to condense speeches, paraphrase them, and translate them into a different cultural idiom, without thereby falsifying their meaning; to change the sequence of events, deliberately subordinating chronology to theology, without by this practice committing an error; to give round figures and make free quotations, according to the literary conventions of the pre-computer age, without being accused of making mistakes (imprecision is not a synonym for inaccuracy); and to quote the Old Testament in such a way as to draw attention to a principle, parallel or pattern, rather than to the detailed fulfilment of a specific prophecy, without being guilty of misquotation.
As for the differences between the synoptic gospels and the fourth gospel, these have of course been noticed and discussed from the beginning, and the fact that we cannot easily tell in the discourses when Jesus stops and John starts shows that John had deeply assimilated the teaching of his Lord. But it is possible to exaggerate the contrast between the claims of Jesus in John and their alleged absence in the synoptic gospels. For if the Ί am' statements may not have been such unambiguous assertions of deity as I suggest in Basic Christianity (e.g. Ί am the light of the world' and Ί am the bread of life' could have been understood in different ways), yet Jesus' claims recorded by the synoptists (to have inaugurated the kingdom, to have authority to forgive sins, to be accorded his disciples' first love and loyalty, and to be the central figure on the judgement day) are comparable in significance to the most direct claims to deity recorded by John.
Supposing, however, as is indeed the case, that some discrepancies remain which cannot with integrity be reconciled or harmonised, how should we handle this situation? That is what our domestic Evangelical debate over inerrancy is about. Two main possibilities have been proposed.
Some Evangelicals conclude that they must recognise in the Bible a few, largely trivial, factual mistakes. But they add that these belong to the spheres of history, literature and science, so that in the spheres of religion and ethics, and especially in teaching about God, Christ and salvation, the Bible remains inerrant, 'the only infallible rule of faith and practice' (Westminster Confession). This position is sometimes called limited inerrancy'. Now to concede a few factual errors will emphatically not cause the whole Evangelical edifice to collapse like a pack of cards. No, the firm foundations on which the Evangelical view of Scripture is built remain in place. In consequence, we have no liberty to deny the epithet 'Evangelical' to such people or to make total inerrancy an indispensable criterion of Evangelical orthodoxy. I agree with both Dr Carl Henry and Dr Kenneth Kantzer that, although limited inerrantists could be called 'inconsistent', they should not be called 'false' Evangelicals.4
Other Evangelicals do not feel the necessity to make this concession, however, but continue to affirm the Bible's inerrancy in every area in which it speaks. At the same time we are concerned to add two riders (more clarifications than qualifications), namely that Scripture is without error (1) as originally given, and (2) as correctly interpreted. These additions are not evasions, but commonsense explanations of what we mean by inerrancy. Our critics may retort that, since we don't possess the autographs and are not sure of the correct interpretation, our concept of an inerrant Bible is useless, even meaningless, because it does not exist. But the value of our clarifications is that they lay upon us the urgent importance both of textual criticism (to establish the most reliable text) and of the hermeneutical task (to establish its correct meaning). For Evangelicals emphatically do not claim inerrancy either for a faulty text or for every weird and wonderful interpretation which Bible students produce.
By the way, those who speak and write for the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy are scholars, not fools! They now have several significant books to their credit, beginning with two wide-ranging symposia: The Foundation of Biblical Authority (1978), edited by James M. Boice, and Inerrancy (1980), edited by Norman L. Geisler. More recently, two more valuable symposia have appeared, both edited by D. A. Carson and John D. Wood-bridge. Although these essays are not sponsored by ICBI, their authors 'hold that what the Scriptures teach is infallibly true and that this belief is not only patient of reasoned defence but is extremely important for the well-being of the church'. Their titles are Scripture and Truth (1983) and Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon (1986).
It will by now be apparent that I belong to the second category of Evangelicals, for I still see no reason to abandon the concept of inerrancy, if it is properly understood, even though I like the positive word 'truth' even better. So let me tell you why I prefer inerrancy to limited inerrancy, and why I defend the suspended judgement on the unresolved problems which you describe as 'wholly inadequate', but which I maintain is thoroughly Christian! 8
(1) Our theological a priori that the Bible is God's word through human words carries with it the conviction that the God who has spoken has not in the process contradicted himself. That is why patient attempts at harmonisation seem to me more Christian than either a premature declaration of error or a resort to artificial manipulation.
(2) A number of old problems, which decades ago were confidently pronounced ΊήΒΙΰΏΐ errors', have subsequently proved not to have been. They have yielded to patient study and further light. I will give only one example. In Acts 17:6 and 8 Luke calls the city rulers or magistrates in Thessalonica 'politarchs', a word which occurs nowhere else in the New Testament and has not been found in any other Greek literature. So earlier critical scholars accused Luke of either ignorance or carelessness. But since then a number of inscriptions have been found, dating from the second and third centuries ad, several in Thessalonica itself, which have vindicated Luke's use of the title. It is now known that the city council in Macedonian towns consisted of a group of politarchs, and that there were five or six of them in Thessalonica. This seems to me to illustrate the wisdom of referring to 'unresolved problems' rather than 'proven errors'.
(3) The distinction between spheres of inerrancy (theology and ethics versus history and science), though understandable, is nevertheless arbitrary. Neither Jesus nor his apostles made it. They seem to have regarded Scripture as 'without error in all that it affirms' (Lausanne Covenant para. 2), to whatever sphere each affirmation belongs. It would seem more consistent for us to do the same.
(4) This is how Christians learn to handle all their other theological problems. No single Christian doctrine is problem-free, and if we were to delay faith until we had solved all the problems, we would never believe anything. Take as an example the love of God, which Christians of all shades believe. Enormous problems stand in our way, like the origin and power of evil, the prevalence of injustice, the sufferings of the innocent and the occurrence of catastrophes. Faced with such problems, however, we do not hold our conviction of God's love in abeyance until we have solved them. Instead, we wrestle with them, and as we do so, some light is thrown on them. But in the end we persist in our belief that God is love, spite of the unresolved problems, because Jesus himself taught and exemplified it. It should be the same with our confidence in God's word.
(5) The acceptance of inerrancy is more conducive to an attitude of reverent humility before God's word, than a belief in limited inerrancy, let alone errancy. True, as I have already mentioned, to admit that Scripture contains a few, minor mistakes of a factual kind does not logically undermine the Evangelical doctrine of the authority, supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture. Nevertheless, as experience has shown, it puts people's feet on a slippery slope, and fosters more a critical than a humble spirit.
This leads me to my last comment.
Evangelical or Liberal?
As I reflect on the correct answer to your question, What is essential for Evangelicals?, I find myself asking, What is essential for Liberals? In other words, what is the fundamental difference between us?
I think I would characterise Evangelicals as those who, because they identify Scripture as God's word, are deeply concerned to submit to its authority in their lives (whatever their precise formulation of the doctrine of Scripture may be). In other words, the hallmark of Evangelicals is not so much an impeccable set of words as a submissive spirit, namely their a priori resolve to believe and obey whatever Scripture may be shown to teach. They are committed to Scripture in advance, whatever it may later be found to say. They claim no liberty to lay down their own terms for belief and behaviour. They see this humble and obedient stance as an essential implication of Christ's lordship over them.
Such an open, unconditional commitment to Scripture would not be acceptable to liberals, would it, David? True, you write that 'these books read us', but are you willing for them to teach us too? Sometimes you seem anxious to demonstrate that your position is more biblical than mine. I wonder why? I mean, if you could prove this to me, I would want to change my mind and position at once. But if I could show you that my position is more biblical than yours, would you be willing to change? I guess your reply would be conditional, i.e. 'Yes, provided that my mind and heart would approve of the change.' What worries me is your biblical selectivity. In later chapters you reject traditional Christian teaching about the atonement, miracles, homosexual partnerships, and the awful reality of hell, not on the ground that you consider it unbiblical, but because on other grounds you find it unacceptable. Does this not mean that in the end you accord supremacy to your reason rather than to Scripture? We are back in the conflict between the Reformation and the Renaissance. As Luther said to Erasmus, The difference between you and me, Erasmus, is that you sit above Scripture and judge it, while I sit under Scripture and let it judge me!'
I also wonder why you seem so anxious to persuade me that inerrancy is untenable? Is it entirely your concern for intellectual integrity? But I am committed to this also. Your assault has reminded me a little of Dr B. T. D. Smith, who taught the synoptic gospels at Cambridge in the 1940s when I was a theological student. It was said that as a young man he had been an ardent Anglo-Catholic, but that now he had entirely lost his Christian faith. He seemed to take what Oscar Cullmann called (in The Christology of the New Testament, 1959) 'an almost sadistic pleasure' in finding discrepancies! I shall always remember the beginning of his lecture on Luke 3:1 ff. Rubbing his hands and licking his lips with evident glee, he said with his famous lisp: 'Thith pathage thimply brithleth with difficultieth!' Now, please, I'm not likening you to him! But I still ask, 'Why?' I wonder whether it has anything to do with a fear of what C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy (1955) styled 'the tyrannous noon of revelation' (p. 63)? Could it be that you think submission to biblical authority is incompatible with intellectual freedom?
Let me finish my response to your second chapter (a response which, though long, is foundational to the rest of our dialogue) by developing a little parable. It uses flight as a picture of freedom (memories of Jonathan Livingstone Seagulll) and seeks to characterise (not, I hope, caricature) the essential difference between the fundamentalist, the liberal and the Evangelical.
The fundamentalist seems to me to resemble a caged bird, which possesses the capacity for flight, but lacks the freedom to use it. For the fundamentalist mind is confined or caged by an overliteral interpretation of Scripture, and by the strict traditions and conventions into which this has led him. He is not at liberty to question these, or to explore alternative, equally faithful ways of applying Scripture to the modem world, for he cannot escape from his cage.
The liberal seems to me to resemble (no offence meant!) a gas-filled balloon, which takes off and rises into the air, buoyant, free, directed only by its own built-in navigational responses to wind and pressure, but entirely unrestrained from earth. For the liberal mind has no anchorage; it is accountable only to itself.
The Evangelical seems to me to resemble a kite, which can also take off, fly great distances and soar to great heights, while all the time being tethered to earth. For the Evangelical mind is held by revelation. Without doubt it often needs a longer string, for we are not renowned for creative thinking. Nevertheless, at least in the ideal, I see Evangelicals as finding true freedom under the authority of revealed truth, and combining a radical mind-set and lifestyle with a conservative commitment to Scripture.
I hope my little parable has not offended you!
Yours as ever,
John