Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals. Carlos R. Bovell
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Regarding the creation story: the strife that the creation-evolution debate has caused evangelical youth is well known. One evangelical church boasted that its youth group studied nothing but creationism for the nine months during which its young people were in school in order to counter the public schools’ effects on its members!
29 C. Fitzsimons Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter. (Seabury, 1966; repr., Vancouver: Regent, 2004), ch. 4.
30 Reuben Hersh, What is Mathematics, Really? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 39.
31 See Lawrence Beyer, “Keeping Self-Deception in Perspective” in Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. (ed. Jean-Pierre Dupuy; Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1998), 87–111. Years ago, Blamires had noticed that there would be times when Christians must become temporary non-Christians in order to join in contemporary discourse because, if not, she would be “the only Christian present” and therefore engage only in a “private monologue”. See Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1962). I think a reason that Christians find themselves shifting between worldviews lies in the paradoxical doctrines that comprise the core of Christian beliefs.
32 From another perspective, Kraft states that what Schaeffer, Sire and others call “worldviews” are not really worldviews. Charles H. Kraft writes that different cultural contexts will produce different Christian worldviews. See his Anthropology for Christian Witness. (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 67–68.
33 This understanding appears repeatedly in Naugle’s Worldview: The History of a Concept.
34 The assumption, for example, that everyone has a worldview and that it is inherently religious is not gratuitous. Richard Taylor, to use an analogous situation, denies that everyone has a metaphysics. (I compare worldview with metaphysics below.) To automatically assume that everybody must have a “worldview” and to insist further that this worldview is inherently religious unnecessarily flattens the playing field. Consider Chet Raymo’s remarks, for example: “There’s a ‘God-shaped hole in many people’s lives,’ says physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne. He’s right, at least about there being a hole in our lives. To call the hole ‘God-shaped’ begs the question . . .” (Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection Between Science and Religion. [New York: MJF, 1998], 1, quoting John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1994], 5, 14.) See also C. G. Prado, “Haunted by Plato and Torquemada” in Walking the Tightrope of Faith: Philosophical Conversations About Reason and Religion. (ed. H. Hart, R. A. Kuipers and K. Nielsen; Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), 128–132.
35 Keith E. Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 16 (italics in original). This has been called the “functional” definition. Clouser, for his part, wants to do away with references to the like of rituals. If his wish is granted, the resemblance to metaphysics is strengthened. See Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame, 1991), 1–34.
36 Quentin Smith and L. Nathan Oaklander, Time, Change and Freedom: An Introduction to Metaphysics. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2.
37 John Peck and Charles Strohmer, Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World. (Sevierville, TN: Wise Press, 2000), 280.
38 James Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004).
39 D. Aerts, L. Apostel, et al. Worldviews: From Fragmentation to Integration. (Brussels: VUB, 1994), 25.
40 What is an explanation anyway? For suggestions, see Paul Teller, “On Why Questions” Nous 8 (1974): 371–380; and in another vain, these and related articles in Synthese 120.1 (1999): Rebecca Schweder, “Causal Explanation and Explanatory Selection,” 115–124; Matti Sintonen, “Why Questions, and Why Just Why-Questions?” 125–135; and Max Urchs, “Complementary Explanations,” 137–149.
41 After all, worldview philosophy has not been developed by Christians for purposes of dialogue but for debate. For suggestions on the distinctions between the two, see Leonard Swidler, “Dialogue Decalogue: Ground Rules for Interreligious Dialogue,” JES 20 (1983): 1–4, available online at http://www.usao.edu/~facshaferi/DIALOG00.HTML.
42 Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, “What if Religio Remained Untranslatable?” in Difference in Philosophy of Religion. (ed. Philip Goodchild; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 87–100, 88. Compare with the issues raised in Gregory R. Peterson, “Think Pieces: Religion as Orienting Worldview” Zygon 36 (2001): 5–19.
43 See, for example, Wolfgang Wischmeyer, “A Christian? What’s That? On the Difficulty of Managing Christian Diversity in Late Antiquity” in Studia Patristica XXXIV. (ed. M. F. Wiles and E. J. Yarnold; Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 270–281.
44 Alan Donogan, “Philosophy and the Possibility of Religious Orthodoxy” in Reflections on Philosophy and Religion. (ed. A. N. Perovich, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–13, 6.
45 Another reason may be that, by their very nature, theology and philosophy are inherently inimical to the Christian faith. See, for example, Donald Wiebe, The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought. (Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991).
Discursus
Wrestling with 1 Tim 2.11–15, A Case in Point
Though evangelical theological argumentation is still blackened by an inherited predilection for objectivity and proof-texts, it is not to be supposed that the NT authors were fazed by either of these two concerns. By contrast, they unabashedly read their own situations into their texts and made a very full use of their Scriptures (and other sources) when interpreting and citing texts in support of a specific conclusion.1 In fact, the scientific impetus of evangelical hermeneutics seems inordinately strict when compared with extant examples of ancient exegesis. For this reason, evangelical hermeneutical practices pose problems with regard to the authority of Scripture in a more urgent way than did those of early Judaism or the early church. That varieties of Second Temple “non-scientific” hermeneutics have found their way into the NT has not yet been taken seriously with respect to the way it ramifies biblical authority.2
What follows is an investigation of the exegetical argument of 1 Tim 2.11–15. The motivation is that evangelical readers might begin to (1) realize just how scientific their own interpretive expectations have become, (2) reexamine the nature of the authority of Scripture in light of ancient interpretive practices, and (3) reconsider what issues are at stake in the women’s debate. The thesis offered here is that irrespective of what position an evangelical takes in