Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals. Carlos R. Bovell
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are implicitly and explicitly taught that inerrancy is the watershed doctrine of historic, orthodox Christianity. Yet few evangelicals in positions of leadership (scholarly writers, professors, youth leaders, etc.) who inculcate an ETS/EPS doctrine of Scripture have acknowledged the potential and actual damage they are spiritually inflicting upon younger evangelicals by insisting on the paramount import of this particular dogma of Scripture.
In the face of a broader evangelical predilection for certainty and a faith that was given once and for all, younger evangelicals are never given the opportunity to critically ask, “What is Scripture?” Evangelicals are trained to have an innate sense that the formal battle for the Bible is never over and to explicitly watch for unbelief in other writings that they read. Amazingly, the smoldering legacy of an older era has not necessarily yielded a clarification of the issues. If “How can we wed our traditions with modernity?” is the question that non-Christian religions are still asking, “How can we wed the Bible with modernity?” is still the question that evangelicals of all stripes, young and old, are asking scholarly and churchly leaders.7 The information network of conservative evangelicalism is such that evangelical church and para-church leaders turn to evangelical theologians and philosophers for answers and the answers that these leaders give are presently couched in terms of the development of a biblical “worldview.”
A worldview, or a pre-reflective story with its set of presuppositions, always shapes the way that the world is interpreted by humans. Contemporary evangelical wisdom holds that instead of interpreting the Bible in terms of modernity, a believer is to strive to interpret modernity (or “postmodernity” for that matter8) in terms of the biblical story. In other words, a believer should try to set the biblical system of beliefs (or, others would say, story) against modernity’s system of beliefs (or story), but this patented evangelical response tends to preclude an adequate appreciation for the specific examples and situations that give rise to the critical examination of Scripture in the first place. From the vantage of historical-criticism, for example, neglected contributions of biblical studies come to mind. Interestingly enough, non-evangelical biblical scholars have reached the limits of historical investigation and have begun to subsume historical criticism into larger theological and philosophical investigations—so much so that scholarly circles, evangelical and otherwise, are presently witnessing a backlash against historical criticism, arguing for the return of theological hermeneutics and the like. Among critical scholars, there is the post-critical turn; in conservative circles of “not very well informed believers,” however, it does not seem that the careful observations of historical and biblical scholars were ever really appreciated at all but rather perpetually gainsaid by policing evangelical philosophers and evangelical systematic theologians.
Conservative evangelicals have taken solace in the fact that critical scholarship is itself informed by a worldview. Perhaps, it is time to question whether the place of worldviews in evangelical circles has become too privileged. Perhaps, a pattern has been psychologically and spiritually set such that it is no longer possible for conservative leaders to see the trees on account of the forest. My argument in this book is that there is a paradigmatic need for a counterbalance: more care should be taken in allowing specific critical problems their due consideration by younger evangelicals. One way to accomplish this is to insist that historical and biblical scholarship should more openly and critically inform evangelical philosophy and theology. My present concern is that the conversation between the disciplines has gone in the other direction for too long; the spiritual formation of many younger evangelicals is unnecessarily being put at risk.
Perhaps, a fundamental complaint regarding the spiritual formation of younger evangelicals can be tersely summarized by (of all people!) Aristotle:
[W]e see the experienced compassing their objects more effectually than those who profess a theory without the experience . . . [E]xperience, indeed, is a knowledge of singulars, whereas art, of universals . . . If, therefore, anyone without the experience is furnished with principle, and is acquainted with the universal, but is ignorant of the singular that is involved therein, he will frequently fall into error . . .9
Theology and philosophy are geared toward generalizing and universalizing theories whereas historical and biblical scholarship tends to examine individual cases. A predilection for theory and system on the part of many evangelical leaders, it seems, is driving evangelical youths to “frequently fall into error,” as Aristotle puts it. What’s more, inerrancy, time and again, has proven an unhelpful purview from which to attempt to systematically account for individual critical cases. The result is often to habitually turn a blind eye toward many of the critical cases in question.10
What a profound existential toll to take on a young believer! Surely this will immediately affect spiritual development and that in successively negative ways. I suggest that in an attempt to keep evangelical youths on a positive spiritually formative trajectory, evangelical leaders should bear in mind that theology and philosophy should not produce theories or systems that ignore or neglect the critical data. Countervailing data will eventually be found out or even personally experienced by our young people and it will then be too late to recover the dialogue with them. Nothing less than the spiritual welfare of the next generation of evangelicals is at stake.
It is commonly held today that the very collection of data is inherently theory-laden and one can readily accede this. Nevertheless, when an evangelical theory that purports to describe the divine nature of the Bible grounds Christian existence (not only doctrines) to a high view of Scripture in such a way that Scripture has to constantly find the strength to hold a young person’s “being-in-the-world” together, the theory endangers evangelical youths to the extent that they are not given resources versatile enough for handling the intellectual and existential vicissitudes that are part and parcel of being a younger evangelical in the modern world.
The young person I have in mind is any believer between whatever ages correspond to those phases of life that extend from the later high school years to the (sometimes extended) periods that cover undergraduate, graduate and, perhaps, early doctoral study. In other words, that long stretch of time during which a person is formatively and gradually working out a firmer sense of who he or she is as a person and what his or her place is in the world. I suppose the terminal point could arbitrarily be set at about thirty years of age, the time at which an individual typically has a more or less enduring sense of identity to which he or she cleaves throughout the course of his or her life.
In what follows, I proffer some of the critical discoveries that have caused me during these very years to realize how badly I myself had fallen into error by accepting the dogma of inerrancy before encountering any of the critical details. On account of swallowing evangelical systematizing tendencies “feathers and all” I found myself unable to deal with the fruits of my own historical-critical studies (to say nothing of the work of other scholars in these and other areas). As a help to evangelical leaders and to other younger evangelicals, I present six academic investigations that collectively caused me to recognize that it simply is not helpful to Christian thinking to affirm something like the ETS/EPS dogma of inerrancy.
These critical recognitions are not presented in chronological order and they are not intended as a comprehensive account. I simply aim to muster a handful of individual cases wherein my own construal of inerrancy, received as it was from my tutors of the faith, failed to prove serviceable for understanding what God is doing (and has done) among his people. As the power of these cases grew over time, in a recognizably Kuhnian fashion, a sense of unease impressed upon me until finally a cumulative case obtained and the inerrancy paradigm came crashing down. I surmise that my initial adoption of the inerrancy paradigm has had severely deleterious effects upon my personal spiritual formation.
My notion of spiritual formation involves that continual growth in faith that propels “baby Christians” from being infants to becoming more developed spiritual and intellectual beings. I have in mind especially that time when one is undergoing that formative intellectual moment that