Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals. Carlos R. Bovell

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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.

      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:

      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


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