Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals. Carlos R. Bovell
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evil.” Compare the Midrash of the Song of Songs: “God saith of the Israelites: Towards me they are as sincere as doves, but towards the Gentiles they are as serpents.”23 The most familiar expression of the saying is, of course, found in Matt 10.16: “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves.” Note the difference amongst the three but especially that feature which sets Jesus’ words apart from the others. The former two establish that one can be “simple” with respect to one thing and “wise” with respect to another. The Jesus saying insinuates that it is possible and desirable to be both simple and wise with respect to the same thing simultaneously. I suggest that this can serve as an illustration of the indicative plurality that believers are to assume as they engage the world.
Virtually every Matthean commentary harmonizes the serpent and dove perspectives under some grand schema. Let us, however, resist that temptation by positing semantic approximates for the two. Let us, for the sake of the present discussion, allow “wise as a serpent” to mean “critical as a skeptic” and let us say that “simple as a dove” means “naïve as a trusting believer.” This way whether one takes the metaphors to touch upon political outlooks, military and non-military stances, or some other range of activity or relationship we can still emphasize the diametric involved.
Not a few scholars have commented upon the stress that is caused by the dual responsibility of both maintaining a critical mind and preserving a sympathetic naivety when they study Scripture, construct theology, interact with others, etc. Crosby, for example, inquires of similar tensions when, in a review of a recent work, he asks:
And how do openness and conviction relate to one another? Would not the openness tend to make theology a mere ethnography or detached, neutral description of different religious traditions, including one’s own? And would not the conviction lead in the direction of a kind of grit-your-teeth persistence in upholding the particularities of one’s own tradition in the face of all challenges or influences from other ones?24
Familiar to all is a situation wherein a writer is grating toward “outsiders” and gratulatory to “insiders,” but remarkable and scarce is the person who is truly both to both.
It is not uncommon for seminarians and college students to remark on how academic training has jeopardized their church experiences. How do I now engage a sermon with childlike expectation with these newly acquired critical tools? Or, in our terms, how do I remain a dove now that the serpent has awoken within me? Pertinent here may be the fact that early Christian tradition identified Jesus’ generic “serpent” with the serpent of Gen 3.25 Neither is it insignificant that the dove became a wide-spread symbol associated with the Holy Spirit. At the very least, we can say that two opposing moods are indicated here: criticism versus trust or some comparable opposition. On the hermeneutical spiral there is no turning back.26
Seminarians’ and other students’ experiences are not confined to church. We can see how similar things are happening in Christian academia where ideas (and those who come up with them) are often judged and classified with respect to dove or serpent alignment. For example, one may be deemed un-Christian by others for doubting the existence of Adam and Eve. If he explains that the opening chapters of Genesis seem to have been deliberately created with hopes of supplying post-exilic Israel with a much needed Exile-looking cosmology,27 he would likely be chided for operating within an un-Christian worldview. “Presuppositions dictate outcomes” is the platitude. His view of the world in its totality must have gone askew since worldviews—or at least this is what everyone is supposed to believe—are by their very nature so closely knit that one change affects the whole system. As I reflect upon such charges, I rather surmise that life experiences (including religious ones) are sometimes filtered through multiple worldviews at once. What would be wrong with a young person discounting the Eden story while insisting that Christ has risen from the dead?28
A last example can be taken from “the contradictions in the theology of Jeremy Taylor” that Allison has detected.29 In the case of Jeremy Taylor, a well-known 17th century Anglican bishop, competing emphases can be discerned between his public writings and his private prayers. His public discourses taught that a Christian’s good life is that which predicated his being accepted by God for baptismal efficacy, for worthy Eucharist participation, etc., but his private correspondences revealed that he believed that sin prevented such a life and that God’s love toward humans persisted in spite of such a failure. Taylor’s legacy is judged today to be a pastorally unfavorable one, but his two doctrinal faces represent what I think can be called multiple worldviews, each emphasizing its respective vantage in turn. Without opening the proverbial can of doctrinal worms too widely, what I am trying to drive home is the reality that the semi-Calvinistic maxim bespeaks: “Preach as if Calvinism is true, but evangelize as if Arminianism is true.” Just as mathematicians are Platonists on weekdays and formalists on weekends30 and scientists conceive of light as waves or particles depending upon the circumstance, so do Christians exercise worldview flexibility. In other words, believers naturally shift into different worldviews depending upon for what a particular occasion calls.31 In these and other ways, the Christian faith may naturally lend itself to multiple worldviews in order that the faithful may responsibly and practically reckon with their mystery-filled beliefs and their relation to day-to-day living.
III. Synthesis
Every commentary I can remember harmonizes the dove and serpent perspectives. I naturally am led to try the same, but as I attempt to do so, I also keep in mind that Western Christianity is sometimes in danger of over-rationalizing the faith or, at the very least, inordinately given to unifying tendencies. If, in the examples above, I am immediately moved to ask, “but are these really examples of conflicting worldviews (if they are worldviews at all)?” perhaps, it is indicative of an unconscious over-synthesizing drive. I would say, nevertheless, that they are conflicting worldviews that happen to both be Christian (and I would clarify that that was precisely the point that I wanted to make in the last section).32 In any event, such questions, however answered, presumably are themselves posed and addressed within worldviews and I am wont to say that this further exacerbates worldview philosophy’s affinity for synthesis.
Is it a problem that the notion of worldview depends upon a certain worldview? According to Naugle and others, this is not necessarily a problem since it is inevitable of all thinking.33 But perhaps this should be given further thought because when Christians talk about worldviews, the concept in question seems deliberately, and perhaps somewhat tendentiously, posed in Christian terms.34 The lists of seven (or four or however many) questions according to which worldviews are contrived are all ones to which Christians believe that their faith can provide an answer and are ones that are important to Christians. For example, I have not found “Was there ever life on Mars?” or “In how many galaxies does there exist a rationally and morally conscious species?” to be among the key questions to ask. Evangelical worldview definitions revolve around how, on a presuppositional level, one understands the fundamental aspects of reality. It is interesting to note that such a definition heavily overlaps with proposed definitions of “religion” and “metaphysics.”
Yandell defines “religion” as “a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals,