Gridlocked
Readers may be beginning to wonder when the exchange begun by my article, “The Bible Under Spirit and Church” [Touchstone, Vol. 4.2] will end. Because the authority issue of which it partakes is an abiding concern of those interested in ecumenical orthodoxy as we think of it here, the larger discussion may confidently be expected to continue. The understanding ad extra upon which our work at Touchstone is based is that there actually is such a thing. But ad intra it must be defined—an ambition that invariably involves the long-standing and very durable differences of those who meet in the pages of this journal.
Our intention in publishing the pieces by Dr. Walter and myself was to help bring an important segment of the Church into what we regard as one of the most consequential theological conversations of our day. Evangelicalism has until now been busy with its own concerns and not really willing to open its arcanum to the larger Church of which it is a part. Its approach to the doctrine of Scripture, with all its complexity and its unique fail-safe mechanism (autographal inerrancy), is what needs the most explanation, for there is a great deal about it that strikes the Christian with strong intuitions of Church authority as eccentric and unnecessary. We were honored to have two of the movement’s most distinguished theologians, Carl F. H. Henry and J. I. Packer, offer responses, and pleased that other correspondents from several traditions also contributed. It is now time, however, to close this phase of the conversation, for some will want time to digest it and others appear to have arrived at an impasse.
Dr. Henry’s final word was that I gave more prominence to the church than to God and that I did not recognize Scripture as a comprehensively authoritative canon. He maintained that the “Church” of which I was speaking does not exist. I am afraid we have carried this conversation as far as it can go, for while I heartily agree with Dr. Henry on most things, I find his opinions on these topics as scandalous as he finds mine. Mr. MacKenzie in the correspondence of the last Touchstone took me up sharply for giving the catholic traditions a leg-up on the free churches, for he believes orthodox segments of both operate within the same epistemological framework: St. Thomas believed in inerrancy; so do Cardinal Ratzinger and other traditional Roman Catholics, those of Mr. MacKenzie’s acquaintance being more comfortable with the formulations of conservative Evangelicals than of those who are slipping to the left. He represents my view of the role of the later Princetonians by citing me in this way: “Reformed theology did without it [the doctrine of inerrancy] nicely until the late nineteenth century, when it was brought forward at Princeton . . . .” The portion in brackets, I have been informed, was added by Mr. MacKenzie. To omit “autographal” from it, however, is to create a straw man, and indicates to my dismay that despite the efforts I have taken to make myself clear, I am simply not making contact with some of my Evangelical friends.
Since I reckon both Mr. MacKenzie and Dr. Henry honorable men who would not deliberately misrepresent my views, I am pressed toward the conclusion that the ideas I am trying to present are simply foreign to them—foreign not in the sense of unintelligible, but incapable of full translation into the language they speak. Given time and the desire to do it this obstacle may be overcome, but not if they identify me as one of their old tribal enemies and set the dogs on me. It is, for example, becoming increasingly difficult to react serenely to people who make me fool enough to claim that the concept of biblical inerrancy was invented at Princeton. This is what I said in my reply to Dr. Packer:
The second sticking point involves the theory of autographal inerrancy itself [emphasis added]. I cannot see it as a necessary or helpful part of the doctrinal iceberg to which Dr. Packer refers—no, not even of its Reformed part. This is both a theological and a historical judgment. Reformed theology did without it nicely until the late nineteenth century, when it was brought forward at Princeton. . .
It is the whole shivering edifice of the theology of autographal inerrancy at which I am tilting—a theology that is built into every institution and statement of faith that makes the authority of the biblical autographs the linchpin of its doctrine of Scripture.
It would be rash to claim that even this idea was first thought up at Princeton. No doubt it has passed in and out of a number of Christian heads down through the years. (One might look for it in places where the Church has been influenced by Islam, whose understanding of the nature of its own scriptures is similar.) Perhaps it may even have left a few odd traces on vellum. But this I will assert: the theory of autographal inerrancy as I believed and advocated in the world of conservative evangelicalism was indeed developed and brought forward at Princeton in the late nineteenth century. This far Rogers and McKim are correct. It has not status as the accepted teaching of the Reformed tradition, much less as the consensus of the Church. To note that Roman Catholics who are faithful to the teaching of their Church believe in biblical inerrancy and are naturally sympathetic to Protestants who do also is one thing; to claim that the Catholic Church’s view of biblical authority has the same epistemological underpinning as that of the autographal inerrantists is quite another.
Neither Dr. Henry nor Mr. MacKenzie find room in the cognitive inn for what I say about authority in the Church, but still must lodge me somewhere. The only stable they see available is that of the Liberal Drift. Dr. Henry finds me a stall among those afflicted with “nonrecognition of Scripture as a comprehensively authoritative canon” for reasons I fail to understand; Mr. MacKenzie beds me down with Rogers and McKim, who hold that the historical consensus on Scripture form which autographal inerrantists have deviated is that “God had condescended to use imperfect human forms of communication, infallibly to accomplish God’s perfect purpose in bringing salvation” (The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 459)—a formula rendered no less suspect in coming from United Presbyterians who call for doing theology “in a flexible, responsible, contemporary style in a pluralistic church and world” (Ibid., 460). Conservatives in the Protestant mainline have heard these lines all too often and know what they mean—that the Bible should be trusted to the hands of militantly nice people who consider themselves flexible, responsible, and contemporary in a pluralistic world. God save us from the likes of these! And me from those who think I am one of them!
No, John Woodbridge, who wrote the major rebuttal to Rogers and McKim (Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal), is on the mark in asserting that the Church has historically believed the Bible to be the written Word of God, inspired by the Holy Sprit, and as such inerrant. It would be anachronistic for those on either side of this debate to read the particulars of the discussion of verbal inspiration of the last several centuries too far back into history (as both conservative and liberalizing Evangelicals all too typically do). Still, the main line of magisterial thought on this subject has clearly been that when one is dealing with the Bible, whatever critical problems there may be—and critical problems there have always been—one is dealing with something that is in some real and unqualified sense the inerrant Word of God. In this regard Woodbridge stands squarely in the Great Tradition, Rogers and McKim outside of it.
Now, the difficulty in holding that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God in this age is very great. One understands why so many have abandoned the inerrancy ship, for the forces that menace it are formidable indeed. Quite apart from this, religious scholars of all persuasions, liberal, evangelical, and catholic, agree that the text as received cannot by any reasonable judgment stand as inerrant. It is at this point where the most fundamental divisions are made. The way of the liberal is well-known: the Bible becomes a collocation of religious documents whose authority is wholly dependent upon enlightened modern judgment. Evangelicals like Rogers, McKim, and James Barr step into this stream when they subject the Tradition to the judgment of people who are flexible, responsible, and contemporary. (In Barr’s writings it is evident that the academy finally dictates to the Church what it can know and how it must know it. The autographal inerrantist does this too, although his is a smaller, more conservative academy.) The effects of these operations may be seen in the destiny of the evangelical Protestantism of the nineteenth century which became, under the influence of critical liberalism, the mainline Protestantism of the twentieth—a course now being recapitulated among late twentieth-century Evangelicals under both this and feminist persuasion.
Another way taken is by those who decide to remain in the Tradition, but this road has several forks. Dr. Henry and Mr. MacKenzie attempt to identify me as one who has left the main road, but I, like them, and like Dr. Packer, recognize and wish to defend the Great Tradition. The difference is that I believe those who follow the Princetonians are on a byway they will eventually have to abandon because it will not take them where they want to go. Mr. MacKenzie’s letter makes it necessary for me to repeat once again that treating the Church doctrine of inerrancy and the nineteenth-century Protestant theory of autographal inerrancy as if they were one and the same is ahistorical and invalid.
Where is even one citation from a Church father or reformer that makes the authority of Scripture dependent upon the autographa after the manner of Hodge, Warfield, or the Evangelical Theological Society? Gentlemen, can you find one who agrees with you? Well, perhaps you can. Then can you find two? And mind you, I mean people who base their doctrines of biblical authority on that of flawless autographa. Why must you consistently obscure this point, implying that this modern apology is a necessary corollary of the ancient doctrine that we should oblige the Church by reading back into its history? When one actually reads Church history—or examines Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or even confessional Protestantism—where does one find an approach to authority that would make the theory of autographal inerrancy an ultimate necessity? No, Professor Woodbridge is right: inerrancy, or something very much like it, is the doctrine of the Church. But Dr. Henry and Mr. MacKenzie are wrong: autographal inerrancy, and the whole theological and institutional edifice that conservative evangelicalism has built around it, is not. Nor does it follow, I must repeat, that if one believes the Bible to be the Word of God, one must commit himself to the desperate expedient of linking its authority to the autographs. The association of the doctrine of biblical authority with the autographa is in fact the death of the quality it seeks to preserve, for it places inerrancy at precisely the same distance from us as the autographa, that is to say, both quite out of reach.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
31.2—March/April 2018
How Best to Face the Total War of the Anti-Culture by R. J. Snell
30.3—May/June 2017
Insider Attempts to Disorient the Orthodox by Alexander F. C. Webster
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