I have been reflecting a great deal of the doctrine of Scripture. More specifically I have been reflecting on the authority of Scripture and the role that it plays in the church and faith formation. I grew up evangelical (Baptist tradition). This meant that the Bible had what I would refer to as ultimate authority. The authority of Scripture was wrapped up in its infallibility and inerrancy. The Bible was God's Word and it couldn't be wrong: in detail, message, or intention (purpose). On of the most important tasks in the church was (and is in many circles) to protect the integrity of the Bible, and by extension, its ultimate authority. This led to much hand wringing over difficult passages that seemed to contradict scientific or historical fact. The hand wringing led to mental gymnastics to either defend the traditional Biblical position or to downplay the contradiction as irrelevant. Ultimately, the hand wringing or mental gymnastics only served to shake an already unstable relationship between conservative evangelicals and much of the rest of the Bible believing West (already unstable because of challenges to the Bible by the historical-critical method, developing post-modern theologies, etc.). To oversimplify: you believed in the Bible and its ultimate authority or you did not. This determined whether you were a good Christian or not.
Much of American christendom looks like this today (albeit with variations given post-modern emphasis on small "t" truth). It seems to me that the dividing line is still Scripture and its authority or lack thereof. Christianity's inability to solve the issue of Biblical authority is still the major issue at hand. Post-modern attacks, as I said above, on truth still have not been solved, by either a "sticking your head in the sand" approach or a more post-modern "anything goes" approach. To state it another way, the literalist and expressivist camps have both failed to convince anyone of their position. The result is that those who don't find their home in either the literalist or expressivist "camp" have no home at all. One should not underemphasize how large this group of is and how it grows daily. I don't find myself in either camp which is what has necessitated what I am working on now. There has to be a "via media" (as I have mentioned in a more recent blog post) that values both Scripture and human cognition without discounting one or the other.
To answer my questions (and perhaps ease my mind relative to my own faith) I have begun to dig through all of my systematic theologies, etc. I was lucky enough to have gone to a Bible believing (almost literalist) seminary in Gordon-Conwell and a less than believing grad school in Boston University. Both schools helped me to build a vocabulary, thought process, and library that now aids me in this journey to find the middle way.
The long and the short of it is that I have found what I believe to be the most helpful book on this topic for me: Donald Bloesch's Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration, and Interpretation. There are others that are helpful as well, but for me Bloesch has been the best resource to help me through this process. Periodically I'll be posting here as I work my way through Bloesch's volume section-by-section. The point isn't to affirm everything that Bloesch writes, but the engage with Bloesch from my own journey.
Much of American christendom looks like this today (albeit with variations given post-modern emphasis on small "t" truth). It seems to me that the dividing line is still Scripture and its authority or lack thereof. Christianity's inability to solve the issue of Biblical authority is still the major issue at hand. Post-modern attacks, as I said above, on truth still have not been solved, by either a "sticking your head in the sand" approach or a more post-modern "anything goes" approach. To state it another way, the literalist and expressivist camps have both failed to convince anyone of their position. The result is that those who don't find their home in either the literalist or expressivist "camp" have no home at all. One should not underemphasize how large this group of is and how it grows daily. I don't find myself in either camp which is what has necessitated what I am working on now. There has to be a "via media" (as I have mentioned in a more recent blog post) that values both Scripture and human cognition without discounting one or the other.
To answer my questions (and perhaps ease my mind relative to my own faith) I have begun to dig through all of my systematic theologies, etc. I was lucky enough to have gone to a Bible believing (almost literalist) seminary in Gordon-Conwell and a less than believing grad school in Boston University. Both schools helped me to build a vocabulary, thought process, and library that now aids me in this journey to find the middle way.
The long and the short of it is that I have found what I believe to be the most helpful book on this topic for me: Donald Bloesch's Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration, and Interpretation. There are others that are helpful as well, but for me Bloesch has been the best resource to help me through this process. Periodically I'll be posting here as I work my way through Bloesch's volume section-by-section. The point isn't to affirm everything that Bloesch writes, but the engage with Bloesch from my own journey.
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