Rob Bell, Hell, and the wisdom of Augustine

A couple of years ago I was chatting to a friend about the differences between online responses to theological debates and those found in print.  We were discussing the mud flung by N. T. Wright at the authors of Pierced For Our Transgressions.  By the time printed journals and evangelical newspapers had offered their comments and observations on that particular disturbance in the Force, the unrest about it in the blogosphere had well and truly come to an end.

Now it is Rob Bell's turn to trigger the sound of the air raid warning in much the same way as Steve Chalke did over penal substitution a few years back.  The doctrine under scrutiny has altered, but the reaction to it is very much along the same lines.  Whenever an article of orthodox Christian belief is questioned, challenged, or denied, whenever a well established biblical truth is "exposed" by a well known evangelical author or speaker as if all along we have been hoodwinked about what Jesus really meant, there is a twin response made by those seeking to defend the truth.

To begin with, aberrations from orthodoxy call for careful analysis, exposition and refutation.  The merits of an opposing position need to understood, fairly presented, and weighed.  Parts of an author's proposal need to be considered in the whole context of that work, or in other words, read in context.  This is all part and parcel of evaluation and refutation.  In the case of Rob Bell's Love Wins we have little to go on until the book has been published, read and digested.

Until then, despite all the noise, we will not have much to engage with.  What is he saying?  How is he interpreting Scripture?  What is he rejecting?  What conclusions has he drawn?  How will this affect the lives of those who embrace his teaching?  Provocative trailers aside, what is the substance of his position?  We will know much more when we have read the book.  I have read a few chapters of Love Wins, but I would like to read them in the context of the whole book.

Doubtless too there needs to be a frank look at the quality of the arguments, and the exposition of Scripture and logic that underpins them, aside from the personality and media image that accompanies them.  Bad and insubstantial arguments can travel a long way on the strength of the personality advocating them and not because of their inherent worth.

The second response offered when someone is moving away from orthodoxy and taking others with them, is the presentation of a clear statement, exposition, and defense of the particular truth under attack.  In addition to blog posts, articles, lectures and sermons appearing on the doctrine of hell it would not surprise me to see some new books and multi-author volumes too.  Not that we lack helpful resources.

For some time evangelicalism has adopted a culture of plausibility concerning the eternality and justice of hell, and has never come to terms with that fact that useful men can wreak havoc when they depart from sound doctrines.  However, we have not lacked men who have kept their nerve and refuted the arguments of the deniers of eternal punishment.

Fresh attacks on old truths, provided that they are of sufficient weight, do present us with an opportunity to look at the roots of a doctrine and our own precision and nuance in stating it.  We can always do a better job of articulating the truth, especially when our contemporary popular expositions of it are connected with the confessional and theological heritage of the church.

Finally, here is the wise counsel of Augustine on the benefits of heresies:

This predestination of the saints is certain and manifest; which necessity afterwards compelled me to defend more diligently and laboriously when I was discussing the subject in opposition to a certain new sect.  For I have learned that every separate heresy introduces into the Church its peculiar questions, which call for a more diligent defence of the Holy Scripture, than if no necessity of defence well and the e had arisen. 

For what was it that compelled me to defend, in that work of mine, with greater copiousness and fuller explanation those passages of the Scriptures in which predestination is set before us?  What, but the starting up of the Pelagians, who say that the grace of God is given to us according as we render ourselves deserving of it?

From On the Blessing of Perseverance, quoted by Calvin in De Aeterna Predestinatione Dei (1552).  The English translation by Henry Cole is found in Reformed Cofessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation Volume 1: 1523-1552 (compiled by James T. Dennison, Jr.), p. 706-7

An interview on the doctrine of Scripture with Greg Beale (3)

The following interview with Professor Greg Beale is taken from Risking the Truth: Handling Error in the Church

In February 2011 Greg Beale will be one of the speakers at the Affinity Theological Study Conference on the doctrine of Scripture. Other speakers include Carl Trueman, Daniel Strange, Martin Downes and Hywel Jones.

Part 1: The exegetical foundations of inerrancy

Part2: Dealing with denials and criticisms of the doctrine of inerrancy

Part 3: The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism

What have been some of the contributing factors to what you have called the 'erosion' of inerrancy in evangelicalism?

There are a number of factors. One has to do with the well-known term ‘postmodernism’. What I mean by that term is the essential notion that truth is relative, and as that has come to be baptized within evangelicalism, especially in the United States, there is a focus away from the notion that the Scriptures are the inerrant Word of God and a focus on the Spirit coming to give every person a particular message through the Scriptures that may not have been originally intended. Hence, original inspiration is not that necessary or, at least, it comes to be seen as not so important.

Indeed, for the evangelical postmodernist, we no longer live in the former apologetic age. We live now in an age of experience where we want to meet the living God. We must not be so concerned about the inerrant propositions of Scripture. ‘Propositions’ almost has become a naughty hermeneutical word. We are told we should be concerned only with the God we meet who reveals His presence in Scripture. That is the kind of ethos that I think has worn away at the idea of inerrancy in evangelicalism.

Together with that there is another angle of the postmodern influence, and that is the notion that we moderns should not judge ancient peoples, i.e. the peoples who wrote the Bible, by our standards of what we believe is true and what is false. They may have had different standards. We should not impose our modern standards on these ancient peoples. For example, it is claimed that the synoptic gospels may indeed contain historical contradictions. That does not mean that the synoptic writers, and their readers, would have thought that they were contradictions and that they were false.

It is this kind of argument that you hear again and again, and this begins to touch even closer to the notion that truth is relative, especially from one age to another. That is one factor in the erosion of inerrancy in evangelicalism, even at some of our traditional evangelical institutions.

Secondly, there is a sociological phenomenon. Beginning at least thirty years ago, and increasingly today, evangelicals have been doing doctoral work in Old and New Testament and theology. One reason for that in Biblical Studies is that evangelical seminaries are rigorous in requiring Greek and Hebrew, whereas the other seminaries typically are not. There are more competent students potentially qualified to do doctoral work coming out of our seminaries (who know Greek and Hebrew well), and they are going on to do doctorates at non-evangelical institutions.

In the United States when one enters into a doctoral program that is not evangelical it is like entering a new world, a world that does not have the values that the student had back at their Christian college. When you go into that world as an evangelical you are made to feel like an ignorant fundamentalist if you really believe in the inspiration, indeed the inerrancy of Scripture. And if that were made known, you are then made to feel odd. No one wants to be made to feel odd by their professors and scholarly student peers. So it is very easy to downplay one’s view, and it becomes very easy to want to fit in. In other words a student wants to be considered normal; no one wants to be seen as abnormal, and so there is tremendous pressure not to reveal one’s belief in inerrancy, when particular occasions may call for it.

There is this huge sociological pressure placed on students, and if they are not tremendously founded on the Word of God and in a strong Reformed epistemology, then I have seen that it is easy for them to become conformed to that environment in which they are around. So students come out and maybe they are still evangelical, they believe in the gospel, but some of their other beliefs have been eroded, such as the full inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, which they also begin to think is the fundamentalist view.

Those are two reasons for the erosion of inerrancy in evangelical: postmodern theological reasons and the sociological factors. I must say there are some students who go through these programs, and they do fine, but there is a significant percentage who come out still considering themselves as evangelical but not with the same set of beliefs on Scripture.

How do you assess the status of inerrancy today among evangelical theologians and biblical scholars? Is the doctrine in good health?

Part of my answer goes back to the rise of postmodernism and its baptism into evangelicalism. You see this with some of our theologians at evangelical schools that do not want to be called systematic theologians. Systematic theology of some of these theologians is a matter of the past, a matter of Church history. Some contemporary theologians do not consider systematic theology to be a viable approach for the doing of theology today. These theologians sometimes like to refer to themselves as constructive theologians.

For them systematic theology focuses too much on reason, and the notion that you can organize Scripture into categories. They would also say that it focuses too much on propositions. So there is a de-emphasis on the inspiration of the propositions and an emphasis on the presence of God in Scripture. Of course that is a wonderful emphasis. Karl Barth had that emphasis. But you do not downplay one for the other. The propositions are true because they are living oracles of God and God is there speaking through them. The way He speaks to us existentially through the Scriptures is going to be consistent with the way they were originally penned under inspiration. There are not going to be different or contradictory meanings given by the Spirit.

I published a book in the mid 1990s called The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts? There is a debate still among evangelicals that the New Testament writers used the Old Testament but gave it completely new meanings, and yet what they wrote was inspired. I have to say ‘no’ to that. I have argued against that in a number of my writings and I think that is the opening of the door toward a dilution of inerrancy. Peter Enns, most recently of course, argued for this position in his book Incarnation and Inspiration.

Another symptom of the dilution of the authority of Scripture among evangelicals is the popularity of the Barthian view of Scripture. Of course, I don’t want to paint everyone with this brush; there are some fine evangelicals upholding the doctrine of inerrancy, (and I’m not going to go school by school!), but some schools are mixed in this regard. I do think that the theology of Karl Barth’s view of Scripture continues to live on, and in fact is becoming very, very much more influential, even more than it has been in the past, much more influential among evangelicals.

What that means is that the key issue is the presence of God confronting one in Scripture, and not so much the focus on propositions. Barth himself believed that there were actual errors in the inscripturated form of the Bible, but that God can reveal Himself even through those errors. This is a kind of strange hyper-Calvinist view. Some of these theologians would think that it is antiquated to try to defend inerrancy as an apologetic because of what they consider to be an appropriate lack of stress on propositions.

An interview on the doctrine of Scripture with Greg Beale (2)

The following interview with Professor Greg Beale is taken from Risking the Truth: Handling Error in the Church

In February 2011 Greg Beale will be one of the speakers at the Affinity Theological Study Conference on the doctrine of Scripture. Other speakers include Carl Trueman, Daniel Strange, Martin Downes and Hywel Jones.

Part 2: Dealing with denials and criticisms of the doctrine of inerrancy

What are some of the consequences of denying inerrancy?

Ultimately, if you hold just to limited infallibility (for example, just the theological and soteric doctrines are inspired, not the other parts of the Bible), what can happen is that one ends up choosing what is inspired and trustworthy. What is infallible is different for different interpreters, and so one can end up making a Bible within the Bible for oneself. That is problematic. Someone might say that there are not a lot of errors, just a few. Well that is up to the ‘error’ decider. For some it may be more, for others less, but that way you don’t end up with a fully inspired Bible.

I should address the typical objection that it is irrelevant to hold that the Scriptures were inspired in the original autographs, since we no longer have them. However, if we didn’t have originally inspired autographs who knows how many errors we could have? And when did the Bible become inspired if they were not inspired in the originals? We are left with even more problems if we don’t affirm a view of the inspiration of the original manuscripts. Furthermore, why do textual criticism if there was not an inspired original? Textual criticism is based on the fact that there was an original and that we are trying to get back to it.

Some people are concerned about the New Testament because there are corruptions in the manuscripts, which of course there are. But, in terms of the textual problems that we have, the really serious ones probably equal only one percent of the whole New Testament. Someone has compared this to the department of weights and measures in Washington D. C. Apparently, they have the perfect ruler there and the perfect foot. Carpenters around the country have rulers also. They are not as perfect as the one in Washington but they are very near it. To all intents and purposes we can say ‘thus saith the Lord’.

If we are preaching from a text of which there is serious doubt about what the original said, then we have to acknowledge that, just as we have to acknowledge that there may be interpretative problems with some texts that maybe Augustine, Luther, Calvin and Hodge disagreed over. In fact, if we had the original autographs it wouldn’t solve most of our problems. Most of our problems are theological and interpretive, not textual.

The doctrine of inerrancy has been criticized as “‘practically worthless’ because it requires so much qualifying. Andrew McGowan has recently questioned it on those grounds. Is it a fair criticism?

You may be referring to his comments about the Chicago Statement on inerrancy. I do think it is important to make qualifications. All that is to say is that the Scripture is inerrant from the angle of God’s intention through the human authors. If numbers are given in one text, and in parallel texts they are not exactly the same, is that an error? Well it depends on the intention of each particular author. One may be approximating and the other may not be. Some will say that is a qualification and that this qualification is a good example of inerrancy dying the death of a thousand qualifications. I don’t think so.

Even those who hold to a broad view of inspiration, for example the infallibilists, will point to intention, even though they limit that intention to soteric issues or theological issues and not historical ones. I feel very happy with the qualifications that the Chicago Statement makes and I don’t think that those qualifications qualify inerrancy in a way that it ‘dies the death of a thousand qualifications’! In this connection, intriguingly, it is very striking, astonishing really, that Andrew McGowan’s book has hardly any exegesis in it.

Another objection to inerrancy is that it is really a nineteenth-century invention that was forged in the conflict with liberal theology and higher criticism. How do you respond to that claim?

What tells the tale on that are some of the articles and books that have been written that deal with the doctrine of Scripture in the apostolic fathers, the church fathers, the medieval period, the Reformation, and on up to the 1700s. The language used of Scripture throughout the history of the Church is the language of perfection, of not making mistakes, of not making errors and other synonymous terms. John Hannah has edited the book Inerrancy and the Church, in which there are several articles, beginning with the church fathers, that show that the doctrine of inerrancy is traceable long before the nineteenth century.

It is also a typical response to say that inerrancy arose from the Enlightenment, especially as this pertains to the use of reason in understanding Scripture. The response to this has to be the same as with the above discussion of the view of inspiration held throughout Church history.

Greg Beale on the exegetical basis for inerrancy

Jim Hamilton reports on Greg Beale's Crossway lecture at ETS:

Beale argued that Inerrancy is not a scholastic theological deduction made by interpreters of the Bible, but rather that it is an exegetical observation of a theological deduction that at least one biblical author has already made within the text of the Bible itself. Citing the logic of innerancy:

• God is true and trustworthy, and he never lies, deceives, or makes mistakes.
• The Bible is God’s revelation of himself.
• Therefore the Bible never lies, deceives, or makes mistakes.

Beale argued that John has already made this argument and drawn this conclusion for us in the book of Revelation. The gist of Beale’s argument went like this:

Revelation 3:14 presents Jesus identifying himself as “the Amen, the faithful and true witness.”

Later in Revelation an angel commands John to “Write,” and then the angel declares to John, “These are the true words of God” (Rev 19:9).

Later still in Revelation the one “who was seated on the throne” commands John, “Write this down, for these words are faithful and true” (Rev 21:5).

And again we read in Revelation 22:6 that an angel says to John, “These words are faithful and true.”

From this string of verses, Beale argued that John has presented to his audience the very logic of inerrancy:

• Jesus is the faithful and true witness, revealing what God has given him to show his servants.
• John is commanded to write the faithful and true words of God.
• Therefore the words that John has written are also faithful and true.

Beale then argued that based on the inter-textual connections between Revelation 3:14 and Isaiah 65:16, and based on the claims made in other texts in the Bible (such as Ps 119:137-42, and cf. Ps 119:103 with Rev 10:9-10) this logic is not limited to the book of Revelation.

I thought the presentation was compelling, and in my view it adds to the evidence supporting the position that the inerrancy of the Bible is not some foreign theological abstraction imposed on the Bible from the outside. Rather, Beale has demonstrated that the inerrancy of the Bible is an inductive, exegetical conclusion that arises from the claims the Bible makes about itself.

Heresy as "wilfulness in doctrine"

More From Warfield:

In a time deeply marked by "concession," at all events, it is worth our while to remember on the one hand that "concession" is the high road to "heresy," and that "heresy" is "willfulness in doctrine"; and on the other, that God has revealed his truth to us to be held, confessed, and defended, and that, after all, he is able to defend and give due force to the whole circle of revealed truth.

And surely it is worth our while to recognize the most outstanding fact in the conflicts of our age-this, namely, that the line of demarcation between the right-thinking and the wilfully-thinking lies just here-whether a declaration of God is esteemed as authoritative over against all the conjectural explanations of phenomena by men, or whether, on the contrary, it is upon the conjectural explanations of phenomena by men that we take our stand as over against the declaration of God.

In the sphere of science, philosophy, and criticism alike, it is the conjectural explanations of phenomena which are put forward as the principles of knowledge. It is as depending on these that men proclaim science, philosophy, and criticism as the norm of truth.

We are "orthodox" when we account God's declaration in his Word superior in point of authority to them, their interpreter, and their corrector.

We are "heretical" when we make them superior in point of authority to God's Word, its interpreter, and its corrector.

By this test we may each of us try our inmost thought and see where we stand-on God's side or on the world's.

Un-inspiring Scripture

Do you think that theological professors live safely above the winds and waves that carry about the immature?

Think again.

Here is Al Mohler on Clark Pinnock's views of Scripture:

Some years earlier, Pinnock had redefined his understanding of Scripture. Theology professors have a good number of choices of Pinnock material to use in teaching the doctrine of Scripture. These include one volume that serves as a wonderful defense of biblical inerrancy (still in print) along with another volume that vitually takes it all back.

According to Pinnock's new understanding of biblical inspiration:

Divine inspiration should not be over-supernaturalized. There is no reason to deny that inspiration is at least in part a perfectly natural response to the need to perpetuate revelation, and that many of the people involved in writing Scripture depended upon the familiar Charisms enjoyed in the believing community even today. I think we have exaggerated the supernaturalness of inspiration.

Where does this leave Clark Pinnock? Too evangelical for the liberal mainline and too liberal for confessional evangelicals, Pinnock bemoans his consignment to a theological "no man's land," while beckoning both sides to join him in what he considers to be the middle ground.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr. "Reformist Evangelicalism: A Center Without a Circumference," in Horton [ed.], A Confessing Theology for Postmodern Times, p. 141