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Friday, April 26, 2013

How seminaries die

Randal Rauser recently applied for tenure at Taylor Seminary. And obvious problem is that Rauser’s rejection of Biblical inerrancy contradicts Taylor’s statement of faith:


We believe the Bible is God's Word given by divine inspiration, the record of God's revelation of Himself to humanity (II Timothy 3:16). It is trustworthy, sufficient, without error - the supreme authority and guide for all doctrine and conduct (I Peter 1:23-25; John 17:17; II Timothy 3:16-17).


Here are some verbatim excerpts documenting his denial of Biblical inerrancy:


Why think that every single authorial sentence in scripture must be inerrant to begin with? If the human authors of scripture could appropriate the morally errant statements of others in their texts, why think that God couldn’t appropriate the morally errant statements of the human authors of scripture in his text?


A person can say that God superintended a process which led to the inclusion of any number of human errors in the text but that God did so with perfect (i.e. inerrant) intentions. By analogy: an author might include all sorts of factual errors in his novel as uttered by the characters within the novel. Though the statements of the characters are in error, the author inerrantly included them in the novel. So all the criticisms I've raised are consistent with a broad confession of inerrancy.


And anyway what is supposed to be inerrant? Are scientific statements in scripture inerrant? Historical statements? Can a writing be pseudopigraphic and inerrant? Or must we say II Peter was written by Peter? Is a human author of scripture allowed to be ironic? (I.e. can he say the opposite of what he means to make a point?) This is the way many people read much of a text like Ecclesiastes. Even if the human author or redactor was not being ironic, could God have been? (This is one way to redeem the imprecatory psalms.)

That is the kind of attitude I commend toward scripture. There could be errors of grammar (indeed there are), as well as history, science and even morality. In the same way that we could in principle allow such errors in a masterfully composed classic text like Ulysses, so it would seem we could in principle allow such errors in scripture, so long as there is some reason that the author allowed those errors to enter into the final form of the text. Consequently, the reader’s task is not to edit the book into the form he likes, or to ignore the parts she doesn’t like, but rather to work on those errant bits which seem recalcitrant to the reader’s understanding of the logic of the whole.


If I were to summarize the problem with GBB in a single sentence it would be this: in multiple instances the book’s defense of God’s behavior depends at least in part on obscuring the depth of the problem at issue. Whether the issue is punishing an entire nation for the sins of its leaders or committing genocide or causing the mauling of youthful tormenters, Lamb’s defense depends on multiple arguments with implausible moral premises which obscure the nature of the issue of debate.


But the text is still deeply problematic for it still affirms the appropriateness of sacrifice as a means to relate to God (presumably including human sacrifice; more on that below) and it also affirms the appropriateness of asking a father to commit a truly heinous act.

As for Abraham specifically, if it is intrinsically wrong to engage in an act, then it seems also intrinsically wrong to ask a person to commit the act, even if your intention is ultimately that they not perform the action. For example if rape is intrinsically wrong then it is wrong to ask somebody to rape a third party, even if your ultimate intention is that they not do so. I think the intuition is very strong that it is inherently wrong to engage in acts of devotional killing of one's child to a deity. But then it is wrong for a third party -- even if that party is God -- to ask a person to engage in that action, even if God intended ultimately that they not follow through with it.


It is precisely at this point that many Christian conservatives have done the Bible a great disservice by thinking that recognizing the inspired authority of scripture means that we need to accept the truth of every proposition uttered by every human author and approved by every human redactor in the long history of the text’s formation. But that is not the way to read a text or its authority. To note the illustration I have made previously, you don’t respect the authority of The Brothers Karamazov by attempting to affirm the equal truth of every statement by every character in the book. Ivan’s atheism is irreconcilable with Alyosha’s Christian piety. And yet this conflict hardly means that Dostoevsky was somehow inept in including both voices in his book.

By the same token, the Christian should not attempt to reconcile irreconcilable voices in scripture. And much of what the imprecatory psalmist says is irreconcilable with other texts in scripture

So just as the reader of The Brothers Karamazov must choose whether to heed the voice of Ivan or of Alyosha, so must the reader of scripture choose whether to heed the voice of the psalmist or Ezekiel and Jesus.


However, Rauser has been able to play the administration (e.g. Pres. David Williams) for chumps. This is one way seminaries die. The administration either lacks the will or the theological discernment to enforce its public doctrinal standards.

Of course, when con men like Rauser game the system, that’s a pyrrhic victory. They win in the short term. But unlike seminary administrators who are easily duped by slick talkers, Rauser won’t be able to con God on Judgment Day.

11 comments:

  1. Steve, according to evangelical Christianity, just what is Rauser's heretical belief that will keep him from heaven and put him in hell with the New Atheists and their followers? As far as what is considered to be orthodox Christian doctrine, Rauser believes the essentials- deity of Christ, Jesus's death for sin, resurrection and other things

    You're making it sound like it's pretty hard to get to heaven.....or that people need to agree with you to get to heaven.

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    1. Mike

      "You're making it sound like it's pretty hard to get to heaven.....or that people need to agree with you to get to heaven."

      I'm glad you appreciate my cosmic role in the grand scheme of things. Some people find that out too late.

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    2. Mike

      "Steve, according to evangelical Christianity, just what is Rauser's heretical belief that will keep him from heaven and put him in hell with the New Atheists and their followers?"

      I didn't framed my discussion in those terms.

      "As far as what is considered to be orthodox Christian doctrine, Rauser believes the essentials- deity of Christ, Jesus's death for sin, resurrection and other things."

      For starters, he repudiates OT theism.

      And given his kenotic Christology, I'd hardly say he believes in the deity of Christ.

      Does he believe in Christ's death for sin? Or does he reject penal substitution?

      Delete
    3. Steve, you asked, "Does he believe in Christ's death for sin? Or does he reject penal substitution?"

      Are you implying he doesn't?

      Delete
    4. He rejects penal substitution.

      Delete
  2. The Scripturalist position is that we begin with Scripture. If the Bible says that Peter wrote Scripture then we must go with that. The pseudepigraphal attributions made by the higher critics would make Scripture errant.

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  3. By the same token, the Christian should not attempt to reconcile irreconcilable voices in scripture. And much of what the imprecatory psalmist says is irreconcilable with other texts in scripture.

    That's not what B. B. Warfield said. He said that we were to assume or presuppose that all the apparent contradictions in Scripture have solutions.

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  4. The importance of proceeding according to the true logical method may be illustrated by the observation that the conclusions actually arrived at by students of the subject seem practically to depend on the logical method adopted. In fact, the difference here seems mainly a difference in point of view. If we start from the Scripture doctrine of inspiration, we approach the phenomena with the question whether they will negative this doctrine, and we find none able to stand against it, commended to us as true, as it is, by the vast mass of evidence available to prove the trustworthiness of the Scriptural writers as teachers of doctrine. But if we start simply with a collection of the phenomena, classifying and reasoning from them, whether alone or in conjunction with the Scriptural statements, it may easily happen with us, as it happened with certain of old, that meeting with some things hard to be understood, we may be ignorant and unstable enough to wrest them to our own intellectual destruction, and so approach the Biblical doctrine of inspiration set upon explaining it away.

    Benjamin B. Warfield, The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, Volume 1: Revelation and Inspiration (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2008), 224.

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  5. But it is necessary for us to believe the harmony to be possible and real, provided that we are not prepared to say that we clearly see that on any conceivable hypothesis (conceivable to us or conceivable to any other intelligent beings) the harmony is impossible—if the trustworthiness of the Biblical writers who teach us the doctrine of plenary inspiration is really safeguarded to us on evidence which we cannot disbelieve. In that case every unharmonized passage remains a case of difficult harmony and does not pass into the category of objections to plenary inspiration. It can pass into the category of objections only if we are prepared to affirm that we clearly see that it is, on any conceivable hypothesis of its meaning, clearly inconsistent with the Biblical doctrine of inspiration. In that case we would no doubt need to give up the Biblical doctrine of inspiration; but with it we must also give up our confidence in the Biblical writers as teachers of doctrine. And if we cannot reasonably give up this latter, neither can we reasonably allow that the phenomena apparently inconsistent with the former are real, or really inconsistent with it. And this is but to say that we approach the study of these phenomena with a presumption against their being such as will disprove the Biblical doctrine of inspiration.

    Benjamin B. Warfield, The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, Volume 1: Revelation and Inspiration (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2008), 219-20.

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  6. But the text is still deeply problematic for it still affirms the appropriateness of sacrifice as a means to relate to God (presumably including human sacrifice; more on that below) and it also affirms the appropriateness of asking a father to commit a truly heinous act. . .

    Whatever God commands is right. As Augustine said, Lord, command what You will and grant what You command.

    Gordon H. Clark comments on that issue:

    One writer says,
    Obviously, God’s command to Abraham that he sacrifice his only son was an immoral one, and it embarrasses not only the modern but also troubled Abraham. And if we regard the command simply as God’s testing of Abraham and thus moralize the story, we have not faced the issue raised by God’s immoral command and his approval of Abraham’s obedience to it.

    Admittedly the writer quoted makes some statements in the sequel that modify to a degree the first impression of these sentences. But all such interpretations complicate the story of Abraham by reading into it elements that are not there. In particular, a conflict – a false conflict between religion and ethics – is produced by the presupposition that God’s command to sacrifice Isaac was immoral. Where does the text make this assertion? It may be true that the Sumerians regarded human sacrifice as immoral, but the question is not one of Sumerian opinion. The question is, Was God’s command immoral?

    The text itself tells us that God said to Abraham, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love…and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains.” Now, if Abraham had subscribed to the principles of Professor Carnell, if he had made theology subsidiary to ethics, if he had judged this command by an “anticipation” of God’s standards of rectitude, he would have concluded that this suggestion was coming, not from God, but from Satan. If this were not the voice of Satan, if one could not anticipate the nature of divine commands, then the voice that is least moral by human standards might be the most moral by divine standards; and since this cannot be true, the command to sacrifice Isaac did not come from God.

    Abraham, of course, did not at all argue in this vein. On the contrary, he recognized that it was God’s voice, and therefore he was prepared to obey, no matter what the command was. No doubt God had previously forbidden human sacrifice; and so long as that command remained in force, human sacrifice was a sin. But if now, for some undetermined period of time, God commands human sacrifice, then it becomes obligatory and right. No ethical standard formulated through empirical observation, no, not even a previous command of God himself, suffices for the repudiation of God’s next command.

    This, however, does not mean that we are left with moral skepticism, as Dr. Carnell claims. We are left with the definite commands of God. We have his complete preceptive will in the Scriptures. Of course, if skepticism means that man without a supernatural revelation cannot establish the norms of morality, so be it. The analyses of the earlier sections are supposed to have clinched that conclusion. Neither Utilitarianism, nor Kant, nor Dewey can anticipate God’s standards of rectitude. But the failure of non-revelational ethics does not leave man without a knowledge of right and wrong. If skepticism means that man can have no knowledge, then an appeal to revelation, with its subordination of ethics to theology, is not skepticism. But everything else is.


    Gordon H. Clark. Religion, Reason and Revelation (Kindle Locations 4296-4324). The Trinity Foundation.

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