Biblical Inspiration (hereafter BI) is a popular, albeit classic, evangelical statement linked to a notion of infallibility: (1) “‘infallible’ means that the Bible is entirely trustworthy for the purposes for which God inspired it” (p. 53; cp. p. 116). BI does not explain “means” or “entirely”, but stipulates that the Bible ” ‘is in itself a true and sufficient guide’ ” (quoting the 1st edition of the I.V.F. Evangelical Belief), and yet on the same page affirms that (2) “the effect of drawing out the significance of inspiration in this way is to shift the focus of discussion from the truth of the Bible to its adequacy for what God intends it to do” (p. 53).
It is inconsistent to maintain that the Bible is a true and sufficient guide whilst also asserting (2), since “true and sufficient” focus on “the truth of the Bible”; and if it is “true and sufficient”, focus on its adequacy is precisely a focus on its truth, not on some refocusing of discussion away from the “truth of the Bible”. This sample is typical.
BI warns about the complexity of ” the concept of truth”, yet does not inform the reader what concept it is which is being articulated, and imposes confused distinctions when dogmatising about it. It is said to be a nonsensical question to ask whether imperatives and interrogatives are true or false (p. 54), though, for example, Kempson and Lyons respectively offer approaches which contradict BI’s opinion. BI’s allegations about truth here are centred on an attack on literalism. But since its analysis of truth is faulty, it does not follow that BI has faulted literalism. Also, it is questionable that BI should offer an extremely naive form of literalism for criticism which leaves untouched in principle the substantive issues about literalism. BI does not admit the deep topics of definition surrounding “literal”. Instead, its own thesis reflected in (1) equivocated over “infallible” and “entirely”. BI argues that (1) is true while the Bible is not inerrant.
This contradicts the sense of Acts 1:3, which reads: “To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs . . .”. If (1) is true and yet it is compatible with a denial of inerrancy, then it is possible (according to BI’s logic) that Acts 1:3 is not entirely trustworthy in its use of proof; but this contradicts (1). So, since BI upholds the view that “It is the Word of God spoken in Scripture which is the decisive criterion for how we understand the various parts of Scripture” (p. 110), this mode of excluding inerrancy from infallibility contravenes BI’s programme and the Bible, as well as producing another homonym for ‘infallible’ which is not clearly distinguishable from a concept like ‘legal fiction’.
Certainly dictation theory may not cover all the Bible; but BI wrongly extirpates dictation in neglecting its deep structure by making a mechanistic caricature of the dictation process in inspiration. BI never discovers how drama transforms the agent in dictation’s theory of meaning. Thus, when an individual acts as proxy for another character, such as an angel speaking in the first person singular as God, the angel may be said to dictate inspired Scripture as God. Bald dismissal based on a bad dictating lecturer as God (p. 39) may betray the Freudian aversion to dictation as a student; and it also ignores the vocabulary afellowship and spiritual union with God which attends dictation narrative in the Bible.
While dissenting from it, BI is still in the grip of executive institutionalism; the reader must not question such statements as: “The findings of honest, unbiased study” (p. 91). Honesty is irrelevant as a factor to prevent criticism, and if unbiased study is a fiction in science, then academic theology is a revisable art.
BI’s stress on hermeneutical1 problems is thus licensed by subservience precisely where it should be free and radical. The NIV’s “only” in John 1:18 (contrasted with “only begotten” in the AV, see pp. 67,68) is cited without any criticism as evidence of “ambiguity”. Here “ambiguity” is confused with definable ambivalence. And the NIV’s illicit cobbling together of the two quite distinct readings from, for example, Bodmer II and the Alexandrinus codices, for the identical lexical position, to invent the anachronistic form “God the only Son”, is such a gross misuse of the textual history and theological paraphrase ( as a glance at, for instance, McReynold’s research illustrates) that BI’s abstraction of “only” from the NIV, without the foregoing type of criticism, confers fictional objectivity and misleading status on “problems” and “where competent scholars agree to differ” (p. 68). This sort of case is characteristic.
Although the reviewer is not of course an evangelical, nevertheless, if one were to look at BI as an impressionistic advertisement of the evangelical policy, then as such it is splendid and an advance over its precursors, although its view of inspiration cannot be endorsed.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)