Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 24:2 (Jun 1981)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

lnerrancy. Edited by Norman L. Geisler. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979, 516 pp., $9.95.

This is an important volume on the subject of Biblical inerrancy. It represents most of the scholarly papers delivered at the 1978 conference that produced the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, and it will shed light on the theological thinking that lay behind that document. Since inerrancy is a doctrinal plank of the ETS, all our members will be interested to see whether they agree with this way of formulating and defending this conviction. The best way to review this volume within reasonable limits is to take up the four major issues it raises and comment on them. These four issues are the Biblical testimony to iner-rancy, the challenge of Biblical criticism, the problem of definition, and the historical roots. There are several essays that raise issues related to Biblical inspiration but not inerrancy per se, and these will be referred to briefly at the end. The question of greatest concern for me is: “Does this presentation of Biblical inerrancy represent the best we can do in its explication and defense?” My general impression is that it does not.

On the matter of the Bible’s teaching pertaining to its own inerrancy, we are given nothing not already argued in John Wenham’s Christ and the Bible (1972). Essays by Wenham himself and by Ed Blum present the case for the God-breathed character of the final text of Scripture. The point is well taken and ought to receive greater attention from scholarship in general, which likes to pretend that this witness does not exist. Two things seem lacking, however, that are needed to make the position more credible. First, all the writers like to leap from this basic Scriptural witness all the way to Warfield’s doctrine of errorlessness as if the Bible itself actually taught his theological construction exactly, as if the development of evangelical doctrine played no part at all in its formulation. Often conservatives seem unaware that the Bible cannot be made to teach the inerrancy of the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon. Something has to be said about post-Biblical developments that led us to this precise conviction. I am far from saying this cannot be done, but only that it is almost never done even when our scholars open their mouths as they do here on the issue. Silence on questions such as these is not likely to impress outsiders and tends to discourage supporters too who hope for something better. And when unwillingness to face up to important questions is coupled as it often is with shrill denunciations of alternate positions, the impression is intolerable.

More disappointing still is the lack of fulness in the presentation of the Biblical witness itself. There is evidence of such selectivity of data. Any text that promises to support the factual ine...

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