Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 43:1 (Fall 1980)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim: The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible. An Historical Approach. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979. xxiv, 484. $20.00.

This book tells you how you can be Reformed in theology and yet disbelieve in biblical inerrancy. More precisely, it argues that inerrancy as commonly understood today is a late accretion which has no rightful place in historic Christian thought in general or Reformed belief in particular.

The book is in two parts. Part I takes the reader from the patristic age to puritanism and in the process appears to make three main points. First, the early fathers maintained inerrancy as an ethical quality (rather than as a scientific or mathematical correspondence) because they acknowledged that God utilized human thought modes in inspiring Scripture. Second, in the Reformation period, the authority of the Bible was restricted to its function to bringing people to salvation. Scripture, it was held, teaches truthfully about Christ and it is not its intention everywhere to teach truthfully in other realms of knowledge such as the scientific. Further, what authority the Bible had did not depend on the intrinsic value of its propositions but on its use by the Spirit. Third, that this state of affairs was modified under the intrusion of Aristotelianism into the mode of theological discourse in the generation which followed the magisterial Reformers. A mechanical view of Scripture displaced a dynamic one; faith was reduced from heartfelt trust to barren, mental assent; authority was identified, not with the Spirit’s powerful use of the biblical Word but with the set of static, crystalline propositions that make up our Bible. The chief culprit in all of this was Francis Turretin, and his obsession with Scriptural form rather than function is contrasted with the outlook advocated by the Westminster divines.

The second part of the book mainly seeks to trace how this development or, more precisely, this conceptual confusion between the Bible’s purpose and its nature, became rooted in North America. The founding of Princeton is examined, the roots of the “Princeton theology” are

explored, the intellectual environment it breathed in Scottish Common Sense realism is made clear and the final unravelling of the theology and the institutional fragmentation of Princeton is explained. In all of this, the authors simply are repeating the charge made much earlier by Nathaniel William Taylor in a set of heated exchanges with Hodge in the 1830’s (which the authors have omitted to discuss) and later by Charles Briggs in the 1890’s that the “Princeton theology” unconsciously evolved beyond the views enunciated in the Westminst...

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