Word and World
Biblical Authority and The Quandary of Modernity
David F. Wells
Introduction
There is a woodcut from the sixteenth century which shows two preachers facing one another — presumably from pulpits that are not in the same church! — and they are evidently in debate with one another or, at least, the ways in which their messages are being authorized are in antithesis to one another. The one preacher is wagging his finger at the congregation and saying, "Sic dicit Papa"; the other has his finger pointed at the page of Holy Scripture and is saying, "Sic dicit dominus deus!" It is not difficult to deduce from this that the maker of this woodcut was a Protestant!
The simplicity of this statement of Protestant conviction, however, should not lead us to conclude that the Protestant theology of the Word of God, epitomized in the sola Scriptura slogan, has been simply maintained or can be simply maintained. For, in the modern world in particular, both the notion of authority — of any authority — and the idea of a divine disclosure have come under fierce siege. This, however, is really part of a wider social transformation whose full consequences we are yet to see;1 and these will have profound consequences for how Scripture will function in the years ahead.
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Authority, Power, and Tradition
The ligaments which have held together Western civilization — authority, power, and tradition — have, in their mutual relations become so stretched and damaged in our time as to raise the specter that civilization as we have known it could collapse. What sounded alarmist when uttered by Spengler earlier this century sounds almost commonplace when described by Solzhenitzen now. And the reason is that we know that two of these ligaments are no longer functional.
From at least the time of Plato and Aristotle and coming down through much of the modern period, authority, power, and tradition have been sharply distinguished from one another in their nature though it has been recognized that they may overlap in their function.
Authority has had to do with rights and hence with the legitimacy of beliefs and actions in society. For centuries this legitimacy has been found in some higher order, or set of laws, from which human society took its bearings. It is not difficult, however, to trace the breakdown in the belief in such an order and hence in the functioning of authority in the West. Modernization, the technologically driven reordering of our world around economic goals which require heavy urbanization, has produced drastically lowered cognitive horizons. For most people, their "world" extends no further than their own personal circumstances and no higher than the secular and trivial thought that pours out the television set seven hours a day into the average home. Artists and novelists in the twentieth century have signalled the breakdown in meaning with increasing shrillness by first turning away from the transcendent and looking in society itself for meaning and values
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and then, in recent decades, by turning away from our disordered society and looking within human consciousness. This cycle of alienation is now running toward its completion in the deconstructionists who have despaired even of finding the meaning of a novelist's work in relation to that person's inner life. There is no order left for meaning or values, be it above us, or around us, or within us, from which legitimacy can be derived for our beliefs and actions. Authority is gone.
Tradition is the conduit by which values are transmitted from generation to generation. It has been the way in which one generation was inducted by its predecessor into its thinking and wisdom, most importantly as this has had to do with values and meaning and the family has been its main conduit. With the collapse of functioning families and the onslaught of modernization, the role of tradition in our social life has evaporated. Modernity powerfully shifts attention from the past to the future, casting the awful stigma of obsolescence over what is traditional. Tradition can be quaint, even charming, but it is always viewed in our society as something that is also outdated, irrelevant and useless. Thus, of the three original ligaments, only power remains.
The collapse of authority into power2 and the disappearance of our collective memory, tradition, is evident all around us today.3 In its crudest form, we hear this in the Nietzschean aphorism that might is right, but in less flat-footed ways we hear it in just about every public discussion about our social life. For if Richard John Neuhaus is correct that the public square has become "naked,"4 stripped of values, it is because we no longer have an Archimedean point outside of the flat plane of human discourse from which to apply moral meaning and leverage to
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what we are doing. There is, in consequence, a constant erosion in society of any commonly held morality or sense of duty to which appeal can be made. There are few shared values which can act as the arbiters in the clash of self interest which is the brew out of which social policy emerges. That being the case, the passage of social life can only be directed through the exercise of power, whether this is done in subtle or in blatant ways, and only very rarely will it be directed by those who ask whether something is right in any sense other than what seems to "make sense" to private experience, and that is often indistinguishable from base self-interest. This context, then, is not only providing the environment in which biblical authority has to be thought about but it is also providing the major impetus for the recasting of traditional ideas of authority in contemporary theology. It is with the latter that I wish to begin before moving to the former, the question of biblical authority.
The Bible as the Instrument of Authority
David Kelsey has observed that "virtually every contemporary Protestant theologian along the entire spectrum of opinion from the 'neo-evangelicals' through Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, to Anders Nygren, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Fritz Buri, has acknowledged that any Christian theology worthy of the name 'Christian' must, in some sense of the phrase, be done 'in accord with Scripture.' "5 It is also the case, of course, that the contemporary crisis in academic theology has produced some who have finally decided that the Bible cannot serve as authoritative in any sense. Nevertheless, Kelsey has correctly identified where the swamp is especially murky.
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Text and Meaning
The reason that the Bible has functioned in so many diverse ways in modern theology, supposedly authorizing a multitude of theologies that are jarringly incompatible with one another, is that text and meaning have been disengaged. Theological meaning is, in practice, merely prompted by the biblical text, or suggested by it, or perhaps the text is the locus where it is given or the clue to where it might lie; but so often theological meaning is suspended upon or derived from something outside of the biblical text itself. This meaning swings and floats loose of the text. It is not controlled by the text. And theologies as diverse as those of Barth, Bultmann, and Buri can all in some sense be viewed as being biblical; but, unfortunately, that "sense" is neither the same nor does it provide clear criteria for assessing the propriety of the theological proposals which are offered.
Ronald Thiemann recently noted this hermeneutical quagmire and illustrated the problem by reference to a dreadful parable that occurs in Kafka's The Trial.6 The parable in Kafka is about existence in general but Thiemann applied it to the hermeneutical task. This parable concerns a man who was intent upon entering the practice of law. The door through which he had to pass, however, was always guarded by tyrannical and forbidding doorkeepers who prevent his entrance. The man bribed and cajoled them but to no avail. After many years of waiting the man began to slide toward death. Just before dying, however, he noticed a bright and beautiful light shining beyond the doorway. He asked the doorkeepers what it meant. He was told that the door had been kept open only for him but now that he was dying it was being closed. And so he died a stranger to the realm in which he
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longed to be, but into which he could never enter. So it is in contemporary hermeneutics. The text is but a doorway beyond which is a meaning that shimmers as if it were a bright light; but it is a meaning which is so elusive as always to be beyond our reach, or so polyvalent as to allow for a diversity of understandings that can never be resolved. And so the exegete always stands on the outside. The door always closes shut before the bright light has been understood.
The earlier polemic over whether revelation is personal or propositional — the neo-orthodox arguing that it could not be the latter if it were the former and evangelicals arguing that if it were to be the former it had to be the latter — disappeared with the final collapse of neo-orthodoxy in America in the 1950s. But the issue, in fact, has never died; it has simply taken on fresh forms that are more numerous and inventive than anything that Barth or Brunner had thought were possible. For once again the biblical text is not itself the locus of revelation; but it is, rather, the doorway to something else that it is hoped in some way will yield some directional meaning for the doing of theology.
This bifurcation between text and meaning was even affirmed, for example, in Barth's theology, although with qualifications. For him, one did not have the Word of God in one's hands because one had the Bible in one's hands, as he put it. Rather, the Word of God, the divine meaning, came to one in conjunction with the reading or hearing of the text of Scripture. It came from above and the inspiration of Scripture was to be understood, not of the biblical documents, but of the person to whom this insight had come as a result of which the very human words of Scripture became witnesses to God and his Christ.7
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For Bultmann, the Scriptures and the "revelation" were similarly disengaged, for the latter came from within. The biblical authors were themselves responding to the existential realities that they knew in their own world. Their world cannot be ours, for world views cannot be put on and taken off like garments. Our world is scientific, theirs pre-scientific; we cannot believe in miracles or in a miraculous Christ, they could. What we do have in common with them, however, is human existence, the same quest for internal authenticity. It is this interest in authenticity, an interest which is internally and existentially formulated and which is heavily influenced by the twentieth century Western outlook which Bultmann then allowed to dominate what the text can say.8
In much Gospel criticism today, by contrast, the assumption is that the real meaning is to be found not in the interpreter, not in the text itself, not above it, but behind it. For, as Norman Perrin has explained with respect to redactional assumptions,9 each saying of Jesus had three contexts: the words he actually used in speaking to the listeners who were present; the subsequent history and development of these sayings in the early communities of faith; and the reworking and adaption by the gospel authors of this material in line with their own theological interests. The key, then, to the meaning of the biblical text is not in the words themselves but in a reconstruction of the history behind the text, and it is this reconstruction in which religious meaning is to be found and not in the text itself. The text is, at best, a clue to what happened; what happened has to be reconstructed, as far as this is possible, from the fragmentary access that we now have to it and it is this reconstruction that is important.
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Finally, the dominant fascination in the World Council of Churches currently is with a family of theologies which see the meaning to lie chronologically beyond the text. The assumptions are Hegelian. Social context — whether this is looked at with a liberationist, feminist, or ethnic interest10 — provides the evidence of what God is "doing"; for if God always identifies with the poor and always opposes the powerful, then in those events today in which the rich and powerful are overthrown, and the poor are liberated, are to be found the "prophetic witnesses" to God's presence. Thus the Scriptures as well as contemporary experience testify to the revelatory presence of God in society and both are commentaries upon it. The Scriptures by themselves, of course, are only a part of this narrative of revelation, the other part coming from contemporary social experience. And thus what Scripture looks forward to in its eschatology can only be grasped by seeing how God is bringing this to pass in our world today.
The Reformation Tradition
What is truly remarkable about this situation today is how few there are who realize that the hermeneutical wheel has turned full circle. The Protestant Reformation was founded on the conviction that God had disclosed revelatory meaning in and through the words of Scripture and it was for this reason that Luther and Calvin opposed the older system of allegorizing. The Holy Ghost, Luther declared is "the all-simplest writer in heaven or earth" and therefore the words of Scripture can have no more than one "simple" sense. The kind of allegorizing that Origen engaged in, for example, Luther described as nothing but "scum." Why was he so vehement?
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What was at issue was whether Scripture would be treated as having its own self-contained authority. The debate with Rome was not over the inspiration of Scripture; on that the two sides were agreed. Nor was it really over tradition. It was over the claim of the Catholic Church to have the authority to give to Scripture a meaning which the text itself could not obviously sustain. That is what allegorizing lead to, for it supposed that there was a "deeper" meaning behind or above the text which was only hinted at in the text. And it was what the radical Anabaptists were to do later on by suspending the function of the exterior Word of the text upon the interior "Word" of insight and intuition, the former not being allowed to function until validated by the latter. The principle in each case was the same. By different means the connection between what the language of the text meant and what the text was taken to mean was broken; the linguistic controls of the text were severed, in the one case by a supposed higher meaning behind the text, in another case by the Church and its supposed fuller meaning beyond the text, and still another by a fuller meaning from within the interpreter. It was against these aberrations that the Reformers argued that unless the Scriptures are seen to be self-interpreting, they cannot be reforming, for private interests can hold captive their meaning. That is exactly what is happening today.
The position developed by Warfield earlier this century, then, is not at all the radical departure that some have claimed it to be. It assumes that words and meaning in Scripture coincide and what secures this is inspiration. Meaning is not to be found above the text, behind, it, beyond it, or in the interpreter. Meaning is to be found in the text. It is the language of the text which determines
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what meaning God intends for us to have. Warfield's own way of asserting this was to say that the N.T. authors made their "habitual appeal to the Old Testament text as to God himself speaking." They made an absolute identification between the Scriptures (text) and "the living voice of God" (i.e., meaning).11 This argument was built on two types of passage: those in which the Scriptures were spoken of as if they were God speaking and those in which God is spoken of as if he were the Scriptures. "God and the Scriptures," he said, "are brought into such conjunction as to show that in point of directness of authority no distinction was made between them."12 It is this identification of text and meaning, of the language of Scripture with the words of God, that is, as Warfield noted, "the fundamental fact of the case."13
In so arguing, Warfield actually placed himself closer to current semantic thinking than is much contemporary hermeneutical practice.14 Words do not mean. Words have meanings. They have semantic fields, ranges of meaning, and it is the author who, knowing the ranges, employs the words in such combinations that the desired meaning is communicated. There is no language which functions in the way that the biblical text is commonly treated. No language allows meaning to float free of the words used. It is not the biblical language that allows this, but it is our contemporary mysticism which demands it.
Unless words and their meaning are rejoined in hermeneutical practice, we can have no access to revelation in anything but a mystical sense. To be sure, language is versatile and the language used in Scripture shows the full range of this versatility; so the access to meaning, and hence to revelation, is an access that is secured through the way in which this language works. This
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versatility, however, does not in any way detract from the fact that, when text and meaning coincide, they produce an authority which is external and objective. The versatility of the language simply informs the way in which the referential nature and function of that external, authoritative source is to be understood.15
In the immediate post-War period among evangelicals, the identification of text and meaning which is accomplished through inspiration was typically described under the language of infallibility. This is language that has primary reference to Scripture's function whereas inerrancy, which has for significant parts of the evangelical movement since this time supplanted infallibility, has to do with Scripture's nature. Inasmuch as the function of Scripture depends upon its nature as inspired, these terms have, in practice, become synonyms except where the newer hermeneutical spirit has affected evangelical thinking.16 Infallibility has been stretched by some to allow for a disengagement of meaning from text that simply is not possible when inerrancy is adhered to. While this in-house debate may seem to outsiders a little like "strife over a diphthong" (to use Gibbon's haughty dismissal of the patristic debates as to the definition of Christ's nature), the fact is that very large consequences sometimes turn on small linguistic adjustments. There was, after all, a significant difference between saying that Christ had the same being as did God (homoousios) and that he had a being (homoiousios) that was only similar to that of God. The language used to safeguard the nature of Scripture is no more a matter of indifference now than was the choice of terms for the early Fathers in regard to Christ. The voices urging the disengagement of text from meaning, both in academia and in the
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culture are now so loud that only the greatest conceptual bonding between them will be adequate to meet the challenge.
The language we use to describe this bonding obviously has to reflect the nature of the bonding itself, and here the analogy between christology and bibliology is vitally important. The analogy, it seems to me, does not lie primarily in the fact that in both cases there is a human and a divine element. It is, rather, that in both cases, function is dependent upon nature.
In christological discussions in recent years there has been a concerted attempt made by some to get around having to make prior commitments to the exact nature of Jesus' divinity, or to the mode by which he came to be divine.17 Instead, it is argued that we should begin with his human biography, a biography which in its humanity is not different in principle from any other human biography, and then see if from this some idea of his being can be constructed. The functional is seen to be the access, the only access, to the ontological. The problem with this approach, of course, is that his divinity was often "hidden" within his actions and could not simply be read from them; he came to his own people who had been nurtured on the Scriptures to expect him, and they neither recognized nor accepted him. A christology "from below" may appear to spare us from embarrassing metaphysical commitments, but it also leaves us with a truncated Christ. Not only so, but it also leaves us with a Christ who really could not conquer sin, death, and the devil, as the New Testament declares that Christ did; for this is work that only God in all of his fullness could accomplish. Christ's person and work, the ontological and functional, are inseparably linked. They are like the two foci in an
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ellipse, distinct but always having to be understood in relation to one another.
So it is with the nature and function of Scripture. Scripture can disclose the character, will, and acts of God and accomplish its purposes of making God's people wise about salvation, because it is God himself who has disclosed these truths by inspiration. To be God's Word in function requires, not simply that we accord it this status as Kelsey thinks, but that it be in actuality God's Word. It can have no assured function of divine disclosure if in its nature it is not divinely inspired. Furthermore, it can have no authority if it is not inspired, for without this inspiration it cannot accord legitimacy to any beliefs or actions. Without a transcendent reference point, legitimacy is simply indistinguishable from personal preference.
Evangelicals have made so much of the importance of authority that it is no small irony that James Hunter has found the generation of younger leaders now in our institutions of higher education succumbing to the habits of privatization that modernity demands. A process of "cognitive bargaining" is now in full spate. Hunter notes, for example, that many younger evangelicals are willing to treat as "symbolic" significant historical material in Scripture, to treat the truth of Scripture as non-cognitive, and to look for special personal "experiences" from its reading. The certainty that derives from divine authority appears to be melting away. Indeed, Hunter charges that at a practical level, neoorthodoxy is making inroads into this generation of evangelicals;18 they, too, are disengaging text from meaning and deriving the meaning from internal, private intuition. This raises some troubling questions
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as we think about the future and the ways in which we are going to have to address modernity.
Biblical Authority and Modernity
No one who has had an eye on the book trade in the last two decades, or on the cycle of learned journals during this present era, could have failed to notice that there has been a growing interest in how theology should be "done."19 It is an interest that has become urgent and intense to such an extent that the perception has emerged that theology in all its shades and stripes has lost its viability as a discipline. So what has brought on this doubt?
The Breakdown of Theology
David Tracy has suggested20 that the recent history of theology has involved a struggle to accommodate three relationships, the combination of whose claims upon theology has not been possible to satisfy. This triangle is made up first, of the confessional source (Scripture or the teaching of the Church in the case of Roman Catholics), second, of culture and third, of academia. And his argument is that modern theologies can be grouped into families, depending upon which point on the triangle has had to be excluded to accommodate the others.
This breakdown Tracy believes can be mapped out more or less chronologically. From about 1930 to 1950 on the Protestant side neoorthodoxy was dominant and thus the element of confession was to the fore. By the 1960s, the neo-orthodox consensus had collapsed. A culture racked with uncertainty about the Vietnam War and increasingly experiencing in itself the forces of relativism and pluralism now heard the death-of-God theologians
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projecting their uncertainty into the being of God himself. The culture provided the means of crafting the substance of theology.
What it provided, however, was so destructive that by the end of the 1960s the death-of-God theology was itself dead. Attention now shifted to the third of the three components, that of academia. Can theology find principles of construction which will be recognized as viable within the academic process, given the fact that that process cannot accept external, supernatural revelation?21 Indeed, Brian Hebblethwaite recently asked whether, given the necessary revelational vacuity in theology, anything but philosophy can remain.
Whether the story is actually as antiseptic as Tracy's account leaves us to believe could be disputed, but he is undoubtedly correct in seeing how the voice of theology has changed from being confessional to being cultural to being philosophical. He is correct, too, in seeing that theology for the most part has given up the struggle to hold in a unified whole the three elements of which he has spoken. And, the truth is, this triangle can only be sustained if one starts with a view of biblical authority such as has been outlined here; and at the very moment when the Bible as the source of confession proceeds to erode, cultural and academic perspectives pour in to fill the vacuum and, singly or together, destroy whatever remnants of revelation are still there.
The revolution in the university, the consequences of which are a fact of academic life today, occurred mainly in the period from 1870 to 1910, as Richard Hofstadter has noted.22 The Civil War eliminated all but 20% of the colleges that had existed in the first half of the century and in its wake a complete revamping of the system occurred. The major universities moved to emancipate
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themselves from denominational control and from the hold which religious interests had exercised over them. Increasingly, the model of the German university came to be accepted as normative for America. And in this model only two conditions were seen to be necessary for a university education: scholarship and freedom. This represented the final collapse of the older model in which the goals, as Matthew Arnold in England had declared, were to be three: the formation of gentlemanly conduct, moral development, and intellectual enrichment. The first to go had been the gentlemanly conduct; the next was moral formation. At the turn of the century, universities saw themselves as only providing intellectual enrichment and they chose to do so on a constricted, Kantian basis which assumed that God could not be known directly, though he might have to be postulated to exist if we are to understand ourselves as moral beings. Thus freedom came to be understood as emancipation from all external constraints, values, and authorities. To be free was to be alone in one's own universe.
With this freedom, however, has also come a relativity in thought that is destructive to the educational process. Allan Bloom, in his book The Closing of the American Mind, notes that students today have lost the capacity for thought and logic and that they no longer believe that this is a deficiency that should be corrected. They intuitively feel that time expended in trying to think clearly, to establish the difference between right and wrong, true and false, would be time invested in a lost cause, since there is nothing in reality that corresponds to these categories.
Carl Henry has also noted that "the most sudden and sweeping upheaval in beliefs and values has taken place this century. No generation in the history of human thought has seen such swift and
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radical inversion of ideas and ideals as in our time."23 We have moved from an educational system that was theistically based to one that is humanistically based. The result is the disappearance of a modern mind and its replacement by a modern mood that is transient, relative, shifting, and owes no allegiance to anything except itself. His conclusion is that what is at stake in the crises of learning is the survival both of the university and of society. Unless learning and unless Western society recover a core of common values that is theistically centered, relativism "will doom man to mistake himself and his neighbor for passing shadows in the night, transient oddities with no future but the grave."24 It is no surprise, therefore, that the canons of academic "integrity" more or less demand as a condition of acceptance into the guild that text and meaning be disengaged. It is permissible to study the text as an ancient document; it is not permissible to employ that text as an external authority, for that surely violates the very conditions without whose presence academic learning supposedly cannot proceed. But what happens in the university is not really different from what happens in a society in which modernization is a powerful reality. Contemporary sociologists have shown how modernization sunders apart private from public life, the internal from the external. Christian meaning, therefore, is relegated to the interior, to the simple function of providing a sense of personal coherence, of inner meaning, and the connections to the external world are often almost entirely lost. This, too, is a mysticism, for once again text and meaning are largely disengaged.
Tracy was entirely correct to argue that theology is, in its nature, triangular. It has a confessional dimension which it has to
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relate to both culture and to academia. He was also correct in noting that most contemporary theologies have abandoned the struggle to do this for the claims of each of these elements can only be satisfied at the price of each other. The conception therefore becomes self-destructive. The reason for this is that most contemporary theology has not seen that a confessional base composed only of a mystical meaning cut loose from a biblical norm simply is not able to adjudicate the competing claims that bear down upon it from culture and academia. This kind of mysticism may give the illusion of having a controlling center, but in fact at its center is an emptiness whose functions have to be assumed either by social interests or by the academic culture.
The Agenda
The agenda that Tracy saw is an agenda awaiting fulfillment. The evangelical understanding of Scripture as a disclosure of transcendent truth, communicated in and through the language of Scripture, is not a foolish irrelevance that stands in the way of doing serious theology; it is the sine qua non without which serious theology cannot be done at all, for without it there is no way of authorizing any belief. Without it, the authorization is at most on the grounds of personal preference. What makes this alternative seem desirable to contemporary people is that it allows large scope for the reality of pluralism and diversity. Our experience of social diversity, secured and guaranteed under the Constitution, should not, however, spawn in our minds the kind of relativism which inevitably results from grounding truth claims simply on internal preference.25 In the end, as Bloom has observed, this becomes self-destructive.
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What actually stands in the way of doing serious theology, then, are the unexamined assumptions of the twentieth century mind, many of which simply echo the social environment in which we now live. Theologies which are conceived in this environment, and which are not able to rise above it through a meaning divinely given, will simply be voices that bounce from side to side in the echo chamber of modernity. There will be no legitimacy, no authority, to what they say, no matter how long and hard they try to absolutize personal preferential options.
The prospects for creating a new, vital, cogent, and compelling theology which is revelational in its assumptions and content are now extraordinarily bright but also extraordinarily threatened. What is most needed is what the historic Christian view on biblical revelation actually secures and that is the means to authorize and prescribe what is right, not because of horizontal preferences, but because of a vertical and transcendent meaning which has been divinely given and which has the power to relativise all human thought. However, the evangelical capacity to deliver on a confessional source such as this has been deeply undermined by modernity. When biblical inerrancy is privatized, it is stripped of its capacity to address either academia or the culture. Biblical inerrancy may remain privately compelling to evangelicals, and serve as a party rallying cry, but it becomes publicly irrelevant because in the context of modernity it, too, can be reduced to nothing more than private preference.
The question that evangelicals have to face is not whether we will give a ritual consent to inerrancy, but whether we really think that human beings have access to truth which, because it is divinely given and secured, is the final measure of what is there,
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whether this is truth that spans both private and public life, and whether it is the same truth for all people in all cultures.
This is the historic Protestant position; it is not always the position on which evangelicals act today. We need, therefore, not only to affirm Scripture's inerrancy, which has to do with its nature, but also to act on its infallibility, which has to do with its authoritative and certain function in our modern world. We cannot have this function unless Scripture is, by the Holy Spirit's inspiration, God's Word in which text and meaning coincide; it is, however, possible to have a Scripture which is believed to be textually inerrant but which is, regrettably, shorn of its authoritative function of meaning. In the end, this produces a modern orthodoxy which, because of its modernity, is no longer orthodox, but an exercise in futility. "Let the buyer beware — caveat emptor!"
1. The exact religious condition of the American people is not easy to read. It is clear that a substantial core of traditional beliefs remains intact and in that sense secularism has made only the most modest progress. On the other hand, those beliefs do not appear to be very functional or determinative and so in that sense America has been secularized. See Richard John Neuhaus, ed., Unsecular America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1986).
2. The collapse of authority into power has had a profoundly destabilizing effect on society. Specifically, it raises questions about the ligitimation of social institutions. On this see, for example, Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) 242-50. Indeed, the disappearance of some moral realm from which values can be derived, Anthony Arblaster believes, goes a long way to explaining the disappearance of the Liberal tradition in the West. See his The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) 334-39.
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3. For a discussion of how the disappearance of the function of tradition has affected one theological tradition, see James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 157-64.
4. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984).
5. David H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press: 1975) 1.
6. Ronald F. Thiemann, Radiance and Obscurity in Biblical Narratives (Unpublished paper presented to the Boston Theological Society, March, 1989).
7. This brief summary scarcely does justice to the intricacies of Barth's view which is developed in his Church Dogmatics, trans. G.T. Thomson (5 vols.; Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1936-77)I, parts 1 and 2.
8. For Bultmann's general views, as opposed to the technicalities of the demythologization program, see especially his Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings, trans. Schubert Ogden (New York: Meridian Books, 1960).
9. Norman Perrin, What is Redaction Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969).
10. Examples of this approach are Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology, trans. John Drury (Maryknoll: Orbi Books, 1976); James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970); Letty M. Russell, Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective: A Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974).
11. Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1970) 299.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 348. The position that Warfield developed within a circumscribed biblical focus, Carl Henry has most completely filled out in relation to contemporary thought. See his God, Revelation and Authority ( 5 Vols., Waco: Word, 1982-84).
14. The current thinking that I have in mind is what is seen, for example, in James Barr's The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). See also Arthur F. Holmes, "Ordinary Language Analysis and Theological Method," The Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society, 11 No. 3 (Summer, 1968) 131-38.
15. For a careful exploration of the role of language in the communication of revelation, see Wayne Grudem, "Scripture's Self- Attestation and the Problem of Formulating a Doctrine of Scripture," Scripture and Truth. ed. D.A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983)19-59.
16. This categorization is not entirely accurate. The newer hermeneutical interests are evident in those works which make a studied preference of infallibility over inerrancy such as G.C. Berkouwer, Studies in Dogmatics: Holy Scripture, trans. Jack B. Rogers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1975); Dewey Beegle, Scripture, Tradition and Infallibility
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(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983); and Stephen Davis, The Debate about the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977). On the edges of inerrancy are those, however, who argue for a "limited" inerrancy which, in practice looks like a form of (loose) infallibility. See, for example, J. Barton Payne, "Partial Omniscence: Observations on Limited Inerrancy," The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 18, no.1(Winter,1975)37-40; Vern Sheridan Poythress, "Problems for Limited Inerrancy," The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 18,no. 2(Spring, 1975)93-103; Richard J. Coleman, "Reconsidering 'limited Inerrancy,' " The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 17,no.4(Fall,1974)207-14.
17. I am here summarizing the conclusions to my own study entitled The Person of Christ: A Biblical and Historical Analysis (Westchester: Crossway, 1984) 21-84.
18. Hunter, 27-8.
19. Some of the more notable contributions to the discussion on methodology would include: Anton Grabner-Haider, Theorie der Theologie als Wissenschaft (München: Kosel-verlag, 1974); Edward Farley, Ecclesial Reflection: An Anatomy of Theological Method (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982); Anders Nygren, Meaning and Method: Prolegomena to a Scientific Philosophy of Religion and a Scientific Theology, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972); Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972); Gordon Kaufmann, An Essay in Theological Method (Missoula: Scolars Press, 1975); George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984); David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury Press, 1970); and Thomas Torrance, Theological Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). Among the journal articles, see the following: A.A. Glenn, "Criteria for Theological Models," Scottish Journal of Theology, 25 (Aug.,1975)296-308; Alfred T. Hennelly, "Theological Method: The Southern Exposure," Theological Studies,38 (Dec.,1977)709-35; Robert D. Knudsen, "Analysis of Theological Concepts: A Methodological Sketch," Westminster Theological Journal, 40 (Spring, 1978) 229-44; R.P. Scharlemann, "Theological Models and Their Construction," Journal of Religion,53 (Jan. 1973) 65-82; and Don Wiebe, "Explanation and Theological Method," Zygon, II (March, 1976) 35-49.
20. David Tracy, "Whatever Happened to Theology?" Christianity and Crisis 35, no.8 (May 12, 1975) 119-20. These themes, of course, are expanded in his book cited earlier and in this summary I have kept in mind his expansion. See also his "Modes of Theological Argument," Theology Today.33 (Jan.1977) 387-95.
21. See the acute analysis offered of these problems in Van Austin Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1966). More recently Mark Noll has explored similar terrain,
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especially as this has related to American evangelical scholars in the biblical field. See his excellent book Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1986).
22. Richard Hofstadter, "The Revolution in Higher Education," Paths in American Thought. ed. Arthur M. Schlessinger and Morton White (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1963) 269-90. Among historians there are not substantial differences with regard to the facts of college and university life in America in the second half of last century. There is substantial disagreement, however, over what we should make of those facts, specifically, whether the disappearance of a Christian world view has been a good or a bad thing. On this point see the fine essays by William C. Ringenberg, "The Old-Time College, 1800-1865," Making Higher Education Christian: The History and Mission of Evangelical Colleges in America, ed. Joel Carpenter and Kenneth Shipps (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987) 77-97, and the two essays by Mark Noll in the same volume, "The Revolution, the Enlightenment, and Higher Education in the Early Republic" (56- 76) and "The University Arrives in America, 1870-1930: Christian Traditionalism During the Academic Revolution" (98-109).
23. Carl F.H. Henry, The Christian Mindset in a Secular Society: Promoting Evangelical Renewal and National Righteousness (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1978) 81.
24. Ibid.
25. Peter Berger has explored this reality with considerable insight, arguing that modern pluralization undercuts plausibility structures in society which in turn spawns pluralism and, hence, relativism as belief becomes increasingly subjective. See, for example, his A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday, 1969) 35-60. Cf: James Hunter, "Subjectivization and the New Evangelical Theodicy," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 21 (March, 1982)39.
