What evangelicals say about God, Christ’s life and work, man’s present predicament and future hope, they say on the authority of the Bible. Insofar as religious knowledge is trustworthy, it derives not from subjective intuition, personal experience, or metaphysical speculation, but from divine revelation, and more specifically, the prophetic-apostolic Scriptures.
Modernist theology drove a wedge between God and the Bible, little realizing that the devaluation of Scripture involved also the discounting of God. Forsaking the miraculous—in deference to evolutionary immanentism—modernists approved only Scripture snippets compatible with their experimental theory, and scoffed at all claims for the Bible as a specially authoritative Book. Christians, they stressed, recognize only one absolute authority: God experienced personally in devotion to Jesus Christ.
This high-sounding appeal did not, however, supply a convincing reply or alternative to the evangelical commitment. Evangelical Christianity has never espoused two ultimate authorities. It considers the authority of the Bible no basis whatever for rejecting God’s authority; rather, it invokes divine authority for its commitment to an authoritative Scripture.
Evangelical Christians affirm one final authority only, the Living God. This is theological shorthand for their insistence that the final authority is solely the Living God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. That, in turn, is but an abbreviated way of affirming that the only ultimate authority is the Living God incarnate in Jesus Christ, whom Christians acknowledge to be Divine Lord and Saviour by the Holy Spirit. In conclusion, this is a summary phrasing for the full evangelical formula: the supreme authority in doctrine and morals is the Living God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, acknowledged as Lord by the Holy Spirit, whose special inspiration makes the scriptural writings the epistemic source of trustworthy knowledge of God and his will and word for man.
The world-church, projected by modernists as a fulcrum for social action amid doctrinal diversity, has fallen into much the same frustration as the United Nations, to which humanists looked as the hope of the world. The Christian churches are now more polarized and divided than at any other time in the present century, and the most conspicuous achievement of the ecumenical movement has been the substitution of larger denominational groupings for smaller ones. Worst of all, theological confusion is now so rife in many ecumenical seminaries that students are taking a rain-check on theological commitments since momentarily current views may become passé before they begin their own pulpit ministries. Many younger churchmen are simply opting for Marxism as a social ethic.
Many evangelical spokesmen had warned that the modernist erosion of an authoritative Bible would lead to the erosion also of an authoritative God, and to modernism’s deflation into humanism. Once it became evident that modernism lacked any objective basis for its attempted reformulation of the doctrine of God, modernism itself was eclipsed as a commanding influence in twentieth-century theology. The churches were deployed from the preaching of the Gospel to the promotion of socio-political change, and if persuasion and legislation would not achieve these goals, revolution would.
Mediating efforts to recover an authority of sorts for the Scriptures, by dialectical-existential theologians who deny the objective inspiration of the texts, have not held ground. These theories attracted some timid evangelicals ready to invoke the “leap of faith” as a solution for every major intellectual difficulty, yet not bright enough to see that the way into the superrational was exploited by every variety of mysticism. If the authority of the texts was to be defined solely as a development “if and as God speaks through them,” the same claim might be made for Baalam’s ass.
Among some evangelicals it seems to be becoming faddish to affirm that the Bible is authoritative while neglecting questions of inspiration and canonicity and denying the inerrancy of Scripture. This strange mix of logic may confuse a supportive constituency, but seminarians are reluctant to speak of the fallibility and errancy of that to which they assign divine authority.
The serious evangelical is called upon not simply to subscribe during installation ceremonies to revered traditions but to pervasively and coherently expound the principle of religious authority whereby one intelligibly and consistently arrives at his doctrinal commitments. If one presupposes, for example, that the creation narratives in Genesis are at bottom simply an edited version of traditions prevalent throughout the ancient Semitic world, he merely begs the critically important question whether all conceptualities assigning meaning and worth to human life are mythological, or whether among the multitudinous explanations of man’s significance and destiny, one has its basis in special divine revelation.
An evangelical who erodes all his energies contending for the inerrancy of the Bible and neglects to unsheaf its revelational content has, to be sure, a warped sense of evangelical duty. But no less tragic is the situation of the evangelical who insists that he champions the inspiration and authority of Scripture but who readily espouses critical concessions and eagerly adduces “biblical errors.” Academic responsibility and professional integrity require such a one to furnish an objective criterion for distinguishing biblical truth from what are alleged to be scriptural errors, or else students will be encouraged to receive or reject the biblical materials merely on the basis of subjective preference.
Evangelicals should be on guard against historical overviews of Christianity that underplay the role of Scripture, or that present the Bible mainly in a context of debate over its inspiration or inerrancy. A special word of caution may be added about the canard that those who assert the inerrancy of the Bible tend to be loveless because they thereby question the Christian authenticity of others. The same distortion of motives might be associated with the evangelical affirmation of the sinlessness of Jesus of Nazareth, or any other doctrinal tenet. It is sheer nonsense to convert the proposition ‘The Bible is divinely inspired, authoritative, and inerrant” into the proposition that whoever affirms these truths should lovelessly cut off anyone who rejects them. What is fundamentally at stake in any academic discussion of the authority of the Bible is not protecting human considerations and relationships but the validity of biblical truth.
CARL F. H. HENRY
