June 25, 2001
COMMENTARY:
A confusing state of affairs
___By Mike Clingenpeel
___OK. I admit it. I’m confused.
___ For the past 22 years, the self-appointed--now messenger-appointed--guardians of orthodoxy in the Southern Baptist Convention have trashed moderate Southern Baptists for their aberrant and heretical views of the Scriptures.
___They accused moderates of holding a low view of the Bible, picking which passages are accurate and believable and which are not, basing personal faith on subjective interpretations of Bible texts, believing the Bible contains human errors and failing to describe the Scriptures with the words inerrant and infallible.
___ Recently, I received an advance copy of "Biblical Authority: The Critical Issue for the Body of Christ," by Jimmy Draper and Kenneth Keathley, a book scheduled for release this summer by Broadman & Holman Publishers. The book is a rewrite of Draper’s original work titled "Authority: The Critical Issue for Southern Baptists," published in 1984 when he was SBC president.
___ In a chapter on what biblical authority does and does not mean, Draper and Keathley make several statements that, well, confuse me.
___ Try this one. "Biblical inspiration does not mean that the translations or editions or versions are inspired. Only the original manuscripts, the autographa, are." Obviously none of us have ever seen the originals, and the earliest manuscript fragments of the New Testament postdate the originals by almost a century. Therefore, in the absence of the autographs, the only Bible I possess is the one on my shelf or nightstand. According to Draper and Keathley, that Bible is not inspired, only the original was.
___ I confess that my understanding of inspiration involves not only the authorship of the originals, but also the transmission of the text throughout the ages, so that whatever sleepy scribes and crafty editors did to the text, God’s word and Word still come through the Bible I bought from LifeWay Christian Resources or Oxford Press. Is it possible that my view of the Bible is actually higher than that of conservatives?
___Consider another one. "As far back as Augustine, there was clear understanding of the difference between the original manuscript and the copy or edition which he might have in his hand. If there was an error, it might be in the copy, but it would not be in the original." So it is possible, imply these authors, that your copy and my copy of the Bible, the only ones available to us, contain errors.
___I thought the rationale of the SBC takeover movement was to purge our institutions, doctrinal statements and not a few of our churches of people who believe their Bible has errors. Now the SBC’s own publishing house promotes a book that implies that the only Bible without errors is one that doesn’t exit.
___When it comes to the words "inerrant" and "infallible," try this one. "The terminology can even be dispensed with. No one word is essential, and everyone is not required to use the same words. One might choose ‘true,’ or ‘accurate,’ or whatever word conveys the same idea."
___In the 1980s and 1990s, it was not sufficient for moderates to say "my Bible is true" or "my Bible is accurate." The "I" words were the magic passwords necessary to prove one’s orthodoxy. That they are not essential now makes one wonder whether they were essential then.
___There’s room for one more. The authors admit the Bible employs metaphor, hyperbole and other figures of speech. "The Scriptures are meant to be interpreted normally rather than saying we hold that the Bible should be interpreted literally." They say, for example, that the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus’ miracle mentioned in all four gospels, could just as well have been 5,115 or 4,910 people present, but that when John says 153 fish were caught in the net it did not mean 152 or 154.
___This makes sense to me, at least until the authors say that "the Bible is either reliable altogether or else it is not necessarily reliable at all and thus may be suspect at any point." The authors, in defiance of this logic, seem about as likely as a moderate Baptist to decide for themselves what is metaphor or literal, precise or an approximation.
___ Actually, at some points Draper, Keathley and I agree on our understanding of biblical authority. Where we disagree, I honestly believe I and most moderates have a higher view of Scripture than they do.
___Now I’m really confused. Why were moderates the bad guys? Why did conservatives use the Bible to splinter our convention? Was the Bible just a red herring?
___ Am I speaking literally here, or metaphorically?
___Now you’re confused.
___You get my point.
___Mike Clingenpeel is editor of the Religious Herald, weekly newsjournal of the Baptist General Association of Virginia.
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