Tag: Becker

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Inerrancy and Science Part 3: Human Finitude of Scientific Paradigms

However, Becker and others ultimately assert that if science says that Scripture is wrong, Scripture must simply bow to the superior wisdom of science and modify its claims. In this vein Becker tells us that we can no longer believe that death is the result of sin (Romans 5), since the theory of biological evolution presupposes that death is simply another cog in the cosmic machine of life.

Such a perspective is problematic for several reasons. First, it presupposes that raw scientific data simply reveal the inner structures of reality to rational and autonomous human beings in an absolutely transparent manner. Nevertheless, although humans have access to the data of reality, their finitude means that such data are always incomplete. Moreover, such data are always interpreted within a scientific paradigm, or interpretive lens, that organizes the information. Since these lenses are always provisional and not infrequently wrong, humans cannot claim any scientific judgment is infallible.1

Hence, if a scientific theory or piece of historical or scientific datum seems to contradict Scripture, there is no particular reason to think Scripture is wrong. Many scientific theories have turned out to be wrong. These incorrect theories and discredited paradigms include many that contradicted Scripture. In these cases the error was in the minds of the interpreters and not in Scripture itself. If we follow Becker’s suggestion, we would operate under the assumption that the Word of God is fallible but human reason is not. In light of history, this position is untenable.

Indeed, if Christians of the past had followed Becker and his seeming faith in the near-infallibility of science, they would have been proven wrong in the long term on numerous occasions.2 One wonders how Becker would answer such a challenge. Should Thomas Aquinas have simply rejected creation ex nihilo because Aristotle and the Arabic philosophers posited the eternity of the universe?3

Aquinas not amused when natural philosophers deny creation ex nihilo.

What about scientific racism and eugenics? Should early twentieth-century Christians simply have rejected the scriptural teaching of a common origin of humanity and accepted what was then considered to be a highly scientific theory of polygenesis and racial gradations?4 To this latter point Becker would likely say that scientific racism and eugenics were simply junk science, whereas macroevolution and other newer scientific theories are not. Nonetheless, just as contemporary macroevolution is taught at all major universities and forms the basis of many governmental policies, so too were once scientific racism and eugenics. Also, in the light of the paradigmatic anomalies of irreducible complexity, gene entropy, and the lack of transitional species in the fossil record, macroevolution has more problems as a theory regarding the origins of life than Becker allows.5

To be continued…..

Part 1 available here; Part 2 available here; Part 4 available here; and Part 5 available here

[1] See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

[2] See similar arguments in Angus J. L. Menuge, “The Cultural and Aesthetic Impact of Lutheranism,” in Where Christ Is Present: A Theology for All Seasons on the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation, ed. John Warwick Montgomery and Gene Edward Veith (Corona, CA: 1517 Legacy, 2015), 220–29.

[3] J. B. M. Wissink, ed., The Eternity of the World in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas and His Contemporaries (Leiden: Brill, 1990).

[4] See Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (Washington, DC: Dialogue Press, 2012); Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

[5] See Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996); David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010).

Adapted from Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 114-115.

Image from Mary Fairchild, “Biography of Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Angels,” Learn Religion, September 22, 2019, https://www.learnreligions.com/thomas-aquinas-4769163.

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Human Agency in Relation to Verbal Inspiration

The doctrine of verbal inspiration should not be confused with a kind of mania that eliminates human agency.[1] When the Bible and the later Lutheran scholastics speak of verbal inspiration, they do not mean that God took over the minds of the prophets and apostles so that they ceased to function consciously as the men they were.

Nevertheless, it is very common to hear modern scholars and theologians attack the theologians of scholastic orthodoxy for essentially teaching such a doctrine. For example, Matthew Becker suggests that verbal inspiration and inerrancy erase human agency in the production of the Scriptures.[2] Becker claims Johann Gerhard taught that divine inspiration makes the inspired author like a flute played by God.[3] Such a claim lacks validity: Gerhard never uses such an analogy in his treatment of inspiration.

The manic concept of inspiration actually is present not in the Protestant scholastics but in the Ante-Nicene fathers. Indeed, one finds the flute analogy for divine inspiration in the second-century apologist Athenagoras.[4] As men of their time and cultural milieu, these theologians often borrowed this concept of inspiration from earlier Jewish and Hellenistic sources. Within the Palestinian Jewish tradition, the intertestamental Book of Jubilees (second century B.C.) speaks of Moses receiving the Torah as a whole on Mt. Sinai in the form of heavenly tablets.[5] This concept suggests an extraordinarily crude notion of inspiration as a kind of literal dictation.

Likewise, pagan Hellenistic culture possessed a concept of prophecy that was manic. Inspiration was understood as a state wherein the rationality and self-consciousness of the individual disappeared and was replaced by the divine agent, whatever form that might take.[6] Taking over this conception as part of their cultural assimilation, some Hellenistic Jews (notably Philo of Alexandria) came to think of Moses and the prophets as entering a kind of trance state brought on by the power of the Spirit.[7] Although Hellenistic Jews and the later Ante-Nicene fathers generally did not think the prophets and apostles had behaved in an irrational manner in the state of inspiration,[8] they nevertheless did speak of God taking over their minds.[9]

Although admittedly there are portions of the Bible where those prophesying enter into a trancelike state (1 Sm 10:10–12; 19:24), there is no evidence to suggest that such a state led to the production of the Scriptures themselves. Indeed, writings like the Psalms embody a genuinely human voice that prays, laments, repents, and praises God. At the same time the Psalms repeatedly are referred to by Jesus and the New Testament authors as divine prophecy and therefore the very voice of God (Mk 12:35–37; Jn 10:30–36; Acts 4:25–26; Heb 2:6–8, etc.).

[1] Franzmann, “New Testament View of Inspiration,” 746.

[2] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 305–6.

[3] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 305.

[4] See Leslie William Barnard, Athenagoras: A Study in Second Century Christian Apologetic (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972), 76.

[5] Leslie Baynes, The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses 200 BCE–200 CE (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 110.

[6] See Christopher Forbes, Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity and Its Hellenistic Environment (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 124–42.

[7] For example, Philo writes of prophecy: “No pronouncement of a prophet is ever his own; he is an interpreter prompted by another in all his utterances . . . when knowing not what he does he is filled with inspiration, as the reason withdraws and surrenders the citadel of his soul to a new visitor and tenant, the Divine Spirit which plays upon his vocal organism and dictates words which clearly express its prophetic message.” Philo, De specialibus legibus 4.49. Cited in Henri Blocher, “God and the Scripture Writers,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016), 503.

[8] Charles Hill, “‘The Truth above All Demonstration’: Scripture in the Patristic Period to Augustine,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, 81–83.

[9] Blocher, “God and the Scripture Writers,” 503–4; Preus, “View of the Bible,” 363.

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 132-133.

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Inerrancy and the Sacramental Nature of Scripture

By contrast, the confessional Lutheran commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture is based on the sacramental nature of Scripture. Just as the reality of grace in the sacraments is hidden in and under the physical elements and is recognizable only due to the word of promise attached to them, God’s Word in Scripture is recognizable as such because of the dominical promise of infallibility Christ has attached to the authors and their words. Hence, calling into question the inerrancy of the Bible also means calling into question the validity of the sacraments. If Christ’s promise remains good for the sacraments, then it should hold for the inerrancy of the Scriptures. Because Christ has risen from the dead, thereby validating all He has said and done, we must believe Him over our fallen and finite human reason. Indeed, as Luther aptly states in the Large Catechism regarding the promise of Christ: “Because we know that God does not lie. I and my neighbor and, in short, all men, may err and deceive, but the Word of God cannot err.”[1] If [Matthew] Becker wishes to accept the validity of the sacraments (as one suspects he does) but not the inerrancy of Scripture, then he must insist on arbitrarily rejecting one of Christ’s dominical promises while accepting the others.[2]

Finally, as observed earlier with regard to [Rudolf] Bultmann, the Gospel cannot be isolated from the scriptural worldview, narrative, and other dogmas of the faith. As we have shown repeatedly, while the Gospel is the central article (Hauptartikel) of the faith, it nevertheless does not exhaust the content of the Christian faith. Neither does the Gospel exist in isolation from other revealed truths. By analogy we may say that if the Scriptures are like a wheel, the Gospel is the axle and the other articles of the faith like the spokes. Although an axle is central to the functioning of a wheel, the wheel is in fact non-functional without the spokes.[3]

In the same manner, the Gospel is ultimately a solution to the problem of the sin committed originally by Adam and Eve and transmitted to their descendants. Adam and Eve could sin only because they were creatures who violated the Law of their creator God. Similarly, Christ’s atoning work would be incoherent without the doctrines of the Trinity or the incarnation or the background of the whole history of Israel. The difficulty with Becker wishing to make the Gospel the ultimate criterion of all theological authority is that the Gospel does not make sense without the context of the total witness of the Bible and hence its inerrant authority.[4] If I believe the Gospel as true unconditionally, then I must believe the whole Bible as unconditionally true.

[1] LC IV (Bente, 747).

[2] Reu makes a similar point. See Johann Michael Reu, Lutheran Dogmatics (Dubuque: Wartburg Theological Seminary, 1951), 459–60.

[3] This is a common analogy within many conservative Lutheran circles. Nevertheless, I thank the Rev. David Fleming for first alerting me to it.

[4] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 285.

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 110-111.