Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith?

A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture

James K. Hoffmeier, Dennis R. Magary, James K. Hoffmeier, Dennis R. Magary

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781433525742
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Is historical accuracy an indispensable part of the Bible's storyline, or is Scripture only concerned with theological truths? As progressive evangelicals threaten to reduce the Bible's jurisdiction by undermining its historical claims, every Christian who cares about the integrity of Scripture must be prepared to answer this question.

Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? offers a firm defense of Scripture's legitimacy and the theological implications of modern and postmodern approaches that teach otherwise. In this timely and timeless collection of essays, scholars from diverse areas of expertise lend strong arguments in support of the doctrine of inerrancy. Contributors explore how the specific challenges of history, authenticity, and authority are answered in the text of the Old and New Testaments as well as how the Bible is corroborated by philosophy and archaeology.

With contributions from respected scholars—including Allan Millard, Craig Blomberg, Graham Cole, Michael Haykin, Robert Yarbrough, and Darrell Bock— Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? arms Christians with fresh insight, arguments, and language with which to defend Scripture's historical accuracy against a culture and academy skeptical of those claims.

Part 1

BIBLICAL, SYSTEMATIC, AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY

1

RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY, THEOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE, AND CRITICAL BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP

A Theologian’s Reflections

THOMAS H. MCCALL

Introduction

“Do you want us to listen to you?”¹ Peter van Inwagen puts this question to contemporary mainstream New Testament scholarship. He makes clear just who he means by “you”: those who engage in historical-critical study of the New Testament, those who presuppose either a denial of “or neutrality about its authority, to investigate such matters as the authorship, dates, histories of composition, historical reliability and mutual dependency of the various books of the New Testament,” those who study the Bible by such methods as “source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism.”² He also specifies just who he means by “us”: believing Christians who are not trained New Testament scholars but who regard the New Testament as historically reliable; “we” are “ordinary churchgoers” and “pastors who minister to the ordinary churchgoers,” as well as “theologians who regard the New Testament as an authoritative divine revelation.”³

Do you want us to listen to you? Van Inwagen asks this as a serious question, and he follows it with an equally serious argument for some surprising conclusions.

First, “ordinary” Christians (Christians not trained in New Testament scholarship) have grounds for believing that the gospel stories are (essentially) historical—grounds independent of the claims of historical scholarship. Secondly, New Testament scholars have established nothing that tells against the thesis that ordinary Christians have grounds independent of historical studies for believing in the essential historicity of the gospel stories. Thirdly, ordinary Christians may therefore ignore any skeptical historical claims made by New Testament scholars with a clear intellectual conscience.⁴

What van Inwagen says about New Testament studies may just as easily be extended to critical biblical scholarship (hereafter CBS) more generally.⁵ Many proponents of CBS may be surprised and puzzled by van Inwagen’s question, and may reply, “Of course we want you to listen to us. We expect you to listen to us, and any honest seeker of truth naturally will look to the experts in the field for information. If you want to know the sober truth of the important issues at stake, then of course you will listen to us. Indeed, failure to listen to us is evidence of noetic laziness (at best) or intellectual dishonesty (at worst).”

But what would prompt a question such as that of van Inwagen? What is it that drives arguments such as his? A well-respected analytic philosopher, van Inwagen is not known for intellectual laziness, and to dismiss his claims out of hand as “dishonest” would itself be both lazy and judgmental. Furthermore, he speaks for many honest Christians; his concerns are more representative of many Christians who think long and hard about these matters than they are idiosyncratic.

In this essay, I first offer a sketch of some important recent work in religious epistemology, work that has direct bearing upon the efforts of CBS—but work that is often not given sufficient consideration by the proponents of CBS. I then relate that work in religious epistemology to some relevant issues in CBS, and I briefly engage with the work of some representative proponents of it. I conclude, not with any kind of slam-dunk argument, but with some serious epistemological and theological reflections.

Important Work in Religious Epistemology: A Brief Overview of Some Recent Contributions

The last few decades have been particularly fruitful in discussions of religious epistemology. While the vast majority of what has taken place is beyond the scope of this discussion, several particularly important elements deserve mention. So while I make no pretense that what follows is anything more than the barest sketch of some of these developments, even such a brief overview will serve to highlight some of the most important of these aspects.

Justification in Religious Epistemology

The position often known as “classical foundationalism” (or, alternatively, “strong foundationalism”) has been prominent in many quarters. Often pictured as a pyramid of knowledge, this view (or family of views) holds that claims to knowledge that could count as truly justified are of two classes: either those that are properly foundational (or “basic”) or those that are appropriately structured upon the properly foundational beliefs. Beliefs that could count as genuinely foundational or properly basic are only those that are either self-evident (e.g., laws of logic and mathematics) or evident to the senses.⁶ So if a belief is really justified, it is so by virtue of being either self-evident or evident to the senses (if foundational), or appropriately built upon such beliefs. Any justified belief would meet one of these two conditions: it will either satisfy

(CF1) being either self-evident or evident to the senses;

or

(CF2) being appropriately structured upon such (CF1) beliefs.

Classical foundationalism has attracted much criticism, and, while it is not without contemporary defenders, it is safe to say that it is on the defensive. One of the main areas of criticism is that classical foundationalism’s criteria for justified belief simply cannot account for a great deal of what we (safely) take to be true. Is the world more than five minutes old? Are there other minds? Critics of classical foundationalism (Alvin Plantinga being among the most important and distinguished of these critics) argue that it is notoriously hard to account for such important—one might even wish to say basic—beliefs as these: surely the world is more than five minutes old, and surely solipsism is false, but it is hard to rule out such obviously erroneous beliefs on classical foundationalism. Classical foundationalism is also commonly charged with being self-referentially incoherent. Is classical foundationalism itself properly basic? If it is, then it must either be self-evident or evident to the senses. So is it self-evident? Not at all. Is it evident to the senses? Not at all. Well, then, is it appropriately built up from something that is self-evident or evident to the senses? Not obviously. But if it cannot satisfy its own stated conditions for justified belief, then it is self-referentially incoherent. Being self-referentially incoherent is not a virtue, and the continuing defenders of classical foundationalism generally recognize that they have work before them. Nicholas Wolterstorff goes so far as to conclude that “on all fronts foundationalism is in bad shape. It seems to me that there is nothing to do but give it up for mortally ill and learn to live in its absence.”⁷

If the future of classical foundationalism is less than bright, what other options are there? One of the main alternatives is coherentism.⁸ Coherentism eschews the picture of the pyramid of knowledge, and instead conceives of knowledge as more akin to a web or a raft.⁹ There are various versions of coherentism, but what they share in common is the notion that a belief B is justified if and only if it coheres with the other beliefs in the system or web of beliefs. Some of the beliefs in the web will be more central than others and vital to the strength or integrity of the raft or web, while others will be on the periphery and of less importance. These beliefs can be adjusted “on the move”; just as one might be able to replace a piece of a raft while floating on it (as long as it is not too large or central), so also beliefs may be added or dropped as their coherence with the rest of the system is tested. Is a belief B justified for someone? Well, there is a way to check: is it consistent with the other beliefs in the epistemic web?¹⁰ If the belief in question is not consistent, then it is not justified. If it is consistent, then it can count as a justified belief (and, of course, if it is a justified true belief, then it counts as genuine knowledge).¹¹

Coherentism has also, however, come in for its share of powerful criticism.¹² There are some common and powerful philosophical objections to coherentist theories of justification: as Plantinga argues (via his example of the “Epistemically Inflexible Climber”), coherence is not sufficient for justification. As engagement with any real “true believer” in a conspiracy theory shows, it is possible to have a very coherent set of beliefs while many of those beliefs are completely out of touch with reality. Nor is it clear that coherence is necessary for justification. Many people will admit that there are times in their lives when it is hard to make everything “add up,” yet we seem to have good reason to hold to all of these beliefs. While tight coherence might be desirable, to conclude that it is necessary for justification would threaten to rule out many beliefs that really belong. At any rate, coherentism makes it tough to choose between competing “webs” or traditions. As William P. Alston puts it, “Coherentism continues to be faced with the stubborn fact that, however the notion of coherence is spelled out, it seems clear that there is an indefinitely large multiplicity of equally coherent systems of belief, with no way provided by coherence theory for choosing between them.”¹³

So if classical foundationalism and coherentism are both in trouble, what other options are there? Some of the most interesting proposals on the contemporary scene are those of the modest foundationalists, the most interesting and influential of which is Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology.”¹⁴ Plantinga is among the most insightful and powerful critics of both classical foundationalism and coherentism,¹⁵ but he thinks that the basic foundationalist structure is not itself problematical. The problems with classical foundationalism come from a foundation that simply is too narrow; the problems come when too little is allowed as properly basic. Taking suggestions from “reliabilism,” Plantinga proposes that “a belief is warranted if it is produced by our properly functioning cognitive faculties working in accord with their design plan.”¹⁶ Belief in God, he argues, itself is (or can be) properly basic. In other words, if it is produced by our cognitive faculties working according to their “design plan” (the sensus divinitatis, before the fall, or the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit,” in the postlapsarian state), belief in God need not be built upon beliefs that are more basic. So although the traditional arguments for the existence of God may have a useful place, they are not necessary for genuine or warranted belief. Moreover, the full panoply of Christian belief—the “great things of the gospel”: Trinity, incarnation, resurrection, atonement, salvation, eternal life, etc.—is also (or can be) “properly basic” for believers (on the “Extended Aquinas/Calvin Model”). So whatever value there might be in the arguments of evidentialist apologetics for, say, the historicity of something reported in the Bible, such arguments themselves are not necessary for robust and warranted Christian belief.¹⁷

Acceptance of the “Extended A/C” proposal does not mean that there is no place at all for apologetics, for Christian belief is not insulated from challenges and potential “defeaters” (some of which are recognized to come from CBS). It means only that apologetics will be focused (at least primarily) on “negative apologetics” (the task of responding to such challenges). Plantinga’s proposal continues to engender much debate, and we shall return to some relevant aspects of that controversy shortly. But even from this sketch it should become obvious that the proposal of “Reformed Epistemology”—as well as the state of play within religious epistemology more generally—has important implications for Christian engagement with CBS.

Internalism, Externalism, and Epistemic Virtues

The debates between internalists and externalists in epistemology are also interesting and important for our discussion. W. Jay Wood locates the “crux of the debate between internalists and externalists” in “the nature and extent of the personal access, or oversight, each of us must have to the factors contributing to our justified beliefs.”¹⁸ Internalists, whose ranks are composed of both foundationalists and coherentists, insist that the grounds of any truly justified beliefs must be something to which we have access (or could get su...