Inerrancy and the Crisis of Evangelicals in the Late 70's
Last night I heard my friend Bob Price give a talk on his new book Inerrant the Wind, which describes the crisis evangelicals had in the late 70's to the early 80's, of which I remember very well. Harold Lindsell dropped his bombshell of a book on us titled, The Battle for the Bible, where he drew a line in the sand whereby evangelicals must accept inerrancy in order to stay evangelicals. Afterward all of us had to take a position on the matter.
This book is Price's dissertation finally in print about that era. There were five evangelical responses as he describes them. Each one of them opened the door to liberal thought, and he takes us through each one of them. Price argues that basically Lindsell was right. Once evangelicals denied inerrancy they were on a slippery slide to liberalism, but Lindsell was wrong in that the Bible is in fact errant, which led evangelicals to travel on this slippery slide in the first place. A history of evangelicals since that time proves that Price's predictions were correct. Evangelicals who denied inerrancy did indeed become more and more liberal. It's a good book and a very interesting read.
In our own day a recent attempt to reformulate and question inerrancy is the book by Carlos R. Bovell. He's already given up the ship.
I also had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Bruce of "Bruce Droppings" who also wrote about last night.
This book is Price's dissertation finally in print about that era. There were five evangelical responses as he describes them. Each one of them opened the door to liberal thought, and he takes us through each one of them. Price argues that basically Lindsell was right. Once evangelicals denied inerrancy they were on a slippery slide to liberalism, but Lindsell was wrong in that the Bible is in fact errant, which led evangelicals to travel on this slippery slide in the first place. A history of evangelicals since that time proves that Price's predictions were correct. Evangelicals who denied inerrancy did indeed become more and more liberal. It's a good book and a very interesting read.
In our own day a recent attempt to reformulate and question inerrancy is the book by Carlos R. Bovell. He's already given up the ship.
I also had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Bruce of "Bruce Droppings" who also wrote about last night.
3 comments:
Dr. Pirces book The reason Driven Life was my first exposure to looking critically at the fundamentalist madness I spent decades in. The book changed my life. I love his Bible Geek podcasts. His insights are fascinating. Looking back, it was the personal stories of Mr. Loftus and Dan Barker that gave flight to a new rational life. As the comments made in the above post, the emotional entanglement via authority figures selling you on the talking snake, 6 day creation, light before stars, piles of foreskins, incest, and a old man responsible for gathering specimens of every living thing in a boat made with stone tools…yeah, I remember now.
The world is a better place thanks to insiders asking important questions, and the boldness to step out of the herd. I will always be in debt to you who have shared things out of the Teachers Edition of “Sunday School Lessons.”
Why do you assume liberalism is wrong a prori? If the implications of the Bible lead one to a liberal conclusions why is not indicative of the truth in Christianity?
I'll never understand this strange game atheists play where they really want to be book ends with fundamentalism. Just like the communists vs anti-communists, these are the only two alternatives everything else has to be a lie.
One other thing I wanted to say, John's comments are on target as far as they go. I've seen that attitude of fear fostered by that period which has led to a bibliolotry in which the fundies have forgotten that the gospel is about Jesus and have begun to actually put the Bible on the level of Jesus as an object of worship. At one point a group of fundies on CARM actually tried to maintain the Bible is "IS" Jesus! They meant this in a sense very similar to Catholic notions of transubstantiation. The CARM guys (Mat and Di) put that down.
I think to really be complete in rounding at an exposition of that period you need to cover the charismatics and the Reaganites. I think the Reagan thing is responsible for all the fundie extremes that came out of that era. They hijacked the charismatic movement in order to turn it into a right wing organizing tool.
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