Carlos Bovell’s book, Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals, grabbed my attention, simply because I know how evangelicals often teach as though inerrancy is the key to genuine faith in God. Bovell hazards something of the obverse: inerrancy will ruin the spiritual formation of ‘younger evangelicals’, a term he self-consciously borrows from Robert Webber’s book, The Younger Evangelicals.
In the introduction, the author seems worried about the way in which inerrancy hinders the interpretation of the text, and thus prevents readers from fully understanding the Bible for what it is. For example, evangelical scholars encountering a problem surfaced by critical scholarship will enter into apologetic mode, and seek only to find a way of downplaying the problem (through, e.g., harmonization). Bovell thinks once younger evangelicals recognize the flimsiness of these apologetic interpretations and how inadequate they are for a reading of Scripture, they will become disillusioned with the Christian faith altogether. Indeed, he admits it happened to him. As noted above, for evangelicals, faith in the Bible is paramount to faith in God; when the former falls, so does the latter.
The book is not just concerned with how inerrancy corrupts the reading of Scripture, however; it also tackles the larger culture of evangelical theology. The author seems to think, though regrettably nowhere states outright, that inerrancy is but a product of the larger evangelical understanding of truth. Thus, one way of reading Bovell’s book is to see it as not so much decrying the affect of the doctrine of inerrancy, but evangelicalism’s philosophical underpinnings. Indeed, as it becomes apparent, Bovell worries that the evangelical concept of truthfulness actually conflicts with the nature of faith and the reality of the Bible, a recipe for spiritual torture.
The first chapter considers the evangelical investment in “worldview philosophy” (see books by IVP’s James Sire or the project of J. P. Moreland and Bill Craig). Bovell notes that according to most theorists, the chief characteristic of a worldview is its ability to see the world through a single interpretive grid, thus possessing coherence and capacity for synthesis. Yet, says Bovell, Christianity “will produce worldviews that are inevitably 1) inconsistent to varying degrees; 2) inherently plural; 3) ’synthesis-frustraters’” (p. 16). He goes on to demonstrate these, pointing to things like the hypostatic union and the way in which mystery is an irremovable feature of faith, to the affect that it allows diverse, even divergent views to be compatible with Christian revelation.
In a sense, this first chapter complements some claims by Kenton Sparks in his book, God’s Word in Human Words. Sparks argues that inerrancy is actually a product of the influence of Cartesianism upon evangelical epistemology. Sparks thinks that because evangelicals assume something like the Cartesian view of indubitable truths, they can only see the Bible as authoritative if its claims operate thus. Sparks thinks that these philosophical commitments keep evangelicals from actually viewing the Bible as it is. For both authors, it seems, the real problem is the conflict between the evangelical concept of what counts as truth and the fact of Christian truth. And in a sense, both authors are aware of how evangelicals have invested themselves in outdated views, and thus, sensitive to the changing intellectual landscape, worry younger evangelicals are feeling the pressure. Bovell simply highlights how this erroneous investment will return a deficit to evangelical spirituality once younger evangelicals find out for themselves how inadequate it is.
So much for chapter 1. What are your thoughts? Is it true that evangelicals have invested themselves in certain philosophical systems and that is what shapes their doctrine of inerrancy? If you’re an evangelical, do you resonate with spiritual turmoil over inerrancy?
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