Chapter 7: A New Strategy

RW: All of this is quite a paradigm-shift for me, but before I forget and we move on to another theme, please tell me what you meant about ‘if Paul wrote Ephesians.’
AT: I guess I’ve been reading too much on Pauline scholarship lately. It’s just that most scholars outside of the conservative evangelical world don’t really think Paul wrote Ephesians or the Pastorals or even Colossians. But it doesn’t really matter to me. The Bible has authority whether Paul or one of his early followers wrote it.
RW: I have a sneaky suspicion that what you mean by ‘authority’ might be different than what I mean by it. Don’t you still believe that the Bible is ‘inerrant?’
AT: To be honest, I don’t feel that comfortable with any words that begin with ‘in’ used to describe the Bible. The push for inerrancy has really been a relatively new phenomena in the United States. It became a huge thing for evangelicals [some would call them simply fundamentalists] from the later 19th century onwards because it provided evangelicals with a much needed ‘foundation’ to lay the groundwork for ‘absolute truth’ in a fast-changing world becoming more and more complex. If the Bible is the error-free Word of God and is self-evidently interpreted with one meaning for every passage for all-time, then we have certainty about what Truth is. That kind of biblical reading strategy is not compelling to me like it was when we were in youth group. Sure it claims to provide simple, black-and-white answers to pretty much all of life’s questions, but I’ve found both life and the biblical text to be a lot more complex than we were taught back in our teenage years.
RW: Are you getting all of this from Yoder?
AT: No, actually Yoder doesn’t verbalize the battle over the Bible very much at all. I’ve read others like Jim McClendon, Nancey Murphy, N.T. Wright, Walter Brueggemann and Richard B. Hays who, in their own unique ways, write a lot about the baggage of modern biblical reading strategies like inerrancy and offer different paradigms. Yoder basically just models a different biblical reading strategy in all of his writings. He does, however, point to two specific doctrines about the Bible that have really held conservative evangelicals back over the years. First, the doctrine of perspicuity which ‘guaranteed that there can be no problems in understanding what the Bible says’ and, second, the doctrine of infallibility [or your even ‘higher’ authority: inerrancy] which ‘protected us against any significant clash with people holding other perspectives.’ When you combine these two theories about the Bible with the well-documented tendency for evangelicals to be anti-intellectual then, I think, it’s a biblical reading strategy that needs to be fixed. In fact, those, like you and I, who have been raised in the conservative evangelical tradition would only get anything from Yoder if we actually admitted that we may not be right about a lot of the biblical themes that we’ve taken at face value like those we’ve talked about for the past few hours: the cross, church, gospel, repentance, salvation, etc.
RW: It seems like you, or shall I say Yoder [?], are engaging with a completely different philosophical world than I am. I mean, as I listen to you, I would have a really difficult time accepting any sort of doctrine of the Bible besides inerrancy. If there are errors, then how would we even be sure Jesus rose from the dead, let alone was even an actual person? And then how would our salvation be assured?