One of the latest wave-making academic books within evangelicalism is Kenton L. Sparks’s God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008).
Today the Old Testament Department at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School had a stimulating “brown bag seminar” for an hour during lunch to discuss this book. I left that meeting thanking God for Trinity’s gifted OT faculty.
- Dennis Magary moderated.
- Dick Averbeck summarized and evaluated.
- James Hoffmeier summarized and evaluated.
- Willem VanGemeren summarized and evaluated.
- Lawson Younger offered comments.
- John Monson (who was friends with Peter Enns while they both studied at Harvard) offered comments.
I don’t feel at liberty to publish my notes or their handouts online, but suffice it to say that the OT faculty agrees that Sparks’s book is deeply flawed and dangerous. (I’m paraphrasing, not directly quoting.)
Sparks uncritically accepts critical views and is overconfident in his conclusions while severely criticizing evangelicals like D. A. Carson, Robert Yarbrough, Kevin Vanhoozer, and James Hoffmeier. Sparks takes the debate beyond Peter Enns’s Inspiration and Incarnation. The book’s subtitle should not include the word “evangelical”: God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship.
More reviews of this book are forthcoming. (For example, look for one by Bob Yarbrough in the next issue of Themelios.) Here are a couple of others already published:
- The enthusiastic RBL review by Arthur Boulet, an M.A. student at Westminster Theological Seminary and an ardent supporter of Peter Enns, is sad. A sharp friend of mine who is working on a PhD elsewhere emailed me this after reading it: “This review makes me want to cry. May God grant grace.”
- The review by Kevin Bauder is a breath of fresh air in comparison.
Updates:
1. S. M. Baugh reviewed Sparks’s book for Reformation21 in August 2008.
2. Gary L. W. Johnson comments on Sparks’s book in the introduction to Reforming or Conforming: Post-Conservative Evangelicals and the Emerging Church (ed. Gary L. W. Johnson and Ronald L. Gleason; Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 23n21:
Sparks in particular paints contemporary defenders of inerrancy in very unflattering colors. Old Testament scholars such as R. K. Harrison, Gleason Archer, and E. J. Young are accused of sticking their heads in the sand to avoid dealing with the real issues raised by critical Old Testament scholars (133ff ) while New Testament scholars such as D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo are said to be guilty of deliberately dodging the issues of New Testament critics (167). Even greater disdain is heaped on Carl Henry, who had the misfortune of simply being a theologian and not a biblical scholar (138). However, the most reprehensible aspect of Sparks’s work is the facile labeling of all defenders of inerrancy as Cartesian foundationalists. Sparks declares Cornelius Van Til, and his presuppositional apologetics, to be Cartesian because Van Til underscored the importance of certainty, which to Sparks’s way of thinking automatically makes one a Cartesian (45). If that is the case, then we must place not only the Reformers and the church fathers in that category, but Christ and the apostles as well! Van Til was no Cartesian. His apologetical approach was rooted in classic Reformed theology, especially in the Dutch tradition of Kuyper and Bavinck, stretching back to the noted Dutch Protestant scholastic Peter Van Mastricht (1630–1706), who was an outspoken critic of all things Cartesian. As Richard Muller notes, “Mastricht’s consequent stress on the necessity of revelation for Christian theology (theology defined as ‘living before God in and through Christ’ or as the wisdom leading to that end) led to an adamant resistance to Cartesian thought with its method of radical doubt and its insistence on the primacy of autonomy of the mind in all matters of judgment.” Richard Muller, “Giving Direction to Theology: The Scholastic Dimension,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 28 (June 1985), 185.
3. Robert W. Yarbrough, “The Embattled Bible: Four More Books,” Themelios 24 (2009): 6–25.
4. A Book-Length Response to Kent Sparks
5. “Scripture: How the Bible Is a Book Like No Other,” in Don’t Call It a Comeback: The Old Faith for a New Day 
(ed. Kevin DeYoung; Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 59–69.
Hello Andy,
I appreciate your comments and the discussion you have facilitated about this book. I am a Bible undergrad (and possibly a prospective Trinity student) presently wrestling with the issues presented in Sparks’ work. I am curious whether you might be willing to share your notes from the faculty seminar on an individual basis. I am anxious to hear how they are responding exactly. Thanks.
Hey, Jordan.
I think it’d be best if you contacted the OT profs directly. (There email addresses are available here.)
Also, the lead essay in the next issue of Themelios (which should come out around mid-April) is by Dr. Robert W. Yarbrough, and he thoughtfully reviews Sparks’s book in a way that will serve you.
Ok, thanks Andy. I look forward to that essay.
Brian,
No problem with the late response. Sorry mine is even later! I’ve been so busy I don’t have time to reflect on what I might write as a response to your queries, but I would refer you to my book and also to a remark by Richard Hays for further consideration of one of my chief complaints:
“One apologetic response I encountered, especially among evangelical writers, was to argue for the authority of scripture by citing isolated Bible verses. Even apart from the disconcerting logical circularity of such arguments, they fail the test of careful exegesis. Scriptural passages that refer to “the word of God” are not speaking–at least not in any simple sense–of the canonical text of the Bible. Rather they are speaking of the word orally proclaimed in a particular setting by a prophet or apostle. Therefore, to invoke these texts in defense of biblical authority entails an act of unacknowledged special pleading, a theological sleight of hand that transmutes statements about prophetically proclaimed words into doctrines about the subsequently canonized text of the Bible.” (Foreword to Telford Work’s Living and Active, xiii-xiv.)
In short, we all have extra-biblical standards we are invoking. One problem is–at least in my judgment–that inerrantists for whatever reason still feel the need to try to convince others (or mainly themselves?) that their extra-biblical standards are somehow “really” biblical.
Grace and peace.
On the car ride home it occurred to me that one thing I might infer from your last statement is that there is no reason for me to keep writing any more because (in addition to my present lack of time) inerrancy can never be disproven anyway. For if I were to raise a problem, you can always say (and you may even count it a virtue to say) that inerrantists just haven’t figured that one out yet. Even when you quote an author from over a hundred years ago that says inerrantists still haven’t figured it out yet and maybe never will, it doesn’t even come to mind that maybe the reason no inerrantists have figured it out yet is that the error can’t be explained away.
Is there a point when an apparent error can be declared an error? I would think that inerrancy would have more going for it if it were subject to eventual refutation at some point. Let me be clear: I think inerrantists are within their paradigmatic rights to persist in their beliefs in spite of anomalies but non-inerrantists are also justified to give up inerrantism when the anomalies are of such a kind that a paradigm shift can no longer be forestalled. I have a forthcoming essay that goes into a little more detail on this.
In any event, I enjoyed our little discussion here.
Grace and peace.
Carlos
Carlos,
I just checked on this post and noticed your response. Here’s my reply, in case you check back at some later point.
In response to Hays, I would refer him first to John Frame’s helpful treatment of circularity in DKG, p. 130ff. Frame actually uses Scripture’s claims about Scripture as an illustration of his point.
Secondly, though Hay’s complaint may be hold true for some “word of God” texts (though even in many of these cases “the word orally proclaimed in a particular setting by a prophet or apostle” has been preserved within the canonical Scriptures), it’s not really relevant to the texts we’ve been discussing, since those text focus on the written Scriptures of the Christian canon.
As to whether the doctrine of inerrancy is falsifiable, I’d say the exegesis supporting the Bible’s claim to inerrancy would have to first be proved to be wrong. Until that happens it seems to sheer hubris to declare something God says is not in error is in error simply because we can’t figure out a resolution with the limited data available to us.
Brian
Brian,
I am under a pile of work, but I stumbled upon this post again and saw your remarks.
I have to say that I don’t understand your point at all about Acts 4 and how I have to square it with anything. The fact that the writer of Acts includes in the narrative a scene where Peter says that the Holy Spirit spoke through a Psalm has nothing to do with inerrancy. If one comes to the text with inerrancy in mind or specifically looking to contrive an inerrancy doctrine than I guess people can find some apologetic use for it, but otherwise I do not see what it is that I have an obligation to reconcile. Everyone thought certain religious books were special in Second Temple Judaism. What I am supposed to take away from this?
On John Frame, my general opinion of him is that he is a very careful and judicious thinker. That said, his discussion about circular thinking seems quite wrong-headed to me. Actually encouraging his readers to practice thinking in circles? The only reason, I think, conservatives keep pointing to him is because he is a systematic thinker who is trying to defend the Bible. Were it any other context or any other purpose to which he set these arguments, the chapter would appear much more ill-advised than it apparently does to conservatives. For example, replace scripture with the Quran or with the Book of Latter Day Saints and see if the argument has the same ring of reasonableness to it. It merely insulates one from criticism. I see no benefit in that. People think in circles when they begin with a principle, not with an already wrought system like Calvinism!
Lastly, you say hubris, I say taboo. It has become a religious and social taboo not to look at the Bible more critically–this effectively blocks people from entertaining the possibility that maybe the Bible’s authority is not yet properly understood among conservatives and that believers are actually and eagerly imposing inerrancy upon the Bible from the outside.
Look at it this way, how might a Muslim ever be dissuaded that the Quran is not inerrant? He/she can just wait forever and say that they just haven’t figured that one out yet and go on about their business. Every textually oriented religion has that prerogative. It’s just that I finally have reached my limit and have had to admit, “How about that? The Bible’s not inerrant!” (After some weeping and gnashing of teeth) now I can go on with my life.
Grace and peace.
Carlos
Hi Andy,
Appreciate the review of the book and the links you provide. However, I must admit, I didn’t find it all that helpful since you, for the most part, simply lament Sparks’ position on theological grounds rather than addressing the issues he in fact raises on factual grounds.
I can’t say that I agree with Sparks, as I’m not an Old Testament scholar (or a biblical scholar of any kind), but I’d like to see evangelicals raise the bar by moving beyond polemical responses to the “liberals” within their ranks.
Neither the theologians and scholars that Sparks criticizes nor inerrancy as defended by Carson, Beale, Henry, et al., are sacrosanct, especially if the discussion is in regard to _evidence_ and not merely _theological presupposition_. Also, I don’t think that we should _necessarily_ embrace every aspect of the modern definition of inerrancy, or the modernist presuppositions that some bring to the discussion (and I am not here referring to the ‘correspondence’ theory of truth, which I do believe we need to maintain, but rather, a more nuanced discussion of genre and historiography).
Naturally, there can and should be a vigorous debate about what the evidence suggests and how strong the evidence is, and therefore what conclusions we should come to, and that’s where I’d like to see the conversation go. Mere theological reactionism, on the other hand, tends to stifle the conversation, paint the “opponents” in a worse light, and leave us less, rather than more, prepared to deal with those who would wield the conclusions of modern scholarship as a weapon against Christianity, which from everything Sparks affirms in his comments here, he clearly is not doing.
All the Best,
Marc
P.S. As a graduate of Biola University, I’m very familiar with the milleu in which this entire discussion takes place, and, as a conservative Christian, I’m very hesitant to take a “lesser” view of any part of Scripture; nevertheless, as someone who’s seen people struggle sincerely with the issues raised in books like Sparks’, I believe we need an honest dialogue that assumes the best, not the worst, in those who disagree with us, yet affirm the centrality of Christ in God’s salvific scheme.