Read with a critical eye both of what the author is saying and what the author is not saying. Do they only voice concerns in one direction? Do they only care about the overreach of the evangelical interpreter and not the overreach of critical scholarship? Does their approach provide the grounds upon which they can claim that Jesus Christ is the only way, truth, life? This is not a “slippery slope” question, any more than any argument presupposes a slippery slope, but this is a substantial argument that gets at the deeply held claims of the believing community.

There has been quite a lot of discussion in recent years about evangelical scholarship in the Old Testament and the validity of the doctrine of Scriptural inerrancy. As I watch from my perch in an evangelical and Reformed seminary, I have a few preliminary thoughts on some of the issues that seem to keep coming up.

1. Tradition should be applied into a present community. I wholeheartedly support the idea that each new generation should confirm the doctrine of Scripture and its authority in the Christian life. Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants like Augustine, Calvin, Hodge, Bavinck, and Warfield, but at the same time our young pastors and scholars need to be personally impressed with the central role of Scripture as God’s unique revelation in this world and that impression needs to be based on both tradition and rigorous personal study. So it is important for us to engage with the challenges to scriptural authority that arise and to revisit and renew our own views of how these challenges relate to the Christian life. It is not enough just to lay hold of tradition, but rather we ought to desire a living faith that is rooted in and blossoms from tradition but is applied in the present life.

2. Epistemology is a fickle subject. We should point out that there is no epistemologically unmarked or merely common sense view of God’s authority in the Scriptures. It is not as if the inerrantist scholarship is completely fideistic and irrational, while the modern critical scholarship is completely rational and based on discernible evidence. To hold such a view is both naive and possibly quaint and appears to be ignorant of the discussions of the mid-20th century on the issues of epistemology and faith.

Yes, saying that the Nephilim descended from aliens displays a radically untenable position, but so does saying that all that humans can know is that which is scientifically observed. Between these two poles, however, we find a rich range of competing faith claims about life, the universe, and meaning. Appealing to human authority doesn’t get one very far either.

In other words, some scholars seem ignorant of the best aspects of their own recent tradition, and they end up making this a debate between faith and reason, a distinction which is incredibly reductionistic and quite frankly counterproductive.

3. The Bible can be an offensive text. To claim that one merely wants to take the Bible as it is and not as one wants it to be appears, at first blush, to be an attractive proposition. But, if one then goes on to reject whole sections of Scripture as being offensive and historically unreliable, we might wonder how exactly the Bible is being taken on its own terms at all. Rather it seems that the Scriptures are being treated as a cafeteria line where one might pick and choose what one finds acceptable and reject whatever one finds repulsive. Of course, many human interpreters have been tempted to read the Bible like a holy “choose-your-own-adventure” novel, which is why no one reads the prophetic books (*Old Testament professor facepalm*) and why we should never forget the fact of our own selectivity.

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