Clarke Morledge -- Computer Network Engineer, College of William and Mary...
I hiked the Mount of the Holy Cross, one of the famous Colorado Fourteeners, with some friends in July, 2012. My buddy, Mike Scott, snapped this photo of me on the summit.
As John mentioned yesterday, he and I have been invited to blog our way through the season of Lent, with a group of fellow believers in our local community of faith. I thought it might be nice to first reflect on where “Lent” came from. We hope you enjoy these posts….
Gregory the Great (540-604) dictating the Gregorian chant
The period of Lent, derived from a 14 century English word for “springtime”, has a long history within Christianity. In the first few centuries of the Christian movement, believers would spend several days in fasting and preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection at Easter. The Lenten period was eventually extended to forty days, but it got its biggest boost from the sixth century bishop of Rome, Gregory the Great (540-604). Gregory moved the beginning of Lent to what many Christians now call “Ash Wednesday”, establishing “Lent” as an important period in the yearly calendar of the Western Christian church.
The Chapel is a diverse community of faith, and so the idea of “Lent” for some may sound a little weird, or simply “a bit too Catholic”. So perhaps it might be some consolation to you to know…
What does it mean to say that the Bible is without error? For a number of people, the answer is a no-brainer: either the Bible has errors (skeptics) or it does not (Bible-believer). But is it really that simple?
Back in the 1970s, a group of evangelical scholars got together and drafted The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. It was an attempt by the best conservative evangelical minds at the time to articulate an understanding of the authority of Scripture that was faithful and consistent with what the Scriptures actually teach. The framers remarkably were able to come together with a unified understanding of what inerrancy means with respect to the Bible. For example, while English grammarians may dispute the correctness of using “regardless” or “irregardless” in a sentence, such similar issues of standardization for ancient Greek grammar do not apply to the concept of inerrancy according to the Chicago framers. In other words, the New Testament was never meant to be a textbook in Greek grammar. While the Chicago Statement was largely accepted within the evangelical faith community back then, there were some rough edges.
Those rough edges are still with us some thirty years later.
In Zondervan’s latest Counterpoint series book, Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy, we find Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the intellectual leader of the largest Protestant evangelical denomination in North America. He enthusiastically supports and affirms the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy to be just as true for us today as it was back in the 1970s. Al Mohler is smart. He is articulate. He is well-read. He is passionate for the truth.
But according to Bible scholar and Ancient Near East literature expert Pete Enns, Al Mohler is also dead wrong. To those familiar with the compromises associated with liberal Protestantism, the complaint registered by Enns is nothing new, except that Pete Enns says that he is still speaking as an evangelical. Enns, formerly an Old Testament scholar at the Westminster Theological Seminary, says that the Chicago understanding of inerrancy advocated by Mohler is flawed and does not do proper justice to how the Bible truly presents itself to us.
In between the above polar opposite positions (further represented with excerpts from the book on the BibleGateway blog by Mohler and Enns) are other contributors, Kevin Vanhoozer, Michael Bird, and John Franke, each who in their own distinct way think that while inerrancy is still in some sense a useful term for understanding the authority of Scripture, its definition should be carefully reevaluated in view of new challenges to our understanding of the Biblical text.
When thinking about inerrancy, there is a certain sense of nuance involved and attention to what is meant by “inerrancy“. For those who look at the Bible from afar, this may not register too much, but for those who really dive into the Biblical text, as John Paine is encouraging us to do in his recent series on Who Wrote the Bible, it becomes really important.
I want to go on record and say that statements like these make me cringe. I can understand when it can be confusing when we run into evidence from science and history that contradict certain ways of reading the Bible. But it becomes clearly absurd when straight-forward mathematics are involved.
Sure, I was a mathematics major in college, so I could be a little prejudiced here. But with all due respect to Pastor LaRuffa, I am not persuaded that this is quite what the Lord has in mind with respect to the authority of God’s Word. Continue reading
Molly Worthen says that there is a “crisis of authority” within the evangelical church today. What authority holds the evangelical movement together: a commitment to Biblical inerrancy, a common “born-again” experience, a shared vision for the transformation of culture, or something else?
Apostles of Reason is an intellectual history of the evangelical Christianity movement over the past 70 years or so, sprinkled with fascinating portraits of influential Christian thinkers, activists, and preachers. But it seeks to make some major corrections. First, many critics in our culture today dismiss evangelical faith as simply a form of anti-intellectualism. Consider the recent Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate. In the popular mind, this pitted a secular, science-affirming worldview against an entrenched dogmatism incapable of change and meaningful intellectual engagement.
Worthen finds this assessment to be entirely incorrect. Instead, Worthen finds evangelical Christianity to be highly rational and intellectual. The problem is that evangelical Christianity does not play by the rules of secular academia. The secular world evaluates truth in terms of an adherence to a scientific method and the embrace of vetted peer review among educated colleagues.
Popular evangelical thought, on the other hand, bypasses much of this encumbrance by taking the message of a fully sound and rationalistically reliable Christian message straight to the people. Far from being “anti-science”, as in the case of the “creationism” debate, evangelical Christians see themselves as simply building upon what the famous 19th century Princeton theologian, Charles Hodge, saw as the “storehouse of facts” that are found within the Bible, accessible to anyone who can read. There is no need to be a “Bible scholar” to discover God’s Truth as found in Scripture. Just read the Bible for yourself! To the frustrations of the Bill Nyes of this world, Christians are making an appeal to an infallible authority that transcends both the limitations of a modernistic, falsely optimistic belief in science to solve all problems on the one side and a postmodern cultural relativism that has no unified vision of ethics and meaning on the other.
But what is the nature of this infallible authority? This question really gets to the heart of Worthen’s thesis. Continue reading
In Why Evolution is True, biologist and atheist Jerry Coyne seeks to drive a wedge between intelligent design and NeoDarwinian evolution, favoring the latter. But what if the Bible and “real world” engineering both make a case that there is less of a contrast than what Coyne would have us believe? Would a little imagination from an engineer help?
When God created the world did He do so as a Master Engineer or as a Tinkerer?
I recently finished listening to an audiobook by Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago biologist, and vocal critic of Christian interpretations of science. In Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne is making the argument that the biological theory of evolution rules out the possibility of Intelligent Design. Evolution does not reflect the divine activity of a Creator. According to Coyne, the biological world does not resemble the work of someone creating things from scratch. Instead, the evolutionary process demonstrates the work of tinkering; that is, working with a limitation of available parts, experimenting at putting together different solutions. Tinkering is not very efficient, nor does it always produce the most beneficial results, hardly becoming the activity of a Divine Creator. But for Coyne, this tinkering is exactly what NeoDarwinian evolution is all about… and it is true.
Jerry Coyne did his undergraduate work at the College of William and Mary, finishing in the 1970’s. I currently work at William and Mary as a network engineer. Coyne is a superbly skilled scientist, but I need to respond to him as an engineer. Continue reading
Gregory the Great (540-604) dictating the Gregorian chant 
