Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis in Biblical Authority by Robert M. Price

Author:Robert M. Price
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2009-08-26T06:23:00+00:00

EVANGELICAL DEMYTHOLOGIZING

As is well known, Bultmann contended, "It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles"" It is equally well known that evangelical theologians have risen up with one voice to counter this assertion; for do they not both live in the modern world and believe in the supernatural? Bultmann anticipated such a reaction: "We may think that we can manage it," but, it is implied, no one really lives as though he believed in the supernatural world of the New Testament, and actions speak louder than words. The following analysis will seek to demonstrate that, on several issues, evangelicals have unwittingly proven Bultmann at least partially correct. These issues concern doctrinal points that are rightly deemed secondary in their own right, but which have the important effect of bracketing off from present experience the supernatural elements to be expected if the biblical worldview were normative for today as evangelicals claim. Examples will make this claim clearer.

Evangelicals have tended to have something of a "love-hate" relationship with miracles. They have sought strenuously to vindicate belief in them against skeptics. Sometimes, as James Barr has shown with ruthless clarity, they have even unwittingly evacuated the miracle narratives of any supernatural element, making the text historically acceptable by analogy with well-established events that were similar in description to the biblical ones, but naturalistic in causation! (For instance, there was a "star" of Bethlehem, that is, the known conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the constellation Pisces. But if this is what happened, poor Matthew was sadly mistaken in telling of a single star moving to hover over a stable.) Even the more sophisticated redefinition of miracles (as divine manipulations, not violations, of natural law) put forth by some apologists tends fatally in this direction, by making miracles into merely striking cases of providential "lucky breaks" of timing. But these expedients of desperate apologists really do not represent the actual belief in miracles held by most evangelicals; they merely do a poor job in defending that belief. The usual belief is that supernatural events (that is, with no antecedent cause in nature or history) occurred as recorded in the Bible.

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