inerrancy

Review: Knock at the Sky

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Cover image of "Knock at the Sky" by Liz Charlotte Grant

Knock at the Sky. Liz Charlotte Grant, foreword by Sarah Bessey. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802883759) 2025.

Summary: After losing faith in biblical inerrancy, the author returns to Genesis with all her questions, seeking God in the story.

Liz Charlotte Grant grew up as a card-carrying evangelical. Mission trips, a minor in Bible from a Christian college, quiet time, and kissing dating good-bye. And then, approaching her forties, the certitudes stopped working. She joined the ranks of those deconstructing her faith. This included giving up her faith in an inerrant Bible. But, as this book shows, it did not mean giving up on either the Bible or God. In fact, it led her into an intense reading of Genesis, not to determine its historicity but to bring her story, with all her questions to the story of Genesis 1-32. She describes her approach as midrashic. She writes, as she invites the reader to join her:

“What else can we find in the Bible besides fact? What does the Bible say about reality, about death, about the purposes and origins of humanity? What does the Bible reveal about God? Ask and you will receive. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will blow wide open. Thanks be to God.”

In succeeding chapters Grant weaves her close reading of Genesis with Jewish commentators and Christian theologians, contemporary music and art, and archaeology and nature. Most of all, she weaves in her own questions, “knocking at the sky” as she seeks God. In the creation account, she considers how unlike God’s voice is to any other voice. The closest she comes to it is whale songs. She suggests we might well try standing on our heads as we read! In the narrative of the fall, she explores how deeply God values human freedom, unlike some controlling churches. She references James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, discussing how important the process of moving through doubt is to mature faith.

Succeeding chapters explore the flood narratives, Babel, and then focus on the life of Abraham. Why does he answer the call of God to leave Haran? Then what do we make of Sarah’s infertility in light of the promise, and her resort to Hagar as a surrogate? What do we make of the fact that God spoke to Hagar and was named by her? But the most troubling is the binding of Isaac. In this case, did Abraham hear God wrong and what do we make of God’s provision? Finally, we come to the night of Jacob’s wrestling. Not only does all his checkered past come to focus, but also his resolve to be blessed.

Not only do we encounter different interpretive possibilities and a host of questions. We also, as we read with Grant, encounter the mysterious, transcendent presence of the God who welcomes the questions, the wrestling, and the knocking.

You may not agree with Grant on her doctrine of scripture. But do you read scripture with the fierce tenacity she brings to the text? You may claim that you bring everything to God in prayer. But do you “knock at the sky” with the unvarnished honesty Grant brings to her study? Instead of certitude, I found in what Grant writes a gritty faith that hangs onto God through doubt and keeps expecting God to show up. When we hear of faith deconstruction, we fear people are abandoning Christ. While that sometimes is the case, Grant offers an example of moving from unquestioning certainty to truly seeking after and being found by God.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Jesus, Contradicted

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Cover image for "Jesus, Contradicted" by Michael R. Licona.

Jesus, Contradicted, Michael R. Licona. Zondervan Academic (ISBN: 9780310159599) 2024.

Summary: Addresses the discrepancies in gospel accounts drawing upon the conventions of ancient biography.

One of the challenges that comes with reading the gospels closely is that we notice discrepancies in the accounts. Not in the major facts but in the details. It is enough, though, that it raises questions about the reliability of the gospel accounts. And some of the efforts to “harmonize” the accounts just seem forced. In Jesus, Contradicted, Michael R. Licona, meets these objections head on without resorting to forced harmonization.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke raise a number of these questions. Most scholars believe Matthew and Luke used much of the material in Mark. Part of what is called “the Synoptic Problem” arises from the discrepancies between the very similar accounts. Some is grammatical, with Matthew and Luke improving on Mark’s rough grammar (does our doctrine of inspiration allow for that?). Licona goes into all of this, inviting us, first of all, to allow for the variations that often occur in eyewitness accounts.

More than this, Licona’s main argument is that we should not base our case for gospel reliability on modern historical accuracy. Rather, we should assess the gospels for what they are: first century biographies. Such biographies permitted the biographer greater freedom in reporting. While they did not invent events, they may not meet standards of exactitude required in a legal deposition. Wording may vary and minor details in an account may vary and yet the biography is accepted as true, especially if other accounts broadly confirm what is written.

Furthermore, biographers used various compositional devices that contribute to variation including paraphrasing and editing, compression displacement, transferal, conflation, simplification, and spotlighting. Licona discusses these various devices and where they may have been employed in gospel accounts.

But this may be troubling for some who hold to a commitment to the inerrancy of scripture. Licona observes that often, this view results in preconceptions of what scripture must be like that lead to the efforts in forced harmonization. Rather, he argues that “our view of scripture should be consistent with what we observe in scripture.” In other words, scripture rather than some standard external to it ought determine our understanding of its inspiration and trustworthiness. Licona takes several chapters ar the end of this work to elaborate this idea. He contrasts what he calls traditional inerrancy with flexible inerrancy. In his apologetic work, he reports that his approach has helped people return to faith who had turned away because traditional approaches to inerrancy had proven unsustainable.

I believe Licona makes an important contribution not only to our apologetic work around discrepancies in scripture. This will be helpful to many raising questions as they begin reading the gospels. And he offers a robust response to the “new atheist” who belittle the scriptures. But this is not all. He moves our discussion of inspiration and inerrancy beyond abstract terminology to the data of scripture itself. Instead of trying to conform scripture to the Procrustean bed of traditional inerrancy, he proposes a bed that follows the contours of the scriptures.

Furthermore, Licona presents this material in a highly readable form, reflecting experiences of presenting the material to the front office staff of a sports team and an adult Sunday School. This is a great text for teachers, apologists, and anyone who has not found satisfying responses to discrepancies in scripture.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Recovering Classic Evangelicalism

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Recovering Classical Evangelicalism

Recovering Classic Evangelicalism, Gregory Alan Thornbury. Wheaton: Crossway, 2013.

Summary: Addressing an evangelical context that seemingly has lost a sense of its identity, core convictions, and model for cultural engagement, the author commends a re-appraisal of the work of Carl F. H. Henry as a source of wisdom for the future.

It seems there are numerous books being published at present addressing what is perceived the parlous state of the contemporary church in America. They seem to fall into two camps. Either they recommend innovation, or they call for a return or recovery of some lost tradition, whether the church fathers, Benedict, or the Reformers.

This book, written particularly for that part of the church that would identify as “evangelical” proposes that the way forward is to recover the philosophical, theological, and cultural vision of the movement birthed in the post-World War II years. This was the time of the founding of Christianity Today as a periodical of both evangelical conviction and theological and intellectual heft, befitting the concerns of two of its’  founders, Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry. This work focuses on the work of Henry, who was evangelicalism’s leading theologian, probably until his death in 2003.

Thornbury hardly consider’s Henry to be perfect, and in the first chapter enumerates some of the flaws in both his personality and work. He also chronicles the “drubbing” Henry has faced from scholars criticizing his commitments to inerrancy, his epistemology, and more. Furthermore, what may be his most significant work, his six-volume systematic theology, God, Revelation, and Authority is also largely unread and unknown, particularly because few got beyond its first, densely written volume. Yet Thornbury commends Henry as a model of someone who brought a Christian mind to bear on both the theological and cultural questions facing evangelicalism, and as one whose example and advocacy paved the way for renewed efforts to bring Christian thought to bear in the academy and the culture.

The focus of Thornbury’s discussion is volumes two and four of God, Revelation, and Authority (hereafter GRA) and Henry’s much more approachable The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.  He focuses on four significant contributions of Henry that he believes deserve renewed attention. First was his rooting epistemology in a God who reveals God’s self and does so in language and propositions.  Second was that theology matters, and here, he focuses his discussion around the fifteen theses found in volume two of GRA. He engages the theology of speech-act theory and the work of Hans Frei and Kevin Van Hoozer, and still comes back to the idea that while language may do more than what Henry allowed, it does no less–that we may find more than just theological propositions arising from the scripture, but for a God who reveals God’s self effectively, we will find no less.

For Henry, the inerrancy of scripture, so much under fire even in evangelical circles today, was of utmost concern because of its connection to the authority. His concerns were not merely liberal criticism, but the hermeneutical relativism of Continental philosophy. It was not that Henry was unmindful of both problem texts in scripture and the fallibility of interpreters. Rather, he was convinced that concessions here would cast a shadow over the whole of scripture and the Church’s proclamation.

Finally, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism was a kind of manifesto that brought to bear biblical thought on the social, political, and economic issues of the day. It lead to the recovery of a social conscience that had been lost in the fundamentalist retreat from society. It provided an argument that culture, and cultural engagement that was not culture war mattered deeply.

Thornbury concludes by arguing that our evangelical roots matter. To unthinking shift from these or to live cut off from our roots can be fatal. To re-examine these roots, in this case the roots provided by the work of Carl F. H. Henry, is not necessarily to affirm that these roots are adequate, but rather important and not to be neglected. It strikes me that in growing things, roots continue to grow as well as the plant above ground, and the plant draws nourishment from an growing root system, both new roots and old.

I have to admit that I have not paid attention to Henry in recent years, paying more heed to newer thinkers. Yet this book reminds me of the personal debt I owe him, and those like him. As a young Christian working in the university context, Christianity Today, which in the seventies still reflected Henry’s intellectual influence and heft, was a great encouragement that I could both believe and think, that I could root my thought in a trustworthy and authoritative revelation that provided the foundation to wrestles with the deepest questions being asked in the university world. I could root a commitment to justice and compassion in the care and standards God established for human societies, and the words of the prophets who called a straying people back to such things. Reading Thornbury, I realized that I have often heard but never read Uneasy Conscience. It now sits on my TBR pile. Look for a review.

Review: Can We Still Believe the Bible?

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Can we still believe the Bible

Summary: an apologetic work on biblical scholarship refuting current “debunkers” of the Bible

There is a cottage industry that has developed around “debunking” the Bible. It goes something like this:

  • The Bible we have is hopelessly corrupted, having been copied and re-copied and this is evident in the numerous discrepancies in the extant manuscripts.
  • The Bible we have was the result of a political power move that suppressed other books that proclaimed a different, more “gnostic” Christianity. Finally these books are getting the attention they deserve.
  • With so many translations of the Bible, how can we trust any of them?
  • Given all these issues and various apparent discrepancies, can we possibly believe in an inerrant Bible?
  • Some of the passages of scripture that purport to be narrative history are either unhistorical or plain fiction.
  • Then there are all those miracles, similar to those in other mythical books. Isn’t the Bible simply another mythical work?

Clothed in the authority of “biblical scholarship” these contentions insinuate doubt in the minds of many believing people who base their beliefs and the way they live on what they find in these scriptures.

Craig Blomberg, an accomplished Biblical scholar answers each of these contentions, arguing that such contentions distort the evidence of biblical scholarship, concluding with a resounding “yes” to the question in this book’s title.

For example, he argues that the manuscript evidence actually argues for the high probability that the text of the scripture we have is very close to what was written. Discrepancies between manuscripts don’t affect any fundamental teaching of Christian faith and most are simply minor copying errors.

Those supposedly “suppressed” books? They were known but never enjoyed the significant level of support from various church communities as did most of the canonical books. Also, the books that are being argued for typically were written a century or more later (with the exception of the Gospel of Thomas) than the canonical works.

All those translations? Actually, the standard versions all reflect the careful work of translation committees and actually read remarkably similarly. Except for those originating in sectarian groups, any of these can be profitably read. The main difference in translations tends to be around differing approaches that either focus more on word for word translation of more for accuracy of meaning in the language of the translation.

Most interesting are the next two chapters discussing whether it is possible to hold to a position of inerrancy and whether some “narratives” are unhistorical and what this means for our ideas of inerrancy. And here, Blomberg becomes more explicit about the reality that he is not simply arguing for a believable Bible against the debunkers, but also that it is possible to affirm inerrancy without dismissing serious scholarly claims and questions–for example about the possibility that Job may not be historical (Blomberg does not contend this but allows that those who hold this are not denying inerrancy). Blomberg thinks these rigid positions (far more rigid than the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy which Blomberg uses as a benchmark) are in fact harmful to evangelicalism in creating the kind of “all or nothing” stance that leads those who can’t affirm all to go to the other extreme of affirming nothing (as he thinks has happened to scholars like Bart Ehrman).

His last chapter focuses on miracles. He sees the biblical accounts differing from others in not being sensational but rather confirming the power of God over “the gods” and confirming the messianic character of Christ and his people and encouraging belief. Of course the paramount miracle central to all is the resurrection.

It was something of a surprise that Blomberg would defend the language of inerrancy. He is one of the few scholars of late who tries to argue inerrancy while engaging critical scholarship. This is tougher to do because it begs the question of apparent errors that other approaches around the terms infallible or trustworthy have to deal with only by implication. I actually found this, particularly as Blomberg framed it, refreshing.

This book is most useful for the student or thoughtful Christian who encounters these debunking efforts, and for apologists in providing the basic outlines of a response based in good, if evangelically based, scholarship. For those who wish to go further, the notes provide extensive additional scholarly sources.

I suspect that Blomberg will be dismissed by more liberal scholarship and attacked by conservatives. I admire his willingness to let the chips fall where they may in this effort to provide a thoughtful work for those facing the debunkers’ challenges. He models an approach that embraces both orthodoxy and engaged biblical scholarship.