Westminster Press has just issued a volume on The Inspiration of Scripture by Dewey M. Beegle. This publication holds special interest through its issuance by a denominational publishing house at a time when ecumenical discussion is centering on Scripture and tradition; through the fact that its author is associate professor of Hebrew and Old Testament in Biblical Seminary in New York, whose founders emphasized that the Bible should stand at the center of the theological curriculum; and through the fact that many evangelical institutions and movements are presently engaged in spirited conversations on the subject of Scripture.
The author “frankly acknowledges his genuine belief in the inspiration and authority of Scripture” and concedes that “few areas of Christian life and thought … do not lead back eventually to the issue of inspiration.” He urges “by the inductive method … a reverent approach to Scripture that resolves at all costs to let God’s Word speak for itself.” Christian theology can in fact become endangered through “superbelief” (such as a docetic view of the Incarnation or a dictation view of inspiration). “Is one justified … in claiming more than Scripture does? Can there be in actuality a higher view (of inspiration) than the biblical view?”
Evangelical scholars will not hesitate to reappraise their regard for the Bible in the light of Professor Beegle’s claims and comments. Most evangelical Christians hold the plenary-verbal view of the Bible’s inspiration; they affirm, in other words, that the whole Bible is inspired by a divine superintendence extending to the very words. They stress the Old Testament’s “thus saith the Lord,” a phrase found some 1,200 times, and New Testament passages on the nature of inspiration such as 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:19–21. They hold that the original writings teach nothing contrary to fact.
Evangelical theologians acknowledge that inerrancy is not formally claimed by the biblical writers. But they assert that it is a proper inference from the Bible’s teaching about its own inspiration, and from the character of the self-revealing God.
It must be granted, as Professor Beegle insists, that the scriptural writers do not expound the doctrine of inspiration (or any doctrine) with “the detail and completeness of systematic theologians”—including, we might add, of Beegle’s own treatise. “Scripture does not tell us the mode or means by which God revealed his message to his inspired servants.” It may be noted that evangelicals do not adduce verbal inspiration as a full answer to the question of method, but rather as a verdict on the inspired end-product or sacred writings.
Dr. Beegle declares the biblical teaching and data to be “so complex and many-faceted that it is virtually impossible to formulate the doctrine of inspiration in any concise, general statement.” We are therefore hardly prepared for his own attempt to account for the Bible in the main by an “extraordinary help of the Holy Spirit” which here sinks to mere intuition and there to mere illumination. No precise definition is given of the nature and content of inspiration, but disturbingly general statements appear: “While there is some justification” for a distinction between inspired men and the inspiration of a compiler of a book, “the idea has been carried too far in some instances.” Or, “inspiration had to do with the understanding of the historical record, not the inerrancy of every word incorporated from the sources.”
We are told that “only a general statement of the range or extent of revelation and inspiration can be given.” Our dissatisfaction is doubled by Professor Beegle’s downgrading of past discussions of inspiration from the second through the nineteenth centuries as “essentially general affirmations of the divine and human aspects of Scripture in which these two facets are nowhere “explicitly reconciled.” If, as Beegle thinks, “the data of Scripture do not warrant the ‘fixed’ meanings” which evangelical theologians assign to the terms “revelation” and “inspiration,” their intelligibility demands a clear statement of what fluid meanings define these supernatural activities.
Beegle is far more explicit in stating the position he rejects: “The sovereignty of God, the honor of Jesus Christ, and the trustworthiness of biblical doctrine are not at stake in accepting a view of inspiration that rejects the qualification of inerrancy.” “We can speak of the Bible as being inspired from cover to cover, human mistakes and all.” Yet “there is no need to posit unique inspiration for every word of the Bible. There are degrees of something in Scripture, and it is more than just degrees of revelation.”
The author at times overstates conservative counter-claims in seeking to discredit them. Champions of the high view are made to say that “without a perfect original text one could just as well turn to Buddhist or Hindu literature.” They are sometimes pictured as requiring repudiation of the entire content of the Bible once its inerrancy is surrendered, and as holding that the whole edifice of belief in revealed religion thereby collapses. The author should stipulate those “groups within Protestantism” which “during the last seventy-five years” have made inspiration “the pivotal doctrine of the Gospel” and hold as “popular opinion … that Christian faith is impossible without belief in the inerrancy of Scripture.” Again Beegle identifies as “a major contention” the view that whoever abandons inerrancy “will eventually … become an extreme liberal.” Yet Beegle himself quotes Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield as emphasizing that the rejection of scriptural inerrancy does not destroy the case for theism and that the burden upon unbelief remains fully as great. Surely evangelical theologians do not make an inerrant record the primary purpose of inspiration. Taken simply as trustworthy records the Scriptures confront the reader with adequate evidence for biblical theism and for faith in Jesus Christ. While the author finally concedes that evangelical leaders “now acknowledge” that belief in scriptural inerrancy is not necessary for salvation, he attacks an alfalfa dummy in making evangelicals contend that inerrancy is the ground of the whole Christian faith.
Beegle’s announced objective is to demolish the premise of inerrancy. A. G. Hebert’s view is endorsed that inerrancy is “a new doctrine” and that “the modern fundamentalist is asserting something that no previous age has understood in anything like the modern sense.” He links the doctrine of inerrancy to a “deterministic definition of divine sovereignty” and insists that it “leads eventually into the mechanical or dictation theory of inspiration”: “Unless God dictated his revelation word for word, there is no assurance that the Old Testament writers caught all the nuances or overtones of God’s self-disclosure.” Thus to advocates of inerrancy he imputes what they disown and repudiate. Temporary retention of the belief, he tells us, may be psychologically valuable in a transition time while one is filling it with new meaning. Since evangelicals ordinarily refuse to detach psychological value from objective truth, and consider reprehensible the retention of terms or doctrines through the device of redefinition, it is remarkable to find an evangelical scholar thus justifying the doctrine.
But Professor Beegle’s hostility extends also to the plenary-verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. He deplores not only inerrancy, but identification of the position of Scripture and of the Apostolic Church as “verbal plenary”: “Only when Scripture and history of doctrine are read with the presupposition of inerrancy is it possible to extend the twentieth-century formulation of verbal plenary, inerrant inspiration back through church history and even into Scripture itself.”
In rejecting verbal inspiration—that is, an inspiration that extends to the words themselves—Beegle views Matthew 5:17, 18 as an attack by Jesus upon the Pharisaic tendency to stress the letter rather than the spirit of the law. But Beegle does not even consider that spirit and letter are not necessarily antagonistic, or that Jesus may seek spiritual fulfillment of the letter. Hence espousal of verbal inspiration is subtly but unconvincingly equated with Phariseeism in contemporary form. The Apostle Paul’s “uncertainty” over whom he baptized (1 Cor. 1:14–16) and his contrast of spirit and letter (1 Cor. 2:1–16) are held to preclude his verbal inspiration. But no mention is made of 1 Thessalonians 2:13, “For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God.…”
For Beegle Scripture’s function is to record and transmit that portion of redemptive history which suffices for belief in Jesus Christ and thus for eternal life. “By proper methods of interpretation human reason can distill the relevant aspects of Scripture.”
Obviously the author narrows the Bible’s profitability from apostolic indications of its value (cf. 2 Tim. 3:16). The statement that “humble submission to the Christ back of Scripture is far more crucial than one’s doctrine of revelation and inspiration” is disappointingly oblique in a book presumably expounding not salvation but inspiration. And the rejection in principle of scriptural revelation is evident from Beegle’s emphasis that “technically speaking … the Bible is a record or witness to revelation,” in contrast to the Church’s traditional position that the Scriptures “are special revelation.”
The Phenomena of Scripture
The author specially aims to construct his view not primarily from the teaching of the sacred writers about their inspiration, but from the textual phenomena (which Dr. Beegle calls “the facts” in contrast with “the doctrinal statements”).
The author faces us with a series of dubious disjunctions. When he states that “aside from the ultimate authority of the triune God, Scripture is our highest authority,” he apparently deprives the Bible at any point of full divine authority. Against an appeal to divine sovereignty in expounding inerrant inspiration, Beegle argues that a sovereign God would achieve his purposes through variety rather than through one method.
In sweeping departure from 2 Timothy 3:16, Beegle passes this judgment on the Old Testament canon: “The books of the Old Testament range from works of unquestioned authority and revelational content to those of questionable authority and rather insignificant value. Some portions of the apocryphal books appear to have greater worth than some sections of the canonical books.…” As Beegle sees it, mere intuition (religious genius or spiritual insight) may account for the historical investigations represented in the writing of Luke’s Gospel and the Acts. Nothing more than illumination is needed to account for a number of other scriptural passages.
From this verdict the distance is not far to an attribution of inspiration to some non-canonical writings alongside the denial of inspiration to elements of the canonical. Does the setting of canonical limits, Beegle asks, “mean that every word within these limits is uniquely inspired of God, while every word outside the canon is not inspired?”
Yet in discussing the New Testament canon, Beegle tells us that the book of Jude (despite its alleged citation of apocryphal literature as authoritative) “has an authoritative ring which sets it apart from … apocryphal books and from the writings of the early church fathers.” But if both canonical and non-canonical literature are inspired, and if Scripture is errant, does not the designation of canonical rest simply upon arbitrary authority or subjective preference?
Original and Copies
We are told that “the Bible makes no essential distinction” between autographs, copies, and translations, and that all three “derive ultimately from God and that all are authoritative.” If this assertion implies as it does a biblical denial of the unique inspiration of the original writers, or an equivalent inspiration of copyists and translators, it is wide of the facts. Inerrancy of autographs would assertedly require identical inspiration for compilers of early sources and for scribes. Since Jesus and the apostles appealed to the extant Old Testament manuscripts as inspired, they assertedly assigned no greater authority and accuracy to the autographs than to the fallible copies, so that inerrant originals are dispensable.
This theory discounts the biblical emphasis on the Spirit’s unique superintendence of the original writers. Beegle ignores the fact that the inspiredness of the translations is not inherent but derivative from the original autographs. The Holy Spirit’s use of errant copies to bless the Church is made to dispense with the need of inerrant originals. But one might as well as dispense with the sinlessness of the God-man because the Spirit blesses the ministry of devout but errant saints. The argument that if God could have given inerrant originals he could also have provided inerrant copies is irrelevant; if God could have become incarnate in Christ he could also have produced sinless believers. The life and the activity of the Church are not set in the dimension of perpetual miracle, but presuppose the once-for-all prophetic-apostolic disclosure. The translations are indeed uncorrupted by error, and are adequate for the Church’s mission in the world, but their value derives from their fidelity to the best manuscripts, and hence ultimately to their fidelity to the autographs. The apostles speak of the divine inspiration of the writers of Scripture, not of the transmitters of it. The assertion that New Testament writers “were not concerned about the autographs as such, nor were they exercised over the difficulties in transmitting the original text” is a misguided verdict of deductive speculation, and is contradicted by an inductive study of the Bible (cf. Rev. 22:18, 19).
Beegle emphasizes that “God did not purpose to maintain in transmission the accuracy of the autographs” but trusted the fallibility of devout human channels to maintain “the level of truth necessary for achieving his purposes.” The admitted “sufficiency” of the present translations is made to imply the superfluousness of superior autographs; presumably only the corruption of all translations would constitute an argument to the need of inerrant originals! So the Westminster Confession’s statement that divine providence has kept the Scriptures “pure in all ages” is turned into evidence against an original inerrancy while the Confession’s related emphasis that the autographs were “immediately inspired by God” is ignored.
The testimony of Jesus and the apostles is bent to support the errancy of the autographs. Beegle disregards Paul’s assertion that the glory of the Jews was their entrustment with “the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2) and instead asserts that inerrancy of autographs is a modern apologetic artifice arising from a discovery of errors in the copies. Inspiration is said, quite properly, to be “involved in” a process that includes a chosen speaker or writer and his message, whether oral or written, so that the end result, or sacred writings, are to be viewed as inspired. But Beegle shies away from the inspiredness of the writings, in order to throw the primary force of inspiration upon the person. Once this step is taken, the divine intention to produce a corpus of sacred literature is inevitably obscured.
Beegle’s position is that Scripture does not teach the doctrine of inerrancy, and that the biblical phenomena require errancy of the original manuscripts and a doctrine of inspiration that conjoins the revelation of a perfect God with an imperfect Scripture. Those who argue for inerrancy, he claims, abandon induction for deduction. But Beegle himself concedes that “perfect objectivity is never achieved” in interpreting the evidence; deduction therefore is also an element in constructing his view. Besides, not a single text lines up the teaching of Jesus or the apostles on the side of the errancy of Scripture which Beegle proclaims. Beegle denies that Jesus believed and taught the inerrancy of Scripture. Yet nowhere in Jesus’ teaching does one find a hint of the errancy of the sacred writings; he deplores those who misinterpret or who neglect or who depart from the Scriptures, but his appeal to the Old Testament is always to adduce and enforce its authority rather than to question its reliability. Nowhere does Jesus teach or imply the divine revelation or inspiration of error. When Jesus speaks of error, he criticizes the current traditions in the light of scriptural revelation; he does not promote doubt over the full accuracy and trustworthiness of the narratives, but rather invokes them to rebuke those who hold speculative views: “Ye do err, not knowing the Scripture.” The emphasis on error leads Beegle to the incongruous insistence that Jesus’ rebuke of the Sadducees for not knowing the Scriptures (Mark 12:24) and his emphasis on the inviolability of Scripture (John 10:35) presupposed errant Scripture because our Lord’s appeal was to extant manuscripts.
The emphasis on the errancy of the apographs, or transmitted texts, places Beegle in a neat dilemma. On the one hand he stresses that the present texts are Scripture; on the other, he repeatedly emphasizes the fallibility of these texts (thinking thereby to discredit the premise of inerrant autographs). He concedes that the Dead Sea Scrolls attest that the text of the standard Hebrew Old Testament available today is “essentially” the same as Paul’s. Textual variants ought then to be as distressing to Beegle as to advocates of a higher view of Scripture, since he assimilates the quality of the autographs to that of the present texts.
The Nature of Inspiration
Beegle initially describes the original writers as “uniquely inspired” in distinction from the scribes who share the “degree of inspiration common to all devoted men of God” (whatever that may be!). But this difference of subjective inspiration assertedly makes no difference in the written records as between autographs and copies.
We are told, for example, that Luke did not consider his Gospel inspired. Beegle does not mention the significant fact that Paul (who wrote 2 Tim. 3:16) in 1 Timothy 5:18 quotes a passage from Luke’s Gospel and designates it “Scripture.” And when Paul depicts Scripture as inspired of God, is not his primary reference to the original writings? And is it not to the written product that he attributes inspiredness? If Paul is mistaken at these points, his unique inspiration would seem inferior to the “common inspiration” of twentieth-century theologians who supposedly can put us right about the matter. Mr. Beegle nowhere tells us what inspiration uniquely accomplished in and through the original writers. He simply rejects “the idea that inspiration is the constant factor throughout Scripture.” And he repudiates the close connection between inspiration and canonicity. We are told that the inspiration of Luke was “not likely” of a different kind from that of God’s servants down through church history nor from that of any man today, and the same is said of Mark. In fact, Professor Beegle finally dissolves “unique inspiration” for some Bible books. “If Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, Augustus Toplady, and Reginald Heber had lived in the time of David and Solomon and been no more inspired than they were in their own day, some of their hymns of praise to God would have found their way into the Hebrew canon.”
At this level inspiration—unique or otherwise—seems hardly any longer to retain any element that is identifiably scriptural. Beegle contends, however, that as the record of sacred history consummated in Christ the canonical Scriptures are distinctive and in this general sense “equally inspired” and that “the canon as a whole will always rank as uniquely inspired literature.” But the introduction of this claim after the earlier deflation of both canonicity and inspiration leaves one with a feeling of rhetorical profuseness.
When he contends, moreover, for the inspiration not of translations as such, but of “all reasonably accurate translations,” one wonders why inspiration should be linked with the precise repetition of mistakes in supposedly errant originals. Yet Beegle goes further, and invokes as a confirmation of inspiration a translation’s pragmatic serviceability—however faulty it may be—in bringing readers under the Spirit’s conviction.
The value of all creedal statements on inspiration formulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is questioned on the ground that they were “precritical in nature and … neither elaborated nor reconciled the divine and human elements of Scripture in any systematic way.” One wonders what the implications of this judgment would be were the doctrine under scrutiny that of divine incarnation rather than divine inspiration.
Twentieth-century champions of inerrancy have included Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield, Edward J. Young, and others. Mr. Beegle in passing quotes a number of contemporary evangelical scholars—Bernard Ramm, Edward Carnell, James Packer, Kenneth Kantzer, Philip Hughes, and Carl Henry—where their statements are somewhat serviceable to his view. But none of these scholars would endorse the main positions of the book, and their differences are unmentioned.
While Beegle deplores the “all or nothing” view of most evangelicals, whose position he overstates, he himself acts on the principle he condemns. He affirms “inspiration—translations—copies and originals in the same sense” over against “translation—no inspiration”—thus distorting the evangelical distinction between the mediate inspiration of copies and translations and the immediate inspiration of the autographs. If the present errant manuscripts are trustworthy and authoritative, we are told, inerrant originals are superfluous. This position reaches ludicrousness with the implication that the apostles made error authoritative, and we should follow their example: “If Jesus and Paul and Peter considered the errant manuscripts of their time as trustworthy and authoritative, should we not …?”
The Quality of Bible Doctrine
The importance evangelicals attach to inerrancy, Beegle notes, has to do with doctrine. He rejects the emphasis that the biblical writers can hardly be considered trustworthy teachers of doctrine if they err in their doctrine of inspiration. He argues that they are not untrustworthy because they are trustworthy only in much rather than in all. But he does not demonstrate (nor can he) that if mistaken about their own inspiration their doctrinal trustworthiness is unimpaired, nor how the strands of truth and supposed error are to be segregated.
Beegle no more defends the infallibility of Bible doctrine than the full trustworthiness of Bible history. Take the difficulties in the synoptic record of the Olivet discourse. These are “likely” explained on the premise that the disciples “confounded some of Jesus’ statements about the destruction of Jerusalem with some of his remarks about his second coming,” unless “the difficulty lay in the original statement of Jesus.” In any event “erroneous elements of doctrine” existed in the original Gospels. The implications of the view that Jesus’ teaching was ambiguous, or of the view that his disciples inaccurately understood him, cover a territory that only the author’s personal surmise holds within quite narrow boundaries. He limits it to the fuzziness of “details of doctrine … as one nears the fringes of truth.” But Beegle finds a “diversity of doctrinal data” in respect to the Atonement no less than eschatology. Fuzziness thus encroaches on biblical truth itself.
When Beegle tells us that “in all essential matters of faith and practice Scripture is authentic, accurate and trustworthy,” he bequeaths us the problem of discriminating what is essential. He asserts that according to the New Testament “Christ and the gospel” (not the Scriptures) are the determinative standard of trustworthy and authoritative doctrine. But we know no Christ nor gospel other than the Christ and Gospel of the Bible. And Beegle asserts their errancy, and the possibility of Jesus’ ambiguity and of his disciples’ misunderstanding. The valid procedure, he now tells us, is “to accept the view that accounts for the most Biblical data related to the subject.” But how often need a truth be affirmed in Scripture in order to be biblically true? For Beegle the Kerygma is obviously not “what the Bible teaches.” The doctrinal content of the revealed Gospel seems disappointingly unprecise when we are told that “the Biblical writers shared unequivocally some doctrines that cluster around Jesus, the incarnate Christ, and the way of salvation.”
Although acknowledging “the validity of concern” over the admission of error in Scripture, Beegle replies obliquely that spiritual security can be found only in daily commitment to God. This reply, if adequate, would dissolve any value whatever in Beegle’s insistence on the (limited) trustworthiness of Scripture.
The important role of revealed truths is understated: “The only protection God has provided (against doctrinal deviation) is the Holy Spirit’s working dynamically in a committed heart, mind, and body. This is sufficient protection for salvation, but it is still not certain protection against false doctrine.” But the real issue is glossed over: it is not whether the Bible can be misunderstood, but whether the Bible, properly understood, informs the mind with revealed truths.
We are told that “all of Scripture does not come under the category of supernatural revelation” and that “all Biblical doctrine is not infallible.”
Logic and the Truth
The logic of the book is sometimes woefully weak. Beegle deplores the syllogism “God is perfect, God revealed himself in the autographs, therefore the autographs had to be inerrant”—or the assumption that God, if he truly reveals himself, must “reveal himself inerrantly”—without examining the alternatives. The claim is made that the Bible is both human and divine, but logic should compel him to ask how it can be both divine and erroneous. Beegle rejects the alternative “either the autographs were inerrant, or else human fallibility infected all of Scripture.” If there is another alternative, it would greatly enhance Beegle’s argument if he would actually segregate the infallible from the supposedly fallible elements and indicate on what objective principle this determination is made. If divine revelation is intelligible communication, Beegle can hardly mean that God conveys propositions that are partially true and partially false, and that he inspires both inerrant and errant words. When Beegle proclaims that “the Bible … does not teach that unless a thing is totally true it cannot be inspired,” the word he italicizes is dispensable, and the alternative he implies is that God inspires untruth. The untenable position to which Beegle is led is seen in his assertion that “Stephen, even while under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, probably made a mistake …” and evidently “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit to let Paul use” erroneous figures “without informing him that he was technically wrong.”
In effect Beegle espouses the view that under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration a chosen divine servant may blend truth and error while a twentieth-century scholar without such unique inspiration is able to distinguish the truth from falsehood. Since Beegle disowns the assumption that “God had to reveal himself inerrantly,” is not the incongruous theological alternative that divine revelation deviates from the truth? The outcome of any such religious epistemology must surely be skepticism.
Yet the author does not hesitate to assail the logic of the biblical writers. Of Matthew’s application of Hosea 11:1 to the return of Jesus from Egypt, he writes: Matthew shared the “Jewish mode of thinking”; “his logic in this instance bears the marks of his day”; and he used a “method of proving (that) does not conform to all the facts.” Instead of concluding from this that Matthew was illogical and reached a false conclusion from assertedly improper premises, Beegle champions “essential truth” (devoid of “erroneous nonessentials”) while repudiating “absolute truth.” “By shifting the line of defense from ‘absolute truth’ to ‘essential truth’ it is possible to reckon with all the phenomena and teaching of Scripture and to have a sound view of authority as well.” “Essential truth” is illustrated to include fallacious conclusions resting on illicit premises.
In an error-leavened Bible the author distinguishes God’s Word (which always accords with the facts) from man’s word (which reflects fallible opinion). But on what basis is the distinction between these strands of truth and error made? Surely not on the ground that a statement is biblical, since even the autographs are held to err. Even statements undiscredited by scientific considerations may still come into question, and if confirmed by science, these scientific verdicts are revisable and reversable. Yet Beegle tells us that “the key events of redemptive history are to be … authenticated, insofar as is possible, by the same criteria employed in checking all other historical data.” It is no real solution to insist, as Beegle does, that “one must decide which parts of the Bible are mistaken or else one is unwittingly accepting error as truth.… Everyone who believes in the validity and indispensability of Scripture is confronted with the inescapable duty of using one’s rational powers to ferret out the mistaken elements in Scripture.” If this is indeed an inescapable duty, Beegle needs to be reminded that both the prophets and apostles, and Jesus of Nazareth, neglected to enjoin this responsibility upon the children of God.
Beegle is finally driven to espouse a highly unsatisfactory theory of truth no less than of revelation and inspiration. He tells us there is “certainly some truth” to Kierkegaard’s notion that a heathen praying passionately to an idol is actually “in the truth.” Beegle thus detaches true worship not simply from Scriptures in-errant and verbally inspired, but from true concepts of God as well.
Existential interpretation is dignified as “new Reformation theology.” It seems hardly fair to credit this “new Reformation theology” with reminding the Church that revelation and inspiration “must be actualized in the lives of persons” while the evangelical tradition is depicted as stressing the role of the Book (presumably unconcerned about appropriation). Beegle never really criticizes Barth for his refusal to affirm the inspiredness of Scripture.
Beegle’s break with the evangelical-biblical view is evident in his declaration that contemporary theologians are “technically accurate in defining revelation and inspiration in terms of personal communication between God and man,” alongside his revolt against the intellectual or doctrinal element. In common with much recent religious philosophy he apparently rejects the unity of truth: “There are two different kinds of truth: objective and subjective.” He assures us that so-called “it-truth,” which deals with “the impersonal world of things and objects,” is not untrue. This does not, however, grip important questions such as: is divine revelation communicated in the form of truths?, and does man have valid knowledge of God as the object of religious experience? The section on “Revelation and Doctrine” is disappointingly imprecise. It repudiates in principle, however, the possibility of revealed doctrines: “It is imperative … that revelation and doctrine be distinguished.”
The assertion that “propositional truths, like doctrine, cannot he considered as revelation because they cannot save” is misleading. No evangelical scholar holds that doctrine saves. But evangelical Christianity contends that there are revealed truths or doctrines, and this Beegle denies. Evangelical scholars contend also that revealed truths have been objectively inscripturated by divine inspiration, and that they have the status of divine revelation—whether or not the contemporary man accepts or rejects them—and this Beegle also denies.
Beegle does affirm that Scripture contains objective truths (must not whatever truth it contains necessarily be objective?). If the “elemental ideas of God and Christ” set forth in the scriptural record are “classified … as doctrine, then a minimal core of doctrine is basic to genuine faith.” In a prize understatement we are told that “Paul recognized that teaching had a part to play.” The essential point, says Beegle, is that “the objective truth of Scripture, whether defined as doctrine or not, is the means by which the Holy Spirit leads to subjective truth”—and it is the latter, Beegle has earlier assured us, that is revelation.
In this century, Beegle acknowledges, the inseparability of ideas and words has become increasingly clear. But inerrancy of ideas does not, he contends, require “the inerrancy of all words”; rather, it necessitates only “correct key words.” Beegle realizes that the wedding of words and ideas drives him to the further admission of “incorrect ideas” in Scripture, and his next apologetic artifice is to contrast “correct key ideas” with “erroneous non-essential ideas,” which are linked in turn with “correct key words” and “erroneous words” leading finally to a distinction between “the essentials and the non-essentials in Scripture.” This obviously settles nothing, since Beegle will hardly concede that everything unessential in Scripture is expressed in erroneous ideas and words, and on his theory he can hardly protect essentials from error.
If skepticism is a consequence of Beegle’s view of revelation, it is also a consequence of his view of language. We are told that “words are symbols that cover areas of meaning, and the area varies from individual to individual.… Consequently no two people speaking the same language necessarily mean the same thing by the same word.… Scripture is no exception.” Such passages deny any identity of meaning in the use of words (and contradict Beegle’s earlier assertion of the wedlock of words and ideas). Nonetheless the author expects evangelical readers to understand his assault on canonical inspiration or he would not have bothered to write this book. In a more cautious statement Beegle adds that “language cannot possibly convey … all the facets of personality and character.” From this he draws three conclusions: first, that despite the symbolism of metaphorical language the human mind is able to distill concepts which amount to literal truth (would not this feat be fully as miraculous as inerrant inspiration?); (2) the necessity for exalting Jesus above the Scriptures (could this superiority then be expressed in words?); (3) Scripture cannot he described as inerrant since language is incapable of absolute communication (why does Beegle then assume that Scripture’s supposed errancy can be absolutely communicated?). Beegle downgrades the God who intelligibly speaks his revelation, and the adequacy of human language to articulate will and word—and the reason he does so is his lack of a theistic view of language. The Creator who fashioned human nature as wholly serviceable to the Incarnation also fashioned human speech as a wholly serviceable medium of divine revelation and inspiration.
Faith and History
The crucial issue, Professor Beegle says, is one’s estimate of “fact and history in Scripture,” or perhaps better, the soundness of that estimate. With an eye on Bultmannism, he insists that subjective faith is threatened once we surrender the key elements of sacred history. “Faith is rooted in fact.” Evangelical Christianity stands with Paul’s “bold” affirmation that faith is futile apart from Christ’s resurrection (although the equally bold prophetic affirmation “thus saith the Lord” is not taken literally). Beegle repudiates the liberalism of R. H. Pfeiffer, who divorced faith from all miracle, and not simply (as Beegle does) from the miracle of scriptural inspiration. Conceding that no history is absolutely objective, and that all history involves subjective elements, Beegle notes the “new Reformation” theology’s dual definition of history and its dialectical relating of time and eternity. Quoting J. Gresham Machen’s statement that belief in the Virgin Birth may not be necessary to every Christian, he asserts that Machen “has shown the impossibility of prescribing a minimal core of biblical events to which assent must be given before saving faith is possible”—which does violence to Machen’s intention and his conclusion. The thrust of Beegle’s exposition is to excuse doctrinal doubts and to stress how little Christians may believe.
The final appeal for belief in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection is merely pragmatic. “As a general rule, churches with ministers and leaders who have consistently denied, or at least minimized” these particular doctrines “have tended to lose the sense of mission.”
The complaint can be registered no less effectively against those who have abandoned the high view of the Bible, which carries these miracles with it. Beegle quotes contemporary adversaries of the high view approvingly despite their rejection of it for divergent reasons which often cancel each other out. If the author had followed a different course, asking where the repudiation of the high view leads contemporary theologians in their conflicting expositions of the essential content of the Christian revelation, the result might have been therapeutic. In the closing words of the book Beegle shifts the argument from the theoretical question of the nature of inspiration to the pragmatic serviceability of extant translations and copies, and he attributes divine inspiration to devout but fallible ministers in every age of church history.
The conclusion of Beegle’s discussion of the historical trustworthiness of the Bible is distressingly imprecise. He discards as extreme the view that faith in Christ can coexist with doubts about “the truth and relevance of much” that Scripture declares. He wants “a mediating view” between Bultmann’s rejection of trustworthiness and the view that the Gospels are reliable stenographic reports. Yet he minimizes even the importance of this broken historical truth: “Submission to Christ is primarily a matter of decision, an exercise of our will, not knowledge.” One who begins (rather than ends) here will not kick long against the pricks of Bultmann’s demythologizing.
Beegle declares that “minor historical errors in Scripture invalidate neither our faith not true doctrine.” But since biblical history is not to be taken as accurate simply on the ground that it is biblical (part of the record), no reason remains for assuming any event not independently confirmed to have actually occurred. One cannot confidently distinguish major and minor events as significant and trustworthy and as unsignificant and untrustworthy as Beegle does except by an act of will. The history of theological debate has a way of bypassing such hesitancies and inconsistencies, and of urging the same compromises with less timidity and with great loss to the Christian heritage.
Concluding Remarks
Much of the difficulty over inspiration may in fact lie in the theologian’s attempt to enforce too rigid a pattern of divine superintendence upon the Spirit of God. The Scriptures assert that inspiration extended not only to chosen persons, but to their sacred writings, and that the very words derive their unique authority from this supernatural superintendence. But the Spirit is no less free and creative in the realm of special than in the realm of natural disclosure of God, and no one method is adequate to account for the end-product. Verbal inspiredness is to be attributed to the writings, but their production presupposes a variety of activity—divine dictation, in the writing of the law on stone, or in Jesus’ teaching, greater or lesser precision as the purpose of God requires, with correspondingly less or more reflection of the personality or stylistic differences of the writers. That copyists and translators have often erred is beyond dispute; textual criticism aims to undo their deviations. But that a perfect God reveals himself in half-truths is a thesis that cripples Christian theology far more than the problems facing the view of an authoritative Bible.
Dr. Beegle states that it is not his purpose “to unsettle the faith of any Christian, but the risk must be taken in order to remove the ‘needless barrier’ which has kept many more from exercising faith in Christ.” But if he thinks either that Christian faith is rendered more secure through the promotion of the errancy of Scripture, or that the real barrier to faith in Christ lies in the doctrine that God reveals himself inerrantly, he is sadly mistaken. The evangelists whose ministries are signally blessed by God are those who confidently champion Scripture as God’s Word written, while the theologians who promote the errancy of Scripture make their converts mainly in the ranks of professing Christians and not among the outsiders. “God chose to make his authority relevant to man by means which necessitate some element of fallibility.… The facts permit no other understanding of Scripture’s inspiration and authority.” Were the premises right, it would be in keeping with them to notch one’s critical pronouncements a shade below the level of infallibility, rather than exempting one’s theory of inspiration from the supposed fallibility which prevented prophets and apostles from accurately interpreting their experiences. We are unpersuaded by the author’s assurances that if we accept his view of a broken Bible “nothing basic is lost,” that “those essential elements which the advocates of the doctrine of inerrancy have cherished … are more firmly supported than ever before,” and that transcending this tradition will ready us “to challenge the tremendous moral and spiritual problems that confront us on every side.”
C.F.H.H.
