I’ve blogged about G.K. Beale’s rare ability to completely miss the point and obscure people’s viewpoints before, and he seems like he is not letting up. His newest book is entitled The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority and just might overtake Dave Hunt’s What Love is This? Calvinism’s Misrepresentation of God
It does not take long for Beale to jump into caricaturing the view that he is opposing (perhaps ’shadowboxing’ might be more appropriate a term here). One only needs to start reading the introduction and the dialogue between “Progressive Pat” and “Traditionalist Tom.” Apparently because “Progressive Pat” notices the literary genres of Scripture and takes them seriously enough to allow them to affect his interpretation he is wrong. To also notice a dual authorship of Isaiah based on the text of Scripture is out of the question for Beale (forget about three authors too!).
The first four chapters are reworked versions of his published critiques of Pete’s Inspiration and Incarnation. That especially the first and fourth chapter were not significantly reworked boggles my mind, considering that Pete responded to them and corrected many of Beale’s assumptions. The second and third chapter simply contribute to Beale’s misrepresentation of Pete’s work.
When I say this I am not playing the “you don’t understand, therefore your critiques are invalid” card. I’ve seen this card played in many debates and realize that it does not provide a strong counter argument. Yet Beale consistently reads Pete in the worst possible light and comes to the worst conclusions that one could based on what Pete says. That is simply not fair and, if one is honest about what comprises good scholarship, a poor example of how scholarship, especially Christian scholarship, should be done. Beale himself acknowledges that this could be the case. For instance, he writes, “In other words, he might contend that the conclusions and implications that I have drawn are not conclusions and implications he would draw, but I think many, if not most, readers would likely read him the way that I have” (54). So Beale admits that his conclusions are probably not the conclusions that Pete would draw, but because “many, if not most” of the people Beale is imagining would “likely” do so, his supposed conclusions from Pete’s work are justified? Is he having a laugh? Misreading and misrepresentation are kosher so long as it is decided by a democratic vote of non-existent readers in the author’s mind? Did I miss a meeting where this became some sort of rule for scholarly discourse? Must have.
Beale then turns his attention to the authorship of Isaiah (chapter 5) and how the biblical cosmology can be reconciled with modern science (chapters 6 & 7). Beale’s defense of the conservative belief that Isaiah wrote the complete book of Isaiah presents nothing new to someone who is familiar with the issue. What I did find interesting, however, is Beale’s unwillingness (or inability) to grant the fact that someone can hold to the dual (or trito) authorship view and yet still have a high view of Scripture. It is interesting to me to read arguments for the dual or trito authorship view and see that these arguments are not based on some ulterior motive to sneak Schleiermacher or Bart Ehrman in the back door, but based on the text of Isaiah itself. The idea that a viewpoint based on the text of Scripture itself can somehow be construed as a viewpoint that does not take Scripture seriously does not make sense. Also, the normal argument from the NT to the OT when it comes to the authorship of Isaiah, I believe, carries too little weight to be taken seriously.
The final two chapters weave together Beale’s polemic against the idea that the OT authors provided a faulty view of science with his work on the temple. This conversation would interest the reader inasmuch as the reader is interested in intramural evangelical squabbles about what comprises a high view of Scripture. I think that Beale brings up some interesting points in his work here and in his work on the temple, but his argument makes Meredith Kline’s reading of Genesis look sane. There is too much theological interpretation and reading into the cosmological passages of the OT for someone who is interested in a historical reading of the OT to take it seriously.
All in all, I wouldn’t recommend Beale’s book to anyone unless they have a lack of something to blog about. What I learned in the book is that saying such things as someone does not “have a high view of Scripture” or resembles anything close to Beale’s view of what “postmodernism” is (whether that is accurate is for another post) is just another way to ‘dirty the water’ in attempt to write them off.
What it honestly seems like is not that there is any ‘erosion of inerrancy’ going on in evangelicalism, but that certain segments of evangelicalism are moving farther and farther to the right. It is as if they became so afraid of falling off the ’slippery slope’ on the left that they tumbled down the slippery slope on the right, only to emerge as a new form of evangelical fundamentalism.
I’m not convinced that is what evangelicalism needs and see Beale’s work as only furthering the problem and lengthening the divide.
1 December 2008 at 11.10 pm
Thanks Art. If I may throw in some thoughts as well…
Even before this book came out I had lost almost all respect for Beale as a scholar. This includes his supposedly great Revelation commentary which, though helpful for pastors preparing sermons and for its few helpful historical insights, is driven by his thoroughly apologetic motivations to “clean up” Revelation…especially its use of the Hebrew Bible.
Getting to this book, Art mentions his cosmology chapters. Those chapters appear to be reworkings of his material published in his NSBT book on the Temple. He focuses on how much OT “cosmological” language is, in fact, ANE Temple language. In general Beale is correct here, though his analysis remains amateur and generally shallow. Beale then makes some entirely arbitrary and historically bizarre distinctions (a typical American Evangelical move) between such “cosmological”-Temple discourse being phenomenological, mythical, or theological. Beale protests that such OT cosmology does not conflict with our scientific understandings of reality (i.e., the sky is not a solid dome holding back water) because it is Temple imagery and thus theological. If I may, this strikes me as a somewhat bizarre and even ridiculous argument as Temple “imagery” in the ANE is “mythic.” Beale’s distinction in this area between theological (good) and mythic (bad) is quite arbitrary and clearly functions to label what the Bible is doing as safe.
One might see the arbitrariness of Beale’s so-called argument here if one considers that if Beale (or anyone else, for that matter) examined similar cosmological-Temple discourse in non-Biblical ANE literature, he/she would understand it as “mythic” without a moment of hesitation. It seems Beale’s underlying logic is that if it is in the Bible is it theological…because it is!
Just for fun, Beale’s moves here are part of the same apologetic scheme that scholars of comparative religion have been decrying for some time. According to this dominant schema, if it is in the Bible it is theology, unique, historical, supernatural, central, originary, and gracious. If it is not in the Bible or not in the writings we like, it is myth, syncretistic, legendary, natural, peripheral, derivative, and RomanCatholic-Pagan-Jewish. Even if we agreed with such a schema from some theological point of view, allowing it to direct historical work makes one a pseudo-scholar driven more by apologetic interests than historical data and method. Put in our language, this makes one more captive to Tradition than Scripture.
The most interesting aspect of the book is how Beale does not discuss, but rather assumes!, the issues Enns and others are trying to discuss—–mainly, evangelicalism’s captivity to modernism and rationalism. You see this in Beale’s explicit framing of his approach: how could the Bible be inaccurate and still authoritative and trustworthy concerning salvation and morality? (the blurb also frames things this way) For Beale, of course, this is purely rhetorical as he assumes (and even says) the Bible CANNOT be inaccurate and still authoritative in salvation and morality.
PLEASE NOTE, this is not an argument but, rather, begging-the-question at the exact point where many within evangelicalism want to have a discussion. A ready answer comes to my mind, by the way. The Bible can be “inaccurate” and still authoritative BECAUSE perhaps God intends it to be that way. Beale and, it appears, many others within evangelicalism are unwilling to allow God to challenge their very conceptions of what the Bible MUST BE in order to be God’s Word. Just for fun, from my point of view this Beale-approach is the Liberal one since it explicitly decides ahead of time what God is allowed to do…God is bound by our modernist-rationalist ideas about reality. Didn’t Machen react against filtering our views of God and what is “possible” through various rationalist, enlightenment, etc., assumptions? : )
2 December 2008 at 12.42 am
Douche chill!
2 December 2008 at 10.35 am
Dear Dr. Funke,
It sounds like you really want to get behind Beale. If you’ve been able to get inside him in a way none of the rest of us have, please fill us in on the details.
2 December 2008 at 2.08 pm
Indeed FS,
By all means if you have probed beale and discovered something of value, we are all ears…
Nick
2 December 2008 at 2.22 pm
Tobias,
I am getting the impression that you blue yourself here…you intended to go on a dry run but now have a mess on your hands?
3 December 2008 at 11.19 am
“And now, Ladies and Gennimmun, it’s time once again for everyone’s favorite gameshow…
…’Crossing the Line!’”
3 December 2008 at 11.38 am
benj,
IF you knew FTH, you would know that his line is still in the hazy distance…however I agree, that last one pushed it out a bit too far…
Nick
3 December 2008 at 12.59 pm
Nick,
Understood.
May I invite myself to the TR/HR bash?
3 December 2008 at 1.18 pm
Yeah, perhaps that last one did push it a bit. I imagine most know, that is something the character Tobias Funke said in Arrested Development.
More seriously, I (and others here) are interested in discussing Beale’s book and our criticisms of it…preferably above the level of Funke’s dismissive (?) ‘engagement.’
3 December 2008 at 2.04 pm
Benj
Of course dude, you were invited formally, by the way Art post up the flyer I sent you already
Nick