I'M CONFUSED...YOU'RE CONFUSED
By Mike Clingenpeel

Okay. I admit it. I'm confused.

For the past 22 years, the self-appointed--now messenger-appointed--guardians of orthodoxy in the Southern Baptist Convention have trashed moderate Southern Baptists for their aberrant and heretical views of the Scriptures. 

They accused moderates of holding a low view of the Bible, picking which passages are accurate and believable and which are not, basing personal faith on subjective interpretations of Bible texts, believing the Bible contains human errors and failing to describe the Scriptures with the words inerrant and infallible.

Recently, I received an advance copy of Biblical Authority: The Critical Issue for the Body of Christ, by James D. Draper, Jr. and Kenneth Keathley, by Broadman and Holman Publishers. The book is a rewrite of Draper's original work titled Authority: the Critical Issue for Southern Baptists, published in 1984 when he was SBC president.

In a chapter on what biblical authority does and does not mean, Draper and Keathley make several statements that, well, confuse me.

Try this one. "Biblical inspiration does not mean that the translations or editions or versions are inspired. Only the original manuscripts, the autographs, are." Obviously, none of us has ever seen the originals. 

The earliest manuscript fragments of the New Testament postdate the originals by almost a century. Therefore, without the autographs, the only Bible I possess is the one on my shelf or night stand. According to Draper and Keathley, that Bible is not inspired, only the original was.

I confess that my understanding of inspiration involves not only the authorship of the originals, but also the transmission of the text throughout the ages, so that whatever sleepy scribes and crafty editors did to the text, God's Word and Word still come through the Bible I bought from Lifeway Christian resources or Oxford Press. Is it possible that my view of the Bible is actually higher than that of conservatives?

Consider another one. "As far back as Augustine, there was clear understanding of the difference between the original manuscript and the copy or edition that he might have in his hand. If there was an error, it might be in the copy, but it would not be in the original." So it is possible, implies these authors, that your copy and my copy of the Bible, the only one available to us, contain errors.

I thought the rationale of the SBC takeover movement was to purge our institutions, doctrinal statements and not a few of our churches of people who believe their Bible have errors. Now the SBC's own publishing house promotes a book that implies that the only Bible without errors is one that does not exist. 

When it comes to the words inerrant and infallible, try this one. "The terminology can even be dispensed with. No one word is essential, and not everyone is required to use the same words. One might choose true, or accurate, or whatever word conveys the same idea."

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was not sufficient for moderates to say, "my Bible is true" or "my Bible is accurate." The "I" words were the magic passwords necessary to prove one's orthodoxy. That they are not essential now makes one wonder whether they were essential then. 

There is room for another. The authors admit the Bible employs metaphor, hyperbole and other figures of speech. "The Scriptures are meant to be interpreted normally rather than saying we hold that the Bible should be interpreted literally." They say, for example, that the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus' miracle mentioned in all four Gospels, could just as well have been 5,115 or 4,910 people present, but that when John says they caught 153 fish in the net it did not mean 152 or 154.

This makes sense to me, at least until the authors say that "the Bible is reliable either altogether or else it is not necessarily reliable at all and thus may be suspect at any point." The authors, in defiance of this logic, seem about as likely as a moderate Baptist to decide for themselves what is metaphor or literal, precise or an approximation. 

At some points Draper, Keathley and I agree on our understanding of biblical authority. Where we disagree, I honestly believe most moderates and I have a higher view of Scripture than they do. 

Now I'm really confused. Why were moderates the bad guys? Why did conservatives use the Bible to splinter our convention? Was the Bible just a red herring?

Am I speaking literally here, or metaphorically?

Now you're confused.

You get my point.