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J.P. Moreland sure knows how to stir the pot.

Dr. Moreland—author of The Rationality of Belief in Inerrancy—delivered a paper at last week’s ETS meetings titled How Evangelicals Became Over-Committed to the Bible and What can be Done about It.

Now, Dr. Moreland is no dummy, so when he opens with words like these you know he’s picking a fight:

…in the actual practices of the Evangelical community in North America, there is an over-commitment to Scripture in a way that is false, irrational, and harmful to the cause of Christ. And it has produced a mean-spiritedness among the over-committed that is a grotesque and often ignorant distortion of discipleship unto the Lord Jesus.

So when Ted Olsen live-blogged the ETS event, a fight is what J.P. got. Scan the comments if you dare; it’s quite the mêlée. Dr. Moreland even weighed in himself to clarify his intentions and defend the salient points of his paper.

The Good

Mark Noll, in his similarly provocatively titled book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, has a chapter titled “The Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism” that resonates with much of what Dr. Moreland has to say. I think Dr. Moreland is at his best in this paper when he says,

By and large, Evangelicals responded during [the secularization of the universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries] by withdrawing from the broader world of ideas, developing a view of faith that was detached from knowledge and reason, and limiting truth and belief about God, theology and morality to the inerrant Word of God, the Bible. If I am right about this, then Evangelical over-commitment to the Bible is the result of the influence of secularization on the church and not of biblical or theological reflection.

In other words, intellectuals blew off the church, and the church returned the favor, creating a separatist, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist ghetto. Evangelicals, says Dr. Moreland, need to abandon that ghetto, and I say “amen.” (But see Roger Overton for why this may be a flawed argument, or at least, an over-generalization.)

Another point of Dr. Moreland’s that I welcome is one that I think he could have made better in his paper, if I may be so bold as to say so. He did a better job explaining it on the Scriptorium blog; see Christianity as a Knowledge Tradition.

It has to do with scripture and the nature of truth, and a clue can be found in our use of the word “inerrant.” To err is to be false; if a proposition is false, it is because it fails to correspond to reality. So when we say that the Bible is inerrant, we are saying that everything in it is backed up by reality. For example, if Jesus did not really rise from the dead, then the resurrection accounts would be in error—the fact that the resurrection accounts are in the Bible does nothing to repair that damage. Put simply, the thing that makes it true is the reality it stands on. The Bible itself is a “truth-bearer” and not a “truth-maker,” to use the philosopher’s language. God’s character, his thoughts, and his actions in history are the truth-makers when it comes to the Bible’s inerrancy. The Bible merely preserves and delivers these truths in an authoritative, God-breathed record.

So when Dr. Moreland goes after “bibliolatry,” one of his targets is the idea that the Bible itself is a truth-maker. That does not diminish the Bible; it simply recognizes it as a vehicle for communicating truth instead of the truth itself.

The Bad

Where to start… for one thing, this is an inflammatory piece. It has a sort of maverick sensibility to it that really isn’t helpful. He calls people out (some by name) for painting these issues with too broad a brush, and yet he does so with a very broad brush himself. He praises Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI for their robust thinking, and less than a page later, takes John MacArthur to task for his “failure to tease out the implications of the ontological reality of the soul.” Even if he is entirely correct and completely justified in the points he makes, he’s making it harder, not easier, for his message to find its home with people.

I’m a guy who cares deeply about Reformed theology and thought, as well as the promotion of the life of the Christian mind in general. Dr. Moreland’s direct and indirect attacks on Reformed sensibilities will draw fire for guys like me who have to answer to presuppositionalist critics who accuse us of “worshiping human reason” or “putting logic above the Bible”. Those are matters for discussion that require an irenic, patient, and careful analysis of some very fine distinctions. Dr. Moreland’s paper did little to help clarify those distinctions. It will also make it more difficult to refer people to Dr. Moreland’s work.

Dr. Moreland dwells a bit on “hearing from God” and signs and wonders. The whole “hearing from God” bit really doesn’t have any traction with me; if God wants to speak to me, he certainly can, but I don’t have any reason to expect that he will and I don’t see anything from Scripture instructing me to operate that way (though I suspect I’m begging Dr. Moreland’s question when I say that). With regard to signs and wonders, I don’t deny that those things can and do happen. I have missionary friends abroad who tell stories that are very similar to those Dr. Moreland has recounted elsewhere about people having dreams and visions of Christ. In the end, I’m not sure that either of these issues is central to a discussion of bibliolatry within Evangelicalism—I think it just muddies the already-disturbed waters.

Finally, his concluding call to “teach people how to avail themselves appropriately of the extra-biblical knowledge available in these areas” is a bit glib. What does he mean by “appropriately?” What sort of boundaries would he suggest? I’m all for making good use of extra-biblical sources, but how do you help people make distinctions between the right and wrong uses of those sources?

See also Roger Overton’s critique at the A-Team blog; he is (or was) a student at Talbot in Dr. Moreland’s program and is therefore in a much better position than I am to speak to these issues. He goes a bit further than I do, especially on a very important point: the big problem today is not over-commitment to the Bible; it’s under-commitment.

Conclusion

Dr. Moreland’s customary passions for careful thinking and a thoroughly integrated Christian life are evident, and his commitment to the correspondence view of objective truth shines through here. I would like for Dr. Moreland to suggest some boundaries and guidance for the use of extra-biblical sources, and I would really like to hear him engage the questions that are important to Reformed thinkers with greater care. Who knows, perhaps he’s tried and failed and this is where he felt he had to go with it. Reformed thinkers are not immune to charges of being hard to talk to.

Dr. Moreland has done tremendous work to advance the kingdom of God by providing much-needed on-ramps to the life of the Christian mind. It would be an awful shame if this paper adds toll gates that aren’t needed.

Epilogue

Two of my favorite bloggers have weighed in:

• Justin Taylor says it’s not what he said; it’s the way he said it that’s causing problems.
• Douglas Groothuis calls Moreland’s paper “superb and much-needed.”

Alvin Plantinga explains what “fundamentalist” means.