Evangelicalism Divided

In the 1920s theological students were commonly told that 'the theory of the verbal inspiration of Scripture was as dead as Queen Anne'. As Oliver Barclay recalls: 'By the 1930s, evangelicals were effectively the only section of the British churches that held to this truth.' (1)

The Intervarsity Fellowship (now UCCF) broke with SCM on this issue in the 1920s (2), and for a time the IVF's testimony to the infallibility of Scripture was unique and alone in the universities.

As evangelical influence grew after the Second World War, and noticeably among students, opposition centred on its claim that evangelical Christianity alone was being true to Scripture. A published address by Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the subject, given at an IVF conference in 1952, drew a stinging response from Nathaniel Micklem, Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. The IVF and Lloyd-Jones outlook, he charged, was 'divisive, schismatic, obscurantist and quite unbiblical'. (3)

Controversy widened during the Graham crusades of 1954-55 as clergy and academics noted with dismay that the American evangelist was clearly a 'fundamentalist' in his view of Scripture. The hostile criticism of Michael Ramsey and of others led to the emphatic response of the hitherto little-known James Packer. In his first IVF book, Fundamentalism and the Word of God, published in 1958, Packer observed: 'There is one point, however, on which all 'anti-fundamentalists' seem to agree; that is, that the doctrine of Scripture which they attribute to their evangelical brethren (whether they define it as dictation, literalism, inerrancy or anything else) is new, eccentric and in reality untenable.' (4)

No matter how carefully evangelicals sought to distinguish between what they believed and the aberrations associated with some fundamentalists, as long as they held to the verbal inspiration of Scripture the same label was given to them all. Thus John Stott was a 'fundamentalist' according to some of his fellow clergy.

Human and divine

Evangelicals were looking for intellectual respectability and it constituted no small problem how they could gain admission and prestige in the academic world if they carried with them such an outmoded belief. In brief, some solution to the difficulty seemed possible in the distinction between the divine and human sides of Scripture. Evangelicals noticed how the neo-orthodox Karl Barth gained credit by recognising the full 'humanity' of Scripture, and they believed they could do the same without any compromise. Belief in the full inspiration of the Bible requires no weakening of the fact that God spoke through men. There need be no contradiction between the supernatural element and the human authorship. So evangelical scholars believed that they could compete with colleagues in researching the language, motivation, education and the cultural background of the biblical writers, without conceding the presuppositions which lay behind liberal scholarship.

Applying this to the academic level, evangelicals would work with liberals on the human aspects, using the same critical tools, while retaining their overall position. The immense cleavage of opinion over the actual authority of the Bible could be by-passed, yet with the ultimate intention of making the other side sit up and rethink the credibility of the conservative position. By not beginning with their 'personal beliefs' and by concentrating on the 'human', evangelicals hoped to dispel the prejudice which their position encountered.

Did it work?

How far this hope was fulfilled is now a matter of history and we must look at some of the evidence. Professor F.F. Bruce was one of the first evangelicals into the new field. In 1959, the same year that he began work in Manchester, the IVF issued his work The Apostolic Defence of the Gospel. In this he wrote: 'It is necessary to inculcate a new awareness of the authority of the Scriptures as God's Word written, and a new awareness of the supernatural' (p.12).

But Bruce's ensuing years in teaching show that he meant to approach the authority of Scripture cautiously and indirectly. There was no question of asserting it as a matter of biblical theology. Instead, his method in teaching was that each part of Scripture has to be assessed without any prior determination to find it consistent with other parts and without any controlling belief which necessarily treats all as true.

It is hardly being ungenerous to Bruce to say that if his doctrine of Scripture was the same as that of IVF (of which he remained a vice-president) that doctrine was not proclaimed in his university work. (5)

Continuing attacks

The tendency which appears in Bruce is full-blown in a number of the professed evangelicals who followed him into the university world. It was James Barr, his one-time junior colleague, who launched a full-scale attack on the teaching to which he had once adhered in his book Fundamentalism (London, SCM, 1977). Wenham notes how Bruce was excluded from Barr's criticism of evangelicals and comments: 'Barr reckoned that Bruce was a conservative liberal.' (6)

This was not the last attack on evangelical teaching from its former friends. In 1982 James Dunn published articles on Scripture which led to disruption in Churchman, the journal in which they were published. Unlike Barr, Dunn, as a member of the Tyndale Fellowship, was still speaking from 'the inside'. (7)

With some subtlety and slight dealing with crucial texts, Dunn presented a case that the Bible does not teach that it is inerrant, and that it is indeed more honouring to Scripture and to the Holy Spirit to recognise that fact. He also saw the text of the Bible as 'historically relative'. He argued that because some of its teaching was true it does not necessarily follow that it is true for all time. Further, the Holy Spirit may give a text a meaning for us now which was not the original meaning, and to accept this, he claimed, is to 'exalt the Spirit' over the letter. Simply to be bound by 'the letter' is Pharisaic legalism, and when evangelicals attribute to Scripture the authority which only belongs to God they are guilty of 'bibliolatry'. As far as the teaching of Warfield and Princeton on Scripture was concerned, Dunn's language was unmeasured. It was 'exegetically improbable, hermeneutically defective, theologically dangerous, and educationally disastrous'.

No response

One of the most disturbing things concerning the statements of Barr and Dunn on Scripture is the absence of response from all the many other men supposedly upholding the evangelical position in the universities at that date.
One of their number was Richard T. France, a well-known IVF/UCCF author and Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. This was the Anglican evangelical college in the same city in which Barr came to teach when he left Manchester. Dr. France appeared to justify the lack of response to Barr from the evangelical academic professionals in these words: 'Professor Barr's target was not evangelical scholarship in general (indeed he uses the term 'evangelical' favourably, to denote the Christian tradition which he hopes to rescue from 'fundamentalism'), but those tendencies within it which are founded on 'inerrancy, infallibility, and the other accompanying features' spelled out in his book, one of which is an innate hostility to modern critical study of the Bible, where it appears to lead in a direction incompatible with a doctrine of scriptural inerrancy. 'Conservative evangelicals' who do not exhibit this tendency (he singles out F.F. Bruce for honourable mention) are therefore not included in the book's strictures. (8)

On these words John Wenham has commented: 'Barr's attack on fundamentalism was particularly an attack on inerrancy; on the idea, that is, that the Scriptures were the direct product of the God of truth and therefore to be accepted in their entirety. Dick France's response to this was that he hardly ever met a fundamentalist, which presumably means that few of his acquaintances would now defend inerrancy.' (9)

The position which France took on Dunn's teaching is evident from the fact that the Durham professor was asked to give the W.H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Wycliffe Hall in 1987, with Scripture as his subject. In one of these lectures Dunn argued that Jesus was a 'liberal' rather than a 'fundamentalist' in his view of Old Testament Scripture. (10)

Words of the Holy Spirit

All this was no small change. For these men the former position of evangelicalism on Scripture had gone and those who still adhered to it were likely to be caricatured and receive the same disdain which formerly came from avowed liberals.

We are faced then with the question how the evangelical endeavour to gain influence in the universities had come to such a position within 20 years? Part of the answer has to be the idea that the 'human' side of Scripture can be addressed without insistence on divine revelation, was mistaken from the outset. While the human element and the divine may be distinguished in words, in reality they are so miraculously conjoined that the human cannot be truly understood without giving full weight to the supernatural. Certainly God did not obliterate the individual personalities and gifts of the writers, but he so controlled and directed them that their words are those of the Holy Spirit. There is therefore no possibility that the 'human' part of Scripture can rightly be studied separately.

On this subject Dr. Griffith Thomas, one-time principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, wrote: ' Divine truth was given to, through, and for man, and when we accept the book as a record of the Divine revelation it will be found that it is not the 'human element' that impresses, but the Divine element . . . By all means let us discover all we can about the 'human element', but let us never forget that it is not the human but the Divine element that constitutes the Bible, the Word of God.' (11)

The academic approach to Scripture treats the divine element - for all practical purposes - as non-existent. History shows that when evangelicals allow that approach, their teaching will sooner or later begin to look little different from that of liberals.

This article is taken from a chapter of Iain Murray's book Evangelicalism Divided, to be published by the Banner of Truth this coming summer. It is used with permission.

Footnotes (abbreviated):

1. O. Barclay, Evangelicalism in Britain, p.10.
2. Douglas Johnson, Contending for the Faith, IVP, 1979, p.131.
3. The Lloyd-Jones address is in Knowing the Times, pp.38-50; the Micklem response in The Fight of Faith, pp.228-9. (Vol. 2 of ML-J biography).
4. J.I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God, p.11.
5. In Retrospect, Bruce's autobiography, pp.187-8, 310.
6.Wenham, Autobiography, p. 195.
7. The Church-man articles of 1982 are reprinted in Dunn, The Living Word, pp.89-136. (Philadelphia, Fortress Press).
8. France and McGrath, Evangelical Anglicans, p.48.
9. Wenham, Autobiography, p.218.
10. Dunn, The Living Word, pp.46-55.
11. Principles of Theology, p.118.

An extract from the book Evangelicalism Divided on evangelical scholarship and Scripture