A kindly reader e-mailed me a link to
THIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE IN CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
It’s an interview with Ben Witherington about a new book he has out critiquing various schools of Evangelical theology, such as Calvinism, Wesleyanism, Dispensationalism, and Pentecostalism.
The central point of the book is that these theological schools tend to go wrong exegetically when it comes to the things that are most distinctive of them. For example,
- Calvinism is at its exegetical worst when arguing for things like perseverance of the saints
- Wesleyanism is at its worst when arguing for arguing that sanctification is a second definite work of grace.
- Dispensationalism is at its worst when arguing for a pre-tribulational rapture.
- Pentecostalism is at its worst when arguing that all Christians need to speak in tongues and that spirit baptism is a second definite work of grace.
Ben is dealing with a phenomenon that struck me back when I was an Evangelical: The various Evangelical schools of thought are vulnerable exegetically because they attempt to over-systematize Scripture. They treat it as if statements in Scripture were axioms of systematic theology that just need to be strung together in the right order to produce an overall systematic theology.
But that’s not what Scripture is. Not remotely. And if you try to handle the text in that manner you will inevitably force your own system onto the text of Scripture instead of deriving your system from Scripture.
A fundamental problem I found toward the end of my time as an Evangelical was that the different Evangelical theologies just didn’t "stick close enough" to the text exegetically. They were always trying to systematize aspects of it that reflected a much messier reality.
Ben deserves a lot of credit for pointing this out. It’s a gutsy move. I love the part of the interview where this comes up:
[N]ow that you have gone public in this book
with a critique of the key teachings of Calvinist, dispensational,
Arminian, and Pentecostal theologies, do you plan to have any friends
left?
I’m obviously a naive person. I’m going to give some lectures in
Abilene next week on "Dispensing with Dispensationalism." This is going
into dispensational territory, as you know. If you hear of my
martyrdom, write a nice obituary.
I’ve corresponded with Ben before (back during the St. James ossuary business), and he was a real nice guy. I may contact him and express my appreciation for the theme of his new book (which I plan on getting) and wish him luck.
I wouldn’t want such a contact to come across in a triumphalistic sense, though I can imagine the topic coming up of how well Catholicism squares with Scripture exegetically. One might ask: Doesn’t Catholicism have its own system that departs from Scripture in the same way that the different Evangelical theologies do?
It certainly has a system that goes beyond Scripture in that it also appeals to Tradition for the data with which it does theology. This is not a problem for Catholics in the way it is for Protestants, though. If you have the idea of sola scriptura as one of your founding theological principles and you don’t give Tradition a normative role then you’ve got to derive your system from Scripture alone.
That’s when you run into problems, because there are many questions that Christians need answers to (e.g., "Who is it okay to baptize and just how do you administer baptism?") that aren’t answered in Scripture. Scripture thus points beyond itself to Tradition for these answers. In fact, Scripture itself is simply the written component of Tradition.
Without the extra-scriptural complement of Tradition, Scripture does not contain enough data to provide confident answers to all the questions that need confident answering (such as the ones mentioned above), and so one attempting to operate from the perspective of sola scriptura will inevitably have to propose some kind of system that can’t be fully grounded in Scripture in order to answer those questions.
But if you reject the premise of sola scriptura and allow Tradition to fill in the missing pieces, you end up with enough data to build systematic theology–even if the result is a system that must, by definition, go beyond Scripture in the data it treats as normative.
There also are places where elements from Tradition exist in exegetical tension with elements in Scripture (i.e., where the two don’t at first blush seem to square), but then this phenomenon exists within Scripture itself, as witnessed by the numerous passages that are proposed as "biblical contraditions" and such. Just as it is the job of the exegete to show possible harmonizations of these alleged discrepancies between different passages of Scripture, it is the job of theologians and exegetes to show possible harmonizations of alleged discrepancies between Scripture and Tradition.
Tradition (including Scripture as its written component) is just a bigger dataset, but the same kinds of issues arise. The difference is that Tradition is a large enough dataset to provide for the needs of systematic theology whereas Scripture apart from Tradition is not.
As an Evangelical, Ben might not agree to all that, but his new book suggests that he’s thinking along the right lines, and the interview itself shows that he’s got significant insight into the nature of the problem.
GET THE STORY.
