In a recent blog post Scot McKnight asks, “What happens, then, to the doctrine of Scripture if David Fitch is right?” The question stems from Fitch’s book The End of Evangelicalism? and, particularly, his assertion that evangelicalism…
…is rooted in three major “master-signifiers”: the Inerrant Bible, Decision for personal salvation, and the Christian Nation. But he contends this ideological set of factors is losing ground because the antagonisms in culture no longer support the ideas, and furthermore the last fifty years have gradually eroded the “politic” that is needed for the church to be what God wants it to be in America.
Hence the following claim by David Fitch:
These theologians1 prod us to leave behind the Bible as ‘inerrant according to the original autographs’ to instead understand it as ‘our one and true story of God for the world — infallible in and through Jesus Christ our Lord.’2
McKnight’s post is already generating a great deal of discussion.3 Many of the commentators agreeing with Fitch’s thesis insofar as it pertains to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Is David Fitch onto something? Is the current notion of biblical inerrancy a product of modernity? Does the model suggested by Fitch better reflect “the missional model that Bible seeks to create”?
- Fitch’s reference to “these theologians” is a reference to Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Christopher Wright. ↩
- David Fitch, The End of Evangelicalism? (Cascade, 2011), 138. ↩
- There are seventeen comments as of this writing. ↩
