Tremper Longman

[discipulo]

I agree wholeheartedly with the WCF on the scriptures: it is inspired and is infallible to provide us with every knowledge of God necessary unto salvation. And I'm seen as a world-infested liberal!

Infallibility is a judgment that is earned through experience of its power and authority confirmed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Sounds very liberal and wishy-washy? It's the WCF: "Our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts". This persuasion started with me the moment I believed because I believed through reading the bible not through preaching, or a church or evangelism - oh I believe in the power of the bible alright; I know it is the Holy Spirit's chosen primary method of operation and as such it is of immense power and deserves the utmost respect and attention.

Inerrancy is not in the WCF unless you use the word 'inspired' in a very particular way of your choosing. Inerrancy is a presupposition - it has to be to avoid being circular. There's nothing inherently wrong with presuppositions of course; they can be good and necessary and their adoption is a function of how much time you're willing to spend questioning a thing compared to its certainty. I will believe the bible is inerrant in the first place. But this working assumption is not to me an article of salvific faith or an indicator of being open to the influences of the world. If the text says that Saul was one year old and reigned for two years, this is not a problem - it just tells me that that information is not necessary unto salvation. If, in all intellectual honesty and prayer, other data of revelation (such as the natural world) contradicts a literal reading of a passage of scripture, the data of revelation will trump the working assumption in that place and I know a literal interpretation of that place is not necessary unto salvation. What these things don't do is change my opinion of the bible's infallibility to provide every knowledge of God necessary unto salvation.

I said that the adoption of a presupposition is a function of how much time you're willing to spend questioning a thing compared to its certainty, but that decision should be a function of its real certainty, not a function of the difficulty and inconvenience that would arise if it were not true. That way lies intellectual cowardice and an actual neglect of the truth.

I belive I understand your argument but In my humble opinion is not a sound one.

I once read an outrageous article by Theodore P. Letis on the Journal of the Kuyper Foundation,

Don’t You Believe in the "Inerrancy of the Original Autographs?" or Have You Stopped Beating Your Wife Yet?

That made the point of differencing Infallibility of Scripture from Inerrancy of Scripture, the first being historically orthodox, the second being a Warfield et al construction.

The Kuyper Foundation ~ promoting a renaissance of Christian culture

In my humble opinion opposing 2 Attributes of Scripture falls close to a Low regard for Scripture,

Scripture is both Infallible and Inerrant.

Try reading

Is the Bible Inerrant? by John M. Frame

John Frame while not being a latitudinarian at all, can’t be remotely classified as a hyper confessionalist either (one who would stand on the side of a Confession against Scripture).

Is the Bible Inerrant

 

[OPC'n]

I have a problem with ppl who don't believe that the subject of creation isn't a big deal bc it's not related to the salvific process. I believe it is. There is where the salvific process began. Adam sinned and fell. God came to the rescue and promised Christ.

As for the amount of time it took for all this to happen I believe God couldn't get more clear when He said " God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day." Do we really believe that the earth has shrunk so much that it now only takes it 24hrs for it to spin around 360 degrees? How big would the earth have to be for it to take millions of years to spin around just once? I know, I know!!!!! Don't be so "highly literal"!!!! A day doesn't really mean 24 hours.....it means millions of years!!! Wonder why God couldn't figure out seconds, minutes, hours, months, and years during creation but then after creation He got it right? I mean, we do have that pesky little example of God using the "highly literal" day when He gave the Sabbath law. not to mention any of the other Scriptural usage of the word day. Did God really make the sun stop for Joshua for a full day? Did the Israelites really pick up quail all that day and night and all the next day? Did God really provide a worm the next day to eat Jonah's plant? Really, if it weren't for the sun disappearing all the time and then reappearing a few hours later we would have this all sorted out!

 

[lynnie]

Moving to CA, he was promised that he could allow his mind to go in whatever direction his scholarship leads him. Westmont does not impose any expectation beyond broad evangelicalism upon its faculty (e.g., Calvinist, Arminian, charismatic, emergent, etc.).

DMc, I had no idea, honestly. I guess you know more about him than I do. But I still maintain that the two videos linked above do not imply that he thinks the bible is untrue. ( although Arminians, etc also think it is true).


To whit, WTS had become (in his opinion) a place where scholarship would be shackled to the limits of confessional conventions.

That is not what I heard. What I heard is that it would be shackled primarily to raising up preachers of confessional doctrine allegedly acccording to Machen's end of his life vision. Things like one on one counseling, and all the various training for non pulpit ministries would be minimized, and preaching maximized. (they have every right to be a preaching seminary if they decide to, but a significant number of students were not headed towards a pulpit, and thus the fuss)

Sorry, Lynnie, but academic freedom does not matter to me as much as biblical fidelity.

well, I sure agree....and in fact the WTS push to have all PhD profs was another big fuss. You can have a PhD and be less faithful than the guy with the MDiv.

But to be fair to Tremper, he did not leave because he had changed his (confessional) vows required of WTS profs. So I am hesitant to join in what seems to be a real effort to discredit him here. You'd have to discredit BB Warfield the same way. I do NOT agree with theistic evolution, I am a young earth geocentrist, but I am not convinced Longman is off into the ditch.

 

[Michael Doyle]

I am sure that my opinions do not carry much theological weight as I am still developing but nonetheless consider this more a musing. Does not even the consideration of a non literal Adam threaten orthodoxy and original sin and all its implications.
Is not scripture to interpret scripture and if so, in the unfolding of the drama of redemption, we can deduce with all fullness, the existence and fall of a literal Adam.

If this is true...Why would Longman not be able to conclude with certainty his existence if he truly subscribes to a covenantal view?

 

[DMcFadden]

Moving to CA, he was promised that he could allow his mind to go in whatever direction his scholarship leads him. Westmont does not impose any expectation beyond broad evangelicalism upon its faculty (e.g., Calvinist, Arminian, charismatic, emergent, etc.).

DMc, I had no idea, honestly. I guess you know more about him than I do. But I still maintain that the two videos linked above do not imply that he thinks the bible is untrue. ( although Arminians, etc also think it is true).


To whit, WTS had become (in his opinion) a place where scholarship would be shackled to the limits of confessional conventions.

That is not what I heard. What I heard is that it would be shackled primarily to raising up preachers of confessional doctrine allegedly acccording to Machen's end of his life vision. Things like one on one counseling, and all the various training for non pulpit ministries would be minimized, and preaching maximized. (they have every right to be a preaching seminary if they decide to, but a significant number of students were not headed towards a pulpit, and thus the fuss)

Sorry, Lynnie, but academic freedom does not matter to me as much as biblical fidelity.

well, I sure agree....and in fact the WTS push to have all PhD profs was another big fuss. You can have a PhD and be less faithful than the guy with the MDiv.

But to be fair to Tremper, he did not leave because he had changed his (confessional) vows required of WTS profs. So I am hesitant to join in what seems to be a real effort to discredit him here. You'd have to discredit BB Warfield the same way. I do NOT agree with theistic evolution, I am a young earth geocentrist, but I am not convinced Longman is off into the ditch.

Lynnie, I don't want to discredit him either, merely disagree with him. The man is a brilliant scholar, a man of great Christian integrity, students report that he is a wonderful teacher and I hear (never met him myself) that he is a really nice guy. I simply disagree with some of his evident positions (e.g., historical Adam).

 

[DMcFadden]

That is not what I heard. What I heard is that it would be shackled primarily to raising up preachers of confessional doctrine allegedly acccording to Machen's end of his life vision. Things like one on one counseling, and all the various training for non pulpit ministries would be minimized, and preaching maximized. (they have every right to be a preaching seminary if they decide to, but a significant number of students were not headed towards a pulpit, and thus the fuss)

As a former student, you were certainly closer to the situation than I am as a total outsider. All I am going off is Longman's own statement which did NOT highlight the issue of preparing preachers but the constrictive attitudes of what it was coming to mean to be a WTS person. He argued that this is not the WTS that he came to know and love.

His later published defenses of Enns seemed to fit in the same vein. He did not defend Enns for not wanting to train preachers, but for the fact that his views are within the circle of acceptable teaching as Longman understood the tradition of WTS. He clearly felt/feels that scholars need to have a right to explore the edges of the circle. And, both his example of what was wrong with his colleague's attitude and his defense of what was right about Enns suggest a person who wants to feel free to operate outside such narrow understandings of the "confessional." That does not mean that he does not fully see himself as Reformed or even fully confessional. It simply means that his definition of it will be a bit "broader" than that of some others.

When my former Westmont prof (Longman's predecessor there) argued against a historical visitation of the magi, he did it maintaining that he still supported inerrancy. In his mind, the disbelief in the magi allowed him to harmonize the Gospels more easily in support for an inerrant text. When my professor in seminary argued for errors in the phenomena of scripture (e.g., historical details, differences between accounts in the Gospels, etc.) he did so to claim that inerrancy only pertained to the salvific core of the message.

The real question in my mind is how much scholarly grazing off the ranch is acceptable? I think that when good guys, nice guys, friends of our friends, trusted teachers (etc.) take an odd view, we tend to cut them too much slack. And, what starts as an "innocent" question by a trusted teacher, becomes in the next incarnation a not so innocent argument by a less trustworthy teacher, and finally an assumed result of scholarship that undermines the faith of many.

I have NO desire to throw bricks at someone's doyen of evangelical scholarship. However, when he or she says something outside the bounds, I suggest that we need to do more to challenge them. John R.W. Stott, for example, was allowed a pass on his annihilationism because of his long standing reputation as a solid evangelical statesman. Some of J.I. Packer's more recent squishy views may fall into the same category. Attack, discredit, and reject the teachers asking questions? No! Challenge them more forthrightly? YES!

 

[lynnie]

DMc....

Thanks you for the lengthy post. I was unaware of what he said about Enns, in spite of all the Enns debate we were exposed to here. ( I live between Princeton and WTS, with church interns/grads/students from both seminaries at my church the past 3 years). Enns was off, no doubt about it. I accept that your concerns must have a seriously valid basis.

As far as grazing off the ranch goes, in my opinion the root of the problem is BB Warfield. He is held in such high esteem (well deserved) that positions like the one about Adam are allowed. If it is OK for BBW then it must in fairness be OK for TL. BBW lived in the days before molecular biology and statistics and the intelligent design books, but even many IDs today hold to evolution with creative acts of God involved, just like Warfield.

Evolution

An example of mediate creation in Warfield’s thought would be the creation of Adam. His body could have been created by a long evolutionary process as postulated by Darwin, et al. However, the creation of his spirit, by divine in-breathing, was a supernatural act of creation. He gives the formation of the God-man Jesus Christ as another example. And as a "creationist" rather than a "traducianist" he also saw the ongoing formation of human beings as acts of mediate creation.

Warfield believed that there was nothing in the first chapters of Genesis that could not be properly interpreted in a way consistent with the evolutionary development of the present world. The only caveat he allowed was that the creation of Eve (Out of Adam’s rib by a special act of God) was hard to reconcile with an evolutionary interpretation of man’s development. But he obviously did not consider this a serious enough objection to cause him to reconsider evolution as a viable interpretation of the Genesis creation account.

Some people into this have a whole theology of death that it means only spiritual death, (with a gazillion verses and alleged hebrew meanings) and Adam was indeed nursed at the breast of a primate mother who died presumably before he did. Believe me I think the bus went off the ditch and into the grand canyon. But you can't fight BB Warfield.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Once upon a time scholars began with questions and concluded with answers. These days they have a tendency to begin with answers and conclude with questions.

Infallibility is a judgment that is earned through experience of its power and authority confirmed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Funny...I always thought that those who were scholars were the experienced. Your whole post describes the novice to me and not the man who ought to be leading another to certainty.

 

[dr_parsley]

Once upon a time scholars began with questions and concluded with answers. These days they have a tendency to begin with answers and conclude with questions.

Infallibility is a judgment that is earned through experience of its power and authority confirmed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Funny...I always thought that those who were scholars were the experienced. Your whole post describes the novice to me and not the man who ought to be leading another to certainty.

Yes, they are experienced and so presumably hold to the infallibility of the bible and would be leading others to the certainty of that infallibility. It appears from your reply you are assuming an identity of inerrancy and infallibility, and if so I'm afraid you didn't understand my post because it should be clear that I don't agree with that identity.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Infallibility is a judgment that is earned through experience of its power and authority confirmed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Funny...I always thought that those who were scholars were the experienced. Your whole post describes the novice to me and not the man who ought to be leading another to certainty.

Yes, they are experienced and so presumably hold to the infallibility of the bible and would be leading others to the certainty of that infallibility. It appears from your reply you are assuming an identity of inerrancy and infallibility, and if so I'm afraid you didn't understand my post because it should be clear that I don't agree with that identity.

Do you hold to verbal plenary inspiration and an infallible and inerrant text in the original autographs?

Do you believe that Adam was a historical person?

 

[discipulo]

To clear all these debates, shouldn’t we just endorse more
the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

It was not only made by Reformed Scholars, but some good ones were there, Nicole, Boice, Packer, Sproul, ... and it’s a Sound Document indeed.

 

[dr_parsley]

Funny...I always thought that those who were scholars were the experienced. Your whole post describes the novice to me and not the man who ought to be leading another to certainty.

Yes, they are experienced and so presumably hold to the infallibility of the bible and would be leading others to the certainty of that infallibility. It appears from your reply you are assuming an identity of inerrancy and infallibility, and if so I'm afraid you didn't understand my post because it should be clear that I don't agree with that identity.

Do you hold to verbal plenary inspiration and an infallible and inerrant text in the original autographs?

I barely know what you mean. 'Verbal', 'plenary', 'inspiration', 'inerrant' and 'original' have too much scope for you and I to hold different definitions that a simple yes or no could not suffice. I found the Chicago Statement referenced by César interesting to read, especially how in amongst the usual language of inerrancy the following is found:

"We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations."

So we agree with Galileo that the earth is moving at a ferocious speed because the data of revelation from the natural world interpreted by logic forces us to put Psalm 93:1 into what the Chicago Statement calls "observational descriptions of nature" which being literally errant DO NOT negate our trust in the truthfulness of the bible. My opinion is that, given inevitable positions like the one quoted above, the word 'inerrant' is of very little (or no) practical use other than to mark out a territory. It seems to be most often used to pour scorn on others and to set up an us-and-them mentality of frustration and distrust between brothers who each believe in the infallibility of the bible but do not naturally express it in the same ways.

Do you believe that Adam was a historical person?

That question has less ambiguity in its terms, so I can answer yes.

 

[tcalbrecht]

Steve Hays over at Triablogue has offered some thoughts.

 

[dr_parsley]

Yes, they are experienced and so presumably hold to the infallibility of the bible and would be leading others to the certainty of that infallibility. It appears from your reply you are assuming an identity of inerrancy and infallibility, and if so I'm afraid you didn't understand my post because it should be clear that I don't agree with that identity.

Do you hold to verbal plenary inspiration and an infallible and inerrant text in the original autographs?

I barely know what you mean.

I'll start a thread in the wading pool so I can find out what it means in detail.

So we agree with Galileo that the earth is moving at a ferocious speed because the data of revelation from the natural world interpreted by logic forces us to put Psalm 93:1 into what the Chicago Statement calls "observational descriptions of nature" which being literally errant DO NOT negate our trust in the truthfulness of the bible. My opinion is that, given inevitable positions like the one quoted above, the word 'inerrant' is of very little (or no) practical use other than to mark out a territory.

It's been pointed out to me that these comments were inappropriate in this thread because it looks like I'm advocating a non-historical Adam. Sorry about that - I haven't even watched the videos to find out what Tremper Longman was saying (my internet connection is inadequate to do so). I also overstated my case on the usefulness of the word 'inerrant' - marking out a territory can be very important and useful.

Do you believe that Adam was a historical person?

That question has less ambiguity in its terms, so I can answer yes.

 

[tcalbrecht]

Do you hold to verbal plenary inspiration and an infallible and inerrant text in the original autographs?

Do you believe that Adam was a historical person?

Rich,

Isn't there still a bit of ambiguity in that second question, i.e., "historical" in what sense? The Bible makes certain claims about the person called Adam beyond the fact that some person once existed with that name. The Bible claims that Adam was created directly by the hand of God out of dust, and that his wife, was created directly by God from one of his ribs.

It's this very history that is under attack.