Last week I
re-read chapter three of T. P. Letis’ The
Ecclesiastical Text (The Institute for Renaissance and Reformation Biblical
Studies, 1997) titled “The Language of Biblical Authority: From Protestant Orthodoxy to Evangelical
Equivocation” (pp. 59-85).
Letis begins the essay noting the irony of the fact that doctrinal traditionalists who rightly objected to the skeptical modern
historical-critical quest for the historical Jesus were more than willing to
embrace the modern historical-critical quest to reconstruct the autographa:
What I hope to establish in this [chapter] is that while
everyone in confessional ranks attempted to resist to the death the invasion of
the nineteenth century German higher criticism with its quest for the
historical Jesus, they, nevertheless, unwittingly gave way to the process of
desacralization by assuming the safe and “scientific” nature of the quest for
the historical text. There is a sense in
which the entire history of the influence of Biblical criticism on confessional
communities is but a working out of this theme, with adjustment after
adjustment taking place, until the original paradigm of verbal inspiration
evaporates and no one is so much aware that a change has taken place (p. 63).
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