Pat McCullough has a good post with some good comments sparked by Dan Wallace’s odd broadside against liberals and their biases. In that earlier post Wallace claimed that “most biblical scholars are not Christians”. (I note in passing that real secular scholars think the shoe is on the other foot.)
Among other links, Pat draws us to Dallas Theological Seminary’s Doctrinal Statement. And I made the mistake of taking the red pill and going down the rabbit-hole clicking on the link. I’m still trying to recover from the shock. I thought I was inoculated against fundyphobia, but apparently not. It not only takes them six articles to get to Christ, but you have to go through some very weird angelology to get there. The idea that this exceeding strange synthesis of various verses about (and actually not about – e.g. Isaiah’s oracle against the king of Babylon) angels and demons is the third article of Christian faith leaves me stranded between laughter and tears. Dan Brown, eat your heart out!
Now it might be that the main purpose of this statement of faith is nothing whatsoever to do with the way the seminary practices scholarship, but is there in order to garner financial support from the great unwashed who wouldn’t know a scholar from a snake-oil salesman. It may be a totemic shibboleth that says “We’re safe to send your sons to” (I’ve no idea how welcome daughters are.– the Fall enrolment figures for 2008 have three men for every one woman, and it’s unclear how that breaks down between on campus and extension students).
In short, it may be that good scholarship which goes with the evidence is welcome and practiced at DTS. Some of the anecdotal comments on Pat’s post and elsewhere suggest it is practiced. The evidence of the DTS website, however, is that it’s not welcome.
So if this doctrinal statement illuminates what Dan Wallace means by “Christians” when he says “most biblical scholars are not Christians”, then I not only agree with him, but I praise the Lord that it is so. For by these standards, I’m not a Christian either.
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And there are fewer and fewer posts for theological educators and lecturers, and so the “I just go and knit my own version” approach is set to flourish and fudamentalist idiocy triumphs.
Having said that, I do a lot of work for members of SOTS, and certainly, it is true that a great many are self proclaimed agnostics or even atheists, plus of course, many are Jewish – all would rightly consider themseleves to be biblical scholars.
doug you’ve barely dipped the tip of your finger in the american fundamentalism cesspool. dts is one of the more reasonable examples. you should really visit the South.
You’d think Jesus would be first in the SoF, but whatever.
I don’t know about American fundamentalism, but I do think we can say too, that Christian scholarship has changed, from the UK to the US in the last several generations. And even in the American Roman Catholic system of seminary education, since the 60′s. Rome is seeking to change that bit of liberal mess. Here are some of the ‘dead bodies’ of the sexual problems. It all touches each other.
I was friends with the American Catholic scholar John L. McKenzie, S.T.D., Professor Emeritus of Theology, De Paul University, Chicago. (RIP).
Hooray for all ye heretics who are not bound by statements of faith and are free to tell the truth
I can’t find it online, but Wallace somewhere has written about how he views doctrines as “concentric circles” with only cardinal doctrines (e.g. Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, etc.) in the middle. He definitely doesn’t view inerrancy as a cardinal doctrine and I highly doubt his angelology is.
But wow! My jaw dropped when I read it.
I suspect that’s the case. As I hinted in the post I have a sneaking suspicion that this operates more to appease the outsider funders than control the scholars – however, it could always become a more heavy handed tool were the Board to become witch-hunt minded. Dare I mention Enns and WTS?
If this is true, and they don’t truly believe their statement of faith, then they are being dishonest. And dishonest people cannot do honest scholarship any more than people bound by statements of faith.
Who’s the “they” in this sentence? DTS’s statement of faith is what they refer people to if asked “what does DTS as an institution mean by _____?” DTS doesn’t require students (or faculty) to affirm the statement of faith.
I am interested in your line of reasoning though. Would you argue that the scholarship of someone committing adultery ought to be called into question?
our faculty and board annually affirm their agreement with the full doctrinal statement … the ‘they’ refers to the faculty, not the students.
yes, if deceit is involved. That is, if he is an evangelical Christian who professes a statement of faith which declares the authority of scripture in which adultery is a sin, and no, if deceit is not involved – ie someone who has a liberal view of marriage, and doesn’t define his sexual conduct as ‘adultery’ and is open about it.
Presumably, if it’s a liberal protestant that deceives, that’s still a problem. I wonder, how does this play out in research? That is, how do I know which scholars have lived properly by their moral code, and which ones haven’t?
Furthermore, what happens when an academic does good scholarship while being honest, but then later cheats on her husband. Is the scholarship retroactively dishonest?
How do you know he was honest in the first place. Life is that sometimes people deceive their husbands and wives but are perfectly honest otherwise. However the whole point of my original comment was that professing a statement of faith to one’s institution of scholarship, prevents one from telling the truth when one’s conclusions are inconsistent with that statement. If one agrees to the statement but doesn’t believe in it, then one’s scholarship is affected by that dishonesty.
DTS SoF: Establish your authority, then go roughly chronologically. I can see that.
I wonder when this SoF was written? It’s very reminiscent of things I commonly heard growing up thirty years ago, and some of the language is either cod-KJV or genuinely old.
But yes, the emphases in the SoF are often strange. The size of some sections in comparison to others is off, to my mind. So little on the Trinity, so much on the devil and the dispensations. It seems to gloss over man’s part in sin to focus on the devil (who is the tempter, not the forcer).
The most offensive words in it for many are doubtless “without error”, “substitutionary”, “translation”, “tribulation”.
“We believe also that today some men are especially called of God to be evangelists, pastors and teachers,”
It is pretty clear that by “men” they mean males. Above apparently sons of God seems to refer to salvation.
Um, actually, they don’t mean males only. I am “called of God to teach” at Dallas Seminary, and I have two X chromosomes. I don’t even have to bring snake oil to class.
Good to know (sorry for the moderation delay – night-time here)
@Tim although you say “DTS doesn’t require students (or faculty) to affirm the statement of faith” the actual DTS site says “While our faculty and board annually affirm their agreement with the full doctrinal statement …” Students don’t have to, but it seems faculty do.
Sorry, Doug, my mistake. I knew the faculty had to affirm something more than what the students do, but I didn’t think it was the statement in full. Should’ve looked it up first!
If you’re truly interested in the origins and development of DTS’s doctrinal statement, the book “An Uncommon Union: Dallas Theological Seminary and American Evangelicalism” might be a good place to start. http://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Union-Theological-Seminary-Evangelicalism/dp/0310237866
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