Abstract
As an important sector of Christianity, evangelicalism flourishes worldwide at the beginning of the twenty-first century. David W. Bebbington’s definition is one routinely used to define evangelicalism. He lists conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism as the central tenets of evangelicalism. This definition can pinpoint the evangelical crisscross, but the evangelical theological distinctiveness is more nuanced. As part of the Protestant ethos, evangelical theology varies from it concerning method, using “sola scriptura more radically than the Protestant traditions out of which it grew.” However, the current evangelical discussion reflects the existence of a plurality of theological methods. This debate has deep roots in the epistemological soil of each theologian. The way theologians see the epistemic role of Scripture directly impacts their methods. The methodological debate is thus an epistemological one.
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Notes
- 1.
Mark A. Noll, “What Is ‘Evangelical’?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, ed. Gerald R. McDermott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 30.
- 2.
David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (1989; repr., London: Routledge, 2005), 3.
- 3.
Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys, A History of Evangelicalism 1 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003), 19.
- 4.
Gerald R. McDermott, “Introduction,” in McDermott, The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, 5.
- 5.
Mary M. Veeneman, Introducing Theological Method: A Survey of Contemporary Theologians and Approaches (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 81.
- 6.
D. A. Carson, “The Many Facets of the Current Discussion,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 32.
- 7.
Stanley E. Porter and Steven M. Studebaker, “Method in Systematic Theology,” in Evangelical Theological Method: Five Views, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Steven M. Studebaker, Spectrum Multiview Books (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018), 21.
- 8.
Anthony C. Thiselton, A Concise Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002), 76.
- 9.
For a broader list, see William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino, “Introduction: The Epistemology of Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology, ed. William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4.
- 10.
As Beilby notes from an apologetic perspective, there are three main approaches. The first emphasizes reason (evidentialism), the second Scripture (presuppositionalism), and the third experience (experientialism). See James K. Beilby, Thinking about Christian Apologetics: What It Is and Why We Do It (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 95–96. Although I am analyzing theological epistemology, my taxonomy overlaps with Beilby’s.
- 11.
BECA, s.v. “Truth, Nature of.”
- 12.
Robert Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, 3rd ed., Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2011), 2.
- 13.
Norman L. Geisler and Winfried Corduan, Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (1988; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003), 69.
- 14.
John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1987), 104.
- 15.
Beilby, Christian Apologetics, 97.
- 16.
Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, 6 vols. (1976–1983; repr., Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1999), 1:239.
- 17.
Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19.
- 18.
Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 173.
- 19.
Alvin Plantinga, “On Reformed Epistemology,” Reformed Journal 32.1 (1982):17.
- 20.
Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 243.
- 21.
Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 10.
- 22.
Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 24–25.
- 23.
Stanley J. Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 213.
- 24.
Stanley J. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the 21st Century (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 73.
- 25.
Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 53–54.
- 26.
Roger E. Olson, The Essentials of Christian Thought: Seeing Reality Through the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 44.
- 27.
As Vanhoozer points out, there is an evangelical consensus that the Bible is “the final and authoritative source for Christian life and theology” (Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Scripture and Hermeneutics,” in McDermott, The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, 36).
- 28.
Abraham and Aquino, “Introduction,” 2.
- 29.
See, for example, Ian W. Scott’s novel approach of Paul’s epistemology in Galatians (Ian W. Scott, Implicit Epistemology in the Letters of Paul: Story, Experience and the Spirit [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006]).
- 30.
James K. Beilby, “Contemporary Religious Epistemology: Some Key Aspects,” in Carson, The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, 823.
- 31.
See, for example, Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation (New York: Doubleday, 1983); Vincent Brümmer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and John C. Peckham, The Love of God: A Canonical Model (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015).
- 32.
Johann Mouton and H. C. Marais, Basic Concepts in the Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. K. F. Mauer, 2nd ed., HSRC Series in Methodology (1990; repr., Pretoria: HSRC, 1996), 141. See also Wentzel van Huyssteen, Theology and the Justification of Faith: Constructing Theories in Systematic Theology, trans. H. F. Snijders (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 163.
- 33.
Avery Dulles, The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System, 2nd ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 47.
- 34.
For Geisler’s impact, see Terry L. Miethe, “Introduction,” in I Am Put Here for the Defense of the Gospel, ed. Terry L. Miethe (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016), xiii and Francis J. Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland, eds., To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview; Essays in Honor of Norman L. Geisler (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).
- 35.
For Plantinga’s influence, see Deane-Peter Baker, “Introduction: Alvin Plantinga, God’s Philosopher,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed. Deane-Peter Baker, Contemporary Philosophy in Focus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–2 and Michael C. Rea, “Plantinga, Alvin,” EP 7:579.
- 36.
Grenz himself characterizes his approach both as a “postfoundationalist” (Grenz, Renewing the Center, 208) and as a “nonfoundationalist” (Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 46). Yet, as Smith indicates, postfoundationalism characterizes better Grenz’s approach, a description also adopted here (R. Scott Smith, “Non-Foundational Epistemologies and the Truth of Scriptures,” in Carson, The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, 846). Grenz uses the two descriptors interchangeably (Grenz, Renewing the Center, 253). For the influence of Grenz’s proposal, see Derek J. Tidball, Brian S. Harris, and Jason S. Sexton, eds., Revisioning, Renewing, Rediscovering the Triune Center: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. Grenz (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). Others have used postfoundationalist language (e.g., Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005]). “Postfoundationalist” refers to Grenz’s variety here.
- 37.
See, for example, authors like William J. Abraham, W. Jay Wood, or Merold Westphal.
- 38.
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 46.
- 39.
Roger E. Olson, “Evangelical Theology,” in The Routledge Companion to Modern Christian Thought, ed. Chad V. Meister and James K. Beilby (London: Routledge, 2013), 549.
- 40.
Robert Krapohl and Charles H. Lippy, The Evangelicals: A Historical, Thematic, and Biographical Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 7–8.
- 41.
Donald W. Dayton, “Some Doubts about the Usefulness of the Category ‘Evangelical,’” in The Variety of American Evangelicalism, ed. Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), 251.
- 42.
Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 2–3. See also the assessment of six evangelical scholars of Bebbington’s quadrilateral printed as the sixth chapter of Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George M. Marsden, eds., Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019), 123–87.
- 43.
Noll, “What Is ‘Evangelical’?,” 22.
- 44.
Ibid. Yet, as he recognizes in 2019, Noll finds it hard to use the adjective evangelical when “a continuous history of interwoven organizations and interconnected personnel such as found in Anglo-American Protestantism of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries” is missing (Mark A. Noll, “World Cup or World Series?,” in Noll, Bebbington, and Marsden, Evangelicals, 306).
- 45.
The categories “intentional” and “unintentional” are borrowed from Krapohl and Lippy, The Evangelicals, 11.
- 46.
Porter and Studebaker, “Method in Systematic Theology,” 5.
- 47.
Paul D. L. Avis, The Methods of Modern Theology: The Dream of Reason, Contemporary Christian Studies (Basingstoke, UK: Marshall Pickering, 1986), 197.
- 48.
Ibid., emphasis original.
- 49.
Ambiguity is not necessarily a negative linguistic aspect, given that “the context almost always excludes irrelevant meanings” (Moisés Silva, God, Language and Scripture: Reading the Bible in the Light of General Linguistics, Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation 4 [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990], 94).
- 50.
Thiselton differentiates between religious knowledge (“knowing whom one worships”) and theological knowledge (“knowing about God”). He also indicates that “in popular or looser terms,” religious knowledge overlaps with theological knowledge (Anthony C. Thiselton, Approaching Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction to Key Thinkers, Concepts, Methods and Debates [London: SPCK, 2017], 153).
- 51.
Brian Haymes, The Concept of the Knowledge of God, Library of Philosophy and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1988), 182.
- 52.
John Greco, “Knowledge of God,” in Abraham and Aquino, The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology, 9.
- 53.
For this reason, in this book, I choose to use epistemology of theology rather than religious epistemology and focus on theological knowledge. But, as understood here, theological knowledge is more than knowledge about God. Thus, theological epistemology focuses on epistemic concepts and theories related to theology (Abraham and Aquino, “Introduction,” 1–2).
- 54.
Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology: The Realism of Christian Revelation [1982; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003], 21.
- 55.
Allen calls hermeneutics the “‘tacit dimension’ of human knowledge in determining how textual sources are interpreted” (Paul L. Allen, Theological Method: A Guide for the Perplexed [New York: T&T Clark, 2012], 13).
- 56.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 315.
- 57.
Ibid., 325.
- 58.
Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 158.
- 59.
Ibid., 1.
- 60.
Oeming includes the subject matter “as the reality behind the text” which “connects author, text and reader” (Manfred Oeming, Contemporary Biblical Hermeneutics: An Introduction, trans. Joachim V. Vette [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006], 7).
- 61.
As he recognizes (Anthony C. Thiselton, Thiselton on Hermeneutics: The Collected Works and New Essays of Anthony Thiselton [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006], 11), Thiselton first talks about the engagement of horizons in The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer and Wittgenstein (Exter: Paternoster, 1980) and later about mutual transformation (Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading, 2nd ed. [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992]). Thus, the meaning emerges when the text transforms the reader accordingly in new contexts.
- 62.
Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 27. See also Petr Pokorný, Hermeneutics as a Theory of Understanding, trans. Anna Bryson-Gustová (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 88.
- 63.
Anthony C. Thiselton, “On Models and Methods: A Conversation with Robert Morgan,” in The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of Forty Years of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield, ed. David J.A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl, and Stanley E. Porter, JSNTSup 87 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), 338.
- 64.
Pokorný, Hermeneutics, 89.
- 65.
Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 22.
- 66.
Pokorný, Hermeneutics, 180.
- 67.
Ibid., 91.
- 68.
Ibid., 180.
- 69.
Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 14–15.
- 70.
I agree with Peckham’s assertion that “the available evidence suggests that only the sixty-six books of Scripture can be confidently recognized as canonical; that is, no other extant books possess the traits of canonicity” (John C. Peckham, Canonical Theology: The Biblical Canon, Sola Scriptura, and Theological Method [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016], 44). For Peckham, “The intrinsic canon refers to those writings that are intrinsically canonical by virtue of what the canon is as the result of divine action” (ibid., 19, emphasis original).
- 71.
The second hermeneutical assumption of this book is that the author’s intention is accessible through the interpretation of the text. Supporting authorial discourse interpretation, Wolterstorff disagrees with Ricoeur’s one-sided case for textual sense interpretation. See Chap. 8 of Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 130–52. This allows Wolterstorff to defend the Bible as a medium of divine discourse.
- 72.
Peckham, Canonical Theology, 206.
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Petre, DA. (2023). Evangelicals and Epistemology. In: Knowing God as an Evangelical. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26556-3_1
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