Customer Reviews

Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis in Biblical Authority

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book is interesting and well researched, but it is basically a reprint of Dr. Price's 1981 doctoral dissertation. It seems a bit disingenuous to be marketed as a new book with no mention of that fact in the publicity review materials. The author protests that he has found almost nothing that needs updating in it, but that is belied by his citations of works right up to 1980. Applying Dr. Price's cherished higher criticism to his own assertion, wouldn't we find it odd that he found so much worthy of citation in the 1970's, even up to the year before his dissertation date, but practically nothing pertinent to the topic in the nearly three decades thereafter?

Last night I heard my friend Bob Price give a talk on his new book Inerrant the Wind, which describes the crisis evangelicals had in the late 70's to the early 80's, of which I remember very well. Harold Lindsell dropped his bombshell of a book on us titled, "The Battle for the Bible," where he drew a line in the sand whereby evangelicals must accept inerrancy in order to stay evangelicals. After that all of us had to take a position on the matter.

This book is Price's dissertation finally in print about that era. There were five evangelical responses as he describes them. Each one of them opened the door to liberal thought and he takes us through each one of them. Price argues that basically Lindsell was right. Once evangelicals denied inerrancy they were on a slippery slide to liberalism, but Lindsell was wrong in that the Bible is in fact errant, which led evangelicals to travel on this slippery slide in the first place. A history of evangelicals since that time proves that Price's predictions were correct. Evangelicals who denied inerrancy did indeed become more and more liberal. It's a good book and a very interesting read.

In our own day a recent attempt to reformulate and question inerrancy is the book by Carlos R. Bovell, Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals. He's already given up the ship.

Snardiff, the "reviewer" who gave "Wind" one star, did not actually read the book and his words are word-for-word what he "wrote" about Bart Ehrman's book. I just think it's important to have that out here in the reviews rather than buried in the comments so everyone has easy access to this dim-witted dishonesty.

If anything DOES deserve that lone star, it's the book's title, which is groan-inducing and nonsensical. Also, it gives the book more of a pop feel than it deserves. This is a scholarly tome, and those with no background in the debates about biblical inerrancy over the past century or two are likely to feel lost. If the names Clark Pinnock, Bernard Ram, and Paul Tillich are not pretty well-known to you, this book does not provide the remedial background probably necessary to make sense of its key themes. This is not a criticism...those of us who obsess over theological issues would be bored going over the history of Higher Criticism, etc., every time we tried to get a new slant on the topics. It's just that if your idea of a theologian is someone like Ray Comfort, this book is not for you.

It is a sign of the sort of respect that Price has earned with his scholarly output that the back of the book jacket is graced with positive blurbs from evangelicals, including my former pastor Greg Boyd, with whom Price probably has little theological in common. Clearly in this book he is reaching out more to his scholarly peers within theology and biblical studies rather than merely making a "popular case" for a point of view, as he has done in, for example, "The Incredible Shrinking Son of God" and other books. This book surveys a great many personalities over recent history (extending back to approximately the mid-19th century for the bulk of the material under discussion) and describes and critiques various approaches to a doctrine (or presupposition) of biblical inerrancy. The denser discussions are broken up by breezy transitions, and the book is quote-heavy, allowing key subjects to speak for themselves. It is a model for the middle ground between purely popular and purely academic writing that would be of interest to, say, a busy pastor or highly motivated layperson.

My favorite parts of the book were the description of criticism that included as its example the likelihood of a person watching TV and coming upon an old "Godzilla" movie mistaking it for news footage; and his discussion of the two dominant paradigms in apologetics, evidentialism and presuppositionalism. Price's nimble, reader-friendly logic seems unassailable, and as a result, along with the debate on inerrancy, the curtain is pulled back slightly on the whole topic orthodox Christian legitimacy as it is most often understood by evangelicals.

Robert Price keeps cranking out books full of fresh, insightful, and often brilliant analysis. I appreciate the fact that he always finds new topics to write about and avoids just rehashing the same old topics. His writing is clear and accessible. He deserves to be more widely read.

A pot pourri of anti-Christian non-sequiturs, arguments from outrage and warmed over Dawkins-isms. *Yawn*. Passages that are complementary and make perfect sense together are turned into "contradictions" and set at odds against one another by crass, ignorant or inaccurate interpretations. "Contradictions" are thus created ex-nihilo by Price's hostile worldview and by nothing else.