IT FINALLY HAPPENED—NORMAN GEISLER DENIES ETS AND ICBI
INERRANCY!
THE SHOCKING EXPOSÉ
In a stunning new
development yesterday, April 25, 2014, Dr. Norman Geisler, for years the
world’s leading proponent of the full, final, complete, absolute, and
unqualified inerrancy of the Bible according to the International Council on
Biblical Inerrancy’s Chicago Statement created such a narrow definition of
inerrancy that he denied it himself!
It was perhaps
inevitable. For years Geisler had been
making the noose tighter and tighter.
Once an active member of the Evangelical Theological Society, he
spearheaded a movement to get Robert Gundry ousted for his redaction-critical
commentary on Matthew. This happened
despite no less a conservative than D. A. Carson having written that the ETS’s
short one-clause doctrinal statement on inerrancy was inadequate for the
task. Only by seeking to stack the deck
with all kinds of members coming to the business meeting at which Gundry’s
membership was voted on who had not been present for or participated in the
society’s discussions of Gundry’s positions was the 2/3 majority attained to
ask Gundry to resign.
Next Geisler went after
Murray Harris, long-time staunch supporter of the resurrection of Jesus. What was Harris’s crime? He strongly affirmed the bodily resurrection
of our Lord. He just happened to
believe that the resurrection appearances between Jesus’ death and exaltation
were appearances from heaven. In other
words, Jesus wasn’t hiding somewhere on earth in between his appearances during
those 40-days, he was actually already in heaven. The case can be debated but Geisler spent several years trying in
vain to get the Evangelical Free Church to defrock Harris. An ETS-trio of leading systematic
theologians—Roger Nicole, Millard Erickson and Bruce Demarest—exonerated Harris
of anything that could be considered counter to inerrancy, evangelicalism or
the Christian faith, but Geisler still managed to publish a book on The Battle for the Resurrection that had
so many factual misrepresentations of Harris that Harris needed a lengthy
appendix in his subsequent work, From
Grave to Glory: Resurrection in the New Testament to list and correct them.
Next came the open
theists. When the ETS failed to get the
2/3 majority needed to ask John Sanders to resign and got only a 1/3 vote to
get Clark Pinnock to resign, Norman Geisler resigned instead, hoping to lead a
mass exodus in protest against the “encroaching liberalism” of the ETS. The exodus utterly failed to materialize so
Geisler began speaking as he traveled of the organization as the Formerly
Evangelical Theological Society.
Then there was Darrell
Bock, an amazing conservative evangelical inerrantist scholar with a
distinguished career of teaching at Dallas Seminary, that “bastion of
liberalism”! Bock’s heresy? He co-edited the volume of the papers
produced by the Institute of Biblical Research’s Historical Jesus study group
with Bob Webb, and Bob in his
introductory articles in the volume made some statements that were incompatible
with ICBI inerrancy. But the volume
never intended to represent ICBI or even ETS, and Darrell did not make the
statements, Bob did. But in Geisler’s Inerrancy for a New Generation (which is
really inerrancy unchanged from an old generation), Bock and Webb are
repeatedly grouped together as if Bock agreed with everything Webb wrote by
himself!
More recently, Mike
Licona’s views became horrid and dangerous in Geisler’s eyes. Formerly an adjunct professor Southern
Evangelical Seminary, Mike had to leave when he wrote a 700+ page defense of
the bodily resurrection of Jesus, brilliantly employing new historiographical
arguments in its defense. What on
earth, then, was his heresy? In just
three or four pages, Licona asked the question (he didn’t even answer
it!)—might it be possible that the little segment in Matthew 27:52b-53, found
in no other Gospel, about the resurrection of certain unspecified saints who
appeared to people in Jerusalem, was an apocalyptic symbol not meant to be
taken literally? Licona didn’t know for
sure, but thought the question worth asking, and for this he has been the
ongoing subject of Geisler’s polemic to this very day.
Finally, Geisler
attacked Craig Blomberg. Along with
David Farnell, Geisler wrote an article posted on-line about how Blomberg had
now denied inerrancy and it was time to expose him to the world. A study by Blomberg, published in the
mid-1980s in two different forms, including in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, had defended the
historical reliability of the miracles in the Gospels, including some of the
most puzzling ones that many scholars had questioned. But Blomberg had the audacity to tuck in a couple of paragraphs
commenting on Matthew 17:27, which reads ἵνα δὲ μὴ σκανδαλίσωμεν αὐτούς, πορευθεὶς εἰς θάλασσαν βάλε ἄγκιστρον καὶ τὸν ἀναβάντα πρῶτον ἰχθὺν ἆρον, καὶ ἀνοίξας τὸ στόμα αὐτοῦ εὑρήσεις στατῆρα· ἐκεῖνον λαβὼν δὸς αὐτοῖς ἀντὶ ἐμοῦ καὶ σοῦ (UBS
Greek New Testament).
A
woodenly literal translation of this verse would be: “but in order that we not scandalize them, having gone to the
sea, throw a hook and take the first fish coming up, and having opened its
mouth you will find a stater. Having
taken that, give to them for me and you.”
As is characteristic of Matthew’s style, the verses combines several
aorist participles of attendant circumstances with imperative mood verbs that
are all most smoothly translated as commands.
The ESV, for example, translates the most relevant part of this verse
as: “go to the sea and cast a hook and
take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a
shekel.” To be more consistent, though
it would be less stylistically elegant, it should have said, “go to the sea and
cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up and open its mouth and you
will find a shekel.” In other words,
there are four participles or imperatives here that give four consecutive
commands: “Go,” “cast,” “take,” and “open.” Then there is one future-tense prediction: “you will find.”
Functionally,
the commands serve as conditions for the prophecy. Peter cannot find the coin in the fish’s mouth unless he opens
it. He cannot open the fish’s mouth
unless he takes it off his hook. He
cannot take it off his hook unless he casts his line into the lake to begin
with. And he cannot begin to fish
unless he goes to the lake in the first place.
In
short, we are never told whether or not Peter obeyed any or all of these four
commands from Christ. The grammatical
form of this verse is not that of a narrative or an account. Matthew does not write that Jesus said to
Peter, “Come, let’s go down to the lake and go fishing. So Peter and Jesus went to the shore and
Peter cast his line (or dangled his hook over the side of his boat). Soon a fish began to nibble at the bait. They hauled it in and Peter pried open its
mouth. Lo and behold there was a shekel,
just what the two men needed to pay the temple tax for both of them together.”
It
is, of course, quite possible that this is exactly what happened. But the text never says that’s what
happened. Blomberg finally had an
opportunity to point this out directly to Geisler yesterday in a thread on a
blog by Joseph Holden, President of Veritas Seminary. Here are the exact words of Geisler’s response: “If the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, then
we do not have to wait for a fulfillment to know it is true. Further, the
traditional view is that the Gospel narrative is historical, and the story in
Matthew 17 about the command to catch the fish is part of that record. Finally,
either Jesus did or did not command Peter to go catch the fish. If he did not, then
the Bible is not completely inerrant. There is no third alternative.”
Let’s analyze each of
these statements. (1) Do we have to
wait for a fulfillment of a prophecy to know whether or not it is true? How about Jonah 3:4—“Forty more days and Nineveh
will be overthrown”? But it
wasn’t. Why not? Because there was an implied condition based
on the whole purpose of Jonah’s preaching—to get people to repent. If they didn’t repent, Nineveh would be
overthrown. In Matthew 17:27 there are
four conditions: Peter has to go to the
lake, he has to throw in a hook, he has to take the first fish, and he has to
open its mouth. The only way Geisler
can know that all these four conditions were fulfilled is if he is relying on a
version of Scripture that says Peter did precisely those four things. But textual criticism has shown beyond the
shadow of a doubt that this is not what the autographs said. Geisler is therefore in violation of the ETS
clause on inerrancy: “the Bible alone,
and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and therefore is
inerrant in the autographs.” Geisler’s
view is based on knowledge he claims to have, which not found in the Bible
alone and certainly not in the autographs, and so he has denied the ETS doctrine of inerrancy.
(2) It is the
traditional view that this is historical.
Here is a strange statement indeed for a Protestant to make. Either one bases one’s views on what is
actually in Scripture or one bases one’s views on what is in tradition. There is no third alternative. But tradition is different from “the Bible
alone,” so again Geisler has denied the
ETS clause.
(3) We must affirm that
Jesus commanded Peter to go catch the fish.
Agreed—and this is irrelevant to the issue. Blomberg never claimed that Jesus didn’t give the command. The question is what did Peter do?
But it gets worse. The ICBI statement is much more extensive
than the ETS doctrinal statement. Its
eighteenth article begins, “We affirm that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted
by grammatico-historical exegesis.”
That is exactly what Blomberg has done.
Careful attention to the grammar of Matthew 17:27, shows four commands
followed by a promise. The commands
must be obeyed in order for the promise to be fulfilled. The text fails to state whether any of the
commands were obeyed. So by insisting
he knows that they were, Geisler has
denied the ICBI doctrine of inerrancy.
He has changed the inspired text to turn it into five prophecies: “You will go to the lake, you will throw in
your hook, you will catch a fish, and you will find in its mouth.”
Please note: not a shred of this post is based on the
controversial method known as genre criticism—of identifying the literary form
of a portion of a document and interpreting it according to the rules for
interpreting that form. It would be
scandalous, for example, to note that all the other miracles referred to in the
Gospels are in the literary form of a historical narrative and as a result to
treat them as if they actually happened.
So we are not relying on some dubious identification of Matthew 17:27
with some literary form found outside the Bible like a law, a psalm, a proverb,
a creed, a virtue list or vice list, and so on. Because these can be found outside the Bible, they should never
be used to help identify the literary form of any part of the inspired text of
Scripture. No, we are sticking strictly to the grammatico-historical method, relying
entirely on the grammatical forms of the verbs in this verse.
In light of Dr.
Geisler’s stunning denials, published on the internet at defendinginerrancy.net
as seen in his comments to objections, schools, churches and organizations
beware. If you want to remain faithful
to inerrancy as understood by the ETS and ICBI, you will not allow Dr. Geisler
to teach for you. You will cancel
speaking engagements that you have scheduled for him, just as he sought to do
for all those he decided had denied inerrancy but refused to admit it.*
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