by
Sylvia Dooling
I am fascinated by some of the responses to the most recent article posted
on the VOW website. The essay entitled _The Anatomy of a Deception_ clearly
upset some people. Responders have declared the piece to be both a jihad and
disgraceful; VOW’s credibility with ‘thinking conservatives” has been
threatened; and perhaps worst of all, it has been pointed out that the
article’s author is (gasp) a lawyer.
Let me answer some of these replies with a response of my own.
First, that some of you disagree with Jane Kerber neither surprises nor
troubles me. VOW publishes a variety of opinions with which we do not expect
everyone to agree. Obviously, however, we had a specific reason for
publishing this particular piece but more about that later.
Second, I have been disappointed with the quality of the responses to Ms.
Kerber’s article because so few of them have dealt with the substance of her
argument. For the most part, they have been indignant apologies in defense
of Mr. Peterson’s evangelical credentials. However, that Mr. Peterson has
impeccable evangelical credentials has never been in dispute. What is in
dispute is whether in this specific case he has accurately rendered the text
of the Bible, and whether his interpretative work deserves the kind of
widespread and unquestioned acceptance that it has received.
Third, what troubles me the most in the responses is the inference that
because Mr. Peterson is an evangelical, his work should somehow be above
criticism. One person wrote that by questioning one of our own, we have
engaged in evangelical cannibalism. That is nonsense.
Fourth, I did not elect to publish Ms. Kerber’s article because of its
specific focus. In fact, while I will admit to being concerned about all of
the different gender-specific, age-specific, culture-specific,
situational-specific, race-specific, and
anything-else-you-might-be-looking-for-specific ‘Bibles” that strain the
shelves at the local Bible book store, I have not spent very much time
reading any of them including _The Message_. However, I am entirely in
agreement with an underlying theme in Ms. Kerber’s paper that evangelicals,
absent careful, methodical and continuing scrutiny of their work, are every
bit as much in danger of wandering into theological error as anyone else,
their motives notwithstanding.
In a word, it is dangerous to create a pantheon of evangelical heroes and
assume that whatever they produce is above reproach. It is also dangerous to
fall into the utilitarian trap of assuming that because something works it
must be good. It is equally dangerous for evangelicals to be unreflective
relative to their assumptions about how they know what they think that they
know because they are, in fact, as prone to deciding what is true on the
basis of their ‘feelings” as any liberal ever hoped to be.
As orthodox Presbyterians, we at VOW are irrefutably evangelical. But, we
are not American evangelicals. And, if the difference between the two is not
clear, then perhaps we have inadvertently stumbled into an area for
theological reflection in which we all should engage more thoughtfully.
Moreover, while we do not subscribe to the idea that to be _semper
reformanda_ (i.e. always reforming) means merely to change and evolve, we do
believe that it means that all of us must repeatedly subject ourselves to
the judgment of the historic faith of the church. Further, we are convinced
that the most evangelical among us stand most in need of this kind of
ongoing critique primarily because we claim to be evangelical.
Even more to the point, we at VOW are concerned about the unreflective,
creeping replacement of our Presbyterian and Reformed convictions about the
Word of God, the Sovereignty of God, idolatry, and the purpose of the church
with a populist, sentimental, unreflective, semi-Pelagian American
evangelicalism. And, if we have caused you think about that as a
possibility, then posting Ms. Kerber’s article has served its purpose.
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