The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Examines recent efforts to redefine the traditional evangelical view of scriptural authority. Providing scores of arguments that demonstrate inerrancy, Beale's logic presents formidable challenges to postmodern suppositions.
Top Highlights
“‘Myth is an ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?’” (Page 30)
“First, the onset of postmodernism in evangelicalism has caused less confidence in the propositional claims4 of the Bible, since such claims have to be understood only by fallible human interpreters.” (Page 20)
“Thus, it may be true that Enns almost never makes the explicit verbal statement that the accounts in Genesis and Exodus are not historical, but he often conveys the concept.” (Page 36)
“Enns discusses the parallels between ancient Near Eastern myths and accounts in the Old Testament” (Page 25)
“interpreting Enns by Enns, that the biblical stories had ‘a firm grounding in ancient myth’” (Page 30)
- Title: The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority
- Author: G. K. Beale
- Publisher: Crossway
- Print Publication Date: 2008
- Logos Release Date: 2011
- Pages: 304
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subject: Bible › Evidences, authority, etc.--History of doctrines
- ISBNs: 9781433522093, 9781433502033, 1433502038, 1433522098
- Resource ID: LLS:09BB57A3C5A4B5CEC1CD2BAC26FD181F
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-05-20T07:27:32Z
Dr. Gregory K. Beale is Professor of New Testament at RTS Dallas. He has had a long and distinguished academic career, teaching at Grove City College, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Wheaton Graduate School, and Westminster Theological Seminary. Before joining the RTS Dallas faculty in 2021, he served as Westminster’s J. Gresham Machen Chair and Research Professor of New Testament and Biblical Interpretation. He is a past president of the Evangelical Theological Society. Dr. Beale is a native Texan and a graduate of Southern Methodist University (SMU), Dallas Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University,
Reviews
1 rating
J Pickering
8/15/2025
This could have been an interesting discussion of problems concerning inerrancy and how one might answer them, but much of it reads as Beale struggling to fit Enns's round peg into his square hole. He treats Enns as an eroder of biblical authority, which is not at all how I experience the citations from Enns's book (which I didn't read first) or Enns's answer to Beale's chapter 1 (which I did read), and he seems regularly to misunderstand what Enns is saying. So the regular misunderstandings made the back-and-forth into a rather frustrating attempt of Enns to correct misunderstanding and Beale to double-down on the misunderstandings as valid. The last two chapters, which are by far the most interesting to me, explain how ANE and Israelite cosmology both understand the temple to be a picture of the cosmos, and the cosmos to be the genuine temple. As a result, the creation accounts, which are "mythical" and figurative in the case of the ANE, but "theological" and figurative in the case of Israel, are not to be understood as relevant to science, and therefore are not challenged by modern scientific accounts of the cosmos. Good, I agree, but this is virtually what Enns seems to be saying, except that he is willing to use the word "mythological" for either nation's figurative origins story, which is the correct genre designation. And Beale doesn't at all discuss the patent fact that so much evangelicalism is absolutely committed to a literalistic, science-relevant interpretation of the biblical creation story as essential to inerrancy---again, the major problem that unsettles laypeople who are not properly schooled in ANE background (the thing that Enns was seemingly writing to correct!). So, I don't think Beale does much except to reassert his traditional inerrantism against Enns's suggestions for a more contextual theology, and then exercises his own good, ANE-based, contextual, figurative reading of the creation account without seeming to notice how unacceptable this is to many inerrantists. Has Greg delivered his "The creation account is metaphorical and irrelevant to science" gospel and been called a heretic? Because I have. It's not a good book.