Righting America

An interview with Jason Hentschel

Jason Hentschel is author of  Desiring Certainty and senior pastor of Wyoming Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Dayton and an MDiv from Truett Theological Seminary. He serves as an editor for Foundations, the journal of the American Baptist Historical Society, and his work has been published in the Journal of Theological Interpretation, American Baptist Quarterly, and Christian History.

One of the great strengths of this book is that it grows out of your personal experience. As you note in the “Acknowledgments” you state that “after writing the dissertation that became Desiring Certainty, I realized that what I had written was my own story of deconstruction and reconstruction.”  Could you elaborate upon this statement? In particular, what did you have to deconstruct, and what led you to “deconstruct”?

JH: Looking back, I think part of the impetus for my deconstruction lay in my growing disillusionment with the over-intellectualization of Christianity as I knew it. Evangelical faith is far more than just intellectual assent to certain propositions, but the logic of inerrancy often runs there because it tends to idolize the Bible. Instead of worshiping the God of the book, we end up worshiping the book itself. So, I began to deconstruct and then reconstruct how we relate to God and God to us. This becomes a through line of Desiring Certainty and provides a lot of the grist for my discussions of inspiration and hermeneutics and, ultimately, my appeal to the language of trust rather than faith.

In Desiring Certainty you make very good use of a variety of secondary sources, including some that are not usually included in discussions of contemporary evangelicalism. One of these works is Daniel Rodgers’ masterful Age of Fracture. What is this age of fracture that we live in, and how exactly does biblical inerrancy serve as a seemingly perfect response?

JH: The “age of fracture” is Rodger’s way of describing the widespread cultural upheaval Americans experienced during the second half of the twentieth century. Think of the rise of feminism, the various movements for civil and later LGBTQIA+ rights, and even the political and social anxieties stemming from the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The church was not immune to these fractures, and Christians, like all Americans, responded to them in various ways, some of which evangelical leaders would eventually consider unbiblical and immoral.
        With all this change and this cornucopia of responses, how was a Christian to know what was right? Did God create men and women with distinct, albeit complementary roles? Was America truly God’s chosen nation and his choice for the salvation of the world? If my son comes out as gay, does that mean he’s going to hell? These were (and are) very live questions for evangelicals, and inerrancy provided an answer. I quote a hymn in the book’s introduction that gets to the heart of this. Its author was one of the lead inerrantists of the day, and he titled his hymn “God’s Sufficient Word.” Here is its third verse: “Sufficient too in daily strife // Providing clear directions // For how to live a godly life // Creating right affections.” In this age of fracture, where do we go for certainty and security? For evangelicals, the answer was easy. We go to the Bible.

You devote your second chapter to the King James Only movement. Given that many would see this as a fringe movement, it is striking that you make the case that King James Onlyism “shares the same concerns, presuppositional methodology, and often the very same rhetoric” as many evangelicals battling for biblical inerrancy. Could you expand on this argument? 

JH: Without giving away the whole chapter, let me just say this. While King James Onlyism may be fringe, it is firmly within the evangelical fold. It, too, argues that the Bible is without error. The difference is that King James Only folks quite reasonably ask which of the hundreds of Bible translations we have are actually inerrant. Is it all of them, even when many of them disagree with each other in any number of important places? In other words, if the doctrine of inerrancy is to have any meaning at all, then we better have those actual inerrant words in our hands and not, as greater evangelicalism often qualifies, only in some lost original manuscripts. And if our inerrancy is only in lost manuscripts, what good is that to us?! What chapter two does is trace King James Onlyism’s argument to this end, including its own often ugly battles with greater evangelicalism, and how a deep-seated fear of subjectivism drives both.

Your discussion in chapter 5 of the biblical scholar Clark Pinnock – particularly his intellectual/religious journey away from inerrancy – is simply fascinating. You end the chapter (appropriately entitled “Gaining Consciousness”) thusly: “Sola scriptura, as traditionally understood, had collapsed for Pinnock under the weight of historical consciousness. It had been exposed as a modern objectivist’s ruse – a clever, rationalistic fiction – and we had best be done with it.” Could you explain and elaborate upon this rather provocative statement?

JH: Sola scriptura translates as “scripture alone.” It’s a classic expression from the Reformation era, often coming coupled with two other “solas”: sola fide (“faith alone”) and sola gratia (“grace alone”). The quick and dirty of the history here is the phrase was used by some Protestant Reformers to push back against what they believed to be the church’s practice of putting its tradition on the same authoritative level as scripture. The Bible, these Reformers argued, stood alone. I was first introduced to the phrase growing up in my church’s youth group, where we were genuinely encouraged to question, wonder about, and even challenge interpretations of the Bible. Despite this relative openness, we had one hard and fast rule: Always make sure you are searching for what God truly wants, not what you want. Translated into practice, this meant opening our Bibles with a conscious wariness not to read into them our own desires and beliefs. The goal, as my college textbooks would later put it, was exegesis not eisegesis. These textbooks taught us how to read scripture alone — without any outside influence from our cultural beliefs, personal desires, or denomination’s traditions, however well intended. I came to call this “Blank Slate Interpretation,” and the point of it was to secure objectivity. But what Clark Pinnock came to realize was just how impossible such a blank slate, objectivistic interpretation is. This was the reality of which he grew conscious thanks to his own experiences interpreting the Bible and living through its battles. To say we should best be done with sola scriptura, in this sense then, is simply to say that an inerrant Bible demands an inerrant reader. And since none of us are inerrant, sola scriptura is a fool’s errand just as much as the search for certainty itself. 

Interestingly, in your epilogue you (following the lead of Christian Smith and other scholars) point out the obvious failure of inerrancy to give evangelicals “the unadulterated interpretive and epistemic certainty its proponents desired,” but you then go on to observe that “in the end, it gave them something just as powerful. It gave them a weapon.” What do you mean? What sort of weapon is inerrancy?

JH: Inerrancy is a weapon that silences debate. It is used to write off alternative interpretations of the Bible prima facie. Take, for instance, the story I tell in chapter three of Robert Gundry, whose argument that the Gospel of Matthew uses ancient midrashic techniques in its construction of Jesus’ birth narrative was determined to be in error because it did not fit evangelicalism’s conflation of truth with historical accuracy. Historicity, it appears, had been written into the definition of an inerrant Bible. So, to argue — as Gundry did — that Matthew “created” his story was simply unacceptable. Gundry effectively offered a losing argument right out of the bag.
      In more popular contexts, we witness such weaponization in the common evangelical appeal to the authority of scripture: The Bible says it; I believe it; That settles it. Suggest, for instance, that Genesis 1 might be theological poetry instead of scientific history, and it’s proof positive that you are following your own whims instead of the Bible’s. In evangelical parlance, what you’ve done is commit eisegesis. You have read into the text what you want it to say rather than reading out of the text what it wants to say. In short, you have placed your will over God’s will. What results from this is an ad hominem argument, an attack on the person instead of on the actual merits of her argument. To call someone “woke” because they support women in all forms of ministry is a dogwhistle that allows people to write that person off as an “errantist” simply because they do not read the Bible as a complementarian would. It shuts legitimate conversation off before it can even begin.

Given that you are a pastor, here’s a pastoral question for you. A young woman from your church – a young woman who grew up fundamentalist -- comes by your office. Quite agitated, she informs you that she has had it with the intolerance and absolute certainty of Christians, and she is simply done with Christianity. What would you say to her that might persuade her to begin the journey of “reconstructing” her faith?

JH: I’ve had this happen a lot of times! My answer is, “Me, too.” And then I try to tell a bit of my own story. That’s actually a big part of the reason why I wrote this book. When I began asking these kinds of questions (and running up against these kind of frustrations), it was stories like the ones I tell in the book, especially that of Clark Pinnock, that helped me realize that intolerance and certainty were not the whole of Christianity. It surely wasn’t Christ. But it’s hard to see anything else because this certainty thing is in the water. This is what I mean in the book when I say historical consciousness cannot be taught. It must be grown. You said it yourself — this is a journey. Not a journey of self-discovery, however, but a journey of divine discovery. And when we consider that God is someone who, like all of us, can and needs to be discovered — even now! — then we can start to move on from the desire for certainty.

I am hoping that this is not the last word from you. Do you have another book project in mind? What else would you like to say?

JH: The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, which ran throughout the 1980s and drafted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, has a story that needs to be told in full, and I was lucky enough to spend a few days a number of years ago at Dallas Theological Seminary, where the council’s archives are held. It was a phenomenal experience. One day, I opened up a manila folder and out fell a short letter from one of the architects of the council. It was written on airline letterhead — Delta’s, if I recall — as if the author had an epiphany mid-flight and needed to jot it down quick. These kinds of artifacts make historical work exhilarating. You never know what you’re going to find, and one thing I found was the council’s intention of hosting a couple inerrancy “congresses” for the general public. Think of them as Billy Graham crusades for inerrancy, and in some sense, that’s exactly what they were — evangelism for an inerrant Bible. If Desiring Certainty tells the intellectual side of the making of biblical inerrancy, a deep dive into the history of the ICBI promises to offer a good chunk of its material and political side, as well as a deeper analysis of its theological underpinnings.