American evangelicals, especially those holding to biblical inerrancy, lean hard towards the position that the Bible’s claim to be true must be put to the test. If it successfully passes the test, they—or anyone else—are obliged to believe anything the Bible says. Why belief in biblical inerrancy does not make such testing of the Bible’s truthfulness unnecessary and even suspect is a question that still lacks an answer. But there is a second question; it arises from the fact that these same evangelicals propose very different tests that the Bible must pass if it has a right to our respect and belief. How can evangelicals who propose such widely divergent tests accept each other as evangelicals? After all, their widely divergent tests indicate very different views of the nature of biblical truth.

Gordon R. Lewis is Professor of Theology and of Christian Philosophy at Denver’s Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary. J. Oliver Buswell, Jr, he says, contends that Christianity must pass the test of our experience (‘pure empiricism’) because, as Buswell urges, all man’s knowledge of reality derives solely from experience and not even in part from the rational structure of man’s mind. Christianity, says Buswell, meets the test of our experience, but, he adds ‘with the fewest difficulties,’ that is, with fewer difficulties than any other thought system’s account of reality. This intimates that no-one, not even an evangelical Christian, can devise a test that Christianity can without reservations pass. Hence in the words of Lewis, Buswell holds that ‘no claim can be shown to be true beyond a high degree of probability’. In short: ‘Buswell concludes that it is overwhelmingly probable that God exists.’ But ‘overwhelmingly probable’ means probable, not certain.

In a brief review I can only indicate that Lewis then considers the position of Stuart C. Hackett who tries to combine the pure empiricism of Buswell with the idea that the human mind has certain built-in rational principles which enable man to make not probable but very certain conclusions about God’s existence and the truth claims of the Bible.

Lewis next discusses Gordon H. Clark. Clark believes the mind has built-in rational principles, but he denies that any true knowledge about the Bible, or anything else, can be arrived at by way of experience. For Clark, God can be exhaustively defined in terms of reason (a human reason that differs in no manner from divine reason) and, therefore, the test of the Bible’s truthfulness lies in its rationality.

Lewis then discusses Cornelius Van Til. Van Til, as does Clark, believes that God is exhaustively defineable in terms of rationality, but unlike Clark, Van Til insists that God is thus definable only by himself and not by man whose rationality is finite and whose concepts are ‘limited concepts’. Van Til, therefore, would not, as Clark does, test Christian truth by rationality. Rationality, in Van Til’s apologetics, could never be a standard by which to test the truth of the Bible, because in Van Til’s view finite rationality (unlike God’s) is unavoidably confronted with many apparent contradictions and irrationalities.

Van Til’s thought really has no place in Lewis’s discussion except as a contrast to those evangelical positions which do subject the Bible to truth tests. Within the hearing of God’s Word, it would never occur to Van Til to ask whether he was hearing truth or untruth. True to his Reformed tradition, Van Til believes that the Bible is self-validating, carrying its own credentials.

Lewis devotes a chapter to the mysticism of Earl E. Barrett for whom the test of biblical truth claims lie not in something so theoretical and abstract as rationality, but in the religious experience of the religious object. Lewis protests and says that religious intuitions are not self-authenticating, and that religious experience is one thing but the interpretation of it is something else.

Lewis gives his time and space to where his apologetic sympathies lie: in the position of the late Edward John Carnell to whose position he devotes a good third of his book. Carnell believed that God would not ask us to believe anything without giving us the evidence by which to verify its truth. Carnell found such verifying evidence in facts, values, psychology and ethics. After an extensive presentation and analysis of these matters, Lewis declares, ‘In sum, Carnell’s apologetic finds the Christian hypothesis true because, without contradiction, it accounts for more empirical evidence … with fewer difficulties than any other hypothesis.’ But the reader should observe that some difficulties remain, and that they might contain contradictions, in which case Carnell’s apologetic method of verifying the truth claims of the Bible would lead to the conclusion that the Bible is after all not true. This possibility is reflected in one of Lewis’ concluding remarks: ‘If the Bible is true, its truth can best be defended on Carnell’s apologetic.’

In an opening chapter Lewis defends apologetics. In a concluding statement he declares that people who will not assent to biblical truth claims without evidence ‘may consider the truth and the relevance of a tentative conclusion [that Christianity is probably true], at least for the sake of argument’. Here Lewis’s apologetics reflects his theology, specifically his theology of the Bible: it is improbable but nonetheless possible that evidence may be discovered tomorrow that will compel us to judge the Bible to be untrue. Lewis agrees with Buswell ‘that it is overwhelmingly probable that God exists’, but he also agrees with Buswell that ‘no claim can be shown to be true beyond a high degree of probability’. So what is ‘overwhelmingly probable’ may yet turn out to be not only improbable, but wholly untrue! How, I am left to wonder, can so many evangelicals hold to this view of probable biblical truthfulness and to an absolute, scientifically literal biblical inerrancy?

I recommend Lewis’s book as a lucid and competent exposure of this problem which so many evangelicals have needlessly saddled upon their own backs.

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