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37 Scripture
Get accessWilliam J. Abraham is Albert Cook Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University and an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (1981), Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology (1998), Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (2007), Canonical Theism: A Proposal for Theology and the Church (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies (2009), and Aldersgate and Athens: John Wesley and the Foundations of Christian Belief (2010). He is a long-standing member of the General Commission on Unity and Interreligious Concerns for the United Methodist Church, and in 2008 was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary.
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Published:10 August 2017
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Abstract
This chapter discusses the epochal shift in scriptural interpretation in the nineteenth century. Applying historical investigation to accounts of divine inspiration and revelation resulted in a call for a radical reconstruction of Christian theology, especially as developed in liberal Protestantism. There were a number of responses to such reconstruction of Christian faith. One option was to resist the logic of liberal Protestantism’s normative apologetic while retaining an existential appropriation of biblical heroes and narratives. A second option was to develop a whole new apologetic for the traditional position on inspiration and inerrancy. A third option was to shore up the appeal to biblical authority by a theory of development culminating in a doctrine of papal infallibility. Fourth, there was the populist option of focusing on personal piety and working from a deflationary soteriological vision of Scripture. All five options, if we include liberal Protestantism, continue to flourish.
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