The first two approaches to Scripture that Kelsey discusses in Proving Doctrine are two that are probably the most widely used among non-specialists. These are approaches that focus on the doctrines of Scripture and those that center around the concepts in Scripture.
To illustrate the former, Kelsey uses the Calvinist theologian B.B. Warfield, who taught at Princeton. For Warfield, what is authoritative about Scripture is the doctrines it teaches. Warfield teaches the idea of the plenary inspiration of the Bible, which leads him to the hypothesis of inerrancy. This leads him to a position that can be termed biblical positivism. The job of theology is to determine the doctrines — explicit and implicit — of individual Scripture writers, then systematize these into a theology. This theology is then adopted by Christians.
To break this down by Kelsey’s four questions (see the first post in this series for the four questions):
- The aspect of Scripture that is authoritative is its doctrines.
- What makes this content authoritative is that it is inerrant.1
- The logical force is a biblical positivism.
- Scripture is brought to bear in a very direct way on theology, with almost a one-to-one relationship between what Scripture says and the doctrines the believer should accept.
Similar to this is the idea of biblical concepts as authoritative. This was particularly popular in the 1930s-1950s, but continues even today. Kelsey points to Hans-Werner Bartsch as a practitioner of this method. Bartsch draws out particular ideas in Scripture through extensive word studies, a method criticized by James Barr in The Semantics of Biblical Language. Bartsch takes one concept, such as reconciliation, and studies it in all of its appearances in the Bible. He assumes that meanings of the concept found in one place are applicable whenever the idea arises (e.g., when Paul talks about the term, it can be assumed that he incorporated all the ideas that Matthew had about reconciliation).
To answer the four questions:
- Concept is authoritative.
- What makes the Scripture authoritative is the fact that its concepts are distinctive. In other words, no other faith centers on just these concepts.
- The logical force is that of a technical concept (i.e., an idea that is used with one particular meaning or groups of meaning every single time it is used).
- As with Warfield, Scripture impacts theology in a very direct way.
Obviously, these two approaches are related, although they are used by very different practitioners. Evangelicals often use the doctrinal approach, while Protestants and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholics often use the other. But although they define doctrine and concept very differently, in practice there is often little distinction between the two.
For both Warfield and Bartsch, what makes Scripture authoritative is an intrinsic property of the text (the Bible’s inerrancy for Warfield and the Bible’s distinctiveness for Bartsch). This will contrast with the functionality to which appeal will be made by subsequent approaches.
Next post in the series: History and Narrative
- Interestingly, Warfield sees inerrancy as methodologically necessary to do theology, but does not see it as one of the central tenets of Christianity. It is logically dispensable for proving other doctrines. [back]