I Just Never Got Over Sunday School
Vol. III, No. 6, September 1990
(The following appeared in the 28 August issue of the Indiana Baptist and was written by Dr. Mark Coppenger, Executive Director of the State Convention of Baptists in Indiana. You may subscribe by writing to the Indiana Baptist, P.O. Box 24189, Indianapolis, IN 46224. $6.00 per year.)
A year or so ago, I had a get-acquainted lunch with a member of the SBC fourth estate. It was a pleasant time of hearing each other's stories, of good-natured give and take.
Early in the conversation, he asked me how I'd become an inerrantist. How exactly had I arrived at that position? The background assumption seemed to be that first you were a normal Southern Baptist kid, and then through exposure to "outside" ideas, you became something different – a hybrid at best, a mutant at worst.
I searched the recesses of my memory for that fateful transition point, the one at which I'd moved from plain-bread belief to theological exotica.
My search was in vain, because I really hadn't moved anywhere. As a child in Sunday School, I'd been taught the Bible as true. Adam sewed fig leaves together. The ravens fed Elijah. Daniel survived the lions' den.... Jericho's walls fell before the trumpet blasts. Week after week, my teachers delivered the real stuff.
But more than this. It was clear to me that these accounts were crucial as well as true. My parents were deadly serious about me hearing them. I know because I tried more than once to feign life-threatening headaches so that I might stay home and "rest" (translate: play with baseball cards or watch TV). No deal. Sunday School and Training Union weren't electives ... What they taught at church was make-no-mistake-about-it-Buster important.
Indeed it was. Both true and crucial. And that, my friends, is the position of inerrancy. I was there at seven. I've never found the slightest reason to leave it.
To hear some of the brethren tell it, I was the victim of child abuse. After all, it's them Fundamentalists what push inerrancy down our throats. All the while, I thought my Southern Baptist college professor daddy (BA. Mercer, M.Div. Southern, Ph.D. Edinburgh) and W.M.U. President mother were mainstream Southern Baptists. But now I learn that they were treacherous influences, setting me up for "creedalism" and worse. After all, they never bothered to tell me that it really didn't matter whether or not Adam was real. They never taught me to relax when someone said that Peter didn't write First Peter or that "demons" were just neuroses or psychoses. Cruel fate. Raised by callous fundies masquerading as true Baptists.
Horsefeathers! They were the genuine item. Inerrancy was the mainstream position. If anybody had shifted under outside influence, it was the errantists. Somebody had to coach those children away from their childlike (not childish) Sunday School commitments. Somebody had to teach them that questioning the accuracy of the miracle accounts was a trivial offense if an offense at all. Somebody had to teach them that to deny the reality of a burning-but-not-consumed bush was to enrich rather than pollute our denomination. Somebody had to teach them that to ignore or tolerate the skeptics' maneuvers was the Baptist way.
It doesn't sound very sophisticated to say that you became an inerrantist in Sunday School or at the bedside family altar. What weight is there in the opinion of a seven-year-old who receives the Scriptures as perfect and registers indignation at suggestions to the contrary?
So maybe I could say that I became an inerrantist when ...I read what the Bible had to say about itself in passages such as II Timothy 3:16 (all Scripture is God-breathed) and II Peter 1:20 (...no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation).
...I saw how theological points in the New Testament rested upon the perfection of passages in the Old Testament, e.g., the reality of Adam in Genesis 3:17 and Romans 5:12; the singularity of the noun, "seed", in Genesis 12:7 and Galatians 3:16.
... I marvelled at how specious the errantists assurances were – "The accuracy of the narratives isn't important. After all, the Bible isn't a book of history, but a guide to salvation." (Oh, I thought the Resurrection was an historical account? Exactly which biblical historical accounts are trivial?)
... I discovered that the founders of our two oldest and largest Southern Baptist seminaries (Southern and Southwestern) embraced inerrancy.
... I noticed that denominations which departed from it withered.
... I observed that seminaries and divinity schools which scoffed at it were evangelistically impotent.
... I watched as archaeological discoveries embarrassed the "learned" pronouncements of errantist scholars (for instance, the way in which new findings in Jericho undermined some of Dr. Kathleen Kenyon's claims).
... I saw scholars at Wheaton College who both affirmed the verbal inspiration/inerrancy of Scripture and held their own against secularists in their various professional societies such as the American Philosophical Association. In our department I worked alongside a Yale Ph.D. (Danforth Fellow) who read Kirkegaard in Danish, a Syracuse Ph.D. who learned Sanskrit to better tackle Eastern thought, and a Northwestern Ph.D. who wrote the article on Christian Philosophy for Encyclopedia Britannica. I saw what utter nonsense it was to claim that inerrancy is for intellectual lightweights. Indeed, very few who say that are qualified to carry Carl F. H. Henry's books.
I saw, too, at Wheaton what wonderful diversity there is among inerrantists. These weren't cookie cut automata, but a fascinating collection of Mennonites, Plymouth Brethren, and Southern Baptists – of McGovernites and Nixonites – of blue collars and white collars – of cat fanciers and dog fanciers – of Cub fans and Sox fans. Differ as they may, they agreed that the Bible was perfect.
I could go on and on with the list. But it would only show the confirmation of my conviction, not its source.
Why am I an inerrantist? The simple truth is this. I just never got over Sunday School.