Saturday, March 28, 2009

Frame on McGowan on Scripture

As John Frame works on his fourth and final volume in the Theology of Lordship series--this one on the Doctrine of the Word of God--I expect that we'll be seeing more of his reviews of key contemporary books on Scripture (which are being published these days in droves). For example, in the past couple of years he has reviewed N.T. Wright's The Last Word and Peter Enns's Inspiration and Incarnation.

His latest review is of a book by his friend Andrew McGowan: The Divine Spiration of Scripture: Challenging Evangelical Perspectives (which is published in North America with a significantly different subtitle: The Divine Authenticity of Scripture: Retrieving an Evangelical Heritage).

The review is detailed and lengthy--over 12,000 words. But here's the upshot:
I would recommend that McGowan give much more attention to the effects of divine spiration on the text of Scripture. So far as I can tell, McGowan regards that text as like any other human book. It is spirated, but that spiration does not make it true. I confess that this absence of attention to the nature of the text seems to be a trend in evangelical theology these days. The same serious flaw, in my judgment, occurs in N. T. Wright’s The Last Word and in Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation. I hope that future writings in this field will discuss this important issue.
In a separate note, Frame also publishes an annotated list of his four favorite books on Scripture.