Video Lectures on Inerrancy and Historical Criticism by David Farnell

In 1998, John MacArthur wrote the foreword to The Jesus Crisis. “Some of evangelicalism’s best-known theologians,” says MacArthur, “and seminary and college professors are now debating among themselves ideas that would have been deemed entirely nonnegotiable before the last quarter of the twentieth century. Destructive applications of redaction theories, source criticism, literary speculations, and so on have always been the theological liberals’ stock in trade. However, to see evangelicals applying this sort of Historical Criticism in order to cast doubt on the authenticity or historicity of the biblical text is wholly unprecedented. Tragically, the prevailing attitude among evangelical scholars today closely mirrors the extreme tolerance that left the door wide open for Historical Criticism in the leading mainline schools and denominations of a hundred years ago.” (The Jesus Crisis, 10).

In 2017, sadly, the confusion that modern historical-critical approaches brought to the scene in evangelical schools nearly two-decades ago is now considered the base-line for evangelical scholarship. Some of the senior professors at leading institutions and so-called evangelical seminaries have not only endorsed, but readily practice and teach their students to embrace, historical-criticism.

Understanding the key leaders in this present-day trend to embrace historical-criticism is important because one’s understanding of the authority and inerrancy of Scripture impacts the exegete’s entire hermeneutical paradigm and theological trajectory.

The following videos are a series of lectures given by David Farnell at the 2017 Chafer Theological Seminary Bible Conference (March 13–15, 2017).

The title of each message and a hyper-link to each video is provided below:

1. Current Challenges to Orthodoxy Inerrancy: Dancing on the Edge – Part 1

2. Current Challenges to Orthodoxy Inerrancy: Dancing on the Edge – Part 2

3. Current Challenges to Orthodoxy Inerrancy: Dancing on the Edge – Part 3

4. Evangelical Critical Scholarship and the Canonical Gospels: What Hath Spinoza Wrought? Click here.

For a link to all of the videos, click here.