Biblical authority

About this book

"My own interest in Rogers and McKim's volume was piqued by the authors' stout claim that they were 'setting the record straight.' For seven or eight years I had been studying the theories about the Bible's authority entertained by Richard Simon, Jean Le Clerc, Baruch Spinoza, and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century biblical critics. I could understand Rogers and McKim's desire to moderate several assertions by Evangelicals who had not been sufficiently judicious in their own claims about "the central tradition of the church." Nonetheless, I found the authors' presentation regarding the issues of biblical infallibility in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries to be unreliable. I had also studied the beliefs of nineteenth-century American Evangelicals about biblical authority. Rogers and McKim's commentary on these viewpoints appeared to be deficient as well."