This isn’t going to be a long post. I simply (again?) want to bring attention to the prevalence, in certain sectors of the evangelical academy, of a particular rhetorical tactic. This strategy of argumentation assumes that whatever insights they may be writing about have only been gained in the last hundred years or so. Before that, silly things like Christendom and Medieval monks and post-Reformation political disputes kept us all in intellectual and theological bondage and didn’t want us to know whatever Dr. Scholar wants us to know now. You’ll know this when you see it, and I’m not calling out anyone in particular here. In fact, this is so prevalent that I’ve probably offended quite a few people I’ve never read. But the truth is that this particular rhetorical tactic is far too common in evangelical academic circles and it’s also patently silly. Yes, the Reformation was needed, in part because of doctrinal error rooted in erroneous understandings of the relationship between Scripture and tradition. But that fact does not warrant the kind of attitude to which I’m referring. This stance towards the history of interpretation and doctrine is not reformational, it is chronological theological snobbery.

It is snobby because it assumes that the Church has not read or understood the Bible well in a given arena until we moderns came along. But it is also silly, because it usually rests on a fairly thin understanding of the history of interpretation and doctrine. So instead of saying something like, “here’s what the Bible has to say about [X text or doctrine], no one said it this way until [Y twentieth century event or person], and so this is a truly revolutionary model of [Z],” we might say, “here’s what the Bible has to say about [X]. While [Y developments in Christian thought] may have obscured this reading/understanding in some quarters, [Z figures throughout church history] evidenced a similar understanding of what I am arguing here.” That’s a more historically and theologically humble way to put it, at least from my point of view.