Pastor's Letter March 7, 2010

Mar 07, 2010
Andrew DiNardo

Dr. James Montgomery Boice – Pt 4 

We ended last week noting that Dr. Boice was going to attend Stony Brook.  ‘He went to the telephone and called Dr. Frank E. Gaebelein, who was the headmaster at the time.  I was admitted by phone, and two days later on Sunday I was on Long Island.’

Stony Brook gave Dr. Boice a solid basis both academically and spiritually preparing him for his next academic challenge, Harvard University.  “Four years at Harvard University provided, in Jim’s own view, the foundation and skills which undergirded his later expositions of the Scriptures.”  Without question Harvard was academically excellent but it was spiritually poor.  Jim overcame this by joining Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship and by attending the historic Park Street Church, where he sat under the expository preaching ministry of Dr. Harold John Ockenga.

Following Harvard, Jim went on to Princeton Theological Seminary.  It was here, while pursuing his studies in New Testament, that his convictions concerning biblical authority solidified.  Princeton held a liberal view of the doctrine of scripture and coming into contact with teachers who spoke against the Bible’s authority forced Jim to struggle with his own convictions. 
Recalling this struggle, Jim wrote:

“I wrestled with the inerrancy of the Bible during my seminary years.  It is not that I questioned it.  My problem was that my teachers did not believe this, and much of what I was hearing in the classroom was meant to reveal the Bible’s errors so that students would not depend on it too deeply.  What was a student to do?  The professors seemed to have all the facts.  How were professors to be challenged when they argued that recent scholarship has shown that the old, simplistic views about the Bible being inerrant are no longer valid and that therefore we should admit that the Bible is filled with errors?”

Although the professors challenged Jim to abandon his unquestioned belief in biblical authority, their attempts proved to be futile.  In fact, their challenges only strengthened his view of the Bible as infallible.  He says: 

“As I worked on this, I discovered some interesting things.  First, the problems imagined to be in the Bible were hardly new problems.  For the most part those problems were known centuries ago, even by such ancient theologians as Augustine and Jerome, who discussed apparent contradictions in their substantial correspondence. I also discovered that the results of sound scholarship have not tended to uncover more and more problems, as my professors were suggesting, still less disclose more and more ‘errors’.  Rather they have tended to resolve problems and to show that what were once thought to be errors are not errors at all.”

Comments(0) Login to Post Comments