Two camps of biblicists will contend at the LC-MS Convention in Houston, July 10-17. President Gerald Kieschnick (755 nominating votes) is the underdog to Rev. Matthew Harrison (1,332 votes). Both Kieschnick and Harrison hold to verbal inerrancy:
1. Kieschnick is an inerrantist. His 10-page response to the 2009 ELCA vote on gay sex: “We affirm the infallibility of the Scriptures . . . every word of Scripture.” “We are grounded in the Bible, God’s written and infallible word.” “The Bible . . . provides final assurance.”
2. Harrison is an inerrantist. His followers: “Authority in the synod is based on scripture” “we study the Scriptures to discover the propositional truth therein.” “We call on the members of synod churches and the delegates to the convention to wake up and restore Biblical purity to our denomination.”
They both hold to “biblical inerrancy,” but it’s not working to unite them. Read Schroeder’s whole report here.
3. Luther was for the “pure Gospel” (Gal 2: 5, 14), not Biblical inerrancy. For Luther “the correct touchstone for evaluating all books: to see whether they drive Christ home or not…” (LW 35:396). What’s authoritative is the word of the cross: Christ died for you and me (1 Cor 1:18-2:2). Thus, as Oswald Bayer writes:
The authority of Scripture is not formal but is highly material and is content driven . . . It is decisive for Luther’s understanding of the Bible that he does not seek to establish its authority as Holy Scripture in advance as a formal “scriptural principle.” Such a claim for authority, which is advocated by fundamentalists, is not possible because the conflict about the appropriate method of biblical interpretation is always at issue. This conflict can be resolved only in the material sense, using the substance [material] of the actual texts to settle the argument.[1]
Read more Bayer here.
[1]Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology. A Contemporary Interpretation, (2003) 69, 74; italics in the text.