Evangelicals were humiliated. So they invented their own scholars.

Описание: Why do people talk about "conservative Bible scholars" like they're a natural category — like there have always been two camps? Liberal scholars vs. conservative scholars, as if this divide is just how biblical scholarship works?

I used to think so too. I grew up in evangelicalism treating conservative Bible scholars as heroes and liberal Bible scholars as enemies of the faith. Then I got a PhD in religious studies and started asking a different question: where did this category actually come from?

Part of the answer goes back to one of the most humiliating moments in American religious history, and it explains almost everything about how American evangelical institutions, apologetics, and biblical scholarship developed in the 20th century.

In this video I trace the history of the conservative Bible scholar from the Scopes trial (1925) through the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the founding of Fuller Seminary, the Evangelical Theological Society, and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy — and I argue that what we call "conservative biblical scholarship" is largely a discursive invention of American evangelicalism, not a genuine methodological category.

Background Reading
Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947)
George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980; 2nd ed. 2006)
Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997)
Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (1997)
James Barr, Fundamentalism (SCM Press, 1977) (Barr was a brilliant, and underread scholar IMHO)

Tracts
Hodge and Warfield - Inspiration - https://archive.org/details/inspirati...
Fundamentalist Tracts (see the whole series) - https://archive.org/details/fundament...

TOPICS COVERED
— History of biblical scholarship and the historical-critical method
— The Scopes Monkey Trial and evangelical humiliation
— Fundamentalism vs modernism controversy
— The founding of Fuller Seminary and neo-evangelicalism
— The Evangelical Theological Society (founded 1949)
— The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978)
— Statements of faith and institutional constraints on scholars
— Mike Licona and the cost of crossing the statement of faith
— Conservative vs liberal Bible scholars — is the distinction real?
— Apologetics, inerrancy, and the performance of scholarship

Photo Credit- Karl Barth - Bundesarchiv, Bild 194-1283-23A - Lachmann, Hans - CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...





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0:00 — Do "conservative Bible scholars" even exist?
1:55 — How the historical-critical movement changed everything
3:18 — Germany vs. America: two very different responses
7:39 — The Scopes trial and the wound that never healed
9:42— Evangelicalism rebuilds — Fuller, ETS, and the re-engagement
16:00 — The statement of faith as a guardrail (and a trap)
20:45 — Why "conservative methodology" doesn't actually work
29:40 — What the "conservative Bible scholar" actually is