Product Description

Conservative Protestantism in America has always wrestled with doctrinal controversies over issues ranging from predestination to the mode of baptism, from charismatic gifts to biblical prophecy. But probably none has threatened the American evangelical movement as much as the recent battle for the Bible. The dispute centers on the doctrine of biblical inerrancy--the belief that the Bible is correct in any statement it makes, whether on nature or history, on doctrine or morals.

In this painstakingly researched and penetrating analysis of the controversy, biblical scholar Robert M. Price helps us understand the present evangelical ferment by focusing on a recent period of intense theological conflict in which fundamentalists accused their slightly more mainstream brethren, the evangelicals, of abandoning the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

Price provides a historical survey of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century and argues that this history began repeating itself in the 1970s. Many evangelicals in fact abandoned rigid inerrancy beliefs and began to assimilate to various alternative approaches such as neo-orthodoxy, demythologizing, and Catholicism. Price analyzes the works, big and small, of evangelical theologians and their fundamentalist critics and distills a set of five distinct noninerrancy approaches evolved by liberal evangelicals amid the debate.

Inerrant the Wind is utterly unique, not only in its comprehensive grasp of the ocean of relevant literature, but also in its cogent taxonomy of evangelical positions for and against inerrancy. Scholars and students on all sides of the debate will want to consult this valuable contribution to an important ongoing debate in the evangelical community.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111967 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 322 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781591026761
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author
Robert M. Price (Selma, NC), professor of scriptural studies at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is the editor (with Jeffery Jay Lowder) of The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave and The Journal of Higher Criticism. He is also the author of Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today's Pop Mysticisms; The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church Was Left Behind; The Reason-Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For? and many other works.

Customer Reviews

Inerrancy and the Crisis of Evangelicals in the Late 70's
Last night I heard my friend Bob Price give a talk on his new book Inerrant the Wind, which describes the crisis evangelicals had in the late 70's to the early 80's, of which I remember very well. Harold Lindsell dropped his bombshell of a book on us titled, "The Battle for the Bible," where he drew a line in the sand whereby evangelicals must accept inerrancy in order to stay evangelicals. After that all of us had to take a position on the matter.

This book is Price's dissertation finally in print about that era. There were five evangelical responses as he describes them. Each one of them opened the door to liberal thought and he takes us through each one of them. Price argues that basically Lindsell was right. Once evangelicals denied inerrancy they were on a slippery slide to liberalism, but Lindsell was wrong in that the Bible is in fact errant, which led evangelicals to travel on this slippery slide in the first place. A history of evangelicals since that time proves that Price's predictions were correct. Evangelicals who denied inerrancy did indeed become more and more liberal. It's a good book and a very interesting read.

In our own day a recent attempt to reformulate and question inerrancy is the book by Carlos R. Bovell, Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals. He's already given up the ship.

a priori
Has this book even been published yet? I'll sacrifice my status in order to counter-balance this Snardiff clown that gave it one star, with the same review that he gave Jesus Interrupted, without reading either, obviously. Price is a scholar. I am confident that he will share valuable information in his work here, as he has with all of his books.

Interesting, but Dated (1981)
The book is interesting and well researched, but it is basically a reprint of Dr. Price's 1981 doctoral dissertation. It seems a bit disingenuous to be marketed as a new book with no mention of that fact in the publicity review materials. The author protests that he has found almost nothing that needs updating in it, but that is belied by his citations of works right up to 1980. Applying Dr. Price's cherished higher criticism to his own assertion, wouldn't we find it odd that he found so much worthy of citation in the 1970's, even up to the year before his dissertation date, but practically nothing pertinent to the topic in the nearly three decades thereafter?