McGrew on Drange: The Argument from Biblical Defects

The problems with ABD are similar to those in the AC. Premise A depends, I think, on how narrowly one draws the boundaries of evangelicalism; I suspect that C. S. Lewis would not have made the cut on a narrow definition. Drange gives a hat tip to the economist Niclas Berggren, whose 1996 essay “The Errancy of Fundamentalism” is posted on the Internet Infidels site. But Berggren’s argument works only with respect to a dictation theory of inspiration, and Berggren expressly claims that “as a matter of logical consistency ... if it can be shown that any translation of the Bible contains just one error, the Christian god cannot exist.” This is absurd.

But even assuming that a fairly narrow definition is meant, premise B does not follow from A and is not supported by any cogent line of argument; though some hapless evangelicals may fall into it by accident, it is certainly not a claim that would be endorsed by the vast majority of self-described evangelical scholars. Claims C1 - C3 are notoriously disputed; if Drange thinks he has the better of the argument with evangelicals here, he should simply make those arguments rather than assuming them as premises.

I note in passing that he would need far better weapons to establish C1 than those he chooses to employ. Drange understandably chooses the question of what is required for salvation as a point where serious doubt would create a problem. But utterly fails to show that such matters are in doubt. His attempt to pit Luke 13:3 against John 3:16, John 5:29, and Matthew 25:46 is execrable exegesis, amounting to the claim that since the latter three verses do not mention repentance, they teach a doctrine of salvation without repentance. This argument is too poor to deserve a response. And it is his only argument for contradictory biblical teaching on a point of importance.

Even granting arguendo that each of the claims C1 - C3 is correct, Drange’s argument will still miss C. S. Lewis—and that is a very significant target to miss. C4 and C5 are pertinent only to an extremely narrow reading of B that is so far out of the mainstream evangelical view as to render the term “evangelical” in this argument positively misleading. C6 is in part trivially true (there have been disputes about the canon) and in part misleading (the criteria for settling these disputes are well known and not arbitrary). C7 is a canard; the absence of the original manuscripts does not render disputes about the original text impossible to resolve.

Drange also makes some very strange errors. His claim that “the Q document is lost” not only presupposes that there was such a document—itself a point of contention among contemporary biblical scholars—but also displays his ignorance of the fact that, among those who believe that there is such a document, it is taken for granted that we have enough information in the overlapping portions of Matthew and Luke to reconstruct its contents, indeed, to write commentaries on Q. But none of this matters; the canon of scripture is not defined by anyone as the set of all of the things we might have liked to include if we had them.