31 December 2010

Standing on the Bible?

When the well-known twentieth-century conservative scholar A. Schlatter was considered for a professorial appointment to the university in Berlin, he was asked by a churchman on the committee whether, in his academic work, he 'stood on the Bible.'

Schlatter's reply: 'No, I stand under the Bible!'
--Andreas Kostenberger, Scott Kellum, and Charles Quarles, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown (B&H, 2009), 52

I should add that Schlatter did receive this appointment and one deciding factor was the university's desire to have someone on the faculty opposite Adolf von Harnack. While Schlatter wound up having a very positive relationship with him, Harnack was the poster-boy of the day for Ritschlian liberalism that read the Bible as inspiring spiritually but fictitious historically. That was the culture into which Schlatter was heading when he stood before that august committee and proclaimed his submission to the Bible.

(P.S. Can't help but quote Packer's blurb for this NT Intro: 'juicy pastoral reflections, and lashings of masterful common sense.' I think someone should compile all of Packer's blurbs into a book--this may be a multi-volume project--and then get some good blurbs for the Packer blurb collection.)

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