The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism

Overall, this was a very weak response to Enns. Beale's use of prior journal articles, his summary of Enns responses instead of actually re-printing them and fairly random supplemental chapters make this book feel very thrown together and a very weak piece of scholarship. If Enns is important enough to write a full book about, he should be important enough to actually write a decent book about. Instead, this book seems to be exactly the type of book that Christian Smith wrote Bible Made Impossible to address. Beale's concern does not actually seem to be the authority of scripture, the value of the text or following the evidence of the text, but preserving his per-conscieved understanding of what the is necessary to maintain inerrancy. I also think much of the problems of the book are because this book is primarily outside Beale's traditional area of scholarship. It likely would have been much better with a co-author or if he had been an editor of a wider response.

My full review (about 1600 words) is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/the-erosion-of-inerrancy-in-evangelicalism-by-gk-beale/