Tonight I was reading through Sherman’s discourse on Pinnick’s epistemological development and shifting over his career. It is fair enough to say Pinnock has surprised me…again. I was quite unaware that at the start of his career he held a combative, calvinistic stance proclaiming the inerrancy of scripture. Such a position reminds me of a couple of people I have come across during my under-graduate studies (as I imagine most people will testify to). So I found this Pinnock quote interesting, he made it in ‘Grace of God and the Will of Man’ (1989).
“One thing I am asking people to give up is the myth that evangelicals often hold – that there is such a thing as an orthodox systematic theology, equated with what Calvin, for example, taught and which is said to be in full agreement with the Bible. As if theology itself were an immutable system of concepts not relative at all to the historical context in which they are conceived and frame! Granted, the idea holds great appeal to us, not because it is our experience, but because it delivers such a delicious sense of security and gives us such a great platform from which to assail those dreadful liberals who are such historicists….I guess it is time for evangelicals to grow up and recognize that evangelical theology is not an uncontested body of timeless truth. There are various accounts of it. Augustine got some things right, but not everything. How many evangelicals follow him on the matter of the infallible church or the miraculous sacraments? Like it or not, we are embarked on a pilgrimage in theology and cannot determine exactly where will it [sic] lead and how it will end.” (Pinnock, ‘Grace of God’, 1989, pg 28)
//Jimmy
