accurately identifies that traditional doctrines - Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Univocality - are confessional theological presuppositions rather than empirical conclusions drawn directly from ancient manuscripts.
Neither paradigm arrives at its framework through raw data alone. Both interpret the ancient texts through prior philosophical commitments regarding history, reality, and divine action.
In contemporary public discourse surrounding biblical scholarship, Dan McClellan has emerged as a prominent voice bridging technical academic research and broad public consumption. Mobilizing tools from diachronic historical criticism, cognitive linguistics, and the cognitive science of religion, McClellan frames his project under the banner of "Data over Dogma". Within this paradigm, McClellan advances a relentless critique of traditional religious approaches to sacred scripture, asserting that traditional confessional interpretive systems superimpose dogmatic axioms onto ancient texts that the historical, philological, and archaeological data fail to substantiate.
Inerrancy is treated by McClellan as a necessary result of dogmatic inspiration that directly contradicts empirical observation. Once a community assumes that an omniscient deity is the primary author of Scripture, it deduces that the text cannot contain factual falsehoods or historical discrepancies. McClellan demonstrates that when biblical literature is examined historically, it routinely reflects the prescientific cosmology of its environment - such as a flat earth supported by pillars beneath a solid firmament - alongside demonstrable historical inaccuracies, divergent chronologies between parallel texts, and incompatible ethical frameworks. Inerrancy is thus maintained only by imposing convoluted harmonizations that distort the plain literary sense of individual passages.
Univocality is identified by McClellan as perhaps the most distorting dogma of all. By presupposing that the Bible communicates a singular, monolithic worldview from Genesis to Revelation, confessional readers erase the vast chronological, cultural, and theological gaps separating distinct authors. This presupposition licenses theological harmonization, wherein later texts are retrofitted into earlier ones - such assuch as retrofitting the philosophical grammar of Nicene Trinitarianism onto ancient Israelite monolatry, reading the Augustinian formulation of Original Sin into the primeval narratives of Genesis, or projecting an immaterial, immortal soul onto early holistic Hebrew anthropology. For McClellan, univocality is a tool of rhetorical coercion: by presuming that every verse must agree, interpreters arbitrarily configure selected prooftexts to construct a novel "biblical view" that claims transcendent mandate while silencing dissent.
The Hermeneutical Impasse: The Positivist Illusion of Pure Data
While McClellan’s critique exposes the ideological mechanics of modern fundamentalist and scholastic bibliologies,
his overarching framework embodies a significant epistemological blind spot. By organizing his critique around the stark binary of "Data over Dogma,"
McClellan implicitly adopts an uncritical empiricism reminiscent of nineteenth-century positivism. He treats historical-critical exegesis
not as an interpretive discipline governed by specific philosophical priors, but as the unmediated, neutral retrieval of objective historical reality.
Philosophical hermeneutics has dismantled the notion that any engagement with human literature can proceed apart from pre-understanding. In
Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer identified the core error of Enlightenment historicism as its "
prejudice against prejudice". The Enlightenment sought an objective
Archimedean or starting point of inquiry, positing that human reason could achieve absolute objectivity only by stripping away all inherited tradition, authority, and interpretive pre-commitments. Gadamer demonstrated that
this aspiration is an ontological impossibility.
Human understanding is fundamentally historical and linguistically situated within temporal horizons. Far from being mere impediments to truth, prejudices and pre-understandings serve as the necessary enabling conditions of all perception; they provide the conceptual framework through which an interpreter can encounter and interrogate an ancient text in the first place.
This hermeneutical reality was introduced directly into modern biblical studies by Rudolf Bultmann in his classic essay "Is Presuppositionless Exegesis Possible?". Bultmann observed that while historical inquiry must not presuppose the factual outcome of an investigation, exegesis can never be free of an overarching pre-understanding. The historical critic never approaches the text as a blank slate. Rather, the questions posed to the text, the criteria used to evaluate evidence, and the decisions regarding what constitutes a plausible historical event are determined in advance by the interpreter’s ontological and epistemological assumptions. In
Warranted Christian Belief, analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga applied this epistemological insight directly to historical biblical criticism. Plantinga argued that
historical-critical scholarship does not operate through unassisted reason examining raw facts, but through a methodology bounded by specific epistemic delimitations - the intentional choices a researcher makes to set the boundaries, scope, and exclusions of a study
. When historical critics insist that the biblical texts exhibit no evidence of divine inspiration or unified transcendent intent, they are
not reporting an empirical discovery; they are observing the necessary consequence of their initial methodological framework, which systematically excludes divine communicative action from its explanatory toolkit.
| Epistemological Approach | Methodological Mandate | Epistemic Assessment of Sacred Claims |
| Troeltschian Historical Criticism | Positive Naturalism: Accepts a closed historical continuum; explicitly excludes divine intervention. | Assumes claims of miracles, supernatural inspiration, or prophecy are historically untenable a priori. |
| Duhemian Historical Criticism | Methodological Agnosticism: Limits research to evidence accessible to public, secular reason alone. | Incapable of evaluating or affirming divine inspiration because theological categories are bracketed by rule. |
| Confessional Theological Hermeneutics | Theistic Realism: Operates from the conviction that God reveals divine intention through historical media. | Evaluates textual data through the hermeneutical conviction of divine speech, human reception, and canonical coherence |
Consequently, the claim that inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality are presuppositions is structurally incomplete without the corollary recognition that the historical-critical paradigm relies on an equally substantive set of foundational assumptions. Historical criticism does
not escape the hermeneutical circle; it simply occupies a distinct quadrant within it
The Inverse Axioms: Historical Criticism’s Triad of Presuppositions
The historical-critical method that McClellan presents as the objective baseline of the discipline relies upon three inverse presuppositions:
Fallibility and historical conditioning,
Exclusive human authorship and compositional evolution, and
Pluralism, polyphony, and irreducible contradiction.
These concepts do not function as neutral conclusions derived from the text, but as axiomatic starting points that dictate in advance how historical artifacts are parsed and understood
| Confessional Presupposition | Critical Historical Inversion | Underlying Historiographical Axiom |
| Divine Inspiration | Exclusive Human Authorship & Compositional Evolution | Methodological Naturalism and Methodological Atheism. |
| Scriptural Inerrancy | Intrinsic Fallibility & Absolute Historical Conditioning | Troeltschian Historicism [Human ideas, morality, and religious doctrines evolve as societies change and cannot be viewed as static or timeless] and Post-Kantian Finitude [we can only know things as they appear to us (phenomena), never as they are in themselves (noumena)]. |
| Canonical Univocality | Irreducible Pluralism, Polyphony, & Contradiction | Atomizing Hermeneutic of Suspicion and Conflict Ontology - i.e. presupposes that scripture is a collection of conflicting human documents born out of ancient sociopolitical rivalries rather than a single, harmonious divine voice |
Fallibility and Historical Conditioning as Methodological Priors
The foundational assumption of critical historiography is that all ancient literature is inherently fallible and entirely circumscribed by its historical environment. This premise does not arise from neutral philology, but derives directly from modern historiographical conventions formalized at the end of the nineteenth century by
Ernst Troeltsch. Troeltsch articulated three interconnected principles that continue to govern modern critical biblical scholarship:
- the Principle of Criticism (methodological doubt),
- the Principle of Analogy, and
- the Principle of Correlation.
The Principle of Criticism dictates that all historical accounts are subject to methodological doubt, meaning that historical conclusions can never attain metaphysical certainty, but only degrees of shifting probability.
The Principle of Analogy asserts that historical knowledge is possible only because human experience across all historical epochs remains fundamentally uniform, meaning that the laws of nature, human psychology, and cultural developments operating in antiquity were identical to those observed today. The
Principle of Correlation establishes that all historical events exist within an unbroken, immanent continuum of cause and effect, where no occurrence can be isolated from its natural historical antecedents or attributed to a transcendent, non-historical intervention.
When historical critics assess an ancient narrative - such as the resurrection of Jesus, the parting of the Red Sea, or conflicting chronological timelines of ancient Judean monarchs - the designation of that account as "
legendary," "
mythological," or "
historically erroneous" is
not a finding extracted directly from the physical manuscript. The manuscript provides only written characters on material media. The determination that the event did
not happen as described depends entirely upon the prior application of Troeltschian analogy [past events adhere to modern natural laws] and correlation. Because dead men do not rise in modern empirical experience, and because nature constitutes a closed causal nexus, the historian assumes the narrative
must reflect pious fiction, theological mythmaking, or human error. That is the only option for those emplyimg the
Furthermore, historical criticism routinely elevates historical conditioning from a descriptive observation into an absolute epistemological ceiling. Critical scholars frequently operate under the unprovable metaphysical assumption that human authors are completely bound by the epistemic boundaries of their material and cultural setting, rendering it impossible for them to articulate theological or metaphysical insights that transcend their era.
Traditional confessional theologies never denied that biblical authors were culturally and historically situated; doctrines of divine accommodation articulated by figures like John Calvin and the Church Fathers affirmed that God deliberately spoke through the finite, culturally conditioned categories and idioms of ancient writers. The decision to interpret historical conditioning not as the human vehicle of divine communication, but as an absolute barrier guaranteeing human fallibility and error, represents a philosophical choice grounded in immanentist epistemology rather than an empirical conclusion forced by textual data.
Exclusive Human Authorship and Compositional Evolution as Methodological Naturalism
The second primary assumption structuring modern biblical criticism is that Scripture must be investigated exclusively as a product of human culture that developed through immanent sociopolitical processes. In the sociology of religion, this baseline was articulated by Peter Berger in The Sacred Canopy as methodological atheism. Berger observed that any scientific, empirical inquiry into religious phenomena must proceed on the operational premise that religious claims are human social constructions, systematically bracketing any question of transcendent reality or divine origin. Within academic biblical studies, this requirement operates as methodological naturalism: an exegesis is deemed academically viable only if it avoids appealing to divine agency, prophetic foreknowledge, or the Holy Spirit as an explanatory mechanism.
This methodological rule directly informs the diachronic models of compositional evolution that dominate critical biblical scholarship. The core disciplines of source criticism, form criticism (Formgeschichte), and redaction criticism were developed to dissect texts into antecedent fragments, identify their hypothetical oral settings (Sitz im Leben), and trace how successive generations of editors renegotiated received traditions to serve evolving political and sectarian agendas.
While these diachronic reconstructions—such as the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch or the synoptic models of source dependence—are often presented to the public as verified empirical realities, they are theoretical models constructed to satisfy the demand for an immanent, purely human developmental etiology. If one rules out divine revelation a priori, every stylistic variation, vocabulary shift, duplicate narrative (doublet), and theological development must be explained through the compounding accretion of multiple human authors and editorial negotiations over generations.
Theologian and philosopher Kevin Vanhoozer, engaging with the speech-act philosophy of J.L. Austin and John Searle, has demonstrated that human authorship and divine communicative action are not mutually exclusive conceptual categories. Within a sophisticated model of double agency, divine discourse occurs in, with, and through the human speech acts of historical writers. The transcendent author appropriates the illocutionary intentions, linguistic idioms, and cultural genres of human agents without suppressing their creaturely reality.
When historical critics dismiss double agency in favor of exclusive, atomized human authorship, they do so not because philological tools have detected the absence of God, but because the discipline’s founding charter bars divine intention from functioning as a legitimate historical category. The critical conclusion that the Bible is merely human literature is an explicit restatement of the method's opening assumption.
Pluralism, Polyphony, and Contradiction as Hermeneutical Frameworks
The third core critical counter-claim championed by McClellan is that the biblical corpus is characterized by irreducible pluralism, theological polyphony, and outright ideological contradiction. In McClellan’s framework, identifying textual and theological contradictions serves as the decisive empirical tool to dismantle the confessional dogma of univocality. Where the confessionalist sees an orchestrated, overarching theological unity across canonical books, the critical scholar uncovers competing political factions engaged in sectarian polemics.
However, the designation of differing perspectives as an irreducible contradiction rather than a complementary polyphony or an intentional paradox is itself an interpretive judgment governed by hermeneutical presuppositions, rather than an unmediated empirical fact. In classic philosophical logic, a contradiction occurs only when two propositions simultaneously affirm and deny the exact same predicate of the exact same subject in the exact same sense and at the exact same time.
When applied to ancient literature, determining whether textual differences constitute logical contradictions depends on the interpreter's overarching framework
Historical criticism frequently operates via a hermeneutic of suspicion shaped by conflict theory, evaluating texts primarily as artifacts of sociopolitical struggle, power negotiations, and ideological rivalries. Under this interpretive lens, any theological divergence or shift in emphasis between two authors is automatically construed as an adversarial attempt by one community to undermine, correct, or subvert the authority of another. Difference is thus equated with opposition, and divergence is categorized as an irreconcilable contradiction.
This interpretive posture is reinforced by the atomizing tendency inherent to historical-critical methodology. As Old Testament scholar Brevard Childs observed in his development of canonical criticism, historical criticism systematically severs pericopes and books from their wider canonical contexts, isolating each fragment within its hypothetical historical moment of origin. By refusing to grant hermeneutical priority to the final canonical form, the critical method fragments the canon into an arbitrary anthology of discordant voices. The resulting theological incoherence is not an unadulterated discovery of what the texts say; it is the inevitable structural artifact of an interpretive methodology designed to dissect rather than integrate.
Conversely, an interpreter operating from a canonical or theological horizon approaches the text with a hermeneutic of charitable coherence. Under this framework, differing voices—such as the distinctive portraits of Jesus across the four Gospels or the varying Pauline and Jamesian vocabularies regarding justification—are understood as complementary expressions of a multifaceted, unified divine economy.
Neither "canonical coherence" nor "irreconcilable contradiction" is an empirical entity visible on the parchment. Both represent overarching interpretive frameworks brought to the evidence. The critic who rejects harmonization as apologetic dishonesty is just as constrained by an a priori demand for dissonance as the confessionalist who demands absolute, uniform consensus is constrained by an a priori demand for flat univocality
The Co-Dependence and Epistemic Parity of the Competing Frameworks
A deeper philosophical examination reveals that Dan McClellan's critical apparatus relies on the very confessional categories it seeks to dismantle. When McClellan defines the dogmatic triad of inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality, he relies almost exclusively on the definitions developed by post-Enlightenment, nineteenth-century American fundamentalism and scholastic evangelicalism. By treating this specific historicist-propositionalist model of Scripture as the normative definition of religious belief, McClellan sets up an ideological target that can be easily dismantled using historical-critical tools.
This interaction exposes a shared epistemological ancestry uniting fundamentalist inerrantism and critical historical positivism. Both camps operate under the modern philosophical conviction that theological truth is intrinsically tied to empirical, scientific, and historiographical factuality. The conservative fundamentalist argues that because the text is divinely inspired, it must be historically and scientifically factual in every detail. The secular historical critic argues that because the text contains historical and scientific anomalies, it cannot be divinely inspired. Both frameworks evaluate ancient sacred literature through post-Enlightenment criteria of meaning and truth, differing only in their assessment of the text's factual conformity
Furthermore, an internal tension exists within McClellan’s application of cognitive linguistics. McClellan routinely affirms the post-structuralist and reader-response premise that texts have no inherent meaning, asserting that meaning is generated within, and confined to, the mind of the reader based on sociolinguistic negotiation. If texts lack inherent meaning and interpretation is an act of reader-generated creation, then the historical-critical reconstruction of an ancient author's "original intent" is itself an unstable projection of the modern historian's mind.
A scholar cannot logically invoke post-modern linguistic anti-realism to delegitimize traditional theological readings while simultaneously asserting an authoritative, positivist historical realism to establish "what the text actually meant" via empirical "data". To do so is to treat historical criticism as a privileged discourse exempt from the very cognitive and cultural conditioning it imposes upon confessional readers
Epistemological Parity Between Confessional Dogmatics and Critical HistoriographyDan McClellan’s claim that inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality are presuppositions rather than empirical conclusions is analytically valid within the boundaries of descriptive, secular historical methodology. Ancient textual manuscripts, considered strictly as material artifacts, do not contain empirical proofs of their own divine provenance or transcendent unity. To present inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality as the straightforward output of inductive empirical historiography is an epistemological category mistake. They are, fundamentally, confessional axioms—theological presuppositions rooted in an ecclesial community's prior faith commitments regarding God's self-revelation in history.
However, the dichotomy that contrasts these confessional axioms with the supposedly presuppositionless "data" of historical criticism is philosophically unsupportable. Historical criticism does not bypass presuppositions to engage unmediated reality. Instead, it adopts an inverse set of metaphysical and methodological commitments:
- Dan McClellan substitutes methodological naturalism and exclusive human agency for divine inspiration.
- Dan McClellan substitutes Troeltschian historicism, the closed causal continuum, and intrinsic human fallibility for inerrancy.
- Dan McClellan substitutes atomizing suspicion, evolutionary conflict, and irreducible contradiction for canonical univocality.
Neither paradigm can prove its foundational axioms through the examination of textual data alone, as the data are parsed and synthesized through the lens of those very axioms. The debate between confessional theology and historical-critical scholarship is not a conflict between unreasoning dogma and objective science. It is an encounter between two distinct hermeneutical paradigms, each governed by its own irreducibly presuppositional framework regarding the nature of history, language, and the possibility of transcendent communication.
When two paradigms cannot use internal data to prove their starting axioms without begging the question, the debate shifts from empirical proof to epistemological adjudication. In the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and comparative worldviews, a framework is judged not by whether its axioms can be directly verified in isolation, but by how well the entire system functions when applied to reality.
A superior lens accounts for the
- 1) widest array of phenomena with the least strain,
- 2) internal coherence and non-self-refutation,
- 3) explains the competitor (the MacIntyre test).
Applied to biblical studies, a mature theological hermeneutic can easily account for why historical criticism finds human fingerprints, historical conditioning, and stylistic evolution: classical theology holds that God accommodated divine revelation through finite, situated human instruments (divine accommodation and double agency). The human messiness predicted by the critic is already built into the theological model.
A purely naturalistic lens, however, must reduce all claims of divine encounter, prophetic fulfillment, and spiritual authority to delusion, political manipulation, or pious fraud - a reductionist move that struggles to capture the existential and theological reality experienced by communities across millennia.
But more on that later....
