[Image: Strange, 2013, JA Van Devender]
Heb. 13:9(a)
9 Do not be carried about with various and strange doctrines.
For all practical purposes, it is now smashed flat. It was a large, bushy, unwanted plant growing right under a tree that my daughter-in-law wanted taken down. It is now buried beneath the fallen limbs and portions of the trunk. But before its demise, I thought the tendrils looked curious and hence gave into their strange attraction and snapped a few shots. It still looks strange. I have no idea what it is, perhaps someone out there in the ether might identify it for me.
There are other "strange" things going on in the religious world I inhabit.
Dr. G. McDermott, a professor of religion at Roanoke College in Salem, Va. wrote a piece entitled "The Emerging Divide in Evangelical Theology" which was published in the June 2013 Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. It's a good article, well written and accessible by those less academically trained but thought provoking for the specialist. McDermott looks at the Evangelical landscape and he sees that a chasm is developing between those who are contributing "to the development of historic orthodoxy" and those are following a "trail blazed by Protestant Liberalism." He has reason for his concerns and clearly articulates them.
The problem is an ancient one. Every religious community lives in a surrounding culture. Tremendous pressures are often brought to bear on that community when its central ideals are at odds with prevailing trends and ideas. The Evangelical community in this country, which I believe is the only remnant of a true Christian witness in it, has its very survival at stake in facing these pressures. If and when it succumbs it will most likely not be at the hands of persecuting pagans... it will be from self-inflicted wounds as more and more of its thinkers find ways to excuse or, worse still, excise from Scripture those passages which do not rest comfortably with the mind of the wider community among whom they dwell.
The pressures are easily categorized: scientific "facts", a changing moral climate, revised views of history, human desires for acceptance rather than ridicule by intellectual peers.... etc.
The most immediate, broadly impacting, shift is the new "open-ness" toward questioning the ancient orthodox formulations. In creedal churches these formulations are found in preserved creeds that date back to nearly the first century. In non-creedal churches it is an attitude toward Scripture itself that is most clearly at odds with previous decades. The idea of "changing times" requiring "changed doctrine" is the issue.
Virtually all of us believe that the Scriptures and the Orthodox tradition, however received and formulated, have to be applied within the prevailing context and hearing of the existing culture in every eon. But applying the Scripture and our doctrine to existing problems is not the same thing as rejecting the Scriptures and doctrine. What is happening now, across a broad spectrum of what used to be called Conservative Christianity, is that pressure to "read the Scriptures" in a new way is under mining the idea of inerrancy of the Scriptures and causing the ancient creeds to be viewed as irrelevant.
If those two ideas are not curtailed Evangelicalism, as we know it, will cease to exist.
As McDermott clearly articulates, the new "hermeneutic" is actually just the old emphasis on "experience" that took hold in the Second Great Awakening and which ultimately set our historic, main-line denominations on their self-destructive path to liberalism. If "experience" trumps doctrine, ... if it becomes standard practice to grant "sincerity of heart" in motive an equal hearing and acceptance as doctrinal integrity, then there are few, if any, safeguards remaining. Some sincere person, who has had religious stirrings of some sort, while reading the Scripture or sitting in an emotionally charged worship service or under the influence of needy psychological drives, is given full status as a Christian whether they hold to a normative view of Scripture or not.
Now when a person does not hold a "normative" view of the Scriptures that does not mean that they do not view them as important. Most often they confess them as the "Word of God." They consider them very important because it is through Scripture that "God speaks to them in their heart." Beyond that they don't go very far. Those passages, many of which are in the Old Testament and in the Pauline literature of the New Testament, which do not "speak to their heart" are simply ignored or excused in some way. If the Bible says something which a person has been culturally conditioned to consider as "hateful" or "not-nice", then it is given short shrift in the person's life or world view. If the individual is an academic he or she will go to great lengths to "prove" that this is actually how the Bible should be read. Statements about the sinfulness of homosexuality, for example, will be dismissed as culturally conditioned, time-specific injunctions that God has since lead the religious community to consider differently and more openly and, of course, in a more accepting fashion.
What this demonstrates is a three-fold process: the church is to (1) elevate experience over doctrine and diminish the latter as divisive, (2) treat the received orthodox tradition as essentially irrelevant because it only reflects the religious experience of men in previous generations and is therefore to be modified in view of later religious experience, and (3) treat Scripture as only "story" in which God awakens experience in its readers or hearers and not as the sphere in which timeless propositional truth is to be discerned.
Preaching becomes friendly exhortation... acceptance is emphasized over conformity of thought and belief.... the difference between the surrounding culture and the visible Christian community is to be minimized so as to make us more palatable to those nice folks among whom we live.
Strange times indeed... when the people of God are playing around with the poisonous vipers that have destroyed the Christian witness in other lands so often and so completely before.
It's almost as if we are not only ignorant of history... it's like we are intentionally closing our eyes to it.
Strange times indeed ... and sad.
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