Christianity is No More

A shocking statement to make, I realize that, but this is the logical conclusion of those suggesting that Christianity is everything you might want it to be. After this article, which adds only disdain and rancor to the discussion on the latest developments in the “culture wars,” commenters ignorantly make this exact argument. Responding to the comment,  “A Christian cannot promote something that is against Christian Doctrine,” another wrote,

…Conservative Christians like to talk as if they are the only real Christians, which of course is simply bull hockey. There are many different Christian denominations, and many different interpretations of the Bible. Some, for example, put no more stock into the anti-homosexual prohibitions of Leviticus than into the anti-shellfish prohibitions of that same Book. Conservative Christians do a lot of biblical cherry-picking that has absolutely no justification in fact or reason, just pure anti-gay animus. The younger generations are abandoning it because they see it as promoting ignorant bigotry. (emphasis mine)

Such assertions encourage the thinking that Christianity is whatever you want it to be. It can be everything we demand of it and probably more. No lines of definition exist that rule out certain doctrinal claims while affirming others according to the teachings of scripture. There is little or no acknowledgment that there is one intended meaning of the scriptures for us to learn through the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit, but rather a positive appeal to a plurality of interpretations, as if it was God’s desire to be unclear and confusing in his self-disclosure as his means to cause us to desire community. As if truth could not do that. I Christianity can be everything, Christianity truly is no more because its grounding has moved from the firm foundation of scripture to the subjectivity of individuals and subcultures. All meaning is lost. Continue reading →

Faith in Culture Radio and other Stuff

The last few weeks have been quite the challenge. You may be aware that a health crisis overtook our home, but things appear to be stabilizing and I’ve chosen the path of trusting God today and tomorrow, giving all of our worries to him. Needless to say, I’ve had a number of things preventing me from regularly writing, though I’ll be jumping back in soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to listen to my new program, Faith in Culture Radio. The show premiered this week and will regularly air on Monday evenings at 7 pm. Eventually we’ll move to a daily broadcast so I hope you’ll begin to listen and even submit topics for future discussions! Click here to check out the first episode.

Don’t forget the the summer women’s theology conference, Belief 2012, is coming up on July 28th. If you aren’t registered go to www.belief2012.com to sign up. It’s going to be a tremendous event, equipping every woman on the meaning and application of the Image of God. Speakers include Kathy Barnette of Judson University, Frederica Mathewes-Green who is a reknown author and speaker, Kelly Monroe Kullberg of the Veritas Forum, Jennifer Lahl of The Center for Bioethics & Culture, and Colleen Gallagher from the Charles Simeon Trust (Colleen is also speaking at a workship at the summer Gospel Coalition women’s conference). We hope to see you there!

The War of Words and Women

This could be a mistaken assumption on my part, but despite what’s been reported, I don’t think Christian bookstores really care if books they sell mention male or female anatomy so long as these mentions aren’t gratuitous. By gratuitous, I mean if the term isn’t necessary to properly convey the intended meaning of a section of writing but is inserted primarily to achieve some degree of shock value, the ink ought not be wasted.

Let me just get this out of the way. I’m talking about all the excitement here, celebrating the inclusion of the term vagina in a book to be released this Fall written by Rachel Held Evans (RHE) and published by Thomas Nelson (TN). The book is A Year of Biblical Womanhood (YBW), and if you know anything about RHE, this book will not be defending the complementarian view of church and family (see her post from May 2). Since I’ve received emails asking for my take on this very strange discourse, I thought it would be helpful to provide a brief history of the vagina-gate scandal along with my own reflections. Continue reading →

B.B. Warfield on The Church Doctrine of Inspiration

From The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible by B. B. Warfield
(pp. 108-109, 1964 printing; P & R Publishers)

If Origen asserts that the Holy Spirit was co-worker with the Evangelists in the composition of the Gospel, and that, therefore, lapse of memory, error or falsehood was impossible to them, and if Irenaeus, the pupil of Polycarp, claims for Christians a clear knowledge that “the Scriptures are perfect, seeing that they are spoken by God’s Word and his Spirit”; no less does Polycarp, the pupil of John, consider the Scriptures the very voice of the Most High, and pronounce him the first-born of Satan, “whosoever perverts these oracles of the Lord.” Nor do the later Fathers know a different doctrine. Augustine, for example, affirms that he defers to the canonical Scriptures alone among books with such reverence and honor that he most “firmly believes that no one of their authors has erred in anything, in writing.” To precisely the same effect did the Reformers believe and teach. Luther adopts these words of Augstine’s as his own, and declares that the whole of the Scriptures are to be ascribed to the Holy Ghost, and therefore cannot err. Calvin demands that whatever is propounded in Scripture, “without exception,” shall be humbly received by us, that the Scriptures as a whole shall be received by us with the same reverence which we give to God, “because they have emanated from him alone, and are mixed with nothing human.” The saintly Rutherford, who speaks of the Scriptures as a more sure word than a direct oracle from heaven, and Baxter, who affirms that “all the holy writers have recorded is true (and no falsehood in the Scriptures but what is from the errors of scribes and translators),” hand down this supreme trust in the Scripture word to our own day–to our own Charles Hodge and Henry B. Smith, the one of whom asserts that the Bible “gives us truth without error,” and the other, that “all the books of the Scripture are equally inspired;…all alike are infallible in what they teach;…their assertions must be free from error.” Such testimonies are simply the formulation by the theologians of each age of the constant faith of Christians throughout the ages.

Scripture, Truth and Trust

When the Bible is viewed as a collection of writings–some inspired and some not–filled with erroneous sayings and irrelevant principles for living, it becomes more of a tangled mess rather than a beautifully woven pattern of God’s orderly self-disclosure. This mess can’t be sorted through to locate truth because there is no agreed upon method for doing so. In fact, there is no real reason to assume any of scripture is inspired when, on self-ascribed authority, much of it is reduced to being the opinionated writings of men trying to hijack the faith for the benefit of their gender. Readers with a hermeneutic of suspicion can’t even assume the Holy Spirit will illuminate a particular text’s meaning because all texts including those about the Holy Spirit’s role in our life are now as suspect as any other passage. At this point, it seems there’s no point in pursuing God within the pages of scripture.

In Scripture and Truth (Carson/Woodbridge, 1992), Dr. Carson writes: Continue reading →