2 Timothy 4:3-4 "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths."
I have long fought the idea that there is One Church that includes all of what we see as denominations scattered around Christendom. I have friends that want to include everyone - out of compassion, understanding, "love," or whatever the excuse for dismissing doctrinal essentials. I guess I am just not that kind of guy.
When I went to Fuller Seminary I always felt like the token Conservative...though I knew there were many others like me who were just afraid to speak out. I don't know why. It never counted against me, except when we had a Commy pinko, liberal professor teach on worship. She and I did not see eye to eye, especially since she lauded Marxist theologies and condemned modern worship as repetitive and shallow, all the while in grandiose overtures extolling the virtues of even more repetitive and shallow African worship (which I loved, btw, but it was very repetitive).
Anyhow, I have just always noticed a side of the church that is suspicious of those who hold up Scripture as, well, true. Textual criticism, form criticism, historical criticism, etc. All of these are good tools for digging in to how God has built the text, even to this day. But as soon as you begin to diminish the Truth content of Scripture in favor of one's own preferred interpretation, you open yourself up to many errors. Now, I know there are nuanced differences between say, Pentecostals and Baptists, or baby-dippers and believer baptists, or the Reformed crowd and the Free Will crowd. But those are not deal-killers, as they are all trying to find Truth in Scripture...not neuter Scripture in order to justify how they feel in the current cultural context. The former use Scripture to speak to the culture about repentance and reform, while the latter repent of Scripture and reform it to fit the culture.
I could name names. Anglicans, Episcopals, Methodists and Presbyterians are the biggest offenders. And I am aware that there are conservative branches of those schools of thought that would not like to be linked with their more liberal colleagues. However, when you've been around the block with them enough, it is easy to see the Scriptural suspicions they hold. There is little sacred when it comes to what they will abandon in God's Word - but much sacred that they will fight for when it comes to their liturgy. They are emptied of the power of the Gospel, but full of their intellect and sanctimony.
It is not that there are no liberals that are not also Christians. I believe most of them are simply deceived into believing that you can pull stuff whole cloth out of Scripture and deny its existence due to some claim of scribal error or Pauline chauvinism, as if God had little concern about whether His Word would be found accurate after 2,000 years. The simple logical fact is that it is either accurate in its content and transmission, or it is wholly unreliable. For if it can be found in error in one part, then whomever it is that decides which part is in error controls the sum verity of the book for all. In other words, if we can claim one part to be fallible, then we can simply begin to reconstruct Jesus, God, Israel, Christianity, even being itself, by simply finding what we believe to be errors and exploiting them to our own desires.
We probably already do this on the things that are peripheral. For instance, if you're not comfortable with tongues and prophecy, you'll probably prefer a church that isn't into the charismata. If you're a hand-raising, dancing, banner waving worshiper, you'd probably be bored at a church that still has a massive organ and doesn't do music newer than those hymns of 100 years ago. But these are merely aesthetic issues, not borne of deep doctrinal fervor - necessarily. OTOH, if we're talking about the diminution of the divinity of Christ, as many liberation theologians are willing to engage, or if you're okay with affirming things the Bible calls sin as normal and approved by God, such as homosexuality, then you're probably playing with core theological issues that push you out of the grip of Scriptural centripetal forces. The more solid your center, the better your spin. Issues on the periphery have less effect on the force exerted, creating less wobble in the rotation. Mess up something big in the middle, and the entire gyro goes completely out of kilter.
So, when I engage "left" ideas versus "right" ideas, I am really engaging issues central to the ideas of truth. One can compare facts and statistics all day without convincing another. But if we start to talk about our understanding of the First Things, our foundational understandings of Truth, we can discern cosmetic differences from fatal theologies. Ideologies that put the life of infants in the hands of mad men (e.g., abortion in all of its forms), or that affirm homosexuality, or that put the responsibilities and duties of the Church in the hands of Caesar, or that diminish Yeshua to a wise, countercultural hippy that sought social justice in his time...these are doctrines of demons. They are flawed not because you cannot find (albeit stretched) support for them if you look hard enough, but they are flawed because you cannot argue with the fullness of Scripture for their validity...rather, you must diminish Scripture enough that your arguments gain validity only with a combination of twisted verses and human wisdom.
Thus, the "left" and "right" churches are not like left and right feet, which carry the whole body along as it marks its course. Rather, they are representations of two factions; one which believes wholly in the fullness of the Scriptures and their adequacy to bring one to faith and keep him or her there, and another which picks and chooses doctrines according to whim, whether political or social, and then dismisses the rest as myth, dated cultural bias or mere superstition. Saying these are like two limbs working in tandem to produce movement in one direction is like saying a full ore on one side and half an ore on the other will steer the boat smoothly to the opposite shore, when one should recognize that the two working together merely steers the boat in circles.
Cast off bad doctrine. Let us realize that the body of those who hold to Scriptural inerrancy and infallibility, we fundamentalists, must carry our own weight, stand firm in our own affirmations, fight the good fight of the faith and watch our lives and our doctrines closely. We can argue about the permanence of salvation, or of free will, or of the charismata. We can argue about the effectiveness of baptizing an infant or of the use of streamers in worship or of the place of women in worship and leadership. But we shall never remove a verse or diminish the words of an apostle or a prophet. We shall never shun jot or tittle. We shall never add our human wisdom to the sum of the wisdom of God contained in the pages of His Word. Let our left foot be Logos and our right foot be Rhema. Let our path be the ancient path and let the light of His Word be a lamp for our feet. But let us never succumb to the vagaries and whimsy of theologies driven by our cultural upheavals or our fleeting feelings. For God's foolishness is greater than man's wisdom, and we should all suffer greatly if we believe that the best theology comes from the seminary, rather than from the whisperings of the Holy Spirit in the simplest of believers who holds fast to the Word that can save.
No comments:
Post a Comment