From the Bookstore...

So we get a mailing from a local Christian bookstore.  I leaf through it.  It has some of the latest Christian music CDs, a big promo for the video release of a recent Christian film.  Lots of knick-knacks related to valentines day and Valentines cards.  There are a whole slew of books about marriage and, yes, sex.  There is as section on finances.  There is an autobiography from a famous athlete.  Lots of decorative crosses, picture frames and a few pieces of jewelry.  A biographical movie about a doctor.  There are a number of Christian fiction entries, mostly in the "romance" category, a few devotionals and some self-help stuff for men.  There are some kids videos, "devotionals" for teens and more CCM CDs.   Add a couple of vids on biblical characters.

In 32 pages of ads, there are three bibles and one book by Lee Strobel on apologetics.  Not a single serious work of theological weight, save for Strobel's.

Just wondering, what does that say about the state of American Evangelicals?   

Origins – the first question

Been reading and pondering and arguing a bit on the web regarding the steady shift among Christians toward either theistic evolution or some form of progressive creation.  It seems more and more University educated Christians who may have come from fairly Bible centered backgrounds are abandoning not only young-earth creationism, but even a broad view of Intelligent Design.

For the moment I won’t argue specific details regarding this or that specific element of the ID vs evolution debate, nor debate the meaning of specific phrases in Genesis 1-3.  What I will question is the assumption those Christians who make this concession may have.  That concession is that God used “natural laws” including natural selection as his method of creation.  Here’s my main beef:

What Went Wrong...

My last post, some weeks ago, lamented the end of a journey. I have been able to give some thought to that journey and have reached a few conclusions.

Several years ago, I started down a path inspired by Tom Oden's "Rebirth of Orthodoxy". I may have misunderstood a bit of what he was saying in that book, but here is what I thought was the central thesis:

The "God-breathed" scriptures are alone the final authority by virtue of their inspiration, but the history of orthodoxy is the history of exegesis, and as such is a path toward greater Christian unity.

As I understood Oden, tradition has great value as a guide to the interpretation of scripture, but scripture remains the objective source of Christian truth. Whatever authority is given to tradition is secondary and derivitive and must be rooted in the Biblical text.

I saw in the Anglican doctrinal statement, the 39 Articles of Religion, a beautiful balance of absolute commitment to scripture as the final authority with respect for the history of how the church has understood scripture. Traditon, if one reads the articles in a normative fashion, is never allowed to assert as "necessary for salvation" anything that is outside the limiting boundaries of the Biblical text. This is why I chose one particular path and rejected others. I was never quite willing to reconsider Rome or follow other evangelicals to Eastern Orthodoxy because my evangelical commitment to the authority of scripture would not allow it, no matter how much I respected aspects of the early church that seemed compatible with either. For both Catholics and Orthodox, tradition plays a role that in some way subordinates the written Biblical text. The 39 Articles clearly insisted that whatever role the creeds, the liturgy and tradition may play, the source and limit is always the writte Word.

But the Anglo-Catholic influences, present in Anglicanism since the Reformation and increasingly prevalent since the days of the Tractarian movement, seems to have introduced an understanding of the role of tradition that goes "beyond what is written". Nineteenth century polemicists like J.C. Ryle were harshly critical of the "ritualism" introduced by Pusey, Newman and others, practices which had a place in the history of Christianity, but did not have a clear warrant in the text of scripture. The use of vestments, candles, incense, particular arrangement of church furniture all came under scrutiny as the excesses of the "traditions of men".

The End of a Journey

Three years ago I waded into the via media of Anglicanism. When I searched for a "middle way" I was attracted to Anglicanism for one primary reason - the Anglican Statement of faith known as the Thirty-Nine Articles. I was disillusioned with the fragmentation of the evangelical movement and burned out from a series of difficult congregational church situations.

I wanted the doctrinal stability of the creed and the tangible experience of weekly celebration of the Lord's supper. My desire for a connection to the history of the church in the creeds, in a view of baptism and the Lord's Supper as more than just symbols found a worthy statement of faith - the 39 Articles of Religion. I saw in "Global South" influenced Anglicanism a respect for the history of the faith that I hoped would mitigate some of the conflict over interpretations of scripture without losing sight of the Reformation principle that it is the Scripture and not the church that is the final authority.

In the 39 articles I found the following things:

Defending Obama by Smearing Your Dad

Frank Schaeffer seems hell bent on not only cutting all ties to conservative evangelicals but seems determined to stab the them in the heart, being not the least bit ashamed to stomp on his father's grave to do so.

Frank writes a blog for the Huffington Post, the same site that Fox News tried to confront over comments rejoicing over things like the cancer of Tony Snow. Frank recently defended Barack Obama over the firestorm of his association with Pastor Jeremiah Wright. He has every right to support Obama if he wishes, but the gist of his defense is rather incendiary.

Obama is in trouble for a 20-year association with a pastor whose theology identifies the gospel with liberation from white supremacy. Reverend Jeremiah Wright has been associated with the theology of James Cone, a theology that includes notions such as "Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill gods who do not belong to the black community.

Somebody Who Understands Schaeffer

Few people I speak to have read significantly from Francis Schaeffer. Many who have mistakenly critique him as a clone of his mentor Cornelius Van Til, or a populist who got too involved with conservative politics. In light of his son's disturbing attacks on him in his novels and most recent book, which I refuse to even name, I found the following article by Christopher Tinker and Melvin Tinker very refreshing. These guys actually understand what Schaeffer was trying to do and why it remains significant and relevant.

Fifty Years On: The Legacy of Francis Schaeffer - An Apologetic for Post-Moderns not only summarizes Schaeffer well, it points out why the collective provocations of Tony Jones, Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt are so distressing.

They state regarding Schaeffer's most basic point about modernism "‘Rationality and faith are totally out of contact with each other.’ This is where modern man was left, in a state of despair. He could understand nature (lower storey) as a closed system rationalistically, but meaning (upper storey), in terms of purpose and significance, were unattainable and continued to elude him. The only way in which meaning could be found was to look to the upper storey where all rationality must be abandoned."

In other words, modernism was left saying that we could have objective knowledge about the material world, but the spiritual world was beyond science and reason. So anything related to the spirit, such as meaning, purpose, love, significance, had to be completely separated from the category called "knowledge". God may exist, but we can know nothing of him. For all practical purposes, all spiritual truth is unattainable if it exists at all.

The Three Faces of Anglicanism - The Revisionists

I have been trying my darndest to figure out what best describes the essentials of Anglicanism. I fear, from time to time, that what defines Anglicanism is the notion of "peace at all costs". Unity at the expense of truth. As a result there appear to me to be three almost entirely incompatable belief systems in the Church of England and its daughter organizations that somehow coexist organically, but present a confusing picture to the world.

I have written before about the "revisionist" wing of the Anglican Communion. I won't rehearse it all here, instead, just a few notes on the historical development, with a bit more focus on the 39 Articles.

JI Packer speaks of the 39 Articles in these terms. They come to the Anglican church:

"... as prior judgements, time-honoured judgements, on specific issues relating to the faith of Christ, as set forth in the Scriptures. They come to us as corporate decisions first made by the Church centuries ago, and now confirmed and commended to us by the corroborative testimony of all later generations that have accepted them, down to our time.... It is a prime obligation for Anglicans to take full account of the expository formulations to which our Church has bound itself; and to ignore them, as if we were certain that the Spirit of God had no hand in them, is no more warrantable than to treat them as divinely inspired and infallible."

This is the balance that ought to be applied to all doctrinal statements - not infallible, but not malleable. But in our pluralistic culture, where modernism and postmodernism have both managed to undercut all confidence in the existence of fixed truths and of a language that can communicate such truths, the Articles of Religion, like most other statements of religious belief, become quite flexible.