Things Forgotten? 4

So why all the mundane autobiography this week, and what was with all of those books from yesterday?  Instead of "Things Forgotten" shouldn’t this have been titled "Things Remembered?"

There is one thing in particular I’ve been driving at - or at least driving toward.  This is simply my own humble (or maybe not-so humble) observation from growing up a Southern Baptist in Oklahoma and later Texas.  We claim to stand firmly on the faith of the Reformers, and yet there is an important element of our faith in which we have left the Reformers, perhaps out of the religious climate of the day, perhaps out of neglect, but certainly to our peril.  It is in a robust theology of the Holy Spirit.

No, no, no.  I’m not channeling Richard Roberts or Kenneth Hagin.  In fact, it is, perhaps, an overreaction to the TBN crowd that is part of our problem.  But here’s more of what I mean.

You’ll notice that in the category section of this week’s posts I’ve listed "Bible" as a category.  Some say that if the Bible isn’t the inerrant, infallible, indisoluable, incontrovertable Word of God [said with a big shout and a "Can I get an ‘Amen!?!’"] then it is totally unreliable.  I think that’s the weakest, silliest thing I’ve ever heard.

I’m not arguing for "fallibility" or "errancy" or "soluability" or "controvertability."  I am arguing for the power of the Holy Spirit within the text even if something was misspelled or if a scribe substituted a word or phrase here or there, or if a copyist didn’t get everything exactly right, and nearly all thinking people who hold to a version of inerrancy today agree that those things are a part of the actual text that we possess.  The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy says as much.

Think of a few examples with me.  Is the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 inerrant?  Is the Constitution of the United States of America inerrant?  Is the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade inerrant?  And if your answer to any of the above was "no," then does that mean that the entire BFM 2000 is suspect?  Does it mean that we might as well throw out the whole of the American Constitution?  Are we to say that every decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court is "full of errors?"  Hardly.  Yet that is exactly what we are regularly told with regards to the Bible. 

But the thing that gives the Bible its authority and its truthfulness is the Spirit who inspired it, not an a priori commitment to inerrancy.  It’s as if we believe that if we can prove philosophically that the Bible has no errors we can maintain that our faith is safe (Millard Erickson in his Christian Theology states that inerrancy is a concept that we must arrive at philosophically through logic, not something that is stated expressly in Scripture itself - see p. 229).  In other words, we don’t need the Spirit to affirm the word to us, we can arrive at our affirmation through reasoning.  And that, to me, is a dangerous trade.

Now some will say that the internal witness of the Spirit is nothing more than a subjective criteria.  But if the Spirit is able to speak objectively to Adam and Abraham before there was a Bible, and if the Spirit was able to speak objectively to Paul before there was a New Testament, at what point did the Spirit lose his ability to speak objectively in other contexts?  This is even true of the Bible itself.  If the Spirit spoke objectively to Moses and Matthew, Jeremiah and John, through Proverbs and Paul how is it that we can say he does less than that today through his internal witness to what he has already said?  How do we avoid the problem by saying that the Spirit spoke objectively through the Scriptures?  He still spoke through men who received the message as subjects.  How do we know they objectively got it right when they put the pen to the paper?  Unless you hold to a theory of strict dictation (a theory which you couldn’t prove if you had to) then the problem remains.  How do we know that Paul didn’t throw in a little of his own ideas?  Well, we say, because the Spirit prevented him from doing so.  Again, at what point did the Spirit lose the ability to do the same for you and me?

The Reformers had a robust doctrine of illumination and the work of the Spirit.  We have traded that for a scholastic dependence on a reasoned argument that is itself based upon an unprovable presupposition (how’s that for a $5 sentence?).  If being conservative means that we are conserving the ideas of the past then, while the principle of a truthful Bible is conservative, the method of making a well-reasoned argument for it to the neglect of the authenticating authority of the Spirit is not.  We need to be reminded of what the Reformers said lest we forget it to our own hurt.

Addendum:

There’s an interesting illustration of our failure in this area from just this week.  On the 29th of this month, in the chapel service at Southwestern seminary, Rev. Dwight McKissic offered a view of the work of the Spirit that many Baptists reject.  Southwestern provides those chapel messages via audio almost immediately.  Shortly after the conclusion of this week’s chapel service the archivist was called and told to hold off on providing that audio online.  It was rather quickly decided that the audio would not go online at all.

As a part of the rationale for this decision a statement was published on the SWBTS website.  The statement, in part, says the following: "we reserve the right not to disseminate openly views which we fear may be harmful to the churches.

… The President made the decision not to
continue the video-streaming of this message lest uninformed people
believe that Pastor McKissic’s view on the gift of tongues as “ecstatic
utterance” is the view of the majority of our people at Southwestern."

The Bible has quite a bit to say about views which "may be harmful to the church."  The 21st Century debate among Southern Baptists on private prayer languages is not one of them.  There is also more than just a little condescension in the phrase "lest uninformed people believe…."  Who exactly are these uninformed people who are going to hear that message and begin confusing Southwestern with Oral Roberts University?

At the root of the issue is the fact that we simply can’t trust the Holy Spirit to guide us in these matters.  Better said, some can’t trust the Holy Spirit to guide you in these matters.  They have no problem with the Holy Spirit guiding them, but they can’t trust the Spirit guiding you.  That is because you, my friend, may be a heretic in hiding.  Or a closet charismatic.  It’s tough work guarding the theology of a six million attender denomination, but if the Holy Spirit can’t do it we have people who can.  Our lack of faith in the preserving, illuminating Spirit of God is often astounding.

Things Forgotten? 3

I’ve never really felt comfortable in Fundamentalist skin.  That’s probably why I’ve never really worn it much.  Oh, I had a college roommate who would bring preaching tapes of Jack Hyles in, but we’d mostly listen and laugh at Hyles making fun of men with hair touching their ears or women who wear pants.  Occasionally this roommate would bring in a copy of the Sword Of The Lord, but that stuff was, in the parlance of today’s youth, wack.

Dr. McWilliams had taught us that there is value in reading beyond the list of usual suspects - those with which we agreed.  So we read a variety of Christian thinkers: Langdon Gilkey and Cornelius Van Til; Karl Barth [gasp!] and Carl Henry; C. S. Lewis and John Hick; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, G. C. Burkouwer, Reinhold Neibuhr and Rosemary Ruether [great big gasp!!]; Donald Baillie and Wolfhart Pannenberg; Will Willimon,

Hans Küng

and Thomas Merton along with Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology and others.

This is my heritage.  And on my bookshelf I have Calvin’s Institutes and The Works of Jonathan Edwards; B. B. Warfield’s Biblical and Theological Studies; W.G.T. Shedd’s Dogmatic Theology, Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology and William Cunningham’s Historical Theology.  I have John Dagg’s Manual of Theology and W.T. Connor’s Christian Doctrines;  I also have Carl Henry’s set on God, Revelation and Authority.

I have Otto Webber’s Foundations of Dogmatics along with Grenz’s Revisioning Evangelical Theology and Renewing The Center.  I have Grenz and Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism and Karl Barth’s classic commentary on Romans.  I have Walter Brueggemann’s commentary on Jeremiah and Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz.  I have probably a half a dozen books by Leonard Sweet, several by Brian McLaren and a couple by Robert Webber.  I like Dallas Willard and I like Sam Keene.

I find a lot of value in a lot of places.  I enjoy reading all of the posts that have been swirling around the theoblogosphere on universalism, though I’m not a universalist.  My theology is, as the venerable Paul Burleson commented regarding himself recently, mine.  Honestly I don’t think borrowed theology is all that valuable, anyway.  And that’s one of the reasons I’d never make a good footsoldier in the SBC political machine.  It’s one of the reasons I don’t believe in the inerrant, infallible Baptist Faith and Message 2000.  It’s a fine statement of faith in many ways.  It’s lacking in others.  Most people don’t like being clubbed with the Bible.  Much less so a denominational creed.

To be continued……………

Reflecting On The Big Easy

Please stop what you’re doing and go read Alan Cross’ recent post on Missing New Orleans.  Powerful, powerful stuff.  While you’re at it read the rest of his blog.  You’ll be better for it.

Here’s his second installment.

And the third. And fourth.  And fifth. And sixth.  And seventh.  And eighth. And the last.

Things Forgotten? 2

I pretty much knew that I’d be going to Southwestern in Ft. Worth.  I got a couple of other applications, mainly from other SBC seminaries, but I passed on them pretty quickly.  Southwestern had a good reputation, particularly in our churches here in Oklahoma.

I had heard that some weren’t happy with the President, Dr. Russel Dilday, but all the scouring in the world his opponents were doing wasn’t turning up any smoking guns.  Enrollment was solid, the faculty was well respected, and Southwestern had avoided most of the criticisms that were being levied at the other SBC seminaries, particularly Southern and Southeastern, and to a lesser degree Midwestern.

I’ve read others on various blogs (usually in comments somewhere) who claimed to have had liberal professors at Southwestern who denied the Bible or some other important doctrine during those years.  Maybe I just had a completely different set of professors.  I never found a professor who questioned  any conservative theological position, much less one who openly advocated for one.  Many of my professors were the type who had "written the book," literally.  I had both Curtis Vaughan and Virtus Gideon, who wrote the Greek grammar that we used in college and that was being used in seminary as well.  I had Leon McBeth for Baptist history and he penned what we referred to as "the little blue pamphlet."  Dr. McBeth perhaps came as close as any in questioning the direction of the takeover that was in full swing in the SBC, but he never dwelled on it.  Honestly, he was too busy cramming dates and names into our heads.

I had men like Dr. David Garland for Old Testament.  Some of us liked to kid him a little bit because he was a Democrat and opposed the death penalty.  It was hard to believe that anyone would be crazy enough to vote for Michael Dukakis.  Of course, only Dr. Garland knows if even he did that.  But Dr. Garland was a tremendous Old Testament scholar and when he opened his class in prayer you knew that you were being taken into the presence of God.

I had Ebbie Smith for missions and never met a person in my life who was more passionate about missions than that man.  My biggest fault with Dr. Smith was that his jokes were ever worse than Slayden Yarbrough’s at OBU.  He would often advise us that if we ever got the chance to preach in a foreign country never to tell jokes because humor does not translate well cross-culturally.  I often wanted to tell him that they didn’t translate well in a seminary world missions class either, but we humored him, even if he wasn’t humoring us much. 

And then there was J. W. "Blackjack" MacGorman.  I took him for everything I could.  Greek.  Romans.  Whatever.  He knew his stuff and had a genuine heart of gold.  He was one of the very few who actually survived the takeover at Southwestern and I often wonder if even that wasn’t a matter of political expediency.

I left Southwestern no less conservative, and perhaps more so, than when I’d arrived.  But like Dr. McWilliams at OBU, Southwestern was doing more to help students think critically and theologically than indoctrinating students in a particular perspective, though they no doubt leaned heavily to the conservative end of the spectrum as they always have.

To be continued……………

Doctrinal Triage?

There’s a very interesting analysis of Al Mohler’s BP article from last week over at the BHT.  It looks like Al may have twisted himself up into a pretty tight bind.

Things Forgotten? 1

I was raised with a high veiw of the Scriptures.  Our pastor was a Landmark fundamentalist.  We were used to frequent quotes from B. B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen.  It was a long time before I learned that they weren’t Baptists.

In the late 70s when "the heresy papers" began to circulate in Oklahoma - papers charging professors at Oklahoma Baptist University with theological apostasy - I wasn’t sure what the bruhaha was all about, but if there was heresy involved then someone better get a match, because we’ve got some heretics to burn.

I basically grew up in the turmoil of the SBC.  I was 14 in 1979, so I grew up with Baptists calling each other skunks and snakes.  And I loved Adrian Rogers.  That deep, clear, booming voice!  Man, that guy was born to preach, wasn’t he?  Bailey Smith was somewhat of an icon in Oklahoma - pastor of the largest church in the state.  In those days he was riding the state circuit preaching the same five sermons over and over - gettin’ deacons and their wives saved.  I think I heard him three times in one year without ever attending his church.

A couple of years later my older brother would be going off to college.  He was going to be a preacher.  I don’t know if he had reservations about the heresy stuff going on at OBU or what, but he nearly went to Criswell instead.  At least one of his good high school friends did.  But he would go to OBU and so would I.

I didn’t learn any heresy while I was there.  Actually, they never did find any.  There was a new President at the school and some of the old professors who had been charged with heresy were either gone or marginalized into teaching subjects that didn’t give them a platform to spread their "questionable theology."  By the time I got there most of them had retired.  The professors I did have weren’t what you’d call flaming fundamentalists.  They were more what I would call fair-minded.  For the most part harmless.  I think the most threatening things I had to deal with were the constant barrage of really bad jokes in Dr. Slayden Yarbrough’s Old Testament class.  He thought that because the class was at 8 AM that we were too tired to get his jokes.  Oh…we got them alright.  We got them so well that it was all we could do to keep from openly weeping.

Dr. Warren McWilliams was the most published of the OBU religion faculty.  And he dared you to figure out what he personally believed.  He was fond of telling us that it would be the most difficult thing we’d do.  He didn’t believe that it was his job to get us to believe what he believed, but to get us to think critically for ourselves about theology.  Thus, he would expose us to various theological concepts and get us to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each position.  He wasn’t a teaching dynamo, by any means, but he may have had the greatest influence on me in the long run because of his teaching method.  And he had the second best comb-over on campus (second only to the librarian).

And then there was Dr. Bob Evans.  Dr. Evans had come to OBU from the pastorate.  That man taught class with a .22 rifle in hand.  He needed it to chase all of those rabbits.  Dr. Evans probably had the greatest immediate impact on me because of his pastoral spirit and because I had him for so many doggone classes.  He was a Baptist who had a tremendous respect for our Baptist heritage and for solid, conservative, biblical scholarship.

But it was during these years that the controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention broiled on.  While other states saw their Baptist institutions move toward independence from their state conventions - Baylor, Wake Forest, Mercer - we in Oklahoma were given regular assurances that such a thing could never happen here…and to date it hasn’t.  I don’t think it ever will.

To be continued………

Pic-O-The-Week

See more of my pictures at my Flikr page.  Also, check out all of the Friday Photos there.

Jesus And Politics

I’ve posted my thoughts on the unhealthy compromises Christians often make with politics and/or culture.  You can read some of those thoughts here, here, here, here and here.  But if you’re in the Tulsa area and you’d rather talk about it than read about it then come to our Emergent Tulsa Cohort gathering in September.  Details will be posted here.

Blogs Gone To The Dogs

It’s amazing what goes on in the comment section of some prominent blogs.  A while back I started seeing some refer to the angry reformed folks who want to beat you with a rolled up copy of their own version of 95 theses.  While I haven’t found verbal chicanery to be under the sole ownership of the reformed folk, they sure do seem to have a controlling interest in it.

But listen, if Carla Rolfe can see how destructive that kind of thing can be then surely some hard-headed Baptists can do the same.  Lighten up, folks.

[Update: Reports that the picture are of Jason Robertson are completely unverified.]

The Bible - A Revisit

Earlier in the year I completed a series of posts on some of my thoughts about the Bible.  I recently read an essay (which was a response to an internet blog post and the comments that resulted) by Daniel Wallace, a professor at Dallas Seminary.  It is very much worth a read.  It’s just under 7600 words, so check it out when you have a few minutes.  Here’s a teaser:

The center of all theology, of the entirety of the
Christian faith, is Christ himself. The cross is the center of time:
all before leads up to it; all after it is shaped by it. If Christ were
not God in the flesh, he would not have been raised from the dead. And
if he were not raised from the dead, none of us would have any hope. My
theology grows out from Christ, is based on Christ, and focuses on
Christ.

Years ago, I would have naively believed that all
Christians could give their hearty amens to the previous paragraph.
Sadly, this is not the case. There are many whose starting point and
foundation is bibliology. They begin with the assumption that the Bible
is the inspired, inerrant Word of God, and that the way one must
define inerrancy is in twentieth-century philosophical terms. I won’t
get into the details of how inerrancy (in America at least) has been
filtered through the grid of Scottish Common Sense Realism, as that
would take us far afield from the main objective here. Suffice it to
say that many evangelicals believe that without an inerrant Bible we
can’t know anything about Jesus Christ. They often ask the question,
“How can we be sure that anything in the Bible is true? How can we be
sure that Jesus Christ is who he said he was, or even that he existed,
if the Bible is not inerrant?”

I think some of the things he gets at in this essay could be very instructive to denominational relations within the SBC.

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