Recent events at the ETS meetings again call into question fundamentalist participation. The Christianity Today LiveBlog reports on a session by J. P. Moreland of Talbot Seminary. The session had this arresting title: "How Evangelicals Became Over-Committed to the Bible and What Can Be Done About It"
Consider this statement as reported by LiveBlog:
“In the actual practices of the Evangelical community in North America, there is an over-commitment to Scripture in a way that is false, irrational, and harmful to the cause of Christ,” he said. “And it has produced a mean-spiritedness among the over-committed that is a grotesque and often ignorant distortion of discipleship unto the Lord Jesus.”
The problem, he said, is “the idea that the Bible is the sole source of knowledge of God, morality, and a host of related important items. Accordingly, the Bible is taken to be the sole authority for faith and practice.”
or here’s another treat:
Likewise, Moreland argued, “because the human soul/spirit and demons/angels are real, it is possible, and, in fact, actual that extra-biblical knowledge can be gained about these spiritual entities. … Demons do not exist in the Bible. They exist in reality.”
By not researching how demons work, how to fight them, and other such issues by, for example, working with exorcists, Christian scholars are harming the church, Moreland argued. In a similar vein, he thinks evangelical scholars and the movement as a whole are rejecting “guidance, revelation, and so forth from God through impressions, dreams, visions, prophetic words, words of knowledge and wisdom.”
This session was some kind of ‘breakout’ session at the meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. I don’t know if the transcript will be represented by a formal paper published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS) or not. Regardless, this kind of thinking is obviously part of the milieu at ETS. I have an electronic copy of JETS and occasionally find some interesting articles there, although I don’t find it a "go to" resource because JETS general tenor tends towards this kind of unbelief. That is not to say that such blatantly unbiblical thinking is present in every JETS article, but that JETS tends in that direction.
Which brings me to the issue of fundamentalist participation in the ETS. I have discussed this on another blog somewhere, although I can’t remember exactly where or when. Some prominent fundamentalists defend the association. I can’t imagine how they can defend their association with such unbelief.
In a related post, LiveBlog reports on an attempt to amend the doctrinal statement of the ETS. At the moment, members of the ETS must adhere to a very simple doctrinal statement. They must affirm belief in the Trinity and in the inerrancy of the Bible. That is all. The attempt to amend the doctrinal statement comes from men who don’t think the current statement is sufficient and that it allows for heretics to be members. I recommend that you read the whole thing, but I am struck by how much this sounds like the attempts of the fundamentalists to clarify orthodoxy in the Presbyterian church and in the Northern Baptist Convention back in the 1920s. It’s sort of deja vu all over again.
The effort at ETS will likely fail, just as those efforts in the 1920s also ultimately failed.
But again, why are fundamentalists involved in something like this at all? Did we learn anything from the 1920s or not?
Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
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