Even conservative Christian apologist James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, who has debated Bart Ehrman on the subject of the Bible’s reliability vis-à-vis text-critical issues, made this important observation on Unbelieveable (3/6/2010):

Most Christians tend to think the Bible floated down out of heaven in a calfskin cover with gold edges and thumb, replete the first time it appeared. That’s not how it came to us. That’s not how it’s been transmitted to us…Any book that has come to us from antiquity has a history to it.

…and a little later,

The books of the New Testament had a life of their own before they became collected into one edition.

Now, my friend knows all this in his head, but in practice, most of us tend to trust whatever our editions of the Bible lay before us and default to a distrust of any further revision to them. But there’s a justified collective facepalm among these same Christians when that very tendency results in KJV-onlyism. The fact is, unless you’ve got a KJV, you’re probably reading a text that significantly depends on the discipline of textual criticism from the last couple centuries, scholarship that has virtually rendered unanimous judgment against Mark 16.9-20′s status as original to that Gospel (although many conservatives propose the credulity-straining caveat that this passage was an accurate historical document itself that just got tacked on to Mark in later centuries).

None of this is a secret among those who pay attention to respected evangelical scholars like Dan Wallace, but given White’s quoted remarks, it bears pointing out to a wider audience. Even “inerrant in the original manuscripts” is only of value if we have a reasonable assurance that what we’ve got is representative of original manuscripts, and we do that by coming to grips with scholarship on textual criticism.

I think every church should have a Sunday School class that discusses (perhaps among other things) textual criticism. I’m sure it would be geared in most churches to demonstrating the “reliability” of Scripture based upon the consistency of the bulk of the texts, as White and Wallace are very much interested to affirm, but at very least it would scale back misconceptions and emphasize the need for a little humility in our assumptions about the text.

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While growing up in three different Southern Baptist churches, being involved mostly with other Christians living the Christian life, I saw little that made me think anything was missing about my own faith.

In high school I recognized the dangers of Fundamentalism (proper) through experiences with one of my school curricula, the Independent Baptist-based A Beka Book Publications. There writ large I saw a host of devout, well-meaning Christians who believed things that I found wholly incredible, despite the fact that by normal evangelical standards my church was quite conservative. I was amazed to think that this type of self-described Fundamentalists would think that I was teetering on the edge of damnation for believing the way I did. I knew that I, at least, was sincere and well considered in my beliefs, and that my relationship with God was as authentic as it could be and none the worse for rejecting what these sincere Christians believed.

As I got older and started jobs outside that tight-knit faith community, I began to see what “outsiders” thought about that community. Naturally, as someone genuinely sold on the faith as it had been presented me, I was defensive of what I thought was valid, yet I just couldn’t cook up enough hubris to simply chalk up everything the world thought about Christians to unregenerate, unenlightened, truth-despising nonsense. I stood firm on the general fabric of my faith; the enticements of the life of my unbelieving peers couldn’t sway someone who had so long enjoyed communion with God and seen His provision in the lives of his community. I remain a believer in the Christian God. But because of some intrinsic desire for intellectual honesty, possibly to distance myself from the dangers I was spooked by in Fundamentalism, I realized that those bedrock beliefs were not enough to sell me on everything else that my faith community had assumed to be true, particularly as I came across other sincere believers pointing out what they saw as errors in the stereotypical evangelical mindset. For instance, despite my highly entertaining Chick Publications’ magazines and tracts telling me otherwise, I personally came to the conclusion that Roman Catholics are not indirectly worshipping Satan with an entirely separate religion; Catholics do not even, as many Protestants believe, spit on Jesus’ sacrifice by worshipping Mary or deny the grace of God in favor of works. These sorts of things helped acclimate me to being at odds with many in my own community.

I went to a conservative Christian school for college. After a short stint in the music department, I was inspired by a teacher who brought out historical-grammatical aspects of the Old Testament. Looking back now, I see that these aspects were, as ever in the evangelical community, carefully selected so as to complement or bolster rather than refine or revise the typical conservative understanding. I switched my major to Bible and Theology. I learned the stuff they taught me, but I didn’t adopt much of it as my very own; nor, I should say, did I find overmuch at this time that I discarded outright. I put everything on the back shelf, and scrutinized it as I had the time.

As it would happen, a profound love for the Bible that I nurtured since early childhood continued to encourage me to understand it as well as I could. I certainly didn’t want to be wrong about what it actually is, and I had as yet been unconvinced, disappointed, and disgusted by some of the attempts at harmonization of niggling Bible conflicts that I had run across. But my encounters with Fundamentalism taught me that if you can find one flaw, you couldn’t trust that there weren’t more.

In a vital turning point for me, I ran across C. S. Lewis’s views on Scripture. Any longtime reader of this site will notice his influence, particularly in some cracking good quotes of his, all of which opened my eyes to how human the Scriptures were — were intended to be — and that they should be embraced warts and all; that to despise the Scriptures for being human is to reject God’s plan for those Scriptures.

This wasn’t the end of my journey, of course. I flirted with that realization for a few years, keeping it in the back of my mind as a back door I could use were I to run across any errors in Scripture that couldn’t be explained. But before I came to the point of admitting outright errors, I came to understand the vital importance of determining genre, which soon affected both my eschatology and my view of Genesis.

Please note: I’ve been accused of taking my stances on the nature of Scripture because of a desire to compromise for science. But It wasn’t until my view of Genesis changed somewhat late in the process that I really looked into evolution. Even though I had become skeptical and even critical of some creationists like Kent Hovind (of whom I must admit to being enamored when in high school), I was shocked in my Christian college that my biology professor taught the entire course without mentioning creationism once, explaining then-current scientific understandings of abiogenesis and evolution without so much as a disclaimer. It wasn’t until after I graduated from my undergrad college that I really settled down to look at the science/creationism debate with my new understanding of Scripture and Genesis in particular, under the influence of fellow believers who, like my biology professor, accepted evolution.

Anyway, that’s a start. And if I haven’t told you personally, I’d like to thank you warmly for reading this blog of mine.

For those of you who would like a summary of the summary listed above, read on. What is this “new perspective”?

Well, for starters, it’s not really new; it takes into account what its supporters insist is the actual historical context for Paul’s teaching on justification and removes it from the lens of Luther’s anachronistic understanding of the issue. What’s “new” about it is that it wasn’t until the seventies that Christians first started taking it seriously. The four most important scholars for this view are Krister Stendahl, E.P. Sanders (with his watershed 1977 book Paul and Palestinian Judaism), James Dunn (who modified Sanders’s view), and N.T. Wright (who has modified Sanders and Dunn). This position has plunged the scholarly community into a flurry of debate for the last forty years, with old school Reformed types standing the hardest against it but other Reformed theologians (such as Wright) showing a willingness to accept criticism of traditional Lutheran understandings on justification.

If you want a short sound-bite summary of this view as I did, you’ll be disappointed; it is, after all, an interpretation of one of the fundamental aspects of Pauline theology, which is remarkably complex for any position. But let me say a couple things that help position us to view Pauline theology in this way.

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Now I would say, you can believe that, and you can make your arguments — and many people do from Scripture. I’m not persuaded at all by them — but at the same time I would say that this is an unChristian way to believe about a particular issue in the end times. It’s an unChristian way or, another way to put it, unorthodox; it is outside of the sphere of orthodoxy within historic Christianity. Now, the next thing we ask is, ok, if it’s outside of the sphere of historic Christianity, does that make… [you] automatically a nonbeliever, someone who is outside the grace of God, someone who is unregenerate as we sometimes put it, or someone who does not have a relationship established with the one true God? And I would say no.

Now, as much as I appreciate his not calling me unregenerate, I am disturbed by this emphasis on Church tradition. He, a Protestant, uses “orthodoxy” (doctrine that falls within the “sphere of historic Christianity”) as a blunt object to determine what is Christian and what is not. Upon what grounds does he do this? What’s amazing is that he doesn’t offer a rationale for determining exactly which beliefs of historic Christianity are diagnostic for the label “Christian”. Infant baptism, baptismal regeneration, apostolic tradition/succession — none these extremely ancient teachings were ever repudiated by the Church of Rome or the East , and were thus held by all Christendom until Protestantism came along. Are all those who deny any of those to be termed “outside the sphere of orthodoxy” and hence guilty of “an unChristian way to believe”? The doctrine of the personhood of the Holy Spirit so essential to orthodox trinitarianism wasn’t even affirmed by the Church at large until after these ancient beliefs, at least two of which I believe Michael Patton denies!

Nor, apparently, can we fall back on the ecumenical councils to define orthodoxy for us. For one thing Patton finds beliefs outside the pale of orthodoxy that were never condemned by the whole Church. For instance, Patton states in no uncertain terms that Pelagianism is unorthodox and hence not “Christian”, yet that battle with Augustine was not fought at an ecumenical council and has yet to be repudiated by the Eastern Church. Conversely, he gives the belief on the hypostatic union as an example of a belief about the Trinity that is not diagnostic of orthodoxy, yet it was confirmed at an ecumenical council.

So what is he saying? That someone, somewhere in Church history had to believe it for it to be in that sphere of his? How arbitrary is that? It seems to be the case that Protestants (Reformed groups especially) selectively draw from Church tradition, and then pretend that the points from tradition they agree upon are infallible because they are drawn from Church tradition, yet at the same time Church tradition may be cast aside where necessary, and people like Michael Patton here don’t have a consistent rationale for which is which. In the same way I contended in the case of the Scriptures, Church tradition either contains errors or it does not. If it does contain errors, it may not be used as a silver bullet to dismiss anything that sounds strange to them but is irrefutable with Scripture. This is what they do with full preterism.

I refuse to be held captive to a “majority rules” hermeneutic; the “church” of Judaism as it appeared in Jesus’ day hadn’t been a good steward of the truth they had been granted in Old Testament times. Jesus showed them they had been wrong about the Messianic Kingdom, and I can’t see why anyone would insist that the late first-century Church had to understand it all, either. Someone was seriously misled somewhere, at least: either Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John were mistaken about the imminence of the Kingdom and Christ’s return or the Church of the latter first century by-and-large misunderstood the eschaton that had occurred. For obvious reasons, I choose the latter. And this makes my thinking “unChristian”?

I thought of this when I came upon the following quote from C.S. Lewis:

If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

It strikes me that God uses the selfsame aspect that damns us to redeem us. Self-regard is not an absolute evil; it is a neutral currency of the universe, one of which our ultimate God naturally demands the ultimate possession. This is no doubt because our blessed Maker, in molding man in His Own image, also imprinted upon him another, converse attribute of which He is the ultimate expression: self-sacrifice. In fact, it is this expectation God has of us, not the self-regard shared by every creature from amoeba to ape, that separates man from beast. That God demands something we are in some sense capable of but not predisposed to do is analogous to a parent teaching her daughter to help her in the kitchen, or her son to brush his own teeth (without swallowing the toothpaste!) so they won’t rot out of his head.

In order for us to become like Him, we must subordinate our self-regard to our self-sacrifice; but thankfully, as Lewis notes, we are not required — nor are we able — to perform self-sacrifice wholly independent of self-regard.

What do you think of this?

Josh Horne at the Smoak House has posted a dissent from Webb’s solo album, Mockingbird, which he finds enjoyable overall. Webb, whose schtick is to point out errors he sees in American evangelical Christianity, is the type who gives Christian activism its stereotype as indicative of liberal Christianity. It seems like anytime I hear of a Christian activist, he overshoots mainstream evangelical ideology to the point that his good points are marginalized and he is identified with the social gospel. For instance, as Josh points out, Webb makes some inane comments in his lyrics about war being an absolute evil. This has caused a little discussion in the comments that leads to discussion of the death penalty. Check it out and weigh in!

(Click here to comment on this post)

I’m not going to say that there was none of that attitude in what they said. I do think, however, that we can make the following observations:

1. The text plainly calls Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar Job’s “friends”.
2. They sat with him and shared his grief for a week’s time.
3. They didn’t simply tell him why they thought God had it in for him, but offered a solution (repentance) to extract him from further judgement. When Job was insistent that he had done nothing to repent for, they became even more determined that he do what they felt was necessary to avoid more of God’s judgment.
4. Job thought enough of them to pray for God to forgive them their incorrect counsel.

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I’m going to post on both sites for a few more days. The biggest downside to switching is that I won’t get much visitor traffic by way of stumbling through wordpress.com by searches, so it’s important that, if I want to maintain or increase the current number of visitors, I will have to do something to make the new site show up on Google’s and other site’s searches. Until I see my page show up on Google, I will post on both URLs.

I would therefore like to request that my regulars (both of you ) update your feeds and especially your blogrolls and begin visiting my new site instead of this one. Please post your comments on that one instead, as well. You’ll notice a couple of my already implemented customizations in the comments section:

1) Below the comment entry block there is an as-you-type comment preview that shows what your comment is going to look like, even giving you a visualization of any html tags you use!

2) Also below the comment entry block there is a checkbox that is supposed to subscribe you to subsequent comments via the email address you enter; you will/should be able to manage your subscriptions and unsubscribe whenever you wish (I know I can manage it at your request, anyway). This plugin is in need of testing, so let me know how it goes, if you don’t mind.

Right now the site looks virtually identical to this one, although I’m likely to experiment with different themes soon. Also, I plan in the next day or so to map the last few comments on this blog and not the other one so that the other site is a complete mirror to this one and can supersede it.

Oh, and by the way, I’m not cross-listing this particular post. it’s my last undeception.wordpress.com exclusive!

Thanks for

I have not said that one can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution. It is entirely possible to be a confused Christian or a confused evolutionist . . . or both. Nevertheless, the dominant theory of evolution — the theory as taught and defended by the world’s leading evolutionary scientists — explicitly rules out any supernatural design or interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum. That fact alone makes the theory incompatible with any legitimate affirmation of divine creation or of biblical theism.

I am frankly amazed that one so learned and esteemed should display such an obvious oversight concerning the most fundamental of the philosophical and theological grounds for theistic evolution (TE). Even in the purest form that affirms absolute naturalism and denies overt divine intervention in the process, theistic evolution affirms that God alone is responsible for setting the universe as we know it into place, but that the “divine creation” occurred by laws He and He alone created and set in motion. It does not rule out supernatural design but rather views God’s design as taking place at a higher level of sovereignty. The universe was created and life developed into human life because God purposed that they do so. TE in its fullest form does indeed rule out “interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum”, or rather, it renders such interference superfluous. The Author of nature did not need to step in and manually execute the actions of the Creation subroutine after He struck the “enter” key to run what He had already carefully programmed.

Later he triumphantly quotes a TE who happens to be a theology professor at the Claremont School of Theology apparently partial to open theism who tries to argue — with no success, from my vantage — that “[t]heologies that emphasize God as deeply involved in natural, open-ended processes seem better able to make sense of evolution than do the classical accounts of an omnipotent God.” I can’t see how this helps anyone’s case, but Mohler doesn’t even attempt to deconstruct that argument analytically, choosing rather to herald it as proof that TE “is not biblical Christianity.” Of course, I can see why he accepts that theologian’s understanding of TE: Mohler agrees with this mistaken theologian that evolutionary advances which appear random preclude any intentionality, even on the behalf of God. I don’t understand how any theologian, whether at Claremont or SBTS, can accept such an anemic view of the sovereignty of God. Scripture consistently declares that God ordains events beyond our purposes.

Another thing that really bugs me is how TE opponents speak incessantly of “Darwinism” and reference Darwin as the man behind the curtain, pulling the strings for evolutionary theory despite his reported demise in the nineteenth century; they don’t consistently apply their criticism to Christians who accept the theory of gravity as “Newtonists” or some such. Both Darwin’s and Newton’s views have been tremendously modified and/or overhauled since they originally formulated them, so the men who first hypothesized what later became accepted as a workable theory can hardly stand in as representatives of the current views, unless of course you need to demonize those views and need a voodoo doll to burn. “Darwin” becomes a boogieman, used to marginalize the theory of evolution as a personality cult. This tactic is manifest in Mohler’s closing stinger, so typical of anti-evolutionists, “…and that is why there is such panic in the temple of Darwin.” Two favorite red herrings here: 1) evolutionary theory is a religion and 2) Darwin the man = the mounds and mounds of scientific evidence that have confirmed some of the basic notions he first articulated.

Come on, Al. You may have reached the top of evangelical academia’s heap, but that doesn’t give you leave to stop thinking critically.