Bully's Blog » Liberal theology

Prisoners of the Future

Mike Bull — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:17:50 +0000

Reformation: Redefinition or Glorification?

Pastor David P. Cassidy discussed the redefinition of the “unchangeable Roman church” by Cardinal Newman, a component integral to the possibility of the revolutionary Vatican II, before taking listeners on a tour of the changes that swept through the institution in the twentieth century. Here is the conclusion of the lecture:

…Vatican II represents the most significant shift, not simply within the Roman Catholic Church and in our relationship with it, but in the whole history of church councils. Words such as charism, conscience, the priesthood of all believers, brothers and sisters, collegiality, and so on, dominate the discussions in the documents of the councils. Scholastic theological terminology is eschewed largely in favour of biblical vocabulary. Absent, gone, are words of intimidation and threat, and alienation and exclusion. Vatican II issued not a single doctrinal definition, though that is what councils had always done. Not a single anathema, not a single canon. Power words are gone, replaced by persuasion. Style, of course, has a lot to do with the difference in meaning, as the difference between prose and poetry makes clear. By its choice of language, Vatican II sought to present the Roman Catholic Church as one which retained an interior hierarchical reality, but with a new exterior, serving, personality.

So, what do we learn at the end of this tour?

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A New Kind of Old

Mike Bull — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:23:45 +0000

Brian McLaren’s twists and turns are too subtle for a generation of Christians left vulnerable by ministers who don’t teach the Bible. Erich Rauch of American Vision is very helpfully working his way through Brian McLaren’s latest book, A New Kind of Christianity.

“Due to the strong influence that he has as a “pastor to pastors,” any time McLaren releases a new book it is a pretty big deal within the walls of the church. And because he is giving voice to concerns that many pastors and church leaders have expressed and thought about themselves, his writings indirectly resonate from American pulpits nearly every Sunday morning. His newest book, A New Kind of Christianity, claims to describe what Christianity might look like if it were “not afraid of questions.” Questions are a really big part of McLaren’s ministry. In fact, the subtitle of the book is: “Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith.” Now I am certainly in favor of questions; I think that far too many people are far too easily satisfied with conventional ways of thinking and doing things. I agree with McLaren that questions can effect change; but I disagree with him and his book’s subtitle because it’s not the questions that cause the progress, it’s the answers. And unfortunately, this is where McLaren is his weakest.”

Rauch carefully untangles the truth from the distortions in McLaren’s questions, and demonstrates the false assumptions that lead this modern thinker astray when it comes to the Bible.

“While [McLaren's position] may have all the trappings and appearances of being a humble and contrite way of interpreting the Bible, the reality is that McLaren’s “new way” is nothing more than the “old way” of theological liberalism. He may claim that his way is neither conservative nor liberal, but he is only half-right; it is liberal to the core. McLaren seems to be under the impression that all liberal interpreters that came before him were looking for ways to “explain away” the text, but in actuality most theological liberalism is the result of trying to do exactly what McLaren is recommending: getting “into” the text, where God can speak to our modern sensibilities through His “ancient” words. This has always been a driving force behind theological liberalism: adapting the Scriptures to the contemporary culture, rather than the culture to the Scriptures. Without explicitly saying it, McLaren portrays conservatives as being crusty, old “Bible-thumpers” who don’t spend more than a second or two thinking about what the Bible actually says, and liberals as ones who want to take every opportunity to discredit the Bible as being untrue. With this (false) antithesis squarely in place, McLaren rides through the battle—with unstained uniform—as the keeper of the proverbial middleground; a sort of hermeneutical Rodney King, naively wondering why we can’t all just get along.

…McLaren makes the correct observation that both the conservative and the liberal ways of interpreting the Bible—at least as far as he has defined conservative and liberal ways to be—gives a great deal of authority to the interpreters themselves. This is undoubtedly true. In fact, this very thing was pointed out to Martin Luther when he was undertaking the task of translating the Bible into German. Putting the words of Scripture into the hands and imaginations of everyone makes everyone an interpreter and, in a sense, gives them power to “be as God,” deciding good and evil for themselves. Luther understood this, but also understood that Truth was worth the risk. Simply by reading McLaren’s book and his way of interpreting and understanding the Bible, I make myself a potential convert to his way of reading and understanding. In actuality, this is exactly what he wants. He wrote his book to influence his readers with his way. He says he is fed up with “careless preachers [who] use the Bible as a club or sword to dominate or wound, [who] discredit the Bible in a way that no skeptic can” (p. 69). I, too, am fed up with this, but I am not quite ready to follow McLaren in a wholesale abandonment of the historicity of the book of Job (for example) as being an “archetypal theological opera” (p. 95). An honest reading of Job seems to indicate that the events that it speaks of are real and actual, not literary devices that are inviting us into “conversation.” My dusty “conservative” hermeneutic may not sell as many books as McLaren’s new and updated liberal one, but, in truth, this is where the real heart of the “authority” question lies.

When McLaren—who is admittedly not a trained theologian—makes judgments about a particular book of the Bible’s overall meaning, he is exercising the very power over the text that he accuses conservatives and liberals of having. It is significant that McLaren has never been to seminary; he does indeed find details and connections in the Scripture that most seminary-trained men will blow right past in their surface-level search for doctrinal application. It is also significant that McLaren was trained in literature because he seems to be incapable of reading the Bible as anything other than a God-inspired (whatever that means to him) work of fiction. This is why I find it so fascinating that McLaren accuses the early church fathers of bringing Greek philosophy into their reading of the Bible, when in reality the fathers were reading the Bible the very way he claims to be recommending.”

A New View of an Old Faith

A New Kind of Authority

A New Kind of Narrative

A New Kind of God

A New Kind of Jesus

A New Kind of Gospel

Timeless Truths?

Mike Bull — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:47:04 +0000

God’s one Law for Adam was temporary. He could eat from the Tree of Judicial Knowledge when mature enough to carry the responsibility. God’s food laws for Israel were also temporary. [1] When the Christ came, and the people of God was brought to maturity, this restricted menu, too, was done away with. It was designed to be outgrown. Not many theologians understand this process of Adam’s “historical maturity”, so they come up with other theories to explain why many Bible truths are not “timeless”. Peter Leithart discusses comments by John Polkinghorne this week:

John Polkinghorne writes that the “human writings [of Scripture] bear witness to timeless truths, but they do so in the thought forms and from the cultural milieu of their writers.” As a result, “we find attitudes expressed in the Bible that today we neither can nor should agree with.”[2]

This description of accommodation is unusually helpful, because it displays the gnostic assumption behind the whole idea of accommodation. That is, accommodation assumes that the writers of Scripture intend to communicate timeless truths, rather than communicating an account of history.

That is, accommodation doesn’t lead to liberalism; it is liberalism.[3]

Polkinghorne blindly rolls together the church’s changed attitudes to circumcision, slavery, the lake of fire and the role of women as though all relied upon the surrounding culture for “inspiration”. His view that the Scriptures are “divinely inspired but not divinely dictated” makes the gutsy Book of God into a maleable tool with nothing to say to culture, a tame gelding commanded to be fruitful, with its fruitfulness the result of being “open” to various interpretations. But the Bible is both bigger and narrower than that.

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[1] See Touch Not, Taste Not, Handle Not and The Greatest Consumer.
[2] John Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 45-46.
[3] Peter Leithart, Accommodation.

Telling Stories

Mike Bull — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 02:50:07 +0000

My friend Matt has been blogging about how postmodernism, with its openness to narrative, is a great opportunity for the gospel. But evangelicals need to sort themselves out first. Otherwise, to the world, they are just a bunch of Patsys. Patsy Biscoes that is.

The big problem is the fact that many evangelicals plainly do not believe the “stories” in the Bible. Compromised with the world’s academia, they lose any real authority to share these “stories” with any gravity whatsoever. Can you imagine any of the patriarchs sharing “stories” around the fire and qualifying it with “but this is just a true myth.” No wonder evangelicalism is a laughing stock to its vocal, “enlightened” opponents.

Then we have the gooey emergents on the other end, who love stories but whether or not they have any basis in reality is irrelevant.

Gnostics on the right. Gnostics on the left. Western Christianity is given the status of ideology and nothing more. And yet God still works in it by His Spirit. “Lord, forgive our arrogant, apostate, vaccillating, intellectualised, world-pleasing unbelief. It must be a stink in your nostrils.”

James Jordan recently wrote:

“This is just plain sad. A few shards and fragments from the ancient world are blown up into a whole system of thought that contradicts the Bible, and evangelicals then buy into it. It may be time for serious Christians to pack it in as far as the evangelical scholarly world is concerned. We can learn from them here and there, just as we learn from Jews and liberals here and there. But unless it shapes up, the future does not lie with this compromised religion.” [1]

Telling stories when we ourselves are not sure of their validity is not the best way to share the faith. It is an embarrassment. It’s a good thing the pomos will go for the story regardless. We need the narratives, but we also need rigorous faith-filled scholarship. Patsy Biscoe’s faith puts the faith of many scholars to shame.

Matt comments:

That’s why I love Tom Wright. He hasn’t hidden behind the pulpit, nor retreated into the academy. he straddles both worlds with a vigorous Christ centered scholarship. he truly believes the narrative of the bible, and is concerned hold theology and history together, without it slipping into just mythology.

Better get a better metanarrative

Matt also writes concerning the relationship between modernism and postmodernism:

…the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Postmodernism declares that all such large stories — “metanarratives” — are destructive and enslaving, and must be deconstructed. The pomo attack on gospel-denying modernism is useful for us. Postmodernism is a necessary critique of modernity. But the current problem is that though the postmodern turn in philosophy and culture has sneered at the great modernist imperial dream, it hasn’t been able to shake it. We live in a time where modernity and postmodernity refer not so much to a datable chronological period but more to two different moods and controlling narratives. Our world is both modern and postmodern. And I don’t see this changing for sometime. We can not go back to being just modern. And could postmodernism survive without the thing is it critiquing? The two ideas have become utterly dependent on each other.

Modernism, like feminism and communism, simply replaced the old exploitation with a new exploitation. Postmodernism doesn’t even have this to offer. Postmodernism is not a system in itself. It is just a critique, which is why it can’t “shake off” modernism. Pomo is helpful in exposing the cracks in modernism so we can inject the gospel, the only true builder of cultures.

The foundation of modernism is evolution, and the currently popular history of “ancient man”. Until this is thrown out, Western Christianity is still stuck within a modernist metanarrative, and can only ever be a manmade ideology. [2]

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[1] James Jordan, Did God Speak Hebrew to Adam, Biblical Horizons #209.
[2] See also The Only True Foundation for Anthropology

A Terrible Marvel

Mike Bull — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:15:10 +0000

or Typology: Deadly Weapon or game of Scattergories?

“Chiastic literary analysis has completely destroyed liberal literary criticism. Liberalism is in tatters, bleeding and dying. Liberalism cannot survive Dorsey’s chiastic proof of the total unity of Isaiah, for instance. Dorsey finds loads of 7-fold chiasms in the Bible. I’ve found scores more, quite independently. What Dorsey does not see is that these are recaps of the chiasm of the 7 days in Genesis 1. And that’s good, because it means he did not go through the Bible forcing passages into heptamerous chiasms. He just found them there, and others can see that these track Genesis 1 as ‘new creation’ passages.”

—James B. Jordan, A Reply on the Nature of the Psalter, Biblical Horizons blog, biblicalhorizons.wordpress.com, referring to David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament.

If chiastic literary analysis (along with typology as I posted recently) is such a powerful weapon against a modernist interpretation of the Bible, why are these methods of study shunned by those who oppose liberal theology? Why are theologians hauled over the coals for using it if it leaves the enemy in shreds?

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