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Man’s Lust As An Agent of Change

Scripture itself chronicles an entire world history long Satanic attack on scripture. It is one of the few major components of apostasy, even as seen in 2 Peter 1. Man wants to do what he wants to do, what the Bible calls “lust.” He follows his own lust. The authority of scripture gets in the way of man’s own desires, so he follows the ideology of Satan by attacking scripture. Without the Bible, authority returns to himself and he goes his own way without compunction.

People who want to do what they want to do are the audience for evangelical outreach. These people look askance at true Christianity, wanting something closer to what pleases them not God. Mere biblical stuff does not attract or allure them.

Evangelical churches and organizations have choices about growth and then budgets. Evangelicals like the same comforts as their potential audience, who want to please themselves. They “get” that audience, because they operate in a similar trajectory. Christianity becomes another way of getting things, except with a lot of the negatives removed. It’s not true, but a desirable narrative, what people would want their Christianity to be. Much in scripture gets in the way of the false narrative.

The Bible becomes the casualty in the clash of desires, please one’s self or pleasing God. These desires compete and something’s got to go. Evangelicals will not keep their attendees without something going. One can see the biblical and historical doctrine of scripture change.

Naturalism in Academia As An Agent of Change

Naturalism also rose and took hold in academic institutions in the United States in the 19th century. This included evangelical ones and then churches out of these. Supernaturalism became unacceptable. The doctrine of the Bible reads from scripture as supernatural. God is in charge of His Words and He wants, even requires, people to follow suit. If professing academics try to take that supernatural point of view, they won’t fit in academia. They won’t be the smart ones, might not find their supernaturalism acceptable for publication.

So how did and does biblical, historical, or classical bibliology change? How did even evangelicals move the goalposts? It’s not always through all evangelicals taking the new positions, but it’s also accommodation of the new positions.

This series will not cover every diversion from scriptural bibliology, but it will represent the point of the title, moving the goalposts for bibliology by evangelicalism.

Moving the Goalposts on Inspiration

Scripture teaches that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16), so that is true. The historical, biblical position on inspiration is “verbal, plenary inspiration.” God inspired every Word and all the Words. The authority of scripture comes from that, even as seen in the rest of 2 Timothy 3:16: “and is profitable for doctrine,” etc. The authority of scripture proceeds from inspiration.

I provide three examples of moving the goalposts on inspiration, not necessarily in any order. Evangelicals see large numbers of deconversions or departures from the faith. These young people or students see apparent inconsistencies, incongruities, contradictions, or what look like errors. I remind you of the mixture of these discoveries with their lust. Why should these young people continue in this path without a perfect book?

The Christological Approach Pushed by Dan Wallace and Others

A text or book verbally, plenarily inspired by God must be perfect, every word and all of them. Since people “don’t see that,” they push the eject button. The presupposition for verbal, plenary scripture comes from scripture. Some might call that circular reasoning. Critics would say that no one should operate on circular reasoning. Daniel Wallace, longtime professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, offers instead what he calls an incarnational or Christological approach.

Describing Christology over Bibliology

This incarnational approach defers to errors in scripture, but says that the Word isn’t a textbook. In fact, the Word is Christ. Christ is perfect, so His Word is perfect. Sure you find contradictions and errors there in the Book. Wallace can’t vouch for a literal inerrancy. There is a mystical aspect to the faith, that starts with Jesus and not the Book.

The high view of scripture according to Wallace comes because of the perfection of Christ. He is the Word. Then those who start with Jesus go to scripture with the same view He had. As you read this, I can understand your seeing or thinking there are some gaps in Wallace’s position.

You might think, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Romans 10:17). It seems faith proceeds from the Word of God, not an experience external to the Word of God with Christ. What is this mystical experience? And if Christ is Who He is, I would expect Who He says He is, then isn’t His Word actually perfect? That is what He says. If He says it, and then we look into scripture and find it isn’t true, what does that say for the testimony of Christ?

John Wenham

Wallace seems somewhat honest about his expectations of the Bible. They are diminished by scholarship. He went back to the drawing board on inspiration, authority, and inerrancy, unlike when Bart Ehrman came to that same juncture. He found a book written by John Wenham in 1972, called, The Bible and Christ. There Wallace found this innovative position, and it’s the one he pushes on his students. Christ is a Perfect Christ no matter if the actual Words of scripture are perfect, and He would contend that we know that by a supernatural, extra-scriptural experience with Christ.

John Frame found the same shortcomings of Wenham’s book in a review he wrote in 2012. This is not an endorsement of Frame, but I would agree with Frame’s assessment of the approach that Wallace embraces on the Christology over Bibliology doctrine. Wallace moves the goalposts on bibliology. Perhaps many evangelicals would reject Wallace’s position, but they wouldn’t call it neo-orthodox. They would accommodate him. Someone included the following in a definition of neo-orthodoxy, which I believe is true about it:

Neo-orthodoxy teaches that the Scripture is a communicator or medium revealing God rather than being revelation by itself. The Word of God is Jesus Himself rather than Scripture serving as God’s Word. The emphasis is on an encounter with God rather than a focus on the inspired words of Scripture.

This kind of thinking, now spoken by evangelical Daniel Wallace, liberals embraced in the writings of Emil Brunner and Karl Barth. This is the end for evangelicalism, when its leaders sway the adherents into this direction and these types of positions.

More to Come

The Requirement of Censorship with the Separation of Church and State: The Truth of the Bible Requires Institutional Adherence

January 19, 2023 / 4 Comments on The Requirement of Censorship with the Separation of Church and State: The Truth of the Bible Requires Institutional Adherence

Recent Twitter Files reveal widespread and coordinated censorship there. Where vile language acceptable, those speaking truth have lost their jobs. Long before, state institutions censored the most important truths in human history without recrimination.

Before you continue, I offer you a guide. This post will move outside of most people’s box. I ask you not to delve into the establishment clause of the first amendment of the United States Constitution. Before you jump to practical ramifications, consider the truth of the post.

The Truth, the Logos

When you read Genesis 1 in the Bible, you are reading the account of the beginning of all time, space, and matter. Everything originates with God out of nothing. That is the explanation for everything. It does not even exist without Him, but He also sustains it.

The Bible record is truth as well as is the truth. Scripture presents itself as the truth. Jesus, God the Son, said to His Father God in John 17:17, “Thy Word is truth.” It might make you feel good and help your life, but that is just a byproduct of its truth. It works because it is the truth. The truth is one, because God is one. Nothing in this record contradicts any other part. God does not deny Himself.

God created man in His image and with His likeness. He intended man to reflect Him in his nature. Men should treat and look at the world in every aspect like God would. They should follow what God says, the truth, for and about everything. God expects men to view the world, see it, like He does.

Modernists speculate a fully naturalistic origination and continuation of all things. They opine this as progress from the superstition of ignorance. In fact, the premoderns had it right. It never was a natural world. The Greeks were right in their concept of cosmos, which they called logos, an intelligence that permeated all space and matter and in contrast to random and chaotic naturalism.

People in John’s day understood his Logos in John 1:1, who He said was Jesus Christ, was the source for this cohesion, intelligence, and order. Paul wrote that in Christ were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3) and that by all things consisted (1:17). That was the Logos.

No Bifurcation of Truth

Paul was also emphatic in the truth of Christ’s bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Jesus showed Thomas the wounds in His hands. He was one, whole Person. A physical body was the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Both body and spirit glorified God. This contradicted a pagan dualism, that separated truth into separate spheres of the spiritual and physical.

This New Testament presentation matches the Old Testament concept of truth, “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). Every aspect of knowledge falls under the purveyance of God’s truth. Even though someone may divide the truth into various fields such as government, economics, math, and biology, it still is one cohesive, orderly truth proceeding from the one mind of one God.

Whatever field or region under the sovereignty of one truth splinters from the one, or whenever it does, it becomes distorted, superficial, meaningless, and subjective. The greatest advancements today in philosophy and science come in what Stephen Meyer calls “the return to the God hypothesis.” The universe is fine tuned. A cell is irreducibly complex. In philosophy, only God explains the existence of everything that exists. It’s impossible for something that exists not to have a reason for its existence.

Separating the truth from government, art, music, and economics, leaves any one in chaos and moral relativism. The gospel does not stand apart from all the truth of the Bible. And the gospel itself cannot and should not be divided into separate components of different degrees of subjective value. For instance, it is good for social reasons and perhaps psychological ones but not to reconcile to God and appease His holy wrath.

Religion the Truth, Equal with Facts

The state is good with religion as long it isn’t the truth. If it becomes the truth, it is equal with facts, science, math, and engineering. True religion cannot just stop with the true definitions of a man and of a woman. Next it says you go to Hell if you reject Jesus Christ. Even worse it limits your marijuana use.

Much of the philosophical conversation today revolves around what I here write. One faction, even considered conservative now, bemoans the loss of Western Civilization and its advantages. It is the water in which we swim, even if no longer Judeo-Christian ethics.

Classically liberal intellectuals warn readers and listeners. They won’t like the disappearance of Christianity, hearkening Nietzche’s prophecy about the death of God in the 19th century. However, if you remove the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Christ, the consummation of all things in the future literal, physical reign of Jesus Christ, you eradicate all of Christianity. It is a whole that cannot be separated into disjunctive parts.

Total Truth

For a long time Christians self-censored by backing away from total truth (the title of Nancy Pearcey’s book). They stopped bringing the truth to all the subjects and every institution, all ordained by God. The dismissal of one is the dismissal of all.

A moral statement is either true or false. True moral statements come from the Word of God. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, nothing else the Bible says is true. Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 15. You cannot chop the Bible up like that. The moral values become meaningless without the truth of the history and the scientific declarations.

The table of nations in Genesis 10 is the truth. The prophecies of Daniel 11 are the truth. What scripture says all over about men and women is the truth. These are not subjective and relativistic. They are objective. They are true. All these writings should be taught everywhere as truth, not in religion class as an alternative along side the lies of other religions.

The separation of church and state, which is not in the United States Constitution, necessitates censorship. Anything church related is only church related and stays in the church. Only state stuff belongs in the state, which as many of you know, includes everything in the world, including biblical issues like marriage and parenting practices. Then the state labels all of theirs science and facts and outside of the state, unless cooperating with the state, subjective, private, and even conspiracy. If it is truth, it is your truth, subjective truth, which is fine as long as you keep it outside of institutions.

Take Moses into the Supreme Court Building

For awhile the state has been fine with a sculpture of Moses with the two tablets on the Supreme Court building. It is a decoration. It is a ritual. Maybe it’s even an archetype into which you read whatever you want. They cannot use it as grounds for decision making, even if its self-evident truths form the basis for logic, argument, and morality.

Perhaps a government and big business or oligarchical complex now joins in widespread censorship. Let’s just say that complex does censor the citizenry of the United States and other Western countries. Christians already censored themselves by segregating themselves away from God’s world and keeping the truth away from its institutions, whose very existence arises from that truth.

God requires more than talking about the truth at church. He requires adherence to the truth in every institution. This is the teaching of all nations. True discipleship requires national adherence. Churches at least should adhere, but their goals are further than that. They want the knowledge and dominion of His truth everywhere.

WHAT IS TRUTH

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INDEX FOR WHAT IS TRUTH

How Evangelicals Now Move the Goalposts on Bibliology (part two)