[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

You hold a distaste for anyone who holds Christian beliefs. You only get along with those whose christian convictions are so weak they allow you to walk all over them. Of course you like Textcritic. He doubts the Bible and many orthodox doctrines. His faith is closer to yours than mine.

Sorry. I'm late to the party again. But I must take issue with this.

Since you pretend to know something about what I believe, I feel that I should set the record straight. So, here is a sampling of a little something that I have been working on. It's long, and I don't have a link for it. My apologies.

...As an evangelical, I have always come to identify my self in relation to God and to his Son Jesus. Within evangelicalism, my interest in who God was, why Jesus was important, and how God continues to live, breathe and act among us were always secondary; of primary improtance for the culture of evangelicalism is “The Word.” It is “The Word” that is Holy. It is “The Word” that is perfect. It is “The Word” that is without error. It is “The Word” that is the standard for correct living, and reciprocally, it is “The Word” that requires constant defense, and unwavering commitment. The difference between who I was as a subscriber to evangelicalism, and who I am as an evangelical is in how I understand “The Word”. In evangelicalism, “The Word” is the Protestant Bible. As an evangelical, I have come to know that the “The Word” is Christ. The Scriptures bear witness to “The Word”; the Bible contains “The Word”, but “The Word” is so much greater than the contents of the sacred writings from Genesis to the Apocalypse of John. In fact, were it not for Who Jesus was and is, the Scriptures would effectively be meaningless.

This becomes a shocking—and yes, an offensive—declaration among many within the culture of evangelicalism, and this makes me very sad. Evangelicalism—no matter how well intentioned and effective it once was—can never grow beyond this gross and inappropriate misprioritization of the Bible. For, because it has traded God for a mere reflection of his character, evangelicalism remains in danger of collapsing upon itself, as the world continues to change and as the Church continues to grow and to live, the inadequacy of the Scriptures alone will become more and more evident. The Bible has become the sole foundation for evangelicalism. The foundation is unbalanced, and this is why: it is an imperfect product, and it is non-linear. To treat it as infallible, inerrent, and wholly unambiguous is to completely misconstrue its very character and function. The Bible is rich and complex, and it is to be cherished among Christians as an indespensible gift. But to reduce it to it’s lowest common hermeneutical denominator, and to strip it of the support of thousands of years of Church tradition and spiritual support is to quash its purpose. It bears considering how the perception of the Bible became so transformed particularly in the past two or three centuries, and how the impact has been felt amoong evangelicals. I fear that most evangelicals are ignorant about their own history; having replaced it with a well-populaized myth about an “early church” heritage. They have done so to their own deteriment. And unless I and my evangelical brothers and sisters are willing to learn from the historical, sociological and political factors that have shaped our way of thinking, we will remain theologically and sacramentally stunted.

The history of Evangelicalism: The rationalistic over-reaction.
The best histories of of Evangelical Christianity have been written by George Marsden, and the best critics of its historical and theological roots have been written by James Barr, and John Barton. In a very recent exposition on the history of the Christian Scriptures written explicitely for an evangelical audience, Craig D. Allert asserted that while we may correctly affirm the Bible is inspired and authoritative, the evangelical doctrine of innerency and the more problematic notion of sola Scriptura is not historically viable. One must wonder how it is that these two tenets have come to define a whole extremely powerful religious movement in spite of this. Without delving too deeply into the history “proper” of evangelicalism (I leave that to much more learned men such as Marsden, Barton and Barr), I should like to offer my own interpretation of this history. I am much more interested in how evangelicalism came to be and why it persists. My own fairly simplisitic understanding of things has led to the conclusion that evangelicalism is a product of the challenges posed to Christian faith by enlightenment thinking and the birth of modernity. It was fully the spawn of the early nineteenth-century rationalists and deists, and because it was formed amid dialogues that subscribed to the supremecy of reason and logic, it is only natural that evangelicalism has preserved a highly rationalistic, modernistic mandate in its approach to faith. Modernity and rationalism were dismissed decades ago for their inadequacies in handling the real-life tension of existence and subsistence. Quantum leaps in scientific dicovery, economic growth, cultural diversity and change, technological transformation, and ethical and moral evolution have left evangelicalism practically alone in an idle state of intransigence. Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton wrote decades ago about a dualistic theology that compartmentalizes our world according to things that are “godly” or “spiritual” and those that are “secular”. They rightly condemned this kind of platonic way of thinking, but then proceeded to compartmentalize life according to their own form of special dualism that sees all spheres of life according to a “right” representation of God and everything else that they considered “idolatry”. The premise for this construction is found in Joshua 24:14–15:

Now therefore revere the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. Now if you are unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.

The application according to Walsh and Middleton is that if you are not serving God in every aspect of your life, or committing everything to the glory of God, you are a quasi-idolator. The solution is to think “biblically” in our evaluations of every sphere of life, whether the Bible fits or not. This same sort of black/white metaphoric perception is commonplace among evangelicals, and it comes as no surprise, then that by their own measure, evangelicalism is idolatrous on two counts: Guilty are many of replacing their God with the god of modernistic rational thinking, and—perhaps even more seriously—they have replaced their God with the Bible. I say more serious, because while the first form of idolatry is something that evangelicals practice somewhat in ignorance, they are mostly fully cognisent of their own improper veneration for Scripture, or, more appropriately, for their own biblical hermeneutic. This sort of biblicistic approach that has given birth to nomenclature such as “biblical theology” and “biblical worldview”, and it presumes that the Bible in its Protestant form is exclusively normative.

It was the rationalists who were chiefly concerned with conceiving the world and the cosmos according to only what can be known; the way to know for certain was through scientific experimentation and discovery. Because this methodology was so effective in making observations and drawing conclusions about the natural world, it was tempting for many to dismiss the divine. God became irrelevant when he could not be understood rationally. Evangelicalism is built upon a premise that God is rational because the world as we have come to know it is also rational. In essence, God became the lacky of rationalism, and it became assumed that for God to be true, he must be “proved” and known rationally. Certainty and order became critical to theology, and in an ironic contradiction spawned the very popular notion of “reasonable” faith. But how could we know God when God is unseen, unheard, and intangible? It was a problem that evangelicalism would find to be irreconcilable with everything they came to understand about rationalism, and the solution was to reconstitute the Bible into something alien that would serve their insatiable need to make sense of a world that quite suddenly had no need for God. The solution was to make the Bible normative. Because the Bible was now the measure of all things, it must be perfect. Because the Bible was imperfect, a doctrine must be invented to hedge its imperfections. Inerrency was the new key that would unlock all mysteries. Things were no longer right or true an and of themselves; they were not even right or true because God willed it; they were now right and true exclusively because the Bible “says” so. “Literal truth” was the only kind of truth that mattered, so the Bible must be entirely and always literally true for it to maintain its place as the measure by which all of life has meaning. Rationalism, it was assumed, could only be corrected rationally, and because it was now more important to be “right” than “good”, the Bible was transformed into something it is not: logical, coherent, correct, exclusive and autonomous.