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Sunday, April 11, 2010

The two faces of Francis Beckwith

John Stackhouse's take on the Waltke "resignation"

Professor Stackhouse writes:

Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) has dismissed Dr. Bruce Waltke because he recently stated publicly two radical convictions: (1) that a Bible-believing Christian could believe in evolution; and (2) that the church needs to beware of becoming a cultural laughingstock for retaining anti-evolutionary views that cannot be supported scientifically.

What’s pathetic about this action is that those points weren’t even radical in the nineteenth century, when when Darwin himself had a number of orthodox defenders. So RTS apparently is not quite ready to catch up with almost two centuries of theology/science dialogue.

http://romereturn.blogspot.com/2010/04/john-stackhouses-take-on-waltke.html

On the one hand:

FRANCIS J. BECKWITH SAID:

I didn't approve of Stackhouse comments. I posted them followed by my own comments about the board's magisterial function in assessing the institution's documents. If you had been reading my blog, you would know that I had posted previously on the matter as well as links to my own contributions on BioLogos and the ID movement.

The criticisms you mention are Stackhouse's not mine. They are not my criticisms via Stackhouse (whatever the hell that means). The quote republished here is from Stackhouse, not me. I can't speak for John, but I suspect he is alluding to Warfield's peace with Darwinism that did not impede his status as a Reformed hero.

On the other hand:

Francis Beckwith
April 8, 2010 1:00 PM

http://francisbeckwith.com
We are so trapped in the present that many of us forget--or don't remember, or never know--that American Christian fundamentalism never required a belief in young-earth creationism.

In the 1950s Biola University had on its faculty, Bernard Ramm, a strong critic of the creationism that was dominant at the time: http://www.amazon.com/Christian-View-Science-Scripture-Bernard/dp/0802814298. It was not considered a big deal then, since in the famous five volume THE FUNDAMENTALS, theistic evolution was defended by James Orr! So much for fundamentalists all being young-earth creationists.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/04/evolution-defense-behind-theologians-ouster_comments.html

7 comments:

  1. What Beckwith still doesn't get is that Protestants don't have the same standards of orthodoxy as Roman Catholics.

    We are not bound to our traditions like Roman Catholics are.

    The time has come to bring this latitudinarianism within Evangelicalism to an end.

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  2. I also can't help noticing that, having left a comment on my blog vehemently denying that he approved of Stackhouse's remarks, he left a comment on another blog in which he takes exactly the same line as Stackhouse.

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  3. James Orr was neither American nor a fundamentalist. He was in the liberal United Free Church of Scotland. He was about as conservative as you could get without accepting inerrancy.

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  4. Again, you missed it. There is a difference between what I said on Dreher's blog and what John said. I made an historical point that people often forget or don't know. And my target was the media's ignorance on the matter; it wasn't the RTS board: "I am convinced that virtually everything the mainstream media think about American Christianity--both Protestant and Catholic--is probably false, since much of what they believe is part of a narrative they have never dreamed of challenging." By not reproducing this quote, you don't give a complete picture.

    That is not the same as saying that the RTS board was not justified in its actions because of this historical point, which was John's argument. In fact, I defend the RTS board here: http://romereturn.blogspot.com/2010/04/thoughts-on-academic-freedom-christian.html

    You should probably read my 2009 article, "Faith, Reason and the Christian University," which I reference in the above link. It gives you a sense of my thoughts on these matters.

    Peace,
    Frank

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  5. Steve,

    What Frank Beckwith and you fail to recognize is that when Bernard Ramm's book The Christian View of Science and Scripture came out in 1954 there was an uproar from quite a few conservatives, many of them Reformed. For example, Burton Goddard of Gorden-Conwell, J. Barton Payne of Covenant, Harold Lindsell of Fuller, Arthur W. Kuschke, Jr. and Meredith Kline of Westminster, J. A. Witmer of of Dallas, Joseph Bayly, Director of IVP, to name a few.

    Its also interesting that the fundamentalists argument of a slippery slope turned out to be true in Ramm’s case as he increasingly became less conservative and eventually adopted something similar to the theology of Barth (see After Fundamentalism, 1983).

    BTW, Ramm was left BIOLA in 1950 four years before the publication of CVSS. He was at Baylor University when it was published. A school in those days where he would have been the most conservative member of the theological faculty.

    Ramm's 4 books before CVSS all took an explicitly inerrantist position.

    He was a progressive creationist not a theistic evolutionist.

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  6. Feel free to show where I fail to recognize that fact.

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  7. FRANCIS J. BECKWITH SAID:

    "Again, you missed it. There is a difference between what I said on Dreher's blog and what John said."

    Yes, there's such a difference that what you said is a virtual paraphrase of what he said.

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