So far as we know, all the followers of these first-century messianic movements were fanatically committed to the cause. They, if anybody, might be expected to suffer from this blessed twentieth century disease called "cognitive dissonance" when their expectations failed to materialize. But in no case, right across the century before Jesus and the century after him, do we hear of any Jewish group saying that their executed leader had been raised from the dead and he really was the Messiah after all. (Cited in Paul Copan and Ronald Tacelli, edd., Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? [Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000], p. 183)
But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside for a little while. And he said to them, "Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!"
John Bugay Update: He is has been kicked off of the website "Beggars All." From what I can gather he was finally called aside by his handlers and told that many of his arguments were garbage and actually making his position look bad and well, he did not like being questioned so he took his ball and went home.I responded, noting that I was now posting here at Triablogue, which has a much larger readership. And a regular contributor there, “paul c”, asked this question:
Why do you feel a need to address contemporary Roman catholicism? What compells you to do so?I posted this answer, which can probably be seen as a more personal and “devotional” counterpart to my Motivations post from about a week ago.
The short answer is that I believe that God has both prepared me to do so and compelled me to do so.Now, even this is not a complete accounting of all the struggles I went through when thinking about leaving. While Rome admits virtually anyone who “try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience” to salvation, there is a fearsome curse on Roman Catholics who would leave that fold:
Here is a bit of a longer explanation:
I grew up Roman Catholic, attended Mass and CCD weekly, and being from a good Catholic family, of course I wanted to “be good” and please God. In high school I had some friends who were “born again” Christians, who gave me tracts about “the Gospel,” God’s plan of salvation. At first, of course, I defended the Roman Catholic Church, but I was curious about the very stark differences in belief and practice between my non-Catholic friends and of course, what I had learned in church.
Some time later I bought myself a Bible and read through the entire New Testament. And this “stark difference” was pressed home on me more.
I did have a tremendous and unmistakable new birth experience when I was 19; I was reading John 17:23 (while in the process of reading the larger passage), and while some have accused me of not being properly catechized (“you couldn’t have been and still say the things you say”), at that moment I was remembering my CCD teaching about Augustine and the Trinity, and understanding the awesome love that God the Father had for me, personally. It was a breakthrough moment, God in my life -- something that had not happened in all my encounters with “the sacraments”.
I did not leave the Catholic Church at that time, but migrated through a “Charismatic Catholic” group at our church (sponsored by a priest), to a Protestant Charismatic group, to a Protestant Charismatic church, where I met some other friends who led me on a journey down south. There I fell in with a Reformed Southern Baptist Pastor who became a life-long friend. Another good friend of mine suggested that I consider going to seminary (Southernwestern Baptist Seminary in Ft. Worth). My Pastor friend had even agreed to sponsor me there.
During that time, I was traveling a good bit, and we were also heavily involved with the pro-life movement, where I met some very fine Catholic people, one of whom invited me to “come home”. He also invited me to consider a Catholic seminary, which I did.
So for a time I would attend my friend’s Southern Baptist church on Sundays, then head up the street for a noon Mass at Holy Rosary church in Memphis.
Eventually, I applied for, and was accepted into, the diocesan seminary program here in Pittsburgh, to attend St. Paul’s seminary. That was about 1983 or ‘84. I met Fr. Donald (now Cardinal) Wuerl when he was the rector there.
But I couldn’t bring myself to make that commitment. Still, I considered various religious orders – I spent some time with the Capuchin Franciscans, and very much was attracted to that whole ethos. While I was in the midst of that consideration, I met my present wife; we married in 1987, and eventually had six children.
[As an aside here, I’ll mention that the priest from my home parish, the priest who married my wife and me, and who baptized several of my children, was one of those convicted during the sex abuse scandal. And in fact, one young man committed suicide because of this priest. But we did not know that at the time, and it did not affect my decision to leave.]
For several years during the early 1990’s, I was somewhat politically active (I campaigned with Rick Santorum in 1990 and 1992, as he was going door-to-door). In 1994, a Presbyterian friend, knowing of my background, handed me the issue of “First Things” that contained the initial “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” statement. At first I was overjoyed, and I began reading “First Things” on a regular basis.
Another devout Catholic friend was, during that time, attending “Evenings of Recollection” through Opus Dei. He invited me to attend, and for several years, he and I attended these monthly “evenings” together.
That was not long after the publication of the new “Catechism,” and I was struck at the similarities – the men at Opus Dei quoted from the Catechism in almost the same exact way that my Baptist friends had quoted from the Bible.
At any rate, I began following the program that Opus Dei recommended you follow: saying the Rosary (I even purchased a CD with the deep, baritone voice of John Paul II reciting the Rosary in Latin); going to confession regularly. I even was meeting with “a priest of Opus Dei” for “Spiritual Direction”.
During those years in the mid 90’s, however, I was also beginning to read more of the literature that was coming out on the topic of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” and I was realizing that there was a bit of fudging of the language associated with that document. Especially the 1997 statement, “The Gift of Salvation,” which came to this conclusion:Justification is central to the scriptural account of salvation, and its meaning has been much debated between Protestants and Catholics. We agree that justification is not earned by any good works or merits of our own; it is entirely God's gift, conferred through the Father's sheer graciousness, out of the love that he bears us in his Son, who suffered on our behalf and rose from the dead for our justification. Jesus was “put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). In justification, God, on the basis of Christ's righteousness alone, declares us to be no longer his rebellious enemies but his forgiven friends, and by virtue of his declaration it is so.Without getting into a discussion on justification here (as I had done with my “Spiritual Director”), I will note that this was seen as a fudge on the language from both sides. And in fact, I walked out of confession with my “Spiritual Director” during a discussion of this very issue.
The New Testament makes it clear that the gift of justification is received through faith. “By grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). By faith, which is also the gift of God, we repent of our sins and freely adhere to the Gospel, the good news of God's saving work for us in Christ. By our response of faith to Christ, we enter into the blessings promised by the Gospel. Faith is not merely intellectual assent but an act of the whole person, involving the mind, the will, and the affections, issuing in a changed life. We understand that what we here affirm is in agreement with what the Reformation traditions have meant by justification by faith alone (sola fide).
Again, as I was at age 19, I became gripped by a desire to know, what was really going on here. Fortunately, the Internet was making available resources that had previously been available only in specialized libraries. And I came across earlier versions of “Protestant/Catholic” online discussions.
I will say that James White’s book, “The Roman Catholic Controversy,” had a very profound impact on me.
So in 1998, I summarized what I was thinking in a very long “resignation letter” to my new Parish Priest (the old, abuser-priest having since been moved away somewhere).
2000 years of church history is a tremendously large topic, and I’ve dived right into the study of it with great enthusiasm. I’ve not followed an organized pattern of learning, but I can honestly say that in my own mind, I’ve more than adequately answered every objection that every Roman Catholic has put to me about leaving.
And that leaves me with the understanding that if Rome really is not what it says it is (“THE Church that Christ founded”), then there is some measure of untruth and even betrayal about its claims. Roman claims to authority are fundamentally at odds with the Truth proclaimed by Christ and the apostles, and fundamentally at odds with the actual history of the actual church.
So for me, it’s been a lifetime of wrestling with this issue, and now sharing what I know.
Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it [CCC 846, citing Lumen Gentium 14].Again, some well-meaning Catholics have suggested to me that, as a Roman Catholic, I really didn’t “[know] that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ,” and hence I’m not going to hell because of that, but that seems to me to be just another Roman Catholic mind trick that denies reality with a slippery use of words.
... the seeds of Modernism had been sown. And looming in the background stood the titanic figure of Cardinal John Henry Newman, (1801-1890). (15:55)
Newman had of course been a prominent Anglican, and he had converted to Rome in 1845. Now Newman was not really a theological liberal, or modernist at heart, but in the process of his conversion to Rome he wrote what was to become a key text for many liberalizing Roman Catholic theologians, both in the modernist crisis, and later, at the time of Vatican II. (16:32)
This was Newman’s “An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine”. Now Newman’s purpose in this essay was to put forward a new argument for the truth of Roman Catholicism. Prior to Newman, Roman Catholic apologists had maintained that Rome was the unchanging church founded by the apostles and carried on by the early church fathers. That modern Roman dogma and practice accorded precisely with the apostolic and patristic church of the first few centuries, including such things as the papacy, indulgences, purgatory, Rome’s Mariology, etc. Protestantism, by contrast, was marked by continual change and development, and therefore could not be in possession of the truth. (17:25)
Now for any Protestant who knew the history of the first 400 years of Christianity, this Roman Catholic thesis was laughable. Newman perceived this, and turned the argument on its head. “Development,” he argues, “is actually the sign of the fruit.” Ideas are like seeds. When first planted, they have a primitive simplicity about them. Their full meaning and potential are unfolded as they grow, in conflict with opposing ideas. When Christ and his apostles planted the seed of Christianity, therefore, one would expect to see a growing organism, which evolves and changes through the centuries, bringing to maturity more and more of its hidden potential. This, Newman contends, is precisely what we see in the Roman Catholic Church, which, of course, he identified, with the apostolic and patristic church. But, we see no such organic process of growth and development in Protestantism, which is wedded to the sterile and stagnant idea of reproducing first century primitive Christianity. (18:40)
Newman knew that his, for example, with its doctrine of the Virgin’s “Immaculate Conception,” was for Newman, not a betrayal, but a “development,” an unfolding of a seed idea, found in Scripture and the fathers, although made explicit only later. In this way, Newman turned on the edge the Protestant critique that Roman Catholicism did not look much like the church of the apostles or the early fathers. Does an oak tree look philosophy of development could justify all those features of Roman Catholic theology, piety, and worship, which Protestants had historically regarded as betrayals of the early church. Roman Catholic Mariology like an acorn? (19:30)
Now to be fair, Newman recognized that there could be illegitimate developments, corruptions. And he outlined a complex scheme of seven tests by which to distinguish these from proper developments. But in his own mind, he was perfectly convinced that 19th century Roman Catholicism was the historical continuation of first century apostolic Christianity. The early church was the primitive, undeveloped infant; Roman Catholicism is the mature and majestic man. (20:04)
Now Newman’s philosophy of development has won the day in modern Rome. Very few defenders of the old view can now be found. A cursory reading of modern Roman Catholic histories of the church and of theology will reveal Newman’s assumptions at work. It has liberated Roman Catholics from the unenviable burden of trying to prove that everything they believe and practice today was believed and practiced by the apostles (emphasis added). (20:33)
Of course Newman’s development thesis also chimes in with the pervasive evolutionary mindset of 21st century man. Like life itself, church and theology have evolved. (20:47)
Now Newman didn’t write his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine to justify modernism, but his ideas on how Christianity has changed and developed through the centuries were eventually to give comfort and inspiration to those Roman Catholics who wanted to reject the rigid theology of neo-Thomism, and instead promote modernist thinking. If Newman was right, and Christian doctrine had undergone this long process of development, then why should the church canonize the doctrine of one limited time period, the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century? Could things not develop still further? Could modernist thinking not be the development needed to meet the challenges of the 19th and 20th centuries? (21:42)
We believe the Scriptures as originally given by God, both Old and New Testaments, to be the inspired Word of God, infallible, entirely trustworthy, and the supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.
We are happy to announce that distinguished Arminian theologian and SEA member, Roger Olson...
When I read the qualifications of inerrancy being made by signers of the Chicago Declaration (both in it and in their own writings) I was appalled and shocked. For example, one leading advocate of inerrancy wrote in his systematic theology that “inerrancy” is compatible with “inerrant use of errant sources” by biblical authors. In other words, the Bible is inerrant even if it contains blatant errors so long as the biblical writer who erred didn’t err in his use of sources. How ludicrous! Why not just give up on the word inerrancy once you’ve come to that point?
This chapter is devoted to a critical analysis of certain lines of argument used by many New Testament scholars to support a negative conclusion on the historical value of reports of dominical sayings and of events in the Synoptic Gospels…I will be concentrating, though not exclusively, on reported utterances of Jesus rather than on his deeds and other happenings. I will also exclude the parables from discussion–not because I regard them as unimportant; quite the contrary. It is because the parables are, at least in what is regarded as their earliest form, more widely accepted as stemming from the historical Jesus than the sayings I will be discussing…The principle that short sayings are most likely to be remembered fits ill with the principle that parables are among the alleged sayings most likely to be remembered. For some of the parables are considerably longer than many allege sayings rejected by the [Jesus] Seminar].
As everyone knows, the health reform Mr. Romney passed in 2006 as Massachusetts Governor was the prototype for President Obama's version and gave national health care a huge political boost. Mr. Romney now claims ObamaCare should be repealed, but his failure to explain his own role or admit any errors suggests serious flaws both in his candidacy and as a potential President. …
In the name of personal responsibility, Mr. Romney also introduced the individual mandate, first in the nation, requiring everyone to buy coverage or else pay a penalty. Free riders, he said, transferred their own costs to others, either through higher premiums or taxes. This is the same argument the Obama Administration is now using to justify the coercion of the individual mandate in the federal courts. Because the states have police powers under the Constitution, Mr. Romney's plan posed no legal problems. His blunder was his philosophy of government. …
The only good news we can find is that the uninsured rate has dropped to 2% today from 6% in 2006. Yet four out of five of the newly insured receive low- or no-cost coverage from the government. The subsidies will cost at least $830 million in 2011 and are growing, conservatively measured, at 5.1% a year. Total state health-care spending as a share of the budget has grown from about 16% in the 1980s to 30% in 2006 to 40% today. The national state average is about 25%.
The safety-net fund that was supposed to be unwound, well, wasn't. Uncompensated hospital care rose 5% from 2008 to 2009, and 15% from 2009 to 2010, hitting $475 million (though the state only paid out $405 million). "Avoidable" use of emergency rooms—that is, for routine care like a sore throat—increased 9% between 2004 and 2008. Meanwhile, unsubsidized insurance premiums for individuals and small businesses have climbed to among the highest in the nation.
Like Mr. Obama's reform, RomneyCare was predicated on the illusion that insurance would be less expensive if everyone were covered. Even if this theory were plausible, it is not true in Massachusetts today. So as costs continue to climb, Mr. Romney's Democratic successor now wants to create a central board of political appointees to decide how much doctors and hospitals should be paid for thousands of services. …
Once government takes on the direct or implicit liability of paying for health care for everyone, the only way to afford it is through raw political control of all medical decisions. …
Brad said:
I’m given to reckless oversimplification. Here I go again: The Redeemerites/transfos are basically “U2 church.” Their deepest desire is to see Bono join a hipster PCA church. For Bono to sign up of course he’d need to like us and feel comfortable. The whole movement is about building a “space” that Bono would like and about doing things he would largely approve of.
I came to Christ listening to Keller preach during my undergraduate years at New York University, after which I spent a few years attending Redeemer.
What Keller preaches is viewed as radically intolerant and utterly absurd by the secular world in NYC, to say nothing of how ridiculous Keller and fellow evangelicals look within the university context (I was a Religious Studies major). He’s just another contemptible Evangelical as far as many are concerned, as Redeemer’s preaching ministry is unapologetic in its clear declaration that Christ alone is the path to salvation and fulfillment.
You can criticize his approach to homosexuality, and there’s probably a better way for Keller to address the issue (I suspect he frames it the way he does because some, or many, gay people in NYC listening to an Evangelical on these issues will automatically associate him with the “God hates f—” movement unless he’s exceptionally careful with his words). But please avoid these kinds of simplifications about how Redeemer simply wants hip celebrities to “need to like us and feel comfortable.” Maybe you simply need to live and work in the city to appreciate the utter contempt its inhabitants have for any exclusive truth claims; neither I nor my friends in the city felt that Redeemer was seeking to make others “feel comfortable” like you might find at some theologically liberal church. Simply by proclaiming Jesus as exclusive Lord and Savior and taking the Bible seriously as God’s inspired/inerrant Word you are creating a deeply uncomfortable, even offensive, environment (to say nothing of Keller’s consistently pointed critiques of the postmodern, relativistic understanding of truth and fulfillment).
Phillip Mayberry said:
Dear Matthew,
Your point about oversimplification is well taken.
I am glad you are in the faith, my brother. There IS a better way to address homosexuality, and it is to say what the Bible says. The way something is viewed by a God-hating culture is irrelevent to the message itself. We have no liberty to change the message. Period. I rejoice where Pastor Keller gets it right, I lament where he gets it wrong. Whether or not we will speak what Jesus spoke openly is a serious matter according to Mark 8:38: check it out. With prestige comes great temptation to compromise.
I remember a man whose message was also rejected, and yet the message was not altered at all. This man calls his disciples to do the same… nothing less, for any reason, and no matter where they live, and no matter what the consequences- even death or loss.
Hope you will consider this: it is written in love. I have spoken personally to Pastor Keller along the same lines, and exhorted him to stick with the Bible, and proclaim it openly on every topic, not just what we deem to be the “main” ones. We are heralds, speaking the message of the King, not politicians, keeping some parts of the message quiet so as not to offend. The gospel is offensive: and as you point out, people already think we are crazy anyway- why not declare the whole counsel of God?
Grace to you,
Phillip
Phillip,
I appreciate the spirit in which your comments are offered.
We need to distinguish between compromise and presentation. I think the question is not whether the message is declared, but where and how it is preached, and in what manner, for, if I recall correctly, Redeemer is undoubtedly clear about this issue on its membership form. I also believe it confronts the issue in small groups.
In NYC (or Manhattan, really) what is the critical issue for its inhabitants? Since Richard Rorty won the question of solidarity at the academy, and logical positivism has suffered its (frankly all too fitting) death, the critical philosophical issue, and thus critical theological concern, is whether objective truth exists, whether there are normative, universal standards binding on all of humanity. Obviously the secular intellectual and cultural leaders of the city say "no," and there is now a belief that the words you choose have the power to create value and meaning. Combine this with a generous heaping of Enlightenment individualism, and you have an edifice, a structural framework, that excuses sins of every kind merely as a matter of personal preference, fulfillment and choice.
Keller attacks and dismantles this edifice on a regular basis. It's one of the stronger points of his preaching that only Christ will satisfy the deepest longings of your heart, not whatever you yourself define and pursue as the means of satisfaction. He attacks the intellectual/philosophical roots that produce virtually all the sins of the secular world, including homosexuality. To focus on this foundation is highly effective in that sense, especially given the intellectual nature of his audience, which will work out the implications of what he teaches a the core level. Certainly this line of attack, this destruction of deep, abiding, foundational patterns and assumptions of sin, worked much more effectively on my heart than if someone had simply preached to the surface manifestations of my sinful behavior. Obviously that's not applicable in all situations, but I don't think we can discount this approach as necessarily false.
People listening to Keller come to see the ravishing beauty of Jesus Christ over against the secular ash heap that is personally defined fulfillment. They then can't help but give up their sinful habits and ask Christ what he demands of their lives--including sexually in the practice of homosexuality, if I am to believe some of the reports I've heard.
While you're certainly correct to say that the "way something is viewed by a God-hating culture is irrelevant to the message itself," this has the potential to paper over an acute issue that all pastors in cultures other than the ANE in which Christ was preaching must address. Sometimes when you say one thing to one culture, it will be misinterpreted as another thing you didn't say. Of course, sometimes this is willful and deliberate on the part of the audience, done in order to distort and create (yet another) excuse for sinful behavior. But since we have some measure of control over how the Gospel is received, to what extent do we have an obligation to change our presentation (not content) so as to be properly understood by the audience hearing our message? The practical outworking of this question is felt in NYC when people hear condemnations of homosexual behavior; the homosexual community and its allies will interpret such language as that of Fred Phelps. Obviously the orthodox position on this matter is nowhere near what Phelps presents, but how do you speak to this issue so that others, conditioned by the media to associate a denial of homosexual "rights" with the language and attitude of "God hates f---," can understand that you are offering the Gospel of hope to sinners who are lost under the wrath of God in their self-destructive ways, rather than a reveling and rejoicing, as Nietzsche and other moderns suspect (not without reason), in the eventual torment and suffering of those "disgusting sinners" over there? This is not an easy question, and its often made out to be almost binary by those who really demonstrate no comprehension of the difficulties of ministering in what is almost accurately called the City of Satan.
Again, I think Keller could be better on this issue, but it's not the kind of deficit it's often made out to be by people (not necessarily you in particular) who strike as both simplistic and unsympathetic in their critique of Redeemer and the work it does in a culture completely and totally alien to the Southern and/or Christianized environment that most of the PCA seems to enjoy.
The ObamaCare preview that Massachusetts has been conducting for the last several years grows more ominous by the month, not that anyone in Washington is paying attention. So let's check on the Bay State's latest warning, coming soon to a hospital or medical practice near you.More:
A new survey released yesterday by the Massachusetts Medical Society reveals that fewer than half of the state's primary care practices are accepting new patients, down from 70% in 2007, before former Governor Mitt Romney's health-care plan came online. The average wait time for a routine checkup with an internist is 48 days. It takes 43 days to secure an appointment with a gastroenterologist for chronic heartburn, up from 36 last year, and 41 days to see an OB/GYN, up from 34 last year.
In 1543 a little book was published in Venice with the title Trattato utilissimo del beneficio di Giesu Christo crocifisso i cristiani (A Most Useful Treatise on the Merits of Jesus Christ Crucified for Christians), written by an elusive Benedictine monk called Benedetto da Mantova (dates of birth and death unknown, but his surname seems to have been fontanino) with some help from the humanist and poet Marcantonio Flaminio (1498-1550), a popular work of piety that was translated into several languages including Croat. At first sight this may appear to be a piece of native Italian Christocentrism, part of a Pauline and Augustinian renaissance known to have been nourished by a Spanish humanist and biblicist, Juan de Valdes (1500-1541), whose pious circle in Naples had included Flaminio. But the Beneficio can be read in more than one way. It proves to have been made up from a number of transalpine Protestant texts, and especially the 1539 edition of Calvin's Institutes. Whether or not Benedetto had come across Calvin in his monastery on the slopes of Mount Etna, which seems unlikely, the Institutes was known to Flaminio.So, yesterday, the thing I was lamenting was not so much that the Heidelblog was gone (though I’ve quoted from it many times and found it to be a very fine resource), so much as that it was thought that the act of deletion was some sort of disciplinary measure, by one party or another, thinking that either the “plucking out of an eye,” so to speak, or the excision of some inconvenient form of information, was going to be a solution to a problem.
It is hard to distinguish between the theology of the Beneficio and Protestantism. “Man can never do good works unless he first know himself to be justified by faith.” Other scholars insist, however, that the Beneficio is an expression of Evangelism, a movement that was not generated by Protestantism and should be distinguished from it. What is certain is that the Beneficio was placed on the Index and so successfully repressed by the Roman Inquisition that of the many thousands of copies of the Italian edition that were once in existence only one is known to survive, discovered in the library of a Cambridge college in the nineteenth century. That sort of successful repression was the Counter-Reformation. (“The Reformation, a History”, Patrick Collinson, (c) 2003, New York: The Modern Library (Random House edition), pgs. 105-106.)
Justin Taylor has picked up a paragraph from Scot McKnight’s brief review of the recently published biography of George Eldon Ladd: I don’t believe our goal as Bible or theology scholars is to be deemed among the finest of scholars or to find a place at the table, but to be faithful to Jesus Christ and to the gospel and to orthodox theology and to academic rigor. Yes, we are to work to discover and to be creative, but the driving passion to prove ourselves at the feet of others falls short of a true Christian telos. I’d put it this way: we are called to be faithful, whether we are accepted or not.McKnight summarized: “Ladd single-handedly reinvigorated evangelical scholarship and D’Elia tells that very story…. George Eldon Ladd was a Titan, his work irreplaceable, and his impact incalculable.” I’ve also had the opportunity to read and comment on Ladd’s impact. Here’s a paragraph from Donald Hagner’s Introduction to the Revised Edition of Ladd’s 1974 work:
Without question Ladd’s theology reflects the orientation of a specific interpretive community, that known widely as “Evangelicalism.” It was Ladd who was especially instrumental in helping many fundamentalists to see for the first time not merely the acceptability, but the indispensability, of historical criticicsm. Evangelicals – at least many of them – have become more open to many of the conclusions of critical scholarship (in regard to, for example, the authorship and dating of New Testament writings and the implications for the development of the New Testament) in the twenty years since Ladd wrote (in 1974). They continue, however, to share the basic convictions embodied in Ladd’s approach to biblical theology. For all the actual diversity in the New Testament writings there remains an unforced and genuine unity among them at the same time. For all the historical particularity of these writings they continue to possess a normative authority for the church. And if, as J. Reumann has recently written, “the ultimate test for any biblical theology will be whether it enables faith and obedience to God’s word,” that practical concern was close to the heart of Ladd. Ladd’s interpretive community continues to cherish the goals of faith and obedience. At their best, evangelicals will cultivate openness to all that increases faith and leads to a more effective obedience (pgs 19-20).
Theologian David Bentley Hart expresses it thus: One should consider the price of this God-centeredness: It is a strange thing indeed to seek [God-centered theology]…at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome. (The Doors of the Sea [Eerdmans, 2005], p. 99)
In this theology, the God at the center is the ultimate narcissist, the greatest egoist who finds glory in displaying his naked power even to the point of consigning millions to hell just to manifest his attribute of justice.
Better a man-centered theology than one that revolves around a being hardly distinguishable from the devil.
I don’t see Jesus giving us that “out.” The Sermon on the Mount is clear. We are to love all people equally and never resist evil.
