There are "progressive Christians" who view their vocation in life as a valiant effort to save Christianity from itself. Rescue Christianity from the clutches of the "fundamentalists". This has been going on since Schleiermacher. Theirs is often a lonely, thankless calling, yet they soldier on in their heroic mission to reinvent Christianity.
But what are they saving Christianity from? Christianity is worth saving if Christianity is true, but these are people who regard much of Scripture as pious fiction. They think the Gospels contain a fair amount of pious fiction.
Are they saving Christianity? If they save Christianity by radical surgery, by drastically redefining Christianity, then what are they saving? Have they saved Christianity, or have they recanted the Christian faith to replace it with something foreign to Christianity, something they regard as newer and better than the obsolete original?
Why do they feel the need to reconstruct Christianity when they have so little faith in the original? Why do they constantly denounce Christians who wish to remain faithful to the original?
Where do they draw the line? Do they draw a line? For them, what is not Christian? You can't say what Christianity is unless you can say what it's not.
At what point do they conclude that there's nothing worth salvaging? Where's the tipping-point? At what juncture would they concede that they were vainly laboring to remodel a fundamentally flawed paradigm? Why haven't they reached that crossroads already?
Rather than retrofitting the Christian faith to accommodate modernity, why don't these people simply renounce the Christian faith? Why do they cling to the semblance of Christianity? If they feel the incessant need to make ad hoc renovations to Christianity, is there not a point beyond which they should admit, from their own perspective, that it's time to ditch an irredeemably timebound, culturebound, all-too-human religion and start from scratch?
There's a sense in which forthright apostasy is more intellectually honest. Why don't they say they used to be Christian, they were raised in the Christian faith, they gave it their best shot, but in the end they just don't find central planks of the Christian faith credible, so the time is past due to made a clean break? Become secular humanists. Would that not be more consistent?
I guess it's true that there is nothing new under the sun. Haven't researched specifics prior to Christ and the Apostle Paul so there may have been this argument and debate circa 04 B.C. and back?
ReplyDeleteJesus after being challenged for casting out a demon, being accused by his challengers of working hand in hand with Beelzebul said what if your sons cast out demons like I am, then are they of the same spirit as Beelzebul? They will therefore as a matter of consequence become your judges.
The Apostle Paul wrote about this phenomenon in the following citation:::>
Tit 1:15 To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.
Tit 1:16 They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.
He has a more expansive description of this sort of soul, here:
2Ti 3:1 But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.
2Ti 3:2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,
2Ti 3:3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good,
2Ti 3:4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,
2Ti 3:5 having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.
I guess besides writing about them, when we come across them we should just avoid such people.
"There's a sense in which forthright apostasy is more intellectually honest. Why don't they say they used to be Christian, they were raised in the Christian faith, they gave it their best shot, but in the end they just don't find central planks of the Christian faith credible, so the time is past due to made a clean break? Become secular humanists. Would that not be more consistent?"
ReplyDeleteThat was exactly Machen's point in "Christianity and Liberalism."