Colin,
Just as Robert Boyle found it edifying to worship God on Sunday in his laboratory, for me it is genuinely recreational to think about theology on Sundays. I hope it gives you no offense that I wrote most of this reply early this morning.
I certainly had not expected a treatise in response to my own brief statement of the gospel message, but of course you responded as you saw fit. As I told you when I responded privately, I could have said much more myself, and I could have stated different definitions that would have been equally biblical. I could take that route now, but I won’t: BL isn’t about preaching a specific type of Reformation theology (as you did), even though all of us are devout Protestants, the president of BL is a strongly committed Calvinist, and I find much to admire in Calvinist theology myself. I attended the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology many times in the halcyon days when John Gerstner, R.C. Sproul, Roger Nicole, and James Montgomery Boice were the regulars. I wrote a paper about aspects of John Calvin’s theology for a graduate course on the Reformation. I’ve read the Institutes in their entirety, and many of Calvin’s commentaries as well. Indeed, I own the Institutes in Latin, French, and English, partly b/c I want to understand Calvin as well as I possibly can. I regard him as the greatest theologian of the sixteenth century, bar none, and I think he was very often right. Finally, most of the several churches I’ve been part of through various geographical moves have been Reformed, including my current membership, though I have also been involved with an Anabaptist congregation that upholds Wesleyan-Arminian theology. So, I could write a little treatise on Reformation theology myself.
But, as you surely know, there are many varieties of Protestant theology; nor (IMO) do Protestants have a monopoly on Christian truth, as if there will be no Catholics or Orthodox believers in the Holy City. BL is not a ministry whose primary focus is to refine and proclaim a very specific version of Christian theology, and you will look in vain for it in any of our official statements. You want BL to say a lot more than this about the gospel, and you place much import on how we might parse those words. That isn’t going to happen. It doesn’t mean that people who work for BL think that soteriology and other aspects of Christian theology don’t matter. Not at all. It means simply that, like C. S. Lewis, we have a gracious vision of Christianity, and we are committed to gracious dialogue. So, for example, we invite speakers like N. T. Wright and Tim Keller to speak at our events, even though (as you probably know) they hardly have identical views on very important theological questions, including soteriology. We believe we have much to learn from them, and perhaps they can also learn from us. We want to seek truth together with them and many other committed Christians whom I have not singled out here as specific examples.
By comparison, AiG condemns as “compromisers” a long list of Christian leaders from the past 150 years, including two I have mentioned here (Boice and Keller), simply because they do (or did) not agree with AiG’s interpretation of Genesis. Others on that list include Charles Spurgeon, Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield, Gleason Archer, Bill Bright, Norman Geisler, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Billy Graham, and Bruce Waltke. (My own view is that to be consistent they should also include John Calvin, since I don’t think Calvin would have agreed with their specific view of inerrancy.) Perhaps you are right, Colin, that “theological errors such as evolution ultimately derive from inexact understanding of and/or commitment to the gospel.” However, I suspect that none of the people I just named would fall short of your own theological standard here: am I mistaken? If not, then there must be more to this issue than you seem to think.
But, you did not disagree with BL’s statement of the gospel (“We believe that all people have sinned against God and are in need of salvation”), as far as it goes. Neither do I. That’s good enough for me. I’m glad we share at least that much.
Beyond that, I cannot speak for anyone else at BL. I speak only for myself, with the understanding that others who work for BL might not necessarily agree with me on each and every point. Also, I will take care not to make this a treatise.
You took your definition from Paul in Romans–not a bad place to start, we surely agree on that.
The starting point for my statement was not (directly) Paul, but of course no Christian can just throw Paul out the window any more than they can throw out the gospels. My statement reflects my view that the best short summary of core Christian beliefs are the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. I don’t know whether you hold the same opinion; perhaps you do, or perhaps you regard them as “insufficient,” a word you used to describe my brief statement of the gospel. The single sentence I offered reflects my great love for orthodox theology (not necessarily Orthodox with a capital O, though I obviously made favorable reference to that great tradition), as briefly summed up in those two pre-Reformational creeds. IMO, the gospel–the good news–is about the love of God made manifest to sinful creatures through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and also about how we ourselves should seek to imitate the love Christ showed us, turning our backs to sin and doing our best to follow the two great commandments about loving God and others that Jesus himself affirmed. Unlike Luther, I do not regard James as an epistle of straw.
My own Christian faith begins just as much from the empty tomb as from the cross. Without the former, we’d never have heard of Jesus: he’d have been nothing more than an insightful Jewish rabbi or just another false Messiah crucified by the Romans. For this reason, my very favorite modern book is Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. If I had the ability and knowledge to write such a book–neither of which is true–I would not have changed one single word in the long section on “Easter and History.” That great moment in history underscored the validity of Jesus’ ministry. He preached salvation to the poor and the rich alike, and he surely meant repentance and loving God and neighbor when he spoke about salvation. We probably agree on this also.
So then, where ultimately do you and I differ, Colin? From where I sit, it’s probably spelled out in the final plank of AiG’s statement of faith: “By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.” I note what is not said–and is glaringly absent: “Of primary importance is the fact that the Bible is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.” If this were not so, Colin, than all true Christians would agree on all of the many theological points you listed. If all of those things matter as much as you seem to think, then I fear the body of Christ is microscopically small and I am not part of it myself.
More to the point, if more Christians really did regard what I just said as being of primary importance, then perhaps religious wars would not have devastated much of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Contrary to what many Protestants might want to say, that strife was a major cause of secularization, as was the Reformation itself. Why? The Reformation undermined traditional religious authority, thus leading to religious doubt and skepticism, and it encouraged every person to read and understand the Bible individually, rather than in the context of an authoritative faith community, leading to exactly the outcome that Rome feared: the fragmentation of the body of Christ, which had previously had one faith and one baptism. Forgive me if I use an archaic reference to fill out my point: I remember using the phone book to locate churches when we moved briefly to Nashville in the 1980s. There were literally half a dozen pages of just Baptist churches, each (except for the dominant SBC) with different adjectives carefully slotted in front of “Baptist,” let alone many more pages listing churches lacking the word Baptist entirely. I am a child of the Reformation myself, but I cannot accept at least one central aspect, the tendency to magnify differences of theological opinion to matters of life and death–and I mean that literally. I don’t mean to imply that you are doing that as literally as they did; you aren’t. But, please consider that what God knows is not so easily equated with what we think God knows.
II am not inclined to take this further on my end. Nevertheless, I will be sure to read any further thoughts of yours. I greet you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
