Thanks, Jay! Lack of time and mental/physical focus have prevented me from finishing the intro to K that I’ve been reading, but I’m getting closer to done! Just the intro’s gloss of his work and thinking has been fascinating, and I’m anxious to begin to really wrestle through primary texts again. I’ve been warned by many this will be hard. But I also see throughout posts in the Forum’s history that you have at least quoted and referred to his work frequently. So, I may be bugging you soon!
I need to write this quote on my hand.
Maybe along with your comments about it, too.
Thanks, Jay!
Kierkegaard can be hard sledding in the primary texts, and his output was voluminous in a short amount of time. His early habit of “indirect” communication through pseudonyms is also tough to sort out one book at a time, and that misses a lot of things like his journal entries and later “attack on Christendom” in local publications. I actually appreciate his religious writing more than his philosophical musings, but for a fantastic anthology of his primary works, this can’t be beat:
Since I hijacked the thread with SK, I should bring the discussion back around to inerrancy and KK Du Mez.
Du Mez is following a particular strand of history, i.e. patriarchy. But you’re right in the overall origins and development of the culture war. To put some dates on things, Criswell and the SBC as a whole viewed birth control and abortion as a “Catholic issue” in the 60s. The Nixon (!) DOJ began investigating segregationist schools run by Falwell and Bob Jones in 1970, threatening their federal funding. They tried to rally evangelicals around “religious liberty,” but that didn’t work. As historian Randall Balmer said,
While that was happening, the editor of Christianity Today, Harold Lindsell, published “The Battle for the Bible” in 1976. Two years later, evangelicals convened to write the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. But even that didn’t create a ripple in the public consciousness until evangelical intellectual Francis Schaeffer and popular Surgeon General C. Everett Koop came out with the documentary “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” in 1979. Suddenly, abortion and “Pro-life” became the rallying point. Falwell even rewrote history in the mid-80s to make that the main thing from the start, and thus began the Moral Majority and one-issue voters.
I recommend J. Davidson Hunter’s book “Culture War” from about 1992 to see the first (I think) serious analysis of the mess. He is overly thorough, but he builds a strong case for what he saw as terribly destructive. He was still hopeful at the time.
He’s still writing. I wonder if he’s still hopeful now……
Good points Jay. Some of this is more in the weeds than I am able to venture. But going back to something I touched on previously, and maybe you can comment on it. Did any signers of the Chicago statement advocate for segregation?
I’d find it hard to believe someone like Packer or Sproul would share the same room with someone doing that after MLK.
I don’t know, I feel like I’m about to get clobbered, but I’ll put it out there anyhow.
The contradiction of treating people like they don’t exist. I’d be interested to see what happens downstream of that making its way into philosophy textbooks. I also like to think that corrupt politicians might put a little more interest into representing the interests of the people they are supposed to serve.
People change, and ideas mature and I accept that many on that list are just flawed people, as am I. But, I think you can make a strong case that the popularity of inerrency by the rank and file was motivated by more than pure theologic concerns. And, perhaps that motivation reached the higher ranks as well in some cases, though certainly not all. And I would rather broaden that motivation to be the retention of power, which would cover racism, patriarchy, and of course making it a marker of who was and who was not part of the club.
Sorry I’m not seeing the connection to segregation in the 2001 sermon.
“while many conservative evangelicals try to find other ways to describe the Canaanite conquest than to call it “genocide,” MacArthur is totally fine setting aside his own humanity and embracing it as genocide”
I’m not a fan of MacArthur, but the Canaanites that acted like Canaanites, and the Israelites that acted like Canaanites, were cursed. And as the text also states, the Canaanites that acted like Israelites were saved.
But I did get to hear him preach at a Ligonier conference. He followed Max McLean reading Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and joked that he had to follow some great preachers, but not ever one as great as Edwards. The difference in the richness of the vernacular was palatable.
Yeah this is a entirely different and more complex issue. Would it be fair to say that CRT has its roots in Marxism? Not that it by default negates its criticism, but it no doubt complicates it. The issue I see, as Thomas Sowell has explained, is that not every kind of racial disparity is caused by racial injustice.
Have you seen the list? I’m sure a lot of the Southern Baptists who signed in 1979 (like Criswell) were segregationists 20 years before that.
Besides Criswell, I spotted Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, two now-disgraced abusers who were the architects of the conservative takeover of the SBC a few years later. Other interesting names:
Henry Morris (The Genesis Flood)
Duane Gish (of “Gish Gallop” fame)
Hal Lindsey (Late Great Planet Earth)
Jerry Vines (former SBC prez who preached anti-Muslim hate after 9/11 and covered up for serial rapist D. Gilyard)
Franky Schaeffer (now an atheist and highly critical of his father, Francis)
Wayne Grudem (co-founder of Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood)
Greg Bahnsen (Christian Reconstructionist/Theonomy)
That’s quite a laundry list. I was going off the list of notable signers wikipedia has. Interestingly, it has Francis Schaefer as a signer, when the official list has Franky. That’s a real surprise!
Criswell was for segregation in the 1950s and changed his view in the 1960s. Just curious if any of the signers were calling for segregation at that time.
I doubt if that is ‘the official list’ – it’s a DTS document (and unsigned ; - ). Frankly would only have been 26 in 1978 and hardly an esteemed scholar or clergyman.
I couldn’t find a Schaefer on the list at all. Even my wife who used to teach seventh grade English half a century ago and read widely assorted cursive penmanship (or lack thereof) when grading papers didn’t find one.
Ummm, did you notice both the sigs and the typed (1979!) list are part of the same Dallas Theological Seminary library collection? I’m sure the lists are the same, but I’m not about to try and count.
Franky Schaeffer was heavily involved with his dad’s 1979 documentary on abortion. I’d bet Franky served as his representative while Francis was busy promoting the movie.
Sure. I don’t know that I would agree 90% with them today, but I still own these guys’ books and learned a lot from them in the '90s-'00s:
Henri Blocher (great book on Original Sin)
D.A. Carson (commentaries)
Ed Clowney (ecclesiology)
John Frame (doctrine of God)
Frank Gaebelein (Expositor’s commentary series editor, CT editor)
Walter Kaiser (OT commentaries)
Walter Liefeld (Luke commentary)
John Wenham (OT)
I recognize a lot of other names on the list, but I only know them second-hand.
Correction: There are some people on the list whose books I got rid of, starting with Grudem’s Systematic Theology. It was just a grab-bag of proof quotes. Unfortunately, in my YRR days I replaced it with Robert Reymond’s systematic theology, which turned out to be even worse. It was nothing but a modern exposition of the Westminster Confession.
