I've been exploring what happened when Rome became Christian and asked when Europe became Christian. Today I want to begin exploring several theories of Western decline.
1. The Story of Progress
Before I mention several stories of decline, I might mention the story of progress. There are many who view the last five hundred years as something like a non-stop evolution to a better and better understanding. They would view the Middle Ages as something like the "dark" ages and the Renaissance as a rebirth of culture.
The Enlightenment was thus truly about becoming more reasonable, about shedding religious superstition, and so forth. The rise of science is seen as parallel to this trajectory toward reason and truth. We expect science to make the world a better and better place. At one point, we thought humanity would become more and more virtuous.
2. The Modernist Dead End
I don't know how many people still really subscribe to any strong form of the story of progress I just mentioned. Star Trek in the 80s still looked to a future where humanity was more civilized, more evolved than it is now. But the movies of the last 25 years have been much more apocalyptic. There are more zombies, more world-ending catastrophes, more post-apocalyptic reversions.
Nietzsche in the late 1800s was a herald of where modernism ended, namely, with no basis for morality other than the creation of ingenious Superman who could convince the rest of the world. Alistair MacIntyre depicted a moral world where we had fragments of a picture from the past that we could not remember. Louis Pojman's ethics text deliberately mimicked J. L. Mackie with the subtitle Discovering Right and Wrong rather than Mackie's, "inventing" right and wrong.
In Nietzsche's theory of Western decline, Socrates himself was the culprit. It was he who taught the West to ask questions, that the "unexamined life is not worth living." While Nietzsche agreed with the end of that train of thought in his own writings, he warned that it would not be good for most people to play out the train of thought. They might think that it was good for God to be dead, but it would not turn out as well as they thought. In that sense, Nietzsche is sometimes considered a prophet of the twentieth century.
3. The Story of the Protestant Principle
According to Paul Tillich, it was inevitable that Protestantism would splinter into tens of thousands of little groups once it made a text the center of authority. Texts are polyvalent. They are susceptible to multiple interpretations. So each little group, reading the Bible "alone," becomes confident that it knows exactly what God thinks... and it splinters off from its parent body. And it then goes on to hereticize everyone who disagrees... until the next group splits from it.
Brad Gregory, in Unintended Reformation, more or less sees the turn away from the external authority of the Church as the culprit. Left without some third party to arbitrate the meaning of Scripture, each interprets as is right in his own eyes. Most crucially, secular authority becomes the highest authority rather than religious authority. Completely unintended, Christianity hands its ultimate authority over to worldly powers. Gregory is, of course, Roman Catholic.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of almost Catholics around. There are plenty of people in Wesleyan circles who are on some version of the Canterbury Trail, although many of them stop at Episcopalian. You often get the feeling, though, that they think the Reformation was at least in part a mistake, certainly that modernism was a mistake. All we need to do is go back to some version of catholicism, even if it is the catholicism of the 400s.
In another scenario, Protestant Liberalism was a predictable trajectory for a "Bible only" approach. For once the historical consciousness of modernism comes into play, the premodern, unified text suddenly falls apart into 66 distinct books with distinct contexts addressing distinct audiences. Thus, even most evangelical biblical theologies are not divided up by theological topic, but by Paul, Matthew, and so forth.
4. Nominalist Ideas Have Consequences.
Richard Weaver, in 1948, argued that America was in a state of degradation because of a trajectory first set by the nominalists just before the Reformation. In rhetoric now very familiar, he blamed a turn to relativism and away from absolutes. I've recently written on how fallacy-ridden most of this rhetoric is. Weaver's ideal world was the Roman Catholic society of the Middle Ages (even though he was a "nominal" Protestant).
Nominalism was a rejection of the reality of universals in the late Middle Ages. It is, in my opinion, an extension of Aquinas' version of absolutes, where absolutes are not distinct from the things in which they occur. The nominalists took this concept one step further, namely, that there are just individual things. Weaver, unsurprisingly, was somewhat Platonic in orientation.
Luther's theology is often thought to have been influenced by nominalism. God deems a person righteous without a person being righteous.
5. Aquinas and the triumph of reason
Francis Schaeffer taught that Aquinas had started the decline of the West by rejecting that the human mind was fallen. No serious scholar of history or Aquinas agrees. Schaeffer was a presuppositionalist thinker who more or less held that unless God gave you the right presuppositions out of thin air, you couldn't possibly arrive at the truth.
So the introduction of reason into the equation, in his view, inevitably resulted in humanity thinking it was the authority on what was true, with a resultant decline in the West climaxing with the legalization of abortion in the 1970s.
6. James Sire and declining worldviews
In The Universe Next Door, James Sire describes the changing worldviews since the Reformation as a logical unraveling from theism to deism to naturalism to nihilism to existentialism to neo-spiritualism. In the 1500s, God was thought to exist and to be active in the world. In the 1600s and 1700s, we saw the rise of deism, which sees the world more or less as a machine that doesn't require God's intervention.
In the 1800s with evolution, we see the rise of naturalism, where God is not even thought to be needed as creator. This inevitably results in a Nietzschean nihilism. In the 1950s, existentialism rose to try to reintroduce meaning into the universe. But as it is ultimately unsatisfying, an attempt to recapture a spiritual dimension to life is seen in the new age movement and neo-spiritualism.
On Monday, I may try to evaluate these in some sort of synthetic way. What seems true about these somewhat conflicting theories?
Showing posts with label Francis Schaeffer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Francis Schaeffer. Show all posts
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Worthen: Presuppositionalists and the End Times (10)
It neareth the end: Chapter 10 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)
Chapter 9 (A Form of Intellectualism)
And now, chapter 10, "God's Idea Men."
The final sentences of this chapter are worthy to start with: "Schaeffer, Falwell, and other self-appointed spokesmen of the Christian Right appeared, to casual observers, to reflect some kind of consensus. One must not underestimate the power in this illusion of solidarity--but one should not take it for reality either" (240).
1. This statement comes at the end of a section called "history is written by the victors," which tells the story of the conservative take-over of the Southern Baptist Convention. Prior to the 80s and 90s, the Baptists tended to be Arminians, were largely opposed to any kind of credal statement, and put a strong emphasis on "soul competency," the idea that each individual is only accountable before God.
But by the end of the century, the Southern Baptists were controlled by 5 point Reformed Calvinists and had added credal requirements like inerrancy to their core statements. Clear roles for men and women were added to their statements to prevent women in ministry. When I was at Asbury in the late 80s, there were still ordinations of women even in Kentucky, before Al Mohler's notorious purge of the faculty at Louisville Southern Baptist Seminary.
There is an important point here. It can feel like the Bible has an obvious meaning and that all contemporary evangelicals see it. This sets up evangelicalism to be the true elect, those who are truly following the Bible. What isn't remembered is that there was a thirty year political struggle through which a particular ideology consolidated its power. The current "clarity" of Scripture within contemporary evangelicalism is an example of history told by the winners.
2. The chapter begins with the influence of "Reformed presuppositionalism," such as that espoused by Schaeffer, on the American church. Schaeffer wrote, "People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize" (221). His mistake is that he is talking about large ideological systems. He is right that people have underlying values that they live by, but to equate them with overarching philosophical systems is to skew the discussion.
And people are inconsistent. We operate by different paradigms depending on what the area of life is. More primary are our drives and urges, not our thoughts--which often are rationalizations that aim to justify what we want to do. And to the extent to which we might operate by presuppositions, they tend to be micro-presuppositions rather than grand recits.
But we have the "high end" presuppositionalists of Alvin Plantinga and Nicolas Wolterstorff. They argued that belief in God is "properly basic." That is to say, belief in God is something that does not need proof but can be assumed like an axiom of geometry.
They could be right although obviously it is obviously a matter of dispute. I have not read Plantinga's tome where he sets this out (Warranted Christian Belief), but I suspect his claim connects with the ontological argument in some way. If it is impossible to conceive of existence itself without a necessary Being, then the existence of God might be considered properly basic.
I suspect this sort of presuppositionalism is compatible with Wesleyanism, although I consider it a foreign body within our theology. I believe pragmatism is more at home within Wesley-Arminianism, and I hope there will always be room for the more natural breed. By contrast, a whole army of IWU students was indoctrinated in presuppositionalism by one of IWU's best known twentieth century professors.
Rushdoony is another presuppositionist, so radical in his thinking that he wanted to bring back stoning disobedient children. He influenced conservative American thinking with a stark capitalist ideology that he fused with biblical interpretation, sanctifying a particular economic approach as the Christian approach.
John Whitcomb and Henry Morris gave rise to the creationist movement. It's easy to forget some of the diversity that used to exist on evolution in earlier times. They effectively squashed options like the "gap theory" and gave form to the current assumed consensus within fundamentalism. Again, we live at a time when the positions of fundamentalism seem obvious and seem a straightforward reading of the Bible to many, but this consensus was won over a half-century of American religious politics.
3. The final element in this chapter to mention are the envoys of the end times, Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. "Like Schaeffer's offhand references to Locke and Jung, Late Great Planet Earth made the reader feel smart, in the know, and personally involved in history's climax" (229). It is worthwhile noting how often the revealed antichrist has changed over the years. Lindsey was sure that the USSR was going to attack Israel and that the European Common Market reflected the ten horns of Daniel. Who is the antichrist of the day now? It seems to change with the decade.
One more chapter...
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)
Chapter 9 (A Form of Intellectualism)
And now, chapter 10, "God's Idea Men."
The final sentences of this chapter are worthy to start with: "Schaeffer, Falwell, and other self-appointed spokesmen of the Christian Right appeared, to casual observers, to reflect some kind of consensus. One must not underestimate the power in this illusion of solidarity--but one should not take it for reality either" (240).
1. This statement comes at the end of a section called "history is written by the victors," which tells the story of the conservative take-over of the Southern Baptist Convention. Prior to the 80s and 90s, the Baptists tended to be Arminians, were largely opposed to any kind of credal statement, and put a strong emphasis on "soul competency," the idea that each individual is only accountable before God.
But by the end of the century, the Southern Baptists were controlled by 5 point Reformed Calvinists and had added credal requirements like inerrancy to their core statements. Clear roles for men and women were added to their statements to prevent women in ministry. When I was at Asbury in the late 80s, there were still ordinations of women even in Kentucky, before Al Mohler's notorious purge of the faculty at Louisville Southern Baptist Seminary.
There is an important point here. It can feel like the Bible has an obvious meaning and that all contemporary evangelicals see it. This sets up evangelicalism to be the true elect, those who are truly following the Bible. What isn't remembered is that there was a thirty year political struggle through which a particular ideology consolidated its power. The current "clarity" of Scripture within contemporary evangelicalism is an example of history told by the winners.
2. The chapter begins with the influence of "Reformed presuppositionalism," such as that espoused by Schaeffer, on the American church. Schaeffer wrote, "People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize" (221). His mistake is that he is talking about large ideological systems. He is right that people have underlying values that they live by, but to equate them with overarching philosophical systems is to skew the discussion.
And people are inconsistent. We operate by different paradigms depending on what the area of life is. More primary are our drives and urges, not our thoughts--which often are rationalizations that aim to justify what we want to do. And to the extent to which we might operate by presuppositions, they tend to be micro-presuppositions rather than grand recits.
But we have the "high end" presuppositionalists of Alvin Plantinga and Nicolas Wolterstorff. They argued that belief in God is "properly basic." That is to say, belief in God is something that does not need proof but can be assumed like an axiom of geometry.
They could be right although obviously it is obviously a matter of dispute. I have not read Plantinga's tome where he sets this out (Warranted Christian Belief), but I suspect his claim connects with the ontological argument in some way. If it is impossible to conceive of existence itself without a necessary Being, then the existence of God might be considered properly basic.
I suspect this sort of presuppositionalism is compatible with Wesleyanism, although I consider it a foreign body within our theology. I believe pragmatism is more at home within Wesley-Arminianism, and I hope there will always be room for the more natural breed. By contrast, a whole army of IWU students was indoctrinated in presuppositionalism by one of IWU's best known twentieth century professors.
Rushdoony is another presuppositionist, so radical in his thinking that he wanted to bring back stoning disobedient children. He influenced conservative American thinking with a stark capitalist ideology that he fused with biblical interpretation, sanctifying a particular economic approach as the Christian approach.
John Whitcomb and Henry Morris gave rise to the creationist movement. It's easy to forget some of the diversity that used to exist on evolution in earlier times. They effectively squashed options like the "gap theory" and gave form to the current assumed consensus within fundamentalism. Again, we live at a time when the positions of fundamentalism seem obvious and seem a straightforward reading of the Bible to many, but this consensus was won over a half-century of American religious politics.
3. The final element in this chapter to mention are the envoys of the end times, Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. "Like Schaeffer's offhand references to Locke and Jung, Late Great Planet Earth made the reader feel smart, in the know, and personally involved in history's climax" (229). It is worthwhile noting how often the revealed antichrist has changed over the years. Lindsey was sure that the USSR was going to attack Israel and that the European Common Market reflected the ten horns of Daniel. Who is the antichrist of the day now? It seems to change with the decade.
One more chapter...
Sunday, February 09, 2014
Worthen: A Form of Intellectualism... (9)
Chapter 8 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)
And now, chapter 9, "Evangelicals' Great Matter." I lament that this book has taken so much of my time. I would rather be reading something else. But I believe it is important for someone with my particular skill set to be engaging the whims of religious culture. I view my engagement with these sorts of issues a ministry to evangelicalism and to my own faith community.
Those who control the story, control the future. Most people aren't interested in nuance--slogans and simple narratives win the day. Scholars, who usually deal in nuance and are often boring communicators, are thus easily and often lynched by the masses. I feel like someone needs to be carefully wading in these historical waters and offering simple but accurate counter-narratives.
1. Two names basically sum up this chapter. The first is Harold Lindsell, known for his incendiary 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible. His slogan? Inerrancy.
Simple. An easy idea to rally around. How could a scholar compete, full of nuance and knowledge of ancient genres unfamiliar to the person in the pew or the wealthy donor? Even to make a counter-argument sounds like you are against the Bible. As one Southern Baptist leader at the time put it, "it is no easy matter to bridge the gap between the scholarly historical approach and the views of the Bible which some people hold" (199).
Lindsell would have his revenge on Fuller, where he left in protest in 1962. He would paint a picture in his book of them as liberals abandoning Scripture--a narrative I heard from someone even last week. Here is Fuller's evil statement on the Bible: "All the books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, are the written word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice"
Lindsell wanted more and was instrumental in getting the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy written in 1978. Such a tool would help fight off trends like women in ministry and the way the church growth movement was contextualizing the gospel in new contexts. It would stem the tide of the charismatic movement with its emphasis on the Spirit speaking through Scripture.
"To argue that [his] inerrantist position represented the original view of the early Church Fathers and Protestant Reformers, Lindsell began with a string of quotations plucked from church history and shorn of context" (201). The meaning of words is not merely in quoting them (locution). It is in knowing what they meant within the context where they were spoken (illocution). Lindsell quoted the words, but gave them subtly different meanings, because he had quite different assumptions from a different time and place.
Yes, Christians have never thought of the Bible as having errors. But what is an error? And what meaning to the Bible were they saying did not have error?" Even the Reformers were not reading the text as a science or history book but as a book about faith and practice. Even Lindsell's old roommate and friend, Carl Henry, lamented that Lindsell had "shifted the public perception of the evangelical movement from its role as a dynamic life-growing force to a cult squabbling over inerrancy" (202).
Worse, he basically set conservative Christians on a warpath to devour each other, which made no one more godly, did great harm to the church internally, and turned lost souls off to Christ.
2. The second name in this chapter is Francis Schaeffer. Mark Noll, then the darling evangelical historian of Wheaton, had this to say about Francis Schaeffer to Newsweek: "the danger is that people will take [Schaeffer] for a scholar, which he is not. Evangelical historians are especially bothered by his simplified myth of America's Christian past" (218).
Worthen sums up his historiography in this way: "Schaeffer wowed audiences by explaining 500 years of intellectual history in a paragraph and a casual chalkboard diagram--but he did so with exaggeration, oversimplifications, and misinformation that would make a specialist cry" (216).
What was this grand narrative? It was one of decline. It was Schaeffer that made abortion the climax of a Western decline that he said started with Thomas Aquinas in the 1100s. Interestingly, it was Schaeffer who made abortion the centerpiece of conservative American Christian politics, to where even today many Christians can't even imagine a Christian voting for a Democratic candidate.
His book, How Should We Then Live?, was more than influential in ideas. It was a multi-media presentation. Evangelicals would now begin to enter the entertainment world to try to influence the popular imagination. He would revive the slogan, "Ideas have consequences" (from a 1948 book that instead looked to William of Ockham instead of Aquinas as the beginning of the end).
Schaeffer created a battle for civilization based in ideas. After all, Schaeffer had dabbled in the fundamentalist Calvinist world of Kuyper and Van Til. So it is predictable that he would see a decline of ideas at the root of civilization's decline, starting with the ridiculous notion that Aquinas stood at the fountainhead.
True decline, from a biblical standpoint, has to do with submission to God and love of our neighbor. Has love of neighbor declined in our world? I seriously doubt it. There was as much hatred and prejudice in the Middle Ages down to the civil rights era as ever. In fact, if anything, the Western world is more loving than ever toward the other.
Submission to God appears to be in decline, especially if you filter it through a question of what people believe. But are less people truly in submission to God than before? In truth, people who call themselves Christians have always used the name of God, even the Bible as a cover to do hateful things opposed to God! Were the fundamentalists pastors who rallied with the KKK more in submission to God than Bill Nye the science guy, even though he is an atheist?
I don't want to push too hard on Schaeffer's ideas here. I think he even influenced some of my early thinking on the last 500 years, at least indirectly. I believe that Schaeffer was a wonderful man and I wish I could have met him. I believe L'Abri must have been a wonderful place for people to find Christ. I think I would have enjoyed the warmth of this man, who believed in taking care of God's creation and helping those in need.
I have only pushed back because, as you know, ideas have consequences.
3. I also push back because these forces so easily capture popular imagination, so much so that my own tradition is infected. I didn't think much of it at the time, but what business did Wesleyans have going to Bill Gothard's seminars in the 70s, when his sentiments are vastly different from those of historical Wesleyanism?
In 1978, Nazarene scholar Mildred Wynkoop summed up my feelings well: young Nazarenes "are being drawn in to the many 'cultish' movements in our religious world, today... These include groups with a very strong Calvinist ground, often camouflaged by social activity or flashy philosophy... A one-man (or woman) operation... 'Un-Christianizes' all those who question or reject some theory of Scripture... Claiming to be a Shepherd over others (only Christ is Shepherd) rather than Servanthood, as Jesus and Paul indicated" (209).
Finally, this chapter covered the switch to the NIV that took place in the 70s. Interestingly, it was facilitated in reaction to The Living Bible. Next to the KJV, the NIV looked like a liberal force. But next to the Living Bible, it seemed conservative.
The bottom line of the NIV debate is that many people can't tell the difference between what is a matter of faith and what is a matter of tradition. A person's faith inevitably gets formed around whatever form of faith they grow up with. Accordingly, when a person says something about there not just being three wise men, they take that as an attack on faith rather than as a refining of faith.
So it was with the NIV. If you grew up with the ending of Mark, it seemed like an attack on faith to suggest it wasn't original. In reality, it was just a refining of the form of faith. Ironically, when the TNIV and then NIV2011 came out, those who had formed their faith around the old NIV made the same KJV complaints again and came up with the ESV.
Hear the conclusion of the matter: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again!
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)
And now, chapter 9, "Evangelicals' Great Matter." I lament that this book has taken so much of my time. I would rather be reading something else. But I believe it is important for someone with my particular skill set to be engaging the whims of religious culture. I view my engagement with these sorts of issues a ministry to evangelicalism and to my own faith community.
Those who control the story, control the future. Most people aren't interested in nuance--slogans and simple narratives win the day. Scholars, who usually deal in nuance and are often boring communicators, are thus easily and often lynched by the masses. I feel like someone needs to be carefully wading in these historical waters and offering simple but accurate counter-narratives.
1. Two names basically sum up this chapter. The first is Harold Lindsell, known for his incendiary 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible. His slogan? Inerrancy.
Simple. An easy idea to rally around. How could a scholar compete, full of nuance and knowledge of ancient genres unfamiliar to the person in the pew or the wealthy donor? Even to make a counter-argument sounds like you are against the Bible. As one Southern Baptist leader at the time put it, "it is no easy matter to bridge the gap between the scholarly historical approach and the views of the Bible which some people hold" (199).
Lindsell would have his revenge on Fuller, where he left in protest in 1962. He would paint a picture in his book of them as liberals abandoning Scripture--a narrative I heard from someone even last week. Here is Fuller's evil statement on the Bible: "All the books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, are the written word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice"
Lindsell wanted more and was instrumental in getting the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy written in 1978. Such a tool would help fight off trends like women in ministry and the way the church growth movement was contextualizing the gospel in new contexts. It would stem the tide of the charismatic movement with its emphasis on the Spirit speaking through Scripture.
"To argue that [his] inerrantist position represented the original view of the early Church Fathers and Protestant Reformers, Lindsell began with a string of quotations plucked from church history and shorn of context" (201). The meaning of words is not merely in quoting them (locution). It is in knowing what they meant within the context where they were spoken (illocution). Lindsell quoted the words, but gave them subtly different meanings, because he had quite different assumptions from a different time and place.
Yes, Christians have never thought of the Bible as having errors. But what is an error? And what meaning to the Bible were they saying did not have error?" Even the Reformers were not reading the text as a science or history book but as a book about faith and practice. Even Lindsell's old roommate and friend, Carl Henry, lamented that Lindsell had "shifted the public perception of the evangelical movement from its role as a dynamic life-growing force to a cult squabbling over inerrancy" (202).
Worse, he basically set conservative Christians on a warpath to devour each other, which made no one more godly, did great harm to the church internally, and turned lost souls off to Christ.
2. The second name in this chapter is Francis Schaeffer. Mark Noll, then the darling evangelical historian of Wheaton, had this to say about Francis Schaeffer to Newsweek: "the danger is that people will take [Schaeffer] for a scholar, which he is not. Evangelical historians are especially bothered by his simplified myth of America's Christian past" (218).
Worthen sums up his historiography in this way: "Schaeffer wowed audiences by explaining 500 years of intellectual history in a paragraph and a casual chalkboard diagram--but he did so with exaggeration, oversimplifications, and misinformation that would make a specialist cry" (216).
What was this grand narrative? It was one of decline. It was Schaeffer that made abortion the climax of a Western decline that he said started with Thomas Aquinas in the 1100s. Interestingly, it was Schaeffer who made abortion the centerpiece of conservative American Christian politics, to where even today many Christians can't even imagine a Christian voting for a Democratic candidate.
His book, How Should We Then Live?, was more than influential in ideas. It was a multi-media presentation. Evangelicals would now begin to enter the entertainment world to try to influence the popular imagination. He would revive the slogan, "Ideas have consequences" (from a 1948 book that instead looked to William of Ockham instead of Aquinas as the beginning of the end).
Schaeffer created a battle for civilization based in ideas. After all, Schaeffer had dabbled in the fundamentalist Calvinist world of Kuyper and Van Til. So it is predictable that he would see a decline of ideas at the root of civilization's decline, starting with the ridiculous notion that Aquinas stood at the fountainhead.
True decline, from a biblical standpoint, has to do with submission to God and love of our neighbor. Has love of neighbor declined in our world? I seriously doubt it. There was as much hatred and prejudice in the Middle Ages down to the civil rights era as ever. In fact, if anything, the Western world is more loving than ever toward the other.
Submission to God appears to be in decline, especially if you filter it through a question of what people believe. But are less people truly in submission to God than before? In truth, people who call themselves Christians have always used the name of God, even the Bible as a cover to do hateful things opposed to God! Were the fundamentalists pastors who rallied with the KKK more in submission to God than Bill Nye the science guy, even though he is an atheist?
I don't want to push too hard on Schaeffer's ideas here. I think he even influenced some of my early thinking on the last 500 years, at least indirectly. I believe that Schaeffer was a wonderful man and I wish I could have met him. I believe L'Abri must have been a wonderful place for people to find Christ. I think I would have enjoyed the warmth of this man, who believed in taking care of God's creation and helping those in need.
I have only pushed back because, as you know, ideas have consequences.
3. I also push back because these forces so easily capture popular imagination, so much so that my own tradition is infected. I didn't think much of it at the time, but what business did Wesleyans have going to Bill Gothard's seminars in the 70s, when his sentiments are vastly different from those of historical Wesleyanism?
In 1978, Nazarene scholar Mildred Wynkoop summed up my feelings well: young Nazarenes "are being drawn in to the many 'cultish' movements in our religious world, today... These include groups with a very strong Calvinist ground, often camouflaged by social activity or flashy philosophy... A one-man (or woman) operation... 'Un-Christianizes' all those who question or reject some theory of Scripture... Claiming to be a Shepherd over others (only Christ is Shepherd) rather than Servanthood, as Jesus and Paul indicated" (209).
Finally, this chapter covered the switch to the NIV that took place in the 70s. Interestingly, it was facilitated in reaction to The Living Bible. Next to the KJV, the NIV looked like a liberal force. But next to the Living Bible, it seemed conservative.
The bottom line of the NIV debate is that many people can't tell the difference between what is a matter of faith and what is a matter of tradition. A person's faith inevitably gets formed around whatever form of faith they grow up with. Accordingly, when a person says something about there not just being three wise men, they take that as an attack on faith rather than as a refining of faith.
So it was with the NIV. If you grew up with the ending of Mark, it seemed like an attack on faith to suggest it wasn't original. In reality, it was just a refining of the form of faith. Ironically, when the TNIV and then NIV2011 came out, those who had formed their faith around the old NIV made the same KJV complaints again and came up with the ESV.
Hear the conclusion of the matter: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again!
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God...
... subtitled, "How I Grew Up as One of The Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back."
At the mid-life age of 42, I would be hard pressed if you asked me to tell you who my heroes are. I deeply love and respect my parents. As parents they would be hard to beat in my book--I don't come close. My wife is a champion for the oppressed. Hire her if you want a go-to person for children who ask Santa for a bed for Christmas. My heart breaks to realize the situations some kids are growing up in out there.
OK, OK, I do remember in the past being in awe of people whose names I had read when I first started this scholar thing. I would walk around AAR/SBL looking at the name tags. Wow--Thomas Altizer! Or in England I remember watching Charles Cranfield walking down the street all hunched over--Wow! Or in Tübingen I remember how surreal it was to eat my Döner Kebab on the steps of the Stiftskirche and watch Martin Hengel casually stroll by.
Now I just envy these guys :-) Tom Wright is just a guy like me... just a little more famous and better published and could get a job anywhere and I guess he's the Bishop of Durham too.
All that is to say that I've not been offended yet as I read Schaeffer Jr.'s new book. I used to deeply admire Francis Schaeffer, but I never worshipped him the way so many do him and C. S. Lewis. And indeed in some ways for me he came to be simply another fundamentalist thinker, ironically the type of image Schaeffer Jr. says his mom strongly resisted. I continue to respect the man, but I don't think I would recommend anyone read him.
The strange thing about this book--that some apparently are decrying--is that it actually makes me feel good about Francis Schaeffer again. The book is hilarious--I can tell that Franky takes after his apparently exuberant mother. Not in the sense of nakedness, but I get the sense of Frank as a bit of an "exhibitionist," a show off. But he does it openly and with panache. Somehow it seems appropriate that Carrie Fisher has been on the talk circuit at the same time as Franky is making the rounds! Franky and his mom come off manic (and his dad depressive).
Well, all of that is to say that it's a very enjoyable read, especially for someone like me who comes from a not dissimilar background, well, apart from the whole growing up in the Swiss Alps with Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Barbara Bush coming for dinner every once and a while.
I'm only 25 pages in and probably won't say much more if I combat my ADHD long enough actually to finish the thing. I tried to read some this afternoon from a monograph in the Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft series, but it just wasn't working for me. But salacious details by a prodigal son about his famous but now dead parents and grandparents, now that kept my attention for a full 25 pages before I had to blog!
At the mid-life age of 42, I would be hard pressed if you asked me to tell you who my heroes are. I deeply love and respect my parents. As parents they would be hard to beat in my book--I don't come close. My wife is a champion for the oppressed. Hire her if you want a go-to person for children who ask Santa for a bed for Christmas. My heart breaks to realize the situations some kids are growing up in out there.
OK, OK, I do remember in the past being in awe of people whose names I had read when I first started this scholar thing. I would walk around AAR/SBL looking at the name tags. Wow--Thomas Altizer! Or in England I remember watching Charles Cranfield walking down the street all hunched over--Wow! Or in Tübingen I remember how surreal it was to eat my Döner Kebab on the steps of the Stiftskirche and watch Martin Hengel casually stroll by.
Now I just envy these guys :-) Tom Wright is just a guy like me... just a little more famous and better published and could get a job anywhere and I guess he's the Bishop of Durham too.
All that is to say that I've not been offended yet as I read Schaeffer Jr.'s new book. I used to deeply admire Francis Schaeffer, but I never worshipped him the way so many do him and C. S. Lewis. And indeed in some ways for me he came to be simply another fundamentalist thinker, ironically the type of image Schaeffer Jr. says his mom strongly resisted. I continue to respect the man, but I don't think I would recommend anyone read him.
The strange thing about this book--that some apparently are decrying--is that it actually makes me feel good about Francis Schaeffer again. The book is hilarious--I can tell that Franky takes after his apparently exuberant mother. Not in the sense of nakedness, but I get the sense of Frank as a bit of an "exhibitionist," a show off. But he does it openly and with panache. Somehow it seems appropriate that Carrie Fisher has been on the talk circuit at the same time as Franky is making the rounds! Franky and his mom come off manic (and his dad depressive).
Well, all of that is to say that it's a very enjoyable read, especially for someone like me who comes from a not dissimilar background, well, apart from the whole growing up in the Swiss Alps with Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Barbara Bush coming for dinner every once and a while.
I'm only 25 pages in and probably won't say much more if I combat my ADHD long enough actually to finish the thing. I tried to read some this afternoon from a monograph in the Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft series, but it just wasn't working for me. But salacious details by a prodigal son about his famous but now dead parents and grandparents, now that kept my attention for a full 25 pages before I had to blog!
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