What ever happened to inspiration?

That is what I wonder when I read Karl Giberson and the other folks at Biologos. The mission of Biologos is to help the church embrace theistic evolution. Part of that project is to reject the historicity of Adam and Eve, the fall, the flood and a great many other events recorded in the Bible. Of course, this cannot be done apart from a diminished view of the Bible's inspiration. To help this along, last year Biologos ran a series of articles by Kent Sparks savaging the doctrine of the Bible's inerrancy. The message is clear: "We love the Bible, but only the true bits. Those parts of the Bible that are intellectually unsatisfying for us must be rejected."

Al Mohler comments on a recent article by Dr. Giberson published by CNN's Belief Blog and a new book coauthored by Francis Collins and Giberson entitled The Language of Science and Faith.

In his new book, The Language of Science and Faith, written with Francis S. Collins, readers will find this strange paragraph:

Biblical interpretation falls short without an understanding of biblical inspiration, of course, as we do not suggest that the Bible is simply another book to be interpreted. But we do a great disservice to the concept and power of inspiration when we reduce it to mere factual accuracy, as though God’s role were nothing more than a divine fact checker, preventing the biblical authors from making mistakes. A dead and lifeless text, like the phone book, can be factually accurate. The inspiration of the Bible is dynamic and emerges through engagement with readers.

That paragraph is, quite simply, one of the most ridiculous statements concerning the Bible one might ever imagine. Who has ever argued that the divine inspirationof the Bible is reduced to “mere factual accuracy”? Giberson’s dismissive language about God as “nothing more than a divine fact checker” is sheer nonsense. Who has ever made such a proposal?

The conclusion of the paragraph is an embarrassing non sequitur. It is patently untrue that only a “dead and lifeless text, like a phone book” can be factually accurate. Giberson and Collins reveal their true understanding of biblicalinspiration when they locate it, not in the authorship of the text at all, but in the modern act of reading the text.

As they make their argument for theistic evolution, Giberson and Collins embrace a form of Open Theism and argue, quite consistently with arguments common to BioLogos, against the historicity of Adam and Eve.

They end the book with their own version of “The Grand Narrative of Creation.” This is their climactic conclusion of the narrative:

Eventually, the most advanced of the life forms on the planet, human beings, become deeply religious. Throughout the history of our species belief in God or gods has been close to universal. Abstractions like right and wrong, the meaning of life, the where everything came from have become critically important questions. The religious impulse developed into one of the deepest aspects of our complicated understanding of ourselves.

They conclude: “And God saw that it was good.”

Here is their own rendering of what it looks like when the “Book of Nature” trumps the Bible. Just compare their “Grand Narrative of Creation” with Genesis.

Read the entire post HERE.

What price credibility?

Dr. Darrel Falk is celebrating the impact of Biologos on the evangelical church. Indeed, he has declared the "dawning of a new day." At the same time he laments the continuing influence of men like Al Mohler and John MacArthur. Dr. Falk will understand, I trust, that there are many of us who do not share his concern over Drs. Mohler and MacArthur. Likewise, many of us do not celebrate the possibility of greater numbers of evangelicals embracing the views of Biologos.

In a recent article Al Mohler points out that Biologos has been advancing far more than the theory of evolution only. Quoting Dr. Falk, Mohler writes:

Will we ever be able to show the followers of Albert Mohler, John MacArthur and others that Christian theology doesn’t stand or fall on how we understand Genesis 1 or the question of whether Adam and Eve were the sole genetic progenitors of the human race? These are extremely critical issues to many and the task of showing in a convincing manner that evangelical theology doesn’t depend on the age of the earth, and it doesn’t depend upon whether Adam was made directly from dust will likely take decades before it will be convincing to all.

So, Dr. Falk sees the task as that of convincing us that evangelical theology “doesn’t depend” upon affirmations about the age of the earth or the historicity of Adam as “made directly from dust” — but Falk envisions this task as lasting decades “before it will be convincing to all.” With all due respect, I think he will need a longer calendar. Most frustratingly, Dr. Falk’s statement does not acknowledge the fact that the arguments published by BioLogos go far beyond even these important concerns. Articles at BioLogos go so far as to suggest that the Apostle Paul was simply wrong to believe that Adam was an historical person. A recent BioLogos essay argues that Adam and Eve were likely “a couple of Neolithic farmers in the Near East” to whom God revealed himself “in a special way.” There is a consistent denial of any possibility that Adam and Eve are the genetic parents of the entire human race. The BioLogos approach also denies the historical nature of the Fall, with all of its cosmic consequences. BioLogos has published explicit calls to deny the inerrancy of the Bible. The concerns do not stop here.

The Bible reveals Adam to be an historical human being, the first human being, and the father of all humanity. Adam is included in biblical genealogies, including the genealogy of Jesus Christ. If the arguments offered thus far by BioLogos for resolving the “theological challenges” associated with “evolutionary creation” are any indication of what is likely to come in the future, Dr. Falk and his colleagues will wait a very long time indeed for evangelicals to join their club.

In his Biologos post, Dr. Falk makes a very telling comment: "Scientific knowledge is not deeply flawed and we cannot allow ourselves to be led down this pathway any longer." Falk likens any opposition to evolution as damaging to the church's witness. He reasons that if the church insists on believing in things like the special creation of Adam and Eve and the historicity of the Fall then the scientific community will not take us seriously. Of course, our cultured despisers do not take Bilogos seriously. After all, they believe in God. For this very reason, Biologos has been mocked by well known atheists. I ask you, what will they think of the church if we embrace Darwin's theory of evolution but insist on holding to other such anti-scientific claims as the virgin birth, deity, atonement, and resurrection of Christ?

The "descriptive theology" of Biologos

Over at the Biologos, Mark Sprinkle has written an open letter challenging Al Mohler's conclusions about their organization. However, Dr. Sprinkle's letter is frustrating in it inaccuracy about what Mohler has actually written and said. But even more significant is what the letter reveals about the theological trajectory of Biologos. Once the inerrancy of God's Word is dismissed so too is its authority, uniqueness, and sufficiency. It seems the folks at Biologos believe that theology is merely "descriptive" and not "prescriptive."

Mohler has responded:

The writers for BioLogos have been unsparing in their criticism of evangelicals who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible or are proponents of either Intelligent Design or creationism. They initiated a public debate by presenting their arguments in the public square. But now, it appears, they really do not want a public debate at all. They want a one-way conversation.

On November 8, an article appeared at the BioLogos site that was explicitly addressed to me. The author, Mark Sprinkle, had courteously informed me by e-mail on November 7 that the article would appear the next day. And so it did.

In his article, Dr. Sprinkle uses the account of Peter and Cornelius from Acts 10 to argue that “our theology is descriptive, not prescriptive; it is our collective and halting attempt to describe in coherent terms what we know of God by what we have seen of His acts and what we have read in His Word—and, above all else, by what we have seen in the acts of the Word, Jesus.” That argument points very clearly in the direction of minimizing theology and doctrine, but it is also false. Unless a church forfeits all doctrinal responsibility, at least some theology is always prescriptive.

But theology, he argues, “is put to the test not just by our logic, but by the witness of what God is doing in our lives and in the lives of others around the world.” He then states this: “Evidence of the Spirit at work is the only true measure we have of our theology; all other measures, including whether it fits our carefully-reasoned arguments of who is in and who is out, are vanity.”

That is an interesting statement, but it is nonsensical unless there is some means of evaluating what is and is not authentic evidence of the Spirit at work. And that, of course, would mean some kind of biblical and theological test. The effort to escape theology gets us nowhere.

Dr. Sprinkle then turns to me specifically, charging that I regard those involved with BioLogos to be “confused Christians” at best. He claims that my criticism of the arguments made by figures associated with BioLogos amount to my effort to limit “God’s ability to redeem and transform whomever He so pleases, in whatever manner He so pleases.” I would greatly appreciate any reference to where I have ever addressed such an issue with reference to BioLogos. There is none. At the same time, Dr. Sprinkle’s unavoidable implication is that God’s Spirit moves in ways contrary to God’s Word — and that I do flatly and energetically reject.

Dr. Sprinkle writes with concern about “Dr. Mohler’s repeated implications and suggestions, if not outright pronouncements, that I and anyone else who does not reject evolutionary processes are, therefore, not Christian in any but a nominal or diminished way, not authentic followers of Jesus no matter what we say and despite the evidence of the Holy Spirit both in us and working through us.”

At this point, given the public nature of this statement, I have to ask the only question I know to ask. Can these people read? I defy anyone to locate a single sentence where I have ever questioned the salvation of anyone in any context where I have addressed anything related to BioLogos. I have never questioned their salvation, nor have I attempted to interrogate their hearts. I accept at face value that their ambitions and intentions in their own minds are worthy. I cannot read their souls.

I can read their words, however. Their theological arguments are published in the public arena. They are not shy about making their proposals, and they call for a radical reformulation of evangelical doctrine. Their assaults upon biblical inerrancy have not been made in private conversations, but in public discourse. Their argument that the Apostle Paul was wrong to believe in an historical Adam and an historical Fall was made in public, as was their denial of common descent through Adam.

They will have to take responsibility for these arguments. They should expect no less than a spirited debate over their proposals, and it is nothing short of bewildering that they now ask, in effect, for a pass from all theological scrutiny. They accuse conservative evangelicals of driving evangelicalism into an “intellectual cul-de-sac” and into the status of an intellectual “cult,” and then they have the audacity to complain of the “tone” of those who argue that their proposals amount to a theological disaster.

Virtually every form of theological liberalism arises from an attempt to rescue Christian theology from what is perceived to be an intellectual embarrassment — whether the virgin conception of Christ, the historicity of the miracles recorded in the Bible, or, in our immediate context, the inerrancy of Scripture and the Bible’s account of creation.

Dr. Sprinkle kindly invites me “to come and see what I see in the hearts and lives of people in the BioLogos community.” I am willing and eager to enter into any conversation that serves the cause of the gospel. But a conversation that serves the cause of the gospel cannot avoid talking about what the gospel is — and that requires theology.

BioLogos is a movement that asserts theological arguments in the public square in order to convince evangelical Christians to accept their proposals. They now have the audacity to ask for a pass from theological responsibility. That is the one thing they may not have.

Read Dr. Mohler's entire response HERE.

God and Evolution

The fires of debate among Christians concerning evolution have been getting a lot of fuel lately. In one corner is Biologos which has been seeking to convince evangelicals to embrace evolution and deny the Scripture's inerrancy. In the other corner are Al Mohler, the Discovery Institute, and many others who uphold the special creation of man and the Scripture's full trustworthiness.

Kevin Deyoung has posted a helpful interview with Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute and editor of a new book critiquing "theistic evolution."

Hi Jay, thanks for doing another interview for us. Maybe you can start by telling us what you’re up to these days. You’ve left Grand Rapids and are back in Seattle, correct?

Yes, I left Acton full time in November 2008. In 2009, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and worked on a couple of projects related to economics. In September 2009, I also started writing as a Contributing Editor at the The American and the Enterprise blog at American Enterprise Institute, and returned to Discovery Institute full time in February 2010. We’re living in Seattle now, just a few miles from the Discovery Institute offices.

You edited this new book “God and Evolution.” Who are a few of the others contributors and why did you feel compelled to do this book?

Other than me, the book contributors are John West, Stephen Meyer, Casey Luskin, William Dembski, Jonathan Witt, Jonathan Wells, Logan Gage, David Klinghoffer, and Denyse O’Leary. All of these folks are associated with the intelligent design movement, so you might wonder why a bunch of ID folks would get together to write about God and evolution. We did so for several reasons. First, in recent years, there’s been a resurgence of attempts to reconcile theism with Darwinian evolution. Many of these “theistic evolutionists” have claimed that ID is bad theology. Some have even called it blasphemous! These accusations needed a response. Second, while intelligent design arguments are based on public evidence and standard forms of reasoning, the debate over design obviously has theological implications. Finally, speaking for myself, I’ve grown increasingly concerned that many well-meaning Christians are confused about the question of “evolution.” Too many people seem satisfied to say that evolution is just God’s way of creating without being clear on what that means.

We’ve all heard the phrase, but what exactly is “theistic evolution?”

The problem with the word “evolution” is that it means many different things some trivial, some significant and controversial. We use the term “theistic evolution” in the book to refer to those who seek to reconcile more or less traditional theism with Darwinian evolution. Darwinism has always been defined as a purposeless process, so reconciling it with theism is a grade A dilemma. If, in contrast, a person believes that God guided an evolutionary process in creating the various forms of life, they might believe in “evolution” in the sense of common ancestry, but their view would be very un-Darwinian. They would be a design proponent rather than a “theistic evolutionist” in the sense that we use the term.

I know you’ve got a whole book on this topic, so I don’t expect you to rehearse all the arguments, but perhaps you could briefly highlight one or two scientific problems with theisitc evolution?

The key scientific problems with theistic evolution are identical with the key scientific problems with Darwin’s theory. Though we know that Darwin’s mechanism can explain some trivial things, such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria and variations in finch beaks, there’s no evidence that random genetic mutations and natural selection can create major new systems in biology. On the contrary. Much of what we know suggests that Darwin’s “mechanism” is quite limited in scope. One of the popular arguments theistic evolutionists use against ID proponents is the idea that most of our DNA is “junk.” Francis Collins (head of the NIH) is quite fond of this argument. You would expect flotsam and jetsam left over from the Darwinian process, according to Collins, if the system were cobbled together by a mindless process, but not if the system had been designed.

A decade and a half ago, some ID proponents predicted that many of these so-called non-coding regions (regions that don’t code for proteins) would eventually be found to have important functions. Well, evidence for important functions has been reported for years in the scientific literature. It’s becoming clear that some religious scholars were so quick to accommodate Darwinism that they didn’t check the evidence carefully.

You also talk about philosophical and theological problems. Do you think theisitc evolution presents dangers to orthodox Christianity?

Read the entire interview HERE.

Theological Quicksand

Once the authority of Scripture is dismissed in some things it is not long before it will be dismissed in all things.

Karl Giberson over at Biologos continues to reveal more of his theological cards. This is no surprise to those who have been warning about the theological quicksand of subordinating biblical authority to scientific paradigms. So, in a sense, Giberson has done us a favor with his latest articles at Biologos.

Al Mohler comments on Giberson's latest, but not surprising assertion that "science does indeed trump religious truth about the natural world."

The folks at BioLogos continue with a fierce intensity to press their case for theistic evolution. In so doing, they are making the arguments that are essential to their case that Christianity and evolutionary theory are compatible. The arguments they are now making are integral to their cause, and they are amazingly, even breathtakingly candid.

In a recent article series responding to atheistic scientist Jerry Coyne, Professor Karl Giberson of Eastern Nazarene College rejects Coyne’s insistence that evolution precludes theism. Coyne, one of Darwin’s most ardent defenders, seems to operate under the quaint idea that Christians are marked by belief in an interventionist God and a confidence that the Bible is true.

Coyne also seems to believe that Christian theologians are not deists, and he is profoundly right. He wrote of “some theologians with a deistic bent,” who insist that evolution and Christianity are compatible, but who are in no way representative of true Christianity. Sometimes it takes an atheist to see the truth in a theological argument. Coyne strikes gold when he writes: “The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.”

Coyne is one of the most recognized authorities on evolution in the world today. He sees those who argue for an accommodation of evolutionary science and religious belief as either dishonest or delusional. He is increasingly frustrated with scientists who make what he sees as a fallacious argument — that Christianity and evolution can be reconciled. “Attempts to reconcile God and evolution keep rolling off the intellectual assembly line,” he laments. “It never stops, because the reconciliation never works.”

In a five-part series at BioLogos, Professor Giberson seeks to refute Coyne’s argument. Now, Professor Giberson does land a few well-placed intellectual punches on Coyne’s absolute naturalism, but he does great damage to the Christian faith in so doing. At the same time, he ends up proving Coyne’s central point.

Read Mohler's entire post HERE.

Not friends after all?

Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, a scientist and former believer has finally settled the debate between science and Christianity. It seems that the two cannot be friends after all. Of course Dr. Coyne's presupposition is that religious faith is hopelessly nonsensical. His religious fervor is devoted to his preferred worldview which has no space for a God to whom he must give account. This is nothing new of course. Richard Dawkins sees the same incompatibility. But in light of the folks at Biologos wanting to give away the store in order to please the high priests of scientism I found Coyne's words instructive.

As a scientist and a former believer, I see this as bunk. Science and faith are fundamentally incompatible, and for precisely the same reason that irrationality and rationality are incompatible. They are different forms of inquiry, with only one, science, equipped to find real truth. And while they may have a dialogue, it’s not a constructive one. Science helps religion only by disproving its claims, while religion has nothing to add to science.

You see, it is not so much that Coyne and his ilk reject the biblical creation account but that they reject the first four words of the Bible. Under the tutelage of Biologos we can give away Genesis 1-11, most of the Old Testament, and even key parts of the New Testament and scientific opinion-makers still will not be satisfied. They will not allow us into their club until we reject "in the beginning God".

Al Mohler weighs in HERE.

Can Biologos Save Christianity?

Dr. Karl Giberson has apologized to Al Mohler for his schoolyard tactics of "debate". As I mention in an earlier post, Dr. Giberson, in a piece for the Huffington Post, accused Dr. Mohler of not being interested in the truth. While I would quibble with some of the details of Giberson's apology, it is not mine to accept or reject the apology which seems to be sincere.

However, the problem still remains that Giberson and his cohorts at Biologos continue to do just exactly what Mohler and many others contend. That is, the Biologos program is inherently hostile to the doctrines of God, creation, man, sin, and redemption revealed in the Scriptures. Astonishingly, Dr. Giberson states that the work of Biologos to bring about the full embrace of Darwinism within the church is for the purpose of saving Christianity. I don't know which is worse: the ignorance or arrogance of such a statement.

Giberson writes:

Is it not here that we find the central truth of our faith? Our sinful nature is a simple reality… But is it not possible that we might have different ideas about how we came to have that nature? Does the saving power of Jesus vanish if sin becomes something that developed through natural history, rather than appeared all at once in the Garden of Eden? It seems to me that there is a conversation to have here, beyond simply drawing a line in the sand. Satisfactory answers to questions like these are truly ‘How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.’

At BioLogos we have made our peace with evolution, and it has been liberating and even faith-affirming. We encourage conversations to further that agenda and make no excuses for that. We are not destroying Christianity. We are saving it. (emphasis mine).

In related news, Al Mohler comments on an article by John Farrell in the Wall Street Journal.

The American literary critic Frederick Crews once spoke of defenders of evolutionary theory who attempt to make Darwinism appear more congenial to the Christian faith than it truly is. These defenders, Crews wrote, present a vision of Darwin and Darwinism that “is often prettified to make it safe for doctrines that he himself was sadly compelled to leave behind.” The prettifying of evolution continues, even in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Writing in the paper’s weekly “Houses of Worship” column, John Farrell argues that the 60th anniversary of the Roman Catholic Church’s encyclical Humani Generis should be cause for celebration, since that historic document, issued by Pope Pius XII, “confirmed, in broad terms, that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the scientific theory of evolution.”

However, As Dr. Mohler points out, the Catholic Church continues to maintain that any theory of evolution that denies human ascent from the man Adam and the historicity of the Fall is incompatible with Christianity. This of course is the proverbial rub. There simply is no way to be committed to Darwinian evolution and at the same time maintain belief in human ascent from a specially created Adam as well as the historical Fall which is affirmed by both Jesus and Paul.

Mohler points out that Farrell "affirms the work of the late Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, who 're-interpreted Genesis in light of evolution, arguing that the story of Adam and Eve needed to be read metaphorically.' He also applauds John Haught at Georgetown University, who proposes 'that the new cosmology of the expanding universe and the evolution of life require a more dynamic sense of God’s role in a world that is still not complete, a work in progress.'"

But this "more dynamic sense of God's role" has profound implications.

Actually, John Haught argues that the entire structure of Christian theology should be recast in light of evolution. In his recent book Making Sense of Evolution, Haught asserts that “Darwin has altered our understanding of almost everything that concerns theology.”

Let no one doubt just how comprehensive Haught’s alteration of Christian theology will turn out to be. “Other disciplines such as geology, cosmology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, computer science, and medicine have already undergone a major retooling in the wake of Darwin’s findings,” he asserts. “Can theology realistically expect to escape a major metamorphosis?”

In Making Sense of Evolution, Haught provides ample evidence of what this “major metamorphosis” would mean. Every doctrine is brought to terms with evolutionary theory, including God. The revised deity of Haught’s evolutionary model is inseparable from his creation and stripped of sovereignty.

This kind of theological revisionism is not limited to Roman Catholic theologians, of course. John Weaver, a former Baptist minister and geologist who currently teaches at Regent’s Park College at the University of Oxford, also argues that we must surrender belief in an historical Adam and an historical Fall. Adam is a
symbolic, rather than a genetic head of humanity, he asserts. As for the Fall, he argues: “Within the movement of evolutionary development, there must have been a moment when Homo sapiens came to full moral consciousness for the first time.” He suggests that a proposed “bottleneck” in the evolutionary past probably reduced human populations to “fairly low numbers for a time,” and that this made “the significant moment of moral choice even more critical for humankind as a whole.” The historicity of Genesis 3 is just dismissed.

Read Mohler's entire article HERE.

Al Mohler responds to Karl Giberson

As I posted last week, Karl Giberson of Biologos apparently thought it was a good idea to write an article attacking Al Mohler over at the Huffington Post. The tone of Giberson's article, his failure to actually respond to Mohler's thesis, and his remarkably poor choice of venue are worth further conversation. However, I am happy to say that Dr. Mohler has responded in a way that will hopefully help Dr. Giberson to stay on the subject at hand: Is human evolution compatible with biblical faith?

I understand why Giberson wants to avoid that thesis. It is a monumental, indeed impossible, task to prove that a mythical Genesis record with an accompanying denial of the historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall is compatible with biblical orthodoxy. But this seems to be the clear program for Biologos.

The article begins by demonstrating that Giberson's criticism of a statement made by Mohler in a recent address was overstated.

I have read your posting several times, and it seems that your central complaint comes down to one or possibly two sentences in my address to the 2010 Ligonier Ministries National Conference. Indeed, you provide a link to the transcript of my address that was posted at the BioLogos site. You point to this section of my address: “Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged in all of its diversity, fecundity, and specialization. Darwin left on his expedition to prove the theory of evolution.”

You complain that this was a misrepresentation of Darwin, and you answer that with considerable bombast. In your words: “Of course, Mohler may simply have made a mistake. He is, after all, a theologian and not a historian. He could have gotten this wrong idea from any number of his fellow anti-Darwinians. However, I don’t think so. In his address he read from my book Saving Darwin, in which I took some pains to correct the all-too-common misrepresentation of Darwin he presented. So, unless he was just cherry-picking ideas from my book that he wanted to assault, he should have known better. But let us bend over backwards here and give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps his only real encounter with Saving Darwin was an instruction to an assistant to ‘find something in Giberson’s book that I can ridicule in my speech.’”

No, I can assure you that my encounter with Saving Darwin comes through reading the book quite thoroughly and more than once. You are at great pains to present an understanding of Darwin that will appeal to conservative Christians who are committed to biblical Christianity. You have a great challenge in this respect, and I seriously doubt you will make much headway. You are determined to convince biblical Christians to accept evolution. I seriously doubt you will make much progress through your book.

In making my argument, I did not need to “cherry-pick” ideas from your book. Nor do I need to misrepresent Darwin and his views. I would be most interested and concerned to find that I have in any way misquoted or misrepresented you. I am confident that your larger problem with the Christian public is in being understood, rather than in being misunderstood. You are straightforward in your celebration of evolution, and you utterly fail to demonstrate how an embrace of evolution can be reconciled with biblical Christianity. Your rejection of an historical Adam and Eve is one precise point at which the Gospel of Christ is undermined, and your proposed “new and better way to understand the origins of sin” is incompatible with the Bible’s clear teaching.

The theory of evolution is incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ even as it is in direct conflict with any faithful reading of the Scriptures. Darwin’s historic role in the development of evolutionary theory is central and significant, but the theological objections to evolution are not centered in the person of Darwin, but in the structure and implications of his theory of natural selection.

Mohler continues by pressing the antithesis between evolutionary theory as advanced by Biologos and biblical Christianity. He challenges Giberson's thesis that Darwin had been an orthodox Christian. Mohler shows quite clearly that Giberson has at best erred in casting Darwin as a conventional Christian believer.

And if a misrepresentation of Charles Darwin is the central issue, I must insist that it is you who offers the truly dangerous misrepresentation. In Saving Darwin, you attempt at great lengths to present Charles Darwin as a rather conventional and orthodox Christian, prior to his later loss of faith. You state that he was “born to a well-to-do British family who, despite having some unorthodox characters listed in the family Bible, raised him in the Anglican Church, educated him in an Anglican school, and put him on the train to Edinburgh to study medicine.”

This hardly seems adequate or straightforward. The “some unorthodox characters listed in the family Bible” included both his father and his paternal grandfather. His mother’s family was Unitarian in belief, rejecting the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. Even as Charles Darwin was nominally involved in the Anglican Church, largely through the influence of his sister and brother-in-law after the death of his mother, his involvement and exposure appears to me largely incidental to his life. He later married a woman of Unitarian convictions as well.

It is certainly true that Charles Darwin was directed to become an Anglican clergyman by his unbelieving father, but this was a social tradition for second sons of the developing British middle class. As Randal Keynes, Darwin’s own great-great-grandson explains, “His idea was to become a country parson, caring for his parishioners but living for natural history.” And, as the authoritative biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore recount, “Dr. Darwin, a confirmed freethinker, was sensible and shrewd. He had only to look around him, recall the vicarages he had visited, [and] ponder the country parsons he entertained at home. One did not have to be a believer to see that an aimless son with a penchant for field sports would fit in nicely. Was the church not a haven for dullards and dawdlers, the last resort of spendthrifts? What calling but the highest for those whose sense of calling was nil?”

Of far greater concern is your tendency to appear to agree with some of Darwin’s complaints against biblical Christianity. You claim that he “boarded the Beagle with his childhood Christian faith intact,” but then add, “although he had begun to wonder about the historicity of the more fanciful Old Testament stories, like the Tower of Babel.” This is insignificant? Are we to understand that you, too, see that biblical account as “fanciful”? You explain that Darwin, “like most thoughtful believers,” began to distance himself from the doctrine of hell — a doctrine you describe as “a secondary doctrine that even many conservatives reject.”

If your intention in Saving Darwin is to show “how to be a Christian and believe in evolution,” what you have actually succeeded in doing is to show how much doctrine Christianity has to surrender in order to accommodate itself to evolution. In doing this, you and your colleagues at BioLogos are actually doing us all a great service. You are showing us what the acceptance of evolution actually costs, in terms of theological concessions.

I stand by my address in full, and only wish I had been able to address these issues at even greater length in that context. I plan to do that over the next few months. I greatly regret that you have committed yourself to a cause that I can see as incompatible with the Scripture and destructive to the Christian faith.

I look forward to Dr. Mohler's continued interaction with the theories flying about at Biologos. I hope that their contributors will show better judgement in their responses that has been so far demonstrated by Dr. Giberson.

Birds of a Feather

I noticed over the weekend that Biologos is attacking Al Mohler (once again). This is no surprise since Dr. Mohler is taking them to task for their efforts to rid the church of the doctrine of the Scripture's inerrancy. What interested me about this latest attack against Mohler, authored by Karl Giberson, was two-fold. First Dr. Giberson is almost apoplectic in his anger against Mohler. Secondly, the complaint was published in the left-wing and aggressively secular Huffington Post. But as I reflected further I concluded that it makes perfect sense for the Biologos folks to publish at the Huffington Post. What is more, it makes perfect sense for the folks at the Huffinton Post to eagerly publish the thoughts of Biologos contributors. It seems that the Huffington Post has a better understanding of the implications of Biologos' program for the historic Christian faith than does Biologos.

Over at Pyromaniacs, Phil Johnson has written a fuller reflection on this issue.

To paraphrase one of my Facebook friends: Even if they really do believe the abusive ad hominem argument they are making against Al Mohler, that's an interesting strategy. Let's air our differences at this bastion of secular humanism, and we'll invite some of the giants of discernment over at Huffpo to sort it out for us in their combox.

Dr. Karl Giberson, vice president of BioLogos, wrote the Huffington piece. The case he makes against Dr. Mohler has basically one point. Here it is: In his Ligonier lecture, Dr. Mohler claimed that Charles Darwin had a pretty good idea about what kind of "evidence" he was looking for before he ever boarded the Beagle; he was already sympathetic to evolutionary theory, and he was already hostile to biblical authority.

Not so, Dr. Giberson says. Darwin was a devout Christian and a creationist when he first set off on the Beagle. Giberson claims Darwin's very first doubts about the reliability of Scripture-as-history came as he collected his samples and observed and analyzed the biological evidence. Dr. Giberson evidently would have us believe Darwin was a typical evangelical until an honest inquiry into the scientific evidence forced him to take a more enlightened position.

I'm admittedly no Darwin scholar, but I do know for a fact that the only version of "Christianity" he ever adhered to was by no means evangelical. He was a product of that Unitarian intellectualism that dominated the established church in Georgian times. According to an 1887 article by Robert Schindler (published in Charles Spurgeon's magazine, The Sword and the Trowel):

If anyone wishes to know where the tadpole of Darwinism was hatched, we could point him to the pew of the old chapel in High Street, Shrewsbury, where Mr. Darwin, his father, and we believe his father's father, received their religious training. The chapel was built for Mr. Talents, an ejected minister [i.e., a Puritan who dissented from the established church order]; but for very many years full-blown Socinianism has been taught there. (Emphasis added.)

Furthermore, Darwin was enthralled with natural theology and (like BioLogos) held the truth-claims of Scripture to be less reliable and less authoritative than "scientific proofs." That was what prompted his interest in science to begun with. And—as Dr. Giberson himself notes in an earlier open letter to Dr. Mohler—"[Darwin] was a devotee of William Paley."

Perhaps the most succinct summary of William Paley's religious convictions comes to us from Sir Leslie Stephen, a younger contemporary of Paley's. Stephen was a respected English author and an Anglican clergyman. He described William Paley as "Socinian in all but name."

Given BioLogos's own theological trajectory (I'm thinking particularly their dismissive attitude toward key doctrines like biblical authority and original sin), they may not recognize Socinianism—or its close cousins, Unitarianism, Deism, and theological liberalism—as anti-Christian worldviews. But Dr. Mohler certainly understands that those ideas are hostile to Scripture and antithetical to every major stream of historic Christian faith.

In other words, Dr. Mohler undoubtedly disagrees with Dr. Giberson's assessment of Darwin. As difficult as this may be for Dr. Giberson to receive and as hurtful as it may be to his academic ego, Dr. Mohler no doubt found Dr. Giberson's book Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution unpersuasive.

Read the entire post HERE.

Where rejection of biblical orthodoxy ultimately leads

Michael Dowd is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and a graduate of Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also enthusiastic about the rise of the new atheists. A self-proclaimed "evangelist" for evolution, Rev. Dowd's words seem eerily similar to some of the postings at Biologos about God, evolution, and inerrancy. I point this out because many of Dowd's views would, at this point anyway, be rejected (I suppose) by some of the scholars who post at Biologos. My question is "why?" Once the criteria for whether or not I will accept what the Bible says is my own moral sensibilities or what happens to be "intellectually satisfying" to me then everything in the Bible is up for grabs.

One of Dowd's recent comments was indistinguishable for some recent comments from an Old Testament scholar at Biologos. Dowd rejects God as He is revealed in the Bible as "brutal, cruel, vindictive, and genocidal." It seems inevitable. Let a man reject the full trustworthiness of the Bible as God's Word and he will then make a god in his own image; a god that will be satisfying to his intellectually autonomous self.

Al Mohler has written an article commenting on some of Dowd's recent pronouncements.

Michael Dowd argues that Christians should thank God for the New Atheists. A self-styled “evangelist” for evolution, Dowd recently preached a sermon in Oklahoma City in which he called for nothing less than a rejection of biblical Christianity and the embrace of a spirituality rooted in an embrace of evolution and a rejection of the supernatural.

A few weeks ago, a reporter called me for comment after Dowd had made a similar argument on his Web site, “ThankGodforEvolution.com.” In more recent days, Dowd has responded directly to my comments. Without doubt, his argument deserves a closer look.

In his 2007 book, Thank God for Evolution, Dowd recounts that he, along with his wife, Connie Barlow, decided in 2002 to go on the road as “evolutionary evangelists.” As he explains, “We offer a view of our collective evolutionary journey that frees the imagination, touches the heart, and leaves people wanting more.” An ordained minister of the United Church of Christ and a graduate of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now Palmer Theological Seminary), Dowd now finds his passion in spreading his message of “the epic of evolution” or “the Great Story.”

Read the entire article HERE.

God's Knowing and Man's Knowing

In reading posts at Biologos I have been struck by the biblical scholars who seem to suggest that their apprehension of truth is of higher authority than what is revealed in God's Word. In other words, when something in the Bible does not comport with their intellectual or sentemental categories they simply dismiss it as error, myth, or even immoral.

Cornelius Van Til built an apologetic around the notion of antithesis - the idea that there is a God-imposed and therefore fixed conflict between the people of God and the unregenerate (Gen 3:15). This antithesis extends to every realm of being, including the intellectual. Therefore the unregenerate mind while able to grasp facts cannot fully integrate those facts or understand their ultimate meaning. This is the clear teaching of Scripture. The unregenerate cannot and will not accept the things of God for they are spiritually discerned (Isa. 44:18; 1 Cor. 2:14). What is more, he will always take the facts that he can know and twist them into a justification for his idolatry (Romans 1).

It seems to me that the biblical scholars writing for Biologos are demanding that the Bible be subject to unregenerate and unbelieving standards of epistemology. As a result whatever portions of the Bible which do not yield to these unbelieving standards must be dismissed. This agenda is not even veiled. It is stated by at least one of these scholars that they will only believe those portions of the Bible which are intellectually satisfying. It is quite breathtaking.

Van Til addresses the issue quite powerfully:

As God has self-contained being and all other being has created or derivative being, so also God has self-contained and man has derivative knowledge. In contrast with this all forms of non-Christian epistemology speak first of knowledge in general and introduce the distinction between divine and human knowledge afterwards. It is true that there are forms of non-Christian epistemology that speak of the divine knowledge as though it were wholly other, qualitatively different, from human knowledge. So there are also forms of non-Christian metaphysics that speak of God's being as wholly other, as qualitatively different, from man's being. This is notably the case with the Theology of Crisis, [neo-Orthodoxy, Karl Barth, etc.] informed as it is by a skeptical theory of knowledge. But when this God, whose being and knowledge is said to be who wholly different from the being and knowledge of man is, as he must be, brought into contact with the being and knowledge of man, there follows a fusion of the two. Either God's being and knowledge are brought down to the level of the being and knowledge of man or the being and knowledge of man are lifted up to the being and knowledge of God. There is always the same monistic assumption at work reducing all distinctions to correlatives of one another...

Hence man's dealings in the realm of truth are not ultimately with God but with an abstraction that stands above God, with Truth as such. For apologetics it means that the basic principle of the non-Christian conception of truth cannot be challenged. According to this most basic assumption it is man rather than God that is the final reference point in all predication...

A moment's reflection upon the fall of man in paradise will prove this to be true. In paradise God said to man that if he ate of the forbidden fruit he would surely die. The truth about the facts in the created universe, Adam and Eve were told in effect, could be known ultimately only if one knew their relationship to the plan of God...God did not, because he could not, look up to an abstract principle of Truth above himself in order, in accordance with it, to fashion the world.

- Christian Apologetics, pp. 31-33

It is profoundly significant that Biologos and their biblical scholars deny the historicity of Adam and Eve and the fall. Indeed, this fact alone says MUCH about their basic assumptions about the capacity for the unregenerate and unbelieving mind to subject to its own standards the revelation of God.

Only hard to believe if you don't believe the Bible...

Recently Sojourners ran an article by a woman named Anne Eggebroten who was shocked that Grace Community Church (John MacArthur, pastor) actually practices what the Bible teaches about male leadership in the home and church. Now, this isn't exactly new. Movements like "evangelical feminism" have been around a few years challenging the plain reading of Old and New Testaments regarding the God-designed complementary roles of men and women. What becomes clear is that evangelical feminists like Miss Eggebroten will either torture or simply dismiss those passages of Scripture which interfere with their opinions.

Al Mohler weighs in on Miss Eggebroten's article:

In “The Persistence of Patriarchy,” Eggebroten writes about “the wide reach” of complementarian views of manhood and womanhood among conservative Christians. Her article is subtitled: “Hard to believe, but some churches are still teaching about male headship.” Hard to believe?

Can anyone really be surprised that this is so? In some sense, it might be surprising to the generally liberal readership of Sojourners, but it can hardly be surprising to anyone with the slightest attachment to evangelical Christianity. Nevertheless, Anne Eggebroten’s article represents what I call a “National Geographic moment” — an example of someone discovering the obvious and thinking it exotic and strange. It is like a reporter returning from travel to far country to explain the strange tribe of people she found there — evangelical Christians believing what the Christian church has for 2,000 years believed the Bible to teach and require. So . . . what is so exotic?

She begins her article at Grace Community Church in California, where, in her words, “God is male, all the pastors, deacons, and elders are male, and women are taught to live in submission to men.” That is a snappy introduction, to be sure, but it requires some unpacking. When Eggebroten says that, at this well-known evangelical church “God is male,” she is echoing the arguments of the late radical feminist Mary Daly, who famously asserted that “if God is male, then male is God.” At Grace Community Church, as in the Bible, references to God are masculine, but God is not claimed to be male. Interestingly, she also missed the fact that Grace considers the role of the deacon in terms of service, rather than authority, so women in fact do serve as deacons with responsibility for particular ministries...

Eggebroten argues that the church has simply perpetuated the patriarchal traditions of the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures that formed the social context for the early Christian church. Against these she contrasts the Apostle Paul’s beautiful declaration in Galations 3:28 — “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

But this is the kind of sloppy and agenda-driven exegesis that reveals the desperation of those who would reject the New Testament’s limitation of the office of pastor to men. In Galatians 3:28 Paul is clearly speaking of salvation — not of service in the church. Paul is declaring to believers the great good news that “in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” [verse 26]. He concludes by affirming, “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” [verse 29].

To read Galatians 3:28 the way Eggebroten reads the verse, you would have to believe that the Apostle Paul was in direct contradiction with himself, when he restricts the teaching office to men in letters such as 1 Timothy and Titus.

Or . . . you can try to deny that Paul actually wrote those latter letters. Eggebroten accuses conservative evangelicals of ignoring “evidence that the ‘pastoral epistles’ (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) were written in honor of Paul long after he died and reflect a second-century debate over women’s roles in the church–whether to conform to social customs for the sake of winning converts, or to advocate radical social equality (and even celibacy) in the last days before the Second Coming.”

What this reveals, of course, is the argument of many evangelical feminists that we can discard the teachings of the Pastoral Epistles. We can keep the Apostle Paul we like (taking Galatians 3:28 out of context, for example) and disregard the Paul we do not like.

Read Mohler's entire article HERE.

Theological liberals have always dismissed the authority of Scripture. That is nothing new. What seems to be new is the number of those claiming the title "evangelical" who openly deny the truthfulness and authority of God's Word.

In recent posts I have noted the aggressive agenda at Biologos to rid the church of the doctrine of inerrancy by certain biblical scholars who claim to believe in the inspiration and authority of Scripture. But their own words testify against them.

One contributor denies the historicity of Adam and Eve. Interestingly enough, this same scholar was, only a few years ago, claiming to believe some of the very things he now denies. Another contributor claims that Scripture is in need of redemption, that it is "broken" and "warped." It is little wonder then that he also writes, "I have no interest in preserving Christianity ... I believe because, as I understand it, it makes sense of human experience. But if it turns out that Christianity fails to do that, I’ll simply turn elsewhere."

It is clear that without the Scriptures as our infallible guide we will inevitably look to what "makes sense" to us as that guide. If I don't like the fact that God used his people to be the means of judging wicked and depraved nations then I will simply say those passages of the Bible are immoral. If I don't like the fact that Jesus and Paul believed in the historicity of Adam and Eve then I will simply say that the Lord and His apostle were wrong. If I don't like what the Bible teaches about God putting his Son forth as our substitute to bear away His wrath in our stead (the heart of the gospel) then I will simply dismiss it as does the previously referenced scholar.

Gleason Archer warned that if we deny Scripture's inerrancy then we will replace the authority of God's Word with the authority of our own judgments.

Update - Okay, so I edited out a comment about Sojourners that some may realistically interpret as a slight against anyone who reads or benefits in some way from said magazine. That was not my intention. However, I am troubled by the position on Scripture that Sojourners tends to take.

"Vaguely religious quasi-theism"

In my previous post I link to an article by Phil Johnson concerning Biologos and their exotic handling of the Scriptures and historic Christian doctrine. In the comment thread Tom Chantry contributed some thoughts that are worth your time to read:

I met a guy on Saturday who told me about his conversion from Catholicism. He was raising his kids in the Catholic church, having grown up there himself. Somehow he got the idea that as a dad he needed to know enough to teach his kids, so he started reading them the Bible. Then one of his kids came home from Catholic school with a pamphlet from a religion teacher entitled, “The Genesis Myth.” And of course his kid said, “Dad, I thought you said Genesis was the truth!”

So he started digging. He discovered that none of the other parents, few of the teachers, and not even the nun who was the principal of the school knew what the church taught about creation, but when he talked with the priest, he was told, “The church teaches that you can’t take the Bible too literally.” He didn’t quite know what that meant, but he came to two conclusions: The church didn’t believe the Bible, and the people in the church didn’t know about it. He had to leave, because, as uncertain as he was about what he believed, he couldn’t see the point of being a “Christian” if you didn’t believe the Bible. Only later did Bible-believing Christians introduce him to the gospel of grace.

Obviously the same situation is developing in “Evangelical” churches today. The comparison raises some questions:

What sort of witness is it when we assure the world that just because we are Christians doesn’t mean we believe what the Bible says?

What point is there, indeed, in being a non-Bible-believing “Christian”?

If we don’t doggedly believe what the Bible says, how exactly are we going to hold onto the gospel of grace, a message which runs counter to every instinct of natural man?

At this point, just what distinguishes Evangelicals from Rome? From Mainline Protestantism? From vaguely religious quasi-theism?

It's their doctrine that's the issue...

Phil Johnson has been paying careful attention to the developments over at Biologos. Johnson points out that the repeated problem with Biologos is what they are saying about the Bible and what it teaches. And what Biologos is saying is clearly outside the stream of historic, orthodox evangelicalism.

Let me say this as emphatically as possible: My main objection to the BioLogos agenda is theological, not scientific.

Evidently I need to underscore that point, because every time the subject comes up here, our comment-threads swarm with zealots who are keen to debate about geology, paleontology, astronomy, the fossil record, the age of the earth, or whatever—as if my criticisms of BioLogos were scientific rather than biblical and doctrinal. To date, not one person who supports the BioLogos agenda has even acknowledged (much less replied to) the real point we've been making.

So I'll say this once more: What concerns me most about BioLogos is not merely the enthusiasm with which they champion theistic evolution (bad as that is). I haven't complained about their baffling opposition to the simple, obvious teleological arguments of the "intelligent design" community. And what spurred my objections to their campaign has nothing to do with the old-earth/young-earth conflict per se.

But my greatest concern—by far—is the blithe willingness with which they are prepared to trivialize, disregard, discard, or denounce the foundational doctrines of Christianity.

In every post I have made about BioLogos, I've been critical of two things in particular: 1) their relentless assault against the authority of Scripture, and 2) an attitude toward the doctrine of original sin that ranges from utter indifference to condescending dismissal.

The authority of Scripture and the doctrine of original sin are, of course, bedrock truths of all historic Christianity; they are not merely Reformed or evangelical distinctives. (Nor are they trifling "exegetical molehill[s]," as Peter Enns suggested in his reply to Al Mohler.)

The serious doctrinal problems raised by the BioLogos campaign don't end with those two issues, either. As I pointed out in an earlier post, if the BioLogos team applied their Genesis hermeneutic consistently to the gospel accounts and the resurrection narratives, they would soon relinquish every essential element of the Christian faith.

Read Phil's entire article HERE.

Thinking themselves to be wise...

I have posted recently on the continued efforts by Biologos to destroy confidence among God's people in the Bible as God's authoritative and fully trustworthy Word. Biologos professes to be evangelical and has recruited supposedly evangelical biblical scholars to advance their curious ideas about the Bible.

Now Kevin DeYoung has weighed in with a helpful post. Along the way, he raises some interesting questions like, "Why would evangelicals see BioLogos as “one of us” (and, while we’re at it, why would the president of Gordon College be one of five persons on the BioLogos Board of Directors)? DeYoung points to a specific series of posts at the Biologos blog where the author (a local Old Testament professor) not only challenges biblical inerrancy but openly mocks the idea as "intellectually disastrous."

I recently came across an article online on the BioLogos site entitled “After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age.” It’s a multi-part article (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) written by Kenton Sparks, a professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University. Here’s how it starts:

I write for Evangelicals who either believe or suspect that our tradition has painted itself into an intellectual corner. The Church has been down this road before. In the 16th and 17th centuries it mistakenly criticized Copernicus and Galileo because their scientific views were clearly “unbiblical.” And just as the evidence finally came crashing down on Church dogma in those days, so in ours, the facts are stacking up quickly against fundamentalistic beliefs in “creation science” and in the kind of “biblical inerrancy” that supports it.

While there was perhaps a period in history when Evangelicals could deny the substance of these new theories because the available evidence seemed thin, it seems to me that we’ve now crossed an evidential threshold that makes it intellectually unsuitable to defend some of the standard dogmas of the conservative Evangelical tradition. Holding fast to these old dogmas merely perpetuates the “intellectual disaster of Fundamentalism” and the “scandal of Evangelical Mind.”

The intellectual cul-de-sac in which Evangelicalism finds itself can be traced back to many causes. But it seems clear, at least to me, that a fundamental cause of the scandal is its doctrine of Scripture. Often this doctrine involves a strict adherence to “Biblicism” … to a belief that the Bible provides inerrant access to the truth about everything it touches on … from biology, physics and astronomy to psychology, history and theology. In more progressive Evangelical circles inerrancy is sometimes defined more delicately, in a way that allows the non-biblical evidence to carry more weight in our reflection, but even here the subtle influence of inerrancy often engenders poor, or at least inferior, judgments about science, history, human beings and theology. In the pages that follow I will briefly explain why conventional Evangelical understandings of Scripture simply cannot be right. I will also survey some of the important resources that can help the Church get its bearings in a world without Biblicistic inerrancy.

I’m not sure what Biblicistic means, but any time you turn a word into an “ism” and then add an “istic” on top of that, it must be really bad. I’m pretty sure biblicistic is here to make inerrancy sound as lame as possible. Later, just to be crystal clear, Sparks opines, “Biblicist inerrancy is an intellectual disaster.”

Where Inerrancy?
The authority of Scripture has been, for the past two or three centuries been under almost constant attack. So it’s no surprise see it again. Even Christians hoping to be counted in the evangelical fold are eager to call into question the full and complete inspiration of Scripture. This means it is crucial that we understand, defend, and celebrate the authority of the Bible in our homes and in our churches.

One struggles to know where to begin with Sparks’ assault on biblical authority. A single blog post is not the place to launch a full-on defense of inerrancy. There are many fine books and articles written in years past that do just that, including Robert Yarborough’s fair-minded, yet devastating review of Sparks’ previous work.

Another angle on the subject might look at what constitutes evangelical theology. Sparks writes from “our” evangelical tradition, and yet he disavows any notion of penal substitution and understands the Scriptures to be fallen like creation and in need of redemption. In the comments thread after the fifth post, he argues, “I have no interest in preserving Christianity … I believe because, as I understand it, it makes sense of human experience. But if it turns out that Christianity fails to do that, I’ll simply turn elsewhere.” I don’t know Dr. Sparks and am not an expert on his thought. I just don’t see how he can claim to speak as an evangelical scholar (to use language from his book). And with articles like this, why would evangelicals see BioLogos as “one of us” (and, while we’re at it, why would the president of Gordon College be one of five persons on the BioLogos Board of Directors)?

So there are a lot of things one could say, but let me simply call to mind the Apostle Peter’s assessment of Holy Scripture:
And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the mourning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produces by the will of man, but men spoke from God as theywere carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:19-21).

Read DeYoung's entire article HERE.

It is a vicious cycle. The more man elevates the authority of his own judgments, the more he diminishes the authority of Scripture. And, the more he diminishes the authority of the Scriptures, the more elevates the authority of his own judgments. The end result is death. We need only look at the continued death throws of the PCUSA, ELCA, Disciples of Christ, American Baptists, and the Episcopals. "I believe because as I understand it, it makes sense of human experience. But if it turns out that Christianity fails to do that, I'll simply turn elsewhere." Of that I have no doubt.

Doubting Who?

Not ones to mince words, the folks at Triablogue have a few things to say about Pete Enns and his work with Biologos.

Their words mirror my own concern about Biologos and the biblical scholars that have been recruited to advance their agenda of ridding the church of full confidence in the Bible as God's unerring Word. Indeed, it is clear that while modern scientific sensabilities are to be honored, the Bible is to be doubted, challenged, and even dismissed as intellectually unsatisfying.