Ah, the delicate and difficult balance between freedom of the believer without compromising Scripture being the inerrant Word of God.
Satan’s attack never varies: “Has God really said…?”
So you look for freedom but defend the sanctity and inerrancy of Scripture which is always and forever under attack.
A delicate balance to say the least.

Although this is a bit of a rabbit trail, Tri Delta was founded in the shadow of Park Street Church so it holds a special place in my heart as well. 🙂

One denomination I haven’t seen mentioned on this blog that might interest some is the Evangelical Covenant Church (see here: http://www.covchurch.org/). They practice both modes of baptism and allow each family to make their own decision. It’s the only church I’ve ever been in that followed that policy. They are also very open to women serving in every way.

So some people think CT is going “liberal”? My take is that it’s been leaning toward a far more “conservative” (not sure that’s the right word) slant than in recent years – there’s seemingly lots of room for people in the YRR crowd, even some who seem to endorse patriarchy and quiverfull, as well as some forms of dominionism.

[shivers]

I generally go to sites like Religion Dispatches these days, since there’s commentary from a great variety of beliefs and positions. If that makes me “liberal,” then so be it. 😉

Excellent post. The church my husband and I have settled in sounds a lot like Park Street. It’s part of the Evangelical Free Church of America, and the denominational leadership sponsors a ministerial forum every year in which both (or many, if such is the case) sides of a minor issue come together not to issue a position statement one way or the other, but to have a courteous and reasoned dialogue about it. So refreshing.

Question for Barbara, and apologies for veering off topic a bit here:

I was reading over ATS’s Standards of Accreditation earlier this week after posting about my experiences at SBTS in the late 90s. At that time, SBTS had probably a half dozen female faculty members in the CE, music, and counseling departments. Today there are only 3–one music instructor and 2 instructors in the fledgling “women’s leadership” department. There are only 2 African-American faculty members, in spite of all the lip service given by the SBC in the 90s to racial reconciliation. I’m generally not in favor of “enforced” diversity (quota systems, etc) and would prefer to see positions go to the best-qualified candidates, but this begins to look suspicious to me, especially in light of the ATS standards requiring member schools to “promote racial and ethnic diversity” and to “promote the leadership and participation of women.” There’s a potential escape clause in “within the framework of each school’s stated purposes and theological commitments,” but it seems to me that SBTS is upholding the letter of the standards instead of their spirit (no surprise here since that seems to be how they handle the Scriptures, too). Do you have any idea how big a red flag this will be when ATS reevaluates SBTS’s accreditation status next year? What about the alarming percentage (42, by my calculations) of “home-grown” faculty appointees who earned their doctorates at SBTS (cf. standard 6.1.3)? Just curious–I’m torn between wanting to see academic integrity and free inquiry upheld and wanting the degree I earned through blood, sweat, and many tears still count for something in the eyes of the rest of academia.

I had heard rumors that the head-hunting had stopped at the seminary; I guess this is why–the faculty is now completely homogeneous.

Along with the rhetoric of Perry Noble getting mad, talking about how he doesn’t care if others are mad….relegating them to the hallway if they dare be late (which would further make me want to be late and still walk in the sanctuary despite what he would want), I hear the words Oh my God, and holy crap. What’s wrong with this picture in light of the passages on the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians and 1 Corinthians 13? Perry Noble, Matt Chandler etc. are so wrong on so many levels.

I can’t think of any persons I’d rather listen to preach the “gospel” less than the Gospel Coalition. I get the cold sweats just thinking about the battleship chains these guys call the “gospel”.

Dee, great post. A hard hitting one. Way to start the new year off, sister!

Thanks for keeping up this kind of message. I feel that there are too many SGMers starting to fall back into a comfort zone. Back into the “SGM is fundamentally sound, like the other Calvinistas; they just need to iron out the kinks”…even on some of the other blogs. I feel a complacency setting in. This kind of post reminds me that one can never get complacent in the face of these oppressors.

Seneca,
Your problem is that you simply cannot or will not be clear in what you say. You speak through a muddy tongue, and I find this disturbing and manipulative. Honestly, your posts are fit for no useful purpose unless they are clear about what they are trying to say.

You said: “Ah, the delicate and difficult balance between freedom of the believer without compromising Scripture being the inerrant Word of God.
Satan’s attack never varies: “Has God really said…?”

Are you saying that anytime one questions another person’s perspective on a secondary issue related to the Bible that they are being Satanic? That is, to question, for example, let’s say a pastor’s perspective that women should not work outside the home, or that to not believe in a literal six day creation is an actual demonic manifestation couched in an inquiry?

You see everyone, this kind of overt abuse of scripture guised as benevolent religious thinking has been a tool of despots and blood-spillers in the name of Christianity for years. This is precisely the kind of argument the neo-Reformed and Calvinistas use to subdue their congregants. This is exactly why blogs like this can never let up in the fight.

I have to know how many of the Calvinistas have come forward to say that they are concerned that the likes of C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther, and Billy Graham aren’t saved? They are sounding more and more like the old school church of christ. You know, some of them don’t believe you can be saved unless you are baptized in church of christ. I know that isn’t the case for all of them but I have met a few.

Today, however, I am regularly confronted by those who believe that, in order to be a “real” Christian one must believe in all sorts of doctrines such as 5 point Calvinism, adult baptism, young earth creationism, premillenial rapture, weekly communion, no alcohol, gender restrictions of all sorts, patriarchy, quiverfull, and on and on.

Dee, you know what these guys keep reminding me of?

Communist Party Ideologists. Purity of Ideology, Purity of Ideology, Purity of Ideology. And the same attitude towards Couterrrevolutionary Bourgeiose (i.e. anyone outside The Party) and what should be done with them.

Eagle:”In a nutshell I believe many fundys have made doctrine an idol. That’s the problem…and whether it be YEC, or how women are to be treated their obsession with these issues shows that they have elevated it to a status of worship. Mark Driscoll, Tim Challis, and crowd are worshiping these items over Jesus. For them Jesus isn’t enough.”

I completely agree…this is a profound but true thing you’ve said. Someone on another blog (maybe it was this one…I wish I could remember) said something equally as good. They said that the Calvinistas (or fundys, as you call them; or hyper-authoritarian tyrants as I call them) have made the Epistles of Paul the new Torah; where they elevate the new “law” over the well-being of our fellow human beings. I think this is completely accurate…and I think parallels nicely your “idolatry of doctrine” perspective. It’s not an idolatry of the Bible as some have suggested, but their own interpretations that they worship. In essence, if you follow this sick logic through it’s not long before you realize that they worship themselves…so not only is Jesus not enough, He really doesn’t factor into the equation at all. People’s salvation depends not on Christ, but on whatever doctrine any given despot decides to make the lynch-pin of his mega-church/para-church.

Meet the new law…same as the old law.

This was a fun post to read.

I have never really like CT. I feel like it is to Christian magazines and journals what USA Today is to newspapers.

I understand you desire for the type of church that you seek.

I, too, don’t like bombastic people, and tire of many of the issues that you have mentioned.

But let me add that there can be and are thousands of churches that come down on some of the issues that you seek to want no official position to be held.

I understand your desire on these particular issues for the ideal church to have no official position so that people of every stripe can be in the same church together.

Let me suggest that an equally good option (though it might not be preferred by you) is that a church does take a position on some of these issues (even ones that I disagree with), but they do so with Grace and they major on the major issues.

Most denominations, for example, have denominational distinctives that Christians from other denominations would not agree with. So that would prohibit those Christians from being members in the same congregation. And I think that really is a good thing, so that different types of churches can keep order.

But I also believe that convictions about these things should not keep fellow Christians from acknowledging their bond in Christ and enjoying deep fellowship.

As an example, I am not a Charismatic. I don’t believe that I have a strict cessationist doctrine that is firmly found in scripture, but it is a type of modified cessaation (sort of) that I have deduced from a combination of scripture, logic, history and personal experience.

I do not wish my Charismatic brothers ill. We share many things, and I admire their emphases on some aspects of the Christian life.

But for us to be in a church together, run a church, worship together, do ministry and education together, that is really going to be unworkable.

So, while I understand the longing that you have, I see that longing fulfilled in heaven when we will not even have the need for the answers to these issues.

In the meantime, I believe it is a perfectly acceptable and God honoring option to attend a church of one’s choice that may hold positions on many issues that are not central to the Gospel, but they hold these positions with a sense of balance and charity.

I am sure that you agree with this, too, but just thought I would share my perspective.

As always Dee, you write an insightful post and bring to the forefront what many blogs in Christendom are reluctant to discuss.

You’ll be pleased to know that I have just finished reading “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis. It’s the first C.S. Lewis work I’ve ever read. It can be tough going with its grad-school rigor & old school British venue, but if ya stick with it and do some digging you’ll get it.

You wrote: “…Gospel driven leaders” are now questioning the salvation of CS Lewis and Martin Luther…”

After reading Lewis’s appendix to “Abolition” which includes the analects of Confucius and the thoughts of non-Christian Western thinkers (Jewish & pagan), I can see why the Calvinista ideologues despise him. Lewis presents evidence that humans are not totally depraved but are also endowed by their Creator with a spark of divine, and with the volition to exercise it or to not exercise it.

Francis Schaeffer and not Lewis is the great godfather of the YRR, because Schaeffer’s emphasis was on ideological purity in reformed thought, not pragmatism & practice for a general Christian populace. Schaeffer is to them what Chairman Mao’s little red book was to the cultural warriors of the People’s Republic back in the day.

Wiki – There are few academic sources discussing Mao’s private life, which was very secretive at the time of his rule. However, after Mao’s death, his personal physician Li Zhisui published a memoir of unique insight into Mao’s private life: The Private Life of Chairman Mao, which claims that Mao chain smoked cigarettes, never bathed or brushed his teeth, rarely got out of bed, was addicted to sleeping pills and had a large number of sexual partners from whom he contracted venereal disease.[113]

Francis pretty much stuck exclusively to Mrs. Schaeffer; appears that he bathed, brushed his teeth, was generally out of bed, not addicted to illicit or licit substances and did not appear to suffer from veneral diseases.

Seneca,

The analogy was strictly rhetorical. A rhetorical analogy says nothing whatsoever about specific elements moral or otherwise being mapped into or out of the statement. Only that the main structure is similar. I could just as well have used some analogy to show that Lewis is the godfather of some non-reformed cleric or theologian.

Dee and Deb –

I wonder if these men who distain bloggers ever wondered what the priests and pharisees thought of those lowly fishermen and ladies of the night who followed that carpenter about? No one would surely listen to any of them!? And then, bother of all bothers, that Pharisee of all Pharisees who was so well versed in the law. He had the nerve to convert and follow this carpenter, and Oh! My! he started writing letters and sending them all over the WORLD. Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – WHAT WERE YOU THINKING writing all those books about Jesus? Don’t you know that you are not qualified to discuss the things of God? You’re just common folks living in your mothers’ homes. Many of you aren’t even married for goodness sake!!

Do these silly men (who don’t even dress as nice as our Blog Queens) ever listen to their own words and compare them to what Jesus taught?

My fun for the day 🙂

Francis Schaeffer was more a pop culture critic and preacher than a person who formed the ideological backbone of what has become YRR. I don’t see YRR as having an ideologically stable foundation unless we’re “only” talking theonomists who would claim to go back to Rushdoony and then to Cornelius van Til (though it’s debatable whether van Til would have approved of where theonomists take some of his ideas). Carl MacIntyre arguably played a significant role in politically and theologically conservative Reformed land but I wonder how many folks remember him even by name.

My Eastern Orthodox friends and relatives seem to agree they think Frank Schaeffer is an idiot and Orthodox-in-name-only. All Frank seems to do is sell books and articles where he pisses all over his dad’s legacy because that’s all he has. He’s not exactly distinguished himself as a novelist or film-maker to the point where people would know him for that work. Mediocrity in itself can be respectable but blogging that he predicted Christian right-wing terrorism days after Breivik was caught and this he predicted because his old man was advocating terrorism is positively mercenary. Anyone who actually read Crazy for God would ask Frank how on earth he keeps working to have it both ways. After saying Francis was very tolerant and lenient about homosexuals in one book one year he turns around and tries to sell his now dead old man as a founder of christian right-wing terrorist a la Breivik when Breivik’s actual beliefs put him at a far remove from anything Francis Schaeffer publicly advocated for for decades. I’ve come to have a lot of disagreements with Francis Schaeffer over the years but if Francis were alive today YRR’s would probably give him the boot just for Pollution and the Death of Man being too ecologically concerned. I think Frank was smoking crack when he imagined Francis Schaeffer could have been a hero of the Religious Left but Frank admitted he did at least some drugs.

You wrote: “…Gospel driven leaders” are now questioning the salvation of CS Lewis and Martin Luther…” — Muff Potter

And eventually of EVERYONE other than themselves.

Dee –

Were they referring to you and Deb specifically in that clip, or just bloggers in general? Well I guess in their mind if you aren’t an ordained, male, pastor then you can’t share the Good News or study the scriptures in their original texts because your still under the curse and can’t possibly interpret what you read. Sigh 🙁 Their good news no longer sounds like the Good News.

WTH – I loved Crazy for God; also two of Frank’s novels (Portofino and Saving Grandma). Not fond of Zermatt.

I don’t feel comfortable with most of what Frank writes (or has written in the past), but Crazy for God helped me make sense of my time at Swiss L’Abri, back in the mid-70s. 9I didn’t know his family, although I heard both Udo and John preach and lead studies – John was wonderful).

Swiss L’Abri is (or was) a very quirky place!

numo, I actually enjoyed reading Crazy for God (and I own it) because though I found a lot to like about Francis Schaeffer I still think he’s been given a halo effect by evangelicals who have used him as a shortcut for actually engaging the arts at any critical level. Instead of following Francis Schaeffer’s EXAMPLE of getting into the theater of the absurd or trying to wrap his head around the avant garde a lot of people used Francis Schaeffer’s work as an excuse to not arrive at any potentially independent assessment of the things he wrote about.

I read Addicted to Mediocrity more than a decade ago and ultimately came to the conclusion that, unfortunately for Frank, a mediocrity complaining about American evangelicals being addicted to mediocrity was a problematic polemic. I admit that if Addicted to Mediocrity were a polemic written by Bob Dylan or Brad Bird instead of a Frank Schaeffer I would have a completely different reaction to such a polemic.

yikes! typos in my lat post… Frank’s “art” book came out in the late 80s, for one.

One thing to note – re. so many peoples’ criticism of Frank’s supposed airing dirty laundry about his family – is that pretty much everything he talks about is *not* news to anyone who read his mom’s books. As for people who’ve been to Swiss L’Abri, I think we all heard stories about Frank, and I’m sure he knows that. 😉

One thing about Crazy for God that I found disheartening was Frank’s discussion of the splits with both Os Guinness and John. (I have no axe to grind re. Os; it’s just sad to see how he was acting about who should take over once F.S. retired; I heard rumors about John and was/am sorry to see how he was ousted from teaching, as he and Prisca are both sweet people and John is really a good teacher.)

Dee, the Elephant Room is not remotely a Calvinista Club. Noble, Furtik, and Greg Laurie are hard Wesleyans in their theology and revivalistic their methodology. That was the point of the elephant room, to a certain extent: bringing opposite views together to hash it out. The three churches those guys represent, one is a Calvary Chapel, are very large, and that is what “qualified” them for the event, NOT their brand of theology. Chandler and Driscoll were the only 5 point tulips there, to my knowledge.

I’ve lived your music story, I am a music minister and I’ve dealt with this battle more times than I can count. I am a staunch advocate of compromise, sensitivity, and bending over backwards to get multiple generations singing together. But I think in this situation, the complaint was about style, not volume. Those are two separate issues that should not be confused (the loudest services I have been in were driven by a ginormous pipe organ – it rattled the air down my esophagus…). In your situation, there was a severe lack of sensitivity in the leadership. I don’t blame anyone for leaving a church that insists on causing physical discomfort. Perry seems to be addressing a situation where their niche genre isn’t being catered to. If so, he rightly opposes it. If they are showing up late because it is simply uncomfortably loud, well good for them, but at some point, is the church still worth going to? (The answer is no for a long list of reasons before this even came up!)

Ted, that is neither tortured or a justification. If you read my two comments in full, I clearly stated no one could be blamed for taking offense at that; Noble is tactless and forceful, and a textbook example of how not to respond to parishioners. But it is still shallow to attend church only when and where you like the music, and that’s what has him so riled up. He handled it poorly. The man clearly said to him, “I come late because I don’t like the music,” not, “this music is so loud it’s causing physical discomfort.” IMO, that attitude, and not just Noble’s behavior, is worth calling out. That being said, I abhor that church’s approach to music and would never attend.

I am enjoying all this immensely and have been relieved to find out in the last several months that there are others who have come through a journey from nutty legalism to soft core legalism but who are now floundering a bit. There are good sites out there to read, though the ones that feature former extreme conservative Christians now proclaiming atheism make me sad.

Your description of a church that accepts differences sounds wonderful to me, but here is what I am trying to think through…It seems that one of the big problems with what you call neo-Calvinists is that they make up their own rules and make demi gods out of their leaders. The traditional system of denominations seems to avoid this, because churches are basically controlled from afar. I am sure this leads to a whole n’other set of problems, though perhaps less hero-ization of any one pastor.

So where is the middle ground? Doesn’t a more formal, less whimsical and vindictive type of church normally have a set of particular points of doctrine? Doesn’t that hamper the ability of Christians with varied ideas to mesh together?

Maybe what is throwing me off is that what I’m looking at here as “doctrine” shouldn’t even be defined as such… I’m thinking of the hysterical adherence to Young Earth Creationism (been there somewhat) and all that. Also, the rapture issue, ordination of women… I guess the point here is that the “neo-Calvinists” elevate many things to an importance they should not have.

I would love for anyone to share their thoughts. I just know as I am enjoying the realization of my liberty in Christ, I notice others in similar position heading back to more “traditional” churches from the Piper, Patriarch, McArthur models.

Thanks for helping me sort this out.