eChurch Blog

Just because I feel like it….

Marc Cortez points us to the following article, which is re-published here with kind permission, and perfectly articulates a sad phenomenon I witness all too often, namely, folks throwing out with careless abandon, our creedal heritage.

Theology Forum

Be your own Pope: On the Tyranny of Individualism – by Kent Eilers

D.H. Williams sounds a stunning warning against Free Church Protestantism and its dismissal of the church’s creedal heritage, and with it the elevation of the individual to “Pope-like” status.

“[F]or all its theological and historical importance, the Protestant Reformation should not be the sole means of identity for any Christian. It was (is) not the primary basis on which the Christian faith was founded—something the Reformers themselves knew quite well. Here I am referring to how one ‘reads’ the history of Christianity. …

[T]he Protestant mind has been shaped in specific ways to think about itself as the Christian faith, not as a reform movement of Catholicism, but as a restoration of the apostolic church and therefore a dismissal of everything that followed the New Testament church and was prior to the ‘Reformation.’ In the name of rejecting ecclesiological authority as ‘hierarchy’ or ‘tradition’ as theological manipulation and bondage, we have instead created a hermeneutic of suspicion and have invested every biblically informed conscience (instead of a pope) to speak ex cathedra. It is a Pyrrhic victory for Free church Protestantism when the net effect of its teaching results in the replacing of the tyranny of the magisterium with the tyranny of individualism [Retrieving the Tradition, Renewing Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 201]

I have seen the harmful effects of this tendency on more than one occasion.  I think of many Free Church believers I have known who operate under the unconscious pressure of picking up their Bible and reading it as if no one has ever read it before. With this comes the concomitant weight of sifting and weighing matters on which the Church has spoken in her creedal heritage, an interpretive weight one should never bear alone.

Perhaps, to take D.H. Williams’ point (among many other contemporary and not-so-contemporary Protestant voices), the Church’s shared creedal heritage is indispensable for the Church’s reading of her Scriptures today, even in the Free Church tradition of Protestantism. Without accepting a hierarchical ecclesiology, perhaps the Protestant Free Church tradition would be greatly served by a modest return to a self-consciously “ruled reading” of the Bible in which a community’s reading of the Scriptures is carried out together with its creedal heritage: allowing the rule of faith generally found in the Nicene Creed to consciously guide and train a community’s reading, reminding it of the heart of the Gospel, and serving its faithful proclamation.

(Postscript: This is a conversation also being had among Anglicans. See, Ephraim Radner and George Sumner, The Rule of Faith: Scripture Canon and Creed in a Critical Age (Morehouse, 1998)).

Jim West alerts us to an article in this manner:

Bob Cargill has a marvelous essay in Bible and Interpretation on the misuse of archaeology for evangelistic purposes. It’s excellent and he makes some very, very salient points. Do read it.

And you know what, Jim’s dead right, this is a marvelous and excellent essay, and you should read it:

If scholars do not counter sensational claims made by religious groups perverting science for their own evangelistic purposes, archaeologists run the risk of having their own research, their own voices, and potentially their entire discipline diluted by these ideologically inspired, nonscientific claims. And that is precisely the goal of religious organizations posing as scientific endeavors: if they can saturate the media with enough junk science to counter each claim made by legitimate archaeologists, the public will not be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction, will get lost in the exchange, and will see the junk science as a remote possibility and therefore just as worthy of consideration as legitimate science.

Continue Reading

A few links to stuff I found interesting for one reason or another:

Internet Monk – Selling Jesus By The Pound

Experimental Theology – The Psychology of Christianity: Part 1, The Bigger Tent

BioLogos – The Benefit of Doubt

scientia et sapientia – When self-control just isn’t enough

Mark Stevens – And still I wrestle and struggle…

Parchment and Pen – Why is God so silent?

Jerusalem Post -  UK Church to boycott Israeli goods

Bish Nick Baines – The hope of things to come

Marc Cortez – John Walton on reading Genesis as an ancient text

Polycarp – Is the PCUSA about to gain Common Sense on the Middle East?

Anglican Samizdat – Christopher Hitchens diagnosed with cancer

Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion – WorldNetDaily Warns Bible Might Predict Destruction of Saudi Arabia

Marmalade Sandwich -Politics, establishment religion, & outsider religion