On target. I left the Evangelical fold in 1989 after seminary and was ordained in the United Church of Christ. While it was the open social stances on LGBTQ issues, racism an ordaining women that attracted me, it is really the inerrancy underneath that was intolerable and driving the social outcomes. To extend your poison analogy, if you pour chemicals on your farm for years, it won't stop being toxic when you stop. You must learn a new way of farming that respects the earth. Inerrancy is the Roundup in the garage. Just don't use it.
Nailed it. Thank you for saying so clearly what I’ve been trying to put into words. I too have been uplifted by Moore, and French and others, but felt they were missing something, and it’s the inerrancy. I used to mistake my certitudes for faith, and once I let them go and learned-still learning-to walk in the “I don’t know”, I discovered a much deeper faith that I can’t quite describe with words. Beautifully written. TY.
Holly, You knocked it outta da park. As a liberal Episcopalian, I still run up against traditions and interpretations that seem much too close to the evangelicalism I ran away from. But now, I don't have to believe I'm eating Christ's body and blood if I don't want to. I don't have to intone the Nicene Creed if I don't believe it. Yesterday, I asked our rector (a very youngish recent D. Min.) what he thought of Elizabeth Schraeder's research on Mary Magdalene. He hedged a lot, I could practically see him being torn between believing Mary was the Tower and cleaving to the traditional interpretation. But he didn't tell me what I should believe. As long as my community is following Jesus without all the nonsense, I'll stick with it. A very fine piece, thank you! ~Linda Clare, The Deep End
No good writing is too long. No bad writing is short enough.
Sidenote: I enjoyed the writing, but it was really hard to read with all of the animated gifs (or whatever the kids call those things). Any kind of motion tends to grab the eye, and boy do those things have a lot of motion. I'm guessing they're there to break up the long text, but personally, I'm old enough to be able to read a long piece of writing without needing a crutch.
LOVE the gifs! I think they add so much to the reading experience. I totally respect Jacob's (and other's) opinion, but just wanted to represent the gif-loving segment of the audience. (I am also an old-enough person, for the record).
Finished listening to this book last week. Huge fan of Dr. Moore. I'm still a Southern Baptist (although I continually ask myself WHY.) I was raised in a church of SBC heretics. We had women deacons and ministers. I like my current church and pastor, I just despise our convention.
I do believe that the bible is the true word of God. I just don't have 100% faith in our interpretation of it. Many people far wiser than I have spent their entire lives studying it, and they all come up with different results. I personally don't see where Catholics get Purgatory (and I've read the verses they cite) but I don't KNOW. Maybe they're right. Does it matter?
Andy Stanley suggested that we should "unhitch" from the Old Testament and just do like the early Christians. They didn't even HAVE a bible. They just went out and tried to emulate Jesus. Maybe that's a good place to start.
THIS! It feel SO presumptuous to assume, if you believe in divine inspiration of the text, that we humans can interpret it correctly. "Let me accurately translate God's intent for you, from this time-bound, often-vague, archaic, oral-tradition, multi-translated document." Where is the respect and reverence for the divine? The awe, the fear and trembling, the gratitude that God speaks to us at all and the understanding that we are small and can only see through a glass darkly? Ugh.
Thank you for defining the problem of Inherency. It is an unnecessarily complex theological construct and evangelicals are great at building them (think Complementarianism). Theological constructs can be like conspiracy theories where the simple is made complex and ideas are taken down a convoluted path in support of a foregone conclusion. You've done a good job of explaining how inherency works and that's not easy. Kudos.
You make many very good points, most of which I agree with, but Moore’s calling isn’t to burn the house down, it’s to be a prophet to his own people--a people who believe in biblicism as a core tenet. For him to argue against inerrancy would not be credible to his intended audience.
When my brother met his 2nd wife he sailed off a cliff, 'fundamentally'. He'd weep over the rest of us going to hell, though our parents were devout, as were the siblings. But we were no longer his kind of devout.
He's been splitting hairs ever since. I think it's a favorite past time.
I have come to believe that the whole core teaching of a personal savior has led many Christians into a world of selfishness. I also believe that our Creator evolved our relationship by forgiving us for our humanness and allowing unconditional love. The experience happens in the heart and not the mind. It is spiritual. It should create a heart that is filled with love and cannot harm any of God's creators. It allows us to communicate with our Comforter, who we had become separated from. A revival is coming to the church because it is filled with hypocrisy. I also do not agree the with the author that all the truth is not in the Bible. The truth is love. Love makes you perfect. If everything you do is done in love and elevating your brother or sister, you are perfect in God's eyes. It's that simple. Love, love, love.
I was raised Catholic, and when I was in college I ran up against the Young Life crowd--had never been around many Evangelicals until then. I always thought that "I have accepted Jesus Christ into my heart (sometimes expressed as "my personal savior.") sounded so....backwards. Is there like, an interview process wherein Jesus is just one applicant among other candidates for the dwelling, and you pick one? Are you then his landlord? Can you evict Jesus from your heart if he doesn't pay the rent on time or lets his hippie cousin John live on a sofa on the porch?
Nonono...we don't get to pick Jesus. He picks us--all of us. Whether we need to consciously accept the invitation--that's what the sacrament of Baptism is for. Even if you aren't aware of it or don't choose it, once your parents get you baptized, you are saved by His grace. It bothers me that the Evangelical view of salvation requires some sort of individual agency.
I grew up a Southern Baptist Liberal. Yes, there were such things back when I was growing up in the 1950's and early 1960's. My whole family fit this description. We were passionate supporters of Martin Luther King, Jr. We were also passionately devoted to Jesus as the 2nd person of the Trinity. And yes, we had a personal relationship with Him as our Saviour. And no, we did not believe that Adam and Eve were real humans, but rather metaphors for the human condition. And we did not believe in the virgin birth. (I might add that my father was an engineer and I was an engineering major who ended up going to medical school.). If there was any conflict between the Bible and science we were team science all the way. I did not learn until I took Old Testament and New Testament at Duke in the late 1960's that the birth narratives and resurrection narratives in the gospels, indeed, the gospels themselves, were not written down until many decades after the death of Jesus. And that the Pentateuch is a product of four ancient accounts that were not written down until the time of Solomon at the earliest, and that Israel, centered on Samaria, was a much bigger deal than Judah, centered on Hebron, until the former was conquered and its leading citizens carried off by the Assyrians. Its priests of YHWH carried their sacred scriptures to Judah, the ones that survived that is, and the prophets of the time gave voice to their sorrows and hopes. My mother was a Sunday School teacher and she ate this stuff up when I introduced her to it. Skip ahead ten years and we come to the first Southern Baptist purge, when they kicked out the liberals around 1979. Another 10 years and they kicked out the moderates around 1990. The latter, along with some of the liberals, formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, to which Jimmy and Rosalynne Carter belong. I have not read Russell Moore's book but I plan to. If he is still sticking to inerrantism that may be because his liberal spiritual foreparents left the fold long before he came along. But in his retaining enough of the power of thought to reject Donald Trump and to affirm that God loves all God's children and doesn't privilege one sex over another, one sexual orientation over another, one race over
another, he is standing in a long line of Southern Baptists who grew up in a part of the country where that was the only Baptist denomonation for white people, but where some folks looked up to the National Baptists (black) more that our fellow SBCers. I have gone North, gone Episcopalian, but feel more spiritually in sych with the Black Baptists up in these parts that in some of the Episcopal churches.
On target. I left the Evangelical fold in 1989 after seminary and was ordained in the United Church of Christ. While it was the open social stances on LGBTQ issues, racism an ordaining women that attracted me, it is really the inerrancy underneath that was intolerable and driving the social outcomes. To extend your poison analogy, if you pour chemicals on your farm for years, it won't stop being toxic when you stop. You must learn a new way of farming that respects the earth. Inerrancy is the Roundup in the garage. Just don't use it.
GREAT analogy!!!!!
Nailed it. Thank you for saying so clearly what I’ve been trying to put into words. I too have been uplifted by Moore, and French and others, but felt they were missing something, and it’s the inerrancy. I used to mistake my certitudes for faith, and once I let them go and learned-still learning-to walk in the “I don’t know”, I discovered a much deeper faith that I can’t quite describe with words. Beautifully written. TY.
Holly, You knocked it outta da park. As a liberal Episcopalian, I still run up against traditions and interpretations that seem much too close to the evangelicalism I ran away from. But now, I don't have to believe I'm eating Christ's body and blood if I don't want to. I don't have to intone the Nicene Creed if I don't believe it. Yesterday, I asked our rector (a very youngish recent D. Min.) what he thought of Elizabeth Schraeder's research on Mary Magdalene. He hedged a lot, I could practically see him being torn between believing Mary was the Tower and cleaving to the traditional interpretation. But he didn't tell me what I should believe. As long as my community is following Jesus without all the nonsense, I'll stick with it. A very fine piece, thank you! ~Linda Clare, The Deep End
Thanks!
No good writing is too long. No bad writing is short enough.
Sidenote: I enjoyed the writing, but it was really hard to read with all of the animated gifs (or whatever the kids call those things). Any kind of motion tends to grab the eye, and boy do those things have a lot of motion. I'm guessing they're there to break up the long text, but personally, I'm old enough to be able to read a long piece of writing without needing a crutch.
LOVE the gifs! I think they add so much to the reading experience. I totally respect Jacob's (and other's) opinion, but just wanted to represent the gif-loving segment of the audience. (I am also an old-enough person, for the record).
I would pay money for a browser that doesn't play gifs or videos until I ask it to!
"Old" is also a state of mind, and yours is clearly younger than mine ;-)
Thanks for this. I love gifs but most can probably just be freeze frame memes.
I replaced many of them with awesome memes! Thanks guys.
Jacob, see if your browser has "reader view." That will remove any images and just present the text.
Thanks, I will give that a try.
Finished listening to this book last week. Huge fan of Dr. Moore. I'm still a Southern Baptist (although I continually ask myself WHY.) I was raised in a church of SBC heretics. We had women deacons and ministers. I like my current church and pastor, I just despise our convention.
I do believe that the bible is the true word of God. I just don't have 100% faith in our interpretation of it. Many people far wiser than I have spent their entire lives studying it, and they all come up with different results. I personally don't see where Catholics get Purgatory (and I've read the verses they cite) but I don't KNOW. Maybe they're right. Does it matter?
Andy Stanley suggested that we should "unhitch" from the Old Testament and just do like the early Christians. They didn't even HAVE a bible. They just went out and tried to emulate Jesus. Maybe that's a good place to start.
I think you can believe the Bible is the true word of God and not be an inerrantist. Not the same thing. Sounds like you’re in a unicorn church ❤️
THIS! It feel SO presumptuous to assume, if you believe in divine inspiration of the text, that we humans can interpret it correctly. "Let me accurately translate God's intent for you, from this time-bound, often-vague, archaic, oral-tradition, multi-translated document." Where is the respect and reverence for the divine? The awe, the fear and trembling, the gratitude that God speaks to us at all and the understanding that we are small and can only see through a glass darkly? Ugh.
Yes! Also that somehow the entirety of God’s revelation could ever be captured in one book, or even a large library.
SO GLAD you kept the Alladin gif, captured this perfectly. Sorry, Jacob ;-)
That one is essential. Basically explains fundamentalism in a gif.
Oh, my beliefs are not the beliefs of my church! They're all very much fundamentalist, inerrant believers.
In 1869 the Catholic Church declared that the pope was INFALLIBLE.
In response, the American protestant church declared that the Bible was INERRANT.
Like Dueling Daltons!
Amazing to me that these became absolute, unquestioned , and more important than anything Jesus ever said.
Amazing! I only heard rumors of liberals growing up. Thank you for sharing that history.
Thank you for defining the problem of Inherency. It is an unnecessarily complex theological construct and evangelicals are great at building them (think Complementarianism). Theological constructs can be like conspiracy theories where the simple is made complex and ideas are taken down a convoluted path in support of a foregone conclusion. You've done a good job of explaining how inherency works and that's not easy. Kudos.
You make many very good points, most of which I agree with, but Moore’s calling isn’t to burn the house down, it’s to be a prophet to his own people--a people who believe in biblicism as a core tenet. For him to argue against inerrancy would not be credible to his intended audience.
That is indeed the rub.
So well written, thank you. Clear and compelling and passionate.
When my brother met his 2nd wife he sailed off a cliff, 'fundamentally'. He'd weep over the rest of us going to hell, though our parents were devout, as were the siblings. But we were no longer his kind of devout.
He's been splitting hairs ever since. I think it's a favorite past time.
Lot of split hairs.
I have come to believe that the whole core teaching of a personal savior has led many Christians into a world of selfishness. I also believe that our Creator evolved our relationship by forgiving us for our humanness and allowing unconditional love. The experience happens in the heart and not the mind. It is spiritual. It should create a heart that is filled with love and cannot harm any of God's creators. It allows us to communicate with our Comforter, who we had become separated from. A revival is coming to the church because it is filled with hypocrisy. I also do not agree the with the author that all the truth is not in the Bible. The truth is love. Love makes you perfect. If everything you do is done in love and elevating your brother or sister, you are perfect in God's eyes. It's that simple. Love, love, love.
I was raised Catholic, and when I was in college I ran up against the Young Life crowd--had never been around many Evangelicals until then. I always thought that "I have accepted Jesus Christ into my heart (sometimes expressed as "my personal savior.") sounded so....backwards. Is there like, an interview process wherein Jesus is just one applicant among other candidates for the dwelling, and you pick one? Are you then his landlord? Can you evict Jesus from your heart if he doesn't pay the rent on time or lets his hippie cousin John live on a sofa on the porch?
Nonono...we don't get to pick Jesus. He picks us--all of us. Whether we need to consciously accept the invitation--that's what the sacrament of Baptism is for. Even if you aren't aware of it or don't choose it, once your parents get you baptized, you are saved by His grace. It bothers me that the Evangelical view of salvation requires some sort of individual agency.
I grew up a Southern Baptist Liberal. Yes, there were such things back when I was growing up in the 1950's and early 1960's. My whole family fit this description. We were passionate supporters of Martin Luther King, Jr. We were also passionately devoted to Jesus as the 2nd person of the Trinity. And yes, we had a personal relationship with Him as our Saviour. And no, we did not believe that Adam and Eve were real humans, but rather metaphors for the human condition. And we did not believe in the virgin birth. (I might add that my father was an engineer and I was an engineering major who ended up going to medical school.). If there was any conflict between the Bible and science we were team science all the way. I did not learn until I took Old Testament and New Testament at Duke in the late 1960's that the birth narratives and resurrection narratives in the gospels, indeed, the gospels themselves, were not written down until many decades after the death of Jesus. And that the Pentateuch is a product of four ancient accounts that were not written down until the time of Solomon at the earliest, and that Israel, centered on Samaria, was a much bigger deal than Judah, centered on Hebron, until the former was conquered and its leading citizens carried off by the Assyrians. Its priests of YHWH carried their sacred scriptures to Judah, the ones that survived that is, and the prophets of the time gave voice to their sorrows and hopes. My mother was a Sunday School teacher and she ate this stuff up when I introduced her to it. Skip ahead ten years and we come to the first Southern Baptist purge, when they kicked out the liberals around 1979. Another 10 years and they kicked out the moderates around 1990. The latter, along with some of the liberals, formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, to which Jimmy and Rosalynne Carter belong. I have not read Russell Moore's book but I plan to. If he is still sticking to inerrantism that may be because his liberal spiritual foreparents left the fold long before he came along. But in his retaining enough of the power of thought to reject Donald Trump and to affirm that God loves all God's children and doesn't privilege one sex over another, one sexual orientation over another, one race over
another, he is standing in a long line of Southern Baptists who grew up in a part of the country where that was the only Baptist denomonation for white people, but where some folks looked up to the National Baptists (black) more that our fellow SBCers. I have gone North, gone Episcopalian, but feel more spiritually in sych with the Black Baptists up in these parts that in some of the Episcopal churches.
A tour de force!
Wow! Hope he reads this.
Fantastic piece, thank you!