DIALOGUING WITH MODERNISTS

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist News Service. Copyright 1996. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites without permission from the author. Any articles which are redistributed by e-mail or print must be left intact and nothing must be removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our primary purpose is to provide information to assist preachers in the protection of the churches in this apostate hour. If you desire to receive this type of material on a regular basis, e-mail us, tell us who you are and where you are located, and request to be placed on the list. Also include your postal address and the name of the church of which you are a member. Some of these articles are from the "Digging in the Walls" section of O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 14th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr. The Way of Life web site is http://www.wayoflife.org.]

May 13, 1996 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The May 20, 1996, issue of Christianity Today contained an article entitled "Back to the Bible (Almost): Why Yale's Postliberal Theologians Deserve an Evangelical Hearing." The author, Roger Olson (professor of theology, Bethel College and Seminary, Saint Paul, Minnesota), noted that there is ongoing dialogue between "evangelicals" and "postliberals." What is this "postliberalism"? It is a theology developed by a group of professors at Yale Divinity School. Chief among them are Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, authors of books which develop this theology. Postliberalism claims the Bible is important, but not because it is historically true. "For Frei, the truth of the narratives about Abraham, for instance, is not dependent on their referring to either authentically universal human experiences or facts of time-and-space history. ... Frei and other postliberal, narrative theologians of the Yale variety make no bones about the fact that much of the narrative of Scripture is 'historylike' without needing to be historical. This is an all-important distinction to them."

As far as we are concerned, this is no different in kind from the old modernism. The subtle differences which its proponents attempt to make are meaningless. Both deny or question the historical authenticity of the Bible. Both the old liberalism and the postliberalism claim the historical meaning of Scripture is not important. Both the old liberalism and the postliberalism are antagonistic toward traditional Bible doctrine. Both the old liberalism and the postliberalism look down in their scholarly pride upon the humble Bible believer who simply takes the Bible at face value and believes every word of it and stands on every word of it. For more than 100 years there has been a continuous stream of new theologies, each having a little different twist from the previous, but each maintaining the same unbelieving attitude toward the historical authenticity of the very words of the Bible. Yale's postliberalism is simply another attempt by modernists to claim that they honor Jesus Christ and His Word when in reality they deny them. The Lord Jesus Christ treated the Old Testament as true history. He cited events and personalities from Adam to Malachi, and he never questioned the historical authenticity of the same. The Apostles stood in the same shoes. To claim that the historical authenticity of Scripture is unimportant is to deny Jesus Christ and His Apostles. If Abraham, for instance, was not a historical man and if his biography is not precisely detailed in the book of Genesis, the Lord Jesus Christ and His Apostles were either deceived or they were deceptive. There can be no middle ground here. We can entertain no new theologies. A theology is either biblical or it is anti-biblical. It is right or wrong. The New-Evangelical does not like to see things in such black and white terms, but this is the biblical position. This is precisely how the Apostles saw things. Timothy was not told to dialogue with those who came with new theologies. He was told to cleave to the one theology he had been taught by the Apostle Paul and to not allow any other doctrine to enter the churches (2 Tim. 2:2; 3:14; 1 Timothy 1:3).

Olson said that in April 1995 a dialogue was conducted between evangelicals and postliberals at Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center. "The colloquy attracted hundreds of theologians, pastors, and students and featured presentations and seminars that explored the common ground of these contemporary schools of Christian thought."

This is very interesting. The Bible warns that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. A little error leavens a lot of truth. Thus the only protection against error is for churches to practice discipline and separation. Today's Evangelicalism, having rejected the doctrine of Bible separation more than fifty years ago, lacks sufficient spiritual discernment or backbone to resist error effectively, and it has itself been infiltrated with error. The doctrine of inspiration is a key example of how Evangelicalism has been influenced by modernism. The evangelicals who are dialoguing with "postliberals" and other types of liberals can find common ground because they, too, do not believe that every word in Scripture is true and historically authentic. This has been documented by men such as Harold Lindsell (The Battle for the Bible and The Bible in the Balance), Francis Schaeffer (The Great Evangelical Disaster), and David Wells (No Place for Truth Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?). A case in point is Fuller Seminary professor Charles Kraft. His commentary on Genesis (Genesis: Beginnings of the Biblical Drama, New York: Woman's Division of Christian Service, Board of Missions, The Methodist Church, 1964) is founded upon the critical approach to the Pentateuch, which claims that Moses did not write the first five books of Scripture, that these books were not edited together until hundreds of years after Moses, that these books contain a certain amount of "folklore," that the book of Genesis is not scientifically accurate, etc. In my book, this is modernism. All of these propositions deny what Jesus Christ and the Apostles stated about the Pentateuch. It matters not that a man goes by the label "evangelical." If he denies any part of the Word of God, he is a false teacher and a heretic.

God has not told us to dialogue with false teachers and heretics. We are to reject them (Titus 3:10-11).

Do I hear someone argue, "But that is too simplistic"? Friend, it is the devil who tries to make the truth of God's Word complex. "But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ" (2 Cor. 11:3).

David Cloud dcloud@wayoflife.org http://www.wayoflife.org/
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