compromisers

This charge of compromiser, accommodationist, concillatory, to AiG's favorite label of churchian, is an interesting one.

Partly a debate technic, partly a way to immunize people against thinking. As a debate technic it is the error of poisoning the well, the idea is to paint your opponent as being so wrong, so off base that the very thought of actually dealing with the ideas he/she proposes is unthinkable. As an immunization technic it is designed to enable people to catagorize people quickly, maybe in the first few lines of an essay as compromisers so that you can safely and in good conscience just skip the rest of the essay because you just know that there can be nothing there for you to interact with.

As a technic of debate they are truely functional, for they save time and energy in not even interacting with opposing viewpoints, but if in fact your position is partly true, or that you are interested in learning, these technics stink. For they limit your intake of things contrary to your position and give you a false confidence that all the right people believe similiar things to what you believe.

As a Christian who struggles with these issues all the time, for i dont work at a job because these things interest me and demand my time for reading and study. I am amazed that people who call themselves Christians seem so afraid to read the book of nature and have that study influence their hermeneutics in any way. The relationship of the Scriptures to the rest of the world's knowledge is a little like the relationship of faith to works. As the best analogy of faith i know of, compares faith to an eye, for an eye alone is the organ of sight, but yet any eye on a table, alone, doesn't see anything. The Scriptures alone present us with the only path to salvation, for they are God's revelation to us concerning redemption. But the Scriptures alone, by themselves on a table are silent. Even worse the attempt to read the Scriptures, by ourselves, without helps is bound to lead to serious and complete failure if not gross heresy. Simply to understand the words requires dictionaries, to find similiar passages requires concordances, to visualize Jerusalem requires maps and historical texts. To understand Egypt and Babylonian requires historical,archeological science....well you get the point. Scripture alone leads us to God, but it is not alone on our desks nor in our minds, for it is surrounded and embedded in a framework of language, culture, commitments, knowledge, values, worldview etc etc .... Just untangling this Gordian knot is a lifetime of study.

This is not compromise, this is not concillatory, this is required wisdom. This is part of our task as believers to rightly interact with the Word in the World. The issue is authority and pre-eminence not interaction.

And this is the issue of the creeds. I can subscribe to the Westminster Confession as containing the body of doctrine as taught in Scripture. Which is exactly the promises made by my ruling and teaching elders (i'm PCA). the framework interpretation takes the days as 24 hours, but they have no historical or scientific content, only a literary form to organize the chapter to present a particular set of ideas, not biological nor physical science. The creation report and subsequent discussion effectively modifies the WCF to allow our elders to subscribe in such a way. But the YEC in the denomination will not allow this solution, but are pressing the issue on subscriptionism, and may very well divide the denomination in this way. Sadly it stems from this use of radical polarization to put everyone into one of two boxes; YEC or compromisers with atheistic materialist scientism.

Not only is it sloppy thinking,or worse as argumentative and debate technics become divisive, but it doesnt do justice to the idea of general revelation. This is God's world, certainly sin is a dark veil that blinds people to the truth, but no where in Scripture are we to believe that Satan so blinds Christian's eyes that they are blind to the realities of the world. And this is why the YEC attack OEC and TE much harder than they do scientism, for the testimony of the OEC and TE BRETHREN is that God has used some form of evolution to create this world, both living and material. And the fact that these people sit next to you in the pew on Sunday morning, worshipping the same God as do you is the reason for the compromiser label. The YEC must stop people from looking at the issues because their position can not stand on its own, on the facts, on the issues, it can only be a drawing of firm lines, a division that keeps out the voices.

To me this is sad, for it is the value of not-reasoning over reasoning, the value of not-studying of not-learning over scholarship, the value of emotion over than of intellect. But mostly it shows the value of appealing to emotion and unreason to form, build and sustain political and social movements even among people who ought to know better.

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Wimps, Gimps and Blackguards: Creation, Presuppositions, and Treason

By Rev. Brian M. Abshire


Why do so many sincere Christians compromise on the issue of six-day
creation? The first eleven chapters of Genesis are so clear, that it
would take a creative writing professor to misunderstand them. God
lays out in straightforward manner how he created heaven and earth.
He identifies the "days" as having morning and evening. He sets the
seventh day as an eternal reminder of his rest. He even provides
genealogies from Adam to Christ. How much clearer could he be?

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This essay is certainly one of the most to-the-point YEC polemics i have read. It's fundamental point is that the view of creation is a salvation issue and that the division of the unity of the Body of Christ, His Church is to take place over this issue.

Historically, Biblically, the issue of who was a Christian was to revolve around the issue of submission to Christ as Man and God. To know the Crucified Christ was enough to be within the Pale, but no longer. As a Reconstructionist the author of this essay would have us demand the reinstatement of Mosaic Law as the only legimate law of all Nations. Not a bit different in kind or degree then those Islamists in Nigeria who impose Sharia over a nation 40% each Islamic and Christian.

Not only is the central theme of this essay the complete polarization of the Church over the issue of the days of Creation, but it is fundamentally a call to poison the well for any future discussions. His opponents are not people, certainly not brethren, however misquided, but wimps or gimps, or blackguards. (the logical error is that of the double question---when did YOU stop beating your wife?)
This does no justice to the unity of the church, nor does it substantiate the truthfulness of the YEC position. For if they are unable to persuade, then they will separate out the wimps, and gimps and blackguards.

For months i have wondered why science progresses and the church divides when issues arise that cause dissent and argument. It is because the Church ultimately is not trusting that the truth persuades. As this author so strongly points out, run with your checkbooks, separate from the evil that is OEC or worse TE. Separate, dont persuade, dont convince, dont pray for, dont commune, dont be united---divided we will stand.

We have one confession-Jesus is Lord. We have thousands of denominations, each certain that they possess all the truth within their walls, these same walls hold out error and of course, the gimps and wimps and blackguards. So again the Churches will divide, over 6 days, over a universal flood, etc etc ... all to the honor and glory of God. Unless you happen to be secular and watching the whole process and laughing at the fools who claim to be wise in the Lord and divide again and again. until the ultimate Church is you and me and i suspect you.

Why does the Church divide in the face of divisive understandings? Because of persuasive men like this author, who would divide the seamless body of Christ and cease to talk to the other side. This is the great evil that comes from such radical polarization. That the sides no longer have communication, no longer cross-fertilize the minds of their brethren so that error is persuaded out of different thinking, that one is surrounded on Sunday morning by people just like you. Certain of their correctness, certain of their beliefs. certain as sure as they are that the world is 10K years old.

Go divide the Church again:
we divided over a vowel. over the place of residence of the supreme vicar, over the amount of water in baptism, over the age of baptism, over hymns, over slavery, over missions, over verse after verse ... so go preach division, preach polarization, preach the logic of only for me or against me....divide, divide, divide....

as for me, i will strive to understand the truth of the Scriptures, i will try to understand both books of God, knowing that the natural world is fallen and is not able to teach me the things of salvation. But how old the world is, how old the universe is, and how God created it is NOT a salvation issue, Never was. Never will be. Understanding Jesus and He crucified alone are the issues of faith.

You can throw TE out of all the conservative Reformed Churches, You can bar TE from teaching your children in Christian schools, you can strive to have so called creation science given equal time in the public schools. But you can not rewrite the book of nature. You're interpretation of Scripture is wrong, not right. It is not in harmony with natural theology, with natural science which is as God given as is the Bible. All the polemics and bad logic aside, creation science doesnt work in the real world, evolution does. God is not mocked, even by His people. He will use unbelievers to teach you the truthfulness of modern biology the same way that He used Egypt and Babylonia, and all the other secular, unbelieving, evil doing, wrong presuppositional people to teach Israel that they were wrong. Wrong headed, wrong thinking, wrong believing, wrong doing....but this lessons ought to have been learned first from brethren who have the same commitment to truth as you claim. Who have the same high view of Scripture as you claim. But you won't listen, you would rather exercise a fideism that demands an unreasonable faith, a faith that believes DESPITE the data, not because of it. A faith that believes 3 impossible things before breakfast and counts this activity as faithfulness and goodness.....blah blah blah.

You are wrong.
Wrong to divide the Church again.
Wrong to believe that the Scriptures teach a 10K year old world.
Wrong to force a false polarization on the Church, to make people chose your view of God or choose secular, materialist, naturalist, philosophy. A false choice, A consciously chosen path to divide not persuade. I do not have to believe that purposelessness, directionlessness, randomness rules this universe to see evolution as a technique. The how is less important than the why which is less than the big question--who. By pulling Christians out of the secular realm of science you leave the playing field to philosophic materialist. You desert the game for the bleachers, you will fight a stupid, wrong headed, fideist age issue when the real battle is the philosophy that is drawn out of science. Out of technic comes the data that will support or deny your cherished principles. But you won't be there for that fight. You will be running with your checkbooks to establish little tiny separatist communities who will not even know the issues of the greater world. You will desert the big battle of the 21st century, because you divided the Church and hid in the enclaves of people like yourself.

I am not liberal in religious matters. I quote Calvin and the Westminster Standards in my letters. And i believe them. Just as you do. The issues are important to me, what does it mean to have a deactivated vitamin c enzyme in our genome? The issues of science are important because God created the heavens and the earth, they sing forth His praises, His glory is evident in the equations of Maxwell and Einstein. In the thinking of great men of science, whether believers or unbelievers they say true things when they talk about this world. You can run, but you can not hid from science. You or your children will have to learn how to program your VCR or DVD. But the bigger issues will be if the Church pushes it's children out of science because they can not see how to reconcile Scripture with an old earth. You false polarization will drive the best and brightest either into secularity or into thinking outside of science. Prey to a false polarization the Church will become increasingly irrelvant to the issues of the day for those issues will be determined by science and its progress into new domains. All now dominated by a materialism that goes unchallenged because the Church withdrew from the battle.

Our battle is with theology and philosophy, not with science, for it is primarily technic, fundamentally just a tool. It is the philosophy that is derived from it. The metaphysics that is surrounding it that is the question. If the technic brings out ideas like a very old universe that appear to be in conflict with received religious knowledge then we better rethink what the Scriptures teach, not falsely hold to a past that didnt have the same information about the natural world as we do...

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Science can teach us when and how but never from Whom or why. And if you leave these greater issues which are not scientific at all, but rather metaphysics, to the unbelieving world to make up its stories and myths about why we are here, then you deserted the battlefield and are the real traitors and blackguards. For you left the real world for your isolated, insular communities where you can hide from the hard facts, hide from the hard work of reconciling the two books of God, and you left the natural world to unbelieving man. And the first step is to divide the Church so you dont have to deal with evolutionary thinking in your midst on Sundays....


part 2
points:
any feedback from Science to Religion is a good thing, not to be immediately discarded as compromise
the difference in the public nature of science and the private nature of religion
the use of means in both science and religion


After the issue of polarization of the Church into YEC and not-YEC camps the essay has as a focal point the idea that any feedback from science into theology is to be immediately discarded as compromise. This is a serious misunderstanding of the relative positions of the two books of God, Scripture and Nature.
The first point is that they are both given to us from the hand of God, for our instruction and edification. Certainly we can not expect the book of nature to teach us concerning the Redeemer or even the necessity for redemption from a sinful and fallen nature. But Romans is clear, despite the effects of the Fall, Nature will teach mankind concerning the glory and majesty of God the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. We would expect through the operation of common grace that unregenerate man will say true things about the world, certainly the position of the Creator God of science would not approach that of the God of the Scriptures, i rather think it would be something like the unknown God of Mars Hill, or even the deist God of Ben Franklin.

But the author rather would have us believe that nothing good can come from the hand of science if it in the smallest bit contradicts their particular interpretation of Scripture. This is the problem posed by a fixed canon. The words of Scripture don't change as the book moves through history, how then does it adapt to changing social and cultural conditions? Through the exegesis of those words. The interpretation, the meaning given by the preachers and expositors of Scripture does change, this is the meaning of historical theology. It is the significance of a changing human understanding of a unchanging God. Process theology in particular captures this essential meaning by making God do the changing, but the significance and meaning is that mankind as a whole, the Church in particular responses to changing conditions by changing its content of the preaching. Science is the big bully on the block for the last 150 years or so, it has redone society, reengineered culture in its own image in many ways, it is only right that the Church respond to this change by understanding the forces and people from a Scriptural basis. This is not compromise necessarily. We still read the Scriptures as did our fathers in the faith, but we know different things, we have different insights into the workings of the universe because of science.

Now this is not to minimize the concilatory desire to align Scriptural exegesis with the modern finding of science. Hugh Ross is perhaps my best example of this impulse. But the knowledge that light existed in the first 300K years not associated with starts but rather simply filling space, the evidence being the 3 degree kelvin background radiation is in my mind a legitmate exegesis of the problems with day 1 having light when the sun and stars are not created until day 4. Now i don't have to posit a YEC view of Genesis 1,2 to see science supporting this exegesis but rather see it has consistent with a framework interpretation, but in either case i do not propose to rewrite the first 2 chapters of Genesis, but rather use the increased knowledge of science to help me better understand the meaning of the Scriptures to me today.

This essay would lock my exegesis into some time warp in the past to a golden godly age of perfect exegesis. There is no such time. God continues to challenge and move our exegesis forward and science is the way He uses today as a very sharp instrument to show us the errors in our interpretations. To throw out all feedback from science to theology is to divorce exegesis from the real world and keep it locked up in some Platoist unreal realm of ideas. That is not why God wrote two books, given for our benefit, for our reading pleasure.

This brings up an issue i have discussed in the past in this blog, the public nature of science and the private nature of religion. I had the very good pleasure of reading an essay in Darwinism Science or Philosophy? chapter 8 "Radical Intersubjectivity" by Frederick Grinnell. Where he states "Individual scientists make discoveries; scientific communities make discoveries credible" pg 101. This is the fundamental reason that science has a right to feedback into Christian theology, that the basis of our faith is public, is the real universe that science proposes to investigate. But the public nature of science is smaller in a significant way than is religion. Take the discovery of the benzene ring.
http://world.std.com/~jbaratta/mandalas/M65Page.htm

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Now as i learned organic chemistry i did NOT recapitulate Kekules dream in order to understand benzene and the properties of organic ring compounds. I am sure there exist many people very familiar with organic chemistry that did not know the story. But for me to really understand the book of Daniel, i need to be guided by the Holy Spirit to recapitulate the dreams of David and to have their content made new and applicable to me. This is the private nature of religion, it is NOT transmittable in a very real sense, you must experience it for yourself. Science is not like this, it is radically public, radically de-personalized. Religious people miss this connection because so many things in the faith start in the public realm but end up, by faith, in a private realm that can not be dissociated from an individual's experience. This public nature of science blunts many of the presuppositional type of attacks on science as this essay makes.

In particular he makes reference to the idea of the uniformity of nature as a presupposition of science, but yet uses science's recent adoption of a catastrophic explanation of the extinction of the dinosars as evidence that uniformity is not true. There are several major discontinuities in the fossil record, but the explanation that asteroids hit the earth are uniform explanations, for we see the effects of them in the iridium layers etc. What would be a not-scientific answer would be the invasion of from space hunters who shot all the dinosars as trophies to take home, or troops of pixies who tickled them while they slept thus killing them by sleep deprivation. The greatest discontinuity is the big bang and it was fought for years knowing that it gave ammunition to theists who would be much happier with a definded beginning universe that a steady state eternal universe as was the Greek notion and the reigning scientific one until the Big Bang. But the evidence for the BigBang convinced even the biggest atheistic scientific people because of their committment to a particular way of seeing and relating to the universe.

And this brings up the question of means. Both in science and in religion. Methodological Naturalism is a means to be used in science in order to do the basic work of discovering facts and relating them into explanatory systems. Philosophic Naturalism is a metaphysics which draws its strength from the utility of science, therefore it is impressed at the power of the presuppositions of science and takes those things to logical conclusions in the sphere of philosophy. This makes it look like the seamless robe of science extends logically, necessarily into scientism. This is false, science is a technic, a method, an epistemology. It is radically incomplete as a world view, it is not a substitute religion, for it aschews the notions of value, or morality, of purpose deliberately in order to eliminate the contentious things that would divide the scientific community into the same type of warring camps as does theology. It is the grounds of the least common denominator, the public access to empirical facts, the denial of the personal, of the private, of the irreproducible as part of the system. It doesn't say anything about these not-science things except that they are NOT SCIENCE. It does not deny that they are valid human modes of thought or knowledge, only that visions and private happenings are not part of science. This truncates science, this make science less that a complete human being needs to be, by the very design of the scientific enterprise. It limits itself to what the Hindi, the Christian, the Marxist, the humanist have in common, this empirical world.

Now the Christian points out that you can not completely know the world without knowing the Creator of this world. OK. But that does not mean that you can not say true things about this world without reference to God. You can, but the closer you get to human beings, the closer you get to you and i has responsible moral actors before a Creator and Redeemer God the less you can say from a purely naturalist, materialist view. That is the explanation of why the battles are in biology and psychology and not physics and math between the creationist camp and the humanist. The closer to a responsible human being is to acknowledge his position before God as a moral creature the more the unbelieving world diverges from the believing, the more Abraham Kuyer's two sciences model makes sense. But the YEC in their insistence that the problem begins in physics, in astronomy, in the very age of the earth, stars and universe, the more they miss the point that it is man as responsible to his maker for his actions that is the crux of the matter, not the physics of light.

And this after the polarization of the Church is the greatest error in the essay. The Scriptures make it clear that it is mankind running away from the responsibility for moral agency before a Creator and Redeemer God that is central to the faith. Not the speed of light, not the age of the earth, they draw the line against materialistic philosophy so early in the discussion that they are not even in the game when the world thinks about consciousness, freewill, behavior and the like. This is where process theology and the liberal church is encountering its discussion with materialistic science, in human consciousness and the arena of moral responsibility and there are no conservative Christians in the discussion because they all got lost in the age of the earth blind alley. They desired to challenge the rising star of materialistic naturalistic pseudo-religious dogma but got kicked out of the debate because they didn't do their homework and fix the particularistic literalistic Scriptural interpretation that denied the great age of the earth.

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There are many aspects of the Christian gospel that people find hard to accept. It is wrong for Christians to tamper with the plain teaching of Scripture in a bid to accomodate the views of unbelivers. While some may claim they find this approach is helpful, I'd suggest that many reserve a deep, if at times unvoiced, contempt and disdain for those who abandon God's truth and try to win acceptance through compromise.

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