Re: Living and Worshipping in the Real World

My sense is that the kind of situation described by David is all too common
today, where it was not nearly so common 30 years ago when I was coming out
of college. At that time, many/most of the good evangelical churches that I
knew of, were happy with concordism of some sort. They were not happy with
evolution, but with OEC views of various types. I include in this
description the very important, widely influential church that my wife and I
attended right before and after our wedding, Tenth Presbyterian Church in
Philadelphia. At that time the pastor was the late James M Boice, who was
definitely an OEC not a YEC. Since then some of the leaders of the PCA
denomination, which Boice later joined, have gone wholehog into YEC; this
would include RC Sproul and D James Kennedy among others, and the
denomination did have a few years ago a full fledged debate about YEC vs OEC
in light of the Westminster Confession. Fortunately they rejected the call
to require YEC of all teaching and ruling elders, but the very fact that
such a ridiculous resolution got consideration says a lot about how things
have changed.

Why have they changed?

(1) Home schooling, a result of the increasingly anti-religious mood of our
nation's courts and schools. (I don't want to enter a debate about those
final words, although I agree with them myself; the point here is that a lot
of people agree with them--something I don't think can be debated--and some
of those who do are acting on it by rejecting public education.) The
materials they find, from the "Bob Jones" style Christian school movement
and from websites like answersingenesis, are very strongly YEC. We've
discussed this before.

(2) Complete rejection of concordism by YECs. This started in the early
1960s, at least, and represents a fundamental change in orientation on the
part of fundamentalists and other conservative evangelicals from the more
welcoming, OEC/concordist views they almost all embraced (Yes, the
fundamentalists did also) in earlier decades. As John Whitcomb wrote in his
very revealing tract, "The Origin of the Solar System" (1963), "the
double-revelation theory ... fails to give due recognition to the tremendous
limitations which inhibit the scientific method when applied to the study of
origins." In other words, origins science vs observational science--a
distinction that some of the IDs are also now pushing hard. But when
coupled with YEC biblical views, it serves to create a whole alternative
"science," as we know. I don't think this interpretation of the history of
things, which I note in my essay in Keith Miller's Perspectives on an
Evolving Creation, has been noted by others; but it's very real and also
very important, not to add highly relevant to the topic of this post.

(3) The "culture wars," related to (1) but not identical to it. It's my
own refusal to participate as a combatant that, more than anything else
(though adding onto other things) keeps me out of the ID movement. Truth is
harmed when it's more important to "win" politically than to discover the
truth. And that goes both ways, with regard to ID, as I've said often here.
 I do not believe that we have presently an entirely honest conversation
about the alleged explanatory difficulties of mainstream science, and the
high political cost of "losing" in the culture wars surely has something to
do with this.

We could say a lot more, but that's all I have time for this morning.

ted
Received on Mon Jan 23 09:02:39 2006