Re: [asa] An Evangelical Manifesto

My take on this section is that it is trying to maintain an evangelical
center against the extremes of fundamentalism and liberalism. You're right,
the statement is a bit vague on this, and if you notice the signatories
include people who could be called either "fundamentalist" or "liberal"
depending on one's definition. But I think this seeks to distinguish
evangelicals from groups that, say, question the ultimate uniqueness of
Jesus as Lord and Savior.

 Also, Merv said: do participants here advocate "sola Scriptura"

 I respond: I do, but like you, I don't take that to mean
"*solo*Scriptura" -- and I don't think that's what the Manifesto does
either. For
example, note this passage:

We therefore regard reason and faith as allies rather than enemies, and find
no contradiction between head and heart, between being fully faithful on the
one hand, and fully intellectually critical and contemporary on the other.

And also this one:

All too often we have disobeyed the great command to love the Lord our God
with our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, and have fallen into an
unbecoming anti-intellectualism that is a dire cultural handicap as well as
a sin. In particular, some among us have betrayed the strong Christian
tradition of a high view of science, epitomized in the very matrix of ideas
that gave birth to modern science, and made themselves vulnerable to
caricatures of the false hostility between science and faith. By doing so,
we have unwittingly given comfort to the unbridled scientism and naturalism
that are so rampant in our culture today.

  Of course, we probably can all find things in this Manifesto to disagree
on, and even statements like the one above can be taken to mean different
things by different people -- the Manifesto's signatories include some
people I'm pretty sure are YECs, some who I'm pretty sure are strongly ID,
and some who maybe would be sympathetic to some version of EC. But on the
whole, it seems to me that most of us could agree that the foregoing is a
good start.

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Merv <mrb22667@kansas.net> wrote:
>
>
> Dick Fischer wrote:
>
>
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> Any comments on this part?
>
>
>
> Evangelicalism should be distinguished from two opposite tendencies to
which Protestantism has been prone: liberal revisionism and conservative
fundamentalism. Called by Jesus to be ―in the world, but not of it,
Christians, especially in modern society, have been pulled toward two
extremes. Those more liberal have tended so to accommodate the world that
they reflect the thinking and lifestyles of the day, to the point where they
are unfaithful to Christ; whereas those more conservative have tended so to
defy the world that they resist it in ways that also become unfaithful to
Christ. The liberal revisionist tendency was first seen in the eighteenth
century and has become more pronounced today, reaching a climax in versions
of the Christian faith that are characterized by such weaknesses as an
exaggerated estimate of human capacities, a shallow view of evil, an
inadequate view of truth, and a deficient view of God. In the end, they are
sometimes no longer recognizably Christian. As this sorry capitulation
occurs, such ―alternative gospels represent a series of severe losses that
eventually seal their demise:
>
>
>
> First, a loss of authority, as sola Scriptura (―by Scripture alone‖) is
replaced by sola cultura (―by culture alone); Second, a loss of community
and continuity, as ―the faith once delivered becomes the faith of merely one
people and one time, and cuts itself off from believers across the world and
down the generations; Third, a loss of stability, as in Dean Inge's apt
phrase, the person ―who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a
widower; Fourth, a loss of credibility, as ―the new kind of faith‖ turns out
to be what the skeptic believes already, and there is no longer anything
solidly, decisively Christian for seekers to examine and believe; Fifth, a
loss of identity, as the revised version of the faith loses more and more
resemblance to the historic Christian faith that is true to Jesus. In short,
for all their purported sincerity and attempts to be relevant, extreme
proponents of liberal revisionism run the risk of becoming what Søren
Kierkegaard called ―kissing Judases – Christians who betray Jesus with an
interpretation.
>
>
>
> Dick Fischer, author, lecturer
>
> Historical Genesis from Adam to Abraham
>
> www.historicalgenesis.comWhile the general concern seems sound enough, it
is still ... very general. The criticized extremes are not specified.
 They are only labeled as "exaggerated", "shallow", "inadequate", and
"deficient". So of course then, by definition, they are not where a
Christian should be, but we are still left wide open to decide what views or
camps merit those words and to apply them to whatever other category of
thought we wish to criticize.
>
> Also, do participants here advocate "sola Scriptura" ---or do we rather,
as it seems to me, advocate more of a Scripture interpreted by the help of
other tools such as the wider body (the Church), and even nature (the two
book model)? Which is NOT, to my thinking, the same as diminishing the
authority of Scripture to a level below those other things, but rather,
recognizing that our interpretation of it can never happen in a vacuum, and
it is unhealthy to try and pretend so.
>
> --Merv
>
>
  --
David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology

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Received on Thu May 8 09:43:03 2008