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The Logic of Biblical Authority

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This essay is the fourth in our series examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of otherwise intelligent people. In this essay we change our focus from the culture in general to the church and the Bible. Perhaps we can stretch our minds to understand how a culture that has abandon reason common sense, and knows nothing about the Bible, could fall for the new gender ideology. But now we ask how it came about that the Bible, which so plainly affirms the created order of male and female in its moral teaching, could be taken by many self-identified Christian people as affirming LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living as legitimately Christian. Today we focus on biblical authority.

The Genesis of Biblical Authority

The earliest church looked to the Old Testament, the teaching of Jesus, and the apostolic witness as the authorities that defined its identity. As we see clearly in the gospels, Jesus came to call the Jewish people to repentance in preparation for the coming kingdom of God. He spoke with a new authority, not to reject the law and prophets, but “to fulfill them” (Matt 5:17). Jesus prayed to the God of the Jews as “our father” (Matt 6:9-13). The early church proclaimed the resurrected Jesus as the long-anticipated Messiah (King) of the Jews. It understood itself as a continuation of the chosen people of God. Hence it treasured the Old Testament as one of its defining authorities.

The church, however, read the Jewish scriptures in light of the new thing that happened in Jesus. Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom, his miracles, exorcisms, welcoming of outcasts, conflict with the Jewish religious authorities…and above all his crucifixion by Jerusalem and Rome and his resurrection from the dead—all of these things signaled that God had done something new and completely unexpected in Jesus the Messiah. From now on, the people of God must gather around Jesus, trust him, listen to him, remember him, and follow him (Mark 9:7). Everything must be understood in his light: the meaning of the Old Testament, the character and purposes of God, and the moral life. Hence the words and deeds of Jesus were treasured by the church as of equal (if not greater) authority with the Old Testament.

Jesus’s words and deeds were heard and seen by many people, especially by his chosen twelve apostles. The Twelve and many other disciples, including Paul, were granted an appearance of the resurrected Jesus. It seems that strictly speaking an “apostle” is one personally commissioned and sent by the resurrected Jesus as a witness (Acts 1:21-22; 1 Cor 9:1-2). Because of their unique relationship to Jesus as his designated witnesses and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, the apostles possessed authority to proclaim the teaching and deeds of Jesus, to interpret the meaning of his death and resurrection, and to govern the early church with wisdom. Hence the writings that preserved the teaching and the deeds of Jesus and the apostolic teaching were received with the same reverence as the teaching they contained.

These three authorities—the Old Testament, Jesus’s teachings and deeds, and the apostolic witness and teaching—are reflected in our Bibles today: (1) Old Testament, (2) Four Gospels, and (3) Acts, the letters, treatises, and the Apocalypse. Hence the authority of the Bible to which the church appeals today is derived from the authority of Jesus and his apostles. Specifically, the Bible’s unique authority is grounded in its preservation and communication of the original teaching of Jesus and his apostles.

What is Authority?

So far, I have used the word “authority” without defining it. But it is important to get a clearer idea of this concept. Authority is a quasi-legal concept. It implies power, legitimacy, and competence. Authorities are identified as directed to a particular community or subject area—Roman law, the US Constitution, the King of Spain, etc. An authority has the first (as author) and last (as power) word on a subject. Authorities declare what is or shall be and invite trust and obedience or disbelief and disobedience; they do not propose opinions for negotiation or debate. Jesus taught “as one who had authority,” not as a mere commentator or one offering a likely opinion (Matt 7:28-29). He spoke with divine authority, which called for decision, not quibbling. The apostles spoke with authority derived from Jesus—that is from their firsthand knowledge of Jesus and their appointment and empowerment by Jesus to speak on his behalf (Matt 28:18-19).

For those who wish to be recognized as disciples of Jesus, that is, as Christians (Acts 11:16), submitting to the apostolic authority and teaching is essential. Recall what Jesus said to the seventy in the limited commission: “Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me; but whoever rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16). And who can forget what Jesus said to Peter: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matt 16:19).

The Bible Today

The church of today appeals to the Bible consisting of the 36 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament as the authority to define and regulate all things Christian. The Old Testament scriptures collected in our Bibles were already current in Jesus’s day and were held by most Jews to be holy. As one can see from the quotations in the New Testament, the early church appealed to the full range of Jewish scriptures, the law, prophets, and writings. The story of the collection of the 27 books of the New Testament is a bit more complicated.

As far as we know, Jesus did not write down his teachings. He traveled around Galilee, Judea, and eventually Jerusalem teaching by word of mouth. His disciples followed him and listened to him. They witnessed his miracles, words, and his death and resurrection. The apostles, too, after Pentecost proclaimed and taught by word of mouth. After persecution broke out in Jerusalem, believers were scattered everywhere preaching as they went. They spread throughout Judea, Samaria, and Syria (Acts 7-9). The Christian gospel was first proclaimed, passed on, and remembered by word of mouth by faithful disciples and institutionalized in such offices as prophets, elders, and bishops. And as long as the first generation of disciples and apostles were alive there was no great impetus to write it all down. The essential gospel could be memorized and recited in a few minutes. Besides, they possessed the Old Testament with its moral teaching, prophetic admonitions, psalms, and wisdom.

Paul’s letters are our first preserved Christian documents. Paul wrote First Thessalonians around 50 AD, about 15 years after his conversion. With the exception of Romans, Paul wrote his letters to deal with problems that had recently arisen in churches he founded. He did not write with a view of preserving the history of Jesus and the church. But his letters are invaluable witnesses to the gospel and history of the early church.

It is important to distinguish between the act of writing the New Testament documents and the acts of collecting, copying, distributing and recognizing them as authoritative. As we can infer from the Prologues to the Gospel of Luke (Lk 1:1-4) and Acts (1:1-3) and a reference in Hebrews 2:3, the second and third generations began to feel the need to compile and record the teaching of Jesus and the history of the early church. Before the end of the first century Paul’s letters were being copied, collected, and distributed as witnessed by the New Testament book of 2 Peter, the letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians (95 AD) and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (110 AD). The Four Gospels were probably collected and circulated in the late first or early second century. All were listed in the Roman Church’s Muratorian Canon (170 AD) and in Irenaeus’s list of NT books (190 AD). It seems that by the end of the second century most of the 27 books of the present New Testament were recognized as authoritative (i.e., as canonical). A few, however, were disputed and not universally recognized until later: Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter. The gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul were never disputed and were passed on as part of the apostolic tradition. The disputed books were questioned because of doubts about their apostolic origin. By the middle of the fourth century, they were universally and formally accepted because their connection with an apostle or the apostolic tradition was acknowledged.

A few observations are in order at this point: (1) The teaching of Jesus and the witness of his apostles did not become authoritative because the church recognized them. They are foundational for the church in that the church came into being by accepting them. (2) The first century church taught and passed on the same authoritative tradition by word of mouth and written word without distinction or tension between the two. Only in the middle of the second century did questions arise about the limits of the written canon. Hence only with respect to a few writings—Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter—can it be said that the church deliberated and decided the canon of the New Testament. The heart of the New Testament canon was determined before the church became conscious of the need to set limits to the canon. (3) In this process—whether informal and unself-conscious or formal and self-conscious—the authority of the oral and written tradition derived from the divine authority of Jesus’s words and deeds and his designated witnesses, the apostles. Hence the authority of our Bible derives from its role as the unique deposit of the tradition of Jesus’s words and deeds and the apostolic witness to Jesus.

Next Time: we will pursue the questions: do our Bibles perform this function, and how do we know this?

The Abolition of Creation and the Gender Revolution (Part One)

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Why This Series?

Recently a group of ministers from one of the most secular regions of the United States asked me to present a series of lectures on the challenges contemporary secular culture poses to the church, specifically the popular hostility toward the moral vision of life taught in the New Testament and treasured by the church for 2000 years. Some of them had read my 14-part critical review (September and October 2021) of Karen Keen, Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships* and wanted me to follow up with a more comprehensive treatment. I proposed to address the topic under four headings:

The Abolition of Creation

The Abolition of the Biblical Text

Reclaiming Creation

Reclaiming the Biblical Text

In the next few posts, I want to develop these topics in preparation for my presentations. Perhaps readers can help me refine my thought.

The Darkening of Creation

From July 22 to August 6, 2021, I wrote a five-part review of Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020). Trueman explains the origin and agenda of his book in this way:

“The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (p. 19).

Like Truman, I am curious about how this change occurred. What factors led people to abandon the moral significance of the order of nature? How could so fundamental a distinction as the biological difference between male and female be completely disengaged from human identity?** Truman began his study with Jean Jacques Rousseau and traced the sexual revolution from the 18th to the 21st century. I will interact with some of the same thinkers as Truman did, but instead of beginning with Rousseau I will begin with Galileo and the scientific revolution. Truman did not describe extensively the premodern understanding of nature and natural law. But I think it is important to explain how Plato, Aristotle, and later Christian philosophers understood and experienced nature. Only then, I think, can we understand what forces led to the abolition of creation as a source of moral guidance and spiritual inspiration. This essay will be devoted to describing the view of nature’s moral order that modern thinkers dismantled and replaced with subjective human feelings.

The Way Things Were

Before 1500, people saw nature as a unity containing different kinds of things, living and nonliving, plants and animals of different shapes and colors. Each individual thing is an organic whole, a unity, an identity. And this inner unity—a mystery in itself—reveals itself in its outer manifestations: that is in the total impact of its color, shape, smell, texture, taste, sounds, and for animals, also in their behaviors. This way of experiencing nature is a matter of common sense, which everybody possesses. Such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, however, asked theoretical questions about our common-sense experience: what is the inner basis of the distinct identities of things? What accounts for their unified, spontaneous, and purposeful activity?

In common sense we perceive unreflectively the unity of the being and activity of living things, but stop at that unexamined perception. Practical necessity demands no more. Plato and Aristotle—each in his own way—designated the inner principle of identity “form.” And they named the power for unified, spontaneous, purposeful action “soul.” Designating the inner principle of identity as “form” assures us that this principle is intelligible or mind-like; for that is the only way to make sense of the perceptible differences among things. Matter alone cannot account for the order and qualities that differentiate one kind of thing from another.

Even though forms are too complex for us to grasp in one act of understanding in the way we can grasp a simple mathematical idea, they must be intelligible, if only to the divine mind. Likewise, the inner power for unified, spontaneous, purposeful action (soul) must be nonmaterial. Note here that the doctrine of forms and souls postulates a likeness between our inner world of mind, will, and life and the inner world of things in nature. To anticipate future posts, the scientific revolution shattered this likeness and drove a wedge between the human reality and nature.

Admittedly, giving the names “form” and “soul” and “nature” and “substance” to the inner principles of things adds nothing to our common-sense understanding of things. For what information does it add to the appearances of things to postulate a hidden cause of those appearances? But it does articulate our confidence that our ordinary perceptions of the distinct identities of things are perceptions of something real in itself, that is, the invisible reality in things that shows itself through the appearances. The appearances of things are revelations of the inner reality of things. They are not deceptive.

The Christian thinkers Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas took up the concepts pioneered by Plato and Aristotle and incorporated them into the Christian doctrine of creation. The creation as a whole and all creatures within it embody ideas and purposes that find their archetypes in the mind of God. Augustine and Aquinas used such concepts as ideas, forms, souls, and natures to designate and explain our common-sense perception of the inner unity and reality of things and of their inner power for spontaneous, purposeful action. Like the forms and souls of Plato and Aristotle, their Christian adaptations add nothing to our perceptions of the appearances of things. Nevertheless, they assert our confidence that through the appearances our minds make contact with the intelligible inner reality of things.

There is more, however, because the Christian doctrine of creation also assures us that in knowing the forms of things through the appearances, our minds also contact the mind and will of God. Thereby, our ordinary common-sense experience of nature is drawn into the religious and moral sphere. The glory of God and the nature of the good is at least partially revealed in the appearances of creatures.

Observations and Anticipations

1. Hence, we can see clearly why people living before scientific revolution of the seventeenth century would find the statement “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Truman, p. 19) not only false but incomprehensible. Laughable even. For if a human being appears to the senses as male, we can be certain that his inner reality (or form) is male. Forms do not deceive us by appearing in bodies as something they are not in themselves.

2. The traditional Christian doctrine of creation adds another dimension. Because the forms that give each creature its identity find their archetypes in God’s mind and embody God’s good will, they demand our respect. They are revelations of God’s wisdom and goodness. It would have struck a person living 400 years ago as impious, ungrateful, and irrational to reject one’s sex.

3. Before the modern era, common sense, the doctrine of forms, and the Christian doctrine of creation together provided a strong foundation for the conviction that a moral law is woven into the fabric of creation. Some activities are good and some are bad. Some are right and some are wrong. And these moral distinctions can be discerned by reason and common sense. For Augustine and Thomas Aquinas or any of their contemporaries, it would have seemed as irrational as it is wrong for a human being to live as an animal or a male to live as a female or a female to live as a male.

Next Time: We will see how the architects of the scientific revolution—Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, et al.—destroyed confidence in the reality of forms and souls and replaced them with atoms, space, and machines. The appearances no longer reveal the reality of things. Creation is emptied of spiritual reality, meaning, purpose, moral law, and beauty, all of which are transferred to the inner subjective world of the human mind.

*Subsequently published in revised form as Ron Highfield, The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living (Keledei Publications, 2024).

**If you want to think about the true nature of the biological distinction between the sexes, I recommend reading Tomas Bogardus, The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters (Routledge, 2026). Bogardus is a philosopher colleague of mine. I will say more about this book in a later post.

Teaching the Faith in a Christian University, Part Two: The Religion Professor’s Responsibility

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I ended my previous essay by quoting a statement that I place in all my course syllabi and teased my next essay by saying, “Next Time I will unpack my syllabus statement in hopes of answering the question about the place of evangelism, catechesis and theology in the Christian college.”

Preliminaries

The much-discussed tensions within the concept of “a Christian university” find expression also within in the idea of teaching the faith within an academic institution. An institution that presents itself to students, donors, and the public as a “Christian university” incurs an obligation both to be authentically Christian and to uphold sound academic standards. I won’t undertake here the challenge of blending these two principles together harmoniously in one institution. I work toward this end in my forthcoming book The Christian University & The Academy.

A professor teaching the faith in a Christian university must do justice to at least three major concerns:

  • Courses should present authentic Christianity
  • Courses should be pedagogically appropriate to students
  • Courses should be academically sound

The meaning of each of these concerns is contested and always has been. Contested or not, however, a Christian university must define the limits of what it considers true Christianity, good teaching, and sound academia. Individual professors don’t get to define these values as they wish.

Courses Should Present Authentic Christianity

At whatever level and by whatever method, professors should endeavor to present true Christianity to their students. The measure of “true” Christianity is its conformity to the teaching of Jesus and his apostles as recorded in the canonical New Testament. I will accept no substitute for this criterion. There have always been disputed questions and obscure matters on which learned and sincere Christians have disagreed. But it is very clear both in the New Testament and in the course of church history that some matters of faith, doctrine, and morality are nonnegotiable. To step outside these boundaries is to move away from orthodoxy into heresy.

In secular private and public universities, leftist politics has all but replaced liberal values and traditional subject matter. This is especially true in the humanities and social sciences but increasingly so even in the natural sciences. Christian university professors—most of whom received their graduate education in secular universities—are not immune from the temptation to use their classrooms to advocate for the social or political causes dear to them. In my experience, the ones most likely to politicize their classrooms are on the political and theological left.

After the elections of 2016 and 2024 in which evangelical Christians overwhelmingly supported Donald J. Trump for President of the United States, it is not uncommon for Christian university professors to dismiss the faith of evangelicals in very harsh terms. In the politicized Christian university classroom, students often hear barely-argued assertions that Christianity is incompatible with capitalism and most compatible with socialism, that Christians should champion radical responses to climate change, that God is always on the side of the oppressed, and other claims based on a liberationist approach to theology. (For my thoughts on Liberation Theology, see my essay of February 19, 2025: “Is Liberation Theology Christian?”)

I do not deny that Christianity has implications for the way we live in the world and that we need to reflect on these implications. But such reflection presupposes a thorough grasp of Christianity and a commitment to live according to the teaching of Jesus and his apostles. Unhappily, most contemporary students and many faculty do not possess either one. So, “Christianity” becomes an empty cypher invoked to enhance the authority of the speaker. In my view, it is unethical as well as unacademic to ask students to accept a supposed social or political implication of Christianity before they gain a thorough knowledge of Christianity itself.

The first priority, then, is to make sure that Christian university students encounter the full range of Christian teaching as presented in the Bible and the ecumenical tradition of the church.

Courses Should be Pedagogically Appropriate to Students

The student bodies of the colleges I attended as an undergraduate were pretty homogeneous. Most of us were raised in Christian homes, attended church all our lives, and had a basic knowledge of the Bible. Most students lived within 250 miles of the college. There were very few international students, and I don’t recall a single Roman Catholic, adherent of a non-Christian religion, or atheist among my classmates.

This description fits very few Christian universities today. In my general studies classes I have evangelical students, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists. I have students from six continents. How do you teach the true Christian faith to such a diverse class of students? Do you design your course for the least, average, or most knowledgeable? Do you teach in a way that presupposes Christian faith or belief in God or at least openness to faith? Do you stay objective and descriptive or do you advocate for belief?

Precise answers to these questions must be decided by the teachers, given the makeup of their classes. However, I think there are some goals we must strive to achieve whatever the composition of the student body. We should want every student to learn the story told in the Bible and embodied in the historical life of the church. Even if we teach in the descriptive and objective style characteristic of academia, the Christian sources themselves present Christianity as the truth about God’s identity and purposes. So, even if professors refrain from using the rhetoric of evangelism, the claims of the Christian message will exert their persuasive power. And a Christian university professor should be happy about that.

Consider what the student with no prior knowledge of Christianity can learn: the basics of what Christianity asserts about God, creation and providence; about human nature, sin, death, and salvation; about Jesus Christ, the Spirit, and the church; about what constitutes well lived human life, and about the hope for eternal life. And the student with prior knowledge of Christianity can benefit from an orderly, sympathetic, and coherent presentation of the Christian narrative and doctrine. Catechesis, then, if conducted in an academic mode, is not out of place in a Christian university classroom. In contrast, theology explores in depth the interconnections among the topics of faith. It teaches students how to justify the church’s teachings from Scripture, tradition, and reason and engage in debates with dissenting views. Theology is best reserved for advanced students who are believers and wish to learn how to teach the basics of the faith to others.

Courses Should be Academically Sound

Teaching the faith in an evangelistic or catechetical way differs from teaching the faith in an academic style. But that difference is not what you might suspect. We expect the academic style to proceed rationally, to respect the freedom of the student, to delve deeply into the subject matter, and explore the subject’s connections to other subject areas. But evangelism should also appeal to listeners’ reason, respect their freedom, and address their concerns honestly. Catechesis, too, respects these values. What then makes a presentation of the faith academic?

Academic teaching accepts the obligation to avoid relying on presupposed authority. It feels an obligation to state clearly its presuppositions and axioms, present evidence for its assertions, get informed about the views of others, and argue logically for its conclusions. Though evangelism makes arguments, it is primarily proclamation and confession. Catechesis does not ask students to bow blindly to the church’s authority. It respects their rationality and freedom. Nevertheless, it focuses on explaining the details of what the church believes to those who already have faith and wish to learn more. Christian evangelistic, catechetical, and academic teaching communicate the same faith, but they do so in different ways tailored to different audiences and for different purposes.

To teach the faith academically is not at all synonymous with taking a skeptical, cynical, or ironic stance. It’s not identical with being progressive, liberal, or rationalistic. Except in extreme cases—concluding to a flat earth, holocaust denial, or soundness of phrenology—it is not the conclusions you reach but the methods you use that make for academic soundness.

Teaching the Faith in a Christian College

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In the previous essay, I posed the following question, which I left unanswered: “What about teaching the faith in the Christian college? Is it catechesis or theology or evangelism or something else?” I will address this question today.

What is a Christian College?

My Experience

I do not remember a time when I did not know that I would attend a Christian college. The Christian college was presented to me as a safe alternative to state colleges. Faculty at state colleges were known for ridiculing the faith of Christian students, and state-college students, away from home for the first time and unsupervised, often plunged into drunkenness and fornication and reaped the consequences. In contrast, faculty at Christian colleges were all faithful Christians and encouraged students to pursue lives of faith. Most students were raised in Christian homes and chose to attend a Christian college because of its devotion to Christianity. There they could study the Bible at a deeper level with knowledgeable Bible teachers and live in a community dominated largely by Christian ethics and worship.

I attended two Christian colleges and found them to be much as they were described to me. All the faculty were indeed Christians, and a religious mood permeated both campuses. No matter what their majors, students were required to take a Bible course every semester. We attended dorm devotionals every evening and chapel services every day. You could hear the continual buzz of theological conversations in dorm rooms, hallways, and classrooms. These two Christian colleges gathered hundreds of Christian students and faculty in one place for one purpose, and it was good for me. Indeed, it was so good for me that I set my sights on teaching in a Christian college. And for the past 36 years I have taught in a Christian university.

A Little History

During my time as a student in these two Christian colleges I knew nothing about the history of the Christian college in America and very little about the history of the institutions I attended. I knew only their founding dates and founders and the names of a few of their most illustrious presidents. Later, I learned that from the colonial period until the late 19th century nearly all colleges and universities in America understood themselves to be in some sense Christian. However, from the late 19th century to about 1920, many of the older church-related colleges moved from an overtly Christian stance first to non-sectarian and then to a secular identity. At the same time, conservative Christians—sometimes called fundamentalists—established small liberal arts and Bible colleges as orthodox alternatives to liberal and secular colleges.* My alma maters, too, were founded in the early 20th century in response to the loss of the older Christian colleges to modernism. And they retained that countercultural mentality through my time there and beyond.

Diversity Within Limits

According to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, there are hundreds of Christian colleges in the United States and Canada and around the world. And they are quite diverse. Some are closely associated with a particular denomination and some center their identity in a confession of faith. Some require all faculty to be confessing Christians and some do not. Some require students to adhere to a Christian confession of faith and a code of conduct and some do not. Given this diversity, I cannot hope to present a one-size-fits all answer to the issue posed in the title of this essay: “Teaching the Faith in a Christian College.” Should it approach students as subjects for evangelism or catechesis or theological instruction? Below is a statement I place in all my syllabi and read to my classes on the first day of the semester. Although you can easily find out where I teach, I will not use my university’s real name. Let’s call it Misty Mountain Christian University or MMCU.

My Syllabus Statement to Students

“Misty Mountain Christian University is a Christian university.”

At minimum, this assertion means that (1) most professors and staff profess and practice the Christian faith; (2) students are required to take courses that introduce them to the original, normative religious texts of Christianity—the Bible—and show how this faith has influenced the world; (3) students are allowed and encouraged to be involved in voluntary Christian activities of worship and service; (4) the University takes an affirmative stance toward Christian belief and practice. If you are a Christian, studying at MMCU gives you an opportunity to deepen your faith in an affirming climate. If you are not a Christian, studying at MMCU will give you an opportunity to understand what Christianity actually teaches and why it affirms these things as good and true.

In terms of your course of study, MMCU does not require you to be a Christian to study here. Nor does it make the quality of your grades depend on affirming Christian belief. Grades will be determined by your level of mastery of the course material and not your beliefs.

Professor Highfield is a Christian believer, thinker, and writer. This course takes an affirmative stance toward belief in God in general and Christian faith in God in particular. Nonetheless, I will respect every person even if you do not agree with my viewpoint and Christian beliefs. I ask you to treat your classmates with the same respect. The quality of your grade does not depend on agreeing with me.

This statement contains the essential features of my view of the purpose of teaching religion courses in the Christian university.

*For more of this fascinating story, see William Ringenberg, The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America (Baker, 1984, rev. ed. 2006).

Next Time I will unpack my syllabus statement in hopes of answering the question about the place of evangelism, catechesis and theology in the Christian college.

Understanding the Church’s Teaching Ministry

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It may be, as John Calvin thought, that human beings are born with a sense of divinity, so that their experience of the magnitude, mystery and grandeur of the universe invariably evokes the thought of God. But it is certain that children are not born with explicit knowledge of religion any more than they are born with knowledge of agriculture, animal husbandry, or physics. Their sense of divinity will be given concrete form by the society into which they are born. In many cultures, especially those dominated by only one form of religion, children gain religious knowledge by participating in the common activities of the culture: listening to its founding stories and myths and participating in its rituals, ceremonies, and holidays. The Old Testament records how the nation of ancient Israel was established. Israel taught every new generation the stories of the patriarchs, Passover, Exodus, wilderness wanderings, the giving of the Law, and the conquest of the land. They celebrated feasts and holidays associated with these great events. They participated in sacrifices, ritual washings, and purity practices.

The Teaching Ministry

The church engages in at least four types of ministry: sacramental or worship, pastoral, teaching, and works of mercy. Each is important and teaches the faith directly or indirectly, but I want to focus on the teaching ministry. Like ancient Israel, the church must teach its faith to converts and every new generation. The story of Jesus from birth to resurrection is the center of that message. But that story is set within the history of Israel told in the Old Testament and it continues in the work of the apostles and the churches they founded. The goal of that teaching ministry is that believers may continue to possess the original, true faith and enjoy the fulness of life in Christ and the Spirit to the glory of God the Father.

The church teaches in many ways and at many levels. Christian parents teach their children when they pray over meals, read Bible stories, point out the works of the Creator, take them to church services, and answer their questions about God. The church provides such programs of instruction for children as Sunday school and catechism classes. Regular church services usually incorporate Scripture readings, homilies or sermons, and hymns into the program.

Catechesis

Catechesis merits further comment. The English word catechesis derives from the Greek verb katecheo found in Acts 21:21; Galatians 6:6, and 1Corinthians 14:19. It means to instruct. As it is now used, catechesis refers to the process of teaching the full range of doctrinal and moral teachings to believers at a secondary level. It is usually conducted in special classes devoted to this purpose. Surveying all these teachings in detail in sermons, homilies, or the eucharistic liturgy would not be possible or appropriate. These teachings include such topics as God, the Trinity, creation, providence, the incarnation, the atonement and resurrection of Christ, the Holy Spirit, sin, the church, the sacraments, justification, sanctification, the Ten Commandments, marriage, the biblical virtues and vices, and much more.

Theology

Catechesis supplies knowledge of the faith appropriate and useful for every believer. However, the church needs some believers who are taught at an advanced level. For it needs people qualified to teach the basics of the faith and answer difficult questions asked by students. At this level, select students explore in depth the interconnections among the topics of faith, learn how to justify the church’s teachings from Scripture, tradition, and reason, and engage in debates with dissenting views. At this level, we first engage in the study and practice of theology. Theology methodically employs reason (logos) to see connections among the truths of the faith, explore the presuppositions, and unfold the implications of these truths. Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) famously defined theology as “faith seeking understanding.” At the level of catechesis, the believer trusts that the church possesses the true faith and the correct interpretation of Scripture. The study of theology helps the advanced student understand why the church is correct in what it teaches.

For most of its history, the church has valued a theologically educated clergy—priests, presbyters, and bishops—and provided means toward that end. Theological training has taken place in a variety of settings. In the early centuries, individuals studied theology in catechetical schools, monastic schools, or private study. In the Middle Ages, bishops established cathedral schools, some of which developed into universities. After the Reformation, the Jesuit Order established the first seminary (1563), which is a school devoted exclusively to training clergy. In the American colonies, people destined for the ministry would attend college for an advanced classical education but for their theological education would apprentice themselves for three years with an experienced clergyman. The first Protestant seminary in America was Andover Theological Seminary (1807). (For the full story, see Justo Gonzalez, The History of Theological Education, Abington Press, 2015).

Why the Church Needs Theologians

There must, however, be an even more advanced level of theological education. Some individuals must qualify themselves to teach teachers, ministers, and priests for service in the church. Let’s call them theologians. In the early centuries, many of them were highly educated in secular learning before they embarked on a program of reading and writing theology. Among these are Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, and many more. Some were bishops, some—like Origen—were monks, and some—like Justin Martyr a converted philosopher—were private teachers. In every generation some theologians stand out as teachers of theologians or doctors of the church. Since the Middle Ages, most theologians have been located in universities or seminaries.

The Christian College

What about teaching the faith in the Christian college? Is it catechesis or theology or evangelism or something else?

To be continued…

Orthodoxy or Progressivism: The Choice all Christian People Must Now Make

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The Change

The decisive choice facing Christian people today is not picking a church based on worship styles or children’s programs. Nor are the most pressing decisions occasioned by the traditional differences among Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Churches. For sure, each of these great traditions still places before us distinct doctrinal positions. But in the past, one could assume that with all their differences each preserved the essential Christian gospel and a faithful vision of the life of discipleship, what C.S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity.” But lately that confidence has been shattered. Now every believer in whatever tradition must decide between orthodox voices and progressive ones within their tradition.

The Choice

The orthodox voices call us to listen to all of Scripture, deal honestly with the apostolic teaching, and pay attention to the faithful of all times. They urge us to follow the narrow way of obedience and sacrifice. Orthodoxy warns us not to listen to the voice of the world, which often resonates with our lower natures. In contrast, progressive Christianity values liberal social change more than personal repentance. Whatever deference it gives to Christian language, progressivism is not animated by the spirit of obedience. It views miracles as parables and Christian teaching as wisdom for a less enlightened age. Biblical morality is useful only insofar as it contributes to personal happiness. The true authority for progressivism is subjective feeling validated by the spirit of the times. Its religion like all idols has been crafted by human hands.

My Growing and Shrinking Family

I am a life-long member of a fellowship of believers that reaches back into the early 19th century. I treasure it and remain committed to its central aims…that is, of being simple New Testament Christians without too many “addons.” For most of my life I’ve respected believers from other traditions, but I never felt the desire to join one of their denominations. And I still do not.

But within the past few years I’ve realized that I have more in common with orthodox Roman Catholic, Global Methodist, Orthodox Presbyterian, Greek Orthodox, Baptist, Bible Church Evangelical, Pentecostal, or almost any other group of orthodox believers than with the progressives in my own tradition. I share with the progressive wing a common history, traditions, institutions, heroes and villains, but sadly, we are no longer led by the same spirit. Our diverging paths grow further apart with every step.

Evangelicals: The Group Progressives Love to Hate

Progressives love to hate evangelicalism. The reasons for this antipathy are clear. Progressives lean to the political left; American evangelicals lean right. Progressives adopt a permissive view of sex, gender, and marriage.  Evangelicals hold to traditional sexual morality and marriage. Progressives are doctrinally liberal while evangelicals are orthodox. Most progressives are former evangelicals embarrassed by their roots and eager to demonstrate their enlightened credentials.

Pan-Orthodoxy

Evangelicals are orthodox but not all orthodox Christians feel at home in American evangelicalism. It’s too emotional, entrepreneurial, doctrinally shallow, political, culturally narrow, etc. I suggest that orthodox believers need not feel locked into a choice between American evangelicalism and progressive Christianity. Orthodox Christianity was not born with the American evangelical movement. It can be traced back to the New Testament through all the great traditions, despite their cultural differences and distinct doctrinal emphases. It’s in that line of true faith, that spirit of obedience, where I feel most at home. I am brother to all my orthodox brothers and sisters wherever they worship the Lord Jesus. I stand with you. We can work out or bear patiently our differences as long as we share that loyalty. Let’s find each other and stand together “to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people” (Jude 3).

Christian Colleges Are Academically Sound and Socially Necessary

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Today I want to flesh out an idea I introduced in the previous essay: “Can Christian Scholars (and Colleges) be Academic?” Secular critics of the idea of the Christian college charge that such colleges cannot live up to the ideal of a university. As I observed in that essay, according to the reigning model of academia,

to be a real college or university, that is, to live up to the ideal of academia, the institution must not presuppose the truth of any belief. No theory, hypothesis, belief, description, method, etc., can be given privileged status. Professors must be left completely free to go wherever their minds and hearts take them and share these thoughts with students and the public.

Christian colleges and universities violate this principle by presupposing the truth of Christian faith. Hence, they are not true colleges and universities.

An Abstract and Unworkable Ideal

University Not a Street Corner

Notice first that the ideal of the university as articulated in the above principle is abstract. It has never been realized in any real university; nor can it be. Every real university embodies a host of value judgments, social goals, methodological principles, and truth claims. And it excludes many theories and truth claims from examination because it considers them false, immoral, irrational, or irrelevant. It seems to me that the “ideal” of a free-for-all discussion fits better in the general space of society governed by the First Amendment right of freedom of speech than in the university where speech is governed by rules far more restrictive than freedom of speech. You don’t have to possess a PhD to express your opinion on the street corner. But possessing a PhD is the minimum qualification to teach in a university classroom; and by the time students complete their PhDs they’ve already been socialized into the elite world of mainstream academia.

A Fallacious Argument

Second, academic critics of Christian colleges and universities make a fallacious argument. They apply an abstract ideal to Christian colleges but not to the secular university. Secular universities will not allow the geocentric theory of the universe or the idea that the earth is flat to be taught because they “know” they are false. They will not allow racist or homophobic or sexist ideas to be expressed by professors because they “know” they are immoral. The list of proscribed theories and dogmatic certainties is long. I am convinced that the real reason secular critics reject the idea of a Christian college is that they believe that Christianity is false or immoral. Or, is it that they are afraid it might be true?

No University is Universal

Third, no university is universal. No particular university can house research professors from every discipline and study every problem. Nor can any one university create programs and employ teachers in every possible subject. Many significant problems will suffer neglect and resources will be wasted pursuing ephemeral winds of change. Universities possess limited resources and draw on a finite pool of prospective students. They compete with each other for resources, professors, and students. They vie with each other to construct the most appealing “brand.”

No Professor is An Island

Fourth, the idealized principle quoted above makes it seem as if professors work in complete isolation, boldly experimenting with ideas, daring to think for themselves, having no settled opinions, and beginning every morning with a clean slate and a clear mind. This image completely misrepresents how academia really works. Professors work in disciplinary departments—chemistry, sociology, psychology, biology, history, and philosophy. And though there are always inner departmental controversies and rivalries, departments have a tendency to hire like-minded professors. It is sometimes called ideological inbreeding.

Professors also belong to national and international associations devoted to their discipline: The American Chemical Society, The Modern Language Association, The American Historical Association, and hundreds more. These societies develop professional standards and give professors a sense of identity beyond their local universities. Perhaps even more significant, every subject area is further divided into rival theories held by communities of adherents that are often called “schools of thought.” No one is just a philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, language scholar, theologian, biblical scholar, or political scientist. These subjects divide into rival theories bent on refuting each other. Some of these rival communities have existed for decades or centuries and some for over 2,400 years.

An isolated researcher, a member of no community, without adherence to a school of thought can make no progress. Progress in any field of study is marked by extending the explanatory scope of a paradigm or theory held by the community of scholars to which one belongs. People like Galileo or Newton or Einstein come along once in a century. In the meantime, thousands of scientists work out the implications and applications of their theories to new areas of experience. Mathematics, physics, and Chemistry best exemplify the possibility of progress. But every discipline taught in the university imitates these sciences insofar as it can.

Every modern university conducts its business according to this method or pretends to do so. For only in this way can a university claim to advance knowledge, provide a sound education, and therefore justify its existence.

The Christian Philosophy

Secular universities as institutions adhere to rules, principles, values, and certain truths that distinguish them from a gathering on a street corner, and research professors and teachers conduct their work within departments, disciplinary societies, and among rival schools of thought. There is no such thing as an uncommitted, neutral academic institution or enterprise. Academia is about testing, extending, and applying theories and paradigms that researchers believe are reliable guides to discovery and progress. Therefore, I believe I am fully justified in rejecting the secular criticisms of the idea and practice of the Christian college based on the abstract principle quoted above.

How may the existence of a Christian college or university be justified in view of the actual practice of research and teaching in American colleges and universities as I described it above? What if we think of Christianity as a “school of thought” in analogy to such philosophical schools of thought as Platonism, Stoicism, Idealism, or Empiricism? These philosophical paradigms can be, and in fact are, taught in state and private secular universities. Many philosophers who teach courses in Plato or Stoic literature argue for the truth of these philosophies in part or as a whole. Why couldn’t Christianity be taught in secular universities alongside these philosophies, some of which are very theological? As long as professors argue in rational ways and deal fairly with objections rather than merely asserting Christianity dogmatically, I can see no rational or legal objection to the practice.

Sadly, state universities appeal to the United States Supreme Court’s decisions about the First Amendment’s prohibition of government-established religion to forbid professors from arguing for the truth of Christianity. But more than that, there is a huge bias against Christianity in both state and private secular universities. Hence Christians need to establish their own colleges and universities to explore the implications and applications of their Christian faith.

The exclusion of Christian theology from academia is an important academic rationale for the existence of Christian colleges and universities.* Because of the bias against and legal restrictions on teaching Christianity as possibly true, beautiful and good in secular universities, theology has been exiled from the curriculum. In my view, this exclusion is a dereliction of duty based on animus—a betrayal of the true academic ideal. Christian colleges and universities are doing for American society what secular colleges and universities culpably neglect to do. Christian colleges and universities serve the Tens of millions of American Christians and other believers in God by seriously exploring the implications of their faith for all aspects of life and in providing an education for their children that takes their faith seriously as a truth claim. And these institutions keep alive for society as a whole a very influential and profound viewpoint on the perennial questions about the human condition.

*There are many other rationales for establishing Christian universities and colleges. I am focusing on one academic reason that secular academics should acknowledge even if they are not sympathetic.

Can Christian Scholars (And Colleges) be Academic?

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For the past year I’ve been reading about higher education in America, about 10 books in all. I wrote blog reviews of 5 of them. Most of these books focus on secular private and state-controlled colleges and universities. Whenever they mention “denominational,” or “sectarian” schools, the clear implication—if not the explicit declaration—is that these colleges are not truly academic. Indeed, they cannot be academic, because they exempt certain religious dogmas from critical scrutiny and prohibit professors from teaching or writing anything that contradicts them. To be a real college or university, that is, to live up to the ideal of academia, the institution must not presuppose the truth of any belief. No theory, hypothesis, belief, description, method, etc., can be given privileged status. Professors must be left completely free to follow where their minds and hearts take them and share these thoughts with students and the public…and be given career-long security and a salary to do so.

Academic Hypocrisy

I think you can see already that this ideal of academia is unworkable. It is skepticism of the most cynical kind that envisions academia as a game to be played for its own sake. If students, parents, and the government came to believe this, would they pay professors and administrators to play this game? In fact, however, the secular description of academia is a cynical ploy designed for one purpose: to make it seem irrational for a college to presuppose Christian faith, traditional morals and common sense as guiding principles. Secular colleges and universities have no intention of living up to this ideal.

The whole point of anything we might call an academy is to rise above the undisciplined and emotion-driven conversations of the street. The academy claims to be a social good because it uses time-tested and critically proven methods of assessing facts, perceiving logical coherence and causal connections, and weighing probabilities to approximate truth. And in order to carry out this process, scholars work within traditions, schools of thought and communities to work out the implications of the dominant theories. Apart from accepting well-supported theories at least provisionally, scientific progress is impossible.* The same holds true in all areas of academic research—from fine arts to history to economics. It is precisely the methodical, rational exploration of (provisionally) accepted theories that makes academia academic!

Christian Academia

Christian scholars, colleges and universities conform to this model of academia as well as secular colleges and universities do. If you think of basic Christian doctrine in analogy to a well-supported theory, Christian scholars seek to work out the full implications of this theory in religion, theology, ethics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. Christian colleges and universities gather Christian scholars from all disciplines to work together on this grand project and to share the results of their study with students and the public.

Objections and Replies

1. But you may object that Christian colleges presuppose only one grand theory, whereas secular colleges gather scholars that presuppose many theories, which are allowed to clash. In response we might point out that secular colleges exclude many theories from consideration. Just try exploring the implications of belief in divinely revealed moral law or the resurrection of Christ at a secular university. Or try teaching a class arguing for rejection of the theory of human-caused climate change or that there are only two genders. Larry Summers was forced to resign from the presidency of Harvard just for suggesting that the disparity between the numbers of men and women in the STEM subject areas should be researched to see if it might be biologically based. Secular colleges’ and universities’ claims of neutrality and all-inclusivity are clearly disingenuous.

2. Some would object that Christian faith is not a “well-supported” theory but a set of beliefs based on faith. But this objection misses an important truth about Christianity. Christianity claims to be true. Belief in God can be supported by many lines of argument that many people find compelling. The distinctive beliefs of Christianity are based on events that it claims really happened. Christian scholars assert that Jesus Christ really lived, taught, died on a Roman cross, and three days later rose from the dead. The tomb was empty and Jesus was seen alive by many people, including Saul of Tarsus. One may argue that these beliefs are false, but note well, you have to argue that they are false! And if something is worthy of arguing about, that makes it worthy of academic study! If Christians believe that basic Christian doctrine is true, that of itself makes engaging in scholarship to explore the implications of this truth and creating an institution to facilitate that exploration an immanently reasonable (academic!) thing to do.

*This is a major conclusion of Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Revolutions come along generations apart. In between, scholars work within traditions or paradigms. Kuhn calls the activity within these interim periods “normal science.”

Is Liberation Theology Christian?

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I am taking a break from my essays on higher education to ask, “Is Liberation Theology Christian?” A few years ago, I would have answered this question, “It depends.” Perhaps that was because I knew it only from books. But now my first impulse is to say “No!” because I find myself surrounded by “liberation” theologians, and I know firsthand where they are coming from. It does not matter what they focused on in graduate school—biblical studies, church history, systematic theology or practical theology—everything is about liberating the oppressed. They’ve multiplied like rabbits. It seems that within the past 10 years, every theology graduate program in America decided that the only subject worth studying is oppression and liberation. Everybody is a social ethicist and a political activist. And you advance your academic career by discovering new classes of oppressed people and ever more subtle ways oppressors oppress their victims.

Before I go further into my complaint, I should probably define liberation theology. Liberation theology is a general term for any system of theological thought that privileges “liberation” as the lens through which it views all the topics usually studied in Christian theology. It evaluates every theological utterance by its tendency to oppress or liberate some group of people. There are no neutral theological statements! Everything is political, and everyone has an agenda. The purpose of liberation theology is to critique theologies that justify oppression and construct theologies that justify the efforts of designated oppressed groups to liberate themselves. It is not to listen to the word of God, repeat it to the church, and obey it.

What kind of oppression does liberation theology have in mind? Not sin, death, and the Devil! These three are the classic oppressors of humankind from which traditional Christianity sought liberation through the gracious saving action of the Father, Son, and Spirit. In liberation theology, the oppressors are human beings and the social structures they create. Liberation theologians work to expose and critique the capitalism, patriarchy, white racism, homophobia, colonialism, transphobia, etc., that they see permeating American society. Liberation theology focuses on political liberation. And it draws on the socio-political analysis of Karl Marx and his contemporary followers often called neo-Marxists. They divide the world into the oppressor classes and the oppressed classes. It’s a very simple analysis of a very complicated world. And from this simple analysis liberation theologians derive a simple theology that divides people into good and bad, guilty and innocent based on group identity. The oppressors can make no defense and the oppressed can give no offense.

What gives these liberation theologies the appearance of being Christian? The simple answer to this question is that they argue that the God of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ always took the side of the oppressed. Liberation theologians select such prooftexts as the Exodus story, some of Jesus’s statements, some of his interactions with the poor and rich, and a few other isolated statements in the Old and New Testaments. They sprinkle these quotes within an already complete system of social and political thought derived from Karl Marx and lead the reader to leap to the conclusion that the whole system springs from the essence of Christianity. But Christianity is completely superfluous to the doctrine. It is added to tickle Christian ears and, frankly, to deceive them.

Why do I say that liberation theology is not Christian? (1) Read any liberation theology you please—feminist, Black, womanist, gay, queer, and Latin American—and you will always find that the subjective experience of these groups is considered a divine revelation as authoritative, if not more so, than Scripture. No reading of Scripture, no matter how obvious to the ordinary reader, will be allow to subvert the “truth” of the subjective experience of oppression. But in any theology worthy of the designation “Christian,” Scripture must be acknowledged as the norm of all theological doctrine and ethics, and to reject this norm is to cease to be Christian. To continue posing as Christian is to lie and deceive. (2) Liberation theology selects one theme within Scripture—liberation—and subordinates everything else to it. Liberation theology does not therefore present the fulness of the gospel or the apostolic teaching; and this distortion through omission is a textbook definition of heresy.

How to Use Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

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In my previous essay I made some suggestions about how to read Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God. In that essay I asserted that we should not read the book as if it were Christian theology, philosophy, psychology, or sociology. It is rather a “phenomenology of homo religiosus” or religious man; that is to say, it is a study of the ways in which human beings perceive and respond to the divine. In this essay I will suggest a few ways in which the book can be useful to Christians.

Why Read Peterson?

First, it is important not to be afraid to incorporate the wisdom of non-Christian thinkers into our thinking. Of course, we must do this with care. But faithful church leaders and even apostles have done this from the beginning. In Acts 17, Paul quoted two Greek poets, Epimenides (6th century B.C.) and Aratus (4th and 3rd centuries B.C.), approvingly: “In him we live and move and have our being” and “We are his offspring.” Paul taps into the near universal belief and experience that the divine is near, around, within, and active everywhere. The pressing question within the religious horizon of the Old and New Testaments was not “Is there a god?” but “What is the true nature of the divine?” and “Who is God?” And that is what Paul proclaimed to the Athenians that day.

We, however, cannot presume that our contemporaries experience the overwhelming, self-evident presence of the divine. They do not. It is doubtful that even we who believe in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit experience it as well as the pagans in Athens did. We wrestle with the question of the existence and presence of God in a way no ancient person did. For many people, belief requires heroic effort. This modern feeling of divine absence is why we need to listen to Jordan Peterson and other thinkers who can awaken us to the universal divine presence felt so vividly by the Athenians and all premodern people.

The Question of God is Inescapable

As I argued in the first essay, Peterson reads biblical texts for their witness to the universal experience of the divine. Human beings are by nature religious, that is, human consciousness is so constructed that we cannot help but raise religious questions, questions of meaning, of life and death, being, eternity, and divinity.  Unless we are taught otherwise, we experience the power and beauty of nature, the inner call of conscience, the threat of death, and the lure of love as intimations of the divine. We feel the tension between the upward call toward the good, true, and the beautiful and the downward pull into sensuality and chaos. Peterson criticizes such modern errors as scientism, race and gender ideology, and utopian revolutionary theories (“idiocy” he would say) that blind us to what lies open before us: We live in Someone else’s world and we can never become what we could be unless we respond sacrificially to the divine call.

From a Christian point of view, Peterson does not provide satisfactory answers to the two questions Paul posed and answered in Acts 17: (1) “What is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the Creator of heaven and earth!” And (2) “Who is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the One who raised Jesus Christ from the dead.” But Peterson sets the conditions wherein these questions make sense. If we come to perceive the divine all around and within us, and if we feel compelled to choose between seeking the divine and falling into chaos, the next step naturally appears before us. It is to ask: “What and Who are you, Lord? How may I seek you and find you? What would you have me do?”

Peterson and the Bible

Peterson does not read the Bible as the canonical text for the Christian church. Nor does he read it according to the modern historical critical method, which seeks, not to hear the religious/moral message of the text with a view to obeying it, but to uncover the history of the composition of the present texts and to reconstruct the “true” historical events behind the text, neither of which we can know for sure. Peterson takes the biblical texts seriously as speaking universal truth learned in genuine encounters with the divine. Unlike modern historical interpretation, Peterson finds an existentially relevant and religiously compelling message in the Bible. It articulates a command built into human nature that we must obey or disobey. Once we have heard it, we can never return to our naive secular existence.

The church, like Peterson, reads the Bible for its religious/moral message. Unlike Peterson, however, the church reads the Bible as its authoritative scripture, as the normative story by which it measures all its teaching, theological and moral. But it does not contradict the ecclesial reading of the Bible to read it also as a witness to the universal human “perceptions of the divine” as does Peterson. Believers read the Bible as more but not less than Peterson. And this is why a person who is not a Christian can recognize their experience in many biblical texts and a Christian can recognize their experience in some pagan and secular texts. God has not left himself without witness in nature and in human consciousness! Peterson is on the side of the angels here. In my view, then, Christian preachers, teachers, apologists, and theologians could make good use of his work and the work of others like him.

Next Time: Perhaps I will follow up these essays with some reflections on Peterson’s moral and social ideas.