Tag Archives: God

Pearls, Pigs and Politics: Reclaiming Christian Ethics

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6 “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces” (Matt 7:6).

 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory… 13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit (1 Cor 2:7-14).

A New Series

Today we begin a new series. I think I know the general direction and the destination, but I don’t know the exact route. I am guided by the conviction that much of what passes as Christian moral teaching today is really political ideology in religious disguise. That is to say, instead of helping individual believers understand how they ought to live as disciples of Jesus in an idolatrous culture, teachers focus on social/political issues and invoke the teaching of Jesus—and selectively the Old Testament and apostolic teaching—to support particular public policies. Instead of speaking of faith, hope and love, they instruct us about social justice. Instead of calling us to personal responsibility and repentance, they blame the social order for our sins and sufferings and call for political change. In short, they prefer to change the world than change themselves.

In this series I want to challenge this social/political distortion of the gospel and return Christian ethics to its proper subject: the individual person’s character and actions in relation to God and neighbor.

Ethical Principles

Below are some principles that will guide our discussion. I will have to unpack and defend them, but for now I want to assert them for your contemplation.

  • The only entity capable of moral dispositions and actions is the individual human person.
  • Jesus and the apostles address their moral teaching to individual persons; not a single line is addressed to an institution.
  • Christian moral teaching presumes the unity and inseparability of our highest religious duty (to love God) and our highest moral duty (to love neighbor); loving God takes priority.
  • Christian moral teaching demands that the dispositions of the soul and external actions dwell in harmony in the good and right.
  • The believing church—understood as a community of persons not as an institution—should endeavor to embody the perfect community of the Kingdom of God in this world.

The Journey

I hope you will walk along with me as we explore this subject. I am afraid I will have to kick a few sacred cows, step on a few toes, and deflate a few delusions along the way. But my goal is to discern and explain the way of life taught by Jesus and his apostles.

“How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy”—A Recommendation

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I just finished listening to the Audible version of J. Budziszewski, Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy (February, 2026). I won’t do a full review. Instead, I want to give you enough information to back up my recommendation that you take a look at this book. Budziszewski has been a professor of philosophy, specializing in ethics, at the University of Texas, Austin, since 1981. You can read about the author on his blog The Underground Thomist. Budziszewski began his teaching career as a self-described “nihilist,” but along the way returned to Roman Catholic Christianity. You can read about his conversion on his blog. He is a prolific author on ethics, culture, and Thomas Aquinas. I am especially appreciative of his defense of natural law. Perhaps in the future I will explain why I think a recovery of natural law is very important for the defense and advance of Christian ethics and theology.

For now, I simply want to whet your appetite for Budziszewski’s latest book, Pandemic of Lunacy. The book contains six parts and thirty short chapters each devoted to analyzing and refuting a crazy but popular idea. These chapters are short, general-reader friendly, well-illustrated with examples, and carefully reasoned. It would make a good gift to a college student and would be an ideal text for discussion groups. Also, it is simply a pleasure to hear common sense, reason, logic, and facticity juxtaposed to lunacy and self-delusion.

I will list the chapter titles below. You can read the first four chapters as a sampler by clicking the chapter links on the Kindle version:

Pandemic of Lunacy

Introduction: Some Crazy Ideas are Deadly Serious

Part I

Delusions About Virtue and Happiness

Lunacy 1. Basic Right and Wrong Are Vague and Equivocal

Lunacy 2. Basic Right and Wrong Are Different for Everyone

Lunacy 3. Sometimes We Just Have to Do the Wrong Thing

Lunacy 4. There Is No Such Thing as Good Character

Lunacy 5. Good Character Is Unnecessary for Well-Being

Part II

Delusions About Politics and Government

Lunacy 6. There Is No Such Thing as The Common Good

Lunacy 7. We Can Attain the Common Good Without Virtue

Lunacy 8. The Purpose of Government Is to Take Care of All Our Needs

Lunacy 9. Scientists, Scholars, And Experts Are Neutral Authorities

Lunacy 10. Democracy Is the Literal Rule of the People

Part III

Delusions About Family and Sexuality

Lunacy 11. Uncoupling Sex from Its Consequences Has No Consequences

Lunacy 12. Both Sexes Must Make the Same Choices

Lunacy 13. Marriage Can Be Whatever We Want It to Be

Lunacy 14. Manhood and Womanhood Can Take Any Shapes That We Wish

Lunacy 15. Men And Women Don’t Need Each Other

Part IV

Delusions About What It Means to Be Human

Lunacy 16. Each Human Being Has His Own Nature

Lunacy 17. Human Nature Is Merely Animal

Lunacy 18. Everyone Is Evil—Or, Deep Down Everyone Is Good

Lunacy 19. Human Nature Changes

Lunacy 20. We Can Transcend Human Nature

Part V

Delusions About What Is Real and Unreal

Lunacy 21. Reality Doesn’t Have to Be Logical or Make Sense

Lunacy 22. Each Person Has His Own Reality

Lunacy 23. Things Are Whatever We Say They Are

Lunacy 24. All That Exists Is Material

Lunacy 25. Existence Has No Meaning Unless We Invent One

Part VI

Delusions About God and Religion

Lunacy 26. Religion Doesn’t Concern the Truth About God

Lunacy 27. We Can’t Know the Truth About God

Lunacy 28. The Truth Is That There Is No God

Lunacy 29. Judging What Is True or False Is Intolerant

Lunacy 30. The Truth About God Doesn’t Matter

The Devil is Always in the Details (of the Method)

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This is the sixth in our series of essays 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 I will offer further critique of the historical critical method of biblical study, focusing on the four scientific/critical principles of interpretation listed in part five.

The Principles of Historical Criticism Examined

In the previous essay, I listed four general principles of the historical critical method of Bible study. Biblical scholars derived them from the new empirical/mechanical science and the rationalistic enlightenment inspired by this revolution. The pioneers of the enlightenment—Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Locke—appealed to the stunning advances made possible by the new empirical method as setting a new paradigm for progress in all areas of knowledge. We must, they contended, reject tradition, faith, authority, and common sense, as reliable ways of attaining knowledge and rely instead on our own examination of truth and fact claims. Applying enlightenment principles to the Bible demands that (1) we treat the Bible just as we treat other books, (2) in our biblical studies we rid ourselves of all dogmatic presuppositions, such as those about divine inspiration or the authority of the creeds, (3) we interpret the biblical texts within their ancient cultural, religious, and literary horizons, (4) we must not take fact or truth claims within the biblical texts at face value but must examine them and accept them only to the extent that they are supported by historical evidence.

I titled my previous essay (#5) “How Experts Stole the Bible.” These four principles justify my choosing such a dramatic title. Taken separately or together they wrest the Bible from the arms of the church and place it in the hands of individuals to be used as a quarry from which to gather materials to build their private philosophies or religions. The secular university declares itself the true interpreter of the Bible and the moral conscience of the culture—in direct and self-conscious opposition to the church. Let’s examine each principle separately.

1. Read the Bible Just Like Other Books*

There is, of course, some truth and common sense in this principle. The Bible is written in ordinary human languages with grammatical and syntactical and semantic features that characterize all literature. Its ideas are connected by logical relations and its narratives flow in ways common to literature of its type. The church has rarely disputed this. But the church has never understood the Bible to be in all ways just like other books! It is Holy Scripture! In the early centuries, martyrs surrendered their lives rather than turn over the Scriptures to the pagan authorities. In the Bible, the church hears the word of God speaking through the prophets and incarnate in Jesus Christ. The church gathered and preserved these writings because they contained the apostolic witness to the Word of God, which according to John, “we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). The church never has, does not at present, should not, and never will read the Bible just like other books! And any institution that does so cannot be the church.

2. Responsible Bible Students Must Rid Themselves of All Faith Presuppositions

The second principle of modern biblical criticism also possesses superficial plausibility, which evaporates when examined. The church looks to the Scriptures as its canon (its rule or normative standard). Of course, the church should always be open to deepening and sharpening its faith by its continual reading of Scripture. But the early church received the apostolic writings as authoritative already having an understanding of the faith received from the apostles, memorized and stated concisely in what they called “the rule of faith.”** The church has been reading the Scriptures for over 1900 years. And it keeps on hearing its “rule of faith” confirmed by every reading. The church does not read Scripture as if it had never read it before. It reads it as a community that reaches back in time, not as isolated individuals. Each generation is taught how to read Scripture and what to expect from that reading. Reading the Scriptures without presuppositions is not only impossible; it is also self-deceptive.

3. Interpret the Bible within its Ancient Cultural, Religious, and Literary Horizons.

The third principle, too, contains much truth and much danger. In general, modern people are more aware of the historical distance between the ancient world and contemporary culture than were those, for example, living in the Middle Ages. This awareness can help us hear in those ancient texts what their first readers heard and avoid reading modern ideas and customs back into those ancient texts. It can also warn us not to take the changing customs of dress and diet as binding for all times. However, there is a tendency in modern thought toward what is called “historicism,” which is the belief that we must interpret ancient texts as locked within the ideological limits of their day. Applied to the Bible, critics account for the origin of all its ideas by borrowings from the cultural, religious, and philosophical systems contemporary with it. Historicism excludes miracles, divine revelation, inspiration, and universally applicable moral and religious truth. On historicist principles Jesus must have believed in demon possession, the coming kingdom of God, the resurrection of the dead, etc., because these were the common religious beliefs of his day.

4. Never Take the Biblical Texts at Face Value

More than the others, this principle embodies the enlightenment demand that would-be rational thinkers think for themselves and examine every proposed belief, weighing its credibility in terms of the evidence that supports it. Whereas the early church received the scriptures as a precious legacy and passes them on to each new generation to be read in faith with a view to obedience, modern biblical critics assert the right—indeed the obligation— to question the early church’s judgment at every point and relitigate every sentence. And yet, the process by which the earliest church received and passed on its knowledge of Jesus and the apostolic witness is largely lost to us, except what we have in the canonical New Testament. The process cannot be recovered. But the church of the 1st through the 4th centuries assures us that the end result of the process—the New Testament—is true to Jesus and the apostolic witness. Either we trust it or we don’t.

But modern historians claim to have developed criteria by which to reexamine every detail of the New Testament and judge its historical veracity. They speak with such confidence about “what really happened” you wonder whether they may have mastered the science of time travel! However, the more you read historical critical reconstructions of New Testament history, the more you realize that it’s all speculation and guesswork based on modern notions of what is psychologically plausible, metaphysically possible, and morally and politically desirable. Moreover, scholars reach wildly different conclusions even when they use the same methods. Apart from respect for the canonical texts as they are written, there are no objective standards for interpretation.

*You might be interested in a recent article by James A. Thompson, “Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Higher Critic,” 67. #4 (2025). Restoration Quarterly. Thompson addresses the first principle: read the Bible like any other book.

**See the excellent study by the renowned church historian Everett Ferguson: The Rule of Faith: A Guide (Cascade, 2015).

Next Time: We will see how progressive Christian interpreters use the historical critical method to find justification in the New Testament for acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living.

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.

Erika Kirk’s Three Words and the Meaning of Forgiveness

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At her husband Charlie’s memorial service Erika Kirk stunned the audience and much of the world with her three words, “I forgive him.” She explained why she felt forgiveness in her heart: “because that’s what Jesus did.” She was right. In that moment she let the light of the gospel shine brightly in a dark world.

Some people may have found Erika’s words not only stunning but incomprehensible or spoken because “that’s what a Christian is supposed to say”; some may have even found them inappropriate. But I believe that everyone who knows the heart of Jesus Christ and possesses his Spirit understands her heart.

In Honor of Erika

So today, in honor of Erika’s witness to the power of the gospel, I am reposting some thoughts on forgiveness I wrote on this blog over 10 years ago. These thoughts address some of the questions people are asking about Erika’s three words:

Questions About Forgiveness

I am often asked about Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness:

“Do we have to forgive everyone, no matter what they’ve done to us?”

“Can we forgive someone who has not asked for forgiveness?”

“What do we do when we cannot forgive someone?”

Like many concerns that arise from trying to live the Christian life, these questions take some things for granted that we need to get on the table if we are to find satisfactory answers. For instance, what does it mean to forgive? And, is it always right to forgive? In this post I’d like to consider some of these fundamental questions.

The Negative Side of forgiveness

When someone injures or insults you, you get angry. Your first impulse is to injure and insult them in return in an act of revenge. To forgive means to renounce the act of revenge and let go the emotion of anger. I don’t want to place too much weight on this, but you can see a hint of the meaning of forgiveness even in the English word “forgive.” Instead of “giving it to them” you forgo that pleasure. And the Greek word aphesis begins with an “a” (alpha), which often negates the idea of the root word. So, forgiveness is a negative idea. It’s about not doing something that feels so natural, that is, taking revenge and harboring anger.

But what about justice? We always feel that injustice has been done when someone injures or insults us. The desire for revenge is the impulse to put things back into balance. But what happens when we forgive? Aren’t we allowing injustice to stand? Or worse, are we even justifying injustice by not punishing it? Forgiveness does not seem to address this problem. It does not put things right again. And we can’t convince ourselves that the injustice done does not matter. Something ought to be done about it! Because of Jesus’ teaching, we feel we ought to forgive, but it doesn’t seem quite right. Perhaps, these problems are part of the reason we find it so difficult to forgive.

I think it has now become apparent that forgiveness makes sense only if we believe that God can and will make things right. We can “let go” injustice done to us because God never lets it go. Our power to forgive derives from our faith that God’s love refutes every insult and God’s power will heal every injury. In forgiveness, we deny the power of the enemy to lessen our dignity with insult or do us lasting harm with injury. We trust God to punish injustice or atone for it or overrule it and make it work for our good. Either way, God can do what we cannot. Forgiveness, then, is not an act of injustice but an act of faith.

The Positive Side of Forgiveness

Now let’s consider the positive side of forgiveness. In forgiving, we refuse to take revenge. We don’t act. But in not acting in a destructive way, we do an act of love. The first step in loving your enemy is not returning injury for injury and insult for insult. The loving dimension in forgiveness is the space it gives for repentance. By forgiving wrongs, we demonstrate the possibility of freedom from the cycle of “eye for an eye” justice. Forgiving our enemies expresses confidence in God’s power to change the enemy. It is an act of loving faith, a faith that believes in the power of God’s love to do for others what it has done for us. In forgiving, we suffer by endure insult and injury for the enemy’s sake. And in suffering for our enemy, we become instruments through which the suffering love of Jesus touches the enemy. This activity of suffering love brings us to the joyful side of forgiveness.

Think about the unhappiness we bring on ourselves when we keep a record of every insult and injury done to us! There are no limits and no end to the wrongs we encounter even in one day. The unforgiving, like emotional bloodhounds, can detect insult in the slightest gesture and threat of injury in the least movement. The list of negative emotions associated with our sensitivity to injustice is long: fear, anger, hatred, envy, resentment, bitterness, sadness, nostalgia, regret, despair, guilt. Fear anticipates injury, and anger defends against insult. Anger becomes hatred when it is nourished with memories of ancient wrongs. Envy sees injustice in others getting what we would like to have, and resentment turns to bitterness when we feel we’ve been passed over for honors we deserve. Nostalgia unhappily remembers long passed happiness, and sadness settles in when hope of better days fades into expectation of endless disappointment. And these feelings are compounded by the dim awareness that we are responsible for our unhappiness.

But what a difference forgiveness makes! Faith in God’s power at work for us and his love toward us frees us from the power of insult and injury. In place of fear, anger, hatred, envy, resentment, bitterness, sadness, nostalgia, regret, despair and guilt, we find love, joy, peace and hope. The causes of negative emotions have been exposed as impotent. Insults are empty nothings, lies with no basis in reality. Nothing and no one can diminish our worth and dignity because it is grounded in the unchangeable love of God for us. And injury cannot touch our true lives, which are “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 2:3). Hence we can forgive all wrongs. Our experience of insult and injury, instead of occasioning unhappy emotions, becomes an occasion to experience the love of Christ acting through us, healing, saving and repairing the world.

Thank you, Erika! Thank you for demonstrating to the nation and the world what a supernatural transformation Jesus Christ can work in ordinary human beings.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome (or understood) it” (John 1:5). Or “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can’t put it out (Highfield paraphrase).

What Keeps You Up at Night?

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Interviewers often ask FBI directors, generals and diplomats the question, “What keeps you up at night?” It’s a simple way of asking about the most pressing dangers facing the nation or the world. Today I want to answer this question in my own case.

Interviewer: Professor Highfield, as a student of church history, Christian theology, and contemporary culture, what keeps you up at night? What dangers currently threatening the church do you see that less observant people may not see?

Highfield: Indeed, I have given much of my life to study and observation of all things Christian. Also, I have given much attention to the cultures with which Christianity has interacted for 2,000 years. However, despite all that study I still feel like I am groping in the dark. The world is far too complicated for one person to grasp. Nevertheless, I will give you my take on your question.

Interviewer: That is all my audience can ask.

Highfield: One more thing before I answer your question. I want to make it clear that I believe firmly in the comprehensive providential care of the infinitely wise and good God. Nothing can separate us from “the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).

Interviewer: Understood.

Highfield: What keeps me up at night? I am most alarmed by the rapidity with which the younger generations in the church are assimilating to the mind and behavior patterns of the surrounding culture and abandoning traditional Christianity. In the history of Christianity there have been many crises, defections, and heretical movements. From Judas who betrayed the Lord onward there has been a steady stream of traitors and deserters. I am aware of this. So, I am not claiming that this latest crisis is unprecedented. Only that it is different from anything I’ve seen during my life.

Interviewer: Could you unpack your thoughts for us. What exactly are these young generations finding in the surrounding culture that they are not finding in traditional Christianity? Why? And why now?

Highfield: I will state this as concisely as I can. The secular culture appeals primarily to our lower natures, as John says, “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). It offers an easy way to pleasure, excitement, freedom, and happiness. Just follow the inclinations of your desires. In an unflattering contrast, popular culture pictures traditional Christianity as unnatural, backward, and unhappy. Christianity’s ethic of obedience, humility, self-discipline, and prudence, contemporary culture sneers, is as boring as it is antiquated.

Interviewer: Is that all there is to it? Young people have always been tempted to “sow their wild oats” before they come to their senses later in life.

Highfield: I was just about to address that issue. The secular culture wraps its sensuality in appeals to youthful idealism. Secular culture was not created exclusively by its rebellion against Christianity’s strictures on sexual excess, drunkenness, and other modes of self-indulgence. It also inherited certain ideals that it combined with its pleasure-seeking core. Among these are freedom, tolerance, respect, and dignity. In Christianity, these ideals fit perfectly with faith, obedience, and self-discipline. Popular culture, however, uses the rhetoric of these ideals to construct a view of the self whose inherent freedom and dignity give it a kind of moral independence that supposedly deserves respect from others. We are told that each individual is unique and must be left free to seek happiness in their own way.

Interviewer: So, secular culture uses Christian ideals to lure young Christians away from their Christianity?

Highfield: Precisely! Well…almost. In Christianity, “freedom” is the God-empowered state of exemption from the destructive powers of sin and death. In popular culture, freedom is the ability to indulge your desires as you please. In Christianity, we are sometimes allowed to tolerate behaviors we condemn. In secular culture, to tolerate means to approve. In Christianity, dignity is rooted in our God-imaging nature. In secular culture, a sense of our dignity comes out in asserting our rights to self-determination.

Interviewer: And young people are fooled by this rhetoric?

Highfield: Sort of. When young people hear these ideals used to justify a life of self-indulgence and criticize traditional Christianity, I am not sure they are completely fooled. The human tendency toward self-deception is very strong. But invocation of these twisted virtues gives the impression of moral superiority. And that moral fig leaf combined with the pull of the flesh and desire for acceptance by the majority culture explains why so many are taken in.

Interviewer: But why are so many so vulnerable to such deception? And what can be done to make them less vulnerable?

Highfield: I wish I knew the definitive answers to your questions. However, I do have some thoughts. First, I think most of us are unaware of how deeply embedded in the Western psyche the ideal of the independent, self-creating individual is, and how anti-Christian it is. Our political rhetoric and all our institutions—even many of our churches—idealize the individual’s freedom to choose their own path to happiness free from subservience to any lord. This pattern of thought is woven into every level of society and every social activity. So, when the time is ripe for secular society to use the rhetoric of freedom and individualized happiness to subvert traditional Christianity, young Christians fall by the millions.

Interviewer: Why now? Why was the time ripe?

Highfield: Again, you are asking a question to which only God knows the answer. I am sure it is much more complicated than this. But I believe this precipitous fall results from generations of ever more thorough assimilation to an ever more secular culture. It was not as precipitous as it seemed. The churches, the grandparents and parents of the current generation failed. They failed to understand and teach the true nature of the inner rot and godlessness of modern culture. They failed to understand and teach the true inner nature of the Christian faith and way of life. They failed to understand and teach the true nature of Christian freedom, dignity, and joy and how these ideals fit perfectly with faith, obedience, and self-discipline. They failed to understand and teach how to love God truly and keep ourselves from idols.

Interviewer: What can be done to slow or reverse this crisis?

Highfield: I dearly wish I knew. Until God visits us with revival on a large scale, all I know to do is repent and urge others to repent of our negligence. Church leaders need to repent of their superficiality, get educated, and grow a backbone. Parents need to repent of worldly ambition and childish self-centeredness, teach their children, and get their families involved in a like-minded group of believers.

Interviewer: So, that is what keeps you up at night?

Highfield: Yes. I pray I am wrong, but I don’t see it changing on a large scale until it gets much worse. But it can change for your church and your family. It starts with you and me. Who knows, God may yet surprise us with a great outpouring of his Spirit. Come Holy Spirit!

Without God, Without Soul, Without Heart

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The Postmodern University

In the previous essay we examined Julia Schleck’s defense* of the postmodern university. Though she admits that the postmodern university no longer believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue in the traditional senses of these terms, she nevertheless argues that society ought to grant professors academic freedom and tenure and generous financial support even though they engage in activities that seem destructive, useless or perverse to most people. My somewhat tongue in cheek paraphrase of her argument goes like this:

Trust us with your children and your money. Give us unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment. But don’t expect us to answer to you or explain why your investments are sound.

With Scheck’s argument in mind, I want to contrast the idea of a Christian college with her description of the postmodern university. As I observed in my former essay,

A university that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue no longer believes in itself. As far as I can tell, its driving purpose is maintenance of a system that provides faculty unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment in exchange for expressing their private opinions in esoteric vocabularies.

By rejecting all presupposed knowledge, truth, and virtue, the postmodern university loses its purpose, forfeits its prospects for progress, and gives up any measure by which we could judge its outcomes. To the casual observer, the postmodern university’s rejection of all “dogmas,” presuppositions, and time-honored truths, and its openness to strange and unpopular ideas may seem the epitome of enlightenment and a fine formula for uncovering new truth. But in this “the casual observer” is completely mistaken. For as described by Schleck, the postmodern university is not about discovering true and useful ideas. It’s about winning a struggle for power and money. The postmodern university replaces knowledge, truth, and virtue with ideology, power, and pretense.

The Christian College

A Christian college worthy of its name believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue; therefore, it believes in itself. Hence it can devote itself energetically to achieving its purpose. Its knowledge is faith, its truth is God and God’s creation, and its virtue is the way of Jesus Christ.

Faith Knowledge

The founding principle of the Christian college is faith, the apostolic faith preached and preserved for us in the New Testament. Far from viciously restricting our search for understanding and truth, faith points us toward truth and away from idols and ideologies. It protects us from evil, immoral, and superstitious paths. The knowledge of faith serves as a foundation on which to build our understanding of God, the world, and ourselves. Faith provides a language within which every discipline and every professor in the college can communicate with every other. Faith, sincerely held by every member of the college community, unifies the Christian college in a way the postmodern university can never achieve.

Transcendent Truth

Because it believes in God the Creator of heaven and earth, the Christian college believes in an objective reality. For God is unchanging and eternal and is the Creator of all else. Truth is the conceptual form of reality and knowledge is the form of a mind in which dwells truth. In faith, the Christian college believes it possesses knowledge of God centrally and principally in Jesus Christ who is the living truth of God manifest in the world. And with respect to this knowledge, its purpose is twofold: (1) to pass this knowledge to the next generation unchanged and (2) to seek deeper understanding of the truth in all its dimensions. Every discipline and every professor is united in this purpose. All seek to know God and God’s works in truth.

True Virtue

A Christian college worthy of its name looks to Jesus Christ as the model for its conduct. There are not two systems of virtue, one for the church and one for the Christian college. Jesus Christ is the Lord of both. The way of Jesus is obedience to the Father; his is the way of humility, faith, love, hope, peace, and patience. The Christian college affirms the teaching of Jesus and his chosen apostles as the normative guide for our relationships to others and the use of our bodies. We are not allowed to do as we please with regard to money, power, sex, and honor. We must bring our words and deeds under the sanctifying and strengthening power of the Spirit. For the postmodern university “virtue” is a mere strategy for attaining power, a Darwinian struggle for money, control, and honor. It should not be so in a Christian college.

Freedom Versus Freedom

At first glance, the postmodern university seems to offer more freedom than does the Christian college. Professors have the freedom to reject Christian faith and traditional morality and to affirm atheism, immoralism, and perversity. They can blaspheme the holy, praise the profane, and parade the ugly without sanction. And they can teach their students to do the same. Christian colleges do not allow professors these freedoms, and true Christians do not want them. On the other hand, postmodern universities do not allow believing faculty to affirm Christian faith and interpret the world under the guidance of the Christian faith. And postmodern universities have their own dogmas, sacred cows, and lists of virtues and vices. They will not tolerate the blasphemies of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; you may not speak against their sacraments: fornication, adultery, and abortion.

The Christian college holds a different view of freedom. There is no freedom in the power to do evil, only blindness and slavery to lust and pride. True freedom is God-given power to know the truth and do the good. Since Christian colleges believe in knowledge, truth, and virtue, they encourage believing faculty to teach and research under the guidance of their Christian faith. Students can learn from faculty who are so guided. Instructed by faith, Christian faculty can pursue the truth of God and creation with confidence, energy, and hope. And this is the freedom I cherish!

*Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Identity Politics and the People of God (Part Two)

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In part one of this two-part series (June 13, 2024), I described the essential features of identity politics. Identity politics divides people into oppressors and the oppressed and further subdivides the oppressed into a hierarchy of oppression. One’s place in this hierarchy determines all personal relationships, communal bonds, and social policies. This vision of society is characterized by division, hostility, and shame. Communal bonds among the oppressed are forged by a sense of victimhood and hostility toward the oppressor classes. The oppressors are allowed into the community only if they confess their privilege and guilt, engage in rituals of shame, and pay reparations in some form. In this way, the oppressed become everything they hated in their oppressors. Just like their oppressors, they seek power, wealth, privilege, and honor but use a different set of virtues to rationalize their quest: justice, diversity, respect, inclusion, truth, and equity. And like their oppressors, they display the vices of greed, envy, resentment, pride, and jealousy.

The People of God

The New Testament frankly acknowledges the existence of social divisions and hierarchies, of class and ethnic consciousness. It understands the human tendency to seek power, wealth and honor, and it is well aware of the rationalizations used to justify it. It sees the widespread injustice, violence, and oppression that plagues the world. It knows of the prevalence of greed, envy, resentment, pride, and jealousy. But the New Testament neither excuses these evils as do defenders of the status quo nor attempts to reverse the order of oppression and privilege as do theorists of identity politics. The Christian vision of community is dramatically different from either order, as we can see from 1 Peter 2:9-10:

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Peter declares that those who believe in Jesus Christ have been given a new identity superseding all others. God has united people from every tribe, tongue, and class into a people, a nation. The divine power that unites them is much greater than the worldly forces that had divided them, for their unity is grounded in God’s eternal nature, will, and power. The “identities” that identity politics makes primary—race, class, sex, gender, and all others—God subordinates to the greater harmonizing force of the Holy Spirit. God orders natural and cultural diversity into a rich harmony of love, beauty, and fellowship.

Consider the identity markers these people share. They are each and all chosen by God, each and all are ordained priests, each and all are holy to God, each and all are called by God, each and all have the task of praising God, each and all have been saved from darkness and blessed with light, and each and all have been given mercy. Notice especially the words bolded in the quote from 1 Peter. Peter uses three Greek words that may sound familiar because they have been incorporated into the English language: genos, ethnos, laos. They are often translated race (or generation), nation, people. It would be foolish to attempt to distinguish them. That is not Peter’s point. He uses three different words to emphasize one point: just like the ancient people of God, he says to his readers, you have a bond of kinship, calling, and purpose that takes priority over all other bonds. You are not a people because of your similar economic interests, not a nation because of your common ethnic origins, or your language, native customs, etc., but because of your divine calling and your common faith.

The Line of Division

In an essay posted May 03, 2024, I wrote about the origins of such training programs as Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED), which is used in hundreds of American colleges and universities to inculcate identity politics. In the 1980s, Erica Sherover-Marcuse developed workshops designed to promote a new intersectional consciousness among educators and other shapers of culture. The most well-known exercise in these workshops is the “privilege walk.” Participants divide into groups based on where they stand in the hierarchy of privilege and oppression. The privileged, then, must acknowledge and apologize for their racism, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. Imagine a room filled with students, school teachers, or college professors. The facilitator asks the white males to move to one side of the room. White females stand next to them. The process continues in order of least to most oppressed. Those considered oppressed are invited to share stories of abuse, shame, and marginalization. Tears abound. The privileged, however, are not allowed to defend themselves from accusation or relate their stories of oppression; instead, they must confess their undeserved privilege and engage in penitential rituals. No reconciliation here. No love. No forgiveness. No foundational unity. Only resentment, envy, shame, and hypocrisy.

The Circle of Unity

Imagine a different room. Men and women and children from different ethnic groups, languages, cultures, economic classes and educational levels gather to worship the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They surround the Eucharistic Table to participate in the body of Christ in grateful memory of their costly redemption. United in the one baptism and full of the one Spirit, they sing praises to their Creator and Savior. They form a circle of love by joining hands. They look across, to the right, and to the left and see only dear brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. Each has a claim on all and all have a claim on each. The love of God compels them to love each other, to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. There are no oppressors and no oppressed…no shame, no envy, and no contempt.

Lines have beginnings and ends, tops and bottoms. Circles do not. The most prominent feature of a circle is the center, the principle of its unity. A line has a middle but no center, therefore no unity. As we can see from 1 Peter 2:9-10, God is the center that makes a circle of a line and a people of a crowd.

Young Seminarian Visits With Old Theology Professor (Part Three: The Bible)

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Introduction

The last meeting (posted on December 19, 2023) ended with the professor’s summary of the conversation:

 “To doubt” and “to believe” are acts of situated individual subjects involving judgments, decisions, and moods. Every doubter is also a believer and every believer is also a doubter. The doubter possesses no inherent intellectual or moral superiority to the believer. I think this truth sheds light on your seminary struggles. You may have been beguiled by academia’s spurious claim that doubt is intellectually superior to belief and seduced by the offer of membership in a social class marked by its presumption to higher wisdom.

Setting: The young seminarian drops by the professor’s office without an appointment, hoping that the professor is in and available for a visit.

Seminarian: Hello professor. I remember that you have open office hours at this time on Wednesdays, and I was hoping to visit with you, if you have the time.

Professor: Good timing. A student just cancelled her appointment. Come in. Have a seat.

Seminarian: Thanks. I wanted to continue our conversation. Last time, you mentioned that we’d discuss the Bible next; that is, the contrast between the way the church treats the Bible and the way the modern academy treats it.

Professor: Oh yes, so I did. Since we last talked, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways, overt and covert, modern academia subverts faith. As we saw in our last conversation, modern academia canonizes doubt and criticism as methods of weeding out superstitions and other unscientific beliefs. It rejects tradition, orthodoxy, and commitment as ways of knowing and living. This institutional stance in itself, apart from any particular criticism, places faith under a cloud of suspicion. Of course, we know that modern academia is deceptive and hypocritical. As we learned last time, the doubter is also a believer and critics of one belief must remain uncritical of opposing beliefs. The modern university cherishes its own traditions, orthodoxies, and commitments, but it calls them by other names: professionalism, science, scholarship, equity, diversity, critical thinking, research, inclusion, tenure, academic freedom, free speech, progress, fairness, and academic integrity. So, as we begin our reconstruction of faith, I suggest we refuse to be intimidated by modern academia’s claims to moral and intellectual superiority over faith and tradition.

Seminarian: The Bible?

Professor: Okay. We are nearly ready for the Bible. But I want to know that you see academia for what it truly is. Its two traditional activities are teaching and research. On the one hand, it is tasked with educating the coming generation. It introduces young people to the current state of discussion among scholars of the arts and sciences and it helps them develop the skills they need to become expert practitioners and researchers in their chosen fields of study. On the other hand, academia is a way of generating and testing beliefs, hypotheses, and theories by means of criticism and doubt. It protests that its purpose is not to pass on political, moral, and religious tradition of any kind. But we know that American universities are much quicker to criticize traditional morality, conservative politics, and the Christian religion than they are progressive morality, leftist politics, and exotic religion.

Seminarian: I get it. I should adopt a critical attitude toward the critical attitude practiced in modern academia.

Professor: Yes! As a way into the subject of the Bible, recall as best you can the view of the Bible and the Christian faith you brought with you to seminary.

Seminarian: I don’t recall that I was taught a “doctrine” of Scripture as a child. In my home and in church, the Bible was quoted, preached, and taught as the true moral, religious, and metaphysical worldview. It was our unquestioned framework for meaning, identity, and purpose. In its teachings about creation, fall, atonement and the world’s end, the meaning of history and the destiny of humanity were laid out before our eyes. Our greatest enemies are sin, death, and the devil, and these foes can be dealt with only through the power of Jesus Christ and the Spirit. The Old and New Testaments’ stories and heroic characters provided examples of courage and obedience. The law, the prophets and the Writings provided moral rules and wise principles by which to live. Jesus’s teaching, example, and above all, his sacrifice on the cross and resurrection from the dead were at the center of our worship and moral lives. Religious and moral disputes were settled by determining what the Scriptures teach. Whatever the Bible says is the truth of God.

Professor: At what point in your development were you taught an explicit “doctrine” of Scripture, and what was it?

Seminarian: I can’t remember a particular occasion, but in my teenage years I became aware that there were outsiders who did not believe. This seemed very strange to me. How could anyone not believe? It stands written in the Bible and has been held true for thousands of years. The voice of the prophets, Jesus and Paul ring out as authentic and powerful witnesses to the truth they experienced. Who would have the temerity to label them liars or fools? Around the same time, I began to notice that the church leaders taught a “doctrine” of Scripture, albeit a rudimentary one.

Professor: I am very interested in exactly what you remember about the doctrine of Scripture you learned at this stage in your life. Understanding this process is important because we need to discover what made you vulnerable to the critiques you faced later on. So, try to remember the view of Scripture you internalized in your late teen years.

Seminarian: I will try. But I am not sure I can remember exactly how I understood things at that stage. I may have to use categories I learned later to express what I remember.

Professor: Okay. Do the best you can.

Seminarian: As I said above, as a child I accepted the biblical portrayal as the true world. The voices within the Bible seemed as real to me as those of my parents and the preacher. I believed not because I compared and contrasted it with other ways of understanding but simply because I was taught it. That is to say, I believed the Bible because I trusted my parents and the church. At some point I began to notice church leaders speaking not simply about the contents of the Bible but about the Bible itself. We learned about the distinctions between the Old and New Testaments and the various types of literature within each division. We memorized the names of all 66 books within the Bible. We even sang songs about the B.I.B.L.E. I could not have put it into words at that point in my life, but I could not help but notice that the scriptures were use as the exclusive source and authority for teaching within the church. The Bible was the authority by which theological disputes were settled. Church teachers and preachers often referred to the Bible as “the inspired Word of God.” I took this to mean that the voice of Scripture was the voice of God. I don’t think I heard the word “inerrancy” until I entered college, but even before then I would have rejected instinctively the proposal that the Bible contained mistakes, lies, and myths. Accepting such a proposal would shatter my biblical worldview and thrust me into an uncertain, chaotic world without guidance.

Professor: I presume that in college or seminary you encountered a more sophisticated doctrine of Scripture?

Seminarian: Yes. I learned what many people pejoratively label a “fundamentalist” doctrine of Scripture. That is that the Bible as a whole and in every part, from Genesis to Revelation, down to every word, is “inspired” or “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16). I took this to mean that God chose every word the human authors wrote and miraculously protected them from error. The words of Scripture are simultaneously the words of the human author and the Word of God. In terms of its use, this conviction reinforced the authority of the Bible for use in teaching and theological disputation. To quote the Bible was to quote God.

Professor: And you accepted this doctrine of Scripture?

Seminarian: Yes. But what I did not see at the time was that I accepted a doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture on the same basis that as a child I had accepted the reliability of the contents of Scripture; that is, that the church whom I trusted believed it and assured me that it is so. I did not ask at the time, “Can the doctrine of the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible be independently verified?” In my childhood, I could not have asked this question, because I accepted the word of those I trusted. To ask for their assurance to be independently verified would be to abandon the very basis on which I trusted Scripture. But by the time I entered seminary, I came to think that the absolute truth of the Bible could be (and needs to be) verified by reason. How this transition occurred I don’t know, but I think it had something to do with my conservative teachers’ efforts to demonstrate by rational arguments the complete truth of the Bible. In other words, my path to doubt was cleared by the friends of faith.

Professor: Humm. This seems like a good place to end for today. Let’s return next time to this ironic turn of events wherein efforts to make faith secure by rational argument ended up making it doubtful.

Seminarian: I look forward to disentangling the matter.

Professor: Goodbye.

Seminarian: Goodbye.