Hutterites Ambivalent About Cell Phones

It's a serious story. 

First thing I saw when I logged on this AM was a notice about the death of Dr Kennedy. This isn't the time to begin evaluating his life and ministry. That will come later. Today we grieve and rejoice with his family and congregation. We grieve with them for their loss. We rejoice with them in the hope of the gospel and the resurrection.

Kennedy taught millions to ask the question, "Suppose you were to die today and stand before God and He were to say to you, 'Why should I let you into My heaven?' what would you say?" We know, of course, what Dr Kennedy's answer was. He made that abundantly clear from the pulpit: I am resting on Christ and his finished work for me.

 Today Dr Kennedy knows what it is to stand glorified before his glorious Savior clothed in that perfect righteousness .

The pilgrimage is over. Welcome home Jim Kennedy. 

In a recent book, church growth guru George Barna seems to suggest the end or irrelevance of the local congregation. He speaks for a significant number of people who find their congregation unsatisfying or who cannot find a church at all. It is not hard to understand such ambivalence and frustration. The church is divided and broken. It is filled with sinners and hypocrites. R. R. Reno and others have said that we are living in the “ruins of the church.” This is how it has always been and exactly as Jesus said it would be.

Welcome to life in the church. It is not perfect and, in this life, it will never be perfect, but it is nevertheless instituted by God. The ministry of the Gospel (and sacraments) and the exercise of discipline are the evidences that the church is Christ’s. More>>.

For anyone interested in the history of modern evangelicalism, this will be fascinating. The Carl Henry Center has put online a series of interviews done some years back featuring three prominent evangelicals, Carl Henry, arguably the father of neo-evangelicalism, Kenneth Kantzer both of whom being interviewed by Don Carson.

(HT: Justin Taylor) 

In the wake of the rise of the Open Theism movement and now with the recent resignation of the president of ETS in the wake of his conversion to Rome, there are renewed calls for a more stringent statement of faith for members of the ETS, the Evangelical Theological Society.

[Open Theism is the doctrine that the future, to which we contribute, is "open" to God, that he neither can know or control the future but rather that he, like a divine chess player, has excellent reflexes and reacts to the future. It is driven by an impossibly naive biblicism. They argue that Gen 6 ays that God "repented," therefore, if we're to really take the Bible seriously, we must say that God literally thought one thing and then, at another moment, having seen how sinful we became (which was a surprise to him), he thought, "Oh my, I guess things didn't work out as I had hoped."

"Impossible" you say? "Not even Arminians think this way!" you say. Well, it really exists and it's being promulgated by a group of leading evangelical theologians. One of them, my favorite of the group because he's just so much fun to read, Clark Pinnock even dallied with the Mormon doctrine that God is bodily in his book, The Most Moved Mover. Strangely, while concern has been expressed by leading evangelical theologians about Pinnock's doctrine of Scripture, to my knowledge, no one has pointed out his positive citation of Mormon theologians. Does this say something about the state of evangelical theology or about how many people read the book all the way through? I don't know.]

Anyway, with the rise of Open Theism, evangelical theologians have begun to clamor for an expanded statement of faith for the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS). To be sure the ETS statement is impossibly brief.

The ETS Doctrinal Basis says:

The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs. God is a Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory.

Arguably, the brevity of the statement reflects the widespread consensus on other issues when ETS was founded by the older neo-evangelicals. Many of the leading neo-evangelicals in the 1940s and '50s assumed, more or less, a Reformed soteriology and Christology but simply rejected the Reformed doctrine of the church. Others, such as Timothy George in First Things argue that the two point statement reflects the fundamentalist roots of neo-evangelicalism.

Whatever the original reason, whatever the original assumptions behind the ETS, it seems highly unlikely that the ETS will be able to add to the current statement without alienating significant segments of its constituency.

Let's say they start to add propositions about God. If they say that God is omniscient, they will alienate the Open Theists and those who think that Open Theism is tolerable. If they propose anything regarding Christology, will both Lutherans and Reformed folk be able to sign? Will Calvinists and Arminians be able to sign whatever the propose regarding soteriology? What about the Roman Catholic members of ETS (there are some)? What about the New Perspective Proponents or the Federal Visionists? If they say sola fide, which was the essence of what it meant to be "evangelical" in the 16th and 17th centuries, surely the Roman members and the New Perspective members, and the even some others will complain that ETS is imposing someone else's soteriology upon them. Then there is a question for confessional Protestants: Should confessional Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists) sign anything else beside their ecclesiastical confessions? I'm working on an essay on the role of Calvin as a "negative boundary marker" for confessional Lutherans and if they are to be faithful to their tradition, it's hard to see how they can sign anything in common with us Reformed folk since we are, according to their 19th-century writers, thinly disguised Enlightenment rationalists and fanatic anabaptists!

What is it that makes one "an evangelical" anyway? What's the one conviction that all post-1720 "evangelicals" share? I contend that the only universal all "the evangelicals" share is an immediate encounter with the risen Christ. Everything else seems to be up for debate. In other words, the ETS statement is reductionist because post 1720-evangelicalism has become reductionist. Religious experience is the only thing that binds them together.

That's why I say now, for what it's worth, I'm "evangelical" but I'm not "an evangelical" in the same way I'm catholic but I'm not "a (Roman) catholic." The Reformed faith is evangelical. It is catholic. It is a lot of other things. The Reformed faith cannot be properly reduced to one universal, but I can reduce contemporary "evangelicalism" to "has had an immediate encounter with the risen Christ" without doing a great injustice.

Then, as Mike Horton pointed out when this issue came up ca. 2001, there is the nature of ETS as an academic society. Is it appropriate for an academic society to exclude and include folk the way that some are proposing? To this Reformed confessionalist, the evangelical power struggle about who is "in" and who is "out" seems not only unseemly but inappropriate to an academic society. Some evangelicals seem minded to treat ETS as if it were some sort of Synod. Well, it isn't. I certainly don't recognize ETS as any sort of ecclesiastical or quasi-ecclesiastical entity with disciplinary powers.

Why don't the powers that be propose some academic standards? I'm not setting myself up as the arbiter of all things academic and perhaps the standards are fine (though they are allowing me to give a paper so that's prima facie evidence of low standards), but if the ETS is an academic society, perhaps more attention should be given to academics, to the quality of scholarship in the journal and at the society, than to the theology of the members?

There was a time (in the days of Carl Henry, the early days of Fuller Seminary, the early days of Christianity Today) when it might have been possible to sort out the theological boundaries of ETS and to exclude Open Theists and Roman Catholics but how can that be done now with the bewildering diversity of views all claiming to be authentically "evangelical"?

When the baby-boomer children of the neo-evangelicals took the reigns of evangelical power in the 1970s whatever consensus existed prior to the 70s passed into oblivion. Today Pandora's box is wide open and how are they going to stuff it all back in? It doesn't seem possible and perhaps it's not even desirable.