Before I talk
about the appropriate treatment of men like “Ted” I think I should say a little
more about his views. As a presuppositional, reformed, covenantal, Baptist
Christian, I subscribe to the view that there are really only two worldviews.
There is the Christian worldview that involves complete submission of the
intellect, the will, and the emotion to God in all things. All-embracing
submission to God is the central concern of this worldview. The Summum bonum of
the Christian worldview is the glory of God alone. Then there is the
non-Christian worldview. This worldview demands, at all cost, the defense and
elevation of autonomous man regardless of the shade of that specific cloak. One
cloak comes in the shade of atheism while another in agnosticism and another in
pagan religion, and so on and so forth. Regardless of the number of shades the
non-Christian worldview comes in, it has the same principle beating in its
chest when you remove the cloak: human autonomy. While the shade of the
worldview changes to the eye, some lighter, darker, and of various colors, the
fabric itself is all of the same essence: human autonomy. Essentially, the two
worldviews available to man are summed up either in the total acknowledgement of
the divine sovereignty and Lordship of Christ or the intrepid and supercilious
claim of the unconditional autonomy of human reason. There is no middle ground.
In fact, when examined through the proper lens, the entire process of Christian
sanctification is the purging of human autonomy from the Christian life. The
mark of the true Christian is the struggle against his own autonomy, his
actions to eliminate the ungodly idea from his daily life.
Nothing places
human autonomy on greater display than the manifest willingness of men to call
into question the authority of “thus says the Lord.” Human autonomy was
launched in the garden when Eve willingly called into question the Word of God.
She placed herself over the Word of God in an arrogant attempt to judge the
holy edict itself. The key to eliminating the ungodly attitude of human
philosophy is situated in the purifying power of Sacred Scripture. Scripture is
the only source by which human autonomy can be purged. Outside of Scripture,
there is no hope for man, no escape from the godless attitude of man’s
absolute, unconditional independence.
Yet, my detractor
“Ted,” along with the Rob Bells of the world have much more in common with men
like Sartre and Locke and the pagan philosophers of the world than they do with
Peter, Paul, James, and John or any one of the prophets. Ted wants to place
reason in the position of determining whether or not revelation has occurred,
which is precisely reflective of Locke. At the same time, he argues for a
radical freedom in man not unlike that of the philosopher Sartre. The move that
has to be made if you wish to stand in judgment of the Bible is that you must
replace the Bible as your final source of authority for what is and is not true
knowledge with some alternative. The moment you make that move, you have now
demonstrated that it is your conviction that there is another source that is
more reliable, more dependable, and more authoritative to determine what is
true knowledge than the Bible. Moreover, this is true even if you want to
create an unholy mixture of the Bible + Science + human reason. Anything other
than the sufficiency of Scripture and the authority of Scripture alone is the
obvious removal of Scripture from its proper place as judge of humanity and
final arbiter of true knowledge. This move results in the obliteration of
biblical Christianity. Hence, anyone making this move is an opponent, an enemy,
and a hostile foe to traditional, historic, biblical Christianity. 
Now, what is
interesting is that the philosophical move here is the exchange of one criterion
for true knowledge for a different criterion for true knowledge.
And this has been where I have pressed Ted on several occasions without must
result. Like Rob Bell, Ted only wants to talk about what he denies rather than
what he affirms. He seems to operate under the delusion that it is possible to
deny claims without also, at the same time, affirming counter-claims. Such a
tendentious approach is fatal to his philosophy. The reason is that unless Ted
can come up with defensible criteria for how he knows the things he must know
if he is to call into question orthodoxy, then he really isn’t demonstrating
anything at all. And that is precisely what we have seen from Ted from the
start. It almost feels like Rob Bell has his hand in a puppet’s back when we
read Ted’s views.
The basic problem
is Ted’s criteria. This is the core issue in his approach and it is one you
should point out to anyone like Ted that dares to make these kinds of
arguments. Ted has developed a certain set of criteria, albeit undisclosed as
of yet, by which he judges whether or not Scripture is authoritative, binding,
inspired, and inerrant. Now, the problem with any criteria is that it requires
certain presuppositions in order to get off the ground. Suppose your job is to
pick and process apples. Good apples make it in the basket and bad apples get
tossed into the applesauce sack. In order for you to determine that an apple is
good or bad, you must have previous knowledge of what a good apple is. How else
would you be able to judge it? In order for us to decide upon a criterion for
true knowledge, we must already have in mind what true knowledge is. And if we
already know the answer to the question prior to asking the question, then why
should we bother with the question to begin with? If we already think we know
what true knowledge is, then how can we possibly establish a supposedly
objective standard for how to judge the truth-value of any proposition? It
seems that whatever criteria we invent it will be viciously circular in nature
designed only to prove what we think we already know to be true. This is a
serious defect in Ted’s argument and for whatever shade of the non-Christian
worldview we are evaluating.
The second problem
is Ted’s inability to justify his non-Christian system. Yes, I am employing a
very specific kind of rhetoric and yes it is intentional. No, it is not
intellectual bullying. It is forcing someone to face the full force of a
logical argument. Every system rests upon what we call self-justifying beliefs.
Alvin Plantinga calls them properly basic beliefs. A properly basic belief is a
belief that does not rely on another belief in order for it to be the case.
That is to say, a properly basic beliefs requires no argument. The reasons for
believing them are self-evident and self-sufficient. “Christian belief in the
typical case is not the conclusion of an argument, or accepted on the
evidential basis of other beliefs, or accepted just because it constitutes a
good explanation of phenomena of one kind of another.” [Plantinga, Warranted
Christian Belief] Ted seems to want to subject Christian dogma to the pagan
philosophical principle known as verification. This view states simply that
every belief must be verified by other more basic or more obvious beliefs. But
how does the pagan philosophy justify his principle of verification without
eventually ending up in an infinite regress? That has yet to be seen.
According the
model, experience of a certain sort is intimately associated with the formation
of warranted Christian belief, but the belief doesn’t get its warrant by way of
an argument from the experience. [Plantinga] He goes on to say, “In the typical
case, therefore, Christian belief is immediate; it is formed in the basic way.”
What we have with Ted’s approach is similar to what we have with so many
rationalists who think themselves genuine Christians. Every Christian dogma is
subjected to the criteria of either modern science or human reason or a mixture
of both for verification and testing. This method has not only proven to be
philosophically fantastic, it represents the non-Christian method of thought at
its core. It relies on the absolute, unconditional autonomy of human reason.
How do we know we are the children of God? The Spirit Himself testifies with
our spirit that we are the children of God. (Rom. 8:16) How did the disciples
finally come to understand the Scriptures about Christ? This profound statement
is recorded by Luke: τότε διήνοιξεν αὐτῶν τὸν νοῦν τοῦ συνιέναι τὰς γραφάς· Then he opened their mind to understand the Scripture. The work of God is
necessary for genuine Christian belief. This is the system of biblical
Christianity. Rational argumentation and evidence without the work of God on
the heart, as we have seen, produces shallow, rational, faithfuless profressors
of Christ that inevitably end up challenging the most precious and basic of
Christian tenets. They will tare Christianity apart from the inside out if we
allow it. Ted is an excellent representation of this sort of Christian.
The final problem
is Ted’s reliance on a form of literary criticism that is not appropriate for
the literary type found in the Scripture. Ted believes that the Jewish authors
of Scripture wrote exactly as did their ANE counterparts ~500 BC and earlier.
The OT is filled with the same sort of legend and myth employed by other ANE
writers. First, Ted is employing the methods of higher criticism in his
evaluation of OT literature. Well, perhaps what Ted is likely doing is adopting
the conclusions of these pagan literary critics more than he is actually doing
literary criticism himself. Suffice it to say, a word about higher criticism is
in order, albeit a very brief one.
The
Historical-Critical Method typically embraces the following tenets: 1) that
reality is uniform and universal; 2) that reality is accessible to human reason
and investigation; 3) that all events historical and natural occurring within
it are in principle interconnected and comparable by analogy; and 4) that humanity’s
contemporary experience of reality can provide objective criteria by which that
could or could not have happened in the past can be determined. It seems
obvious to me that (4) is especially problematic for the would-be student of OT
studies. For that matter, it is problematic for anyone approaching the sacred
text of Scripture. Eta Linnemann tells us, “For that reason, no one who reads
this book should feel obligated any longer to heed the suppositions of biblical
criticism just because it makes the claim – without justification – to convey
scientific results. Its arguments were tested at hundreds of points, and not
one of them passed muster. The colossus of historical-critical theology has
clay feet. [Eta Linnemann, Biblical Criticism on Trial]
Any approach to
the interpretation of Scripture is grounded in a system. I think I have said
enough about the impossibility of the contrary to that argument. The question
is whether or not that system is pagan or Christian in nature. What are the
basic beliefs and presuppositions that serve as the foundation of that system?
It is Christ-centered, God-centered, submissive to the divine revelation that
is Scripture or it is at core, pagan, humanistic, autonomous, and faithless. Ted’s
approach is pure postmodern in its method. “What the postmodern discovers
behind various worldviews are political interests and power levers. For these
postmodern disbelievers in knowledge, philosophy is not about truth but about
power, rhetoric and ideology.” [Vanhoozer, First Theology] Often enough we hear similar arguments from the younger crowd as they fearlessly challenge
tradition, practice, and even the most basic of Christian tenets. What is the
ground of their challenge? What serves as the foundation of their own worldview
from which these attacks are launched? Human autonomy? Postmodern philosophy?
Goldsworthy writes, “In the end, it becomes human reason that judges what is
reasonable evidence about the nature of the Bible. As soon as we admit this,
then we see that it is choice of two opposing circular arguments: one that
assumes the ultimate authority of God and his word, and the other that assumes the
ultimate authority of unaided human reason.” [Goldsworthy, Gospel-Centered
Hermeneutics]
In the end, the emergent apostate, while sounding humble, and seeming to be kind, turns out to be a ravenous wolf seeking to turn men away from the faith that has been handed to the elect from the hand of Christ through His Apostles. We must understand that apostates among us is a serious matter. We can ill afford to take them too casually. They are in hot pursuit of the destruction of biblical Christianity even though they tell us that all they want is to recover it. 
Clever are the ways of the wolf, seemingly harmless at a distance, a majestic site to behold, even beautiful ...until he has driven you to the ground and is standing over you, with saliva running out of his mouth dripping onto your bloodied face just before he begins to rip your throat out with his massively powerful and razor sharp incisors.
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| See the truth and react accordingly |
