Thursday, April 15, 2010
Doug Wilson has a great analogy here.
The fundamentalist is a "get-to-the-bottom-line" kind of guy. He knows where the plane is going, and he knows that right away. His mistake is that of thinking that wherever the plane is going must be the place where the plane is already. He thinks that everyone in the world sees the implications of an idea just as quickly as he does, and that if they embrace an idea that naturally leads to x, then they must be self-consciously embracing x right now. If they deny this, then it just goes to show their mendacity in addition to their heresy. But there are many Christians who are better Christians than they are logicians. And, sad to say, and more germaine to the point I am making now, the church also contains a number of logicians who are better logicians than they are Christians.
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Apparently my work firewall blocks Wilson's site, so I can't view the whole thing. But he so nailed it right here. He articulated this perfectly. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find a Christian - or even a preacher for that matter - who does not exhibit this attitude to some extent. I have recognized it in myself, but progressively to a lesser degree - only because I'm aware of it though.
I was recently involved in a dispute with a minister who took a church's Statement of Faith - which I will admit had serious problems - and proceeded to read into it the worst possible errors, potentially misrepresenting the church's views. When he called upon me to analyze it, I pointed out the most obvious and egregious errors that were provable, and basically said that the rest of it may or may not indicate error. It was simply impossible to know because of the ambiguity of the language. The minister who asked me to provide my analysis, who supposedly has a doctorate in theology by the way, "totally disagreed" with my analysis and proceeded to "correct" me because I simply refused to presume something about the Statement of Faith that was not provable. In his attempt to "get-to-the-bottom-line" he actually wrote an article naming the church in which he committed a number of logical fallacies in order to paint this pastor and his church in the worst possible light, basically calling the minister a universalist and a bunch of other things.
The comment he used to accuse him of universalism was only one sentence long and would have also been consistent with syncretism, inclusivism, or something as harmless as Paul's finding common ground upon which to preach the Gospel in Acts 17. I called him out on this, which I probably should not have done. And I think this sort of made me unpopular with some people, but I frankly didn't care and still don't. I'm not going to be a party to something like that. If they want a yes-man they're going to have to look elsewhere.
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