2 Timothy 3:15-17
The inspiration of Scripture is one of Christianity’s most basic beliefs, yet one of the most undervalued. People with a low view of Scripture can’t get anything else right, yet they are unable to trace their problems to the source in a disregard for the Word of God.
There have been long ages in which nobody would have accepted the idea of being a Christian and disbelieving the Bible. The Bible is the book that tells us about the Christ we claim to believe, and so with resistless logic, people of a more forthright era would have said that it’s absurd to profess belief in Jesus while rejecting the written record about Jesus. You might as well say rulers ought to be elected but you don’t believe in voting. Reasonable people will squint their eyes and say, “What the…?”
Yet this situation prevails in much of American Churchianity. Millions of Christians grow up in church and pass through all the motions of doing the Christian religion, and when the guy from Barna Research Group calls, they say they believe in Jesus. And then their daily living stands as a piece by piece deconstruction of virtually everything the Bible actually teaches. I do not refer here to ordinary hypocrisy which has always been around, but to a certain species of it, a hypocrisy which still claims the name of Jesus but which denies all the Bible’s inconvenient particulars.
Years ago when I confronted a church member on a moral issue (church discipline for engaging in prostitution), he said, “I’ve never heard this before. Where are you even getting this?” When I showed him 1 Cor 5:11, he replied, “But that’s only the words of Paul.” So here was the connection at last made plain: A zero opinion of the inspiration of a book of the Bible led to his belief that the church must not object to its members engaging in prostitution. And no, I am not making this up.
This is how we get a generation of people who claim Christ yet move in together without being married, or who “come out” as gay, or exploit bankruptcy laws to get a house and free stuff, cheat at school, dress their daughters trashy, claim sick time at work when they really just wanted a day off, oppress their employees, use lawsuits and taxation as proxy theft, wink at their sons being hoods and sexually immoral, and generally blend with the moral shoddiness that characterizes mainstream Americana.
There is no easy solution to this. Among Southern Baptists, as a friend recently said, the pastors are generally much more conservative than the rank and file members. This makes the corrections risky and sometimes painful, but the general prescription isn’t complex at all. We must preach the Word with all its native force and potency and spend a good deal of time reminding people of something Dr. Warfield wrote concerning the Bible: Whatever it says, God says.
otherbrothersteve@gmail.com
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