"So, in light of the General Assembly vote to accept the PUP Report, is it time for biblically-committed Christians to leave the PCUSA? I'll pick up this question tomorrow."
So says PCUSA Pastor and blogger Dr. Mark Roberts. Tune in tomorrow for his answer.
The PCUSA also voted to receive a paper that allows for new terms for the trinity including Mother, Child and Womb. Why? It is all about language and power.
One reason is that language limited to the Father and Son "has been used to support the idea that God is male and that men are superior to women," the panel said.
Albert Mohler has a response here.
Is it any wonder that the rolls in liberal denominations like the U.S. Episcopalians and the PCUSA are plummeting?
I feel for those in the PCUSA in particular. I know some good people who are hanging on in that denomination. They face a tough decision. What do you do when your own denomination becomes your mission field?
While the move seems silly to me, are you denying the assertion that it has indeed been used to assert the supremacy of males over females?
And as to the idea that people are abandoning liberal chruches in droves, I'm not sure I buy it. According to the published study, double-digit percentages are leaving these denominations, yet according to 2000 estimates, every one of those denominations had grown in membership since 1990.
According to ARIS, from 1990 to 2001, the United Church of Christ better than doubled in size, while the Baptist church stayed roughly the same (losing a statistically-insignificant number of adherents). Now, the UCC is tiny compared to the Baptist church, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the 130% increase in UCC membership according to ARIS can't be squared with Glenmary's 14.8% decline.
How is this possible? Both can't be true.
The ARIS study used self-identification as the standard. I'm curious to know what standard the Glenmary study used.
If the ARIS study is to be believed, it's not so much that people are leaving liberal churches for conservative ones; one must take a fairly selective view of the data to discern that, never mind the other logical flaws in Mohler's argumentation. It seems that people are leaving Christian churches, period. In 1990, 86.2% of Americans self-identified in Christians. By 2001, that number was down almost 10 points to 76.5%. (The total number of Christians in 2001 is slightly larger than in 1990, but they make up a smaller percentage of the overall population.)
Meanwhile, my "team" is growing but is still statistically insignificant. Atheists/Agnostics/Humanists/Secularists grew from 0.8% of the population in 1990 to 1.25% in 2001 -- nuthin' plus 56% still equals nuthin'. :)
(Fully 13% of the American populace is in the annoying fence-sitting "none of the above" category, making it difficult to gauge how they should be counted.)
Final note: Big problem with the ARIS paper, as I see it: They don't differentiate between PCA and PCUSA, lumping them all together as "Presbyterian."
Disclosure: I attended a PCUSA college, and studied scripture under a PCUSA minister, after a dozen years of formal Catholic catechism.
Posted by: tgirsch | June 22, 2006 at 18:13
"While the move seems silly to me, are you denying the assertion that it has indeed been used to assert the supremacy of males over females?"
I am not even addressing the assertion -- the truthfulness of the assertion is irrelevant. Raising it is a red herring. The question is, is scripture God breathed or is it a human document written to tell us how humans think about God.
If it is God breathed, then it is not a living document that needs to have its language upgraded to keep up with all of our "progress".
I have heard others cite the shrinkage in liberal churches -- especially the UCC -- I have heard it has dropped somewhere on the order of 40 % (not sure of the time frame). Sounds like an interesting thing to research further. Whatever the outcome of the research and fact checking, there are really only two camps ... the sheep camp and the goat camp.
http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/search/?q=Matthew+25%3A33
The other distinctions are irrelevant.
When you mentioned you were influenced by a Prebyterian minister in college, I immediately knew what kind of Presbyterian minister you were talking about (based on his views). Quite obvious.
Posted by: Mr. Dawntreader | June 23, 2006 at 11:45
If it is God breathed, then it is not a living document that needs to have its language upgraded to keep up with all of our "progress".
The problem is, scripture is tweaked and misappropriated all the time, even by churches you agree with. The Exodus verse about miscarriage is a perfect example (ask David about this).
If scripture is God-breathed, and if God protects scripture from human error and human malfeasance, then things like the Jefferson Bible or the Book of Mormon wouldn't be possible, and we wouldn't have bibles with and without Apocrypha, and we wouldn't have a dozen or more competing translations of the Bible with substantial translational differences.
There may exist, somewhere, a God-breathed scripture that is indeed perfect and infallible. But we don't have this scripture. The idea that the Bible we have today is perfect in every way, without error or flaw, is, I'm sorry, patently absurd. The idea doesn't even withstand cursory scrutiny.
Now that doesn't leave us with the false dilemma you tried to leave us with the other day, where scripture is either pure, perfect, and God-breathed, or it's worthless. If the scripture we have today has been corrupted over the centuries (both unintentionally and intentionally), that doesn't mean that there wasn't some perfect, pure and true original source.
So rather than putting people in the hopeless position of either blindly accepting scripture as unconditionally true, or rejecting it wholesale, you can take the road that most scholars take, trying to unpack scripture to find out where the truth lies. You can only do that by taking an honest look at what's in scripture, when it appeared, why it's there, and who put it there.
The scripture that we have today is taken from copies of copies, made by fallible men, and then translated by fallible men. And the decisions about what stories/books to include or not include were also made by fallible men. It's risible to suggest that this process was done completely free of corruption.
Could an all-powerful God intervene to prevent such corruption? Sure, but it doesn't appear that He did so. To do so, first and foremost, would subvert free will. But in any case, if He had done so, then there would be no Apocrypha, no Gnostic Gospels, no Book of Mormon, no Gideons New-Testament-Only Bibles, and only one translation in each language/dialect.
Posted by: tgirsch | June 23, 2006 at 16:59
But hey, according to Matt 25, as long as I treat people well and help the needy, I'm in the sheep camp, so I'm cool. :)
Posted by: tgirsch | June 23, 2006 at 17:03
"The question is, is scripture God breathed or is it a human document written to tell us how humans think about God."
And can this Catholic point out how amusing it is to see Protestants say that about the Bible -- you know, the book they changed 1550 years after it was compiled into its final form
Posted by: kevin | June 26, 2006 at 13:27
To be fair, the Bible wasn't exactly compiled into its final form in 33 BCE (1500 years before the reformation). :) Heck, the earliest gospels date to AD 70. And the story of the adultress doesn't appear in John until nearly 1,000 years later (early manuscripts lack the story). But time means nothing to God, so it shouldn't concern us that He would breathe in this afterthought 1,000 years after the fact. ;)
Posted by: tgirsch | June 27, 2006 at 17:52
I, on the other hand, am only "cool" because Jesus bore the righteous wrath of God the Father that was due me. Pastor John Piper does it full justice here...
http://www.desiringgod.org/library/fresh_words/2006/061406.html
Later.
Posted by: BWB | June 27, 2006 at 19:09
BWB:
I've never understood why God gets all the credit for the good stuff, but none of the blame for the bad stuff. If I give a gun to someone who I know is going to shoot someone else with it, do I bear none of the responsibility for this? That's the argument people give with God. We're due wrath and punishment. Why? God created us knowing in advance that we were going to screw up in the ways we screw up. It can be no other way; we are the way we are because God created us that way. How is this our fault and not His? This is a concept that has never made any sense to me...
Posted by: tgirsch | June 28, 2006 at 00:00
Thanks for the reply Tom. If I was to answer your post, perhaps I would start this way: God has to know everything - that is part of who God is. When he created Man, He gave us the freewill to make the choice, or not. When Adam and Eve willfully disregarded God's clear instructions, mankind was cutoff from fellowship with God. It was then, that God made the choice to provide a way back to fellowship with Him, on His terms not on our terms.
I think we as humans have such a prideful spirit that we want it OUR way, on OUR terms, when it is the Creator that makes the laws, not the created. Scripture records Lucifer's "I wills ..." as he decided that he didn't want to abide by the rules laid down by the omnipotent Creator.
I can bow my knee before a God who loves me so much He allowed His Son to be slaughtered on a cross ... so that I can live in freedom from sin and from death.
I can't point the finger at God and say "it's your fault" when I clearly see my evil desires and thoughts on a daily basis. I know that repentance is the key to a life devoted to God.
Thanks for letting me share ... the kids are ready to go to the pool.
:)
Later.
Posted by: BWB | June 28, 2006 at 17:16
BWB:
I think we as humans have such a prideful spirit that we want it OUR way, on OUR terms
How did we get this way? Oh yeah, because that's the way God created us. Again, our fault exactly how? How did He not see this coming? What you're arguing, in essence, it that God knowingly set us up for failure, and yet He bears no responsibility for this. And that, in the name of "free will," God is knowingly damning the vast majority of His creation. Doesn't sound very omnibenevolent to me.
Posted by: tgirsch | June 28, 2006 at 19:08
A Reformed theologian would now move the discussion to the four states of man in relation to God. The state of the created man in the Garden would be the State of Innocency. Man had both posse pecarre (power to sin) and posse non pecarre (power not to sin). God gave man the power not to sin, hence, the fall was man's fault, not God's fault. If you then take the thread that God should have given man the power not to sin alone, then God gets little created automatons, or animals, or something else, NOT created in the image of God.
Again, I do not point the finger at the judge (I've been in court enough times to know that!). I follow the law ... the Lawgiver has determined the path to re-establish fellowship with Himself.
Who wudda thunk, all this from a Chicago Bears fan?!
:)
Perhaps we can pound your Packers again this year (to make up for years of misery inflicated upon the Bears by Farve ...)
:)
Later.
Posted by: BWB | June 28, 2006 at 21:20