"Biblical" Balderdash: How Evangelicals Undermine the Bible & Give Christians A Bad Name

Given the upcoming Sept. 30 deadline handed to The Episcopal Church to make an unequivocal pledge not to consecrate another openly gay bishop or bless same-sex unions, the Christian Post has republished this column "by request." It was originally published Wednesday, August 13, 2003.

A Trajectory Away From the Truth By R. Albert Mohler, Jr. Christian Post Guest Columnist:

"The great obstruction in the path of homosexual activists in the church is the Bible. This is not really a limitation on the thinking of the theological elites within liberal churches, but it is a problem at the grassroots. Liberal theologians long ago decided that the Bible is hopelessly homophobic, hostile to women, and that it presents a judgmental deity with all kinds of hang-ups.

"But those unsophisticated laypersons (and their enablers, the conservative clergy) still harbor that quaint notion that the Bible is God's Word, bearing His full authority, and is therefore binding on all Christians. There are only two options for liberal theologians in dealing with the Bible's unconditional rejection of homosexual behavior in any form. The first option for neutralizing the Bible is simply to reject its authority. Some homosexual activists just dismiss the Bible outright and call for the church to liberate itself from bondage to biblical authority," Mohler writes.

The rest of this "Biblical" balderdash can be found here.

Why label this as "Biblical" balderdash?

Simple: it is based on the un-Christian (and highly un-American) notion that a group of people can claim exclusive rights to being the only "true" Christians based on their interpretation of the Bible.

In the Episcopal Church these folks claim to be the "real Anglicans" - which is a new twist for a side of the debate whose evangelical zeal was offended when the word "Protestant" was dropped from the name "Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America." Before the current vogue, "Anglican" was church speak for "high church" or "Anglo-Catholic," and anathema to the "Protestant" evangelicals.

Now these pseudo-Anglicans also call themselves "orthodox," a term heretofore used principally by the Greek Russian, Easter and other Orthodox churches.

But the best self-proclamation of the would-be schismatics is "traditionalists." On the one hand they claim to uphold "Biblical traditions," while on the other they engage in highly nontraditional, unorthodox and un-Anglican tactics. None of the "orthodox" "Anglican" archbishops who are sending bishops to work in other provinces would tolerate that degree of diversity of opinion in their own dominion.

Like George Bush, these neo-conservatives are content to stretch and distort language to suit their momentary needs and objectives. If they think US churches can be used as cash cows, they will continue to violate Anglican protocol and church law, sending bishops to lure away disaffected churches. What they don't realize, of course, is that every parish they lure away is makes the Episcopal Church of the United States of America that much less conservative and that much closer to the values and views of people in this country. By lightening the conservative anchor of our church, they makes us both more liberal and more attractive to younger people.

Like the author cited above, these folks believe there is only one way to read the Bible, and that is their way. What chutzpah: to assume that there is only one way to read the BIble, and that you are 100 percent right. This is the kind of thinking that brought us the Inquisition and allowed the Southern Baptists to wait to apologize for supporting slavery for more than a century.

The Biblical Truth is that none of us can understand God's law 100 percent. If we could, we would be God. Come to think of it, that is just how these folks are acting. Which is how evangelicals undermine the Bible and give Christians a bad name.