A Guest Editorial
by
Brian Carpenter, Georgetown, Ohio
Two fine essays have recently come my way. Both were written by women associated with VOW, and both deal with the fact that the heterodox and the orthodox factions of the church seem to be constantly talking past each other, much to the bewilderment of the folks watching from the pews.
Dr. Deborah Milam Berkley, in her essay Language and the PC(USA) [1] accurately describes the facts when she observes that both the heretics and the faithful are describing their beliefs with the same terms. However, they assign radically different meanings to those terms. It is a situation reminiscent of Alice’s bizarre experiences “Through the Looking Glass:”
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.”
I want to suggest, and rather forcefully so, that the Left’s redefinition of theological terms which has taken place in the last hundred years or so is not an innocent byproduct of the natural evolution of language. It is instead a deliberate effort to appropriate the shareable symbols with which we communicate the faith once given by the Apostles, to empty them of their previously agreed upon meaning, and to reinvest them with an alternate meaning in order to use them as Trojan horses with which they might infiltrate and recreate the Church in their own warped image.
Emil Brunner, a colleague and contemporary of Karl Barth, and no great bastion of orthodoxy himself, writes in his book Das Mittler (The Mediator) that the whole force and flow of liberal theology can be summed up in one word: Unbelief. 19th, 20th, and ultimately 21st century theological liberals do not believe that the revelation of God offered to us in the Bible is in any sense correct, authoritative, or binding. Instead, they find it to be repugnant, primitive, and even harmful.
But just because one ceases to believe the Bible, and the Creeds and Confessions doesn’t mean one has to give up a cushy job as pastor or theologian. One does not need to walk away from the vast repositories of cash given by the faithful, trusting that it would be used for the propagation of the gospel. Not at all! But one must be clever about it. The aspiring apostate must never tell the poor saps in the pews who are making his living possible what he actually believes. They would fire him, and quite properly so. So he must quietly redefine the terms instead. Down must become up and black must become white.
Thus we can have a theologian like Rudolf Bultmann who could wax eloquent about “the resurrection,” and then say that he believed that the body of Jesus lies undiscovered somewhere in Palestine. We can somehow conjure to have a demonic but no Devil. Instead of being an inordinate “self esteem,” sin can instead become a lack of self esteem. Liberation is no longer freedom from the bondage of sin. Rather, it is freedom to sin with gusto, along with an ugly hostility towards anyone who tells you differently. We’re told it’s a silly myth that Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 with a few loaves and fishes. We in the modern age know that miracles can’t happen. No, no! The real miracle is that Jesus got all these people to share what they brought with them in their tunic pockets. Jesus gave us the first church potluck supper! And when they run into anything in the Bible which doesn’t suit their fancy, like Jesus claiming to be the only way for sinful men and women to approach a Holy God, or even claiming to be God, then the “assured results of modern scholarship” will soon explain it as a fiction created by the Biblical authors. They will then proceed to tell us what Jesus actually said, or what Paul would have said if he had only known X, Y, and Z like we do. All this Orwellian doublespeak allows them to take their ordination vows (in which pledge to God and the church that they believe the scriptures to be inspired by God and the confessions of our church to be accurate summations of what the scriptures teach us) and to have no sense at all that they are bald-faced liars.
Jesus taught us very clearly about these people. He called them wolves dressed up as sheep. Their essential nature “arpages” in Greek or “plundering.” They are ravenous thieves who plunder the flock of God. No doubt they are very sincere thieves. Some of them are even very nice thieves. But they are thieves nonetheless. Their legacy is death. Every denomination in which they have ascendancy and control is in decline. As Will Willimon, the dean of Duke University Chapel pointed out, God kills churches that no longer worship and serve him in the manner he has prescribed. Right now he is killing the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopalians, the American Baptists and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. According to the Layman’s research, taken in the aggregate, the churches who hold to orthodoxy and which have become a part of the Confessing Church Movement are growing even while the denomination rapidly shrinks around them. It takes an act of sheer will to ignore this obvious fact, all the while clucking the tongue about the “complex” and “poorly understood” reasons for our plunge in membership.
If Dr. Milam Berkley describes a theological world that is “Through the Looking Glass,” Rev. Tracee D. Hackel describes a theology that is in essence “In the Looking Glass.” In her essay Dialogue or Monologue [2] she describes the difference between orthodox Reformed theology and the theologies which I will lump under the rubric “feminist” for convenience sake. She paints a vivid picture.
The idea of encountering God as he has revealed himself in the Word has gone by the wayside. This is because radical feminist theologians believe that concepts like God as Father, Lord, and King are not concepts which were given from heaven by God to teach us about himself. Rather, they were pasted up onto heaven by the ill-intentioned men of antiquity as a tool for oppressing women. God may therefore be freely “reimagined” in any way that a woman believes to meet her needs. So the apostate church has produced a set theologies which encourage women to spend their days gazing into the Looking Glass of their experience so that they can decide whom they want their god(dess) to be. Their goals would be comical were they not so tragic: a church full of women totally infatuated with their own selves, lifting their eyes from the mirror of their own experience only momentarily in order to tell others about the “wonders” they see there. Each one deciding how they want their reimagined god to look. Thousands upon thousands of little self absorbed pretenders to the thrones of their own lives minor goddess wannabes deciding just how much of the Holy One’s self disclosure (if any) they want to let in. How different from the courts of heaven portrayed for us Revelation 4! The elders do not spend their days gazing into the glassy sea and admiring their reflections. They have utterly forgotten themselves. Instead they are enraptured by the One on the Throne. They spend their eternal time gazing at him, honoring him, worshipping him, “casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.” Rev. Hackel is correct. There can be no dialogue in this new feminist Tower of Babel, only an endless round of monologues. That is probably for the best.
J Gresham Machen wrote a book called Christianity and Liberalism in which he argued quite convincingly that the “progressive” theologies that have invaded the church are not a variation of Christianity. Instead, they constitute another religion altogether. This is becoming clearer and clearer. This alien faith is at bottom a religion in which human beings decide what kind of God they will or won’t have the creation telling the Creator who he ought to be. At its headwaters it draws from the same poisoned well that William Ernest Henley drew from when he wrote his poem “Invictus,” a poem which has recently been in the news. Henley says in the last stanza:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
In contrast, G.K. Chesterton tells us that:
The one principle of Hell is “I am my own.”
It is almost unimaginable that such a stark contrast faces us in our church today, but here it is, and the shenanigans of the most recent General Assembly prove it. In our current situation the sin is not in fighting with the other side. The sin is in not fighting with the other side. For if we sit on our hands and do nothing, fearing conflict or the harsh words of the enemies of the gospel, then Hell wins in the PCUSA. So let us brace ourselves for our duties. Let us fight together, each in our own way and in the places where God has providentially placed us. Our Lord expects us to do no less.
THE FOLLOWING CORRECTION WAS PUBLISHED ON JUNE 29
Peccatum Briani
by
Brian Carpenter
peccatum- n. Latin. A sin, error, or mistake.
I made two errors in my essay “Looking Glass Theology.” Both were unintentional. The first I discovered on my own. It only requires simple correction; the second was brought to my attention and is a bit more involved.
The first error is this: the quote I attributed to G.K. Chesterton …
“The one principle of hell is, I am my own.’ ”
… was actually said by George MacDonald.
The second error was my allusion to something I attributed to Will Willimon. I based that attribution on a quote I recalled reading a couple of years ago. The quote was, as near as I can remember it,
“God is killing the mainline church and we damn well deserve it.”
It seems that my memory is faulty. Dr. Willimon denies he ever said such a thing, and I am unable to locate the source of the quote to find out who did say it.
Therefore, I seek to correct my essay. It was not a malicious error, but it was a sloppy one — and I should know better. I have already asked (and received) forgiveness from Dr. Willimon, and I ask the forgiveness of VOW’s readers and of Sylvia Dooling. I will try to be more thorough in the future.
Happily, though, I believe my point still stands. God does indeed kill churches that do not worship and serve him as he has commanded. I don’t need to quote any human author, since the Risen Lord himself says this to the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2:5. It is interesting to note that according to Barclay (p 127, Daily Study Bible Series, Revelation Vol I.) five of the seven churches mentioned in the first chapters of the Book of Revelation ceased to exist. Two churches still exist today, Smyrna and Philadelphia. These are the only two churches to which Christ gives no correction and rebuke. It is my sincere desire that the PCUSA repent and be restored to wholeness. It is my great fear that it will not.
Rev. Brian Carpenter
Georgetown, OH
[1] http://layman.wpengine.com/Documents/Doc0062.aspx
[2] http://layman.wpengine.com/Documents/Doc0020.aspx