First Baptist Church of Greenville, South Carolina, a founding member of the Southern Baptist Convention, announced this week that, following a congregational vote, “In all facets of the life and ministry of our church, including but not limited to membership, baptism, ordination, marriage, teaching and committee/organizational leadership, First Baptist Greenville will not discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Good for them. There is no moral duty to be stupid or to visit pointless degradations upon your neighbors, even if the Inerrant Bible does say they ought to be stoned.
Y’all will not be surprised to learn that Albert the Pious is having a regular conniption fit.
There are big lessons here for every church, every denomination, and every Christian institution. Once biblical inerrancy is abandoned, there is no brake on theological and moral revisionism. The Bible’s authority becomes relative, and there is no anchor to hold the church to the words of Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian witness.
The discernment process at First Baptist Church in Greenville offers us all ample lessons that should lead to a more fundamental discernment: Without the affirmation that the Bible is inerrant, “discernment” leads to disaster.
Yeah, yeah — ho-hum. Biblical inerrancy is a claim so intellectually corrupt, so egregiously nonsensical, that it bespeaks a genuine-article character flaw. Case in point: The canonical gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Nobody knows who was the author of any single one of those texts; or who made the attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; or why; or when; or anything about the authors except what they themselves tell us. And the texts themselves are so full of improbable claims that, if someone were to advance the hypothesis that they were written by the first century analog of a bunch of drunk college boys who just wanted to see what they could get away with, neither Mohler nor his entire faculty could adduce a single objective fact that would overturn the hypothesis.
And we are still not done with inerrancy’s crimes against ordinary intelligence, for it is not the versions of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John which are found bound inside books which are labeled Holy Bible — in any translation — which are supposed to be inerrant. N-o-o-o. The inerrant versions of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (and of every other book in the Bible) are the ones produced by the authors’ own hands.
The SBC’s Holy Men were driven to that position because they got tired of being laughed at as the long and well-documented list of changes and contradictions in successive versions of the sacred texts just kept getting longer.
I kid you not: The official position of the Southern Baptist Convention is that the never-seen and long-gone original texts produced by Bronze Age anonymities are “totally true and trustworthy.” To make such a claim requires a very high order of intellectual dishonesty, and to condemn your neighbors on such grounds evidences a very grave character failure.
The job before democracy is to get rid of such
canaille; if it fails they will devour it. — H.L. Mencken