Albert the Pious devoted his entire radio broadcast today to the contentious, just-finished quadrennial meeting of the United Methodists. As everybody who pays attention to these sorts of things knows, the meeting was dominated by sharp disagreements over homosexuality; specifically, should the denomination ordain LGBTQ persons, and perform same-sex marriages?
In the event, the UMC decided not to decide.
Mohler’s commentary included this remark, a splendid enunciation of the intellectual dishonesty that Christianity requires of its clergy.
Either the Bible is the Word of God, or it merely contains the Word of God. If it merely contains the Word of God, then we’ve got to find the Word of God within it. We’ve got to look at Scripture as a basically fallible human witness within which there is some degree of divine inspiration. Once we adopt that understanding of Scripture, the church itself becomes its sole authority and there’s no reason why the church can’t simply decide it will abandon this particular biblical teaching while claiming to continue others.
I cited the proposal by Adam Hamilton in order to demonstrate that it’s not just the fact that these liberal denominations include outright theological liberals who deny the authority of Scripture, we also see the presence of those who, like Hamilton, are arguing for a more neo-orthodox understanding that places the church in the position of judging Scripture while continuing to claim that the Scripture at least contains the Word of God.
But there is an infinite gulf between claiming that the Scripture contains the Word of God and affirming and confessing that the Bible is the Word of God. The historic faith of the church is rightly described as orthodoxy, not neo-orthodoxy. The moment you put any qualifier — “neo” in this case, meaning new — you actually don’t have orthodoxy at all, because the very reality of orthodoxy is making certain that we are saying exactly what the Apostles said, teaching exactly what the Reformers said, understanding that we want to state the Christian faith — affirm it, teach it, preach it, and apply it — exactly as there has been a consensus of the faithful throughout the centuries based upon the prior authority of the Bible as the Word of God.
So: What began as a marketing lie intended to aggrandize preachers — Inerrancy, “This book is totally true, and we are the experts about its meaning, so you have to do as we say!” — is now the cause of, literally, global heartache.
As a class, or type, Christian clergy are among the most dishonest men in society.