THE BIBLE ORIENTED CHURCH'S RESPONSES TO DATE

     A growing number of Bible oriented Christians are awakening to take intelligent stands against these pervasive ideologies and their bitter results, though there are also some of us who take stands that are reactionary and without a sound intellectual foundation -- operating as it were out of nostalgia, or a blind religious zeal, or just throwing back high sounding mnemonic phrases like “Let’s just win souls!” as if soul-winning were something done in an historic vacuum.  Like anybody else, Christians, even when they have a biblically-based idea of what is right and wrong, can respond to their historic situations in unwise and reactionary ways.  Landing on our rumps is both painful and humiliating.  It makes one want to lash back.  As a matter of record, even Jesus foresaw that frequently we Christians would be more apt to deal with serious questions in an inept manner than our nonbelieving contemporaries:

    At no time was this lack of shrewdness more evident than in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.  When Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES was first published in 1859, many church leaders from all creeds either laughed in their complacency, or sanctimoniously told people that science was "worldly," and that they should devout themselves to more "spiritual" things.  Ill conceived and thoughtless pronouncements, borrowed from earlier, less educated times thundered from many pulpits, warning the still largely believing masses that "fossils had been put in the ground directly by God to test their faith," and other pious sounding nonsense.19  They seemed to think they could afford such intellectual laziness -- why bother examining intellectual foundations when the entire European and American social order was on their side?!  But as the turn of the century arrived, when the rug came fully up and our feet finally left the floor, it became apparent to many in the clergy that they were not considered believable any more by an increasingly educated society that had once respected them.  In desperation, still not examining the faith-held philosophical foundations of evolutionary thought, many clergymen jumped onto Darwin's band wagon with theologically and scientifically inane attempts to harmonize Genesis with evolution like "Theistic Evolution" and the "Day-Age Theory."  But creation and evolution start from two diametrically opposite world views, with irreconcilably different starting assumptions BEFORE even the first shred of objective evidence can be examined.  These assumptions control, to a large degree, how evidence is pieced together and interpreted.  If one assumes that an identifiable Creator-designer is not relevant to the study of origins, it should be obvious that this assumption will drastically affect the kinds of questions one will ask in the course of using the scientific method to examine the physical evidence.  It is foolish and intellectually dishonest to try and mix conclusions from a reasoning process governed by such a starting assumption with those from a scientific process which began with the presupposition that order and design in nature demand a designer, and that it is rational to assume that this designer has revealed himself in words and concepts which can be understood.  The reasoning processes used in both models might be valid, but the opposite starting assumptions are going to guide the interpretation of the evidence in drastically different directions.  The historic attempt by many theologians to irrationally mix conclusions from these two mutually exclusive systems by saying that God could have used evolution to create life on earth is a ludicrous evasion of the real issues!  Those holding to such a position always point out that Darwin was a theologian, but what they fail to realize is that he only studied theology as a third alternative, after flunking out of medicine and law -- his own letters reveal that it was a theology he despised.20
     If the physical evidence REALLY points exclusively towards an evolutionary world view, with no other scientifically reasonable explanation for the data from a creationistic philosophical framework, then the ONLY honest and honorable thing for conservative Christians to do is throw their Bibles in the trash and apologize to anyone they might have offended while insisting on Jesus' own claims to being the only way to God.  Because if evolution is true, the Fall of Man never really happened and death is not the result of sin -- the very reason Christ had to come and die is nothing more than a Jewish religious myth.  The intellectual dishonesty of Christian leaders who try to mix evolutionary hypothesis with Genesis has created a tremendous erosion away from biblical truth, and practically destroyed the last shred of intellectual and spiritual credibility biblical teaching has enjoyed in Western higher education.  How ironic it is that when theologians do this it is always for the reason of trying to preserve that which their own methods have helped to destroy.  The saddest thing is that it is so unnecessary.
     This is not a mere abstract theology debate.  What a person believes about where they came from is the fundamental base of that person's very view of reality -- a view which will ultimately determine how that person sees God, himself, the gospel message, and how he will behave towards those around him when tested to the core.  People who try not to believe anything on the subject are cut adrift, and apt to fall apart completely if the pressure gets strong enough.  They have no basis for whatever it is they believe about reality other than the shifting currents of popular thought and their own wish lists as they endlessly seek for a comfort they will never ever be able to find on that road.  This is true no matter how simple or complex a person’s level of education or ability to grasp ideas are.
     Because artistic and scientifically oriented people had been alienated by the largely "don't ask hard questions" approach of many church leaders to the new Enlightenment-based philosophy, few in the Bible oriented churches of the turn of the century could navigate intellectually in these realms.  When it became more apparent just what was really at stake, desperate attempts to salvage some intellectual foundation for biblical faith were made too little and too late to effect the flow of general Western culture away from its many scriptural roots.  The Bible-believing church dropped the ball, and needs to take responsibility for its part in the fumble.  Especially if we continue to make the same mistakes.  What may have been safely labeled “a biblically peripheral issue” 50 or a hundred years ago has grown into a tremendous erosion problem through neglect.  Half-baked ideas like the Genesis 1:2 Gap Theory, which, born out of scientific ignorance and theological wavering, created more artificial science and Bible conflicts than they solved, dominated the first half of the Twentieth Century even in churches firmly committed to the expository, verse by verse, teaching of Scripture.  The world, and even much of the church, easily saw through such intellectual and spiritual lameness.  But to quote the lament of King David in Psalm 11:3, "If the foundations are destroyed, What can the righteous do?"
     The philosophic foundations of biblically straight-forward Christian thought had been destroyed by the complacency and defection of late Nineteenth Century Protestantism.  Only through a series of seemingly limited revivals in the last ninety years has God begun to rebuild those walls, sporadically and not always through the same denominational movements, but in a definite strategic pattern that is piecing together a renewed, love guided, gospel based, culturally relevant, spiritual, moral and intellectual foundation for a confident biblical faith in Christ for those of all cultural backgrounds and levels of education who want it.  Our civilization desperately needs this, because for modern people -- even most who regularly attend a church with an orthodox view of God -- a straight-forward biblical view of reality has become more foreign than a philosophy from another planet invented for a science fiction novel!

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