Front Page: winter 1993 LIVING ON BORROWED TIME Despite all the noise being made by the vo

Front Page: winter 1993



         LIVING ON BORROWED TIME 

   Despite all the noise being made by the vociferous religious right and the 
influence it currently exerts on the Republican Party, there are clear indica-
tions that Christian fundamentalism is rapidly losing ground.  In "The 
Strange Decline of American Evangelicalism," John Warwick Montgomery cited a 
recent report by the Princeton Religion Research Center, which said that a 
nationwide Gallup poll revealed that "the Average American's belief in the 
reliability of Scripture has declined by half in the last 30 years (from 65 per 
cent in 1963 to 32 percent today)" [Christian News, Sept. 21, 1992, p. 1]. 
The article went on to say that "69 percent of U.S. adults now identify with 
moral relativism." After citing these statistics, Montgomery declared evan-
gelicalism "a conspicuous failure in our generation."

   That some unusual liberal trends are developing in fundamentalist church-
es has been apparent for some time. To stay abreast of what is going on in 
the religious right, TSR subscribes to several fundamentalist papers, and the 
same theme runs through most of them.  What can we do to hold our ground 
against liberalism? A bitter fight is being waged in the Southern Baptist 
Convention between the old-line inerrantists and those who believe that the 
inerrancy doctrine is indefensible. The same is true in the Missouri Synod of 
the Lutheran Church. In the Church of Christ, the denomination that TSR's 
editor was once affiliated with, a hard-core guardian-of-the-faith group 
constantly pleads for a return to "the old paths."  They wage constant battle 
with "liberal" preachers who have renounced the we-are-the-only-true-church 
mentality and now openly seek accommodation and fellowship with other denom-
inations. They rave against "modernistic" professors in their "Christian" col-
leges, who unabashedly teach in their classes that the Bible contains errors 
and even mythology.  The situation has become so desperate for some of the 
diehard congregations that they have given up on their Bible colleges and 
established their own "schools of preaching" to train ministers in the old-line 
doctrines of the "restoration" preachers who founded the Church of Christ.

   Probably the most startling development in this church is the trend to 
minify the issue of instrumental music in Christian worship. In 1910, this 
issue split the Campbellite movement into  the Christian Church and the 
Church of Christ, and thereafter the latter vehemently denounced the use of 
instrumental music in worship as the work of Satan himself.  That is until 
recently, but now many Church-of-Christ preachers are acknowledging that 
this view may be erroneous.  They speak of a "new hermeneutics" and ex-
press the desire to have dialogues with the liberal wing of the Campbellite 
movement to see if some kind of accommodation can't be mutually agreed upon 
that would unify the two groups.

   To the old-line, guardian-of-the-faith preachers, of course, "new herme-
neutics" is a cuss word, and they will have no part of it.  They preach 
sermons and write articles against it and issue debate challenges to those who 
advocate it, probably believing that someday they will lead their wayward 
brothers back into "the old paths" when once more the denunciation of in-
strumental music, divorce for any reason but adultery and lots of other good 
things like these will be preached again in Church-of-Christ pulpits through-
out the land.

   No one likes to be a party-pooper, but we predict that this just ain't 
going to happen. The reason why it will never happen is as simple as the 
principle implied in the WW I song lyrics quoted  in TSR's first issue: "How 
are (see TIME, p. 15) you ever goin' to keep 'em down on the farm after 
they've seen Pa-ree?"  ("The Last Hurrah of the Inerrancy Doctrine," Winter 


                           1

1990, p. 3).  Just as the soldiers of World War I who had had their horizons 
broadened by their experiences in Europe were unlikely ever again to be 
content with the routinism of life on the farm so ministers and Bible college 
professors whose knowledge has been broadened by exposure to facts about 
the Bible that in times past were kept from the flock will never again be 
content to hide the truth for the sake of preserving something as dubiously 
important as "the old paths."

   Once something is learned, it cannot be unlearned. This is the principle 
that spells doom for Bible fundamentalism if not the Bible, period.  We live in 
an age of rapid discovery.  In this century, man journeyed to the moon; in 
the next century, he will journey to Mars and probably beyond.  Man has 
conquered many diseases and will conquer even more. Scientists talk routinely 
of genetic mapping, gene-splicing, black holes, quarks, and other concepts 
the ordinary mind can barely grasp.  In such an environment as this, how 
can people possibly go on believing that the God who created an endless 
universe once lived in a tent that nomadic tribes carried with them in their 
desert wanderings, spoke to them from a column of fire that followed them 
overhead, selected them to be his chosen people "above all peoples on the 
face of the earth," and took delight when they slaughtered animals and incin-
erated them in homage to him?  How can people who will witness the eradica-
tion of cancer, AIDS, cystic fibrosis, etc. through the application of scientif-
ic methods continue to believe that "the son of God" once went about curing 
diseases by casting out devils?  To ask such questions is to answer them. 
They won't go on believing such ridiculous nonsense.  That kind of supersti-
tion is doomed.  Even now, it is running on empty.

   We say this knowing in advance how Bible fundamentalists will scoff at it. 
No doubt, they will cite men like Thomas Paine and Voltaire, who made similar 
predictions within time frames that have now come and gone, yet the Bible, 
"the word of God," endures.  We are well aware of what Paine and Voltaire 
rashly predicted.  Their primary mistake was that they were too optimistic. 
Faith in the Bible will not die overnight; it will not die in the next century 
or probably even the century after that.  But it will die.  The history of 
religion is one of birth, development,  expansion, decline, and death. It 
happened to the ancient religions of Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and 
Persia.  It will happen to Christianity, as it will also happen to Islam, Hindu-
ism, and Buddhism.

   Christians who scoff at the notion of a distant future in which no one 
believes in their "word of God" should consider the statistic quoted in Mont-
gomery's article.  Already within our lifetime, we have witnessed a 50% loss in 
faith in Bible inerrancy, and no doubt the 65% who believed in Bible inerran-
cy in 1963 was significantly lower than the percentage who believed in it in 
1930.  Go back a hundred years before that, and the percentage of believers 
in Bible Inerrancy (in Western societies) probably exceeded even 90%.  So if 
Bible inerrancy is not living on borrowed time (as we believe it is), why does 
it steadily lose ground?  What is going to happen to thrust it back into the 
privileged position that it once enjoyed?

   People constantly tell us that they are praying for our return to the fold, 
but this is never going to happen, no matter how many prayers are uttered. 
We have learned too much ever to go back to what we once were.  Few 
laymen devote even a tenth as much time to studying the Bible as we do, yet 
they live in an age when they can't help absorbing information that erodes 
belief in biblical superstition. That erosion will remain steady until there is 
nothing left... except amazement that anyone could have ever taken a book 
like the Bible seriously.






                           2