Living on Borrowed Time Living on Borrowed Time Despite all the noise being made by the vo

Living on Borrowed Time




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
indications 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
evangelicalism "a conspicuous failure in our generation."

   That some unusual liberal trends are developing in fundamentalist
churches 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 denominations.
They rave against "modernistic" professors in their
"Christian" colleges, 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 express 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
hermeneutics" 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 instrumental music, divorce for any reason but
adultery and lots of other good things like these will be preached again
in Church-of-Christ pulpits throughout 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 you ever goin' to keep 'em down on the farm after they've
seen Pa-ree?"  ("[ref001]The Last Hurrah
of the Inerrancy Doctrine," Winter 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 incinerated them in homage to
him?  How can people who will witness the eradication of cancer, AIDS,
cystic fibrosis, etc. through the application of scientific 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
superstition 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, Hinduism, 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 Montgomery'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 inerrancy 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.






[ref001] http:1hurra90.html