Timothy Dalrymple over at Patheos has a nice post: “Are Conservative Churches Getting ‘Radical?‘ “
The significance of this point cannot be overstated. Young believers committed to radical discipleship and sacrificial service to the poor and the lost have too long felt – and too often experienced – that there is no place within conservative Christendom for them to live out their vision of what it means to be followers of Jesus. It’s imperative to demonstrate that a strong commitment to the authority of scripture and the historical teachings of the church does not eclipse, but actually grounds and inspires, a profound devotion to Christ as well as a wholehearted commitment to serving Christ in the least of these. If conservative churches come to be seen as the stagnant backwaters of a comfortable and compromised faith, while emerging or liberal churches are seen as the mobilizers of compassion and service, then conservative churches will damage their witness and lose many of the most fervent believers in the younger generations.
I disagree with Timothy Luke Johnson’s position in this matter because I submit to the authority of the text (albeit, imperfectly and with many unknown subtle preferences), but he is honest about the text and scriptural interpretation. The entire article is worth our time:
The task demands intellectual honesty. I have little patience with efforts to make Scripture say something other than what it says, through appeals to linguistic or cultural subtleties. The exegetical situation is straightforward: we know what the text says. But what are we to do with what the text says? We must state our grounds for standing in tension with the clear commands of Scripture, and include in those grounds some basis in Scripture itself. To avoid this task is to put ourselves in the very position that others insist we already occupy—that of liberal despisers of the tradition and of the church’s sacred writings, people who have no care for the shared symbols that define us as Christian. If we see ourselves as liberal, then we must be liberal in the name of the gospel, and not, as so often has been the case, liberal despite the gospel.
I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality—namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God’s created order.
HT: Mere Orthodoxy
The folks over at Kingdom People has a take on the SBC’s decline – that is, decline in numbers.
