What if …?
What happens when a biblicist church (non-creedal, non-liturgical, congregationalist) becomes biblically illiterate? Brad East (Biblicist Churches that Don’t Read the Bible) thinks it’s happening, and that:
there is nothing left; at least, not if you remain, on the surface or even beneath the skin, biblicist-primitivist-congregationalist in polity, doctrine, and practice. The rug has been pulled out beneath your feet, the branch you were sitting on has been sawed off, the pillars have all been thrown down: there is nothing left.
Besides, that is, the Zeitgeist. But discerning the spirits is no longer possible when the word of the Lord in Holy Scripture is no longer known, cherished, prized, read. Where else is there to turn? Either to tradition or to the culture. I see no third option.
As he has defined the problem, the only third option probably is, as he “Updated,” “the singular authority of a charismatic, entrepreneurial, popular pastor.”
But as a former member of biblicist, non-creedal, notionally non-liturgical, congregational churches, I’d suggest thinking outside that box: creed, liturgy, hierarchy. That means admitting you’ve been wrong, but I ate that humble pie 27-plus years ago, and it was awfully good.
The Jefferson Bible
What was that again you were saying about our Christian Founding Fathers?
Practical Atheism in the Church
Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?
Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens
The Grand Myth
That grand myth which I asked you to admire a few minutes ago is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 