Well now you just seem more confused than before.
You still haven’t answered my question; but I gather that your assessment of Gen.1 derives from the interpretive principle that Scripture should be read in its plainest sense unless the text itself clearly indicates otherwise.
I agree with this principle; but I suspect we disagree on how to apply the ‘unless’ clause: I think that if reading a text as a straightforward recounting of empirical facts renders that text incoherent, this *just is* the text indicating that it’s not meant to be read that way.
Centuries upon centuries of Christian scholarship—including luminaries like Origen and Augustine—have questioned or rejected your assessment of Gen.1, on precisely these grounds.
And I’m mystified by your suggestion that there’s some tension between the foregoing analysis of Gen.1 and the doctrine of transubstantiation: do you think there’s something incoherent about the idea of literally eating flesh or drinking blood? Surely not.
More mysterious is your unwillingness to embrace the doctrine of transubstantiation yourself, given your commitment to a monocular, literalist interpretive lens. Matt. 26, Mark 14 and Luke 22 each report Christ's plain words as: “This is my body…This is my blood.”
Perhaps you just find transubstantiation far-fetched. I don’t see how you could, in light of your other commitments. In any case, that wouldn’t be a principled reason for adopting a non-literal reading of the text—just a lack of faith on your part.
By contrast, I’m perfectly prepared to believe that God created the universe in roughly 144 hours. I certainly believe that God is capable of it. I’m just not convinced that’s the correct way to understand the text of Gen.1, given its structure.
So my view, unlike yours, isn’t occasioned by any lack of faith. Neither is it rooted in any concession to evolutionary biology—millennia before Darwin’s birth, Origen and Augustine, et al., raised precisely same concerns, based entirely on the text itself.
I know better than to expect a concession from you. It’s obvious that you’ve started an argument that you’re incapable of finishing, and equally obvious that you lack the strength of character to admit it. That’s why you keep trying to change the subject.
My only purpose here is to assert my devotion to Christ and the Word of God in the face of your totalitarian impulse to control what counts as Christian faith and what doesn’t. Humans don’t decide such things—least of all men with your habits of mind.
And for the record—not because it’s at all relevant but because it’s potentially instructive—I don’t happen to be Catholic, though I hold the teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church in high esteem.
Many (most?) Catholic universities hire non-Catholics; and this intellectual ecumenism is a major source of strength in Catholic academic institutions—in marked contrast to you and your associates, who seek to exclude anyone who rejects your political and patriarchal dogma.
As I’ve told your friend Tom Buck, your particular version of evangelical Christianity has only been around since about 1950, and I’ll be shocked if it’s still around in 2050. In the sweep of Church history, it’s a footnote.
For the blocked:
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For over four decades, American evangelicals have embraced the special-interest paradigm of political engagement—arguing, in effect, that the interests of Christians should take priority over conflicting claims of other interest groups.
This has been a terrible mistake.
If there is objective moral truth then there is objective truth about what people deserve and what we owe to each other—which is to say, justice.
Objective moral truth entails objective truth about justice. It’s as simple as that.
And if there is objective truth about justice, then our efforts in the political sphere should conform to that truth—which is to say, achieving justice should be our only political objective.
If @MBTS is determined to give Owen a platform for his pronouncements on institutional ethics, its administration might consider granting him a teaching reduction that would afford him leisure to familiarize himself with the basic contours of the subject.
One of the culture war’s more absurd mantras is the threat of evangelical leaders capitulating to worldly demands for justice out of an appetite for popular esteem.
In fact the opposite is true: those who give any thought to popular opinion relish every opportunity to shock unbelievers with their abrasive rhetoric—thereby inviting backlash, which serves as a pretext for claims of persecution.
Under guise of combating “wokeness”—a vacuous notion contrived to provoke illiterate fear—men with evangelical platforms make unlearned and outrageous pronouncements on subjects ranging from political economy to public health.
A myth says what is false in order to reveal truth.
A lie says what is false in order to obscure truth.
The myth at the core of our nation is that America provides liberty and justice for all in equal measure.
The truth underlying the myth is that equality before the law is a worthy aspiration.
We lie to ourselves when we act as though this myth reflects the reality of our present existence: we obscure the truth when we tell ourselves that the aspiration has been realized, or realized enough.
The reason that our nation is disintegrating before our eyes is that we, as a society, lack a shared conception of justice--a common understanding of what people deserve and what we owe to each other.
So although Americans share a patch of earth, we do not share a horizon: we've degenerated into a collection of special interest groups--our highest political aspiration is to secure benefits for ourselves and those like us.
Both books are excellent and I commend them to anyone interested in the interplay of politics and religion in the context of American evangelicalism.
Regarding any formal connection between Mohler's official role at Southern Seminary (or within the SBC broadly) and his enthusiasm for broadcasting personal political views that are unrelated to his expertise in theology: