Theology Central

In 1 Corinthians 8–10 the apostle Paul addresses the question of whether Christians should eat meat that has been offered to idols. In chapter 8 his general answer is that an idol is nothing in the world. If an idol is nothing, then meat that has been offered to idols has literally been offered to nothing. To say that it has been offered to nothing is equivalent to saying that it has not been offered at all. Consequently, meat that has been offered to idols is just meat and may be safely eaten.

Nevertheless, Paul places an important caveat on implementing this conclusion. Even supposing that eating this meat is completely morally innocuous, some Christians still have qualms of conscience about it. Some people are keenly conscious of the idolatrous worship that provoked the offering of the meat. They may perceive eating the meat as idolatry-at-a-distance. For them to eat would be to transgress their consciences, and violating one’s conscience is not a good habit to form.

If it is not possible to eat this meat without transgressing the conscience, then one should not eat the meat. Furthermore, one should not eat the meat if eating would induce fellow believers to violate their consciences. We are responsible not only to protect our own consciences but also the consciences of our sisters and brothers. In view of this principle, Paul makes the radical assertion that if eating meat causes his brother to stumble, he will consume no flesh as long as the world stands.

We might think that this statement was intended as a hyperbole, a fantastic exaggeration to emphasize a point. If that is what we think, then we are wrong. The entire next chapter (1 Cor 9) is Paul’s extended explanation of how he is not hyperbolizing at all. Quite the contrary, he already practices similar disciplines in his ministry. As an example, Paul builds an extended case for why he, in ministering the gospel, has a right to expect compensation. He bases this case on Old Testament examples and principles, on the apostolic pattern, and even on common-sense natural law arguments. Then he makes it clear that, even though he has a right to expect compensation, he refuses to insist upon that right.

Paul’s example implies a principle that we should not insist upon rights and privileges when those rights and privileges get in the way of effective ministry. We should “become all things to all men” in the sense of exerting no privilege that would block our ministry by offending the people to whom we minister. Instead, we should discipline ourselves so as to accomplish the tasks that Christ has given us to do.

Parenthetically, it needs to be said that Paul is not telling us to surrender duties and obligations. There is a difference between a right and a duty, between a privilege and an obligation. Paul is not saying that we are permitted to lower our ethical standards for the sake of apparent effectiveness in ministry. Eating idol meat as an evangelistic outreach would be wrong. That much becomes clear in the next chapter.

1 Corinthians 10 starts in an odd place. Paul talks about Israel being identified with Moses during the Exodus, and he notes that this identification involved spiritual eating and drinking. This spiritual eating and drinking is then contrasted with the carnal and rebellious eating, drinking, and fornicating in which the Israelites indulged. These rebellious and carnal acts led to drastic judgments from God. Paul draws a clear lesson from this example: Christians, no less than Israelites, must flee idolatry.

Having established this imperative, Paul pivots to a discussion of the Lord’s Table. His point is that, just as spiritual eating and drinking identified the Israelites with Moses and God, and just as carnal, rebellious eating and drinking identified them with idolatry, in the same way eating and drinking identify Christians with the blood and body of Christ. Comparably, the Old Testament priests who ate the sacrifices in the tabernacle and temple were identified with (became partakers of) the altar. Clearly, eating and drinking are significant acts that have implications for Christian fellowship and worship. They are not merely the fulfillment of bodily needs. They are also acts that carry meaning.

The heart of Paul’s argument is 1 Corinthians 10:20. In chapter 8 he alleged that an idol is nothing in the world. Now he observes that whatever is offered to idols is really offered to demons. While the idol itself is lifeless (per Ps 135:15–18 its eyes do not see, its ears do not hear, it cannot utter words), behind the idol lurks a demon. Paul’s particular concern is that believers not be brought into fellowship with demons.

Eating and drinking can establish that kind of fellowship. If eating and drinking gave the Levitical priests fellowship with the altar, and if eating and drinking bring Christians into fellowship with Christ’s blood and body, then eating and drinking can also institute fellowship with demons. Demonic fellowship would be a serious matter for God’s people, who should be careful about provoking the Lord to jealousy. He is, after all, stronger than we are.

Consequently, Christians should abstain from some things that are not necessarily wrong in themselves. If those things are not helpful and if they do not build up, then they should be avoided. Even if nothing is wrong in itself with eating idol meat, the greater significance of the eating must be taken into account. There may hypothetically be some circumstances under which this meat can be eaten with impunity. In an atmosphere charged with idolatry, however, it must be utterly rejected.

Paul closes his discussion with an exhortation to do all things—specifically, eating and drinking—to the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31). Paul is not here talking about motivations. He is not giving permission to indulge in idol meat or any other activity as long as you want God to be glorified by it. Rather, he is forcing us to evaluate the activities themselves. If an activity is of such a nature that it cannot be done to God’s glory, then we should not do it. When eating and drinking identify us with idols, for example, and thus bring us into fellowship with demons, then we should avoid that kind of eating and drinking. Doing all to the glory of God requires us not simply to examine our hearts (which we certainly should do) but more importantly to examine the implications of what we are doing. Often the activities that we are considering have meanings that go beyond the bare acts themselves.

This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

A Prayer From The Imitation of Christ

Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471)

Let Your name, not mine, be praised. Let Your work, not mine, be magnified. Let Your holy name be blessed, but let no human praise be given to me. You are my glory. You are the joy of my heart. In You I will glory and rejoice all the day, and for myself I will glory in nothing but my infirmities.

Let the Jews seek the glory that comes from another. I will seek that which comes from God alone. All human glory, all temporal honor, all worldly position is truly vanity and foolishness compared to Your everlasting glory. O my Truth, my Mercy, my God, O Blessed Trinity, to You alone be praise and honor, power and glory, throughout all the endless ages of ages.

Have you ever had occasion to speak at the funeral of someone whose faith in Christ is uncertain? While we never can truly know whether a decedent has trusted the Lord for salvation—only God is qualified to judge the hearts of mankind—we have all attended a “questionable” funeral. This is one in which the decedent’s life was marked by little to no observable fruits of righteousness.

I recently attended such a funeral for a 36-year-old man I’ll call Bradley (I’ve changed the names of all individuals referred to here in order to protect their privacy). Bradley grew up attending independent Baptist churches with his family where he actively participated in all the church and youth group functions. After graduating from high school, he attended a Bible college for one semester. But Bradley struggled with ongoing bouts of depression and same-sex attraction. By the time he reached his 30th birthday he decided to pursue what would make him happy (in his words), so Bradley and Clarke were officially joined together in a civil union.

Bradley’s remaining years were filled with much despair and turmoil as he spiraled downward in the throes of depression exacerbated by addiction to prescription drugs, which culminated in a fateful decision to take his own life.

A good number of Bradley’s relatives and friends attended his funeral, many of whom were believers in Jesus. I’m quite sure that Bradley’s family would have preferred to have his uncle, who is a gospel-preaching pastor, officiate the service. But Clarke made the decision to ask the pastor who oversaw Bradley’s and Clarke’s civil union to give the main address at the service. Her talk, based on Revelation 12, included a message about fighting the “dragons” of homophobia and exclusion—a rather strange text to use at a funeral.

Providentially, some other family members were given the opportunity to speak, and I was particularly impressed by the words of Bradley’s younger brother, Sam. I would describe Sam as a mature, Bible-saturated Christian, who loved his brother deeply even as he disagreed completely and was grieved with the path Bradley chose to follow.

During his four-minute address Sam shared some happy memories of Bradley and then proceeded with these words:

I don’t know the final thoughts that Bradley might have had on this earth. I don’t know what his death and transition from this mortal coil was like, but I do believe with all of my heart what the Bible says in Romans 14:11: “It is written: ‘As Surely as I live, says the Lord, every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God.’” I believe that as Bradley faces his Creator, his knee will bow and his tongue will acknowledge God. And though I wish Bradley could come back here to tell all of us the truth that I believe he now fully sees, God has spoken truth and given it to us in His holy Word. I would like to leave you today with what the Bible says to all of us: I pray you will seek the Lord while He may be found and call on Him while He is near. And that you find true comfort in these words as I do.”

Sam then quoted each of these verses without comment: Mark 10:45; Romans 5:8; 6:23; 8:1, 32; 2 Corinthians 5:21; 8:9; 1 Timothy 1:15; and 1 John 4:10.

Though Sam did not give the main address in that service, he presented some clear truths that every gospel preacher should present at a funeral, whether the decedent is “questionable” or not. First, every human being will bow the knee to God; believers will do so willingly and unbelievers begrudgingly, but all will bow before the Judge of all the earth.
Second, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners (1 Tim 1:15) as our ransom and propitiation and to show His love and grace in order that those who believe in Him will have eternal life. Third, Sam implied another truth that we should proclaim at a funeral when he said, “I wish Bradley could come back here to tell all of us the truth…he now fully sees.”

I would like to expand on this third point which speaks to the truth of what the physically dead would say to those still living if they could return to their own funeral and address the audience. If the deceased person did believe in Jesus during his or her time on earth, he or she is presently “with Christ.” This is the language Paul uses (2 Cor 5:8; Phil 1:23), and this is the hope all true believers have. We can be sure that someone who is with Christ would desire that all their friends and loved ones could join them to be in His presence forever. This would be their message at their funeral: “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved!”

But what of the one who has died without Christ? What would he say at his funeral? The Bible does not leave us in doubt in regard to these questions. Luke 16:19–31 provides us with a window into the experience of life after death for the rich man who did not believe Moses and the Prophets, a phrase Luke and John understand to refer to the gospel message about Jesus (Lk 24:44–47; Jn 5:39–46). Two aspects of the rich man’s abode should be noted from this passage: 1) it is a place of torment and 2) it is completely separated from the place of blessing where Lazarus resides. And what is the rich man’s message from this horrible place? “Please warn my five brothers to believe the gospel so they don’t end up here!” Put in modern terms, a person in hell would say to his loved ones and friends, “Please trust in Christ so that you can have eternal life!”

Speaking at a “questionable” funeral presents us with a difficult challenge, but God’s Word provides at least three truths we can share with confidence: 1) every human being will one day bow the knee to God; 2) Christ came into the world to save all who trust in Him; and 3) every decedent, if given the opportunity, would plead with the attenders, “Seek the Lord while He may be found!”

This essay is by Jon Pratt, Vice President of Academics and Professor of New Testament at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

Stoop Down, My Thoughts

Isaac Watts (1674–1748)

Stoop down, my thoughts, which use to rise,
Converse a while with death;
Think how a gasping mortal lies,
And pants away his breath.

His quivering lip hangs feebly down,
His pulses faint and few;
Then speechless, with a doleful groan,
He bids the world adieu.

But Oh, the soul, which never dies!
At once it leaves the clay!
Ye thoughts, pursue it where it flies,
And trace its wondrous way.

Up to the courts where angels dwell,
It mounts triumphing there;
Or devils plunge it down to hell,
In terror and despair!

And must my body faint and die!
And must this soul remove?
Oh, for some guardian angel nigh,
To bear it safe above.

Almighty Saviour, to thy hand
My naked soul I trust;
My flesh shall wait thy kind command,
To mingle with the dust.

“Give to the Max” has arrived! It began November 1 and it will end on November 17. Many years ago, Central Baptist Theological Seminary began to participate in “Give to the Max Day” every November. The event is sponsored by GiveMN, a coordinating organization for charitable institutions. It is intended to encourage giving to Minnesota-based charities, including Central Seminary.

The event is no longer just a day. “Give to the Max” now takes nearly three weeks. From now until November 17 every gift will be doubled until we reach a total of $100,000. More on that in a moment. First, here’s why you should consider donating to Central Seminary during the Give to the Max event.

Think for a moment about the church at Philippi. When the apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians, that church was experiencing the double affliction of persecution and poverty. The members heard that Paul was in prison, and they wanted to help him. They gathered as much money as they could, and they sent one of their fellow members to carry it as a gift to Paul. Though the gift came from their poverty, it touched Paul deeply. They had given him their money, and they had taken his need upon themselves. He praised them and reassured them that God would supply the need that they now experienced. Just as importantly, he promised that their gift would result in fruit that would be credited lavishly to their account (Phil 4:18–19).

The principle that Paul articulated remains both true and important. When we give financial help to others who are doing God’s work, God reckons their work as our work. What they accomplish is credited to us. God rewards us for the work that He does through those whom we support.

This principle still applies today. I may never be able to go to Madagascar or Sri Lanka. Nevertheless, if I support those who do the Lord’s work in those places, then I have a real stake in God’s work there. As souls are reached and discipled, and as churches are planted and grow to maturity, then God credits me with a part of that work. I become a full partner in God’s work wherever I give it my support.

This principle is relevant to our situation. Central Baptist Theological Seminary is training students all over the world. We have students in Kenya, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We have students in Brazil and Bolivia. We have students in India and Russia. Of course, we also have students in the United States and Canada. Central Seminary is training many Christian leaders around the world through its global outreach. Our student population continues to increase around the globe.

We are investing in the education of these students because they are, or promise to be, key leaders of churches, colleges, seminaries, mission agencies, and other ministries in the countries where they live. Through our Zoom technology we can bring advanced levels of biblical and theological training to serious students, whether they live across the street or across the ocean. We are doing the Lord’s work in places that we’ll probably never go.

By giving to Central Seminary you gain a stake in this great work. You too can minister in Africa, Europe, Asia, and South America. In the same way that the Philippians helped Paul through their gifts, you can help to train Christian leaders in many places through your gifts. Just as the Philippians gained a share in the rewards of Paul’s work, you can gain a share in the work that Central Seminary does.

We promise you that Central Seminary will spend every dollar of your gift carefully. We aren’t lining anybody’s pockets. We’re doing ministry, just as we have been for sixty-five years. Our founder and first president, R. V. Clearwaters, often said that a call to minister is also a call to prepare. He established Central Baptist Theological Seminary to prepare Christian leaders. We still hold that vision, only now it spans the globe. Central Baptist Theological Seminary exists to assist local churches in equipping spiritual leaders for Christ-exalting biblical ministry.

Do you want a piece of that action? Then we invite you to give! Generous donors think that what we do is important enough that they have agreed to match every gift up to $50,000. Whatever you give before November 17 will double in value, until we reach a total of $100,000. Since WCTS is a subsidiary of Central Seminary, gifts to AM 1030 will count toward this total.

You can give on our website at www.centralseminary.edu/give or www.wctsradio.com/donate. Or you can phone us from 8:00 AM through 3:00 PM Monday through Friday at 763.417.8250. We’ll be happy to assist you. If you wish, you can mail your gift to Central Baptist Theological Seminary at 900 Forestview Ln. N., Plymouth, MN 55441.

Your support allows us to equip pastors and missionaries in the United States. It enables us to train pastors and teachers around the world. It empowers us to broadcast the gospel twenty-four hours a day. Thank you for your help in furthering the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Lord, It Belongs Not to My Care

Richard Baxter (1615–1691)

Lord, it belongs not to my care
Whether I die or live;
To love and serve thee is my share,
And this thy grace must give.

If life be long, I will be glad
That I may long obey;
If short, yet why should I be sad
To soar to endless day?

Christ leads me through no darker rooms
Than he went through before;
No one into his kingdom comes,
But through his opened door.

Come, Lord, when grace has made me meet
Thy blessed face to see;
For if thy work on earth be sweet,
What will thy glory be?

Then shall I end my sad complaints,
And weary, sinful days,
And join with all triumphant saints
Who sing Jehovah’s praise.

My knowledge of that life is small;
The eye of faith is dim;
But ‘tis enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with him.

Some people talk as if they wish to believe in the inspiration of the Bible, but they stumble over its miraculous stories. To them, accounts like Lot’s wife becoming a pillar of salt or Jonah being swallowed by a whale or great fish seem mythological, not historical. Such people either reject inspiration outright, or else they redefine it so that these stories do not have to be taken as true.

This unwillingness to trust the plain text of Scripture was not shared by Jesus. He regularly drew upon the Old Testament as a source of authority, and He did not shy away from the miraculous accounts. Indeed, Jesus references these miracles so often that it almost seems as if He went looking for them.

For example, when Jesus was quizzed about marriage and divorce, He appealed directly to the original creation account in Genesis 1–2. He flatly stated that the creator made humans as male and female, implying belief in the historical Adam and Eve. He further taught that God Himself instituted marriage (Matt 19:4–5). In the process of this discussion, Jesus quoted directly from Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24.

Jesus also spoke of Noah’s flood as if it were an actual event in the past (Luke 17:26–27). He stated that people were living normal lives (eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage) right up to the moment that the flood came. In other words, Jesus believed that the flood was not anticipated by its victims. He also emphasized the worldwide scope of the flood in decimating humanity: the flood destroyed them all.

In a parallel example Jesus referenced the miraculous destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as an event where fire and brimstone rained from heaven (Luke 17:28–33). He stated that a comparable judgment would occur before His return, and He warned people against failing to take that judgment seriously. To emphasize His warning, He told his listeners to “remember Lot’s wife.” Evidently Jesus had no difficulty accepting this account as true.

The same can be said of Moses at the burning bush. In Luke 20:37, Jesus corrected the Sadducees’ mistaken denial of a future resurrection by appealing to Exodus 3:7, where God identifies Himself as “the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Jesus’ punch line was that God is not the God of the dead (the patriarchs had died centuries earlier) but the God of the living. Along the way, however, Jesus makes it clear that He is referencing the episode of Moses at the burning bush. Jesus not only makes His theological point but incidentally endorses belief in the miracle.

Another episode occurs near the end of Matthew 12, which is a turning point in Matthew’s narrative. In this chapter the Jewish leadership clearly rejects Jesus as the Messiah, with the result that the nation forfeits the opportunity to receive an imminent kingdom. In the wake of this rejection the crowd cynically demands a sign. In fact, they have already had more signs than they need, and their demand for another is equivalent to a further rejection. Speaking a word of judgment against Israel, Jesus calls the nation “evil and adulterous,” and says that the only remaining sign they will receive is the sign of Jonah the prophet: “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:40). Jesus even adds that the men of Nineveh will rise in judgment against Israel, because the Ninevites repented at Jonah’s preaching.

These examples are only illustrative. For example, Jesus referenced miracles by Elijah and Elisha. He also discussed the manna in the wilderness. The present listing is not meant to be exhaustive, but it clearly shows how Jesus endorsed even those parts of the Old Testament that seem hardest for modern people to believe.

Some suggest that Jesus did not really believe in these miracles, but that He was merely accommodating His teachings to the sensibilities and understanding of His crowd. That suggestion flies in the face of everything we know about Jesus’ method of teaching. While He was compassionate and while He readily forgave sins, He simply never countenanced error. Whoever was wrong—scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, even ordinary people—could expect correction from Jesus.

Other have suggested that Jesus so emptied Himself of His omniscience in the incarnation that He could and did believe errors. The kernel of truth in this argument is that the person of Jesus is limited in knowledge according to His human nature. While He remains omniscient according to His divine nature, during His humiliation He did not have conscious and unmediated access to all of His divine knowledge. For instance, He had to ask who touched Him. He acknowledged before His crucifixion that He did not know the day or hour of His return.

Not knowing something, however, is not the same as believing an error. A working definition of knowledge is that it is justified, true belief. Not all beliefs are true; not all beliefs are justified. Therefore, not all beliefs constitute knowledge. During His humiliation, Jesus lacked information about some things according to His human nature. Concerning those things He expressed no beliefs. When He did express beliefs, however, they were both true and justified. To put it in other words, Jesus knew what He knew, and He also knew what He did not know, but He never thought He knew something that turned out to be mistaken.

Suppose the opposite were true. Suppose that Jesus actually were mistaken about, say, the burning bush or Lot’s wife. We could no longer trust His use of the miracle story, which means that we could no longer accept the argument that He based upon the story. Those arguments, however, touch upon the core of who Jesus is, what He came to do, and what His rule will be like. If we cannot take Jesus’ word for the burning bush, for example, then we cannot take His word for the resurrection from the dead. By the time we dismiss everything that Jesus inferred from those miracle stories, our Christianity will be gone.

There is no escaping Jesus’ perception of the Old Testament. During His ministry He singled out several of the most controversial accounts of miracles to be found in the text. In every case, He spoke of those accounts as if they were completely true. Clearly Jesus believed them to be true, and He was willing to base His teachings upon them.

We should be able to accept Jesus’ evaluation of the text. If we do, we shall experience no difficulty placing our full confidence both in what it says and in what Jesus infers from what it says. The fact is that Jesus never used the Old Testament text as if it were anything but infallible and inerrant. Neither should we.

This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

Him Dead and Buried We Confess

Charles Wesley (1707–1788)

Him dead and buried we confess,
The storm our sins had raised t’appease,
Three days and nights for us confined;
But lo, emerging from the grave,
He comes, a ransomed world to save,
He preaches life to all mankind!

O that we all His words might hear,
A greater far than Jonah fear,
And live and die, at His command!
Then shall the grave its prey restore,
Raised by His resurrection’s power,
And cast us on the heavenly land.

John Bunyan was a Puritan, but Puritans came in different sorts. They held differing views of church polity. They also applied their Calvinism in various ways. For example, even though they affirmed justification through faith alone, they also recognized the possibility of a false faith, and this recognition led them into different understandings of assurance.

For most Puritans, eventual assurance of salvation rested upon two elements. The first was a deep struggle with conviction over the guilt of sin. They thought that true Christians would begin by developing a profound sense of how very guilty they were, of how odious God must find them, and of how utterly deserving they were of God’s wrath. Puritans who had not passed through such torment of soul could have no assurance that they were truly trusting God and not self.

The second element in assurance of salvation was perseverance. Those who were truly saved would continue in their faith. This meant not only that they would go on trusting Christ, but also that they would grow in godliness. Consequently, most Puritans subjected themselves to scrupulous self-examination, searching for evidence that sin was being mortified in their members and that holiness was increasing.

The result was what some have called a “Calvinistic Arminianism.” It was Calvinistic insofar as it recognized that salvation is entirely the work of God and rests utterly upon the merits of Christ. It resembled Arminianism, however, in that it robbed many Puritans of the assurance of salvation, for some of them were never quite sure that they were among God’s elect.

Could a Christian experience assurance of salvation? This is the dominant problem that John Bunyan addresses in the beginning of Pilgrim’s Progress. While still living in the City of Destruction, the protagonist Christian has come under the influence of a book (the Bible) that has made him aware that he bears a great burden. This burden symbolizes his conviction of the guilt of sin. He weeps, trembles, and cries out, convinced that destruction is soon to overtake him.

In his distress, Christian is met by Evangelist, who points him to the Wicket Gate. A wicket gate was a small entrance set in a larger one so that individuals could enter without having to open the large gate. Bunyan uses the narrowness of the Wicket Gate as a symbol or emblem for the way of salvation. As a Puritan, Bunyan did not recognize multiple approaches to salvation. He saw only one way, and only those who entered by that way would be saved. In Pilgrim’s Progress, one can only reach the Celestial City by way of the Wicket Gate, so at the advice of Evangelist, Christian sets off toward it.

Along the way he meets Obstinate, who tries to lure him back to the City of Destruction, and Pliable, who agrees to accompany him. Before long, however, Christian and Pliable fall into the Slough of Despond, which represents a moral paralysis that besets those who lose heart under the conviction of sin. Once extricated from the slough, Pliable abandons Christian and returns to the City of Destruction. He symbolizes people who refuse salvation because of difficulty or stigma.

Christian is assisted out of the slough by Help. As he sets off again, he meets Mr. Worldly-wiseman, who tells him of an easier way to get rid of his burden. Worldly-wiseman directs Christian to the town of Morality, to a gentleman named Legality. On the way, however, Christian must pass beneath Mt. Sinai, with all its threatening fire and thunder. Christian cowers there until he is found by Evangelist, who reproves him and sets him back on his way. Through this episode Christian learns that morality and legality only increase one’s condemnation under God’s law.

Eventually Christian comes to the Wicket Gate. There he is admitted by Good-will, who sets him on the way to the Celestial City. The way, he explains, is straight and narrow. Any path that turns away from it will lead him astray.

The Wicket Gate represents salvation. Anyone may knock at this gate, and none are turned away. Later in the story it becomes clear that one must enter the way to the Celestial City only by the Wicket Gate: others who come in from by-paths are still condemned. Passing through the gate represents Christian’s justification.

Nevertheless, his burden is not removed at the gate. Good-will tells Christian, “as to thy burden, be content to bear it, until thou comest to the place of deliverance; for there it will fall from thy back of itself.” So Christian presses forward, stopping for instruction at the Interpreter’s house (of which more anon). From the Interpreter’s house his road, protected on either side by a high wall of Salvation, leads him to a place where stands a cross and a sepulcher. As Christian comes up to the cross, his burden is loosed from his back. It tumbles into the sepulcher and it is never seen again. Then three shining ones appear. One proclaims that Christian’s sins are forgiven, one changes his raiment, and one gives him a roll or scroll (also called a certificate) from which he is supposed to read.

The order of these events indicates Bunyan’s reaction to Puritan views on assurance of salvation. Following the typical Puritan pattern, Christian feels the weight of his sins as an overwhelming burden. His conviction of sin leads him into despondency, and he discovered that morality and legality will deepen his condemnation. All of this was standard Puritan fare: one could not experience assurance until he felt overwhelmed with guilt.

Christian does not receive assurance when he passes through the Wicket Gate. If indeed the gate represents the moment of conversion and justification, Bunyan is still following the usual Puritan pattern. One might be among the elect and yet feel no assurance of that fact. Like Christian, many Puritans continued to feel the burden of their sins after they had trusted Christ for salvation.

Where Bunyan departs from the typical Puritan pattern is in the way that Christian is eventually relieved of his burden. He does not receive assurance by examining his life for perseverance. He receives assurance by coming to the cross. For Bunyan, the finished work of Christ, and not individual spiritual success, was the ground of assurance. Bunyan is taking sides here in a Puritan controversy, aligning himself more closely with the position of Edward Fisher (The Marrow of Modern Divinity) than with mainstream Puritanism.

Subsequently, Christian continues his journey with full assurance of salvation, bolstered by readings from his roll or certificate. Only on one occasion does he lose the roll, and then his progress is blocked until he retraces his steps to recover it. For Bunyan, assurance of salvation was readily available to all believers. It rested upon the objective ground of the cross of Christ. It could be sustained by reading God’s promises in a personal way. Here, Bunyan departed from typical Puritanism.

This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

Let the Most Blessed By My Guide

John Bunyan (1628–1688)

Let the Most Blessed be my guide,
If it be his blessed will,
Unto his gate, into his fold,
Up to his holy hill.

And let him never suffer me
To swerve, or turn aside
From his free-grace and holy ways,
Whate’er shall me betide.

And let him gather them of mine
That I have left behind;
Lord, make them pray they may be thine,
With all their heart and mind.

What manner of thing is Pilgrim’s Progress? Clearly it is a work of literature—indeed, a powerful one—but what kind of literature is it? The book is surprisingly difficult to classify, but several observations are in order.

To begin with, Pilgrim’s Progress is a narrative. It tells a story. It is written mainly in prose, though it has bits of verse scattered here and there. One might be tempted to think of it as a novel, but it precedes the development of the modern novel in English. It is more closely related to Medieval romances such as Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

Like those romances, Pilgrim’s Progress focuses upon a heroic figure (actually multiple figures, since the work is in two parts). Instead of aiming for realism and verisimilitude, the tale incorporates fantastic elements. Furthermore, it is not a work of fiction, but a moral allegory.

Moral allegories were not new when Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. Middle English allegories include an anonymous poem entitled The Pearl (probably from the same author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Romaunt of the Rose (a partial translation of an older French work), and Piers Plowman by William Langland. Not forty years before Bunyan’s birth, English poet Edmund Spenser published The Faerie Queene, also a moral allegory in Early Modern English.

An allegory is a work of analogy that functions more-or-less as an extended metaphor. Persons, events, and objects in the story are intended to correspond to and represent persons, objects, and events in the real world. Some authors may provide a key that identifies these correspondences, but most do not. Trying to figure out what the specific items represent is half the fun of reading allegory. Discovering these correspondences opens up the deeper meaning of the work. Of course, a reader always faces the danger of trying to find resemblances and deeper meanings that were never intended by the author. Some readers even think that they discover correspondences in literature that was never meant to be read allegorically. Interpreters  have known to read the Bible (unsuccessfully) this way.

In the case of Pilgrim’s Progress, however, Bunyan makes the allegory plain to the reader. For example, he provides a key to his meaning by the names he uses. His protagonist is Christian, who leaves the City of Destruction for the Celestial City. Christian encounters such characters as Evangelist, Obstinate, Pliable, Talkative, Worldly Wiseman, Lord Hategood, and the Giant Despair. He falls into the Slough of Despond, must climb the Hill Difficulty, pass through the Valley of Humiliation, and is imprisoned in Doubting Castle. Bunyan removes most of the guesswork from interpreting his allegory.

Besides being a narrative and a moral allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress is written as if it were a dream. This device was well known in previous English writing. Examples of such dream literature include The Dream of the Rood (in which a cross becomes a guide to the narrator), The Pearl, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and John Clanvowe’s The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. By presenting his moral allegory as a dream, Bunyan was following good literary precedent.

Pilgrim’s Progress is a narrative, that is, a story, and Bunyan is the storyteller. The story that he tells is essentially a quest, though it begins as more of an anti-quest. A quest is a story in which the hero must leave home to gain something, and that’s really the big story of Pilgrim’s Progress. In the first part, Christian leaves the City of Destruction to gain the Celestial City. In the second part, Christiana and her children embark on the same quest, and they are aided by the hero, Mr. Great-heart.

The story, however, does not begin as a quest to gain something, but to lose something, much as Frodo sets out not to find a magic ring but to destroy one. Christian bears a great burden, and he is desperate to be rid of it. He sets out initially to seek relief from this crushing weight, but he shifts his attention to the goal of reaching the Celestial City. The fact that he is seeking to lose something—to get rid of it—is what makes Pilgrim’s Progress initially an anti-quest.

In sum, Bunyan’s work sits at the junction of several literary elements. It combines moral allegory and dream literature in a narrative that has a quest (and anti-quest) for its plot. In none of these elements was Bunyan a pioneer. All had been done, and done well, in English literature before him. Bunyan’s main contribution lay in applying these devices to an Evangelical, Protestant, and uniquely Puritan vision of the life of faith.

What exactly is the shape of the spiritual quest that Bunyan envisages? Answering that question is essential to understanding Pilgrim’s Progress, and getting an answer depends upon grasping the story as a whole. Consequently, what I propose to do next is to provide a summary of the overall narrative with at least its principal characters. That summary will allow readers to see the shape of the life of faith as Bunyan imagined it to be.

This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

Upon the Vine-tree

John Bunyan (1628–1688)

What is the Vine, more than another Tree,
Nay most, than it, more tall, more comly be?
What Work-man thence will take a Beam or Pin,
To make ought which may be delighted in?
It’s Excellency in it’s Fruit doth lie.
A fruitless Vine! It is not worth a Fly.

Comparison.
What are Professors more than other men?
Nothing at all. Nay, there’s not one in ten,
Either for Wealth, or Wit, that may compare,
In many things, with some that Carnal are.
Good are they, if they mortifie their Sin;
But without that they are not worth a Pin.

The neoevangelical movement arose primarily after the end of the Second World War. Of course, the movement had antecedents. For example, when the National Association of Evangelicals was formed in 1942, it explicitly rejected fundamentalist ideas about separation from apostates. Furthermore, one of the leaders in founding the NAE, Harold John Ockenga, was also the leading figure in launching neoevangelicalism.

The most pivotal year for the movement was probably 1947. That was the year that Ockenga helped to establish Fuller Theological Seminary, which became the flagship institution of neoevangelicalism. It was the year in which L. Nelson Bell launched Christianity Today, the journal of the neoevangelical movement. It was also the year that the Conservative Baptist Association was organized. Like the NAE, the CBA refused to require separation from apostates.

The original neoevangelicals were a cadre of relatively young intellectuals who had earned doctorates from places like Pitt, Harvard, NYU, and Boston University. This cadre included names like Carl F. H. Henry, Edward John Carnell, and Harold Lindsell, as well as Ockenga and others. In 1948 Ockenga coined the label neoevangelical while delivering an address at a Fuller Seminary faculty convocation.

The engine that drove the neoevangelical movement was a widespread sense that Western civilization was teetering. Millions had died in a world war—the second within living memory. The world’s most ostensibly civilized nation (Germany) had both begun the war and perpetrated the Holocaust. The war had ended with a literal bang as the world witnessed the power of atomic destruction. Many feared that the USSR would soon master the secrets of nuclear warfare, and the result was a profound anxiety. Most of Europe and much of Asia lay in ruins. Many wondered whether civilization could weather the storm.

The neoevangelicals were convinced that they had the solution. It lay, they thought, in orthodox Christianity, if only they could gain enough of a hearing to restore Christian ideals to dominance within civilized life. To do that they would need to establish themselves within the centers of cultural influence, and especially in the academy. They were encouraged by the collapse of old-line liberalism and the rise of a neoorthodoxy that superficially seemed much closer to biblical Christianity. They aimed to earn control of the culture by mounting an effective apologetic for orthodoxy. To gain a hearing, however, they would also need recognition and respectability. Thus, academic respectability became a primary goal.

Neoevangelicals exhibited disdain for their fundamentalist heritage—especially its ecclesiastical separatism. They intended to build a bridge movement, believing that many erstwhile liberals would come over into the evangelical camp if presented with a credible apologetic and a crossable ecclesiastical bridge. They did manage to build the bridge, but almost all the crossing over went in the other direction.

The problem was that the neovangelicals’ goals conflicted. Neoevangelicalism was a fusion of commitments, and in the long run, the commitment to orthodoxy and apologetics could not be reconciled with the yearning for intellectual respectability. Orthodoxy was never going to be respectable, no matter how sound their apologetic might be. The question was whether respectability or orthodoxy would prove the stronger commitment.

The test case became biblical inerrancy. In 1947, all the neoevangelicals were inerrantists. Inerrancy was a part of the orthodoxy that they were sworn to defend. By 1970, however, Fuller Seminary had capitulated on this issue, choosing respectability over orthodoxy. Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible was the equal and opposite reaction, opting for orthodoxy over respectability (though not abandoning hope of the latter). Both Fuller and Lindsell maintained half the neoevangelical fusion, and each was willing to surrender the other half.

Lindsell and others made the case that inerrancy was a watershed doctrine for evangelicalism. Their goal was to drive those who denied inerrancy out of the evangelical fold. They largely succeeded in doing that. The cost that they paid, however, was to lose much of the former neoevangelical movement and to surrender several degrees of respectability within the academic world. After all, one of the canons of academic life is collegiality, and Lindsell’s attitude toward Fuller was now anything but collegial.

In other words, the neoevangelical project came to an end during the 1970s. From about 1975 onwards it became impossible for anyone to hold the entire synthesis of ideas that had characterized the original movement. Neoevangelicalism, whether viewed as a movement or a fusion of ideas, collapsed. To call anyone a neoevangelical after about 1980 is simply anachronistic.

The problem is that the heirs of neoevangelicalism on the Fuller side (i.e., the Evangelical Left) found new bases of support. They managed to establish themselves as a permanent halfway house between orthodoxy and whatever the real theological Left happened to be doing. In the process, they managed to gain at least some of the respectability that they had coveted. The effect was to set up the Evangelical Left as a huge theological magnet that would continue to exert a powerful pull on the rest of the evangelical world. It still does.

For a while, the neoevangelicals who prioritized inerrancy gave a rightward bump to the mainstream evangelical world. In some ways that bump was only temporary as, under the influence of an increasingly magnetic Evangelical Left, much of the evangelical spectrum was eventually pulled leftward. Nevertheless, the rightward bump was adequate to crystalize a conservative evangelical movement that would, for example, aggressively reclaim the Southern Baptist Convention and would eventuate in the large, gospel-centered alliances of the 21st Century.

Meanwhile, challenges have proliferated within the evangelical world. Inerrancy is now merely one of many theological and practical challenges to orthodoxy. Others include Open Theism, the Prosperity Gospel, certain versions of gender egalitarianism, openness toward and acceptance of same-sex sexual relationships, redefinitions of justification, person-relative theories of meaning and truth, and the increasing influence of a recrudescent Marxism appearing under the guise of Social Justice, Critical Theory, Intersectionality, and Wokeness. Even among many whose theology (or what is left of it) is still formally orthodox, pastors have become impresarios or CEOs, churches have become centers of amusement, biblical admonition has been displaced by popular psychology, worship has been converted into self-affirmation, biblical thinking about missions has been replaced by cultural anthropology, and friendship with the world has become de riguer.

To those of us who were alive and awake during the 1970s, evangelicalism seemed like nothing so much as a rambunctious free-for-all. From today’s perspective, however, the evangelical world of the 1970s appears amazingly homogeneous and sedate. Furthermore, for all the campaigns that it has waged and all the issues on which it has capitulated, evangelicalism (including fundamentalism) is smaller now than it was then, and it exerts only a fraction of the social and cultural influence that it did at that time. And that is something that nobody in the 1970s would have guessed.

This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

I Want a Principle Within

Charles Wesley (1707–1788)

I want a principle within
Of jealous godly fear,
A sensibility of sin,
A pain to feel it near.

That I from thee no more may part,
No more thy goodness grieve,
The filial awe, the fleshly heart,
The tender conscience give.

Quick as the apple of an eye,
O God, my conscience make;
Awake my soul, when sin is nigh,
And keep it still awake.

If to the right or left I stray,
That moment, Lord, reprove;
And let me weep my life away,
For having griev’d thy love.

O may the least omission pain
My well-instructed soul,
And drive me to the blood again,
Which makes the wounded whole.

In the early 1970s Bill Gothard had begun to teach a series of practical Bible studies to large groups. In 1974 he began to call these the “Seminar on Basic Youth Conflicts.” They became famous for the red notebooks that attendees used. These seminars became very popular within the evangelical and fundamentalist world, largely because they dealt with real-life problems that pastors too often failed to address. Unfortunately, Gothard was not particularly skilled in his handling of Scripture, with the result that his interpretations and applications became increasingly suspect through the years. Nevertheless, his platform allowed him to speak directly to believers in many local congregations and even to control some of those churches, if only indirectly.

Another source that spoke to many believers was Christian radio. The 1970s was still within the golden era of Christian broadcasters, of whom there were many. Carl McIntire had the Twentieth Century Reformation Hour and radio station WXUR. John D. Jess hosted the Chapel of the Air, and Theodore Epp hosted Back to the Bible. In 1970 Paul Meyers turned the Haven of Rest (with its famous quartet) over to its next host, Paul Evans. Lester Roloff broadcast The Family Altar, which came to include a running commentary on his conflict with the state of Texas. One of the best-known broadcasts was the Radio Bible Class, which was hosted by Richard W. De Haan and which published a small devotional entitled Our Daily Bread. The best-known Pentecostal broadcaster was healing evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman. Oliver B. Green preached on the Gospel Hour, J. Vernon McGee taught on Thru the Bible radio, and Jerry Falwell held forth on the Old Time Gospel Hour.

A new generation of broadcasters also took to the airwaves during the 1970s. These included Focus on the Family with James Dobson (1977), Grace to You with John MacArthur (1977), and Insight for Living with Chuck Swindoll (1979). All three of these broadcasters became celebrities within the evangelical world.

The 1970s was also a decade of political involvement for evangelicals. Going into the decade, figures like Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis headed up ministries that were explicitly anti-communist. Two of McIntire’s earliest books, Rise of the Tyrant and Author of Liberty, had been written to defend free markets and capital enterprise. His paper, the Christian Beacon, hammered both communism and the ecumenical movement (he believed the two were linked) every week. Eventually the FCC pulled his radio station off the air. McIntire bought an old minesweeper and anchored it in international waters off New Jersey, broadcasting under the name of Radio Free America. McIntire’s anti-communism became more stringent through the years, leading many fundamentalists to back away from him.

Hargis operated a college in Tula and had a daily radio broadcast. If anything, he was even more stringently anti-communist than McIntire was. His influence came to an abrupt halt in 1974, however, when several students of both sexes at his college accused him of sexual improprieties. For a few years no evangelical really carried the torch in politics, but that would change before the end of the decade.

Also in 1974, evangelicals met in Lausanne, Switzerland for the International Congress on World Evangelism. This event was dominated by neoevangelicals, especially Billy Graham. Its contribution to the social and political ethos of evangelicalism was to elevate socio-political involvement to a place alongside evangelism as a mission of the church. Its version of socio-political involvement, however, was poles apart from the strident anti-communism of McIntire and Hargis.

Indeed, the social ethos of the evangelical world was increasingly dominated by the nascent Evangelical Left. Ron Sider was a key spokesman for the new position, which was socially liberal in most of its agenda. The attempt to amalgamate left-wing politics with evangelical piety is well represented by Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon. While a Republican, Hatfield was a political liberal who often found himself aligned with Democrats. One example is his co-sponsorship with South Dakota Democrat George McGovern of an amendment calling upon the United States to withdraw all troops from Viet Nam.

Jimmy Carter—ostensibly an evangelical—was elected president in 1976. Carter was a populist whose positions were mildly conservative in international affairs but decidedly liberal on domestic issues. While claiming to be evangelical, he pointed to neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and existentialist theologian Paul Tillich as significant influences. He also gained notoriety and scandalized many Christians when he granted an interview to Playboy magazine, as part of which he confessed to having committed adultery in his heart “many times.”

Carter had campaigned as a born-again evangelical, but his pronouncements quickly cost him support among conservatives. Still, his election was remarkable enough to prompt the curiosity of Time magazine. When Time discovered that over a third of all Americans claimed to have had a born-again experience, it declared 1976 to be the “Year of the Evangelical.”

Carter’s presidency is remembered for stagflation, ennui, an artificially-induced fuel shortage, a nationwide 55 mile-per-hour speed limit, and Billy. The public rapidly lost confidence in the president, and any remaining faith in his competence was shattered when Iranian militants captured the US embassy and held its personnel hostage. This decline in Carter’s fortunes occurred at the very moment when a vigorous conservative leader was emerging in American evangelicalism.

That leader, Jerry Falwell, organized the Moral Majority in 1979. Falwell never claimed that the Moral Majority was a religious organization, but he did say that it was an organization of “religious people,” including Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and others. Its original mailing list was provided by John R. Rice—it was the mailing list for The Sword of the Lord. As events developed, Falwell and the Moral Majority became part of a groundswell of conservative politics that swept Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. A self-identified fundamentalist, Falwell had now taken McIntire’s place as the most visible fundamentalist in America.

Not all fundamentalists rejoiced. To many, it seemed that Falwell had made too many easy alliances with unbelievers and “disobedient brethren.” In 1976, Bob Jones University had organized the World Congress of Fundamentalists, and the Joneses certainly held a different view of ecclesiastical separation than the one held by Falwell. Indeed, they had fallen out with John R. Rice over just this issue in 1971. Mutterings soon arose in the neighborhood of Greenville that Falwell was a “pseudo-fundamentalist.” Tensions between these two camps continued for years. The breach never was entirely healed.

John R. Rice died in 1980. Robert T. Ketcham had preceded him in 1978. Others of their generation (Bob Jones, Sr. and Paul R. Jackson, for example) had died during the previous decade. The earlier fundamentalists were now almost all gone. It remained to be seen what the next generation would do with this movement.

On the other hand, all of the original neoevangelicals (except for Edward John Carnell) were still very much alive. The 1970s seemed to present them with their moment in history. What actually happened, however, was that the 1970s began the demise of neoevangelicalism as a movement. I’ll turn to that story next week.

This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies

Charles Wesley (1707–1788)

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true and only Light,
Sun of righteousness, arise,
triumph o’er the shade of night;
Day-spring from on high, be near;
Day-star, in my heart appear.

Dark and cheerless is the morn
unaccompanied by Thee;
joyless is the day’s return,
till Thy mercy’s beams I see,
till they inward light impart,
glad my eyes, and warm my heart.

Visit then this soul of mine,
pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
fill me, radiancy divine,
scatter all my unbelief;
more and more Thyself display,
shining to the perfect day.

The 1970s proved to be an important turning point for the evangelical doctrine of Scripture. Going into the decade, fundamentalists and other evangelicals shared a broad consensus (at least publicly) over the notion that inspiration was both verbal and plenary and that Scripture was inerrant. There had been a few efforts earlier to unseat this consensus, such as Dewey M. Beegle’s 1963 volume on The Inspiration of Scripture. Nevertheless, as far as ordinary Christians could tell, the consensus held. One example is Clark Pinnock’s work, Biblical Revelation, published in 1971. The book was a full-throated defense of verbal, plenary inspiration and of biblical infallibility and inerrancy. No one then could have guessed that Pinnock would become one of the leading deniers of inerrancy.

In 1970, agreement over biblical inspiration and authority seemed to rule the evangelical world. This apparent agreement was shown to be illusory when in 1971 the board at Fuller Seminary voted to remove inerrancy from its doctrinal statement. This move was made partly to accommodate the views of the founder’s son, Daniel P. Fuller, and it was made quietly. By 1972, however, the change was being widely discussed within the evangelical world.

That year John W. Wenham published Christ and the Bible, in which he examined Jesus’ attitudes toward Scripture. Wenham came to the unsurprising conclusion that Jesus’ view of the Bible was very high indeed. The book is still useful after half a century. What is significant is that Wenham’s book—prepared mainly before the Fuller revision—seems to have been the last major work on bibliology that assumed the older consensus within evangelicalism.

The following year (1973) Beegle was back with a revision of his book, now entitled Scripture, Tradition, and Infallibility. Writing for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Gordon Clark labeled Beegle’s discussion “an all-out, no-holds-barred, always aggressive, sometimes insidious attack on the truthfulness of Scrip­ture. Its basic thesis, used both as an axiom and as a conclusion, is the occurrence of indubitable errors in the Bible” (JETS 20, 275). Clearly something was askew in evangelical bibliology, but what?

The answer was provided by Harold Lindsell, who was a founding professor at Fuller and was presently serving as editor of Christianity Today, the flagship publication of the evangelical world. Lindsell had the distinction of being one of the original neoevangelicals. He could not possibly be mistaken for a fundamentalist. Yet in 1976 he published The Battle for the Bible, in which he claimed that biblical inerrancy was being undermined in multiple places within the evangelical world. Lindsell pointed specifically to the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the case of Fuller Theological Seminary. For the first time publicly, he told the story of Fuller’s checkered relationship with biblical authority. He also argued that if the attack on biblical inerrancy was not halted, then evangelicals would begin to surrender the Bible’s authority on substantial doctrinal and practical issues.

In fact, that surrender had already begun. The year before Lindsell published his book, Paul King Jewett of Fuller Seminary published Man as Male and Female. Jewett speculated that Paul’s views on the relation between the sexes were a result of his rabbinical bias. He suggested that these views ought to be ignored in favor of Paul’s more enlightened statement that there is neither male nor female in Christ (Gal 3:28).

The “battle for the Bible” was fought across several fronts in the evangelical world. On one front, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod reinforced a wavering stance on inerrancy with the result that several professors left Concordia Seminary to found a “seminary in exile,” or Seminex. In 1976 the non-inerrantists were forced out of the denomination.

On another front, denials of inerrancy had permeated the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1978 a group of prominent leaders met in Atlanta to develop a strategy for reclaiming their denomination. The following year these leaders—including Adrian Rogers, Paige Patterson, Paul Pressler, and W. A. Criswell—launched what would become known as the “conservative resurgence” in the SBC. Pressler, a judge, had recognized that by controlling the election of the convention president, the conservatives could eventually shift the weight of the whole structure in favor of inerrancy.

Of course, non-inerrantists were quick to respond. Rogers of Fuller Seminary fired off a stammering reply to Lindsell, Biblical Authority, in 1977. Two years later he co-authored a more robust volume with Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible. Rogers and McKim argued that inerrancy was not the traditional position of the Church. This book was widely acclaimed, and some took it to be the final word on the subject of inerrancy. Nevertheless, it would be answered decisively by John Woodbridge’s Biblical Authority in 1982.

Meanwhile, in 1978, exegetes, theologians, and churchmen from across the evangelical world met in Chicago to organize the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. These individuals deliberately planned for the council to go out of existence after ten years, which it did. Over that decade the ICBI published multiple volumes defending biblical inerrancy. Perhaps its most important contribution, however, was the draft of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. This statement gave the evangelical world its first definitive declaration of just what inerrancy meant—and what it did not mean.

During the intervening years Lindsell had left the editorship of Christianity Today. In 1979 he published his second blast in the inerrancy debate, The Bible in the Balance. Here he repeated and expanded his older accusations. He detailed developments in the SBC, the LCMS, and Fuller Seminary. He offered a critique of the historical-critical method. Perhaps most importantly, he devoted a chapter to the question of who or what is an evangelical.

In that chapter Lindsell argued that the word evangelical had “become so debased that it has lost its usefulness” (319). He found himself casting about for an acceptable alternative. Surprisingly, he—one of the original neoevangelicals—suggested that inerrantist evangelicals might go back to the label fundamentalist. Perhaps not as surprisingly, his suggestion was never widely implemented, even within the more conservative evangelical world.

What Lindsell did manage to do was to hardwire into the more conservative versions of evangelicalism an awareness that inerrancy is a watershed doctrine. For at least a generation other evangelicals echoed his insight that no one who denied inerrancy could properly be called evangelical. Still, Lindsell’s generation had crested in its influence, and it would soon begin to die off. The next generation would change the question so that talk about inerrancy began to sound nonsensical (if meaning is person-relative, then truth and error are also person-relative). The generation after that would again attack inerrancy with a vengeance. The battle for the Bible has not gone away.

This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

Precious Bible, What a Treasure

John Newton (1725–1807)

Precious Bible, what a treasure,
Does the Word of God afford?
All I want for life and pleasure,
Food or med’cine, shield or sword;
Let the world account me poor,
Having this, I want no more.

Food to which the world’s a stranger,
Here, my hungry soul enjoys;
Of excess, there is no danger,
Tho’ it fills, it never cloys.
On a dying Christ I feed,
He is meat and drink indeed.

When my faith is faint and sickly,
Or when Satan wounds my mind;
Cordials to revive me quickly,
Healing med’cines here I find:
To the promises I flee,
Each affords a remedy.

In the hour of dark temptation,
Satan cannot make me yield;
For the word of consolation
Is to me a mighty shield.
While the Scripture truths endure,
From his pow’r I am secure.

In 1970 American evangelicalism was divided into three main camps. A minority on the far right called for separation from all forms of apostasy, including the liberal denominations and the Roman Catholic Church: these were the separatist fundamentalists. A minority on the left believed that the Lord’s work could be furthered by tolerating religious liberals in their organizations, by cooperating with liberal Protestants and Roman Catholics in the Lord’s work, and by infiltrating ecumenical endeavors with evangelical influence. Adherents to this position called themselves neoevangelicals. In the middle was the broad sweep of evangelicalism, which both groups sought to influence and control.

Fundamentalists of the day were represented by figures such as Bob Jones, Jr., John R. Rice, Jack Hyles, and especially Carl McIntire. Leading organizations included the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship, the Bible Presbyterian Church, the Baptist Bible Fellowship, the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, and the American Council of Christian Churches. Schools within the fundamentalist camp included two Baptist Bible Colleges (Springfield, MO and Clarks Summit, PA), Cedarville College, Grand Rapids Baptist College, and Bob Jones University.

Neoevangelicals followed the leadership of individuals like Harold John Ockenga, Carl F. H. Henry, Edward John Carnell, and especially Billy Graham. The leading neoevangelical organization was the National Association of Evangelicals, though many of its members were mainstream evangelicals rather than neoevangelicals. Billy Graham’s crusades were the most visible neoevangelical enterprise. The fountainhead of neoevangelicalism was Fuller Seminary in Pasedena, CA.

Most of evangelicalism lay in between these poles. The majority of evangelical leaders and institutions probably still thought of themselves as fundamentalist, though they may have been uncomfortable with the label. They were uneasy about cooperative evangelism as Billy Graham practiced it, but they were also impressed with Graham’s results and reluctant to distance themselves from him. Bible teacher J. Vernon McGee was one such individual. Schools like Moody Bible Institute and Dallas Theological Seminary fit into this position. Arguably, by the 1970s the bulk of the Independent Fundamental Churches of American stood just about here.

The most separatistic fundamentalists insisted that majority evangelicals must separate, not only from apostates, but also from neoevangelicals. For their part, neoevangelicals didn’t ask anybody to separate from anyone. The difference was disastrous for fundamentalists, who gradually lost influence within the evangelical world. Fundamentalist influence had been waning through the 1960s, but during the 1970s the fundamentalist movement began to see itself as increasingly distinct from the rest of the evangelical world.

This situation was worsened by other influences. The first was the success of the Charismatic Movement, which took hold during the 1960s but reached full stride during the 1970s. Unlike the older Pentecostalism, the Charismatic movement operated within mainline denominations and even in the Catholic church, giving those apostate organizations a patina of spiritual vitality. Charismatics were genuinely interested in God, and most of them were even interested in the Bible. Nevertheless, the movement as a whole was deeply flawed.

Probably the best known Charismatic leader of the 1970s was the healing evangelist Oral Roberts. An old-time Pentecostal, Roberts made the transition into the Charismatic movement in 1968 when he joined the United Methodist Church. Besides personal campaigns of preaching and healing, Roberts hosted a widely-heard radio program and television broadcast. He shocked the nation in 1977 when he announced that a 900-foot-tall Jesus had told him to build a hospital. Roberts also lived in opulence, drawing upon the millions donated to his ministry. Fundamentalists were incredulous at his popularity.

In spite of antics like those of Roberts, Charismatics were generally welcomed within the broader evangelical world. Fundamentalists, however, believed that the Charismatic view of miraculous gifts was seriously deficient. Consequently, Charismatics began to swell the ranks of broader evangelicalism while simultaneously changing the doctrinal and practical atmosphere of the evangelical world, thus increasing the distance between fundamentalists and the rest of evangelicalism.

Hand in hand with the Charismatic movement came the Jesus Movement, which was almost exclusively Charismatic. The Jesus People were young adherents to the counterculture who responded to the gospel by professing Christ. They carried the energy of the counterculture into the evangelical world, but they also carried many of its social priorities as well. They became a hinge that turned parts of evangelicalism in a direction that would eventually become the Evangelical Left. In particular, Jesus People formed a large contingent of the crowd at Explo 72 in Dallas.

Within evangelicalism in general, Explo 72 was seen as a resounding success. It was followed immediately by Key 73, which was a nationwide, ecumenical evangelistic emphasis. Key 73 grew out of a meeting called by Carl F. H. Henry in 1967. Its stated purpose was “Calling the Continent to Christ,” but its ecumenism tended to water its message down to a vague religiosity. I can remember a liberal church in my community promoting Key 73 while simultaneously conducting seances in its basement.

Indeed, the 1970s seemed to be a time for quirky evangelical innovations. For example, in 1976 people started to see billboards, bumper stickers, and buttons with the slogan “I FOUND IT” printed in big letters. These were the product of a campaign launched by Campus Crusade. Hypothetically, people were supposed to ask “What did you find?” and you were supposed to reply, “I found new life in Christ.” Instead, other bumper stickers started showing up: “I LOST IT,” or alternatively, “I NEVER LOST IT.” One even said, “I DONT GET IT.” In fact, most people didn’t.

For their part, fundamentalists tended to mock these campaigns as misguided, charging that they missed the real point of redemption. As one preacher said, “It wasn’t lost, I was.” Another commented, “I didn’t find anything. God found me and saved me.” At the time, nearly every fundamentalist organization was flourishing and growing. The best attended churches in the world were fundamentalist churches.

Much that was done by evangelicals during the 1970s was supposed to help promote the gospel. The overall effect, however, was to muddy the waters and to obscure the message of the gospel, secondarily creating confusion around the concept of evangelical. Were you an evangelical because you believed the gospel? Because you spoke in tongues? Because you put a bumper sticker on your car? By the end of the 1970s, it was no longer possible to say exactly what an evangelical was.

This vagueness or fuzziness was compounded by other events. The inerrancy debate looms large in that list, and it deserves separate discussion. So does the election of a putatively evangelical president of the United States. But those discussions are for another time.

This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

Hark, How the Watchmen Cry!

Charles Wesley (1707–1788)

Hark, how the watchmen cry!
Attend the trumpet’s sound;
Stand to your arms, the foe is nigh,
The powers of hell surround.
Who bow to Christ’s command,
Your arms and hearts prepare,
The day of battle is at hand—
Go forth to glorious war.

See, on the mountain-top
The standard of your God;
In Jesus’ name ’tis lifted up,
All stained with hallowed blood.
His standard-bearers now
To all the nations call:
To Jesus’ cross, ye nations, bow;
He bore the cross for all.

Go up with Christ your Head;
Your Captain’s footsteps see;
Follow your Captain, and be led
To certain victory.
All power to him is given;
He ever reigns the same:
Salvation, happiness, and heaven
Are all in Jesus’ name.