Can The Center of A Square Circle Hold?

 Or Does One Have to Be Cross-eyed To Make It Work?

There are more than a few problems with the latest conversion testimony lite article “Does The Center Hold?” running at the Called To (Candide) Confusion website, masterminded by a philosophical Doctor Pangloss who is obsessed with proving ad hoc that the Roman Church is the best of all reasonable, infallible and true churches in the  performatively nominal noumenal world. That is when we aren’t repeating our self and he isn’t begging the question.

But to the article at hand. The author demonstrates, happy picture of the wife and seven children notwithstanding:

1. An overweening drive to walk by sight, not by faith. If the one holy apostolic catholic church is not one, it can’t be any of the rest. Visible unity is the sine qua non of the true church that trumps all else.
2. A subsequent noticeable absence of interaction with Scripture ensues. Which is not surprising considering, but whatever.
3. The scandal of division to the point again of where unity overrides the other marks of the holy, apostolic catholic church.
4. In the end he plumps for the Roman church because it can hold the center, which,  other than visible unity, is pretty much undefined.

All in all a theology lite effort in order one supposes to join the evergrowing throng of believers streaming back to the Roman church.

Yet we fear that all that glitters is not fools gold. Scharbach has only traded for an appearance of truth and unity, which his simplistic analysis fails to comprehend,  even if the visible unity of the church trumps all as he seems to think it does.

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Old Book Review of New Book on Old Heresy/Modern Evangelicalism

No Place For the Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? David F. Wells, Eerdmans  1993, 318 pp.

[This is an old  “well yeah, but” affair. While we didn't read No Place for the Truth until 1999, it is still getting quite a bit of notice in some circles. Suffice it to say in our opinion, it didn’t quite live up to its reputation then or now. The following are the lightly edited and unpublished comments to  another venue in ‘99.]

Sociology or Systematic Theology?

If the back of No Place For the Truth tells us that Wells is the Andrew Mutch Professor of Historical and Systematic - Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. South Hamilton, Massachusetts, the larger presbyterian and reformed world which has given the book so much acclaim, has been conned well. There is not much, if any, historical or systematic theology in it. Rather Mr. Wells implicitly dismisses even the possibility that the roots of present day problems in evangelical  theology have anything to do with historical or systematic theology at all, much less that of days gone by. Some how we remain unconvinced of his thesis that in the main, sociological  reasons led to the demise of present day evangelical theology.

While Mr. Wells correctly deplores the social science mentality and methodology that has supposedly eviscerated contemporary evangelical theology, by the same token and despite his insights, No Place for the Truth is shot through with the same. He tells us confidently that "Once confession is lost, reflection is cut loose to find new pastures. Once it has lost its discipline in the Word of God, it finds its subject matter anywhere along a line that runs from Eastern spirituality to radical politics to feminist ideology to environmental concerns (p.101, it. add.)." 

Well yeah, but  this is subsequent to Chapter VI on the ministry, entitled "The New Disablers," where Wells refers to the minister, six times in terms of either "his or hers" (pp. 221, 232, 251, 256) or "he or she" (pp. 234, 247).  As they say, somebody's slip is showing. If that in the quest for contemporary practicality "the ministry has becoming a profession (p.112}," ie. timeservers and hirelings; those who say what men want them to say and not what they need to hear, we would agree with Wells. But we would only add, to the detriment of our interpersonal skills,  "Physician,  heal herself himself thyself."

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