Academia

I was preparing to preach on Luke's account of Martha entertaining Christ (Luke 10:38-42) last week, and, as usual, I read Calvin on the passage first.

I'm fascinated when reading Calvin's commentaries by the incredible variety of passages which stirred up controversy in his day. You wouldn't think the story of Jesus commending Mary and chastising Martha would have any relevance to the debates of the Reformation, but it did.

Why? Because, as Calvin explains, the Roman church had distorted Jesus' commendation of Mary sitting at His feet into a wholesale commendation of the "contemplative life."

Usually we regard practitioners of the contemplative life as the monks and nuns, hermits and cloistered religious of Roman Catholicism. And Calvin does condemn monks in his exposition of this passage, but he adds another, rather unexpected, profession to his list of those who have perverted this passage...

Several years ago David and I took part in a battle opposing a number of members of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) in their efforts to remove the sex-markings of thousands of texts of Scripture in the New International Version. At the time, the NIV was the Bible translation standard of the Bible-believing, English-speaking world, so it was the efforts to modernize this particular translation that were our focus.

Our opponents' plan was to put out an updated NIV called the NIVI in which Hebrew and Greek words such as adam, adelphoi, and aner would be denuded of their male grammatical component and thereby rendered innocuous to Westerners raised in a feminized society in which it had become gauche to make references to mixed-sex groups using any word with a male marking. 'Man' became 'humankind', 'brothers' became 'Christian friends' (NLT) or 'siblings' (NIVI), 'man' became 'person', and so on--thousands of times across the pages of Scripture.

As you'll see from the above reference to the NLT, the NIV was not the only Bible in wide use across the evangelical world being similarly updated. In an effort to update the Living Bible which was growing long-in-the-teeth, Tyndale House Publishers had hired a long list of ETS academics to produce the New Living Translation which, benefiting from millions of dollars in advertising and purchased product placement in national bookstore chains, was steadily gaining market share.

Partly because of the naturally lower expectations of accuracy the NLT inherited from its predecessor, the Living Bible; partly because the academics who had done the NLT's translation work likely expected it to be more a devotional than a study Bible; and partly because the NLT's publisher responded to expressions of concern over some of the more egregious mistranslations evident in the NLT's text with thoughtful consideration and, eventually, a number of changes to the text of the NLT's subsequent printings; the public battle was focused almost exclusively on the updated NIVI, its publisher Zondervan, and Zondervan's subsidiary (in a manner of speaking), the International Bible Society and her subordinate Bible Translation Committee.

The battle was joined with the publication March 29, 1997 of Susan Olasky's cover article, "The Stealth Bible: the Feminist Seduction of the Evangelical Church," in World magazine. For almost everyone this was the first hint of Zondervan's plans and the response was a good measure of the profound theological divisions present within the vast entrepreneurial business park named "evangelicalism."

Predictably, one side decried Olasky's divisive spirit and focused their attack on World magazine...

So what ought we to expect from the new president of Princeton Theological Seminary? Check out this excerpt from The Presbyterian Outlook, a newsweekly focused on the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA):

On the Sunday evening in his closing address to the Assembly, the retiring Moderator Professor Iain Torrance, who has recently been appointed President of Princeton Theological Seminary, chose to reflect on the need for a new approach to Christian ethics.

Just about all of us were brought up to believe that Christian ethics is a matter of drawing boundaries, of shoulds and shouldn'ts. I simply no longer believe that. Christian ethics is about transformation first and last. We persist in imprisoning ourselves within the frame of reference of 16th century issues. The disputes between Luther and Zwingli on whether the body of Christ is present or absent at communion ...is all very interesting, but it is not today's issue. What matters today is not whether we can define the mechanism of the real presence, but whether our worship encourages a mind-set of expectation and gratefulness to God, and loving openness to others...

There was plenty of food for thought in his words, not least in his quotation from Seneca about gladiators.

When the gladiator enters the arena, he has no fixed strategies. He improvises on the basis of long ingrained skills. The task of the church is to foster those skills, not to offer preset solutions in a Windows world with drop down menus for each situation.

-Simpson, Dr. James A. "Letter from Scotland: First woman Moderator Chosen" The Presbyterian Outlook (September 27, 2004):11.

To postmodern ears it sounds good. Who in his right mind would oppose exchanging the "drawing of boundaries" for "transformation"?

What do you think, good reader?

This contributed by a member of our congregation, my friend, Scott Tibbs.

Article forgets lesbian women

I was very interested in reading Maggie Bozich's front-page story ("Greeks prepare to crown new Big Man on Campus," Oct. 15, Indiana Daily Student) on Zeta Tau Alpha's research benefit event, Big Man on Campus, but she lost me with her first sentence: "Every male on campus wants to be him, and every female on campus wishes she could date him." Although I have enjoyed reading some of Ms. Bozich's other work, she let me down this time. With one innocent slogan, she silenced every lesbian woman on campus by implicitly denying her existence. Too often we remain complacent with narrow-minded interpretations of love, and by denying the existence of perspectives or orientations different from our own we unconsciously make others feel invisible, which denies them the right to express their love.

I believe Ms. Bozich meant no harm, but let this serve as a reminder of why it is so important that we are inclusive in our language. Silence can be deadly.

Evan Rosenberg, Sophomore

Surely Evan, with all his multi-cultural feminine sensitivities, will make someone a good wife husband.

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. (1Corinthians 1:20,21)

Last week, some within our congregation, Church of the Good Shepherd, took steps to start a new faculty/grad fellowship at Indiana University. Part of the planning process was putting together an E-mail list of the faculty members and grad students within our own church fellowship. When the list was tallied, I was sobered.

This group, along with their families, makes up well over a quarter of our congregation--almost a third. Add to it our undergraduate students and we're close to half the congregation. Add to those two groups the members and their families who have graduate degrees (their masters or doctorate), and we're over three quarters of our congregation.

I'm grateful, then, for the other elders and pastors of our congregation who pushed us to sell our property on the side of town where most faculty members live, and to build our new church home on the side of town where the people who work with their hands live. In fact, after looking at our congregation's educational demographics last week, I went on the US census web site and found that...

The late Allan Bloom was a native of Indianapolis who knew the academic world from the inside, serving for many years as professor in University of Chicago's renowned Committee on Social Thought. In The Closing of the American Mind, his jeremiad against the anti-intellectual groupthink so pervasive within the world of higher education, Bloom lamented the havoc wreaked within the hearts of his students by their parents' divorces.

Observing a decline in his students' ability to be hopeful and creative, and a dullness in their eyes demonstrating the mortal wound they had suffered when their baby-boomer parents "split," Bloom barely contained his disgust at the parents' efforts to heal their children's wounds superficially. Recounting how parents paid for counselling sessions in which their child was expected to process his pain in a productive manner, he summed up the whole dirty mess with the statement, "Psychologists are the sworn enemies of guilt."

If therapists are the sworn enemies of guilt, sex researchers are the sworn enemies of shame. And Indiana University's much-ballyhooed Alfred C. Kinsey leads the pack.

Feted at IU's Memorial Union and Auditorium Theater last Saturday night in connection with the Bloomington premier of Kinsey, a biographical film of the Indiana University professor's life and work, the stars were shining for those able to pay. For a simple donation of $1,000, party-goers were granted the privilege of a private reception with actress Laura Linney (who plays Kinsey's wife, Clara ), producer Gail Mutrux, and director Bill Condon. (Liam Neeson, the actor who portrayed Kinsey, was a no-show.) All of this was in celebration of...

'bowdlerize': syn. abbreviate, abridge, bleach, blot out, blue-pencil, cancel, censor, clean, clean out, clean up, cleanse, clear out, cross out, cut, delete, delouse, depurate, deterge, dry-clean, dust, dust off, edit, edit out, erase, expunge, expurgate, freshen, kill, lustrate, omit, purge, purify, reform, rescind, rub out, scavenge, spruce, steam-clean, strike, strike off, strike out, sweep out, sweeten, tidy, void, whiten, wipe, wipe off, wipe out, and wipe up.

In our local paper, The Herald-Times, a young woman named Arlyn Keith is a Community Columnist. From her picture Ms. Keith seems to be in her mid-twenties and her piece appearing on yesterday's op-ed page is titled, "Rock'n'roll rejects the Bible."

Keith is responding to what she considers the non-news that Jan Wenner's Rolling Stone magazine has refused to run an ad for Today's New International Version, the new Bible put together under the patronage of Rupert Murdoch's News Corps' subsidiary, Zondervan Publishing Company.

Keith yawns as she wonders why Zondervan ever thought readers of Rolling Stone would be their market segment? Acknowledging that this chic Bible has compromised the original text, the better to reach her generation, Keith writes:

I knew that Christian leaders were concerned about the disinterest my generation and those younger than us seem to have with religion, but I just did not ever expect the mountain to come to Mohammed and plead for attention. This latest edition of the Bible aptly named Today's New International Version even features, according to USA Today, a method of translation which is meant to appeal to the 18-34 age group wherein gender terminology in reference to humans is neutral. The "truth" has been made user-friendly and packaged in a politically-correct manner. I am not an avid church-goer myself and am still struggling with my views, but it does seem that some values have been compromised in the process.

Out of the mouths of babes...

After years of hard work trying to convince my family members (owners of Tyndale House Publishers and its own gender-neutered Bible, The New Living Translation), Zondervan's executives (who are presently issuing this latest gender-neutered version called Today's New International Version), and the corporate leaders of the International Bible Society (holder of the copyright on all versions of The New International Version including Today's New International Version) of the false doctrine that is the heart of this work, I despair over their intransigence. And yes, one does begin to wonder what the application of "the love of money (being) the root of all evil" is to this Bible-selling business; or, for that matter, to Wycliffe Bible Translators, mega-churches, missions agencies, seminaries, and my own church's building program?

How lightly we consider our own motives in the light of Scripture's warning, "All the ways of a man are clean in his own sight, But the LORD weighs the motives" (Proverbs 16:2 NASB95).

No matter how often we explain to them that the secular feminists are correct in their judgment that the Bible is "hopelessly patriarchal," hope springs eternal and these false prophets try once again to clean up God's Word so a modicum of its offense is removed and evangelism moves apace into the twenty-first century.

Over the past couple of years, Christ the Word's Rev. Dr. Andrew Dionne has created a web site called KepttheFaith exposing the assault upon God and His Word these men are carrying out. Church of the Good Shepherd has funded the site and my brother, David, and I have fought this battle arm-in-arm. Go to the site and read and pray. Secularists and seekers such as Keith can treat this matter lightly, easily seeing the charade. But Tyndale House, Zondervan, the International Bible Society, and all the reverend doctors paid to do the bowdlerizing take this matter very seriously seeing their reputations are on the line.

They're right. Were one of them a member of Church of the Good Shepherd, the elders would declare him to be in violation of his membership vow to honor and obey the inerrant Word of God, and call him to repent.

Chesterton nailed it almost a century ago:

It is remarked, "We need a restatement of religion"; and though it has been said thirty-thousand times, it is quite true.

It is also true that those who say it often mean the very opposite of what they say. As I have remarked elsewhere, they very often intend not to restate anything, but to state something else, introducing as many of the old words as possible.

(G. K. Chesterton, The Thing, p. 190, "Some of Our Errors".)

My friend, Dave Curell, called my attention to a Reuters article listing the criteria being applied by the prosecution and the defense in the jury selection process for Michael Jackson's trial.

The prosecution is seeking jurors "who are older, more conservative, less enamoured with celebrity, willing to accept authority and appalled by child molestation. Jurors with their own children would be a natural choice."

Defense attorneys, on the other hand, are seeking jurors "who have advanced degrees, critical thinkers who question authority.... (those with) "a lot of education."

It ought to surprise no one that men who have spent large amounts of time within the academic world would be less likely to convict a man of pedophilia.

Back Row: Matthew Miklovic, Benjamin James III, Lawrence Howell, David Canfield, Timothy Bayly, Wayne Huck, Stephen Baker, David Bayly, Robert Forney
Kneeling: Timothy Wegener, Andrew Folley, Michael Vrlenich, Michael Ahrendt, Jamie Thornton, David Curell, Andrew Dionne

The churches Tim and I serve, Christ the Word (CTW) in Toledo, Ohio and Church of the Good Shepherd (CGS) in Bloomington, Indiana, are joining forces to sponsor the Reformed Evangelical Pastors College. We'll share more about our goals for this work in days to come, but last weekend was the first formal meeting of the college board. Board members of the college are Rev. David Curell (CGS), Andrew Folley, M.D. (CTW), Ben James (CTW), Matt Miklovic (CTW) and Tim Wegener (CGS). Rev. Stephen Baker is the college's principal.

Shown are members of the CTW and CGS elder boards at a joint meeting held at the conclusion of a joint men's retreat last weekend in Fort Wayne, IN.

Pray with us that this endeavor is blessed by God with godly students, accomplished and spiritual faculty, and logistical success.

Deficient pastoral training is the primary reason the Evangelical Church has lost her way over the last century: as the training the Evangelical church has given her pastors has grown more academic and less pastoral, her pastors have become more pragmatic and less principled. Ironically, the academic trend in pastoral training and the professionalization of the ministerial office has led to men (and, tragically, women) vested with pastoral titles and roles who are neither committed theologically nor principled practically.

Iain Murray's Evangelicalism Divided describes this trend in greater detail for those who'd like to read more.

A woman shall not wear man's clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman's clothing; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God. -Deuteronomy 22:5

The craziness started when sex morphed into gender and the distinctions between men and women went from the hard reality of body parts to the soft fiction of social constructs. Back in the old days, a baby was born and the doctor or nurse took a quick look and said either "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl!"

Now fathers and mothers wait with hearts a-thumping for their child to report back from college. Dutifully submitting him to the twistings and moldings of the academy (and paying twenty-five to forty thousand dollars a year for the privilege), Dad and Mom can never be quite certain where their child will end up. Things aren't clarified until he has had a a few years of polymorphous perversity, has heard all his options, has been hit on by every segment of the gender continuum, and one day shows up back home with his partner of choice.

Sex has been abandoned, and gender is a social construct that maximizes that idol of Western culture--choice. So now we've traded in man and woman for man-loving woman, woman-loving man, man-loving woman locked up in man's body, woman-loving man locked up in woman's body, man-loving man locked up in woman's body, woman-loving woman locked up in man's body; and so on. Far from the simple on-off of the sex switch, the gender switch is never simply on or off; it's bright or dim or somewhere--anywhere--in between.

And so absurdities multiply.

Wesleyan College:
Connnecticut's Wesleyan College is trying out a "gender-blind" dorm policy.

University of California:
The Financial Times reports that the University of California is considering covering drugs and surgery for her students to change their sex...

Not long after the "Stealth Bible" issue of World went into print, as the conflict over neutered Bible versions grew in intensity across the evangelical world, Don Carson contacted the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and asked that his name be removed from the list of those who endorsed the organization. Having neither met nor corresponded with Dr. Carson, I was uncomfortable hearing of his resignation secondhand and not having a chance to discuss his concerns with him directly. (A couple months earlier in addition to my pastorate here in Bloomington I had agreed to serve as CBMW's first Executive Director.)

I called Dr. Carson, introduced myself, and said I'd heard he wanted to remove his endorsement of CBMW. Would he please reconsider his decision?

After twenty some years of IVCF work on college campuses from the forties through the early sixties, my father used to say, "The problem with Christian colleges is that you don't know who the enemy is. At secular schools it's clear."

The history of colleges and seminaries such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oberlin, and Wheaton bears out the principle that institutions become the very thing they were founded to oppose.

A book filled with the goods on today's Christian consortium colleges is University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter's Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation." Originally published by University of Chicago Press, it's now done by Baker, I believe. It has some priceless stats on the liberal convictions of faculty at evangelical colleges and seminaries, and the inevitable decline of students' piety with each year of schooling under these profs.

Interesting fact: Marvin and Susan Olasky, Vern and Diane Poythress, and my wife and I all sent (or are sending) sons to Vanderbilt.

Were I to send a child to a Christian college, I can think of only a very few I'd consider: Doug Wilson's New St. Andrews, the great books Torrey Honors Program at (led by our own John Mark Reynolds), Hillsdale College, Grove City College, and (maybe) Covenant College. Finally, despite the pronounced feminist drift of recent years under the current and immediate past administration at Columbia International University, I might still consider sending a child there, but only in certain very specific circumstances.

No, I didn't overlook such schools as Gordon (I went to Gordon-Conwell), Westmont (my wife's alma mater), Taylor (my eldest child and her husband's alma mater), or Wheaton (the Christian college I know best, alma mater of both mine and my wife's parents, as well as my eldest son's wife). I believe covenant children would get a better education and would be better off spiritually somewhere else.

Speaking of the Christian vs. secular college debate, a valid alternative to choosing a Christian college is choosing a secular school based on the churches/campus ministries resident on or around that secular campus. For instance, my denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, has a campus ministry called Reformed University Ministries. RUM's work is called Reformed University Fellowship on each campus. Of course, this work is better on some campuses than others. It's excellent at Vanderbilt.

This was a prominent factor in our encouraging our second child, Joseph, to consider Vanderbilt.

RUF is self-consciously church-based and biblical exposition forms the centerpiece of their on-campus weekly meetings. Much different than every other evangelical parachurch campus ministry (trust me), RUF doesn't just pay lip-service to the local church but it pushes its students to be committed to a church--and not as secondary priority after their involvement in the RUF campus ministry, but as foundational to Christian discipleship.

On to a story. Joseph narrowed his choice down to Covenant College or Vanderbilt. He and I visited both of them and Joseph still couldn't choose. When we visited Vanderbilt, Marvin and Susan Olasky's son (Joseph, I think) hosted Joseph overnight and gave high marks to his experience there. Eventually, Joseph chose Vanderbilt.

So with some fear (but always faith), in the Fall of 2000 our family piled in the car and took Joseph to Nashville. We stayed at our son-in-law and daughter, Doug and Heather's, on Friday night and Saturday morning got in the minivan to move Joseph into his dorm room about half an hour away.

The building had only singles and was a pit. It's never easy to let a child go so I was feeling some gloom as we finished carrying boxes and clothes up to the room. The time came to leave and, after praying and giving him a kiss and a hug, we walked out of the room and headed to the staircase. Turning left out of his room and starting down the hall (with tears in my eyes, I admit), I was startled to look in the next door and see, exactly at the same place in the bookshelf over the desk, the same two-volume set we had just placed in the same position in Joseph's room: the Banner of Truth two-volume set of the Works of Jonathan Edwards.

I did a doubletake and looked again, thinking I'd likely been doing the moonwalk and not actually moving down the hall at all as I walked. I must still be looking through Joseph's doorway. So I looked more closely and saw through the door a stranger and his mother. I walked straight into the room and asked the young man, "What in the WORLD are you doing with a two-volume set of Jonathan Edwards on our bookshelf!? Come here, I've got to show you something."

We walked out the door and, turning right, I had him look in Joseph's room and see what he had on his shelf. Then it was time for our new-found friend to do a doubletake. Joseph's next door neighbor then told me how he had an older brother who had gone off to college--a non-Christian school by the way--and been led to faith in Jesus, there. His brother came home and told him about Jesus, at which point he too placed his faith in Jesus Christ.

His brother also turned him on to John Piper, so this younger brother began reading Piper. And he noticed in the footnotes that Piper drank waters from Edwards' well, so he went out and bought this set of Edwards and brought it to school so he could read it. Cinching the matter, he told me his name was Joseph--my son's name, also.

Praise God for His loving provision for His children, even down to determining among thousands of students that two students matriculating at Vandy who love Him would have adjoining rooms and doctrine.

Both Josephs attended RUF which was absolutely critical in their spiritual lives while at Vandy; both grew stronger in their friendship and faith while at Vandy; and our family's faith was strengthened as we saw how much God protects those who belong to Him, including their children.

Incidentally, it turned out that their dorm was sort of a self-selective group of sold-out Christians because all the men living there had asked not to be placed in a co-ed dorm.

The big news is that the ruling has come down declaring the faculty of Caroll College free to unionize...

As if professors needed more power and authority in our time. The only hurdle they hadn't cleared was their subordination to the hacks in the administration and on the board of trustees. It was so infuriating when you stop to consider that some dude who had nothing to commend his leadership beyond being newly rich was able to exercise authority over someone regularly consulted by All Things Considered--someone with the Ph.D., for Pete's sake!

Free at last! Free at last!

So, are doctors next? Pastors? Mothers?

It can't be posted here because it's premium content on the Chronicle of Higher Education site, but if you're able to get your hands on the December 2, 2005 issue, read "For the Love of Narnia" by Michael Nelson. It's an excellent defense of C. S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia against the rabid smears of another children's book author, Philip Pullman, who is using the occasion of the release of the movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, to vent his spleen against Lewis, Lewis's books, and Lewis's God.

Typical of the fungus growing through Pullman's toes is this charge:

The Chronicles of Narnia are "propaganda in the cause of the religion [Lewis] believed in," and they teach that, "Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-colored people are better than dark-colored people; and so on." Pullman calls the Chronicles of Narnia "one of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read," "propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology," "blatantly racist," "monumentally disparaging of girls and women," with a "sadomasochistic relish for violence."

It may give our good readers a better idea of where Pullman is coming from to inform them that Pullman himself is a noted author of a series of children's books called His Dark Materials. Pullman says he wrote His Dark Materials because he "really wanted to do ... Paradise Lost in 1,200 pages. ... It's the story of the Fall which is the story of how what some would call sin, but I would call consciousness, comes to us."

Some would call the Fall sin but Pullman calls it consciousness--that about says it all, doesn't it?

Sadly, in 2001 His Dark Materials won two of the prestigious Whitbread Awards, for best book published in England and best children's book.

I'll leave you with this final charge levelled by the self-avowed atheist, Pullman, against Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia: "The highest virtue, we have on the authority of the New Testament itself is love, and yet you find not a trace of that in the books."

Maybe one of our good readers can find a legit copy of Nelson's article? It's in the Chronicle of Higher Education and it's... wonderful!

(Thanks, Joe.)

As if our teeth weren't sufficiently on edge, it happened on the same Commonwealth Day (referred to below) that another prominent Anglican was in Sydney and, following excerpts from the Jensens' Commonwealth Day services, The Religion Report interviewed the Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright. For a fine illustration of letting your yea be nay and your nay yea, here's a transcript of the interview.

If one were impressed with credentials of the academic and religious variety, I can see why one might find Wright fascinating, but I find him on a variety of issues carefully wrong, and therefore decadent. As just one example, imagine the Apostle Paul summarizing a battle over the morality of sodomy this way:

Because there are many churches and (Episcopal Church USA) has been one of them, which have embraced a particular type of theology, which leads it further and further away from where most of the rest of the Anglican communion are. Of course they will tell it the other way, they would say that the Africans and others have embraced a kind of fundamentalism which leads them away from academic purity and respectability. As an academic myself I would be bound to disagree with that.

For me, that about says it all: speaking of whether the legitimation of sodomy will be accepted by the worldwide Anglican communion, Bishop Wright identifies himself not as a servant of the Word or shepherd of souls, but as "an academic." And his critique of those who are seeking to see sodomy legitimated in Christ's Name is that they are trying to lead Anglican communion "further and further away from where most of the rest of the Anglican communion are."

Imagine the Apostle Paul being interviewed on a Roman radio station concerning the Judaizing schism, and his pointing out that the Judaizers were trying to lead the Church away from where most Christians were on the issue. It boggles the mind, although it's an argument perfectly tuned to Western political culture.

Wright goes on to give a statement that is a picture-perfect synthesis of all that is wrong with the world of Christian intellectuals:

Jesus believed I think, that he was offering a critique from within (Judaism).

Wright "thinks" that Jesus "believed"?

Jesus "was offering a critique"?

Later, Wright thinks again--this time about the Apostle Paul:

(Note from Tim Bayly: Here are excerpts from one of the final comments under my post, "Bishop N. T. Wright as it were." The comments are indented and my responses are not.)

* * *

This post of yours is incredibly misguided.

Since it's rhetoric that's the subject of my original post, let me point out that this criticism is almost always made by members of the academy. This particular occasion, it's worth noting that Mr. Owen has an E-mail address at montreat.edu. And note that the opening statement does not accuse me of misguiding my readers, but of being misguided myself--incredibly so. So who's the villain, I wonder--who's the man who misguided me?

Well, at least I can blame my stupidity on someone else.

1. You apparently are not even capable of looking at ethical questions from Wright's Anglican frame of reference.

Most people wouldn't balk at the use of the word 'ethics' here, but we ought to. There's a world of difference between sodomy being a matter of "ethics" and it being in direct opposition to the order of Creation and an abomination to God. The minute Christians allow the discussion of sodomy to be labelled a matter of "ethics," the battle's largely lost since today speaking of "ethics" carries a relativistic connotation. We debate "ethics" but obey commandments...

In a comment appearing on Pyromaniacs, Steve Wood records the following E-mail exchange he had with Bishop N. T. Wright.

Wood queried Wright:

Do you believe that a significant percentage of mankind will be permanently in hell, as a result of their sin? Do you believe that hell is an objective place, characterized by permanent suffering of an individual? Do you believe that the only way that an individual can avoid hell is to personally repent of his sins, relying on Christ's actions on earth, during that person's mortal life? Do you believe that Christ will preside at a final judgment, dividing mankind into two groups, one to eternal heaven and one to eternal hell?"

Wright responded:

I think the best thing is to wait for my next relevant book. Your questions are so thoroughly conditioned by one particular (and to my mind unbiblical) way of speaking about God's eventual purpose (which, I repeat, is stated in the New Testament not in terms of 'heaven and hell' as in mediaeval and subsequent western thought, but in terms of the new heavens and new earth) that it is impossible to answer them as they stand without colluding with misunderstanding. And I repeat, whatever your powers of recall in other instances, I simply cannot have said anything like what you seem to think I must have done. I strongly suspect it was the result of my trying to turn questions with whose presuppositions I was in disagreement into questions with a biblical base which I could answer, and I can well see that this might have resulted in you or someone else imagining I was giving a particular answer to the question you thought I was answering while my intention was very different. Anyway, let's wait for the book.

Leaving Scripture aside for the moment, what about the good Bishop's Thirty-nine Articles--specifically numbers 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 17, and 18?

With my two brothers, David and Nathan, I took my Masters of Divinity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, an institution bound historically with its sister institution about four miles away, Gordon College. Both schools are on Boston's North Shore. And although no formal ties remain, the two schools have always had plenty of Gospel ties coming out of their mutual Protestant and evangelical commitments, and their common heritage and close proximity.

In 1985, two years after I graduated from Gordon-Conwell, one of the more visible members of Gordon College's academic community, Tom Howard, converted to Roman Catholicism and resigned as a faculty member.

Howard is the younger brother of two prominent evangelicals, Dave Howard and Elisabeth Elliot Gren, but he also was an author with broad name recognition himself. Years earlier, he'd written his angry-young-man book, Christ the Tiger, which was widely read. He'd also done a number of other books, one an extended meditation on the Christian home called Splendor in the Ordinary which I commend to our readers. (Howard continues to write and publishes with the orthodox Roman Catholic publisher, Ignatius Press, one of the most noteworthy Christian publishers today.)

When Howard converted, it hit the evangelical world like a sledgehammer and his departure from Gordon College was not to be taken for granted. A rather typical evangelical institution--big-hearted, broad-minded, but atheological--many of us would not have been surprised for Gordon College to keep Howard on despite his conversion. But they didn't.

Shortly afterward, a document authored by Gordon College's Faculty Senate was released as a partial explanation of the college's decision. The document titled, Explanatory Statement to the Senate's Motions To Affirm the Existing Policy with Respect to the Hiring of Non-Protestants as Faculty Members at Gordon College, circulated broadly. As I've read the discussion surrounding Joshua Hochschild's departure from the faculty of Wheaton College because of his own conversion to Roman Catholicism, I've thought it would be good for those involved in the discussion to have access to this document from Gordon College's past history...

The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. This is a basic principle of spiritual leadership and it applies to those God has called as fathers, pastors, elders, or professors who, by virtue of their calling, are required to watch over and guard immortal souls.

If you were a professor at a state university and Alfred Kinsey was a fellow faculty member, would you speak out, warning student's against him? Or would you protect your tenure by sitting silently as Kinsey did his private and public work of normalizing sexual perversion?

Let's make the question harder. Say you were a professor, not at a secular university but a Christian college--say Westmont, Gordon, Wheaton, Taylor, or Covenant. And the colleague in question was not a zoology professor who was publishing studies that purported to show that sexual perversion was much more common than previously thought. Rather, it was a Bible professor who lectured and wrote books opposing the Scriptural doctrine of father-rule. Would you publicly warn students against him and seek to have him removed from his tenured position? Would you work to inform your students' parents that this man was undermining their son's and daughter's Biblical faith?

Let's turn up the heat even more. Say this same Bible professor not only attacked the Biblical doctrine of father-rule publicly, but was widely known on campus to have been involved in sexual immorality with one of his female students who had had an abortion but, from shame, was unwilling to testify against the professor. If you knew the story was true, would you take it to the administration for their action?

Reform is hard work and reformers frequently die bloody deaths, so if you answered "no" to any of the previous questions I commend your honesty and fully understand how the self-preservation instinct has led to your silence.

Occasionally, though, God blesses a home, church, or college with a faithful shepherd who, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is willing to die for his sheep. Such a man is my friend Professory Gerald (Jerry) Eichhoefer who, until recently, was a member of the faculty of Greenville College in Greenville, Illinois. Jerry gave up his life for his sheep when, in December of 2004, Greenville College's administration fired him as punishment for his work protecting Greenville's students.

For the previous two years, in addition to his duties as a professor of computer science, Jerry had been working to expose wolves who, under cover of faculty status in Greenville's Department of Philosophy and Religion, had been hard at work undermining the faith of their students. Jerry's work publicly exposing the department and its supporters infuriated the powers that be and led to his termination, although the administration disingenuously claimed that fiscal constraints were the reason for his departure.

Note: In the continuing saga of Professor Gerald Eichhoefer's termination at Greenville College, here is another document recording other aspects of the story not previously told. It's particularly interesting to me to see the intense hostility those seeking to undermine the faith of their students at Greenville College had to reformed doctrine.

Men with responsibilities related to educational institutions, whether as a board member of a Christian college, department head, administrator, pastor recommending colleges to members of his church, or parents directing their children to consider this or that school, need to read this and the other Eighhoefer documents. They are an excellent introduction to the state of Christian education today, although I'll grant that the Greenville case demonstrates tactics more obvious than most. Wheaton, Gordon, Westmont, Taylor, etc. would be ever so much more sophisticated in how they did it, but the trends are the same regardless of the average SAT scores of the school's students. (For example, how many years did the faculty and administration of Wheaton College tolerate Professor Gilbert Bilezikian's soul-destroying work within Wheaton's Bible department, and exactly why was Bilezikian granted Professor Emeritus status?)

A short time ago, I sat at a dinner table with a board member of one of the top few evangelical colleges and a student who had just graduated from that school, and I listened as this recent graduate described how the school's Bible department was filled with what she called "egalitarians," and how as a result of their influence she had been leaning in that direction, but was now swinging back to what she called the "complementarianism" her parents had raised her to believe.

She said it matter-of-factly, not realizing my history of work in this issue, and then she concluded, "When I left (the school), I'd lost a lot of my theological foundations, but now that I'm (away from the school), I'm getting them back."

The board member demonstrated no alarm or inquisitiveness at all. It seemed entirely ho-hum to him. Why?

I'm not sure, but my guess is that he sees such placing of stumbling blocks in the pathways of his institution's students as the raison d'etre of higher education--including (and maybe especially) evangelical higher education.

Read on and weep, dear brothers and sisters, for the children who have been lost to our Precious Faith and Lord because of false shepherds with Ph.D.s and our own cowardice in allowing them to carry out their work unopposed. But praise God for men such as Jerry Eichhoeffer.

And remember my Dad's dictum after graduating from Wheaton College, then working on secular campuses for sixteen years with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship: "You never know who the enemy is at a Christian college, but on a secular campus it's always clear."

Some of my Experiences at Greenville College

by Dr. Gerald W. Eichhoefer

In 1998, thirty years after I graduated from Greenville College, I returned with my wife and daughters to teach Computer Science. I was warmly received and supported by my Science Division colleagues as I began work on a new Computer Science curriculum and my family began to adjust to our new home. In my previous job I had a joint appointment in Computer Science and Philosophy and I looked forward to a congenial relationship with the Greenville philosophy professors even though my main focus at Greenville was Computer Science. I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rice University and a bit of graduate work in Theology.

The Templeton Seminar - Fall 1998/Spring 1999

I approached a Greenville Philosophy professor and asked him to introduce me to the St. Louis philosophical community and was surprised and puzzled when he refused...

This is a superb piece on the difference between the warrior theologians of Scripture and academic theologians of our day. I'm increasingly inclined to think that the bloodiness of OT history must be felt and understood in the bones if we are to honor God as He demands.

It's the work of a man I really disagree with most of the time, but then sometimes he's spot on as here.

Thanks, Tim Varner.

(by Tim) Sadly, reformed pastors identify less with those who live in rural communities and make their living as sheep farmers (what used to be called "shepherds") than with those who live in books and make their living as academics. So this story from today's New York Times is particularly instructive.

There's a big stink over a psychology prof at Northwestern University named J. Michael Bailey who's gored the ox of transexuals around the country. But before we get to Prof. Bailey and the transexuals, a few comments about the lesson Christians should learn from this battle.

For decades, freedom of religion and freedom of speech have been under a sustained attack and the content of the books we read, the sermons we listen to, and the Bibles we carry to church Sunday morning all bear witness to the attrition of these freedoms.

Speaking only of our Bibles, did you know that millions of Bibles used by evangelicals have had words deleted in order to avoid expressing incorrect opinions deemed to have the potential of being hurtful to women and Jews? Evangelical Bible scholars, linguists, translators, graphic designers, publishers, bookstore owners, and pastors all joined together to produce and sell Bibles that would not be vulnerable to charges of sexism or antisemitism. Many hundreds of times, the original Hebrew and Greek words were changed or deleted so the Bible would be less offensive to moderns...

(Note from Tim: On another thread, someone asked about Alister McGrath. I asked my dear brother, Rev. David Wegener, to provide the answer. David serves on the faculty of the Theological College of Central Africa and is a missionary of Mission to the World, the PCA's sending agency. David, his wife Terrianne, and their four children are supported by both Christ the Word and Church of the Good Shepherd. For her senior year of high school, Mary Lee and I have the privilege of having David and Terrianne's eldest child, Elizabeth, living with us and keeping our daughter, Hannah, company in the basement.)

I was asked to write a bit on Alister McGrath since he is a prolific author and is publicly identified with the evangelical movement. For a while, at least one of his publishers was puffing him as the next C.S. Lewis, working the Oxford angle. Mercifully, that kind of nonsense has stopped. While there is some value in McGrath’s works, let me make a few comments and give several caveats.

1. An Irishman by birth McGrath took an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Oxford University and later received a Ph.D. from the same institution in molecular biophysics. He was converted from atheism while at university and did an undergraduate degree in theology while getting his doctorate in science. Most folks would have trouble doing one of those, so, clearly, McGrath is very bright.

After graduation, he studied theology at Cambridge for two years, served two years as an assistant pastor (during which time he was ordained to the Anglican priesthood) and then embarked on a teaching and writing career. He began teaching at Oxford in 1983 (when he was 28) and has been there ever since, in various professorships, holding different administrative posts and interrupted by visiting lectureships in the U.S. and Canada.

2. McGrath is indeed a very prolific author and most of his writing is on historical theology (much of it Reformation history), the whole range of systematic theology, and the relationship of science and Christianity. But, don’t be intimidated by the sheer volume of his books. There is a fair bit of cutting and pasting going on...