Several weeks ago Mark Coppenger, distinguished professor of apologetics at Southern Seminary, delivered a reflection on Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz book here on the campus. He’s now published a digest of the talk in his column in The Illinois Baptist. I think the closing of the article bears repeating here:
“Our generation has struggled to defend inerrancy against the incursions of academic ‘higher criticism,’ ‘demythologizing,’ ‘neo-orthodoxy’ and the like. We’ve also fought (yes, ‘fought,’ as in ‘fight the good fight,’ wearing the ‘armor of God’) to restore biblical perspectives on sexuality and the family in a culture that has lost its bearings on these matters. Alas, orthodoxy and orthopraxy are not inherited, but must be embraced, exemplified, and defended in each generation.
“I’ve wondered from where the next dangerous attack on inerrancy would come. The best I can tell, it won’t be from Rudolph Bultmann, Harry Emerson Fosdick and John Cobb this time, but from some ’emerging church’ guru saying, ‘Lighten up.’
“A British politician once observed that if you weren’t liberal before you were 30, you had not heart, but if you were liberal after age 30, you had no brains. Donald Miller is now in his thirties. It’s time.”
