On the online version of the Weekly Standard, Jim Tonkowich of the Institute for Democracy and Religion, sums up the current tumult in the mainline Protestant denominations with a T-shirt slogan he saw at the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA): “I’m Making It Up As I Go.”
Tonkowich explains that the fissures in the oldline denominations are about more than politics. They’re instead about two rival notions of how to view reality itself. And, he warns us, this isn’t just a problem for liberal denominations. As he puts it:
“No wonder the left and right can’t get along. They live in parallel universes and can barely communicate with each other.
“THIS SAME CONFUSION OVER TRUTH is rapidly infecting the evangelical world as churches drink the ’emerging church’ Kool-Aid. Emerging or post-modern church leaders insist that truth is relational and must be experienced. I agree, but to leave it there is to fall into the same subjectivist error in which the mainline/old-line denominations are mired. The traditional Christian understanding is that truth is true even if it is not experienced. It is true objectively and absolutely. This is an assertion for which modern people have little patience.
“In a speech given in 1898, Dutch theologian, pastor, politician, and professor Abraham Kuyper diagnosed modern problem with understanding the nature of truth: ‘Everyone who thinks he can abandon the Christian truths, and do away with the Catechism of Reformation, lends ear unawares to the hypotheses of the modern world-view and, without knowing how far he has drifted already, swears by the Catechism of Rousseau and Darwin.’
“Having abandoned a Christian epistemology and, thus, Christian truths, the mainline/old-line denominations will continue their inexorable drift to the sideline. The current breakdown in the Episcopal church is the natural result of this crisis in authority and truth. The results will be a liberal vestige with lovely buildings and lots of endowment money, but few people.
“Left and right represent radically different understanding of faith and truth. It’s the difference between ‘Making It Up As I Go’ and ‘Thus saith the Lord.'”
