Can We Trade Sexual Morality for Church Growth?

From time to time we hear some telling us that evangelical Christianity must retool our sexual ethic if we're ever going to reach the next generation. Some say that Millennials, particularly, are leaving the church because of our "obsession" with sexual morality. The next generation needs a more flexible ethic, they say, on premarital sex, homosexuality, and so on. We'll either adapt, the line goes, or we'll die.

This argument is hardly new. In the early 20th century, this was precisely the rhetoric used by liberal Protestant Harry Emerson Fosdick and his co-laborers. Fosdick was concerned, he said, for the future of Christianity, and if the church was to have a future we would have to get over our obsession with virginity. By that, Fosdick didn't mean the virginity of single Christians but the virginity of our Lord's mother.

The younger generation wanted to be Christian, the progressives told their contemporaries, but they couldn't accept outmoded ideas of the miraculous, such as the virgin birth of Christ. What the liberals missed is that such miracles didn't become hard to believe with the onset of the modern age. They always had been hard to believe from the beginning.   Continue at Russell D. Moore

Liberalism, Botox, and Lady Folly

“On Sunday morning, 21 May 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick mounted the pulpit of the First Prsebyterian Church of New York to preach the most famous sermon of his career, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Described by Fosdick as a “plea for good will,” the sermon fell like a bombshell on the Presbyterian Church and set in motion a series of explosions that would rock the church until well into the next decade. A liberal Baptist preaching by special arrangement in the Presbyterian Church, Fosdick had become increasingly dismayed by conservative intolerance of liberal Christians. Since the close of the war, liberals and conservatives had been sparring on issues as biblical authority, evolution, and foreign missions. In response to the escalating militancy of the fundamentalists, Fosdick launched a counteroffensive and thereby precipitated the Presbyterian controversy.

The sermon contrasted the differences between liberal and fundamentalist theology and proposed a solution to tensions that threatened to tear Baptist and Presbyterian churches apart. Liberals, Fosdick maintained, were sincere evangelical Christians who were striving to reconcile the new knowledge of history, science, and religion with the old faith. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, were intolerant conservatives determined “to shut the doors of Christian fellowship” against all who would modify any traditional doctrines…”

Reading through Bradley Longfield’s account in The Presbyterian Controversy (Oxford, 1991) of the splintering of the Presbyterian church into fundamentalists, moderates, and modernists, as he assesses it, or the battle between Christianity and liberalism, as Gresham Machen more accurately summarized it, brought me to muse on some of the similarities to the present.  Continue at Christian Pundit

We Have Seen All This Before: Rob Bell and the (Re)Emergence of Liberal Theology

Protestant Liberalism emerged in the 19th century as influential theologians argued for a doctrinal revolution. Their challenge to the church was simple and straightforward: The intellectual challenges of the modern age made belief in traditional Christian doctrines impossible. Friedrich Schleiermaher wrote his impassioned speeches to the “cultured despisers” of religion, arguing that something of spiritual value remained in Christianity even when its doctrines were no longer credible. Church historians such as Adolf von Harnack argued that a kernel of spiritual truth and power remained even when the shell of Christianity’s doctrinal claims was removed. In the United States preachers such as Harry Emerson Fosdick preached that Christianity must come to terms with the modern age and surrender its supernatural claims.

The liberals did not set out to destroy Christianity. To the contrary, they were certain that they were rescuing Christianity from itself. Their rescue effort required the surrender of the doctrines that the modern age finds most difficult to accept, and the doctrine of hell was front and center on their list of doctrines that must go. Read the rest HERE

How to Preach Like a Liberal