Theological Violence in the 21st Century

The Eclipse of Ethics and Morality in Today's World

Dr. Scott T. Kelso

• Publisher: Dr. Scott T. Kelso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781633375086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

YOU HOLD IN YOUR HAND an analysis of two central truths. First, the betrayal of theological education in America leaving the vast majority of clergy bereft of the supernatural element in the Bible and in life. Upon entering active ministry in the local church, too many clergy are ill-prepared to meet the challenges of modern ministry, lacking very little power or confidence in the authority of the Bible to meet basic human needs.

Secondly, having been absent in the most topsy-turvy period of the twentieth century, the 1960s Church all but caved in to the '60s revolution, changing America for generations to come. We are still seeing fruit from that seed sown from the sexual revolution, to the presentday political turmoil in government and in the streets, to the call of Socialism to govern our lives. It's all there in embryo in the 1960s. This book analyzes a path forward from the '60s chaos to a clear message of repentance while turning to the supernatural power of God as we enter a last-days' scenario.

Anyone wondering why the Church has wobbled on the most important social issues of the day when the Bible is crystal clear on many of them will come away with a new perspective of understanding and a clear vision of how the individual Christian can make a real difference in the spiritual landscape of America. Come join the new revolution!

CHAPTER 1

MOVING THE ANCIENT BOUNDARY MARKERS

A HISTORY OF GOD’S PEOPLE IS ONE that narrates a struggle against constant erosion of fidelity to the living God. In the Bible, humankind begins with a revelation from God, “a thus saith the Lord” out of which God’s servants react with their totality of being—spiritually, emotionally, and voluntarily.¹ The resulting imprint is so great that the revelation is then codified and written down.

In theological terms, we call this “inspiration.” One can observe, for example, the need to record a pattern of impression going back in history twenty-five or thirty thousand years with humans marking their journey on the walls of caves throughout France and Spain. Man must record his journey. It is what we do. For the one in dialogue and covenant with God, first comes revelation then comes inspiration.

In the above context, the Bible is a record of God’s journey with the human race written by over forty different people, many of whom never knew each other during a period of some three to four thousand years. Yet it provides a complete narrative with a beginning (Genesis) and an end (Revelation) and has guided countless individuals and numerous civilizations over time. Following this process, such things as rules, laws, mores, and other cultural markers are designed to help the group or tribe maintain allegiance to their revelation.

In addition, such things as memorials, rituals, monuments, statues, paintings, music, sculptures, and the like, motivate the new generation to follow the original ways given through revelation. An example is found in Joshua 4:4–7:

So Joshua called together the twelve men he had chosen—one from each of the tribes of Israel. He told them, “Go into the middle of the Jordan, in front of the Ark of the Lord your God. Each of you must pick up one stone and carry it out on your shoulder—twelve stones in all, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. We will use these stones to build a memorial. In the future your children will ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you can tell them, ‘They remind us that the Jordan River stopped flowing when the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant went across.’ These stones will stand as a memorial among the people of Israel forever.” (NLT)

As Archbishop (Philadelphia) Charles J. Chaput says in his book Strangers in a Strange Land, “Traditionally, nations depend on the continuity of generations to transmit memories and beliefs across time and thus sustain their identity.”²

For some twenty centuries, the Church has been the custodian of such memories and beliefs. The process of erosion mentioned above can be readily observed in the last sixty years in America. The cultural chaos today finds its genesis in a movement of young people known as the ’60s revolution. Some reading this book have lived through and witnessed this radical intrusion into culture.

As a tracker employs markers in the woods to find his way back to his origin, we shall review markers that lead directly back to the 1960s upheaval when the Church abandoned its role in society to be salt and light, losing her mandate (commission) from the God of the Bible and caving in to a political correctness while at the same time leaving a great void in its wake.

This book is about reclaiming lost ground and reversing course before it is too late. Jesus made a haunting statement to His disciples on one occasion by saying “… work while it is day: for the night cometh, when no man can work” (John 9:4 KJV).

The Church in this hour is about to step into a prophetic role as an end times destiny calling which we will unpack later in this book. Because she has abdicated her allegiance to ancient revelation and is rewriting a new moral code, she has caused “theological” violence of sorts to engulf the religious landscape. This theological violence amounts to a kind of wasting away of most if not all foundational principles that have held humanity upright for a very long time.

It’s violence because it is an “assault” on the foundations of faith while it forges a new faith paradigm based on theory, conjecture, postulation, and worse of all, out-and-out unbelief. Here we are reminded what the great nineteenth^-century preacher and expositor Charles Spurgeon asserts concerning those who denigrate the Word of God: “Many modern critics are to the Word of God what blow-flies are to the food of men; they cannot do any good, and unless relentlessly driven away they do great harm.”³

The antecedent to this process of “wasting away” of foundational truths can be found in the historical/critical school of biblical interpretation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scholastic world. This pursuit, which came largely out of Germany, left in its wake a pulverized landscape of conjecture, distorted reasoning, and out-and-out destruction of what has been an anchoring repository of faith understanding based on the authority of the Bible through the centuries.

One of the forefathers of this movement was Julius Wellhausen (1844–1908). He taught the Old Testament at the University of Greifswald. According to his theory, the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible) consisted of four intertwined strands of documents that had been composed well after the exilic period (587 BC). The strands were identified as “JEPD.” The “J” represents the proper name for God as revealed to Moses, known as YHWH (Yahweh); the “E” stands for the original Hebrew name for God— Elohim; the “P” represents the priesthood view of God; and the “D” stands for the Deuteronomistic history of Israel inclusive of the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings.⁴

Wellhausen’s theory is a forced narrative to explain how Israelite religion must have developed. In fact, Wellhausen resigned his position at Greifswald in 1882, realizing that “his theory was in compatible with his job of preparing students for Christian ministry.”⁵ Professor Corduan says, “By sending historical events to the margins of relevance, Christianity becomes pointless.”⁶

In this, Wellhausen completely upends the history, the time lines, and the supernatural element in the prophetic ministry recorded in the Old Testament. The only bright spot in this episode is that Wellhausen had enough integrity to resign in the first place. In his book In the Beginning God, he explains,

I became a theologian because the scientific treatment of the Bible interested me; only gradually did I come to understand that a professor of theology also has the practical task of preparing the students for service in the Protestant Church, and that I am not adequate to this practical task, but that instead despite all caution on my own part I make my hearers unfit for their office. Since then my theological professorship has been weighing heavily on my conscience.⁷

As one can plainly see, drilling down on the wider dimensions of this effort to make the Bible say what it in effect does not say, one would be blind not to observe a breach in the traditional grounding of the people of God. Within this cauldron of intellectual suicide, the historical, critical school has embraced a world-view that no longer has room for the supernatural events of the Bible or the mystery of the living God. Just as the constant pounding of waves of water on the rocky, jagged ocean coast can render the rocks smooth over time, so the Church has mellowed over time to the relentless onslaught of the liberal theological academy. It has left a depleted foundation for the training of church leadership in our seminaries throughout the twentieth century.

To further illustrate my thesis, I refer to Dr. Donald E. Miller, a respected professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Southern California. He wrote a widely read book entitled Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium. The book was an attempt to understand the changing landscape of Protestant Christianity in the United States at the end of the twentieth century. Specifically, Dr. Miller set out to analyze three prominent church movements: Calvary Chapel, The Vineyard Church, and Hope Chapel, all originating in Southern California. These movements had discarded many of the attributes of established religion (mainline Christianity) and were rapidly growing by connecting deep spiritual longings to contemporary cultural forms. By successfully “mediating the sacred,” Miller has termed them the “new paradigm” churches, helping to re-energize a limping Protestantism into the twenty-first century.

In the introduction, Miller navigates an autobiographical segment where he admits writing a book twenty years earlier called The Case for Liberal Christianity. This book was “the product of a young mind trying to pick up the pieces from a graduate education in religious studies.”⁸ Then he really lowers the boom: “Most of my ‘true believer’ understandings of God and the Bible had been destroyed. In fact, I counted myself lucky to still consider myself a Christian.”⁹

Miller admits shortly after the publication of Liberal Christianity “to shelve all attempts at writing theology until I was retired and had earned the right to engage in speculative reasoning. I had demythologized for myself most of the supernatural elements of Christianity and settled into the Social Gospel…”¹⁰

I too was educated under this paradigm of unbelief in 1970.

They have successfully dismantled the “faith of our fathers,” leaving in their wake a disjointed and confused Church, who now records their individual distinction through branding (denominationalism). Thanks to the result of the Protestant Reformation, we have seen a fifty-year run on this kind of religious sequencing. This, in turn, has resulted in a depletion of resolve to address the very grand social and political problems which face our present-day society. Hence, Brandon Hatmaker describes the present-day Church as a river that is a “mile wide and three quarters of an inch deep.”¹¹ He claims that “as our churches continue to grow in size, they lack in depth. Though our programs and events are becoming more and more broad, they only skim the surface of truth. Worse, critics contend, most believers don’t actually live what they say they believe.”¹²

Thankfully, the entire historical/critical apparatus has been rendered obsolete by many modern-day scholars. Unfortunately, the damage has already been done, and the Church has suffered greatly because of it. Please observe the following verification:

One of the more dramatic developments in recent years in biblical and theology studies is the growing recognition of the obsolescence of the historical- critical method as an adequate paradigm for understanding the Bible. There is an increased awareness that the whole modern project’s approach to the Bible was built on a faulty assumption of treating the text as object. Consistent with the assumptions of the modern project the quest of biblical studies focused on understanding the true historical context that gave birth to the final form of the text, and on clarifying the one univocal meaning that the text conveyed in this final form.

Building on the work of Brevard Childs, who sought to understand the shape of the canon, and James Sanders, who sought to understand the process of the canon, numerous biblical scholars such as Walter Wink, James Smart, and Walter Brueggemann have all issued the same declaration that the focus of the critical apparatus was misdirected. They call instead for a serious treatment of the Bible on its own terms, which translates into a rediscovery of its essential narrative character.¹³

In addition, the nineteenth-century abdication of biblical values led to a twentieth^-century fundamentalist-modernist controversy, splitting the Church into two distinct camps, both of which shelved the supernatural of the Bible. Obviously, the modernists-rationalists approach abandoned the biblical witness to the supernatural a long time ago. This side of the equation may be dressed in clerical garb, but they are traitors through and through. As decedents of the Enlightenment, they could no longer conceive of a world where rationality was not king.

On the other hand, the fundamentalists led by B.B. Warfield, a nineteenth^-century Calvinist theologian and self-described theologically as a “dispensationalist,” believed that miracles and the supernatural were no longer needed after the canon of the Bible was complete. He based his entire approach (as well as those who followed him) on a verse in l Corinthians 13:9–10: “Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the picture. But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.” In this view, once the Bible was completed (“time of perfection”), there would be no more need for “additional” help through the supernatural gifts of the Spirit.¹⁴

Fortunately, this entire theological construct has been put to bed by a gifted theologian and friend, Dr. Jon Mark Ruthven, in a well-written book On the Cessation of the Charismata. Dr. Ruthven is the former chair of the doctoral program at Regent University in Virginia Beach and has authored several books on theological issues impacting the academy in recent days. In the above book, Dr. Ruthven details a point-by-point rebuttal of Dr. Warfield’s thesis, which has not to date been refuted by any sitting theologian anywhere. I highly recommend this book to the academy and the larger Body of Christ.

So, there you have it. Two sides of the same coin, heads and tails used to negotiate the fluid world of ideas about God and history.

Sadly, both groups were devoid of any power to contend with the oncoming giant of socialism and secular humanism unmasked in the 1960s revolution. By the time the ’60s rolled around, the ground was fertile for a new crop of radicals to invade, and invade they did.

Because of these developments in theology and history, the Church by and large has relegated the Bible to a diminished role in society.

The Church has fallen in line with a politically correct (PC) agenda, genuflecting to the larger secular culture while it minds its place in a world gone mad. We have seen the Church subservient to cherished ideologies (political, theological, and social) and therefore have aided and abetted the theological violent confrontation between light and the darkness. How else, for example, could we allow homosexual marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges 2015) to be codified as an acceptable norm in America, overturning 5,000 years of human history?

A great mentor and a dear friend of the twentieth century, Dr. Lon R. Woodrum, said on one occasion, “There are a thousand roads that lead away from God, but only one road that leads back—repentance.”

We would do well to observe Jesus’s words to th...