Christians are people of the Word, and as a result they are people of words. We love the Truth, and this is why we must necessarily love truths. The flip side of this is that when a love for the Lord Jesus declines, one of the first places it manifests itself is in an obvious contempt for words. Words become little lumps of neutral play dough, on which a dishonest heart can exercise its creativity. But really the source of this rebellion in the little things, and the final direction of it is hostility to the ultimate Word.
Take the word evangelical. It comes from the Greek word for the gospel, euangelion, and has been used to describe those individuals who held a high view of the gospel, and the Scriptures which brought us that gospel. Whatever disagreements existed among believing Christians, in the era after the Second World War, evangelicals at that time were clearly doctrinal vertebrates of some description. But in recent decades, we have added more than a little money to the movement, some academic respectability, a lust for influence, and the result is the widespread existence of evangelicals who think that dialogue is a verb, and a promiscuous one at that.
The unfortunate result of all this is a fundamental dishonesty in the use and retention of certain names. Years ago, J. Gresham Machen was exasperated by those theological liberals who were not willing to admit that they actually had become adherents of another religion. He wrote his profound Christianity and Liberalism to show that the two were rival faiths, and not compatible expressions of the same faith at all. But the creedal dishonesty of liberalism ran deep, and so the good words were kept, and the guardians of the substance of those words were banished. This same dishonesty is operative today and manifest throughout the evangelical world.
A corrupt hermeneutic is rarely brought to the Scriptures first. Those who want to twist Scripture have to fend off the possibility of any institutional discipline while they do so, and so they scramble to keep themselves wrapped in the good words. This is why the right to continue to call oneself an evangelical is quietly assumed, all while denying the heart, soul, and center of evangelicalism.
A sound hermeneutic of anything can never be sustained without discipline. If a man wants a garden full of weeds, he does not need to do a thing. If a man wants his ability to play the piano to get rusty, he needs to do . . . nothing. And if a church wants its lampstand removed, in a fallen world, all that is necessary is a little more standing around. A sound hermeneutic does not and cannot protect itself. Words and names are protected by honest men or they are neglected by careless men. In the modern evangelical world, virtually all our words are in the hands of the careless.
Consider the advertising blurb for a recent non-Christian book, being marketed as a Christian book by a very brazen former evangelical publishing house. “Many will find things to disagree with in this book, but everyone should agree that it has significantly raised the level of discussion.” The book in question promotes a new “openness of God” theology, one which maintains that God does not know the future, thus enabling him to be more “relational” — more of a 90’s god.
Now why would we want to obey the exhortation implied in this blurb? Did Ireneaus want to raise the level of discussion with the Gnostics? Did Athanasius want to conduct a cooperative and helpful dialogue with the Arians? Because the possibility of any kind of creedal discipline is negligible in our day and age, those who have abandoned the gospel are now openly seeking to make their distinctives into negotiable items, and want to be held by all as being “within the pale.” Thus we do not have to agree with them, but we do have to agree to disagree, and to do so as fellow . . . evangelicals. They do not resist disagreement; in fact, they welcome it. But the disagreement must come in the form of continuing dialogue, and not in the form of showing them to the door.
The astounding thing about all this is the fact that there is so little controversy about it in the evangelical world. Our complacency shows nothing more clearly than how cold our love has grown. If a man were to see his wife being attacked by rapists, all his professions of love and deep concern are meaningless unless he fights for her. Under such circumstances, a refusal to fight does not stem from a love of peace, but rather from the now-revealed contempt he has for his wife. In the same way, a refusal to discipline is nothing but a manifestation of contempt for that which we refused to protect through the needed discipline. Bringing us back to the point, a refusal to fight over the meaning of words betrays, ultimately, a contempt for the Savior. Of course we need fewer church fights over the replacement for the choir director, or the color of the carpet in the fellowship hall. But we need many more church fights over the meaning of some precious and important words.
Until we have them, we must begin to realize that modern evangelicals have become nothing but theological liberals in a varied guise. Some of them are willing to deny the faith once delivered to the saints, and the others, more numerous, are willing to let them.