I emerged here because of your evangelical bent which is all to rare in blogland and you have that APU thing attached to you as well. I’m glad there are still a few left at the old homestead and I really like what you said. It seems to me that a great many in the emerging movement never were evangelical so it’s odd they want to claim the title now. You are well spoken on the subject and I will tune in again (no pun intended).

… the purpose of the bible is not to know the bible but to know God …

I like that because even we Evangelicals lose sight of this and get immersed in the minutia of the proverbial trees and lose sight of the forest.

Having said that, I guess it’s pretty obvious that I’m not really an evangelical.

Lse

“1 : incapable of error : UNERRING
2 : not liable to mislead, deceive, or disappoint”

This implies that:

1. there are absolutely no kinds of errors (from a 21st century perspective)
2. if you just read the Bible, it won’t mislead you

Number two does not take into account the difficult task of interpretation. I realize that you (and Fuller) are using the term in a more technically defined sense, but my point is that the popular, basic definition of the word is a hindrance in my opinion.

I think it would have been funnier had I taken to time to re-login as the messiah.

Aly – I’m always watching, always judging. I’m on you like white on rice.

Really good post. I grew up evangelical but I still need good reminders about why that heritage is so valuable.

The infallibility thing seems really important to me, too. I find it interesting that you use the notion of truthfulness (“We’ve told them to believe it’s true, thundered that from pulpit and screen and print, but we haven’t taught them how to understand the thing about it that is true.”) as the positive alternative. Was that intentional?

This business of Truth is a pretty hot debate in postmodern circles, and needs more working out than I see here. See the discussion here between Emergent and traditional evangelicalism on this.

Cliff

Peace, out. And thanks for the sacrifice.

You know I’m here because I promised to be with you until the ends of the earth. Hate to break it to you, but that includes your little blog. So I’ve been here all the time, and now Scot McKnight makes one post and you go all gaga.

Get a grip.

And tell Chad to stop using naughty words.

Also, since he didn’t say otherwise, I’m claiming that Scot’s backing me up on the whole “infallibility” GroupThink thing, since he suggested “identity-forming.” This makes me feel Okay about me.

Sheesh.

One of my primary goals in life is to stop the chain chain chaaaaiiin of this with my own children. I am, in fact, desperate to teach them how to understand Truth in a way that I was not taught in all my years of church and Christian college attendance. Thanks for this post Mike. It spurreth me on. (I don’t mean to say that I think God/Christianity/Truth/faith/moonlight call all be explained perfectly…I’ve already started using the phrase “It’s a mystery” in regard to certain things they ask about.)

Aly, your point about language is well-taken…and yet, I tend to end up feeling hopeless about language sometimes. In this age, words seem to have very short shelf lives and morph into so very many meanings that no one could’ve foreseen. Maybe I’m wrong about that. It’s all muzzy to me. (I’m generally not smart enough to be in this class.)

It seems lately that I have had to be very specific in what I believe and how I convey that belief to friends that have little or no understanding about what it actually means to be a Christian. Reading things like this really forges my thoughts and encourages me to seek out opinions and teaching by others. Thanks Mike. I clicked on 4 ads for you.

Aly, I like your instinct about the word infallible. Growing up in the church this was always something that I really wrestled with and I think you hit the nail on the head with the connotation of the word itself. When I asked hard questions about things I was often met with a sharp “infallible” backlash that never really answered my question. I felt like it was a cheap way of getting around difficult ideas. It was not until I really started investigating and finding people way smarter than me who would talk to a lot of these points did I get the whole idea of “infallibility.” Fuller sums it up great when they say, “Thus, sloganeering can never be a substitute for the careful, patient analysis of what God’s Word teaches, including what it teaches about itself.” I think that’s why I like the Fuller Mission Statement so much. It’s not pretentious. As for a better word to use, while reading it, the word that jumped out to me is ‘Trustworthy.’ That to me is what the Bible is. It’s inspired by God and we as the Church have put it through the wringer to make sure that what it contains is just that, inspired. Because of this I can trust in it fully. For me personally, I can think of no better compliment than when someone calls me trustworthy.

So Mike, I’m with you. Regardless of the horrible negativity associated with the word, I’m an Evangelical. And I have the big hair and the Costco size can of Aquanet to prove it.

I’m suggesting that “infallibility” communicates a wrong (or at least muzzy) idea. It focuses it’s power on “without error” instead of “God’s purposes.” Which is the more important idea here, deserving of our attention? I believe we should be willing to sacrifice precision for the sake of primacy of importance.