Has he really said?

From the beginning of time, or at least from the earliest biblical record of human behavior, there's been a remarkable strategy for winning an argument when all the evidence seems stacked against you. The strategy is to affirm the authority's right to speak, but in the same breath to question the authority's applicability to the question at hand. In the Garden of Eden, Eve was properly quick to respond to the serpent's temptation by appealing to the authority of God: "God has said ...," she said defensively. But Satan was also ready with his condescending response: "Has God really said?" Satan was clever enough not to challenge either God's existence or his right to set the rules. Instead, he suggested to Eve that she had too expansive an idea of what God had intended to say. If the circle around the area of God's authority stretched clear across her sense of reality, she now had every right, Satan implied, to shrink that circle to a fraction of its original size. Modern skeptics of God's truth use similar strategies for setting aside the applicability of biblical truth to real life. That's why modern scholarship and modern media like to put "religion" in a category by itself. It's why "church" and "state" cannot be allowed to operate in the same sphere. You affirm the legitimacy of "religion" and of "the church," but you narrow their platform so radically that you cut off their relevance to real life.

Sadly, it's not just unbelievers who fall for this approach. Evangelical Christians employ it regularly. That's why you hear people affirm the truth of the Bible and then in the same breath tell you how narrow the Bible's scope is. "You've got to understand," such folks say with a hint of the condescension we first heard in the Garden of Eden, "that God never intended the Bible to be a textbook of history and science." It's the same old trick, however well intended: Affirm the authority, but narrow the authority's base. History and science aren't the only subject areas thus excluded from the authority of God's Word. I get letters almost every week reminding me that the Bible does not tell us much about economic systems. And as modern feminism has come to dominate bigger and bigger areas of the evangelical community, it does so riding on a hermeneutic that grandly declares the Bible to be "transcultural." The immediate implication is that everything the Scriptures say about male and female roles is to be discounted because of the cultural settings of those who wrote. The larger unspoken lesson is that the Bible is culturally irrelevant. The same spirit was evident in a recent review of WORLD editor Marvin Olasky's book Telling the Truth. The review, by Christianity Today senior writer Tim Stafford, appeared in CT's companion publication Books and Culture. After summarizing the Olasky approach to journalism (holding to a standard of "biblical objectivity"), Mr. Stafford inexplicably and disdainfully suggests that the Olasky model is interested only in the Old Testament. But then, flatly ignoring Mr. Olasky's reminder in his book that "much remains hidden, as Job learned, and much we see darkly, as the apostle Paul pointed out," Mr. Stafford says that "Olasky seems to suffer no lack of self-confidence" on "getting the God's eye view right." As proof that the Olasky approach is overly zealous, Mr. Stafford becomes sarcastic: "'Biblical objectivity,' [Mr. Olasky] writes in one example, 'means supporting the establishment and improvement of Bible-based education, and criticizing government schools.' Really? The Bible tells us to criticize government schools?" To which we at WORLD respond enthusiastically: Yes, really. When the Psalmist writes, "Blessed is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly," or warns a young person, "Cease, my son, to hear the instruction that causes you to err," we have no doubt that should prompt any serious believer to question-and critique-a system of education that by definition propagates error. If Old Testament language is too tough, try Jesus's warning that anyone who offends a child would be better off having a millstone tied around his neck and being dumped into the ocean. That suggests to me the need for a careful critique of any system potentially offering such an offense. We are not so naive as to say we know in advance what every Christian's response to such a critique might be-but the critique itself is an easy call.

We wish the call, both on that subject and on many more, were easier for Mr. Stafford and for hundreds and thousands more of our evangelical brothers and sisters. The tendency so repeatedly to ask, "Does God really have anything to say on this subject?" has become a dangerous habit for evangelicalism. Yes, I know it is possible to fall off the other side of the log. One of the dangers of fundamentalism is that it supposes God to be saying things he has not in fact said. Adding to God's Word is as bad as detracting from it. But evangelicalism isn't losing many people these days off that side of the log. For everyone erroneously claiming that "God has said," there are a hundred or more asking, "Has he really said?" It should sober us all to remember who first asked that question.