In bringing our brief discussion of Openness Theology to a close (see my past blog entries under this topic) and highlight the desperate need to refute the slouched posture of some toward the character of God; I will quote a spiritual giant of old – A.W. Tozier. I also will quote a modern voice of evangelical thinking – R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President of Southern Seminary, to clearly articulate the gravity of the situation from a scholastic vantage point.
Tozer: “Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at the bottom a libel on His character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is-in itself a monstrous sin-and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness. . . . The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him-and of her. In all her prayers and labors this should have first place. We do the greatest service to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew and Christian fathers of generations past” (The Knowledge of the Holy, 9-10).
R. Albert Mohler, Jr.: “Having debated issues ranging from biblical inerrancy to the reality of hell, evangelicals are now openly debating the traditional doctrine of God represented by classical theism. My argument is that the integrity of evangelicalism as a theological movement, indeed the very coherence of evangelical theology is threatened by the rise of the various new ‘theisms’ of the evangelical revisionists. Unless these trends are reversed and evangelicals return to an unapologetic embrace of biblical theism, evangelical theology will represent nothing less than the eclipse of God at century’s end” (“The Eclipse of God at Century’s End,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology [Spring, 1997], 38)
How do people, or better, you reading this blog engage the world in which you live to stave off a modern dark ages?
“Keep the light on”. If individually we can cling to the truth in the Bible and not some notion loosely associated to it. Then collectively as a church we can “keep the light on”. I don’t think the future of the church is up to us. Jesus said he’d establish his church and keep it.
After all their have been heresies through out history and here we are. Was does church history teach us about maintaining doctrine?
Dan, I’m a little surprised you’ve only gotten one response to your question. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll offer that the answer is to know what you believe and why you believe it so well that you welcome challenges to the historic faith and seek opportunities to engage those that seek to eclipse God. We do this by entertaining the hard questions that force us to dig deeply into the Scriptures and think about, meditate on, and assimilate the whole of God’s Word into as coherent and defendable a system as we can. This means avoiding the pat answers intended to shut down discussion. Equipped with a Bible, a good systematic theology reference, and some effort (and of course the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit) any believer can refute Openness Theology. For anyone that doesn’t have a good systematic theology reference, I hardily suggest Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem.