It is important (to these folks) that we respect these folks, that we not malign or criticize them or make them feel or look bad. No matter what they say or write, we mustn’t challenge their convictions or character. If they tell us that they fit in with a school’s doctrinal position or confession, we must take their word for it. If they tell us that their books or lectures or articles are sound and orthodox, well then, they wouldn’t lie or dissemble, would they? They’re academics. Their defenders and enablers surely communicate to all that not much is at stake, that it isn’t anything to “get het up” about. 

Privately and publicly, Phil Johnson and I have marveled at the spirit of some moderns regarding God’s truth. We’ve wondered how Christianity could have survived, had it been animated by this spirit at its inception. We’ve wondered what the early martyrs would think of today’s sofa-sitting latte-sippers.

One breed that apparently considers itself exempt from All That has long been the Academy, on which subject we’ve offered some thoughts previously. These are scholars; they’re a breed apart from, well, from the folks who pay their salaries. That’s because they’ve had the benefit of special training and special discipline, and thus are privy to special knowledge. They’re specialists. They know facts and truths that mere garden-working pastors and ditch-digging churchgoers just can’t understand.

It is important (to these folks) that we respect these folks, that we not malign or criticize them or make them feel or look bad. No matter what they say or write, we mustn’t challenge their convictions or character. If they tell us that they fit in with a school’s doctrinal position or confession, we must take their word for it. If they tell us that their books or lectures or articles are sound and orthodox, well then, they wouldn’t lie or dissemble, would they? They’re academics.

Their defenders and enablers surely communicate to all that not much is at stake, that it isn’t anything to “get het up” about. They’ll spill equal amounts of ink lauding the Christian characters of those who depart from anything the great unwashed would recognize as a commitment to inerrancy, and casting aspersions on less sanguine critics or opponents. Because it isn’t as if we should expect someone to commit himself to a position as being binding on his conscience, as being something… oh, I don’t know… worth dying for, or anything so drastic.

For instance, we recently read this:

Belief in the truthfulness of the Bible, then, like belief in the truthfulness of Christianity or materialism or anything else [!], is provisional—scholars hold to it (or not) on the basis of the evidence they’ve seen. Affirming the Bible is true, just like affirming the Christian creeds, is a statement of current conviction: “Based on what I know now, I believe that the Nicene Creed/the New Testament is correct, when properly understood.” It doesn’t prevent individuals from researching carefully, nor from abandoning or adjusting their commitment if the evidence takes them that way; the changes of conviction, affiliation, and worship practices of many of the “aha” scholars, as well as those who have moved the other way, should be evidence enough. In some cases, no doubt, belief in inerrancy is associated with fearmongering, closed-mindedness, misrepresentation, and rudeness. But the same is true of evangelicalism, and Protestantism, and Christianity as a whole, let alone atheism, Islam, feminism, materialism, and virtually all beliefs held by human beings. I’ve seen a fair bit of it on Pete Enns’s own blog, and I imagine he’d say the same of mine.

Where did I see that? Patheos? BioLogos? Huffington Post? No; in the rarified air of TGC — which, I remind you, ostensibly stands not for The Great Clubhouse, but The Gospel Coalition; and which, I am sure, is funded and read and has its conferences swell with people who certainly are fiercely committed to the Gospel and the truths that underlie it.

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