Letters
August 15, 2003
August 15, 2003
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Letters
August 15, 2003 |
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To the Editor: I greatly appreciated Edward Koster's response to Earl Tilford; I would agree with him that only Jesus Christ is God's Word in the full sense, and that there is room for both liberals and conservatives within the PCUSA. However, from an evangelical position, I have a couple of comments to offer in response. The first is that while only Christ is truly the Word, the Scriptures remain God's infallible word to us, and the Spirit speaking through the Scriptures is our final authority. In the incomprehensible lexicon of modern academic debate, I don't think it's necessary to affirm the inerrancy of the Bible in all respects, but that doesn't mean we can junk its infallibility in all that it intends to teach. "All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work." That, it seems to me, is the minimum we may affirm regarding the Bible if we wish to remain within the Church catholic.It also needs to be said that the issues to which Mr. Koster refers don't divide as neatly along left/right lines as he presumes. I've known many liberals who are characterized by "rigidity of theological precepts, the measurement of a Christian by certain visible standards, the tendency to assume to know God's judgment (which I find real risky), [and] the tendency to interpret in a very narrow way," just as much as the hardest fundamentalist; and I must confess that "the subjective interpretation of history and authority, where one's own interpretation, grounded in personal experience, becomes the criterion by which truth is measured," is far more prevalent on the conservative side than Mr. Koster seems to realize. Spend a little time listening to conservative American Christians give their testimonies, or attend many evangelical churches, and you realize that the exaltation of experience is really fairly common on the conservative side as well – only the experiences are different. (It's one reason why so many on the left are ex-evangelicals or ex-fundamentalists – they got different cards out of the experience deck than their former comrades.) As such, one of the things we need to understand in this discussion is that we aren't as different from each other as most of us tend to think. Rev. Rob Harrison Grand Lake, Colorado Send your letter to:
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