Yes but my (admittedly sarcastic) point was that you're flattening out the problems of past and magnifying contemporary concerns. I'm suggesting that perhaps these things are actually smaller matters than you're making out. But I'm glad that you've perceived that all these abominations are derived from a secular discourse and have absolutely no rooting in prayer and study and faith and a sincere desire to see the love of God manifested on earth. And because of course, there is a sharp and clear cleavage between an inert 'Christianity' and 'everything else' to begin with. I see...well that's quite a modern viewpoint isn't it? Does it ever worry you that it kind of looks like a policy of deliberate ignorance about how the world actually is? Must Christianity, once the shining mother of scholarship and learning, philosophical speculation and scientific enquiry, poetry and art, be reduced to a six-toed, simpleton hunting for bits of the ark and making (so far) inaccurate predictions about the timing of the end of days for the amusement of its cultured despisers? Is that so..?
Patrick, if you go back and read it again you'll realise that my intial comment was partially in jest. Everyone is biased, including me, if nothing else because of our own life experience. I do think these modern problems in the Church are quite worrisome but that doesn't mean it's the end of the world or that there wasn't awful stuff going on in the past. I'm not exactly ignorant of Church history and I do trust Christ won't leave us orphans. I do not see how holding the word of God to be factually inerrant is detrimental to scholarship and learning. Our religious axiom is the scripture, the revealed word of God. Our philosophical and scientifical inquiries will always benefit from being nourished by the faith, don't you think? In fact, atheistic philosophy and science is a cancer to modern minds. As for predicting the end of days, that's quite unscriptural, not to mention nonsensical.
Funny enough, ACNA is doing a study to determine if Women's Ordination has any scriptural basis, or is it pushed by feminists
I think you misdiagnose, the modern mind itself is the product of...not an atheistic in the sense of working explicitly on the basis of there being no God(s) whatsoever, but certainly reductionist and materialist perspective (following a Kantian distinction between the knowable phenomena and the unknowable noumena) which by excluding the divine as a factor in their thoughts, will inevitably fail to find the divine in what they do- largely because we assume that reliable knowledge is obtained via empirical sense data. But in a way this does kind of make sense because an infinite, transcendent Divinity like God, which has no comprehensible existence and doesn't qualify as a being cannot be 'known' and so how can we test it? How do we make reliable facts out of it? The answer is we can't really- this is Richard Dawkin's error- he assumes God a scientifically testable hypothesis, and treats him like a 'super-being' which is infinitely short of the truth understood through a means that cannot be quantifiably tested. It's more of a dynamic participative experience if it is anything when humanly expressed established by a means that is epistemologically (and psychologically) interesting, but with the (largely anglo-american dominated, it must be said) consensus of 'matter over mind', considered deeply dubious. It is this belief in the necessity of existential appropriation, the inhering of Christianity as being fundamental to the attainment of wisdom (as opposed to simply factual knowledge) that leads me to say innerancy hobbles scholarship- because it tries to force scripture into being something it is not; it removes all sensitivity to context (vital if we accept religion as primarily existential rather than merely a collection of propositions to be assented to) ignores the fact that revelation is humanly experienced in a continuous temporal sequence, and shifts the focus away from the living reality of the persons of the Godhead towards a text, as if such a reality is so neatly containable, the consequence being of course the denigration or dismissal of other forms of knowledge as not having any revelatory value. This is why I would say that liberal humanitarian and scientific learning isn't really inherantly atheistic, it's actually (as the ancients saw it) a wonderful opportunity to understand God more, ll creation is sacramental and humans are the priests that through contemplation can offer it back to God. Faith cannot be a bolt on extra to secular learning- but in appreciating that thinking and reason are gifts from God, fallible, of course, but capable of some understanding, we may see them as contributing to a theological vision- we should not be curbing human endeavours in knowledge but taking it in, seeing it with the eyes of the heart as giving us genuine theological insight. Or we could just ignore the influence of (neo-)Platonism over the early church, Aristotelianism and Islamic thought in the Middle Ages, Renaissance Humanism for the Reformers, the Enlightenment for modern theology...one may not agree with the conclusions of the thinkers utitlising this knowledge, but it is a blunt fact that Christianity is always in dialogue with learning drawn from and applied in the material realm. I appreciate not all take this viewpoint, I can already see the neo-orthodox spitting venom at this deeply catholic and incarnational vision of theology, but if we assume only a competition for factual space between faith and reason, not only are we lost upon the modern mind (for the reasons stated above) but it is just untenable- I have yet to see someone who claims the bible to be historically accurate in all not be reduced to special pleading when it is actually subjected to historical and textual enquiry. At least Barth and I can make our peace on the notion that the living Word of God is the true point of unity of the mere words of god and we should not conflate them.