THE COURAGE TO STAND AGAINST EVIL

How can we stand against evil? The rewards of feeling good about ourselves in are fleeting at best. Enlightened self-interest will fail us, so too a morality based on pragmatic considerations alone.

The day before he died (February 24, 1791) John Wesley wrote to William Wilberforce, who had been leading the crusade in the British Parliament against slavery:

·       Unless the divine power has raised you to be as Athanasius contra mundum [against the world], I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American Slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it."

William Wilberforce had been standing against the world. Os Guinness had written:

·       "Championing abolition was a dangerous business. The slave trade occupied a position in the British economy (as a percentage of gross national product) equivalent to that of the defense industry in the United States today. At one stage, Wilberforce was the most vilified man in England. He was even threatened and attacked physically…" (Entrepreneurs of Life, 83)

In a speech before the House of Commons in 1787, Wilberforce confessed:

·       "So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the Trade’s wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition. Let the consequences be what they would, I, from this time, determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition."

And Wilberforce, aided by his Christian colleagues, kept his vow, even to the day of his death, as Guinness wrote:

·       "On Friday, July 26, 1833, the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery passed… Wilberforce lapsed into a coma soon after hearing the news of his great success, and died three days later on Monday, July 29, 1833, aged 73." (89)

Wilberforce had travailed for almost 50 years. What gave him his fortitude? Certainly not moral relativism or simply what felt right to him! Instead, he was convinced that he was serving God.

How was Dietrich Bonhoeffer able to endure to his death in his fight against the National Socialists (Nazis)? He wrote:

·       "Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in the faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?" (70)

They are the ones praying over the Word of God.

Scripture must not suffer at the Hands of Bible Criticism or the Present Scientific Consensus

My Response to Dr. Peter Enns:

I must apologize for my response – not having read your book or even Madueme’s response to it. So let me just confine my remarks to your first critique of Madueme:

“(1) An underestimation, devaluing, and/or minimizing of the impact of biblical studies and/or the mainstream scientific consensus on evolution for an evangelical theology of Scripture.”

While you claim that “an evangelical theology of Scripture” must be informed by evolution and bible criticism, the entire Bible, implicitly and explicitly, requires that we put God’s Word above all other words:

  

• Let God be true, and every man a liar. As it is written: "So that you may be proved right when you speak and prevail when you judge." (Romans 3:4)

• Now, brothers, I have applied these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, so that you may learn from us the meaning of the saying, "Do not go beyond what is written." Then you will not take pride in one man over against another. (1 Cor. 4:6)

• To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. (Isaiah 8:20)

Even more explicitly, we are instructed to subject all truth claims to the scrutiny of Scripture:

• The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Cor. 10:4-5)

Everything must be judged in light of Scripture. Meanwhile, it would seem that you prefer to subject Scripture to “the impact of [critical] biblical studies and/or the mainstream scientific consensus on evolution.”

This is a strategy – compromising the Faith in accordance with the day’s “consensus” -that has led the Christian faith down many tragic foxholes. In “Bonhoeffer,” Eric Metaxas gives several illustrations of how tragic this strategy has been:

• Even worse, another church publication, “Junge Kirche,” once an organ of truth and theological orthodoxy, had gone over to the dark side, painting Hitler in brightly messianic collars: “It has today become evident to everyone without exception that the figure of the Fuhrer, powerfully fighting his way through old worlds, seeing with his minds eye what is new and compelling…The figure of the Fuhrer has brought a new obligation for the church too.” (325)

What the eye sees can be very misleading, along with your emphasis on the “mainstream scientific consensus.” However, to be fair to you, it always has been very seductive to the church. We latched onto the “steady-state theory” because this was the consensus view. To our great shame, we also adopted the prevailing consensus racism. You former colleague, Karl Giberson, issued a poignant warning about the scientific consensus:

• How shocking it is today to acknowledge that virtually every educated person in the Western culture at the time …shared Haeckel’s [racist] ideas. Countless atrocities around the globe were rationalized by the belief that superior races were improving the planet by exterminating defective elements…there can be little doubt that such viewpoints muted voices that would otherwise have been raised in protest. (Saving Darwin)

The pressure to keep step with the “mainstream scientific consensus” has long been present. It has led the church to embrace geocentrism and even greater idiocies:

• A church that does not keep step with modern scientific knowledge is doomed. It may take quite a while, but it is bound finally to happen. Anybody who is firmly rooted in daily life and who can only faintly imagine the mystic secrets of nature, will naturally be extremely modest about the universe. The clerics, however, who have not caught a breath of such modesty, evidence a sovereign opinionated attitude toward questions of the universe. (A record of Hitler’s thoughts from the Diary of Joseph Goebels – Quoted in “Bonhoeffer,” 166)