Since I started this post merely wanting to add related links to my Not going to play ball post on local SBC attempted purges, I’ll go ahead and list a few links:
- Another dude angry about “emerging”
- Bill Leonard’s message for SBs and moderates (I have no idea what counts as moderate)
- There’s a Yiddish word for this
- Alert: fellow SBC are not the enemy
It was the last that dropped a bombshell that sent me scurrying to google and brought me to this post. I was raised SBC as a young child, but that was apparantly a different world. I never imagined a multiple divorcee being allowed to go on a moral crusade againt drinking. The fifty-year-old power broker in the SBC, accusing others of being “dangerous and deceptive” and waving the organization’s document entitled “On Holiness and Cultural Forces of Influence,” is himself a product of cultural forces that I don’t think are Biblical.
By the way, I’m not saying that divorce is wrong every single time, or that there is no forgiveness. I’m saying that if someone decides to be a church leader and attack the moral character of other people, he ought not be someone so indistinguishable from the world on an issue of which, unlike alcohol, the Bible actually speaks against.
The whole “intellectual” (I don’t need to explain my use of quotation marks, do I?) situation in the SBC is so strange. What can one say about a environment in which the following sentence can actually be published by a group’s press?
The emerging church movement is diverse and difficult to generalize. However, the mix of influences includes: postmodernism (a focus on sense-making through the various mediums of culture); Calvinism ala John Piper; and for some, Christian liberty, as granted by their scriptural interpretation, to drink alcohol and engage in other cultural activities that many Southern Baptists eschew based on opposing scriptural interpretation.
It is so hard for me to understand this. It is like seeing a TV special about the Amish or something.