Wednesday, April 14, 2010

USA Today Article on Bruce Waltke

Here is the USA Today article by Scott Jaschik on Bruce Waltke that was mentioned around the net yesterday. Waltke was asked to resign his post at Reformed Theological Seminary. The article has this to say:
"If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult ... some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God's Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness," he says, according to several accounts by those who have seen the video. Those words set off a furor at the Reformed Theological Seminary, where Waltke was — until this week — a professor. (The seminary is evangelical, with ties to several denominations.)
This whole situation is very sad. Probably the best quote from the article is from Ron Dreher of BeliefNet, who said:
"Don't mistake me, I believe that any and every religion, and religious institution, has the right, and indeed the obligation, to set standards and to enforce them. But is this really the hill these Reformed folks want to die on?"
My wife said last night that the whole situation scares her because, even someone like her, who tries very hard to stay out of the argument, can see the increasing polarization in the evangelical church. It reminds me of a line from the movie Ladyhawk: "Great storms announce themselves with a single breeze."

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2 comments:

  1. ... even someone like her, who tries very hard to stay out of the argument, can see the increasing polarization in the evangelical church.

    That's a fundamental (!) problem for Christianity and many other religious traditions. There's no principled and mutually agreed process for resolving conflicts, and hence sooner or later suppression and/or schism come into play.

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  2. I would argue that this is true in all human interactions. Even in political circles, which do have established means for discourse of this nature, there is marginalization of individuals. That is the beauty of Orwell's satire Animal Farm, in which he pokes fun at exactly this problem.

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