Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Darrel Falk on Ken Ham and Christian Charity

Darrel Falk has written a BioLogos piece on the Great Home School convention/Ken Ham dustup that happened a week and half back. I posted on it a few times, including a very uncharitable post, written in anger. Darrel is quick to point out that, while Mr. Ham has made mistakes, we all have and it should be in the spirit of Christian charity and forgiveness that we move forward. He writes:
Please pray for Mr. Ham and his ministry during these days. Pray that on matters surrounding this highly divisive issue of how best to seek harmony between God’s two books we might all draw closer to God and to each other. Pray that Mr. Ham’s great fear—that BioLogos will damage the integrity of Scripture as the fully inspired Word of God—will never be realized. We understand his fear and sympathize with his concerns. Please pray that we at BioLogos might always seek the wisdom which is from above, and that we not give into the temptation to advocate a compromise purely for the sake of appearing wise.
Contrast that with the words of Mr. Ham about the event:
More and more organizations are being formed and more books printed by people—even within the church—to try to get God’s people to reject Genesis as literal history, and thus undermine the authority of God’s Word. No wonder we are losing the next generation from the church. For instance, even at this homeschool convention, there are a number of people (including speakers) that are associated with the extremely liberal Biologos Foundation—an organization that is dedicated to trying to get people in the church to believe evolution and millions of years as fact. And now they are embarking on producing homeschool curriculum—such as that from Dr. Peter Enns who spoke at this conference.

But at the same time, I praise God for the opportunity, that even in this sea of lies permeating our culture, I am able to teach the truth of God’s Word to many. Here is a photograph of me presenting at one of the sessions yesterday: (Picture not included)
A greater contrast could not be apparent. Darrel is correct, we do need to pray for all of us who are involved in this area of research. As importantly, however, we do need a dose of humility about what we think and how we arrive at the conclusions we do. My wife admonishes me to pray continually about the things I write. She is correct to do so.

I hope that Mr. Ham prays as well and that he will see that his viewpoint and attitude are harsh and unchristian. Further, they are divisive and serve only to show the outside world that, despite our protestations to the contrary, we can be very good at mean spiritedness and name-calling. Not a shining day for the image of Christianity.

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2 comments:

  1. A telling contrast, Jim. Thanks.

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  2. There is a recent disagreement about a “dinosaur petroglyph” which two archaeologists, Senter and Cole, say isn't real but a composite of real and artificial colors. They further note that there is no record of dinosaurs coexisting with humans. In response, AiG wrote the following: “Senter and Cole begin with a declaration of their absolute adherence to the religion of humanism with its underlying concepts of naturalism, geological evolution, and biological evolution. In other words, they have pigeonholed themselves as biased researchers who come to the evidence, not in a neutral fashion (which no one can do), but with an agenda to push their opinions as fact.” It is as if, somehow, AiG is doing real science by promoting the idea that the two coexisted and everybody else is deluded and going to Hell. And they want us to take them seriously? Amazing.

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