Michael Spencer invited our Scott Hill to comment on BHT. Of course, we all knew what would happen; a bunch of BHT’ers would call Scott names and act like school children do when a new kid dares walk on their playground. I do not recommend anyone waste their time reading their pontifications. Trust me… big waste of your time.
But just for the record, I thought I might clarify Michael’s misrepresentation of Al Mohler. Michael said:
SBC scholar Mark Devine has written an excellent article on Barth- strengths and weaknesses- and why he has a lot to offer evangelicals. He also revealed that Al Mohler did his dissertation on Barth, surveying various evangelical views of Barth. Wow. Must not be in the dog pound library. All these guys wasting their time assessing Barth when all they needed to do was shout “heretic!”
Of course, this statement by Michael makes it sound as if Dr. Mohler agrees with Mark Devine that Karl Barth was orthodox.
Al Mohler’s actually said:
I wrote my dissertation on the evangelical response to Karl Barth. Barth was sub-orthodox in his general system and in the outworking of his theology, and it is important for evangelicals to know why. So I require my doctoral students to read Barth, but I wouldn’t hand Barth to a layman looking for a book on doctrine. Evangelical scholars have a double duty in scholarship. We have to read the liberals’ books as well as the works of evangelical scholarship. The liberals, on the other hand, generally do not bother to read the evangelicals. Orthodox doctrine just doesn’t interest them, and they see us as hopelessly wedded to a dead and oppressive tradition. We must outread the opposition.
Godspeed Scott.
Of course, I hope no one forgets that this is not a debate about whether Karl Barth is neo-orthodox or whether his bibliology was liberal because he rejected the doctrine of inerrancy. No, this has all been a discussion of an essay posted by Michael Spencer that was unorthodox. Of course, Michael would like to either make the discussion personal claiming that someone is saying that he is not a Christian, or he would like to divert the conversation into a debate about anything else (like Barthian theology) than for us to focus on his unorthodox beliefs. He will belittle us by calling us names, or even actually claim that we are trying to increase our “blog hits” by criticizing him. Yeah, I know… that’s silly. I stopped expecting him to actually defend his beliefs long ago when we first had interaction with him.
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Jason Robertson is a husband and a father and a pastor. He is dedicated to leading and equipping his the Church with God’s word and biblical theology for life ministry, using a combination of pastoral, church planting and evangelism experience. He holds a Master of Divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is experienced in church planting, evangelism, missions, and the training of pastors and Bible teachers.
Jason has been preaching the gospel since 1985, serving the first ten years of ministry as a Southern Baptist itinerant evangelist out of Milldale Baptist Church in Zachary, LA which ordained him in 1993. He has preached in hundreds of churches in over 30 States and 4 countries. He planted churches in Siberia, Russia in the summers of 1993 and 1994. He founded Murrieta Valley Church in California, which he planted in cooperation with the SBC NAMB in 2001. He also teaches ministry students at California Baptist University.
You can hear his sermons and read his manuscripts on sermonaudio.com. Just follow the link to "sermons" at the top of this page.
Dude!
Did you guys ever say that Spencer is not a Christian? ‘Cause I’m looking for it and can’t find it.
Of course not. That is an old tactic that Michael has used ever since I have known him. When someone points out that one of his views is unorthodox then he jumps up and down and claims that someone is judging his salvation. Then the person begins to defend themselves while Michael goes on to marginalize the person’s arguments by making the whole thing look like a personal attack.
Don’t fall for it, friend.
Oh, I’m not falling for it, just calling attention to it.
BTW, I think he said something about me calling him a Christian, and I couldn’t find where I had said that either!:-)
Hmmm. To a degree I can’t help but wonder what sort of insanity gripped me in reading all this material (including that at the BHT) this morning, but one thing kind of leapt out at me: the only names I recognized out of the list of authorities on Karl Barth that Mr. Spencer listed (well, I am an ignernt ol’ redneck, y’know) were those of John Franke and Timothy George. I know little of Timothy George. Professor Franke, on the other hand, I recognized because he wrote the forward to Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy, which I read in the course of reviewing that book. In that forword, he makes reference to:…the emergence of postmodern theory with its critique of certain, objective, universal knowledge and its quest to construct new forms of thought in the aftermath of modernity. and makes it clear that he shares postmodernism’s critique of certain, objective, and universal knowledge–all of which makes me wonder two things: first, how a person who does not believe that his knowledge of, say, Karl Barth, can be either certain or objective (let alone universal) could be trusted by anyone to express an objective opinion on the subject, and second, whether the other names on that list don’t share similar philosophical presuppositions that might render their opinions on the matter likewise suspect.
Not that I know. But you gotta wonder.
iMonk always makes my head hurt.
sheesh.