The Authority Crisis

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Blog:

John Schroeder

Oct. 4 2016

 

Today at First Things, Matthew Block looks at some recent surveys of Evangelical Christians and analyzes the results to discover why the traditional doctrines of the church are fading so rapidly:

 

 

 

…the idea that many Christians seem to think saying Sola Scriptura is the ultimate authority somehow means it is my personal “solo” reading of Scripture that is authoritative. They reject the witness of the Church down through the ages in favor of a personal, private understanding of Scripture (which is not at all what the reformers meant by the term “Scripture alone”). Consequently, we see that many Evangelicals deny that the historic Church’s creeds and confessions have any relevance today. In fact, the 2016 report indicates that 23 percent percent of Evangelicals believe “there is little value in studying or reciting historical Christian creeds and confessions,” while a further 9 percent are unsure.

 

Put succinctly, to the modern eye, history has little or no meaning, placing authority in severe crisis. There is a bit of a circle here. History under-girds authority and authority grants history its significance, lose one and you lose them both. Within Christian circles the reasons behind these shifts are complex, but they can be boiled down to a pretty simple phenomena – those with authority have failed to live up the the requirements of having it. From the sex scandals of the televangelists, through the great shifts in views of divorce, marriage and sexuality amongst the Protestant denominations, through the mere silliness of much of televangelism itself, to the crisis of pedophile priests suffered by the Roman Catholic church – Christian authority has eroded itself. The result has been the changes in attitude Block highlights in his post.

 

(Snip)

 

The nation in both its religious and political expressions seems trapped in a downward spiral of wrong leadership reinforcing the worst in the populace, leading to more deeply flawed leadership and so it descends.

 

How to break that descending cycle is more than this blog post can address, but one thing should be completely obvious. Doubling down on a family name that marks a major inflection point in the spiral is a really, really bad idea.