9.07.2006

Francis Schaeffer on conservative infighting

This book edited by Boice is dynamite! I think it is out of print, it is so old (1978). It was put out by some of the Int'l Council on Biblical Inerrancy people. Here is an excerpt from Francis Schaeffer's foreward:

"In the 1930s, Bible-believing Christians across all denominational lines were united in confessing that the Bible is 'not partly true and partly false, but all true...' as Machen put it. Unhappily the old liberals gained control of the bureacracies and seminaries of most of the old-line denominations.

"At this point a tragedy occurred that is a part of the seedbed of our situation in the 1970s. Most Bible-believing Christians divided into two groups: 1)those who held to the purity of the visible church and felt the various old-line denominations had passed the point of reclamation and left those denominations, and 2)those who either gave up the concept of the purity of the visible church or thought their denominations could be reclaimed.

"I represent the first group.... Many felt that those who stayed in had betrayed them; unhappily they then spent more time fighting... the Bible-believing Christians who stayed in than standing against the liberals. Standing for the Word of God got lost in harshness and looking inward...

"Some who held to the principle of the purity of the visible church put (it seems to me) the chasm at the wrong point. They made absolute division at the point of their distinctives - Reformed theology, believers' baptism, a Lutheran view of the sacraments, etc. - rather than between those who were Bible-believing Christians and those who were not, and then practicign their distinctives carefully on
this side of the chasm."

Pgs 17-18.

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