When I was very young McDuff and I were
invited to preach mini-sermons at a Presbyterian Church youth event. McDuff’s response to me later was that he
could understand Scripture because he was going to seminary, but I couldn’t
because I wasn’t being trained in seminary.
That is not an uncommon attitude in some circles. Some years later I attended his
seminary. Its professors were expert at
demythologizing Scripture but had no apparent heart for its meaning. Their application of the Wellhausen approach to the Old Testament left
you with a pile of clipping instead of a workable document.
I recently received the same put down
from an old friend who is quite a scholar.
In essence his view is a form of gnosticism; the claim to superior
knowledge on the basis of much study and insight. Solomon warns us, “My son, beware of anything
beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a
weariness of the flesh. The end of the
matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the
whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:12-13).
It is true that much study may give you “special knowledge” but there is
also a danger. If you think that special
knowledge can lead you to safely contradict the plain teaching of Scripture and
Tradition, you are not only wrong, but you are also foolish.
The truth of Scripture must remain plain
and simple so that “he who runs may read it,” understand it, and be called to the
challenge of surrender to the voice of God speaking truth through the words of
Scripture. Once you resort to an
ingenious “deeper knowledge” of Scripture to defend current changes in
morality, you are running against rocks of Charybdis and the dangerous
whirlpool of contemporaneity will pull you under.
McDuff is always with us with his
new-old Gnosticism. “I have special
knowledge and you don’t, so Scripture doesn’t mean what you and most of the
Church thinks that it means.” That is
not only spiritually dangerous, but it also is arrogant.
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