Emerging Trends at Biblical Seminary

. . . for your encouragement, continued prayer and publicizing of BTS' departure from its evangelical roots. We hope that these trends will also serve as a warning to other institutions not to follow the BTS example (recall that BTS is trying to show the rest of the church how to do it right), and a warning to people who should know better (such as Sam Logan, former president of WTS) not to come along for the ride.

In the following, bear in mind that June 2006 was when the BTS board resigned so that Dave Dunbar could select whom he wanted to remain on the board, i.e. those who were fully onboard with the seminary's new direction in connection with the emerging church movement. Coincidentally, I began a sabbatical in the US the same month and saw the new vision and mission statements (with their odd terminology) posted on the walls of the seminary. In early 2007 Steve and I (with the help of an alumnus who is knowledgeable about such things) started this web site, and alumnus Fred Zaspel started his. Much of my own impetus for deciding to "do something" was when I attended a lunch at BTS to which the public was invited (September 2006) where the new NT prof Daniel Kirk was introducing himself to the seminary community, telling about a low point in his spiritual life (after being rejected for PCA ordination), screaming at God over and over at the top of his voice, "WHAT THE F@@@ DO YOU WANT FROM ME!?" Starting then and for the next few months as I took a look at the emerging church movement I felt a bit like Ezekiel must have felt (chapter 8) when the Lord gave him a tour of the apostasies of Judah; "Do you see, son of man, what they are doing? Yet I will show you still greater abominations than these."

[Update: After hearing from a couple of alumni I guess I didn't make it clear enough that the financial figures I'm giving here only cover through the end of June 2008, thus do not include the effects of the stock market crash, housing bubble bursting, and consequent increase in unemployment.  Yes, I am very aware that since then all ministries are suffering financially, as is our own missionary support]

Figures below are taken from BTS press releases. A printable graph can be seen here:

2005      82

2006      96

2007      91

2008      81

2009      56

These figures represent negative progress towards the fulfillment of the BTS vision:

To be the first choice for training * leaders
for the * church of the 21st century

* represents words dropped for public relations purposes: "missional" and "emerging"

read more

Finances

Figures below are taken from Federal Form 990, which non-profit institutions fill out, and which are publicly available. foundationcenter.org and others put these forms online (I do not have, however, a form for year 2002). We are grateful to a knowledgeable alumnus who alerted us to this resource. The forms are filled with facts and figures, of which I have selected three as being of special interest to our readers (all are from page 1). Keep in mind that "year" in the following refers to a tax year ending June 30. Thus, "2008" means the 12 months ending June 2008, which would be the first full year after our respective web sites went online. Potentially confusingly, the form itself says "2007" in the upper right corner of page 1.

Recall that the year July 2007 to June 2008 immediately followed the BTS board's "no" to alumni requests for the seminary to affirm evangelical orthodoxy in a number of specific areas, and Dave Dunbar's affirmation that the seminary's new direction was the right one. As we reported here, on June 14, 2007 Dave announced a "matching challenge" of $100,000 from the BTS board, and commented (amazingly), "Personally, this matching challenge is a great encouragement to me. It validates the seminary's new direction and shows the [Dunbar hand-picked] board's support for the ideas I've been sharing with you through the Missional Journal." If Dave's theology and logic were correct, whose position would be "validated" by a nearly $1 million dollar drop in the excess / deficit figures, in the year immediately following the board's action?

Direct public support for FY2008 dropped significantly, to a level last seen in FY1999 (not adjusted for inflation - such an adjustment would make the picture even worse). For a printable chart, see here:

1999         $813,391

2000      $1,451,039

2001      $1,881,267

2002

2003      $1,426,277

2004      $1,337,635

2005      $1,207,082

2006      $1,521,014

2007      $1,498,467

2008         $907,687

Such a drop in direct public support should have been entirely foreseeable by the powers that be. BTS board member John Armstrong, for example (formerly quite orthodox), experienced a very substantial drop in his ministry's support figures when he went post-modern early in this decade.

Going along with the drop in direct public support is the emergence of a substantial deficit for 2008, the first deficit seen for this period, indicating that the drop in direct public support was not compensated for by other income or by reduction in spending, etc. For a chart, see here:

1999          $9,503

2000      $350,045

2001      $607,096

2002

2003      $301,158

2004      $290,648

2005      $369,810

2006      $282,609

2007      $232,130

2008     -$730,843

See here for a printable chart:

1999      $2,208,321

2000      $2,507,951

2001      $3,259,722

2002      $3,309,419

2003      $3,344,561

2004      $3,947,050

2005      $4,280,547

2006      $4,760,078

2007      $5,131,421

2008      $4,396,934

You can open the Form 990's that we have (pdf files) on our site. In the following, the year number is taken from the Form 990 upper right corner, first page, and is thus off by a year from the year number in the tables above (and printable graphs linked to). E.g. 1999 on the graphs = 1998 below. This is because the form labeled 1998 covers the year ending June 1999.

1998 (July 1998 to June 1999)

1999 (July 1999 to June 2000)

2000 (July 2000 to June 2001)

2002 (July 2002 to June 2003)

2003 (July 2003 to June 2004)

2004 (July 2004 to June 2005)

2005 (July 2005 to June 2006)

2006 (July 2006 to June 2007)

2007 (July 2007 to June 2008)

On the BTS web site there are numerous glowing testimonies by current students and graduates of the seminary. Sounds like a great place to go to be trained for the Christian ministry! Further, as noted above, the seminary's vision statement no longer mentions the emerging church. Does the change in wording indicate another change in direction (for the good) or does it suggest recognition of a public relations problem?

With respect to missional vs. emerging, John Franke argues in a video still on the BTS web site, that "missional" necessarily implies "emerging," so yes, the dropping of references to the emerging church seem to be merely a public relations move. Everywhere BTS talks about "missional" they are talking about "emerging," unless they repudiate their own theology professor's teaching.

Our interest has primarily been in the particular part of the emerging church movement called "Emergent Village," based on the fact that BTS theology prof John Franke is officially part of EV, and that this organization is well along the Romans 1 road which starts at unthankfulness, and goes on to idolatry, then sexual depravity (see our post on the Golden Calf and the Residents of Emergent Village). BTS is still friendly with heretic and false prophet Brian McLaren, who was invited to speak at John Franke's inauguration last year into his endowed chair of missional theology.

One of the graduates on the seminary web site giving a testimonial, Shaun Turner (who received a masters in Christian thought from BTS), can be found on the Emergent Village web site expressing his interest at the formation of an emerging theologians group. Comment #1 on this post is by Don Heatley, whom we also quoted in our Golden Calf post, approving of homosexual Christians. Shaun's comment is #3: "Like Don above, I too find the prospect of an Emerging Theologian Group a wonderful idea."

Shaun also wrote a favorable review of Peter Rollins's book, How (Not) to Speak of God. We referred to this book elsewhere in connection with it's description of a "body of Christ is queer" affirmation in Rollins's church.

Shaun's review shows him to be a true disciple of John Franke (in note 2 he acknowledges he is "greatly indebted" to Franke), positively portraying the various objectionable pro-postmodern features of the emerging church movement. Some examples:

(1) Turner's description and analysis of theology is entirely Bible-free (and Christ-free, and gospel-free).

(2) Self refutation: Turner writes that for postmodern thinkers truth is a web "containing many beliefs, [this web] has no identifiable foundation and collectively works as a test, checking ideas both inside and outside of itself for their validity." This is an example of the self refuting nature of postmodernism, in which "validity" is supposed to be an unattainable state. For multiple examples of such self refutation, see the Franke - Moreland debate at ETS, 2005.

(3) The obscuring of the distinction between believers and unbelievers: "The majority of modern theologies tend to be foundational, trusting solely in either the Holy Scriptures as some do, or in the power of human emotions and religious experience as others do." So, conservative evangelicalism (those who rely on the Scriptures) and liberalism (those who rely on experience) are just two erring branches of modernism, both of which need reformation by post-modernism. Readers may recall this as being right out of Beyond Foundationalism as well as Franke's preface to McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy. Protestantism today is divided largely along mainline / evangelical lines due to the apostasy of the former into liberalism. This great divide is nothing else than the division we see throughout the Bible, since Cain killed Abel. The division is due to enmity which is set by God between the righteous and the wicked (Gen 3:15), and brought about by his regeneration of sinners. This division made by God is considered a great tragedy by Franke, something that needs to be healed.

(4) The straw man (setting up the man who is easy to knock down but who doesn't actually exist). Shaun describes 3 possible evangelical responses to postmodernism, the first being, "We can choose not to respond at all" in which case we would have to be willing to "further distance evangelical theology from academia in which virtually all other disciplines have engaged with postmodernism, ... and accept responsibility for a lack of caring about those lost in the world." Amazingly, Turner says this is the route taken by Don Carson in his book Becoming Conversant With the Emerging Church. What is Carson's book about? It is about engaging with postmodernism in an attempt to rescue those who are lost in the world (and keep people in the church from being sucked into it as well), precisely the opposite of the straw man set up by Turner!

(5) The false dichotomy (or trichotomy in this case). Continuing from (4); the first approach described above (bad), is followed by a second equally bad option (ignoring the past and starting over again), and both contrast with Turner's third approach (good); "It is by listening to those within the emerging church movement – Christians who have already crossed into the postmodern realm – that we will be able to carve this path towards a postmodern, evangelical theology." Got that? Our only options are (1) ignoring postmodernism, (2) scrapping all the theology done before us; (3) accommodating postmodernism. This is another frankeism; never asking the question, "What does the Bible require me to do and think?" (e.g. does the Bible require me to identify postmodernism as just another form of idolatry?), but rather assuming that since the world has gone postmodern, we need to accommodate it (see Paul Helm's critique).

These first five points are from Turner's own thoughts as an introduction; hereafter he is describing Rollins (sympathetically).

(6) Another straw man: "Modern theology is an intellectual pursuit that seeks to comprehend the subject of our faith, rendering God an intellectual object that is to be reflected upon." Well, that sounds bad, and if that's modernism (including conservative evangelicalism), then postmodernism must be an improvement (because the critic always has a better plan than the one he is criticizing, and "change" is always positive, right?). So goes the facile reasoning. Good theologians, of course, have always warned of the danger of theology becoming merely "an intellectual pursuit." I recall constant warnings from Alan MacRae that what we were learning would lead to spiritual deadness if we were not serving the Lord with it in the church and in the world; we could not afford to wait until we graduated.

Further, postmodernists like Franke are no less susceptible to their theology becoming a mere intellectual pursuit. Speaking of John Franke, John and I used to belong to the same church, which supports my family as missionaries in South Africa. When we were back in PA (around Christmas 2006) I asked our pastor "Did John Franke participate in any of the church's missional activities when he belonged to this church?" "No" was the immediate reply. The reason I asked this question was not because I didn't know the answer; I asked it because a friend and fellow BTS alumnus was visiting me, and I wanted him to hear the answer (he was having a bit of trouble believing things were really that bad at BTS). The pastor then ticked off all the "missional" activities of the church, all of which Franke never participated in. "It's all in his head" was a phrase I heard more than once about him.

(7) I'm not sure what label to use for this one, but it is some kind of sleight of hand, allowing philosophy to overthrow biblical revelation, and hypocrisy all rolled into one.

For the modern theologian, it is the revealed truths of God that serve as the materials for theology. For the postmodernist, this concept is problematic for two reasons. First, it assumes the ability of subjective man to comprehend the objective truth revealed about God, and second, it sets up this subjective understanding of revelation as foundational for theology.

Here again, someone who was trained to think biblically would ask what the Bible says about the subject of God's knowability instead of just taking some philosopher's word for it (the mere reasoning of subjective and fallible men). And someone who was trained to think logically might realize that in stating an inability of man to know God, one is really ascribing an inability to God, an inability to make himself known to man, and as it turns out, he does make himself known in the Bible; further, he holds men responsible for suppressing such knowledge, and postmodernism is just another method for "suppressing the truth in unrighteousness" by those who do not like to retain God in their knowledge:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him or give thanks, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise they became fools.

History repeats itself.

(8) Another false dichotomy (along with self-refutation):

Orthodoxy should be understood not as correct belief, but as belief held in a correct way. . . . of central importance in the Christian walk is faith and trust, not objective information. We should be primarily concerned with our own faith journey, our "becoming" Christian, and our relationship with God, not our understandings of God.

It is self refuting because with a postmodern understanding one cannot know what is "correct" either about what we believe or how we believe it. It is a false dichotomy because Biblical orthodoxy includes both correct beliefs and correct attitudes in which we hold these beliefs, such as "contend for the faith" (can you imagine a postmodernist doing that?). Neither can we have belief held in a correct way unless the content of that belief is correct, as one can see from a multitude of NT passages, e.g. "No longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of their hearts" (Eph 4:17–18). Just substitute "postmoderns" for "Gentiles" and you have an up to date application of Scripture. Paul goes on to say, as he does in Romans 1, that the consequences of such false thinking show up in practice: "they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of all kinds of impurity, always desiring more."

Read or add comments about this item.

No. 1 :

John,
Thank you for doing the research to show what is emerging at BTS. For those of us who invested in the mission of the pioneering years, these things are doubly sad. You are on target with your assessment of these developments. As R. Albert Mohler Jr. said at a Ligonier Conference Q&A, "Today's liberals were yesterday's evangelicals." The more I read of contemporary arguments, the more relevant Machen's Christianity and Liberalism becomes, nearly a century later. Carl T. Martin

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Submitted by pastorct • 2009-06-10 20:35:14

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