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Always Singing One Note —

A Vernacular Bible

First, a choice excerpt to whet your appetite and show the relevance of this message to the issues discussed on this web site:

Erasmus does not live or write in this realm of horrible condition and gracious blood-bought salvation. He has the appearance of reform in the Enchiridion, but something is missing. To walk from Erasmus into Tyndale is to move (to paraphrase Mark Twain) from a lightning bug to a lightning bolt.

[Biographer] Daniell puts it like this:

Something in the Enchiridion is missing. . . . It is a masterpiece of humanist piety. . . . [But] the activity of Christ in the Gospels, his special work of salvation so strongly detailed there and in the epistles of Paul, is largely missing. Christologically, where Luther thunders, Erasmus makes a sweet sound: what to Tyndale was an impregnable stronghold feels in the Enchiridion like a summer pavilion.

Where Luther and Tyndale were blood-earnest about our dreadful human condition and the glory of salvation in Christ, Erasmus and Thomas More joked and bantered. When Luther published his 95 theses in 1517, Erasmus sent a copy of them to More—along with a "jocular letter including the anti-papal games, and witty satirical diatribes against abuses within the church, which both of them loved to make."

I linger here with this difference between Tyndale and Erasmus because I am trying to penetrate to how Tyndale accomplished what he did through translating the New Testament. Explosive reformation is what he accomplished in England. This was not the effect of Erasmus’ highbrow, elitist, layered nuancing of Christ and church tradition. Erasmus and Thomas More may have satirized the monasteries and clerical abuses, but they were always playing games compared to Tyndale.

And in this they were very much like notable Christian writers in our own day. Listen to this remarkable assessment from Daniell, and see if you do not hear a description of certain emergent church writers and New Perspective champions:

Not only is there no fully realized Christ or Devil in Erasmus’s book . . . : there is a touch of irony about it all, with a feeling of the writer cultivating a faintly superior ambiguity: as if to be dogmatic, for example about the full theology of the work of Christ, was to be rather distasteful, below the best, elite, humanist heights. . . . By contrast Tyndale . . . is ferociously single-minded ["always singing one note"]; the matter in hand, the immediate access of the soul to God without intermediary, is far too important for hints of faintly ironic superiority. . . . Tyndale is as four-square as a carpenter’s tool. But in Erasmus’s account of the origins of his book there is a touch of the sort of layering of ironies found in the games with personae.

It is ironic and sad that today supposedly avant-garde Christian writers can strike this cool, evasive, imprecise, artistic, superficially reformist pose of Erasmus and call it "post-modern" and capture a generation of unwitting, historically naïve, emergent people who don’t know they are being duped by the same old verbal tactics used by the elitist humanist writers in past generations. . . .  It’s not post-modern. It’s pre-modern—because it is perpetual.

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Actually, could we say that in the portion of the world that has heard the words of Christ, there are just two kinds of foundationalists, based on the two foundations of Matt 7:24-27?  There are rock foundationalists (wise men who hear the words of Jesus and act on them) and sand foundationalists (fools who hear the words of Christ but do not act on them).  Wise foundationalists and foolish foundationalists, just like the two seeds of Genesis 3:15, the two ways of Psalm 1, etc., etc. 

As an aside, let us not be misled into confining "the words of Jesus" to the immediate context (the sermon on the Mount) or even the words in red of our red letter Bibles.  Since Jesus is the eternal Son, the Bible as a whole, "the word of God," should be considered the word of Christ.  Those who are wise, then, build upon the foundation of the Bible, which is sufficient so that the man of God will be equipped for every good work.  Those who are fools have other foundations.  Even people who say there are no secure foundations must have some foundation for making such a claim, right?

Along the same lines, two papers are shown below, both read at the annual ETS convention, 2005.  It looks to me like John Franke quotes from Karl Barth in a foundational manner, as if to explain Barth is to show something to be true.  I've referred to this talk elsewhere on this site; now see for yourself as you read the paper below, and then contrast it with J.P. Moreland's response.  A good example of sand and rock, folly and wisdom?

I heard from a number of friends who were at this debate.  One was BTS alumnus John Bloom (MDiv, 1983), who said:

After hearing the Franke and Moreland debate at the 2005 ETS meeting, I came home and dropped Biblical as a beneficiary from my will. I humbly suggest that it may be time for a new board and president at BTS. Sadly, it seems that a new generation of teachers arose at BTS who knew not MacRae and do what is right in their own and Barth’s eyes.

We would like to advise, "Go thou and do likewise."

In John Franke's paper he mentions J.P. Moreland's plenary address at ETS the previous year ("Truth, Contemporary Philosophy, and the Postmodern Turn," delivered November 18, 2004).  To supply some context I quote from the conclusion of that paper:

...postmodernism is an immoral and cowardly viewpoint such that persons who love truth and knowledge, especially disciples of the Lord Jesus, should do everything they can to heal the plague that postmodernism has and inevitably does leave...

For some time I have been convinced that postmodernism is rooted in pervasive confusions, and I have tried to point out what some of these are. I am also convinced that postmodernism is an irresponsible, cowardly abrogation of the duties that constitute a disciple’s calling to be a Christian intellectual and teacher...

Faced with such opposition and the pressure it brings, postmodernism is a form of intellectual pacifism that, at the end of the day, recommends backgammon while the barbarians are at the gate. It is the easy, cowardly way out that removes the pressure to engage alternative conceptual schemes, to be different, to risk ridicule, to take a stand outside the gate. But it is precisely as disciples of Christ, even more, as officers in His army, that the pacifist way out is simply not an option. However comforting it may be, postmodernism is the cure that kills the patient, the military strategy that concedes defeat before the first shot is fired, the ideology that undermines its own claims to allegiance. And it is an immoral, coward’s way out that is not worthy of a movement born out of the martyrs’ blood.

The full paper is posted at Stand to Reason.

Read more:

Some of you have asked for some of my thoughts regarding Biblical Theological Seminary’s John Franke and in particular his view of Biblical authority. Here is a brief summary.

Postmoderns are correct to point out that all readings of Scripture are inevitably shaped in some measure by the reader’s context. Finite humans have finite perspectives. Only omniscience can avoid the limitations of perspectivalism. But this is not to say that meaning has been eradicated from the text or that we must now relegate authority to its interpretation. Finite humans are able to come to a true even if not exhaustive understanding of the text, and it is there — in the text, in authorial intent — meaning and authority reside. And it is here that Franke first goes astray.

Scot McKnight, at a conference at Westminster Theological Seminary (October 26, 2006), urged that people in a group should be given the opportunity to say for themselves what they believe. This is fair enough.  On Scot's web site is a paper from Nov 1, 2005 which looks at the things that the emerging church movement (ECM) is protesting.  I'm sure we could all sympathize with a lot of it (of course, we always need to ask if the cure is worse than the disease).  A more recent essay by McKnight, incorporating much of what he said at Westminster, is available at Christianity Today.

Someone has said that trying to label "the emerging church" could be as problematic as labeling "Anabaptists" at the time of the Protestant reformation.  One needs to specify which Anabaptists he is talking about in order to avoid false generalizations.  Here at PBTS we are most concerned with the corner of the ECM called "Emergent Village" (EV).  The reason for this concern is twofold: (1) there has been an association between EV and BTS (or personnel who teach at BTS); (2) EV is involved in various ways with unbiblical teachings and practices (I am referring to major issues, not minor ones).