diversity Archives - Canon Fodder

The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How and When was the New Testament Canon Put Together?

November 20, 2017

For the last few weeks, I have been posting a series of videos where Andreas Köstenberger and I discuss our response to Walter Bauer’s thesis on heresy and orthodoxy in early Christianity.

These discussions are based on our book, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity (Crossway, 2010).

The first week was an overview of Bauer and why we wrote the book (see here), and the second week was on the role of diversity in the NT books themselves (see here).

In this video below, we discuss an area very central to the Bauer thesis, namely the development of the NT canon. Bauer argues that we have no reason to think the books in our NT are the “right” books because they are simply the books chosen by the theological winners. And the winners get to determine the scope of the canon.

After all, argues Bauer, what if another early Christian group had prevailed? What if the Gnostics had won? Then we might have the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip in our Bibles instead of, say, Matthew and John.

This sort of narrative about the origins of the canon has been repeated countless times over the years, in both popular and academic literature. But it runs into a significant problem: [Read more…]

The One Area of Diversity That Doesn’t Count

May 9, 2016

Evangelical Christians have been making the same point for so long, we are running out of ways to say it.

We’ve tried the following phrases/statements:

The intolerance of tolerance.
There is a lack of diversity in the push for diversity.
Those complaining the loudest about discrimination, are often the most discriminatory.
Liberals are not really liberals, but simply want one view.
Those pushing for all view to be treated fairly, are not treating all views fairly.
The supposed quest for equality, is really a quest to privilege a certain viewpoint.

And on and on we could go.

The basic point is this. In the modern liberal push for diversity there is one enormous category missing: intellectual/religious/ideological diversity.

All the while our liberal culture pats itself on the back for being so diverse–whether that diversity be racial, ethnic, or cultural–it continues to ignore the biggest area of potential diversity. Diversity of thinking.

After all, isn’t this what the public education should be doing? Shouldn’t it be exposing students to a variety of intellectual/ideological viewpoints? But that is precisely the thing modern universities do not do (or refuse to do).

It is well known that conservative thinkers make up a shockingly small percentage of major university faculties–and many of these faculties are funded by public tax dollars. A recent study, for example, showed less than 2% of English professors are Republicans.

This point has been eloquently made by Nicholas Kristoff in a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece aptly entitled, “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance.” He writes:

WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.
Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

This lack of diversity is particularly evident in the field of biblical studies at major American universities. Go on a search for genuinely evangelical professors who hold a teaching post in biblical studies at a major public university and see what you find. They are an endangered species.

And the intellectual discrimination doesn’t just happen at the hiring level. It also happens at the Ph.D. level. Evangelicals have trouble getting hired at major universities because they first have difficulty being accepted into the Ph.D. programs of these major universities.

I have seen this up close and personal here at RTS. We had an extremely bright student a number of years ago apply to PhD programs in biblical studies at some of the major universities and divinity schools in America. He had exceptional academic credentials including prestigious undergraduate scholarships, academic awards, fantastic grades, and also a near perfect score on the GRE.

And how many of these major universities and divinity schools accepted him? Zero.

Of course, critics could always write off this single example as an irrelevant anomaly. It doesn’t prove anything, they might say. Maybe he was rejected for other reasons.

Even so, the state of our institutions of higher learning today are not in doubt. They are vastly, enormously, and seriously slanted towards a single ideological and intellectual viewpoint. That is undeniable.

The question isn’t whether it is true. The question is whether anyone cares, or whether anyone will do anything about it.

And if nothing is done about it, our universities (and our culture) will not be the better. Indeed, we will become what the liberals have always said they want to avoid. A totalitarian state that simply indoctrinates rather than educates.

Should Churches Make Diversity Their Highest Goal?

May 28, 2014

When it comes to ethnic diversity, one of the most common refrains in our culture is that 11AM to 12Noon on Sundays is the most segregated hour of the week. Such statements understandably raise important questions about our churches and ministries and whether they are focused enough on ethnic diversity.

However, African-American pastor Voddie Baucham, who leads Grace Family Baptist Church in Spring, Texas, is concerned about our culture’s incessant push for diversity–what he calls “cherished pluralism.” In a recent interview with Ministry and Leadership, the magazine of Reformed Theological Seminary, Voddie offered some very helpful insights:

Q: How does the church adapt to the multicultural, multiethnic world we now live in?
We are at a place of cherished pluralism in much of modern American Christianity, and it’s dangerous. For example, you see one church with two different ethnicities, and another church with four different ethnicities, and you think the one with four different ethnicities has to be doing a better job of church, right? It may be, though, that that’s the neighborhood they are in, and they are no more welcoming or loving to people different than them. Or those four different ethnicities are broken up in four different pockets and they are not sharing community like they ought.
So, I’m very cautious about the push for diversity. I desire that all people would hear the gospel and be saved, that God would bring to his church all those whom he would call. The minute I start playing the diversity game, I’m in danger of stepping over certain lost people in favor of other lost people because I need to ramp up my ethnic diversity quota. And that’s usually problematic.
Q: How is it problematic?
In a number of ways–first, because we change our priorities. Instead of being set on faithfulness, now we’ve added another category. Faithfully preaching the gospel and seeing God bring whoever he brings is no longer enough…It’s not a biblical category of measuring success.
If there’s a problem with our not being welcoming or with being prejudiced toward people, then that’s sin, and we need to deal with that. But our goal is faithfulness in the gospel.
Q: It has been said that 11Am to noon on Sundays is the most segregated hour in our country. How valid is that statement, and how much of a concern is it?
Is it a valid statement? Probably. Is it reason for alarm? No, because people tend to go to church with people who are like them, and that’s always been the case. I don’t think we are seeing today what we saw in the 40’s and 50’s, where people were segregated because they were refused entrance. That’s simply not the case. So is the statement true? Sure, it could be. But is it better in those other hours of the week when people are together because they are forced together?
Inherently, in that statement, we’re saying that the church is wrong and awful because we are not seeing the demographic breakdown that other institutions are seeing during the week…Now we’re thinking we’re inferior to an institution that is forcing diversity on people, and that is simply not the case. If there’s sinful separation, that’s a problem, but the fact that people tend to congregate with people who are like them in a variety of ways is not necessarily a problem.

You can read the whole thing here.