There is good movement abroad for churches to move back to the fundamentals of the faith, to put aside the petty, to teach the congregants to be concerned with the true fundamentals of the faith as were fought for and defended throughout history and then elucidated somewhat in the early 1900s by Torrey, et al.
Lately, we have been making much of molehills and sidetracks and have forgotten our center, causing us to be be weak at our center.
It reminds me of the John Adams quote I’ve quoted here before about why we do hard things so that our liberties and studies can be expanded over generations. But when our liberties, boundaries and opportunities are expanded like this, it makes it easier to stop thinking about the core of what makes us as Americans or Christians, which is those founding, central, philosophies and Gospel.
I was thinking that when I read this today by William Hazlitt (1778-1830):
“When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.”
When a generation fights and bleeds for political freedom or inerrancy or the deity of Christ, the next generation assumes it. But the problem with assuming something is that over generations the thing is sometimes held more cheaply. As a Christian, I want to be centered on pure Gospel and cleave to the list of fundamentals (the Creed) that was ingrained into a memorized list in my head. As an American, I want to be centered on life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, limited government, earnest capitalism, etc. As an educator, I want to go back to the basics and teach kids how to learn and to exceed the prescribed expectations of a meager community.
Sometimes the means are a subject of controversy. The fluid, easy, quiet thing would be to go with the flow. “Why teach Latin?” “Why talk about the atonement?”
Why does all this trying to go back to the core feel so much like rebellion?
And in talking about the atonement….will it be presented as limited? Cause anything less could be considered error or misleading….