Jennings: I wish we were able to interact with “Insider Movements” and other Christian phenomena in categories in more nuanced ways than by asking the single, seemingly straightforward question – one that for us is intertwined with Greco-Latin-European linguistic-conceptual categories – “Is it faithful to the Bible or not?”
Garner: On the basis of careful theological study, the SCIM Committee Report offers a strongChurchly refutation of IM….The Study Committee holds that the IM-critical output is not hermeneutically hamstrung by Jennings’ ambiguating hypens, but is rooted in the clarity of Scripture and the shared cross-cultural import of its message.
Editors’ Note: The first part of this series can be found here. This installment is the first of two responses offered by each participant.
Jennings’s First Response
It is privilege to testify to God’s goodness and greatness, as well as to work together regarding how best to serve the cause of the Christian gospel.
Allow me to assert a few select aspects of this discussion. First, these brief essays are not a debate but discussions about the PCA’s place in worldwide Christianity. Second, these essays are less about “Insider Movements” and more about the PCA’s relationship with other parts of worldwide Christianity. Third, this discussion will not affect the PCA General Assembly’s decision(s) about the SCIM final report. Fourth, I do not believe that Dr. Garner’s and my essays represent “biblical-theological” versus “cultural-anthropological missiological” approaches. Rather, my essays are abbreviated articulations of a comprehensive, multidimensional, and integrated biblical-theological appreciation of God’s greatness, the worldwide Church’s complexity, and the PCA’s limitations for comprehending faithful Christian living in very different situations. Correspondingly, and with all due respect, I believe that my esteemed colleague’s essays unwittingly exemplify the PCA’s cultural-linguistic limitations, notwithstanding those essays’ exhortations that we faithfully convey “biblical transhistorical and cross-cultural realities.”
Let me quickly add my hearty concurrence with several of Dr. Garner’s key emphases, including the central place of his listed “concrete and theologically rich historical realities” that are relevant to “peoples and cultures everywhere,” as well as the dangers of “compartmentalized biblical authority.” Even so, I believe that it is the SCIM majority’s engrained lack of contextual self-awareness of the PCA’s particular Greco-Latin-European conceptual traits that blinds us to our own “compartmentalized biblical authority” with respect to God’s greatness, the worldwide Church’s complexity, and our limitations for understanding, much less instructing others about, faithful Christian living in very different situations.
In our presumption to instruct others, we resemble the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French Jansenists who logically concluded – rooted in their vehement opposition to Jesuit approaches – that Chinese ancestral rites were idolatrous; hence, the Jansenists influenced Pope Clement XI to condemn those rites in 1715 (thus supposedly ending the Chinese Rites Controversy). Those zealous Jansenists fell into unwittingly evaluating contextually different biblical-theological beliefs and practices from within their own “Euro-tribal Christian faith”(1) that universalized unseen contextual particulars.
Dr. Nelson Jennings is Executive Director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, Editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, and Teaching Elder in the Southern New England Presbytery (PCA).
NOTES for Jennings’s Response:
1. Craig Van Gelder, “The Future of the Discipline of Missiology: A Brief Overview of Current Realities and Future Possibilities” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 38, No. 1, January 2014 , 10-16. Available online at http://www.internationalbulletin.org/system/files/2014-01-010-gelder.html.
2. Together with its inherent inadequacies, the World Evangelical Association’s 2012-13 internationally representative Global Review Panel, convened to review Wycliffe and SIL International’s translation practices, at least exhibited more biblically-theologially-missiologically nuanced sensibilities about divine-human communication than we are presently able to understand. See their WEA report available online at http://www.worldea.org/images/wimg/files/2013_0429-Final%20Report%20of%20the%20WEA%20Independent%20Bible%20Translation%20Review%20Panel.pdf.
Garner’s First Response
A Rejoinder: The Certainty of Uncertainty
Introduction
First, a word of thanks to Nelson Jennings for his prior articles. To put these particular thoughts into digital ink took significant courage. Having agreed to brief rejoinders, I respond under two primary headers: hermeneutics and theology.
Despite claims to the contrary, the PCA (1) Committee Report on Insider Movements (IM) does not come from missiological ignorance and cross-cultural naïveté.(2) Nor does it appear at the beckoning only of the PCA’s pervasively inadequate church leaders.(3) Those who have “asked [us] to render our own opinion”(4) include non-westerners, nationals in various countries. In fact, the impetus for Overture 9 of the PCA (June 2011) (5) was the outcry of nationals around the world, suffering the effects of IM in their homelands. As they await the PCA’s decision in June, they beg the Church in the West
- To cease sending IM-sympathetic missionaries and funding IM initiatives.
- To speak decisively about IM’s theological errors and its disastrous consequences.
- To stop the IM madness.
To these pleading voices, we have been asked to turn a deaf ear. To those ensnared in IM theology and its syncretism, who self-identify as “Messianic Muslims,” and who “follow” Jesus yet practice some or all of the five pillars of Islam, we are to turn a blind eye. To those who believe or tolerate a version of Jesus that effectively denies him, we are simply to say, “be warm and be filled.”
Why? Evidently, because we so uncritically adopt our theological grid that we cannot truly see or hear beyond ourselves. Jennings does not mince words: “the PCA has over-extended” itself “about so-called ‘Insider Movements’ and associated Bible translations.” In his approach, the Church can never speak to such issues.
Hermeneutics
To develop his point, Jennings constructs a hermeneutic of uncertainty, or better, anti-certainty. Everyone occupies distinct “linguistic-cultural-religious-intellectual-socio-political contexts.” In the west, we suffer “Greco-Latin-Reformed cultural-linguistic-conceptual limitations.” Jennings’ string of hyphens stipulates endless interpretive conditions, making human understanding wholly unreliable. Yes, God has spoken in nature and in Scripture, but understanding is a relativized product of local community, evolved norms and religious practices. Truth is not what God says so much as what we think he means.(6) Certainty vanishes. Postmodernism flourishes. Confusion is born.
Accordingly, because Jennings’ interpretive paradigm demands it, the PCA Committee Report on IM lacks clarity and certainty by default. His imposed ambiguousconstraints ensure that analytical results will prove equally ambiguous. These results, to co-opt Jennings’s own words, are “predictable.”
Dr. David B. Garner is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary and former missionary in Bulgaria.
NOTES for Garner’s First Response:
1. PCA = Presbyterian Church in America.
2. Members of the Study Committee on Insider Movements possess solid biblical and theological skills, vast experience in missions, and recognized competence in missiology.
3. As a PCA minister myself, I continually thank the Lord for the rich heritage and present competence of the denomination’s leaders. Yet in reading Jennings, one could only conclude that the PCA has embarrassed itself by speaking into cross-cultural matters beyond its grasp. He has little confidence in the competence of the Church and its leaders to engage questions of faith, theology, and religion – not only abroad, but right in our own context.
4. All quotes, unless stated otherwise, come from Nelson Jennings’ articles, found at Reformation 21 (May 2014): http://www.reformation21.org/articles/jennings-and-garner-debate-the-insider-movement.php.
5. “A Call to Faithful Witness” (PCA General Assembly, June 2011) can be read on page 2106 of the PCA Study Committee on Insider Movements Committee Report, http://www.pcaac.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2101-SCIM-2014-ALL-with-MRs-4-30-14.pdf (accessed June 2, 2014).
6. For Jennings, human finitude entails provisionality. This is simply untrue. As Scott Oliphint has put it concerning archetypal (divine) and ectypal (human) knowledge, “I am a fallible human being, prone to sin and limited in everything that I think and do. But that fact does not cause me to lack certainty in the fact that I am now typing these words in my study. Neither should it cause you to lack certainty that you are where you are and are reading these very words. Neither does it cause me to lose certainty about that fact that Christ is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, who took on a human nature, or that the triune God exists, or that Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father. These are theological construals, but I am nevertheless certain of their truth. I do not hold such truths provisionally. Fallibility does not entailprovisionality.” K. Scott Oliphint, “Because It Is the Word of God,” in David B. Garner, ed., Did God Really Say? Affirming the Truthfulness and Trustworthiness of Scripture(Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2012), 9.
7. As argued in the prior article (http://www.reformation21.org/articles/jennings-and-garner-debate-the-insider-movement.php), our faith rests not in a series of abstract, one size fits all, philosophical propositions, but in the historical acts by which God has accomplished and applied redemption, and by the historically-given revelation in which God has explained it.
8. For more on redemptive history and confessional theology, see Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., “Biblical Theology and the Westminster Standards,” http://beginningwithmoses.org/bt-articles/188/biblical-theology-and-the-westminster-standards. For an earlier version of this essay by the same name, see Peter A. Lillback, ed., The Practical Calvinist: An Introduction to the Presbyterian & Reformed Heritage. In Honor of Dr. D. Clair Davis (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2002), 425-41.
9. That God takes risks is a feature of open theism. It has also become a tenet of some missiology, under the rubric of the missio Dei. See John Sanders, The God Who Risks, (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity, 1998); Thomas J. Oord, The Nature of Love: A Theology (St. Louis: Chalice, 2010); Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Faith of Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure, and Courage (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011).