I’ve been writing recently about the way in which preaching a different Gospel means you end up with a different God. There can be two reasons for this, either the distorted version of the Gospel leaves us with a distorted perception of what God is like or we have started with a distorted view of God leading to a different Gospel, the kind of Gospel needed to relate to that God.
In my last post on this, I suggested some practical consequences and here I want to throw in another. I’m currently reading a multi-authored book. It’s edited by an Evangelical and in the introduction, it has other Evangelicals in its attack line sights (and yes there is a strong polemic edge to it).
To accomplish the task, the author has assembled a whole array of people from across the theological spectrum, including Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic authors. The thinking seems to be,
“We have all signed up to the historic creeds and we are not talking about the Gospel which some of us disagree on, we are talking about the Doctrine of God, which is a different thing.”
I think this is a misstep. Even if you might find my provocative language of “different God” too much, I’m sure you will be able to see the challenge when authors drawing in different worldview backgrounds and ending up with distortions in their understanding of God’s character are brought together with Evangelicals to critique Evangelical thinking.
And notice something important there too. I think that at times we Evangelicals have become complacent in arguing that all we believe about God comes straight from the Bible. We need to be alert to where we have actually drawn on other world views. This is true for all of us and it includes the Neo-Classical-Theism movement. I think the tendency has been developed there to add in “Bible plus creeds/classical tradition.”. Now, historically we have had a concern not to add tradition to Scripture but what we may not have spotted is that one reason is the extent to which tradition draws on other works views. Again, different works views mean different gods.
It is important that we get our doctrine of God and of redemption both right.
Faithroots 