Being An Alumni of a Bible College/Seminary Can Sometimes Be Aggravating

Being An Alumni of a Bible College/Seminary

Can Sometimes Be Aggravating

I learned today that my Baptist College and Seminary has finally decided they maybe should do something about science and the bible. Specifically, how to handle evolution. Added to this question of science they are also deciding to let go of the teaching of "divine accomodation" where God speaks to us as if we are idiots, in ways we might understand Him. Which is all well and good as it seems we still are in need of being spoken to as idiots by God for all the harm and destruction we do among ourselves and planet earth.

However, in the school's infinite wisdom they are now adopting a newly devised doctrinal term named "divine relevance" (curiously mimicking the title of my own blogsite, Relevancy22, or to that of the publication Relevancy Magazine, which came out several years after I began writing of a contemporary postmodern theology). I find it highly humorous and flattering to name a new doctrinal direction based upon their observation of becoming more "relevant" to the world. I sincerely pray my fellowship continues forward in this direction.

Reading on... I came across my school's most recent words and quote: "The more things change the more they stay the same." This kind of sentiment quite defeats how far behind my conservative evangelical college and seminary have become in terms of philosophical, theological, and sociological relevance. I suppose, given enough time, they will work themselves out beyond their present boundary sets to someday admit gays and trans-, that they are just as much people as my fellowship's brothers and sisters are themselves as church people. People whom God loves and the church should learn to love too instead of sniping behind their backs privately or condemning in their bible study groups to one another.

Reading further, I see how their statement about "relevance theory" seeks to help in explaining the relationship between "the explicit words of the Bible [originalism] and [its] broader cognitive environment [cultural relativism], [pertaining to] the cultural and intellectual context of the original bible audience [added brackets are mine own]." But this explanatory statement really doesn't do it for me. It's simply not apologizing for misreading the bible in the first place nor looking for a more sanitized way of re-stating the bible in an updated fashion to keep people in the church listening to their dogmatic beliefs.

In my experience dogmatists assume they know how people were thinking back in "bible days". But if bible schools do not have heavy concentrations in comparative ancient language, literature, and history in other ancient civilizations beyond Israel, Egypt, and a smattering of a few others, I really don't think they can accomplish their stated task of knowing what the cultural milieu was thinking back in their ancient settings. Heck, I can't even remember 30 years ago with any accuracy how I was thinking or feeling about something let alone pass it along verbally for generations with any accuracy as explicitly as I once knew it then. So usually the theologian or preacher draws upon present day examples and think those personal experiences are "biblical" enough when usually they've completely misconstrued the biblical text they were exegeting.

As an example, let me come down on sports DJ's who stand up one minute for one thing they believe in, then hammer it for a year as if life and death depends on it, and the very next year back out of what they had been saying by agreeing with the other side and supporting it. This drives me crazy as I've heard it once too many times. Needless to say, I don't stay around long enough to hear anything more these talking heads have to say about sports. Being harsh and pig-headed about a disagreeable subject such as denying Black lives matter to then turn around and say, "Hey, I was wrong, let's look at this way instead" doesn't win my allegiance back when that same subject was obvious from the start. Black lives mattered then to me when they didn't matter to those spewing out invectives on Colin Kaepernick taking a knee at the advice of a military veteran to show his commitment against systemic racism.

A holistic purist like myself simply hates the disingenuousness of act and speech. I had tried to the best of my ability at the time to study the bible in a way which would be helpful to those unable to do the same. To be thorough and to listen and pray through those studies during very long years of training. I feel the same way towards Christians who did not apply themselves as hard; who twenty years ago condemned their fellow Christians for speaking out against their moralistic judgments, then preached those same judgments for years and years, to finally say, "La-dee-la-dee-la, 'Oh! I've changed my mind... now it's this way and you should believe what I believe now!'" Which, in shorthand, is that they should've studied and listened twenty years ago instead of condemning what they knew not and preaching against. Teaching the bible carries with it a great responsibility.

Thus and thus are the Christian jedi mind tricks I've lived under and have spoken out against more recently and have become greatly tired of its harmful proclamations. Which is why I went public against evangelical teachings several years ago, though at the time I didn't understand my discontent nor wish to become stigmatized as "heretical". To have to re-discover on my own how the God of the bible and the Christian faith could be much larger than He was from inside my "God-ordained and Divinely sanctified" earlier fellowships. It was hell to leave, hell to figure it out, and hell to speak up. But this was the path the Spirit led me on whether I wanted it or not - which frankly, I didn't. But the burden I carried weighed heavily on me and I felt I had no choice but to write of a new, post-evangelical, postmodern orthodoxy. And I'm glad I did.

What this meant to me then, and what it means to me now, says that I'm the more willing to write down my questions and observations publically - to be scrutinized and criticized for these observations so that what I, and other like-minded individuals write, may become healthier, more informed, and more loving as time passes by in our faith, actions, and words. But my patience for "books of the hour" that titillates the itching brains of the church has run thin.

Lastly, whatever my brothers and sisters were hoping to accomplish in D.C. earlier this fall of 2020, I pray I, like they, have committed ourselves to loving others who are different from us in better ways then we have in the past as an unsympathetic church having backed outrageous civil and political policies of harm and suffering. If the D.C. gathering was just for sympathetic fellowship and conservative political partisanship which continues laying down inhumane and unjust laws for the refugee, immigrant, non-white, or genderly different, than no, your idea and my idea of repentance is completely different. I do not stand with the church in these matters nor in matters of the divisive dogmas and dogmatic doctrines they preach and teach. With deepest apologies, rant ended.

R.E. Slater

October 17, 2020