“No one should deny that traditional biblical interpretation has proved inadequate to protect the Reformed Church in South Africa, inadequate to protect the Medieval Catholic Church from the cruelty of the Inquisition – inadequate to protect American Christians from their twentieth-century military (cf.Ethics, p. 314). We cannot correct all the excesses Christians have carried out under traditional cover, but we must ask if we ourselves are helpless prisoners of our traditional ways of reading the Bible.”
– James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Doctrine: Systematic Theology, Volume 2, pp. 468-469
Have to read this book for Systematic Theology. He comes from a Baptist tradition and teaches at Fuller. Kind of an odd choice for a more liberal Anglican seminary, but it is very good – someone with whom I actually feel an affinity.
Add to this, southern expressions of national denominations that split, north and south (American Baptists vs. Southern Baptists, for example), as they attempted to biblically justify chattel slavery! We will add to this, later on, perhaps many years from now, prohabitionist Christians and denominations as they demanded belief that homosexuality would be the destruction of Western Civilization, the United States, and of all that is good and virtuous in the world, because the Bible said so!
I’m not a scholar nor an intellectual, but why don’t people think?