Neo-Orthodoxy

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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May 22, 2016

00:00: A word of prayer, Father in heaven, I thank you for the opportunity to again study theology together and to focus our time today on a subject which has really influenced the church greatly in the last generation especially and has brought about some of the more negative aspects of modern theology and modern theological thought and I do pray that you would guide me and direct me, lead me, use me, keep me from error and I pray Father that you would open the hearts of your people to the truth.
00:43: And ultimately Lord as we seek to understand the subject of neo-orthodoxy that we would just understand it aright and be able to use that as we further our own understanding of what is true orthodoxy, true proper biblical theology and we pray this in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen.
01:07: We have been, excuse me, isn't the word neo-orthodoxy an oxymoron? No it isn't.
01:14: Well I mean I guess it could be but we're going to get to that in a moment.
01:21: We're going to talk about the meaning of the word and everything but before we even get to that let me just kind of catch everyone up because I know not everyone is here always and want to kind of make sure everybody understands what we're doing.
01:37: We've been studying the book of Charts of Theology and Doctrine by H.
01:41: Wayne House and the reason for this is we have two adult Sunday school classes.
01:46: One is our Bible study class which is across the way.
01:50: Mr.
01:51: Bunting who is our chairman of the elders, he leads that class and then I teach systematic theology.
01:59: Systematic theology is still biblical but it looks at subjects from a systematic perspective looking at scripture and subjects together and sort of giving an overview of different ideas and understandings specifically systematic theology is broken down into the major systems of theology proper, Christology, Pneumatology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, Eschatology, different ologies, all these different things referencing different aspects of theological thought.
02:32: But when we started this book, Charts of Christian Theology and Doctrine, it starts in kind of a weird way.
02:40: It starts by looking at different theological systems before it really gets down to breaking down the different parts.
02:50: So we began by looking at Roman Catholicism and Natural Theology and Methodism, Wesleyism, Reform Theology, Arminianism, it's been sort of the way that it's broken down.
03:03: And we've gone through the major classical views, again those being Reform Theology, Wesleyanism, and when I say classical I mean the ones that have large amounts of adherence prior to the 20th century.
03:21: But in the last few weeks we've been looking at newer, more modernistic theologies that have made their way into the Christian landscape.
03:33: The one that we looked at for a couple weeks was called Existentialism.
03:38: Existentialism is the idea of existence as preceding essence, and we talked about what that meant over a couple week period.
03:49: The idea that man is in essence, first he exists and then there's a purpose for his existence, there's no purpose that precedes his existence, his existence creates his purpose.
04:02: And we kind of talked about the idea that existentialism isn't at its heart atheistic, because we believe that we had a purpose before we were created, we believe God had a purpose for us, he created us with a purpose, and yet with existentialism your purpose doesn't come until after you've existed because existence precedes essence.
04:19: So there's a little different philosophical idea of what existence is, and that's existentialism, and there's a lot more to it, and if you want to go back and listen to the recordings I would encourage you to, maybe help you understand it a little better, but it did have a great influence on how people understand things like miracles, because the big issue with existentialism is to demythologize scripture, to take away the miraculous and try to boil everything down to the natural, and this is why you end up with people who would call themselves Christians but would reject the creation story, they would call themselves Christians but they would reject the resurrection, they would call themselves Christians but they would reject the supernatural, and thus they would call themselves existentialist Christians, and so a lot of that has influence on modern liberal thinking, liberalism tends to be more existential in its perspective.
05:13: Well today we're going to look at something called Neo-Orthodoxy, and Neo-Orthodoxy already was mentioned, well is this an oxymoron, well an oxymoron is two words that go together that mean something different, like jumbo shrimp is an oxymoron, dodge ram is an oxymoron, think about it, if you dodge it you didn't ram it, if you ram it you didn't dodge it, so dodge ram is an oxymoron, so oxymoron is two words that go together that mean something different.
05:56: Neo-Orthodoxy, the word neo means new, neo is the Greek word for new, orthodox comes from a combination of the word orthos, which means straight, and doxa, and there's actually quite a bit, doxa can mean glory, or praise, but specifically in this sense can also mean opinion, it can mean thought, someone's thinking about something, and it comes from the word deca, meaning to accept something, something that's accepted, something that, we'll just say, we just, you boil it down to something, this is what someone believes, or an opinion, I spelled that wrong, excuse me, so you have someone who is orthodox, and by the way orthos, a good way to remember that is orthodontia, orthodontia is when they take your teeth and straighten them, you know, because they were crooked, so an orthodontist straightens teeth, so orthodox, it means to have a straight opinion, well what's the straight, straight is correct, so it means to be right, it means to have, to be in line with what's correct, right, you know, a lot of people are unorthodox in their theology because they're out of line with the truth, and it may only be a 10 degrees off, you know, most unorthodox teaching is not totally perpendicular to what's being said, what's the truth, it's usually just enough to where it creates enough of a divide where the line is no longer contiguous, you know, it's simply off just a little, and so orthodoxy is the idea of keeping something straight in line with what is correct, what is the truth, right, so it's keeping it straight with the truth, so if you say, well, neo-orthodoxy is an oxymoron because you can't have new keeping with the truth, maybe, orthodoxy, I think what you thought was more like tradition, right, and so if you say new tradition, yeah, that would be, or new truth might work, too, I mean, because it's like, if it's new, it's gonna be different, yeah, well, well, something's different, you know, than what the original, yeah, and that's a good point, something new is typically different, and, you know, you could argue, I guess, that the Reformers, Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, and those, that they were neo-orthodox in their time because they were teaching something that was, to the people, new, but it was true, so I'm not saying they were neo-orthodox, I'm saying that you could, you could call what they were doing, they were teaching something that wasn't in line with the normal part of the day, because what was in line with the normal part of the day was the false teaching of Roman Catholicism, the heresy of Roman Catholicism, the true orthodoxy got skewed back then, exactly, so it's really, they're just returning to the, exactly, that's why it's called Reformation, you know, to reform something means it once was correct, it's become corrupt, and now it's got to be reformed back to the beginning, the re, meaning to return to something, to go back, so they're informing based on what it was already formed, you know, and that's what happened, the Roman Catholic Church had taken proper biblical theology and had taken it like a wax face and had, and had, and had mixed it all up, they'd moved the nose, they'd refixed the eyes, they contorted the mouth, and it became like a Picasso painting, it didn't no longer look like a face, it just looked like sort of this mass where you could tell what was eyes, you could tell what was a nose, you could tell what was a mouth, but it wasn't, it wasn't straight, it wasn't right, and yet that's what the people were believing, so long comes Calvin, long comes Luther, long comes men even preceding them like Wycliffe and Hus, and even before them you had the Waldensians and others who were coming out and who were, who were proclaiming, no that's not right, there's a truth, and the truth has been lost, it's been, it's been obscured, it's been, it's been mixed and muddled, and, and we need to get back to the truth.
10:24: Well, in the 20th century, and even before, you have the liberal Protestantism, and liberal Protestantism is getting away from orthodoxy altogether.
10:41: Liberal Protestantism sort of takes and steps away from the, the orthodoxy of the past, the truth of what had been believed about the scripture and begins to open up many views about the Bible and about the, the truth of the word that were, that were wrong, but yet in it, in liberal orthodoxy, liberal teaching, liberal theology, there was a, there was a lot of, there was a lot of optimism because the gospel went from being about sin to being about the fixing of social ills, the fixing of problems, and so there was a lot of optimism in, in early 20th century liberalism, the idea that the church's role wasn't to save men from sin, but it was to save men from, you know, persecution and oppression and things like that, and so the church sort of takes on a very socially aware, very socially important role, not so much to get men, getting men out of hell in the afterlife, but getting men out of poverty in the current life, and getting men out of the bad life now, sort of your best life now, kind of proto, you know, modernism.
11:55: So what we see, trying to get around to this, is when the World War happens, a lot of the optimism of liberalism is gone.
12:07: You see the First World War followed very soon after by the Second World War, what do you have? You got a world that's been crushed by men who are evil, and it's had to have been fought back against this evil.
12:22: Thousands and thousands have died, and now you have a new, different view of the world, it's much less optimistic, and out of that rises something called neo-orthodoxy.
12:37: Neo-orthodoxy teaches that, sort of finds, tries to find a middle road between the fundamental orthodoxy of the Bible is the Word of God, it's the truth, we hold to it, hold to a specific teaching of it, and the liberal view, which was very, very much open to all kinds of variations and interpretations and falsehoods and things.
13:04: And so neo-orthodoxy tries to find a middle road.
13:08: So, wouldn't a better, wouldn't a truer way to put it would be like reformed re-orthodox, rather than new orthodox, when you're actually re-bringing it back, rather than creating something new? Well, I'm not, they never liked the term, those who were the proponents of this particular teaching did not use the term neo-orthodoxy.
13:33: It was their, their, people describing them said, well they're the neo-orthodox.
13:40: So it wasn't, this isn't a term they coined.
13:43: One of the, there are other, there are other views, or other, other ways of describing it.
13:53: There's the, what was it, theology and conflict is, is what another way, I think it's in the book actually, it's referred to as the dialectic, which means the conflicting, the idea of trying to, trying to, trying to make a sense of a world of mayhem, you know.
14:19: And let me, let me give you kind of the major theme of neo-orthodoxy, because I see, I don't want to go too far and confuse.
14:29: The major theme of neo-orthodoxy is that, the logos.
14:36: This is in the Greek, logos.
14:43: If I were to ask you, what is the logos? Would you know the, how many of you know what logos means? Logos means word, but if I said, what is the logos? What, what, what am I saying? Okay.
14:58: Now if I said, who is the logos? Jesus.
15:01: Okay, alright.
15:02: So you understand that there is a distinction in the Bible between that which is logos and he who is logos, alright? That which is logos is the word and he who is logos is the living word.
15:15: So you have the written word, so you have the word written, and then you have the word living.
15:26: Now there are, you know, we could, we could argue and say, well the written word is a living word, but when we talk about in this distinction, we have the logos who is written, or the logos which is written, and then we have the logos who is living, and of those two, essentially the Bible and Jesus, okay? Of those two, which one is preeminent? Jesus.
15:59: Okay.
16:01: Anybody else want to weigh in? It's the same, isn't it? I always, you know, Jesus is the word, the word, I mean, I don't separate the two.
16:11: Okay.
16:12: Anybody else want to opine which one is preeminent? Okay, is it both? Well, okay, preeminent means that one has a higher place than the other, and obviously it's difficult for us to say one has a higher place than the other, because you have Christ, who is God in the flesh, and you have the Word of God written, and so we have these two expressions of the logos, one written and one living, and so the question becomes which one is preeminent, and for the fundamental Christian, for the conservative Christian, there is a sense in which the written logos is preeminent, because outside of the written logos, we would know nothing of the living logos.
17:15: True.
17:16: Yeah, follow me, just stay, because I promise I'm gonna make sense of all this, but what I'm saying is, for the conservative Christian, there's a sense in which preeminence rests in the Word of God, because outside of it, we would not know about the living Word of God.
17:32: The written Word of God tells us about the living Word, who is Christ, right? The neo-orthodox position is opposite of that.
17:45: The living Word is preeminent over the written Word, because for the neo-orthodox theologian, the living Word is all that really matters.
17:58: The written Word is not a divine, it's not that it's not divine, it is not the Word of God as revelation, as we would see the Word of God as revelation, but the written logos is the Word of God as a, it is a byproduct of revelation.
18:33: I see where you're going, and maybe I don't think, I might not be explaining, but it's a little different, but there is a mystical aspect to this, because it gets down to the issue of Jesus and me.
18:44: The Bible becomes an artifact of revelation, not revelation itself, and so when you read the Bible, what are you reading? You're reading the Word of God, right? You're reading God's Word to man.
19:07: Do you believe that it's revelation from God? The neo-orthodox position is that the Bible isn't revelation from God, it is a record of God's revelation, but it's not revelation itself.
19:28: How can I make sense of this? The Bible is the medium, but it's not the revelation, according to the neo-orthodox position.
19:41: It's how you learn about the revelation, but it itself is not the revelation.
19:48: The revelation is Jesus.
19:50: He's the revelation.
19:52: You learn about Him through the Bible, but the Bible itself isn't revelation.
19:58: Why is this so important for them? Because there's parts of the Bible that have to be jettisoned, or reinterpreted, or taken out, or reinterpreted a different way.
20:11: If you believe the Bible is absolute revelation from God, guess what? That means you have to accept some things that are really, really difficult.
20:20: You have to accept things like eternal hell.
20:23: You have to accept things like absolute truth.
20:27: You have to accept things like a person who dies outside of Jesus Christ will spend an eternity separated from God, being punished forever for their sins.
20:40: These are things that you have to believe if you believe the Bible is revelation from God.
20:43: But if you believe simply that the Bible is a record of God revealing Himself to man, and it's how men recorded the record, then basically all you're reading is someone's interpretation of what God revealed to them.
20:59: And so what do you get to do? You get to interpret God as to how He reveals Himself to you.
21:08: See, this is not orthodox at all.
21:11: It's really a robbery of the Word.
21:17: What do men want more than anything in the world? They want to be the captain of their own destiny.
21:23: They want to be their own God.
21:24: What was it that caused Eve in the garden to be taken in by the serpent? You will be like God.
21:37: What is in the orthodox promise? Well, you get to be the person who determines the truth.
21:48: You get to be the person who is the arbiter of the truth.
21:59: And so the neo-orthodox position in and of itself sort of opens up the door for a relativistic approach to understanding the Scripture.
22:12: This idea that what's true for you and what's true for you can be two different things because it's how God has revealed Himself to you.
22:27: I brought a lot of notes with me today and I haven't really revealed to...
22:35: I haven't really read a whole lot, but I want to read a little bit in this particular passage.
22:43: This is from an online source on the subject of neo-orthodoxy.
22:50: It says, best described as an approach or attitude that began in a common environment but soon expressed itself in diverse ways.
22:56: It began in the crisis associated with the disillusionment following World War I, with a rejection of Protestant scholasticism, with the denial of the Protestant liberal movement which had stressed accommodation of Christianity to Western science and culture, the eminence of God, and the progressive improvement of mankind.
23:15: Notable figures associated with this form of theology include Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, whose theological methods were markedly influenced by the writings of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who referred to as the father of existentialism, which we talked about earlier.
23:31: Some scholars have added Karl Barth to the list, but this has been disputed.
23:35: Neo-orthodoxy is known for its existential element which stressed the subjective experience of the individual and regards propositional truth as either irrelevant or indeterminate.
23:47: What is propositional truth? When I say that, what is propositional truth? No, that's the opposite.
24:15: Propositional truth is truth that is true in and of itself.
24:21: It's always true.
24:22: It proposes something as absolute.
24:27: For instance, if I say God exists, right? That's a propositional truth.
24:38: It's either true or it's false.
24:42: It's one or the other.
24:44: It cannot be both, right? If I say propositional truth, God exists, now we could debate that.
24:54: I could say God exists, you could say God doesn't exist, we could go back and forth, but neither of us can make it be true or untrue.
25:03: We can't force it to be true or untrue because truth is truth, right? What is subjective truth? Another way, propositional truth, also called objective truth.
25:17: It's true always objectively.
25:20: What is subjective truth? That's what you said, yeah.
25:23: Subjective truth is truth that's determinate on the individual.
25:27: So what if I said this? What if I said God is true for me? What am I saying? I'm saying he might not be true for you, and that's okay, right? No, that's what I would, by adding the term for me, that's why I always hate when I'm having conversations with people and they'll say, well it's true for me.
25:52: And I say, well what do you mean? They'll say, well it's true for me.
26:01: Yes, you know really what they mean, but I'll say, so what you're saying is that something can be true propositionally or objectively, can be true for one person but not true for another person.
26:14: I'll say absolutely, I'll say that, see, I don't believe that.
26:17: I don't believe that truth changes per individual, but there are people who do.
26:25: And this is, again, the issue of neo-orthodoxy is stresses the subjective, rejects the proposition, rejects the objective.
26:35: It's at the heart of relativism.
26:37: By the way, my sermon this morning is on relativism, so you guys are just getting a preview.
26:43: Because that's the stress of this, is the idea that you get to determine, you get to determine how you understand and interpret and apply whatever truth you accept.
27:05: And so we read the Bible, it talks about mankind falling into sin.
27:10: One of the things neo-orthodoxy rejects is the fall.
27:14: The idea that we are all sinners by nature.
27:18: In fact, I remember neo-orthodoxy has really, existentialism neo-orthodoxy really influences a lot.
27:24: When I was in college, we read a book, in the very first page of the first, first page of the book, it said, um, we used to believe, our man used to believe that he was born sinful, he was born with a sin nature, but now we know, whatever.
27:41: I said, I just kind of checked out at that point, but now we know what? He's not? Man's not sinful by nature? See, neo-orthodoxy teaches that the fall is something everyone commits individually.
27:53: Fall isn't something that's a collective thing, that we've all fallen in Adam, but that the fall itself is something that each of us do.
28:00: We all, you know, we all sort of have our own fall, our own mistakes, and so we're all sort of, it's a subjective thing, it's not an objective thing.
28:09: I want to read again a little, just quick note here.
28:11: The Bible is said to contain within it as inspired witness, but it is a mistake to directly identify scripture as the Word of God.
28:18: Jesus, the person, is the Word of God.
28:20: The Bible can become the Word of God only when the person chooses to use it to reveal, only when God chooses to use it to reveal himself.
28:28: So again, the Bible itself isn't the Word of God, Jesus is the Word of God, to the neo-orthodox, that Jesus is the Word of God, not the Bible.
28:36: So the Bible simply is a book, and when God chooses to use it to reveal himself to you, he will, but that's up to God, and how he does it is up to him, and ultimately the Bible then becomes sort of a wax nose, as Martin Luther said, sort of just be twisted and turned however we want it.
28:53: It's very dangerous, very dangerous theology, and my time is running short, but let me just kind of sort of bring everything around.
29:05: We're going to talk about this more next week when we actually get to the book.
29:08: I'll make a copy for everyone next week from the book, but ultimately the neo-orthodox movement is really concerned with understanding subjectivism rather than objective truth, and this is at the heart of most of the problems in the church today, is the absolute abandonment of the concept of objective truth.
29:39: We have, even in the most conservative churches, I would say we're pretty conservative, at least in our theology.
29:48: Even in the most conservative churches, there has been an abandonment of objective truth, because you will still hear people say, well what does that mean to you? Like in a Bible study.
30:02: You hear somebody say, what does that mean to you? I don't care.
30:07: It doesn't matter what it means, but you'll still hear that.
30:13: It reminds me of the book, The Age of Reason, because it's the reason of man that always seems to creep in, and it's the logic of the world, and they're, well, we now know, so they always want to get in and mess things up based on their own knowledge or what perceived knowledge.
30:40: Neo-Orthodoxy claims many Orthodox doctrines of the faith.
30:45: We're going to talk about that more next week.
30:47: They claim to hold to Orthodoxy, and that's again why they claim, you know, it's called Neo-Orthodoxy, but where it departs is in the most critical area.
30:56: It is in the authority and inspiration of the Bible.
31:00: Once you've given up the Bible, everything else is up for grabs.
31:06: Once you've given up the authority of Scripture, everything else is up for debate.
31:13: It can ultimately be lost.
31:16: One of the most precious parts of systematic theology is bibliology, the study of the Bible.
31:29: Why is it that we can trust it? Where did it come from? How do we know where it came from? These are all parts that we really need to understand.
31:37: I listened to, last night in preparation for this message, I listened to a liberal professor who was just a religion professor, was not a Christian, at least from what I could gather.
31:51: He knew a lot.
31:52: He wasn't a dumb person, certainly had a lot of knowledge, but I listened to a lot of things in preparation for teaching and whatnot.
31:59: And it was just interesting listening to him talk, because he would refer to the fundamentalists as naive.
32:11: Now, not necessarily in an ugly way, because he wasn't any nicer to the liberals in the sense, because he would, you know, refer to them in different ways that were somewhat derogatory as well.
32:24: I think he was sort of an equal opportunity basher, if you will.
32:29: He sort of just bashed everyone.
32:31: But he did say that the approach of the fundamentalists to the Bible, of it being the absolute Word of God and being without error, is a naive approach.
32:43: And I'll say this, if you have never sought to understand where the Bible came from, how we have it in the form that it is currently in, the transmission, canonization, translation of the text of Scripture, I think there is some naivete in the modern church.
33:17: Because people have not been willing to learn these things.
33:22: It's not naive to believe the Bible is the Word of God, but it is naive if you don't know why you believe it's the Word of God.
33:35: I don't know why I have faith, but I do.
33:49: Challenged on why there's 66 books.
34:00: Why? What do you mean? Some are taken out? Okay.
34:03: See, just on that very statement you just made, you said some are taken out.
34:07: Some of what? See, we don't have time to get into it.
34:13: We don't have time.
34:14: Okay, we don't have time today, but this is what we're going to talk about more next week.
34:19: There is a reason to believe it, but most people don't know what that reason is.
34:23: Most people don't.
34:25: You go to your average fundamentalist church.
34:29: You ask them, why do you believe the Bible? Because Mama did.
34:36: If you think I'm lying, you think I'm wrong, try me.
34:40: Go somewhere.
34:40: Ask them.
34:42: Ask them why is there 66 books and not 67.
34:48: Why don't you have Maccabees in your Bible? The original King James Bible, 1611, had all the Apocrypha in it.
35:00: Why don't you have the Apocrypha? See, this is the issue.
35:08: This is how neo-orthodoxy creeps in.
35:10: It creeps in on the heels of ignorance.
35:12: We don't know, yet we proclaim we have the truth.
35:18: We should know, and we can know.
35:21: The truth is there, but we often are satisfied in not knowing.
35:29: Alright, I've gone further than I wanted to, but I hope that I've challenged you to at least think through these things.
35:34: Let's pray.
35:35: Father, thank you for this time to study.
35:38: Help us in the weeks to come understand even better why we would hold to the inspiration and authority of Scripture.
35:44: In Jesus' name, Amen.