So Who Exactly Is On Notice?

I've never met Bob Hyatt, but I enjoy his blog and, much of the time, the way his brain works. He's started a conversation/discussion about Mark Driscoll's latest lecture - one given at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. There Driscoll says that Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Rob Bell are heretics. (The names are separated from "heresy" by a few intervening sentences, but the title is applied.)
     Now, I also have never met Driscoll and I don't know exactly what he means by heretic or heresy (Does he think they're condemned?). But I have listened to the mp3 of the talk and I'd largely agree with most of what Mark says. And, frankly, how he says it. I cannot comment on McLaren and Pagitt, since I've heard very little or read very little of either men. But I too think that Bell went over the line in Velvet Elvis discussing whether Jesus' birth of a Virgin is an essential of the faith. The Virgin Birth is an essential.
     On Bell's side, he believes in the Virgin Birth - just that he doesn't think it crumbles the faith if it is dispensed with. We will have to disagree there. If I can dispense with the Virgin Birth, excuse my slippery slope, what else do I think I can dispense with? It seems the Scriptures are quite clear in speaking of Mary's virginity, and Mary's virginity allows and guards Christ's divinity. That being said, Bell does believe in the Virgin Birth - so I don't think one can call him a heretic for believing what all Christians believe.
     It's an interesting conversation taking place on the edges of the emerging conversation. I pray that it proceeds and ends in a greater love for one another rather than a diminishing of that love. And it raises some interesting questions: What is heresy? What is orthodoxy? Why does Driscoll believe that he has the authority to say that someone who believes differently is a heretic? Why do I?

Pagels Read Judas, Colbert Don't

I'm not sure if the name Elaine Pagels means anything to you or not. But she and Bart Ehrman (former Wheaton grad, now unbeliever) seem to be the leading textual-criticism darlings of those who would contest the gospel and therefore the veracity of the New Testament Scriptures. They say that the early Church fathers censured/buried any of the early writings that didn't agree with what they were teaching - as if antiquity itself is reason enough for our acceptance of these writings (Why should we accept John's gospel over Judas's? they would ask).

Indeed, the early fathers did bury these texts. This is one of the reasons why we submit to the authority of the Church - she alone has and has had the authority to decide what is orthodoxy and what is heterodoxy. It is because of her, guided by the Holy Spirit, that we have the New Testament canon as we have it.

HT: Mike Aquilina, and a trail of others

Quoting Chesterton

"Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded."

- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics