Sovereign Grace Baptist Church Meets weekly at 907 Hillsboro Boulevard, Manchester, TN, 37355. Currently, our church is without a pastor/elder and the members meet weekly for praise and worship in hymn, prayer, reading of Scripture, study of the word, and fellowship.
For Christian’s in today’s world, the issue of authority has been heightened once again. The evangelical cause suffered blows in the 1920’s while the moderates and fundamentalists fought over evolution and other matters. At the core of this dispute was the question of an ultimate standard of authority. Modernists at the time were strong on defending the so-called assured results of science. Fundamentalists, with all their eccentricities and “ghetto mentality,” had some things right. They were sure and correct in affirming the Holy Bible as God’s inerrant, infallible, and absolutely trustworthy record. This Holy Scripture was not an amalgam of some religious experiences with an evolving sense of true worship; it was a revelation from the Heavens. God’s Word was what God Himself has said.
This basic issue of authority has once again come to the fore as no other time. In our postmodern world of relativism and tolerance, the only notion of heresy is that there is no heresy. In this cultural milieu where everyone’s opinion is deemed right, any voice that claims an absolute truth or a definitive way for all peoples is branded as narrow minded, bigoted, intolerant, and unquestionably unwelcome. In itself this postmodernist or shall we say post-postmodernist way of viewing the world is in a sense self-referentially defeating, as there is no room for the evangelical Christian who rejects postmodernism and suggests that our authority is not grounded in a community agreed upon set of values or on subjective emotions that a group find to be “true” for them. How is this to fit in that everyone’s view is OK? It is not OK according to current public opinion for the evangelical gospel to sit at the table with all other truth claims.
What’s an evangelical to do? The temptation is to find some supposedly neutral ground upon which the Christian believer and the unbeliever may stand together. This appears to be a safe way to begin dialogue and hopefully will disarm prejudice against the truth of Christianity. But hold on a second. We just made an absolute truth claim concerning Christianity; we say it is truth. This merely echoes our Lord Jesus Christ’s commitment to the absolute trustworthiness and veracity of Holy Scripture. In this sense a Christian must follow His Lord, and not let the unbelieving person set the agenda. At the end of the day there is no middle ground or neutral ground. The differences that will inevitably emerge in the clash of worldviews, is determined by our starting places. The non-believer starts with experience, or science, or anti-supernatural bias, or materialism. Whatever it is, we are clear that we must start somewhere. The place we as Christian’s should start is the Truth of God’s Word. Jesus said it best; Thy Word is Truth. We begin our dialog and challenge to the unbelieving world showing the absolute incoherence and unintelligibility of their suppositions. We outline that they cannot live within their system. We counter their refuted position with the only way of explaining the world as we lay open God’s perspective. It is compelling as it is His creation, and He has set the rules of logic as the way we can infer with rationality and language His perspective from Scripture. At the end of the day, we are still in a deep battle over authority. We must stand upon God’s Holy Word, even as we stand under the authority of the God of the Bible. Indeed, Thy Word is truth!
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