[The intellect of fallen man] may be compared to a buzz-saw that is sharp and shining, ready to cut the boards that come to it. Let us say that a carpenter wishes to cut fifty boards for the purpose of laying the floor of a house. He has marked his boards. He has set his saw. He begins at one end of the mark on the board. But he does not know that his seven-year-old son has tampered with the saw and changed its set. The result is that every board he saws is cut slantwise and thus unusable because too short except at the point where the saw made its first contact with the wood. As long as the set of the saw is not changed, the result will always be the same. So also whenever the teachings of Christianity are presented to the natural man, they will be cut according to the set of sinful human personality.

Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., 97

This is a very helpful metaphor for understanding the Reformed idea of the noetic effects of sin. The saw (analogous to our reasoning faculty) does indeed work; it is the same saw that was previously set correctly. Because of its faulty setting, however, even though it works, it always cuts with the wrong slant.

Note by K. Scott Oliphant in Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., 97, n. 18.

There are many Christian people today, it seems to me, who claim to be believers in the inspiration of the Scripture but who nevertheless quite deliberately avoid large portions of Scripture because they are difficult. But if you believe that the whole of Scripture is the Word of God, such an attitude is sinful; it is our business to face the Scriptures. One advantage in preaching through a book of the Bible, as we are proposing to do, is that it compels us to face every single statement, come what may, and stand before it, and look at it, and allow it to speak to us.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, God’s Ultimate Purpose, 84.

The current issue of the Economist has an informative article about Christianity in China. Here are a few significant paragraphs.

On the number of Christians in China:

ZHAO XIAO, a former Communist Party official and convert to Christianity, smiles over a cup of tea and says he thinks there are up to 130m Christians in China. This is far larger than previous estimates. . . . If so, it would mean China contains more Christians than Communists (party membership is 74m) and there may be more active Christians in China than in any other country. In 1949, when the Communists took power, less than 1% of the population had been baptised, most of them Catholics. Now the largest, fastest-growing number of Christians belong to Protestant “house churches”.

On the growth of the house churches:

House churches have an unclear status, neither banned nor fully approved of. As long as they avoid neighbourly confrontation and keep their congregations below a certain size (usually about 25), the Protestant ones are mostly tolerated, grudgingly. Catholic ones are kept under closer scrutiny, reflecting China’s tense relationship with the Vatican. Private meetings in the houses of the faithful were features of the early Christian church, then seeking to escape Roman imperial persecution. Paradoxically, the need to keep congregations small helped spread the faith. That happens in China now. The party, worried about the spread of a rival ideology, faces a difficult choice: by keeping house churches small, it ensures that no one church is large enough to threaten the local party chief. But the price is that the number of churches is increasing.

On the need for educated pastors:

Abundant church-creation is a blessing and a curse for the house-church movement, too. The smiling Mr Zhao says finance is no problem. “We don’t have salaries to pay or churches to build.” But “management quality” is hard to maintain. Churches can get hold of Bibles or download hymn books from the internet. They cannot so easily find experienced pastors. “In China”, says one, “the two-year-old Christian teaches the one-year-old.” Because most Protestant house churches are non-denominational (that is, not affiliated with Lutherans, Methodists and so on), they have no fixed liturgy or tradition. Their services are like Bible-study classes. This puts a heavy burden on the pastor.

On Christianity as a private or public matter in China:

So far, Christianity’s spread has been largely a private matter for individual believers. The big question is whether it can remain private. The extent of its growth and the number of its adherents would suggest not. But at the moment, both Christians and Communists seem willing to let a certain ambiguity linger a while longer.

“Christians are willing to stay within the system,” says Mr Zhao. “Christianity is also the basis for good citizenship in China.” Most Christians say that theirs is not a political organisation and they are not seeking to challenge the party. But they also say clashes with public policy are inevitable: no Christian, one argues, should accept the one-child policy, for example.

Here’s the point Van Til was driving at in the previous post (though the whole argument is worth reading, even if it is a bit long).

It would appear then that the theory of being that we have presented fits in with the notion of the Bible as an authoritative revelation of God. Such a being as the Bible speaks of could not speak otherwise than with absolute authority. In the last analysis we shall have to choose between two theories of knowledge. According to one theory God is the final court of appeal; according to the other theory man is the final court of appeal.

Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., 58.

The Associated Press Stylebook has a decent working definition of Fundamentalism (even if most reporters don’t heed it):

fundamentalist The word gained usage in an early 20th century fundamentalist-modernist controversy within Protestantism. In recent years, however, fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians. In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself.

In the October edition of First Things, Richard John Neuhaus uses an article in the New Yorker as the basis for a discussion of changes in evangelical political involvement.

Here are a few key paragraphs.

In the last issue I discussed “An Evangelical Manifesto,” with its palpable and touching eagerness to be accepted by those whom its signers view as their cultural betters. The message of the manifesto is: “Please, we are not that kind of evangelical.”

p. 62

But sometimes what passes for change is a replay of very old stories. Rick Warren is quoted by Fitzgerald as declaring to a Baptist convention that the great need is for  ‘a second Reformation,’ one that would be about ‘deeds not creeds.’ I hope he is misquoted . . . . The slogan ‘deeds not creeds’ was of course the rallying cry of the social-gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was the “modernism” to which first fundamentalism and then its post-World War II reconfiguration in evangelicalism was the response. And now the New Evangelicals are hailed as the social-gospel movement redivivus. As one never runs out of occasions for mentioning, history has many ironies in the fire.

p. 63

The only reason a Frances Fitzgerald is interested in evangelicals or evangelicalism is that these people are political players. For people such as Fitzgerald, politics is “the real world.” In the perspective of Carl Henry’s 1947 manifesto and the emergence of that earlier instantiation of “the new evangelicals,” the so-called religious right of recent years may be seen as the first inning in the game of cultural and political engagement. The evangelicals didn’t always play it well, but at least they were playing in the big leagues. Now, impressed by their unaccustomed influence, some evangelicals are prepared to concede the game in return for a permanent pass to the stadium. If Fitzgerald and like-minded commentators are right, evangelicalism is joining liberal Christianity on the well-worn path to public irrelevance.

p. 63

Neuhaus, however, closes on a positive note:

It is a heady sensation to be exalted by the likes of the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, but it is an embarrassingly paltry reward for betraying the promise of evangelicalism in American public life, and I am persuaded that most evangelicals will not accept the deal.

p. 63