A hundred and fifty years ago the mainline Protestant denominations were, by today’s standards, as morally orthodox as the strictest of our era’s fundamentalists, let alone conservative evangelicals.

Why the change? And what does that change imply for the future?

Why The Change?
Well, the change has occurred because of a lack of living authority, which leads to division, which leads to doctrinal drift.

The Bible is the authority-center for evangelicals (as it once was for mainline Protestants). But the Bible doesn’t speak up to say, “Hey, waitaminute; you’re interpreting me wrongly!” So in practice the Bible is almost infinitely malleable for the purposes of teaching moral and theological truths.

As a result, when a denomination starts off with a very conservative set of moral teachings, it only starts off that way. Cultural drift occurs, and there are always tares and wheat, mixed together, inside every denomination. Traditions begin to shift over time.

Now some folk resist the drift towards worldliness; they’re called “conservatives” or “traditionalists.” Others embrace it; they’re called “liberals” or “progressives.” When the two groups can’t agree with one another, the denomination splits into two denominations, one more worldly than the other.

This is the history of denominations, of course: In the beginning, there was The Church. The Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic separated; there are now fifteen or twenty organizations constituting Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Likewise, in the West, there was the Catholic church under Rome; then the Protestants formed three or four separate parallel organizations. But each of these split along conservative/liberal lines, several times over. A hundred years later there were a couple of hundred “churches” (from an organizational perspective) in the West; a hundred years after that, nearly a thousand; by the 21st century, nearly twenty thousand. (And that’s if you don’t count all the one-off churches unconnected to any denomination.)

Don’t misunderstand me: I am not here talking about unique permutations of doctrines and creeds. One could not honestly argue that there are twenty-thousand-plus different Protestantisms in terms of unique core beliefs. But if we count organizations containing more than one congregation, over whom the organization can exert influence about what the leaders in that congregation teach? There are easily 20K plus in the U.S. alone.)

So history shows that division occurs over differences of doctrine, and that the Bible provides no practical source for unity.

Fine, one might say: But does that prove that gradual liberalization occurs? Is it not, one might ask, equally likely that a unified denomination has the same quantity of liberals and conservatives before the split as the two denominations have, taken together, after the split? Doesn’t this endless mitosis merely result in the clearer labeling of the orthodox and the heterodox by sorting them into different organizations? Is there any reason to believe it actually increases the numbers of the heterodox?

There is.

First, when we compare the morals of the denominations of four hundred years ago to those of evangelicals today, it is obvious that the earlier ones were far stricter, and far more open about it.

On masturbation? Abortion? Fornication? Adultery? Remarriage after divorce? Extravagant living? Failing to tithe? Immodesty? Does anyone not know that our Christian forebears were, by modern standards, positively browbeaten from the pulpit regularly on all these topics? Find me an evangelical church today that from the pulpit teaches, boldly, the morals of yesteryear! There aren’t any.

So change has certainly happened.

Second, we can easily see why this is so. The mechanism is related to the doctrinal divisions:

Moral standards are traditions; they are not independently and exhaustively reasoned out from first principles by each person who decides to adhere to them, but are instead more “caught than taught.”

So when young congregants are raised in one of the conservative denominations, they “catch” their moral code — but some less well than others. That is, they either pick up the fullness of conservative morals, or a compromise between those morals and those of the secular world.

And when they are raised in one of the liberal denominations, they either pick up the fullness of liberal morals, or a compromise between those morals and those of the secular world. (Remember, this is one of the liberal denominations, so their moral starting point was already compromised to some degree!)

A few decades later, the conservative and the liberal denominations will each split, but they’ll rarely produce offspring denominations more conservative than the original. Instead, one of the offspring will be as conservative as the original, and the other, more liberal.

And of course, when a new generation of children are raised in these four denominations (where there once were two), two groups will be raised with less-conservative morals than their forebears prior to the split.

There will be exceptions to this pattern, but what I have described is the norm. The outcome over many generations may easily be foreseen!

What Does This Imply For The Future?

In the near future, a large minority of today’s evangelical churches will be solemnizing gay marriages. In the far future (say, 200 years?) most of them will do so.

Your grandchildren’s Christianity won’t look much like yours, just as yours doesn’t look much like your grandparents’, and theirs didn’t look much like their grandparents’.

Want to Buck the Trend?

There are Christian organizations capable of bucking the trend. Eastern Orthodox churches have not liberalized as much as Western Protestantism, because Apostolic-era traditions provide additional data. The practice of only permitting Biblical interpretations which could plausibly have been held by Church Fathers in the first 500 years of Christianity has, therefore, a stabilizing impact.

And, while lay Catholics and some parishes in the U.S. have become very liberalized, it must be noted that the teaching of the Papacy hasn’t, because the Popes have an even more effective mechanism for preventing doctrinal drift; namely, the claim of infallibility. If there ever was a pope who taught (as a matter of his Magisterial office to the whole Church) that homosexual liasons were intrinsically disordered and sinful, no later pope or bishop can ever say otherwise without entirely destroying the claim to papal infallibility, and thus destroying the Catholic Church. So in Roman Catholicism, each pope paints all his successors into a corner. The papacy may do a piss-poor job enforcing their teachings (witness pro-choice Catholics in Congress), but the teachings themselves, once adopted, don’t (can’t) change. That’s a boon.

Conclusion

We can therefore anticipate that the Christianity of 100 years from now won’t look much like today’s, in many moral areas, except for the Orthodox and Catholic communions.

Most churches, however, don’t have ordained music leaders; these folk are “on staff” in the same sense that the church secretary or nursery administrator is “on staff.”

But that’s a red herring. The question of the historical trend towards heterodoxy is the broader question, and female musicians aren’t especially relevant.

I agree, Don – except that I assume you mean a person should compare all spiritual teachings to Scripture if they want to be a Berean. I am a great believer in going to primary sources.

My favorite egalitarian is Dorothy L. Sayers, but she is nothing like the CBE egals. I liked Dr. Stackhouse’s book, but I disagree with his conclusions. He actually helped me define myself more clearly as a complementarian.

I have read quite a few articles at the CBE. I would read the more recent book defending egalitarianism – the name escapes me at the moment – if it is available free online. I have pretty much quit buying books. We live in a condo.

I have read many, many posts written by egalitarian apologists such as yourself and Sue. I have “dialogued” many, many hours with egalitarians.

I read pretty much all of Gundry’s online materials.

DLS is the only one I take seriously at this point in time.

Brian, it seems to me that the egalitarians would put the Holy Spirit at war with Himself and men and women at war with their own nature.

Not sure this is the right place to dive into all of that. But, I’ve read many of your comments over the last couple of years here and so I know that you are a thoughtful guy. In light of that, along with your declaration of a fairly extreme version of sola scriptura, I would guess that you are familiar with the historical and ecclesial arguments I would make anyway. Hope you had a great Christmas.

Russ

If you want me to understand your claims, you will need to unpack them more for me. Also, it would help to know from what perspective you are coming from? For example, I am evangelical prot studying Hebraic roots of Christianity and am egal.

Your question is also implicitly a question to all prots (and Messianics for that matter), unless they accept all the declarations of the ecumenical councils to the time of the listing of the books.

I will give my answer, other prots or Messianics may have other answers.

Part of my answer is seeing the canonization process as recorded in Scripture itself, as this guides what happens later. This includes the process where Scripture comes into being and later is recognized as Scripture.

Part of my answer is my relationship with God. I get confirmation thru my study of the Scriptures as a consistent story across many years and many authors.

Part of my answer is that I see the church council as endorsing the existing canon in operation in the vast majority of congregations, rather than selecting items to be in the canon or not. That is, they did not have the authority to select anything, the most they might have done is endorse what already was the case. And it was already the case because the 12 DID have the authority, as guided by the Holy Spirit.

Of course there are many details I have left out, but that is a summary.

You state, “…I am one of those that actually believe the Bible alone is sufficient for faith and practise, so I prefer not to use terms not found in the Bible. I am non-creedal…”.

Thanks for the clarification. As an explicitly non-creedal person, how do you know which books of the Bible to use? There is no inspired list of books in the Bible. If you use the 66 books of the Protestant canon (or those of the Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic canons), then you are explicitly affirming a creed or declaration of which books are inspired. Help me to understand your position better.

Thanks, Tim