Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
The world does not want the church’s approval. It has managed very well without that for many years and will continue to do so. What the world wants is the church’s capitulation. And however one cares to dress up these latest findings—as pastorally sensitive, as keeping up with the times, as affirming the marginalized—they represent the latest fulfillment of that desire.

A recent poll conducted by The Times of London indicates that a majority of Church of England clergy now favor gay marriage. The figures (53.4 percent in favor, 36.5 percent opposed) show a significant shift from 2014. Back then, in the aftermath of the legalization of gay civil marriage in the U.K., only 39 percent were in favor and 51 percent were opposed. There are numerous lessons here.
First, the old battle lines between conservative and liberal Christians have changed. In the past, it was the affirmation or denial of the supernatural claims of the Bible, supremely that of Jesus’s bodily resurrection, that divided churches. Today, it is questions of morality, specifically sexual morality, that are the points of contention. And these are of more significance for the broader life of the church within society. To affirm the resurrection might have made you look like a benighted fool, but societies generally tolerate benighted fools. To oppose our current Western cultural regime, where sexual identity is key to personal value, is to deny the humanity of fellow citizens. The world sees that as a deeply immoral act, and not one that will likely be tolerated forever. Christians need to understand that. This is not an excuse for abandoning biblical teaching on kind words turning away wrath or on blessing those who curse us. But it is to say that we should expect suffering, not op-eds in the Washington Post, to be our reward.
And that brings us to the second lesson. The clergy’s shift on this issue might well be motivated by pastoral intuitions to affirm people. It is a caring vocation and few, one hopes, enter it with a view to hurting others. Kindness is the order of the day. Ironically, however, this shift buys the immediate possibility of affirmation at huge long-term cost.
One reason for this is that gay marriage does not simply involve a minor expansion of the traditional concept. There was a time when gay writers such as Andrew Sullivan argued that allowing same-sex marriages would simply permit gay people to be part of a conservative institution. It is now clear that gay marriage did not merely expand the set of those considered to be married, but fundamentally evacuated marriage of meaning—or, more accurately, exposed the fact that it had already been fundamentally evacuated of meaning by the ready acceptance of no-fault divorce. It is no longer a unique relationship whose stability is important for its normative ends, but little more than a sentimental bond that only has to last for as long as it meets the emotional needs of the parties involved.
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Following the scientific community’s widespread adoption of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the geological uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell in the nineteenth century, Christian scholars were divided into three camps. On the left were the theological Liberals (i.e., Modernists) who sought to shoehorn the rapidly changing scientific consensus into the Bible or otherwise reject the Bible writ large. On the right were the theological reactionaries (i.e., Fundamentalists) that vigorously rejected the purported findings and theorizing of natural scientists. Between the two were those who sought honestly and sincerely to figure out what was going on.

Having established that Scripture is inspired by God (Articles VI through X) and infallible in nature (Article XI), the Chicago Statement proceeds to defend the Inerrancy of Scripture in all that follows. We have come to the heart of the matter. Article XII begins:
We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.
By this affirmation, the Statement makes two important theological moves. In the first place, it draws out the necessary implication of the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible as Holy Scripture. We know that God is truth (John 14:6) and does not change (Mal. 3:6; James 1:17), and we confess with Christ our Lord that His Word – being the God-breathed Word of truth (2 Tim. 3:16) – is likewise immutably true (John 17:17). If something is immutably true, then it must be without error (i.e., inerrant). God’s Word is immutably true and therefore necessarily inerrant.
In the second place, this affirmation includes an elegant explication of what it means for the Bible to be inerrant. The three terms used here as contrasts to inerrancy – falsehood, fraud, and deceit – clearly overlap in some measure. But are they simply synonyms? Did the framers of the Chicago Statement crack open a thesaurus and pick out three descriptors to develop the doctrine of inerrancy with a superficial statement of redundancy? I think not.
The inerrant Word of God is “free from all falsehood” in that it does not contain any error. There is neither jot nor tittle (Matt. 5:18) out of place or composed in error in the original manuscripts of God’s Word. The content of the now-lost autographs has been “by [God’s] singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages,” in the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which means that the Hebrew (and Aramaic) Old Testament and the Greek New Testament “are therefore authentical” (WCF 1.8). There are no errors or falsehoods due either to innocent mistakes, uncertain hypotheses, or malicious intent in God’s Word.
God’s Word is “free from all…fraud” in that it does not lie. Unlike the capricious false (and fraudulent) gods of the nations, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is true to His Word. We read in Numbers 23:19 “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent; has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?” The Apostle Paul grounds “the hope of eternal life” at the beginning of his letter to Titus in the ancient promise of God, “who cannot lie” (Titus 1:2).
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The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years. Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted into the then largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to follow.

When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.
Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.
Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment for infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.
Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flame throwers—an ancient precursor to napalm.
The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior thousand years of Roman jurisprudence.
Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell.
There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a huge Turkish army of over 150,000 attackers.
The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years. Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted into the then largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to follow.
So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?
Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy.
In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from Western Europe to the besieged city.
In fact, 250 years earlier, the Western Franks of the Fourth Crusade had detoured from the Holy Land to storm the supposedly allied Christian City of Constantinople.
Then they ransacked the city and hijacked the Byzantine Empire for a half-century. Constantinople never quite recovered.
The 14th-century Black Plague killed tens of thousands of Byzantines and scared thousands more into moving out of the cramped city.
But the aging and dying empire battled more than the challenges of internal divisions, or an unforeseen but deadly pandemic and the empire’s disastrous responses to it.
The last generations of Byzantines had inherited a global reputation and standard of living that they themselves no longer earned.
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