In group Bible studies generally, participants are led to look directly for personal devotional applications without first contemplating the writers’ points about the greatness, goals, methods, and mystery of God. In putting together Christian books and magazines for popular reading and in composing, preaching, hearing, and thinking about sermons, the story is the same: it is assumed that our reaction to realities is more significant than any of the realities to which we react. Thus we learn to cultivate a mode of piety that rests upon a smudgy, deficient, and sometimes misleading conception of who and what the God we serve really is. Brought up on this, we now reflect the subjectivist turn of the Western thought-world of more than a century ago: personal guesses and fantasies about God replace the church’s dogma as our authority, a hermeneutic of habitual distrust and suspicion of dogma establishes itself, and dogma becomes a dirty word, loaded with overtones of obscurantism, tunnel vision, unreality, superstition, and mental enslavement.
J.I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett | Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old Fashioned Way, 11.
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Christopher Smith
Christopher Smith is originally from Bellevue, Nebraska. A graduate of Westminster Seminary California (M.Div 2019; MA (Historical Theology) 2020). He is associate pastor of Phoenix URC in the United Reformed Churches of North America. He is currently pursuing a ThM in systematic theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.
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Packer succumbed to this in his embrace of two gospel destroying movements: theistic evolution and Evangelicals and Catholics Together. He knows this top all to well, bowing to the cool people.
Packer hits the societal nail on the head with his statement that “our reaction to realities is more significant than any of the realities to which we react”.
That describes modern-day societal reactions to virtually EVERYthing that crosses our transoms: How does it affect ME and my “identity”? is the paramount question most folks ask.
Absolutely! The subjective, “what does it mean to you?” has replaced the Reformers’ quest for the precise meaning God intended by giving us the Word, as if Bible study was just a critique of another human author’s work. This is another symptom of modern evangelicalism, which tries to make religion relevant to the human desires of this life in order to keep them coming in the door of the churches. It sets up the idea that the Bible’s meaning is as varied as the people who read it, and it can mean whatever the individual decides.
Groupthink