QOTD - A Malnourishment that Leads to Death

From Dale Bruner's Matthew: A Commentary. Volume 1: The Christbook

A church that is not nourished yesterday, today, and tomorrow by the wholesome food of the Word of God in Scripture - a church not ruled and dominated by exegesis - is on her way to death. For too long the mainline churches in Christendom have illustrated this death march by teaching and preaching a Bible that has been only marginally appropriated (witness the death of the biblical-language requirement in many seminaries and denominations) because, it is said, there are in fact so many other imperative issues. (What is Hebrew in a hungry world?) We have become churches without doctrinal passion (for doctrinal passion would be "fundamentalism," the kiss of death), and a result has been people leaving our churches in droves and flocking to what are called independent or Bible churches where, at least, they are given doctrines served with fire. A return by mainline churches to a responsible christocentric biblical passion will be a return to apostolic-catholic-Reformation Christianity with all of this Christianity's perennial sources of spiritual and social renewal."

Bruner's words were first published in 1987, and yet most mainline denominations persist with their marginalization of the Word of God with predicable results. For example, on July 1, the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) announced, in a classic Friday-night-news-dump kind of way, that the denomination lost 61,000 members in 2010 alone.