QOTD: Doubt What the World Exalts

Commenting on Matthew 4:3, the place where the tempter tempts Jesus with the words, "If you are the Son of God," Dale Bruner writes:

It is said we live in an age of doubt, in an age of the death of God. We must be careful how we say this. We ought not imply that human nature has normally liked the truth of God and that only recently, in modern times, have people found God doubtful. As the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531) ... reminds us, ever since the Fall, human nature has universally resisted the true God, hid from God, doubted, and distrusted God. Adam and Eve hid from God immediately after their rejection of God's command (Gen 3:8). And the apostle Paul taught us that we are not so much naturally seekers after God's truth as we are suppressors of it (Rom 1:18-3:20). Human nature lives in doubt of God's reality because it wants to. The last three centuries have simply succeeded in making this fact explicit and praiseworthy. Care needs to be taken lest we glorify doubt and make doubt seem more mature, advanced, and modern than faith. Doubt of God is not a virtue to preen. The praise of doubt is sometimes fulsome, especially in college settings, and is often boorish. Let us doubt a great deal, but not God. Let us especially doubt what the world exalts, "for what is exalted among human beings is an abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15). And one of the things secularism exalts is doubt of God. "Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth we cannot know it" (Pascal, Pensées).

Emphasis added. Excerpt from Matthew: A Commentary. The Christbook: Matthew 1-12, page 123.

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.