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Thursday, June 5, 2008

Who's Your Boss & Authority?

I came across an article by Gary Thomas titled Who's Your Boss. It is about our arrogance in thinking that we can somehow discover "truths" that are contrary to the best Christian minds the Church has produced through out her history. Men like Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, Wesley, B.B. Warfield, Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, J.I. Packer have affirmed, embraced and defended the basic truths of the faith through out Church history.

I thought I'd pass on this quote below. You can find the entire article by clicking here.

Up until relatively recently (the past century or so), hardly any serious believers suggested that the numerous verses in Scripture talking about a husband's authority at home, and the ones assuming that elders in the church are male, with Paul tracing their authority back to creation, were anything less than clear. The church has spoken, without significant exception, and with overwhelming consensus, for 1,900 years on this very topic.

How this authority was exercised, many times maliciously and without the corresponding call to male sacrifice and even martyr-like selflessness (Eph. 5:26), led us to be quite embarrassed at such an "antiquated" thought, so we have spent a generation trying to show how Scripture simply can't mean what it seems to say, and what the church has said it says, for almost two thousand years.

In light of this, when one pastor, with three years of Bible school beneath his belt, and four months of personal study, comes to a conclusion that differs from this, perhaps you'll understand why it doesn't carry much weight with me.

Should it with anyone?

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