Remember “records”? Those 12-inch wide platters of vinyl we used to listen to on “record players” or “turn-tables”? Yeah, well, if you got a scratch on your record, it could end up “skipping,” and getting stuck so that one brief section of the song, say, about 1.5 seconds or so, would keep repeating itself over and over again until you “nudged” the needle out of that groove into the next one (ah, technology!).
Well, that’s how I feel about the rC’s out in Blogopolis. Right now the song is “Let’s be kinder and gentler,” but the second stanza is always “not like the people who oppose us, and especially that James White guy.” And like the record with the scratch that repeats itself, the same scenario just repeats itself over and over again. In simplified form, it goes like this,
Me: So, Rome is not a true Church because it lacks the gospel, for it teaches such things as the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice, limited in its effect, purgatory, indulgences, sacramental confession and absolution, and it denies the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.
rC: You radical Baptists are so narrow minded and focused upon only your views of “truth” as propositions floating about without any connection to the space-time continuum!
Me: But I am just following the example of the Apostle Paul, who, when he wrote to the Galatians.
rC: Oh, as if you can exercise objective exegesis and come to such conclusions without reference to the traditional and cultural matrix (or matrices) that so deeply impact your reading of the text of Scripture! I bet you haven’t even read Wittgenstein like I have, so you are simply naive to think you can even begin to enter fully into the context of Paul in Galatians!
Me: I reject, of course, the idea that one has to know Wittgenstein’s theories to accurately handle the word of God or to understand what Paul was saying to the Galatians! Goodness, couldn’t the Galatians figure it out, long before Wittgenstein? Do you not see how you are destroying the functional perspicuity of Scripture by taking that stance?
rC: I am doing nothing of the kind! How incredibly mean-spirited of you to go ad-hominem like that, and attack me personally! And you claim to be a minister! You radical Anabaptists are all alike! And why don’t you ever interact with what we say, anyway? You talk a lot about sola scriptura, but why don’t you practice it! We raise all these deep biblical presentations and you just ignore them!
And so it goes. Round and round. I saw a comment about myself just today as a “vocal critic” and how I have failed to interact with the viewpoints presented by the rC’s! So, if I respond, as I did a few days ago, to Mark Horne’s comments, without saying a word about Mark Horne as a person, or anyone else, but instead generalize about the movement when I speak of its functional diminishment of the perspicuity and clarity of the text of Scripture, I am being mean spirited and personal; yet, at the very same time, the substance of those comments has been completely ignored by the rC’s in favor of their “Oh, he’s so mean to disagree with us!” tactic, and yet they can still say I am the one not interacting with their position! I am not the only one who has concluded that there is something about putting two contradictory terms together in a single name that results in a major disconnection with reality itself.
