9/20/09

If liberals tend toward intellectual antinomianism, then fundalit evangelicals tend toward doctrinal donatism.

do you refer to conservatives’ tendency to want to exclude those that don’t follow the given set of beliefs and positions they consider essential?

Yes, but there’s also this element of perfectionism and legalism. It’s not only moral legalism, but intellectual or doctrinal legalism. It’s the notion that one must be “perfect” according to evangelical “orthodox” standards in order to be counted as a participant of the church. In short, it is a salvation by intellectual works, and it falls within the scope of the donatist heresy that Augustine denounced.

Interesting how those old heresies come up in new ways – Mark Noll also talks about Manichaeism in ‘The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind’ by which I think he means the idea that we have the secret knowledge that is not available to the ignorant masses about the 70 weeks of Daniel and whatnot.

A Presb. theo. named Shirley Guthrie (but a male), who taught at Columbia Seminary in Atlanta used to claim that all heresies were, at bottom, Trinitarian heresies. I used to think that made no sense, but more and more I see what he meant.

Actually that would be gnosticism. Manichaeism is a cosmic dualism in which Good and Evil, God and Satan, are equal in power and battle against each other throughout eternity. Like gnosticism, Manichaeism also denies value to the bodily world. Noll applies this to the evangelical dualism between matter and spirit, body and soul, creation and heaven.