Sorry for posting two times in a row. I have another repsonse and our comment section was getting terribly hard to read. Steve, quite dancing and get in the game!

One last note before my response. I hope all reading this do not make me out to be some cranky old foundationalist who needs to pick a fight to feel like I am defending the truth. i am having so much fun with this and hope we can keep it light-hearted and fun.

Kurbis,

Thanks for he reply. I agree wholeheartedly that the church has aligned themselves with a political party that has its holes in it. I think the emergent church has raised a great issue in Evangelical Christianity's blind trust in “a party”. And to that extent it is frustrating to see the atrocities happening while Christians are ignorant to the outcomes. However, saying a political party represents evangelical Christianity is a bit of a generalization. I loved your sentence: "We are not American Christians. Rather we are Christians sojourning in America." The inability of comfortable Christians to see this is to our shame.

I would also agree that evangelicalism is extremely guilty of marrying Bible to culture. I could give you many personal frustrations of cultural tradition infecting the church. My issue with the emergent church is they are simply contemporizing the problem. I am not trying to speak on behalf of the infallibility of evangelical Christianity, because I am well aware that does not exist.

The one area that I still get confused about in your logic is your understanding of the Bible. You state, "Fifth, Jesus promised us the Spirit, not a book." That is a great comment, but it comes from the very book that is being discredited. I agree that there is truth outside the pages of the Bible, but your very argument uses the Bible. How would you know what was promised except through reading the word? Is this not the same example of the atrocities stated in history? Aren’t you taking bits and pieces to make a viewpoint valid?

The reason I say it is more then a simple matter of trust is because I can agree that God can exist in a man's heart without words on a page. But I get concerned when people feel the need to take away the words on the page that are so useful and powerful to explain who the God is that is living in the heart. It is not a matter of trust, but a reaction to the attitude that takes away stock in the Bible. If God works through people who have only partial sections of scripture or none at all, the praise be to God. However, that does not mean we should get rid of the books importance when we have been blessed with it in its entirety.