Inclusivity and the Bible

Jason Rosenhouse thinks he knows an apt summary of the Bible when he comes across one. And thus he approvingly quotes Cal Thomas, who wrote:

Inclusivity has nothing to do with the foundational truths set forth in Scripture. The church, which belongs to no denomination, but to its Founding Father and His Son, is about exclusivity for those who deny the faith.

Exclusivity and inclusivity can both be found in Scripture, and neither strand can be eliminated simply by pointing out the other. Both are there, and it is precisely this that makes it impossible to simply “believe the Bible”.

If those who understand Christianity exclusively can find passages to support their viewpoint, those who are looking for support for being inclusive can find plenty of justification too. The most striking example, to my mind, is to be found in the case of Paul’s strong arguments for the inclusion of the Gentiles, those who were previously excluded from the definition of God’s people. Cal Thomas further wrote that “The church is inclusive only for those who are adopted by faith into God’s family.” What he fails to note is how Paul set aside the clear teaching of Scripture in order to welcome new adoptees.

And so the irony is that Cal Thomas condemns a church in his time for doing precisely what Scripture itself says the church did nearly two millenia ago, namely set aside some Scripture in order to apply the principles found in other Scripture, so as to include those formerly excluded.

Those who most adamantly oppose the “church of what’s happening now” usually do so because they haven’t really understood the “church of what was happening then”. They are good at repeating select verses from the Bible, and manage to persuade even many of their opponents that their summaries of “what the Bible says” are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (Rosenhouse is a case in point). But what they’ve missed is any sense of what the authors of the Scriptures themselves were doing when they rewrote what others before them had written, reinterpreted Scripture, and even appealed to some Scripture in order to argue that other Scripture had now been superceded or simply set aside.

Why should parrotting some of their words be judged more important, or more faithful to their message, than understanding and emulating what they were doing when they wrote those words?