Evangelikalismus, intellektuelle Ehrlichkeit und akademische Freiheit
First of all it is vital to realize there are two types of Evangelicals.
1) Conservative Evangelicals believing that everything the Biblical writers intended is true and the Bible is the unique revelation of God to man.
2) Progressive Evangelicals holding the counter-intuitive view that the Biblical writers did mistakes but that everything that God intended through the text is without errors and that the Bible is the unique revelation of God to man.
It turns out that a considerable number of ID-creationists (proponents of Intelligent Design) are conservative Evangelicals.
They complained very loudly about the alleged lack of academic freedom of defending their form of creationism within the Academia through their film Expelled.
This raises the obvious question: how well does academic freedom fare in Evangelical universities, seminaries and colleges?
The answer is: it is very far from being perfect (which is probably the understatement of the year).
Thom Stark relates the case of Dr. Rollston who got fired because he accurately reported that in most parts of the Bible, women get described as humans of second class (like in all other cultures of the Ancient Near East).
Even more baffling is the fact that Mike Licona got fired, tough he is himself a conservative Evangelical. He wrote in one of his books about the resurrection of Jesus that he believed that Matthew at end of his Gospel did not mean that an army of zombies invaded Jerusalem but intended this as an allegory.
Atheist anti-apologist John Loftus reports similar cases on his blog.
All this non-sense led progressive Evangelical Peter Enns to write a post about the intellectual suicide many honest academics have to go trough within Evangelical institutions because they have no other choice than holding fast to narrow views.
However one might disagree with progressive Evangelicalism, it cannot be denied that this does not lead to the intellectual disasters one sees in fundamentalist circles.
Before whining because they are not allow to teach ID-creationism in public schools, conservative Evangelicals would do much better to keep themselves in check.
Let Jesus have the final word.
3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
(Mattew 7.3)
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