Gavin Ortlund is, without a doubt, my favorite Reformed Baptist clergyman YouTuber. I really appreciate his charitable approach, intellectual rigor, and defenses both of Christian belief in general, and classical Protestantism as well.
I'm looking forward to the day when he sees the light on bishops and infant baptism.
Here is a video that Ortlund did celebrating the early Methodist revival movement within the Anglican Church led by John and Charles Wesley. It's a good video, especially in looking at the conditions in England before this 'awakening' and some of the lessons we might apply today.
Since today is "Aldersgate day" - May 24th, when John Wesley had his "heart-warming" experience of assurance from the Holy Spirit that really sparked the revival - I commend it to you. Today is a good day to remember just how much influence a Spirit-filled renewal can have on the whole of a society - and today is a good day to pray for another one.
I believe one of the problems that plagues Christianity, and has become a serious stumbling block to many non-believers (and indeed believers), has been the assumption that empirical/scientific knowledge is the only (or the best) form of knowledge.
I believe that what happened was, in early Modernity, with the rise of modern science there was such obvious benefit to the scientific method as a way of gaining knowledge that people - in their excitement over the advancements being made - began to assume that empirical knowledge (the kind of knowledge achieved through scientific observation and experimentation) was the best kind of knowledge. Some (such as the "Positivists") held that it was the only kind of knowledge.
Like Joe Friday in the old "Dragnet" TV show, people wanted to build a worldview on "just the facts."
Christians should have been challenging this Modern conception of knowledge, but I think that too often they accepted it uncritically. Part of the root of the whole "Fundamentalist/Modernist debate" of the late 19th and early 20th Century was (as I see it) both the Fundamentalists and the Modernists just assuming that 'facts' (in the scientific sense) were the supreme (or only) reliable form of knowledge. Then the Fundamentalist reasoned, "And since we already know that the Bible is a reliable guide to truth, and since facts are the supreme form of truth, it must follow that the Bible gives us the same sort of knowledge that science also gives us."
But in reality there are other sorts of knowledge than simply empirically verifiable facts that could be demonstrated scientifically. Supreme among them are "relational" forms of knowledge - what Anglican bishop and former Oxford professor N.T. Wright has termed "the epistemology of love."
The knowledge that my wife loves me, or that I love my children, may not be empirically verifiable in the same way that the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy can be demonstrated by scientific observation... yet these truths about my family are FAR more important to my life and decision-making than those facts about astronomy.
While it contains many historical facts (which in my view should not be presumed "false until proven true"), the Bible is - by its own description - a book about relationship. Look at how the purpose of Scripture is described by St. Paul in 2 Timothy 3:15 - "wisdom for salvation by trust in Christ."
The Bible is not a science text book, nor even a history text book (though it contains much true history within its pages) - it is rather more like a love letter: it is a writing that invites us into relationship. If we could keep that in view, many other supposed "problems" would turn out not to be so problematic after all.
I've been thinking about this lately because of personal conversations; Jonathan Pageau also has some thoughts along somewhat similar lines in this video:
