Last week USA Today reported the following story:

When it comes to incriminating videos these days, the one of Bruce K. Waltke might seem pretty tame. It shows the noted evangelical scholar of the Old Testament talking about scholarship, faith and evolution. What was incriminating? He not only endorsed evolution, but said that evangelical Christianity could face a crisis for not coming to accept science.

"If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult ... some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God's providence that brought us to this point of our awareness," he says, according to several accounts by those who have seen the video. Those words set off a furor at the Reformed Theological Seminary, where Waltke was — until this week — a professor.

You can read the rest of the article here:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-04-09-IHE-evangelical-endors...

In response to this, here is part of what I believe to be a very helpful and, for the most part, very gracious article by Prof. Carl Trueman:

The recent comments by Professor Bruce Waltke, to the effect that Christianity risks becoming a cult, or at least being perceived as a cult, unless it embraces evolution, have provoked a storm of comment, pro and con. I do not wish to address Professor Waltke's comments directly; for the record, I have always enjoyed his writings (and found them helpful). He is a scholar and gentleman, and when Professor Waltke speaks, I listen, even when I disagree. Thus, what I want to reflect on here are not Professor Waltke's well-known and long-standing views on origins but the questions surrounding the claim that a Christianity which rejects evolution really does risk becoming a cult, and, if so, whether that is something about which we should worry.

Of course, in classic English style, my first response to this is to say `Well, it depends what you mean by "cult".' When I use the word 'cult,' I generally use it to refer to organizations which are highly secretive in the way they run their business, and exert inappropriate power over the lives of those who choose to associate with it...

I would not, however, include mainstream conservative Protestantism, despite its obvious faults and failings. As a member and office bearer in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I have taken certain solemn - but voluntary - vows. These vows do not micro-manage my family life, my sexual relationship with my wife, or my choice of schooling for my children. Further, if I decide at some point that I can no longer abide by said vows, I can step down from the ministry; I can even leave the church if I so wish. If I were to apostatize, I would hope that my fellow Christians would make some effort to persuade me to return to orthodoxy, but I doubt very much that they would kidnap me, shun me to the extent that I could no longer function as a member of society, or turn my family members against me. Further, presbytery meetings are `open' - in other words, anybody can attend and listen to what is being said. In other words, whatever its manifold faults might be, I do not think that, by the Trueman definition, the O.P.C. as I know it is a cult.

In addition, I would also exclude belief in silly ideas as making one into a cult member. True, those who believe that the earth is flat, that the moon is made of green cheese, and that Sarah Palin's speeches are models of substance, logic and insight are clearly somewhat out of touch with reality, but the holding of such views, and even the tenacious and militant propagation of the same, do not indicate the existence of a cult. The free world is a whacky place; and one can be whacky without necessarily engaging in organized mind-control, brainwashing, and violent manipulation. Stupidity and gullibility are often quite sufficient as explanations; and being stupid and gullible do not make you a cult member.

The next level of the matter, of course, is whether the holding of whacky views can lead to the perception of Christianity as a cult, even if it is not. The answer to this is: yes, but so what? Now, the `so what?' is important here, for at least two reasons: first, that the world sees it as a cult is neither here nor there when it comes to the church being the church; and, second, the truth of any particular belief within the church is not to be determined by the plausibility structures of the world but by whether it is a consistent articulation of what the Bible teaches.

To the first point, it is clear from the New Testament that Christian views, particular of the cross, were regarded as stupid and offensive by the wider world. I Corinthians 1 makes that point in dramatic fashion; and the various Jewish and Gentile persecutions of the church described in Acts would imply that the church was not only seen as holding silly beliefs but as doing so in a way that scared society - a hallmark of being regarded as a sinister cult. This continues in the post-apostolic period. Pliny, writing to Emperor Trajan ca. 112, describes how he broke up a local Christian group. He describes them as secretive and engaging in strange practices which reflected their strange beliefs. In other words, he seems to have regarded them as a cult. Historian Tacitus is much the same: when he alludes to the Neronic persecutions, he speaks of Christianity as `shameful and hideous.' Well, as I have said in this column before: if it's white and woolly and goes `Baaaa!' when you kick it, it's a sheep.

To the second point, every theological discipline has its own point of whackiness. Perhaps evolution is where Old Testamentlers feel the pinch. Homosexuality would be the hotspot for contemporary Christian ethicists. For me as a historian, it is the resurrection: my friends in the secular history world will always regard me as a mediocre, or, perhaps more charitably, methodologically inconsistent, historian because I believe the tomb was empty. I am guessing that scientists would probably regard that belief as ridiculous too: the empirical and theoretical evidence for bodies being resurrected after traumatic execution and days of decaying in a tomb is, to say the least, not very compelling. Let's face it: opposition to homosexuality and belief in the resurrection are whacky views in today's climate, enjoying little or no support from the scholarly scientific world. Do we therefore change our views on these in order to avoid being seen as a cult? Even more dramatic, perhaps, is the increasingly strident voice of the aesthetic atheists, of whom Hitchens and Dawkins are just the most famous. As aesthetic atheism gains ground, any form of theism will increasingly be regarded as idiotic and cult-like. What will we do then? Cultural acceptability is a cruel mistress.

You can read the rest of this article here:

http://www.reformation21.org/articles/life-on-the-cultic-fringe.php