Al Mohler, a Southern Baptist seminary president, told a recent pastors gathering that it is a preacher’s responsibility to “save his people from ignorance” about the Bible. Here are few significant quotes (emphasis mine):
“How many of your people know much of anything about what we have been talking about in the first 11 chapters of Romans?” he asked. “How many people are there who have been sitting in pews for decades who know next to nothing about this, because they’ve never been taught?”
“one of the central problems in the church” today is that many people “simply don’t know enough to be faithful Christians.”
“The nominalism that marks their lives can be traced to a nominalism in terms of their knowledge,” he said.
Whose fault is that?
Leaving aside the rationalism underlying his statements (the conviction that better knowledge will kind of automatically result in better living is one the the myths of modernity), Mohler was addressing the right people. Preachers are the main cause of people’s Biblical illiteracy in churches. Simply because they are themselves often Biblically illiterate. And this is not happening in some liberal churches, where, supposedly, this would be expected, but in one of the most fundamentalist denominations around. It seems that the devil is not afraid of fundamentalists either.
Read more about it HERE.
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