I couldn't agree with Mike McKinley more. We've lost our faith in the power (and even necessity) of God's Word, and we've put our faith in method.

And here's one reason it matters. In abandoning God's Word for method and experience, we're playing into the hands of a growing segment of our culture that is perfectly willing to make room for transcendent experience but is utterly opposed to the notion of a personal God who reveals Himself with truth claims on our lives.

This week I was listening to the Kojo Nnamdi show on my local NPR station. Kojo was interviewing Stuart Kauffman, a bio-physicist who on the one hand argues against the reductionism of modern physics, but on the other hand rejects the traditional notion of the God of the Bible.

Then there's the article by NYT columnist David Brooks that a church member just sent me, The Neural Buddhists. Brooks, with people like Kauffman in mind though he mentions a different list, describes a new atheism that, like Buddhism, is quite comfortable with a spiritual transcendent reality, but is completely at odds with a notion of Deity that is personal and able to reveal specific doctrines that have universal application.

What does all this mean? It means that in a post-modern world, in which science itself is increasingly comfortable with the notion that it cannot explain everything we experience, people are going to be at ease with our talk of spiritual reality and attracted to our services designed to produce an experience of the transcendent. What they are not going to be comfortable with is the exclusive claims of Christ (when have they ever been?).

As Brooks notes, that means the debate is likely to shift. It will shift from a discussion of the existence of God to a debate over "faith in the Bible." If he's right, and I think he is (we've been in one form or another of this debate ever since the hermeneutical turn of the mid-20th century), then ironically, our attempts to redefine and recommend the truth of Christianity through spiritual experience, or social engagement, or aesthetic innovation will simply give comfort to the new Buddhists, who

"feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits."

Where do we learn that behind our experience of the transcendent stands a personal God who has revealed himself concretely in the person of Jesus Christ? Where do we learn what the will of this personal God is? Where do we discover the objective means to experiencing a subjective relationship with this God? We don't learn it from our experience, our aesthetics, or our social engagement. We learn it from Scripture, which alone is "able to make us wise unto salvation." (2 Tim 3:14-16) If in the midst of the cultural shift which this new scientific revolution is precipitating we abandon the Bible, then we will discover that we have lost the battle before it's even been engaged.