98 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
evangelical feminist writings in the 1970s, today’s “disputed passages”
on women in ministry were not thought to be unclear. Therefore this
matter is much different from disputes over the end times or baptism or
Calvinism and Arminianism.
B. AVOIDING DISPUTED PASSAGES WILL LEAVE THE CHURCH VULNERABLE
TO MANY FALSE TEACHINGS
There is another serious problem with an approach that says we will not
make decisions based on any “disputed” passages. If people really
adopted this principle, they wouldn’t be able to take a stand against any
major heresy in the church. In the fourth-century controversy over the
deity of Christ, the Arians (who denied the full deity of Christ) were
apparently godly people who disputed every major verse used by those
who argued for the full deity of Christ. That meant that all the passages
on the deity of Christ were “disputed passages,” with godly, praying
scholars on both sides of the question.
In the debate over biblical inerrancy in the 1970s and 1980s, many
genuinely godly people vigorously debated the key verses used to sup-
port inerrancy. In another example, the “Oneness Pentecostals” (who
deny the Trinity) hotly dispute all the verses brought to support the
Trinity.^22 If we are going to avoid making a decision on disputed pas-
sages, we cannot defend the deity of Christ, or inerrancy, or the Trinity.
To take another example, I wonder how many who take this “avoid
disputed passages” approach have ever tried to discuss justification by
faith alone with a born-again Roman Catholic. Within the Roman
Catholic church are “godly people” who make every verse on justifica-
tion by faith alone a point of controversy. If one is committed to avoid-
ing disputed passages, one could never decide whether Protestants or
Catholics are right about justification by faith alone.
Two final examples: If the principle of “avoiding disputed passages”
were followed consistently, no Christian could ever come to any con-
clusion about whether to baptize infants, because “godly people” differ
on whether infants should be baptized, and every verse is in dispute! And
(^22) See my Systematic Theology, 242-243. I am not speaking of Pentecostals generally, who
clearly affirm the Trinity, but only of one splinter group, the United Pentecostal Church, who
were forced out of the Assemblies of God in 1916 over this issue.