(un)Friendly fire

Being part of a family sucks sometimes.

Every now and then I make a remark about the unfairness and crippling partisanship of some evangelicals and the way that it harms our collective effort to present the Christian message to the world. However I don’t typically name names when it comes to people who have personally attacked me. I don’t like to give publicity to those who do not deserve it. This post is an exception, both to give an example of the kind of widespread behaviour that is of such concern, and also to point out that I’m not just making it up. I’m also putting this here to give the perpetrator the opportunity to publicly make amends, after thus far ignoring my public invitation to do so at his blog.

Steve Hays over at Triablogue has taken it upon himself to name and attack me over my recent defence of William Lane Craig against some rather hasty and unfair attacks (attacking seems to be the order of the day).

First, Steve quotes one of my opening comments in my previous post defending Bill Craig:

I thought I would add my voice to those defending Dr Craig and calling our fellow evangelical Christians to be a little more patient and careful – as well as striving to be better informed about the theological issues we discuss.

Now if I do say so myself, this seems like a worthy enough goal. But according to Steve, I am lying. This is not really my goal at all. He decides to name and quote me, and then says:

Of course, Glenn isn’t really defending Craig. Rather, Glenn is using the Craig incident as a pretext to defend himself. Glenn is a liberal (denies hell, denies inerrancy), so he wants to make evangelicalism a big tent. Defending Craig is just a ploy for making his case that evangelicals should be more tolerant and open-minded with respect to the Glenn Peoples of the world.

So contrary to what I have said, Steve says I’m not really defending Craig. This is a pretext. I am just pretending to defend Craig.

Apparently – and some of my correspondents will, no doubt, get a kick out of this, I am a liberal. This is because I affirm, on the basis of conservative biblical exegesis, a different view of what the Bible teaches about hell from Steve, and because I do not affirm a doctrine that the Bible itself doesn’t affirm (namely, inerrancy). All I really want to do is get rid of the boundaries of evangelicalism so that liberal views (apparently like mine and Dr Craig’s) are counted as evangelical.

This sums up just the kind of partisanship that has prevented so many evangelicals from being effective. The worst enemies are deemed to be those who agree on all things but differ on a jot or tittle, and these (namely, people like me) are the ones most worthy of public smearing. With (yes, shame on me) little hope of success, I offered this comment to Mr Hays:

You have publicly made comments dissecting my motives and attacking my character.

Of course, Glenn isn’t really defending Craig. Rather, Glenn is using the Craig incident as a pretext to defend himself. Glenn is a liberal (denies hell, denies inerrancy), so he wants to make evangelicalism a big tent. Defending Craig is just a ploy for making his case that evangelicals should be more tolerant and open-minded with respect to the Glenn Peoples of the world.

Here you accuse me of:

1) Being a liar (pretending to do one thing when I am knowingly doing another).

2) Being a liberal in spite of my ostensible conservatism and of my repeated defence of evangelical Christianity against liberalism.

3) Being self serving in the defense of another.

None of these accusations are true.

Steve, I did not name any of Bill Craig’s critics. I certainly did not single you out and attack your character, yet you have made the choice to do this of me – without contacting me at all.

With little hope that you will do so, I am asking you to apologise and retract the claims you have made about me, my motives and my character. Since you have chosen to name and attack me I will assume that you believe I am in need of some correction. If you wish to do so, I invite you to contact me. At the blog where you copied my words, you can contact me via the “contact” page.

I await your response. I will see whether or not you are interested in being an evangelical – someone who cares for the teaching of Scripture in doctrine and practice.

I do not believe that anyone can honestly say that this message contains insults, rudeness or hostility. However, not once, but three times I posted this comment, because after each time, it was visible for a few minutes and then deleted by a moderator. This in spite of that same blog’s posting policy, which includes the following statements:

Triablogue isn’t Mother Hen. We don’t make a habit of moderating the combox. It operates under the honor code.

You can say pretty much anything you please about the team. Attack us with impunity. We don’t care. We can take it.

Anyone is welcome to disagree with anything we say. It matters not whether he’s an atheist or Romanist or what have you.

By the same token, we will not permit Triablogue to be co-opted by an outsider to slander a second or third-party. If you have a personal beef with somebody, contact him directly. Don’t go using Triablogue as a platform to take potshots from behind the bushes of a second-party blog.

Interestingly, those principles were authored by one Steve Hays. This is the same Steve Hays who has himself used his blog as a platform to gracelessly slander a third party.

Steve, I posted these comments at your blog for you to see, and they have continued to be deleted. Your attack on me was public. The behaviour you have exhibited is exactly what is wrong with evangelical Christianity: The intention to persuade the world that our intellectual universe is intact when we cannot even get our moral compass and behaviour right in the way that we deal with each other. I realise that you do not share my beliefs as expressed in my defence of Bill Craig, however as you know, I neither named you nor accused you of engaging in sin. It is incumbent upon you now to make amends. You ought to let your readers know that you have failed in your duty to serve as a witness of Christian thought and conduct when you thought that it was alright to conduct yourself in this way towards me. You should also approach me with an apology, as you have resisted my attempt to communicate with you at your own site, and I know that you read this blog.

Choose how you want to be known.

Your fellow
Glenn Peoples

Update:

Steve, along with some of his regular commentors over at his blog, have replied to me. Unfortunately none of the above concerns about being accountable for our deeds seem to be very important to any of them. I am only detailing this because, as a rule, I don’t detail examples of people who do this, so I’m going into some detail to show just the sort of thing that goes on on a regular basis when would-be defenders of the faith get their knives out for their brethren’s backs.

I contacted Steve via Facebook as it’s not possible to contact him privately via his blog. Here’s what I said to him:

Steve, as someone who makes the claim to be a brother in Christ – with all due respect, you owe me an explanation of yourself.

You have publicly named me as a liar who misrepsents his intentions and who is a liberal. You may not personally know me, but you are called to a much higher standard than this. You have visited my blog and you have there had the ability to contact me. you did not. Instead you merely attacked me, in an attempt to name and shame.

No fewer than three times I have raised this concern at your blog, and my concern, and my request for you to apologise and contact me privately has been deleted. This in spite of your blog policy that says you will not be mother hen and moderate everything, and that “You can say pretty much anything you please about the team. Attack us with impunity. We don’t care. We can take it.”

Steve is this the standard to which you believe you are called? Did I even once name you, let alone accuse you of sin? You must surely be capable of better than this.

I again ask that you publicly apologise for your public slander of me. As a believer who emphasises the grace of God, you must surely believe that this grace and love should permeate the way that you personally and publicly live your life.

Regards
Glenn Peoples

I noted that Steve is “a believer who emphasises the grace of God” because as far as I know he is a Calvinist. This was Steve’s initial response (note: Steve’s profile photo over at Facebook is a photo of Fabio):

Hi Glenn,

My talent agent forwarded your message to me.

I’m afraid you must have me confused with someone else. I’m an Italian fashion model who makes supplementary income doing margarine commercials. Perhaps you’ve seen me on TV.

However, I don’t hold it against you. Mistaken identity is a common occurrence. Why, there are some folk who actually mistake Glenn Peoples for a Christian. (Hard to believe, I know.)

Arrivederci!
– Fab

I’m not making this up. Sensing that this was pointless, I simply replied:

Mistake me for a Christian? Well there it is then. You are concerned about Christian belief but not Christian behaviour. It is now clear to me who is the liberal. This is a real shame, Steve. You could have done better.

But then Steve replied, this time not pretending to be Fabio:

You play the Christian “brother” card as if I’m supposed to give you the benefit of the doubt. When, however, you deny core principles of the faith like the plenary inspiration of Scripture as well as everlasting punishment, you forfeit any such presumption.

As far as behavior, brush up on how NT writers “behave” when they describe false teachers and apostates. You’re a false teacher.

And let’s not forget that you initiated the personal attacks when you said things like “The fact that some Christians got outraged by this just shows how ignorant and insular they are,” “Actually there’s a third problem stirred up by ignorance and insularity, namely an unwillingness to listen carefully and charitably to what another person is saying.”

Here Steve refers to the fact that I affirm the doctrine of annihilationism, which says that the biblical view of eternal punishment is everlasting destruction, and not eternal torment. I have frequently affirmed biblical inspiration, however. What’s more, as the reader probably knows, the New Testament writers, whatever they think of a person’s doctrine, never say that it is acceptable to accuse them of things that they never did. The prohibition on bearing false witness is not just a rule that applies when dealing with people who agree with us.

What’s more again, Steve here quotes from my comments which didn’t name anybody, and which describe people as ignorant and insular. This is a far cry from accusing named people of  intentionally lying. I again replied to Steve, trying to remind him of the issue at hand:

Steve – whether you agree with my doctrine or not, it is not acceptable to tell lies about me.

You teach a false view of hell and an unbiblical view of Scripture. You are a false teacher. I get it. We disagree on doctrine, but that is not the issue here.

You don’t agree that you are insular and ignorant. Fine. Those are matters of opinion that I am justified in holding, but neither of them amounts to an accusation of sin. You cannot wriggle around this. You have specifically accused me of being a liar and you need to apologise and retract this accusation.

Let us see how committed to being a Christian you are.

Well, this is how committed Steve was:

Alleging that my accusation was false hardly makes it false.

After first of all defending his doing what I was complaining about, Steve now tried to back away from the claim that he had even made false claims about me. If this was his position, he could have said so right away. At the risk of getting nowhere, I once more (and this proved to be the last time) replied to Steve Hays:

Steve, stop puffing up that chest and resisting correction. You stated that I was not really defending Craig. You have no way of knowing what I was thinking. You made this claim up and accused me of lying.

It is up to you to show that I lied, or else repent. You are only making things worse by hardening your attitude toward what you have done.

You know full well that what I am saying to you is right. I am the Christian here, and you are the one in need of repentance.

Thus ended our correspondence.

This issue is the same for children as it is for adults – something as a parent I have come to see time and time again. Arguably the sin that is most harmful to oneself is that of pride: The unwillingness to admit that you have done something wrong, which in turns forms a kind of mental scar tissue, hardening us to our own behaviour and making us more willing to do it again and again.

Commentors at Steve’s blog provide clues that it is a kind of haven for this type of behaviour. For merely stating that Steve should not have lied about me and should retract, a commentor called “Coramdeo” quipped: that I was  “acting like a whiny little pansy” and that “someone needs to get over himself already. And get a haircut.” But apparently this didn’t count as ridicule because “Pointing out that you’re whining and in need of a haircut are simply observations, not ridicule.” The last time I checked, there was a blog entry accusing a correspondent of physically assisting in raping altar boys, and the commentors were accusing anybody who objected to this disgusting tirade of somehow defending child abusers.

I realised – too late it seems, that the blog is a place where like minded (and like behaving) people hang out, bash anyone who disagrees with them about anything, feel free to accuse people of whatever they like (hey, who cares if it’s true or not, the biblical writers did it all the time – apparently), and rubbish any attempt at correction as whining. There is no integrity, no accountability, and most importantly of all: Never retract, never apologise, never receive correction. Ever. If you disagree, you are a liberal, a nonbeliever, or worse.

This is the dark, ugly intellectual underbelly of what some like to call evangelicalism.

PS – Steve intially claimed that my three posts were deleted by the spam filter “automatically” and that I should stop being so “ignorant and paranoid.” However, he uses blogger. When I posted those comments, all of them made it through the spam filter and appeared on his blog. I checked each time by visiting the blog again. Then minutes later, they had disappeared after being visible on the blog for a short time. I have used blogger and I know others who use it now. I know that this is not how blogger’s spam filter works. If a comment is picked up by the filter as spam, it does not appear at the blog. It can later be moved to the spam folder, but this requires manual action by an admin. I make no comment on why Steve made this claim about why my comment vanished three separate times. Make of it what you will.