What Changed?

I received an email recently from someone who had been raised in the Catholic church and is now committed to the reformed faith. She was thinking back to her teen-age years and the consternation many Catholics felt about Vatican II. She said that as a teen-ager, she wondered how it could be that after teaching for many generations that a Catholic couldn't eat meat on Fridays, all of a sudden, it was "no big deal!" What changed? This is the big question that haunts modern Christianity today. How could abortion be seen by the church as such a bad thing in the early '60's and be perfectly acceptable ten years later? How could it be that the Bible was "the only infallible rule of faith and practice" to Presbyterians in the mid-1960's, and then become simply "a unique witness to Christ" only a few short years later? What changed? Well, of course, nothing changed, except that the church decided to pursue what one friend calls "a theology of accomodation." Questions about morality, the attributes of God, the authority of Scripture, and other matters of faith are not questions that require new scientific discoveries or new technological insights. These are eternal, unchanging matters of right and wrong, truth and error. They are matters that have been decided by the church many times; but not until recently has the church been so unsure of the answers. Of course, there have always been dissenting opinions. Because we are sinful creatures, error is always mixed with truth. But the church has usually been able to distinguish heresy from the true understanding of the Christian faith. Are we now losing the capacity to preserve and distinguish the good from the bad, the true from the false? Certain segments of the church once defended some social practices we now find evil, or resisted the discoveries of science which seemed to fly in the face of church doctrine. But these were not questions that struck at the very heart of the gospel; and, in the case of science, it was soon apparent that one could prove that the earth is not flat, or that the sun does not revolve around our planet. Too many today are simply looking for ways to make the church and orthodoxy appear ridiculous. Actually, the ones who wind up appearing ridiculous are the ones who are so eager to destroy Christendom. No, the principles of God's Word and righteousness are eternal. If God's Word teaches a thing in 1961 or 1875 or 2007, it is still teaching it today; and so should we. God's Word requires interpretation, but not revision. If it was wrong to steal or lie or commit adultery in the time of Christ, it's still wrong today. What changed? Unfortunately, in too many cases, it is the church that has changed!