Throughout its long and variegated career, the church has seldom cultivated a humble, sensitive attitude of listening to God’s Word.  Instead, it has frequently done what it has been forbidden to do, namely, become conformist.  It has accommodated itself to the prevailing culture, leaped on board all the trendiest bandwagons and hummed all the popular tunes.  Whenever the church does this, it reads Scripture through the world’s eyes and rationalizes its own unfaithfulness.  Church history is replete with tragic examples.  How was it that the Christian conscience not only approved but actually glamourized those terrible Crusades to recover the holy places from Islam – an unholy blunder which Muslims have never forgotten and which continues to obstruct the evangelization of the Muslim world?  How is it that torture could ever have been employed in the name of Jesus Christ to combat heresy and promote orthodoxy?  How is it that for centuries Protestant churches were so inward-looking and so disobedient to Christ’s Great Commission that William Carey’s proposal of a mission to India was greeted with that patronizing retort, ‘Sit down, young man.  When God wants to convert the heathen, he’ll do it without your help’?  How is it that the cruel degradations of slavery and of the slave trade were not abolished in the so-called Christian West until eighteen hundred years after Christ?  How is it that racial discrimination and environmental pollution have become widely recognized as the evils they are only since World War II? Such is a catalogue of some of the worst blind spots which have marred the church’s testimony down the ages.  None of them can be defended from Scripture.  All are due to a misreading of Scripture, or to an unwillingness to sit under its authority.