The Truth War (22 page)

Multitudes of “enlightened” evangelicals have therefore wholeheartedly embraced those cardinal postmodern virtues—broad-mindedness and diversity—while deliberately setting aside critical biblical values, such as discernment and fidelity to the truth.

How many well-known evangelical leaders do we see squander wonderful opportunities to make the truth clear and plain when they are handed a microphone by the secular media? They often balk or simply give the wrong answer when put on the spot by questions about whether Christ is really the only way to heaven. Apparently, some evangelicals are prepared to let the dogmas of political correctness trump any article of faith. It seems many have already imbibed the full array of postmodern values without even realizing it.

That attitude is especially dominant in the elite echelons of the evangelical academic world, and it filters down from there. Long-held biblical and evangelical convictions are easily discounted, but trendy scholars can't wait to endorse the latest new perspective. Novel ideas about doctrine are never supposed to be repudiated with any degree of force; that is considered seriously uncouth. Read the reviews in almost any theological journal, and you will notice this. Anyone who comments on the latest opinions sweeping the evangelical world is expected to spend a significant amount of time and energy pointing out strengths and saying positive things. Perhaps no one is more generous or more reckless than contemporary evangelicals when it comes to handing out indiscriminate affirmation.

It is hard to imagine anything more at odds with the biblical command to contend earnestly for the faith. Evangelicals need to stop and think very seriously about how our movement got where it is today and where it is headed from here.

HOW DID EVANGELICALISM
MORPH INTO SUCH A MESS?

For the past two decades or more, the evangelical movement has been pounded with an unrelenting barrage of outlandish ideas, philosophies, and programs. Never in the history of the church has so much innovation met with so little critical thinking.

Giving a thoughtful biblical response becomes harder and harder all the time. Merely sorting through all the evangelical trends and recognizing which of these novelties really represent dangerous threats to the health and harmony of the church is challenging enough. Effectively answering the huge smorgasbord of accompanying errors poses an even greater dilemma. New errors sometimes seem to multiply faster than the previous ones can be answered.

To be an effective warrior in the battle for truth today, several old-fashioned, Christlike virtues are absolutely essential: biblical discernment, wisdom, fortitude, determination, endurance, skill in handling Scripture, strong convictions, the ability to speak candidly without waffling, and a willingness to enter into conflict.

Let's be honest: those are not qualities the contemporary evangelical movement has cultivated. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Consider the values and motives that prompt postmodern evangelicals to do the things they do. The larger evangelical movement today is obsessed with opinion polls, brand identity, market research, merchandizing schemes, innovative strategies, and numerical growth. Evangelicals are also preoccupied with matters such as their image before the general public and before the academic world, their clout in the political arena, their portrayal by the media, and similar shallow, self-centered matters.

Maintaining a positive image has become a priority over guarding the truth.

The PR–driven church.
Somewhere along the line, evangelicals bought the lie that the Great Commission is a marketing mandate. The leading strategists for church growth today are therefore all pollsters and public relations managers. In the words of Rick Warren, “If you want to advertise your church to the unchurched, you must learn to think and speak like they do.”
¹
An endless parade of self-styled church-growth specialists has been repeating that same mantra for several decades, and multitudes of Christians and church leaders now accept the idea uncritically. Both their message to the world and the means by which they communicate that message have been carefully tailored by consumer relations experts to appeal to worldly minds.

MANY CHURCH
LEADERS HAVE
RADICALLY CHANGED
THE WAY THEY LOOK
AT THE GOSPEL
RATHER THAN SEEING
IT AS A MESSAGE
FROM GOD THAT
CHRISTIANS ARE CALLED
TO PROCLAIM AS
CHRIST'S AMBASSADORS
(WITHOUT TAMPERING
WITH IT OR CHANGING
IT IN ANY WAY),
THEY NOW TREAT IT
LIKE A COMMODITY
TO BE SOLD
AT MARKET.

Many church leaders have radically changed the way they look at the gospel. Rather than seeing it as a message from God that Christians are called to proclaim as Christ's ambassadors (without tampering with it or changing it in any way), they now treat it like a commodity to be sold at market. Rather than plainly
preaching
God's Word in a way that unleashes the power and truth of it, they try desperately to
package
the message to make it subtler and more appealing to the world.

Runaway pragmatism and trivial pursuit.
The most compelling question in the minds and on the lips of many pastors today is not “What's true?” but rather “What works?” Evangelicals these days care less about
theology
than they do about
methodology.
Truth has taken a backseat to more pragmatic concerns. When a person is trying hard to customize one's message to meet the “felt needs” of one's audience, earnestly contending for the faith is out of the question.

That is precisely why for many years now, evangelical leaders have systematically embraced and fostered almost every worldly, shallow, and frivolous idea that comes into the church. A pathological devotion to superficiality has practically become the chief hallmark of the movement. Evangelicals are obsessed with pop culture, and they ape it fanatically. Contemporary church leaders are so busy trying to stay current with the latest fads that they rarely give much sober thought to weightier scriptural matters.

In the typical evangelical church, even Sunday services are often devoted to the trivial pursuit of worldly things. After all, churches are competing for attention in a media-driven world. So the church vainly tries to put on a bigger, flashier spectacle than the world.

Evangelical fad surfing.
Contemporary evangelicals have therefore become very much like “children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14). They follow whatever is the latest popular trend. They buy whatever is the current best seller. They line up to see any celebrity who speaks spiritual-sounding language. They watch eagerly for the next Hollywood movie with any “spiritual” theme or religious imagery that they can latch on to. And they discuss these fads and fashions endlessly, as if every cultural icon that captures evangelicals' attention had profound and serious spiritual significance.

Evangelical churchgoers desperately want their churches to stay on the leading edge of whatever is currently in vogue in the evangelical community. For a while, any church that wanted to be in fashion had to sponsor seminars on how to pray the prayer of Jabez. But woe to the church that was still doing Jabez when
The
Purpose-Driven Life
took center stage. By then, any church that wanted to retain its standing and credibility in the evangelical movement had better be doing “Forty Days of Purpose.” And if your church didn't get through the “Forty Days” in time to host group studies or preach a series of sermons about
The Da Vinci
Code
before the Hollywood movie version came out, then your church was considered badly out of touch with what really matters.

It is too late now if you missed any of those trends. To use the language of the movement, they are all
so
five minutes ago. If your church is not already experimenting with Emerging-style worship, candles, postmodern liturgy, and the like (or—better yet—anticipating the next major trend), then you are clearly not in a very stylish church.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that all those trends are equally bad. Some of them are not necessarily bad at all. For example, there can be great benefit in teaching a congregation how to respond to something like
The Da Vinci Code.
But contemporary evangelicals have been conditioned to anticipate and follow
every
fad with an almost mindless herd mentality. They sometimes seem to move from fad to fad with an uninhibited and undiscerning eagerness that does leave them exposed to things that may well be spiritually lethal. In fact, the question of whether the latest trend is dangerous or not is not a welcome question in most evangelical circles anymore. Whatever happens to be popular at the moment is what drives the whole evangelical agenda.

That mentality is precisely what Paul warned against in Ephesians 4:14. It has left evangelical Christians dangerously exposed to trickery, deceitfulness, and unsound doctrine. It has also left them completely unequipped to practice any degree of true biblical discernment.

The sad truth is that the larger part of the evangelical movement is already so badly compromised that sound doctrine has almost become a nonissue.

The mad pursuit of nondoctrinal “relevancy.” Even at the very heart of the evangelical mainstream, where you might expect to find some commitment to biblical doctrine and at least a measure of concern about defending the faith, what you find instead is a movement utterly dominated by people whose first concern is to try to keep in step with the times in order to be “relevant.”

Sound doctrine?
Too arcane for the average churchgoer.
Biblical exposition?
That alienates the “unchurched.”
Clear
preaching on sin and redemption?
Let's be careful not to subvert the self-esteem of hurting people.
The Great Commission?
Our most effective strategy has been making the church service into a massive Super Bowl party.
Serious discipleship?
Sure. There's a great series of group studies based on
I Love Lucy
episodes. Let's work our way through that.
Worship where God is recognized as
high and lifted up?
Get real. We need to reach people on the level where they are.

Evangelicals and their leaders have doggedly pursued that same course for several decades now—in spite of
many
clear biblical instructions that warn us not to be so childish (in addition to Ephesians 4:14, see also 1 Corinthians 14:20; 2 Timothy 4:3–4; Hebrews 5:12–14).

What's the heart of the problem? It boils down to this: Much of the evangelical movement has forgotten who is Lord over the church. They have either abandoned or downright rejected their true Head and given His rightful place to evangelical pollsters and church-growth gurus.

USURPING THE CHURCH'S TRUE HEAD

Jude's initial description of apostates in the early church culminates in this statement: “[They] deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ” (Jude 4). Of all the many doctrinal flaws in their system that Jude might have called attention to, this is the one that heads his list and sums up all the others. The false teachers' absolute rejection of Christ's authority was the root and the real motive for their apostasy in the first place. They resented the lordship of Christ and disowned Him as their true Master because they had rebellious hearts and wanted the authority for themselves.

THE FALSE TEACHERS'
ABSOLUTE REJECTION
OF CHRIST'S AUTHORITY
WAS THE ROOT AND THE
REAL MOTIVE FOR THEIR
APOSTASY IN THE FIRST
PLACE. THEY RESENTED
THE LORDSHIP OF CHRIST
AND DISOWNED HIM AS
THEIR TRUE MASTER
BECAUSE THEY HAD
REBELLIOUS HEARTS AND
WANTED THE AUTHORITY
FOR THEMSELVES.

Jude stresses that the major reasons for their rebellion are immorality, greed, and lust. These sins are characteristic of virtually all false teachers. (They “turn the grace of our God into lewdness” [v. 4]; they have “given themselves over to sexual immorality” [v. 7]; they “defile the flesh” [v. 8]; and they “run greedily in the error of Balaam for profit” [v. 11].) Again, this is a reminder that the root cause of false doctrine is nearly always immorality or sinful lust rather than ignorance or misunderstanding. The person who wants to indulge his or her own evil desires and self-will must reject Christ's authority.

However, to mask their evil motives, most false teachers also deliberately keep their rebellion against Christ's authority covert—usually under the disguise of some sort of religiosity. As we have seen from the start, the false teachers Jude was dealing with could not have penetrated the church secretly unless they had somehow kept their utter contempt for Christ's lordship clandestine. They no doubt
professed
to know God and recognize the lordship of Christ, but
in their works
they denied Him (Titus 1:16).

Even today most false teachers operate that way. They give lip service to Christ but have no true love for Him. They
call
Him “Lord, Lord,” but they don't do what He commands (Luke 6:46). They disguise themselves with the appearance of spirituality, artificial piety, and cordiality. But look closely at any apostate, and you will see someone who despises divine authority.

It is no wonder, then, that evangelicalism's recent flirtations with apostasy have always involved some kind of effort to oust Christ from His rightful place as Lord over the church. Most of these involve indirect or subtle assaults on Christ's lordship, but every one of them may nonetheless be used to mask a heart that seeks to turn God's grace into lewdness while utterly denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ (Jude 4).

“Seeker-sensitive” methodologies. As churches have tailored their Sunday services to suit the tastes of “seekers,” for example, there is less and less emphasis on edifying the saints and more and more stress on entertaining unbelievers. Drama, music, comedy, and even forms of vaudeville have often replaced preaching in the order of service. That strips Christ of His headship over the church by removing His Word from its rightful place and thereby silencing His rule in the life of His people. In effect, it surrenders the headship of the church to unchurched seekers.