The Truth War (27 page)

In other words, the Truth War is a
good
fight (1 Timothy 6:12). So let's wage good warfare (1 Timothy 1:18)—for the honor of Christ and the glory of God.

APPENDIX

WHY DISCERNMENT IS OUT OF FASHION

This I pray, that your love may abound still more and more
in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the
things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and
without offense till the day of Christ.

—Philippians 1:9–10

This appendix is adapted from my 1994 book,
Reckless Faith
, which is now out of print. It included a chapter about biblical discernment, and I am excerpting that section here in the hope that it will encourage and equip Christians who desire to be faithful soldiers in the Truth War.
¹

M
any summers ago I drove across the country to deliver my son's car to him. He was a recent college graduate, then playing minor-league baseball in Florida. He needed his car for local transportation. The cross-country trip fit perfectly with some previously scheduled ministry engagements on my calendar, so Lance Quinn (my senior associate pastor at the time) and I made the journey by automobile together.

As we drove through Lance's home state of Arkansas, our route took us off the main highways and through some beautiful rural country. We topped one hill, and I noticed near a rustic house a homemade sign advertising hand-sewn quilts. I had hoped to stop somewhere along the way to buy an anniversary gift for my wife. She likes handmade crafts and had been wanting a quilt, so we decided to stop and look.

OUR GENERATION
IS EXPOSED TO MORE
RELIGIOUS IDEAS THAN
ANY PEOPLE IN
HISTORY. RELIGIOUS
BROADCASTING AND
THE PRINT MEDIA
BOMBARD PEOPLE
WITH ALL KINDS OF
DEVIANT TEACHINGS
THAT CLAIM
TO BE TRUTH. THE
UNDISCERNING PERSON
HAS NO MEANS OF
DETERMINING WHAT
TRUTH IS, AND
MANY ARE BAFFLED
BY THE VARIETY.

We went to the door of the old house and knocked. A friendly woman with a dish towel answered the door. When we told her we were interested in quilts, she swung the door open wide and ushered us in. She showed us into the living room, where she had several quilts on display.

The television in the corner was on, tuned to a religious broadcast. The woman's husband was lounging in a recliner, half watching the program and half reading a religious magazine. Around the room were piles of religious books, religious literature, and religious videotapes. I recognized one or two of the books—resources from solid evangelical publishers.

The woman left the room to get some more quilts to show us, so the man put aside his magazine and greeted us. “I was just catching up on some reading,” he said.

“Are you a believer?” I asked.

“A believer in
what
?” he asked, apparently startled that I would ask.

“A believer in Christ,” I said. “I noticed your books. Are you a Christian?”

“Well, sure,” he said, holding up the magazine he was reading. I recognized it as the publication of a well-known cult. I took a closer look at the stacks of material around the room. There were a few evangelical best sellers, materials from several media ministries, a promotional magazine from a leading evangelical seminary, and even some helpful Bible study aids. But mixed in with all that were stacks of
The Watch Tower
magazines published by the Jehovah's Witnesses, a copy of
Dianetics
(the book by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard), a Book of Mormon, Mary Baker Eddy's
Science and Health
, some literature from the Franciscan brothers, and an incredible array of stuff from nearly every conceivable cult and
-ism
. I watched as he jotted down the address of the television preacher who was at that moment offering some free literature.

“You read from quite an assortment of material,” I observed. “These all represent different beliefs. Do you accept any one of them?”

“I find there's good in all of it,” he said. “I read it all and just look for the good.”

While this conversation was going on, the woman had come back with a stack of quilts and was ready to show them to us. The first quilt she laid out was a patchwork of all different sizes, colors, and prints of fabric scraps. I looked at it, trying to see some kind of pattern or design in it, but there was none. The color combinations even seemed to clash. The quilt itself was—well, ugly.

I described for her the kind of quilt I was looking for, and she pulled one out that was exactly what I wanted. Her price seemed reasonable, so I told her I would take it.

As she wrapped up my purchase, I couldn't help looking again at that first quilt she had brought out from the back room. Frankly, it was the
least
attractive of all her quilts. But she was obviously quite proud of it, having labored over it for hours. It was evidently her personal favorite—and undoubtedly a genuine piece of folk art. But I couldn't imagine anyone else being attracted to that particular quilt.

Her quilt, I thought, was a perfect metaphor for her husband's religion. Taking bits and pieces from every conceivable source, he was putting together a patchwork faith. He thought of his religion as a thing of beauty, but in God's eyes it was an abomination.

Too many people are like that—fashioning a patchwork religion, sifting through stacks of religious ideas, looking for good in all of it. Our generation is exposed to more religious ideas than any people in history. Religious broadcasting and the print media bombard people with all kinds of deviant teachings that claim to be truth. The undiscerning person has no means of determining
what
truth is, and many are baffled by the variety.

Meanwhile, evangelicals (once known for a very prudent and biblical approach to doctrine) are fast becoming as doctrinally clueless as the unchurched people they are so keen to please. At least three decades of deliberately downplaying doctrine and discernment in order to attract the unchurched has filled many once-sound churches with people who utterly lack any ability to differentiate the very worst false doctrines from truth. I constantly encounter evangelical church members who are at a loss to answer the most profound errors they hear from cultists, unorthodox media preachers, or other sources of false doctrine.

THE RISE OF EXTREME TOLERANCE

Aclosely related second reason for the low level of discernment in the church today is the growing reluctance to take a definitive stand on any issue. This, too, has been one of the central themes of this book. But it deserves to be stressed one more time.

Discernment is frankly not very welcome in a culture like ours. In fact, the postmodern perspective is more than merely hostile to discernment; it is practically the polar opposite. Think about it: pronouncing anything “true” and calling its antithesis “error” is a breach of postmodernism's one last impregnable dogma. That is why to a postmodernist nothing is more uncouth than voicing strong opinions on spiritual, moral, or ethical matters. People are expected to hold their most important convictions with as much slack as possible. Certainty about anything is out of the question, and all who refuse to equivocate on any point of principle or doctrine are therefore automatically labeled too narrow. Zeal for the truth has become politically incorrect. There is actually zero tolerance for biblical discernment in a “tolerant” climate like that.

In the secular realm, postmodernism's extreme tolerance has been foisted on an unsuspecting public by the entertainment media for several decades. A plethora of talk shows on daily television have led the way. Phil Donahue established the format. Jerry Springer took it to ridiculous extremes. And Oprah made it seem somewhat respectable and refined. Shows like these remind viewers daily not to be too opinionated—and they do it by parading in front of their audiences the most bizarre and extreme advocates of every radical “alternative lifestyle” imaginable. We are not supposed to be shocked or notice the overtly self-destructive nature of so many aberrant subcultures. The point is to broaden our minds and raise our level of tolerance. And if you do criticize another person's value system, it cannot be on biblical grounds. Anyone who cites religious beliefs as a reason to reject another person's way of life is automatically viewed with the same contempt that used to be reserved for out-and-out religious heretics. The culture around us has declared war on all biblical standards.

Some Christians unwittingly began following suit several years ago. That has opened the door for a whole generation in the church to embrace postmodern relativism openly and deliberately. They don't want the truth presented with stark black-and-white clarity anymore. They prefer having issues of right and wrong, true and false, good and bad deliberately painted in shades of gray. We have reached a point where the typical churchgoer today assumes that is the proper way of understanding truth. Any degree of certainty has begun to sound offensive to people's postmodernized ears.

A few years ago I did a live radio interview where listeners were invited to phone in. One caller told me, “You seem like a lot nicer person than I thought you were by listening to your sermons.” He meant it kindly, and I took it in that spirit. But I was curious to know what he had heard in my preaching that he interpreted as not “nice.” (When I preach, I am certainly not angry or acrimonious.) So I asked what he meant.

“I don't know,” he said. “In your sermons, you sound so opinionated, so certain of yourself—so dogmatic. But talking to people one on one, you're more conversational. You just sound nicer.” Like many people today, he thought of dialogue as “nicer” than a sermon. Someone who is “loving,” by that way of thinking, could never be emphatic, critical, or zealous for the truth. That reflects a severely skewed understanding of what authentic love demands. Real love “does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6).

One young pastor told me he didn't like the authoritarian implications of the word
preaching.
He said he preferred to speak of his pulpit ministry as “sharing” with his people. He didn't last long in ministry, of course. But sadly, his comments probably reflect the prevailing mood in the church today.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones noticed the same trend several decades ago. His marvelous book
Preaching and Preachers
began by noting that modern society was becoming uncomfortable with the whole idea of “preaching”:

A new idea has crept in with regard to preaching, and it has taken various forms. A most significant one was that people began to talk about the “address” in the service instead of the sermon. That in itself was indicative of a subtle change. An “address.” No longer the sermon, but an “address” or perhaps even a lecture. . . . There was a man in the U.S.A. who published a series of books under the significant title of
Quiet Talks
.
Quiet Talks on Prayer
;
Quiet Talks on Power
; etc. In other words the very title announces that the man is not going to preach. Preaching, of course, is something carnal lacking in spirituality; what is needed is a chat, a fireside chat, quiet talks, and so on!
³

Lloyd-Jones was simply noticing one of the subtle harbingers of postmodernism's contempt for clarity and authority. A problem that existed in embryonic form in his era is now a full-grown monster.

At the “Emergent Convention” in 2004, a gathering of some eleven hundred leaders in the Emerging Church movement, Doug Pagitt, pastor of Solomon's Porch (an Emergent community in Minneapolis), told the gathering, “Preaching is broken.” He suggested that a completely open conversation where all participants are seen as equals is better suited to a postmodern culture. “Why do I get to speak for 30 minutes and you don't?” he asked. “A sermon is often a violent act,” he declared. “It's a violence toward the will of the people who have to sit there and take it.”
⁴

Rudy Carrasco, a Pasadena-based Emergent pastor, agreed that preaching is simply too one-sided, too authoritative, and too rigid for postmodern times. “Every day, every week, there's stuff that pops up in life, and it's not resolved, just crazy and confusing and painful. When people come across with three answers, and they know everything, and they have this iron sheen about them, I'm turned off. Period. I'm just turned off. And I think that's not unique to me.”
⁵

By contrast, compromise is what drives this pragmatic, postmodern age. In most people's minds, the very word
compromise
is rich with positive connotations. On one level, that is certainly understandable. Obviously, in the realm of social and political discourse, certain kinds of compromise can be helpful, even constructive. Compromise lubricates the political machinery of secular government. The art of compromise is the key to successful negotiations in business. And even in marriage, small compromises are often necessary for a healthy relationship.