JoelH
January 23rd, 2008, 06:18 AM
Hi brothers and sisters in Christ,
I hope the following rant doesn't sound too incoherent and/or self-serving at all. It is hopefully a good attempt to laid out my deepest worries concerning what's happening throughout what we would regard as "the evangelical world" especially in the West.
The story must go back a few years (eons ago by the standards of we post-modern seeking-instant-solution generation:lol2 ) when I got serious about my walk in God after reading about Bible prophecy. I started to pay attention to the Left Behind board. At that time, it was a couple of years before 9/11 and I remembered a lot of doctrinally pretty sound people who firmly rejected the liberal theology sprouted around. I assumed everyone is like the fictional New Hope Village Church in the LB series.
Then Rick Warren come onto the scene. Initially I thought he was merely promoting a different approach to preaching the gospel and trying to use modern terminologies to convey the biblical idea of Christian discipleship. I saw quite a lot of David W. Cloud diatrabes against Left behind, Tim LaHaye etc, and I just dismissed this as fundamentalism run amok.
Eventually we found the debates of evangelical Christendom was no longer between pre-trib and post-trib, but rather pre-trib dispensationalism vs preterist/idealist amillennialism, and now developed into pre-trib versus fullblown postmodern join-the-world impact-the-world proto-liberal theology. Rick Warren has shown signs of convergence with old-fashioned liberal mainline denominations in theology. We have numerous people that crop up which the Left Behind-reading Christians would have rejected outright: Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Beth Moore, etc.
It would have shocked me 10 years ago to hear an ECUSA clergy to declare "we are all born as God's children", but we now have even self-styled conservative Bible-believing "relying on God for the forgiven sins" Christians proudly flaunting this in front on us right on this very board. We have streams of posters who talk about "we must adjust our gospel message to reach out to the pretty close-minded youth generation about the gospel". These posters used to say pre-trib, now they call themselves amillennial and I notice their belief on the Bible's authenticity as God's Word and our only doctrinal foundation is rapidly weakening. We now also have posters who openly pride themselves of "I allow my Bible to fall open, and I always find answers to my questions or how to deal with the turmoils through whatever passage I found first at random."
And I have recently discovered a young sister in Christ, who I got to know as a solid-in-belief, solidly pre-trib teenage believer on the old LBMB (Left Behind Messageboard), now openly declares herself a lesbian, got "engaged", and social+political+religious liberal and yet still calling herself a Christian. I'm quite sure had the Left Behind series only been published now she would reject it outright.
All of this makes me aware the evangelical movement is, just as many others have commented, deeply in trouble. The rot is in fact much closer to home than an occasional Charismatic preacher, or some liberal-who-call-himself-evangelical like Jim Wallis. We have indeed begun the march into merging with the World Council of Churches in ecumenism in preparation of the Babylon Harlot.:ohno
Finally I would like to close my rant with the words of Daniel Wallace from Dallas Theological Seminary. Wallace spoke this in 2001, long before anyone heard of the Emerging/ent Church:
Even with the proliferation of Bibles today, Christians are reading their Bibles less and less. I believe the evangelical church has only 50 years of life left. 50 years left of evangelicalism because of marginalization of the Word of God. We need another Reformation! The enemy of the gospel now is not religious hierarchy but moral anarchy, not tradition but entertainment. The enemy of the gospel is Protestantism run amock; it is an anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge, feel-good faith that has no content and no convictions. Part of the communal repentance that is needed is a repentance about the text . And even more importantly, there must be a repentance with regard to Christ our Lord. [B]Just as the Bible has been marginalized, Jesus Christ has been ‘buddy-ized.’ His transcendence and majesty are only winked at, as we turn him into the genie in the bottle, beseeching God for more conveniences, more luxury, less hassle, and a life without worries or lack of comfort. He no longer wears the face that the apostles recognized. Or, as Erasmus remarked, “When you read the Greek New Testament, you can see the face of Jesus more clearly than if you were one of his disciples”! A bit of hyperbole, but the point is worth underscoring: The God we worship today no longer resembles the God of the Bible. Unless we return to him through a reading and digesting of the scriptures—through a commitment to the text, the evangelical church will become irrelevant, useless, dead.
Who can believe 7 years later the apostasy has gone far beyond the Prayer of Jabez of my LBMB days? Maybe David W. Cloud is right after all with his stance on Fundamentalism.
YBIC,
Joeln
I hope the following rant doesn't sound too incoherent and/or self-serving at all. It is hopefully a good attempt to laid out my deepest worries concerning what's happening throughout what we would regard as "the evangelical world" especially in the West.
The story must go back a few years (eons ago by the standards of we post-modern seeking-instant-solution generation:lol2 ) when I got serious about my walk in God after reading about Bible prophecy. I started to pay attention to the Left Behind board. At that time, it was a couple of years before 9/11 and I remembered a lot of doctrinally pretty sound people who firmly rejected the liberal theology sprouted around. I assumed everyone is like the fictional New Hope Village Church in the LB series.
Then Rick Warren come onto the scene. Initially I thought he was merely promoting a different approach to preaching the gospel and trying to use modern terminologies to convey the biblical idea of Christian discipleship. I saw quite a lot of David W. Cloud diatrabes against Left behind, Tim LaHaye etc, and I just dismissed this as fundamentalism run amok.
Eventually we found the debates of evangelical Christendom was no longer between pre-trib and post-trib, but rather pre-trib dispensationalism vs preterist/idealist amillennialism, and now developed into pre-trib versus fullblown postmodern join-the-world impact-the-world proto-liberal theology. Rick Warren has shown signs of convergence with old-fashioned liberal mainline denominations in theology. We have numerous people that crop up which the Left Behind-reading Christians would have rejected outright: Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Beth Moore, etc.
It would have shocked me 10 years ago to hear an ECUSA clergy to declare "we are all born as God's children", but we now have even self-styled conservative Bible-believing "relying on God for the forgiven sins" Christians proudly flaunting this in front on us right on this very board. We have streams of posters who talk about "we must adjust our gospel message to reach out to the pretty close-minded youth generation about the gospel". These posters used to say pre-trib, now they call themselves amillennial and I notice their belief on the Bible's authenticity as God's Word and our only doctrinal foundation is rapidly weakening. We now also have posters who openly pride themselves of "I allow my Bible to fall open, and I always find answers to my questions or how to deal with the turmoils through whatever passage I found first at random."
And I have recently discovered a young sister in Christ, who I got to know as a solid-in-belief, solidly pre-trib teenage believer on the old LBMB (Left Behind Messageboard), now openly declares herself a lesbian, got "engaged", and social+political+religious liberal and yet still calling herself a Christian. I'm quite sure had the Left Behind series only been published now she would reject it outright.
All of this makes me aware the evangelical movement is, just as many others have commented, deeply in trouble. The rot is in fact much closer to home than an occasional Charismatic preacher, or some liberal-who-call-himself-evangelical like Jim Wallis. We have indeed begun the march into merging with the World Council of Churches in ecumenism in preparation of the Babylon Harlot.:ohno
Finally I would like to close my rant with the words of Daniel Wallace from Dallas Theological Seminary. Wallace spoke this in 2001, long before anyone heard of the Emerging/ent Church:
Even with the proliferation of Bibles today, Christians are reading their Bibles less and less. I believe the evangelical church has only 50 years of life left. 50 years left of evangelicalism because of marginalization of the Word of God. We need another Reformation! The enemy of the gospel now is not religious hierarchy but moral anarchy, not tradition but entertainment. The enemy of the gospel is Protestantism run amock; it is an anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge, feel-good faith that has no content and no convictions. Part of the communal repentance that is needed is a repentance about the text . And even more importantly, there must be a repentance with regard to Christ our Lord. [B]Just as the Bible has been marginalized, Jesus Christ has been ‘buddy-ized.’ His transcendence and majesty are only winked at, as we turn him into the genie in the bottle, beseeching God for more conveniences, more luxury, less hassle, and a life without worries or lack of comfort. He no longer wears the face that the apostles recognized. Or, as Erasmus remarked, “When you read the Greek New Testament, you can see the face of Jesus more clearly than if you were one of his disciples”! A bit of hyperbole, but the point is worth underscoring: The God we worship today no longer resembles the God of the Bible. Unless we return to him through a reading and digesting of the scriptures—through a commitment to the text, the evangelical church will become irrelevant, useless, dead.
Who can believe 7 years later the apostasy has gone far beyond the Prayer of Jabez of my LBMB days? Maybe David W. Cloud is right after all with his stance on Fundamentalism.
YBIC,
Joeln