Deliver us from Evil - Identifying the evils of Darwinism - Compromising and Postmodernist "Christianity"

There are a few things that have been common to Christianity since Jesus Christ rose to be with the Father and left us humans with the task of spreading the Word. The Apostles didn't only have to watch out for unbelieving Jews who wanted to kill them, they had to keep an eye out for Romans who also from time to time decided that Christians needed to die. The rulers of Rome, who suffered from (among other things) lead poisoning and inbreeding would, from time to time, decide that hoisting Christians up on crosses and setting them on fire would be entertaining. Still today there are Christians being murdered for their faith. But that is not the problem I am addressing today. You see, opposition actually tends to be good for Christianity.  Not so much for individual Christians but good for Christianity.   It is said that there are more Christians in Red China than any other country.  

There is some confusion about what a Christian actually is.  You are not a Christian because your parents went to church or you went to Sunday School or you think there probably is a God.   Just saying a prayer someone asked you to repeat doesn't do it either.   You could check out this link, here is an excerpt:

"What is a Christian?



As far as I can tell, after thirty years of experiencing God and life as a "Christian" and after thinking about this experience from several perspectives, a Christian is...
a person who has a personal heart-to-heart relationship with the living God, characterized by warm and active acceptance on God's part; our honesty and dependence on the activities of Jesus Christ."  read on for more
DYING FOR GOD IS NOT NEARLY AS HARD AS LIVING FOR HIM

Jesus warned us that we would face tribulation in the world, but to be of good cheer, for He had overcome the world. Nobody gets out of here alive anyway, if someone sends me to Heaven early it will be bad for my family and friends but I will actually wind up enjoying the experience. The hard parts are living...living through the trials, the pain, the accidents, the heartaches and the failures. It is the struggles we all face that are the challenges to a Christian's faith. But then so are the triumphs. Highs come with the possibility of tripping. Whether things are going good or bad the wise Christian continues to trust in Christ and live his or her life according to the leading of God and the Word of God.

Which brings us back to the problem for today.   In the last two posts I discussed how Darwinism was used as an excuse by evil men to do evil deeds and continues to serve that same purpose today.   I also asserted that evil predates Darwin and men were willing to go so far as to use God as an excuse to do great evils long before men like Darwin and Haeckel devised a way to give evil the veneer of science.   In addition I reminded everyone that Islam continues to use a god as an excuse to commit atrocities.   Finally, I pointed out that the mainstream church is falling prey to Darwinist doctrines, "doctrines of devils" but that each of us as individuals have the right and duty to make our own choices about what we will believe.   In the end you alone are responsible for your own choices, blaming Darwin or Allah or something a priest told you once will not help, nor will 16 years of University education and an entire string of acronyms.  In the end, you choose for yourself between evil and good.
THE EMERGENT CHURCH AND THE POSTMODERN VERSION OF CHRISTIANITY

The problem that the Apostles faced that truly troubled them was not the fear of being killed.   Paul even pondered the idea that he would be happier passing over to be with God rather than laboring to spread Christianity throughout  the Roman Empire.   No, it was not a concern for their health, it was a concern for the health of the Gospel message.    It was heresies that plagued the early church and it is heresies that continue to do so today.    The New Testament teaches against various movements like Gnosticism and Antinomianism, it warns against falling back into Jewish legalism, it warns against the worship of angels or the elevation of the status of any one man above the rest.   In fact Paul plainly stated in Galatians One verses 8 and 9 -

" But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.  As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed."

Is there any other gospel being preached?   Oh boy is there ever!   There has been a move of the so-called church away from standing firm upon the authority of scriptures and moving to hitch a ride on the moving sidewalk of secular naturalism with its "Deep Time" and "Darwinism" and of course the millions upon millions of years of the violent and bloody process of macroevolution.    God is no longer trusted by many who name themselves Christians, He is after all a very backwards Deity who continues to stand for a Creation by a Creator, a Fall, a Catastrophic Destruction of the old world and eventually a Savior Redeemer come to bring back relationship with God in the new world.   People want something new and different, like being overcome by laughter or being moved to bark or roar in the middle of a service, or going down for prayer and wind up dancing like a belly dancer on LSD.   That is GOD??



This blog rightly lays much of the blame at the feet of Darwinists who have been luring in Evangelicals and old line denominations and various cults with assurances that "evolution will not conflict with your faith" and often bring along that canard, the "non-overlapping magisteria" concept in which the Bible is authoritative in matters of faith but naturalistic materialistic science is authoritative in other areas.   Yet when someone who has fallen prey to this temptation takes a good look at the real culprit, he or she will be looking back at you in the mirror.   The Darwinization of the church is a self-inflicted wound!   Shame on Christians for even for one second considering a philosophy that denies Christ or the need for Christ!    This is yet another attempt by those who have no real spiritual foundation seeking to "get along" with everyone else at the expense of the absolute values of right and wrong, good and evil, falsehood and truth.    Truth is the province of God.    He is the Creator of all things and that includes what is true.   Darwinism is simply an excuse for sinful man to be sinful.

God said He created in six days.   If a "day is as a thousand years" and He created in six thousand years, which I don't believe, it doesn't give evolution enough time to happen.  He had no reason to lie to us about it and his use of Hebrew is absolutely specific to 24 hour days.  The best Hebrew scholars will admit that the scriptures specify 24 hour days, even some that do not believe it.

But evolution doesn't fit in with what God said about creation, anyway.   He said it was "good."   Evolution is anything but good.   If it could happen (and it doesn't and can't) it would be millions upon millions of years of creatures all killing each other in a violent and mad drive to save the species...wait...if random forces formed everything quite by accident how in the heck did life come up with any purpose at all?  Oops, forgot, life had to come from somewhere, right?  And information?

Darwinists figure this is shooting fish in a barrel.   Christians believe God made the Universe and information and life so the hard parts are done.   Now if they can get Christians to just believe in evolution, then slowly and surely they will break down the faith of Christians until there aren't any left.

See, there must be God giving life to Adam and Eve and setting them aside as special rather than just another animal.  There must be original innocence that allowed Adam and Eve to be in relationship with God and there must be the disobedience and Fall as mankind decided to defy God and then Adam and Eve had the ability to know the difference between right and wrong - which meant they also had the responsibility to act upon that knowledge.   Disobeying God meant a real Adam and a real Eve sinned.   Not highly evolved apes.

Jesus Christ came to save us from the burdens of our sin.    If the Garden of Eden didn't happen and if sin didn't break the relationship between God and man, then Jesus could not fix it.   So Jesus therefore is not the Christ and He came for nothing, did miracles to impress people, He died for no good reason and His resurrection wasn't of much use to anyone other than Himself.   So I have said it before and I will say it again, JESUS AND DARWIN CANNOT MIX!

FAST FOOD CHRISTIANITY 

One reason that there are so many so-called Christians willing to abandon traditional beliefs is that the beliefs were never truly held or valued.  Much of the so-called church doesn't believe or pay attention to the core beliefs of the original church.  You can see this by some of the symptoms.   Some extremely sincere folks get suckered into some of these things and I am sorry to see it.  I mean people who are absolutely Christians will get fooled into believing doctrines that are not Biblical.   I feel bad for the victimized but shame on those who mislead God's children!

Blab it, grab it.  Lots of "Christian" ministries make a point of making Christianity about being prosperous.  Financially prosperous, emotionally prosperous, totally healthy and so on and so forth.  Jesus didn't go around giving people money.   He warned against those who did hoard riches, in fact.   Jesus went about doing good and healing and teaching but His gift to mankind was eternal life and relationship with God, not a big bank account and a six bedroom-three bathroom house.  Just because you say something your words do NOT have creative power.  God spoke the Universe into existence.  Not you.  What the people who tell you that Jesus said if you have the faith of a mustard seed you can, you know, tell mountains to jump into the sea and all of that stuff.   But if you READ your Bible carefully you discover you can do all things through Christ and that God will give you the desires of your heart.   All the power comes from God, ergo, what you  can do by faith has to be in His will, otherwise He will not do it for you.  Also, you probably have no idea how much faith it takes to fill a mustard seed!  

The balanced Christian prays and asks for things.   We have the right to take every care and concern to God.  We can ask for healing and jobs and for anything.   The key is "ask."  Not demand.  God doesn't obey me, I am supposed to obey Him. 


Give to Get.  Robert Tilton has made a fortune, been caught defrauding people, sent to prison, come back out, begun doing his same old shtick and has a massive mansion in Miami right now.   He tells you to make a vow to God to seed maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred, maybe a thousand.  Make that vow to God and you will get it back five times, ten times, maybe 100 times over.    So many poor people get hoodwinked by this kind of "preaching."   So Benny Hinn tells you to give to God and God will give you back ten fold?   Robert Tilton claims that if you make a vow to God and fulfill it, you will be enriched?   Think.

If Robert Tilton believes what he says, shouldn't he be giving YOU thousands of dollars so God will give him back hundreds of thousands so he can give that away and then get millions and before you know it all the Christians who ever watched Robert Tilton would have full bank accounts and paid-off houses?



Curses, foiled again!  Another way various preachers will get people involved in unusual things and have special prayers and of course naturally special offerings is the curse-demon-buried memories game.

You will be told that a curse has been put on that must be prayed against, there is a bondage laid on you that must be broken...Or you will be surrounded by people praying and trying to get you to go back in time in your mind and seek out traumatic experiences.   The leaders of these sessions will often do what we call "leading the witness" in a courtroom, bringing people to remember molestations that never happened or beatings that did not occur or other such things.

Then there are the people who go around trying to cast demons out of everyone.    Demons cannot live in a Christian.  If you are born again and the Spirit of God lives within you, a demon cannot live inside you and is frankly afraid of the Spirit of God in you.   But Christians can offer demons places to hang out around the outside of their life, like ravens sitting on perches in the corners of the room.   Jealously, unforgiveness, hatred...when a Christian ponders sin they can become obsessed and bitter and act and sound like someone demonically possessed and there will be demonic influences hanging around trying to help.   Our sins, if we do not deal with them, they can provide perches for demonic influences to prod you towards wrong thinking and wrong acting.   Don't give them a place to perch and they will go elsewhere.

Just like the guys who tell you to give your money away and yet they want YOU to give it to them, all these preachers who claim to cast out all these demons and do miraculous healings, try to get them to provide documentation sometime.   There was one of these traveling money-grubbing so-called preachers who would have an assistant sprinkle mica into the ventilation system at the right time and turn on some extra lighting  so he could claim that God was present in the room, literally sprinkling the room with gold, the sign of royalty.  When mica is in the air and lights hit it, it looks like little tiny flecks of gold.  These various word of faith preachers seed the audience with people who listen for personal details during conversations, they have perfectly healthy people show up in wheelchairs or crutches and then miraculously tossing them aside after said preacher has prayed for him or cast his demons out or both.


CHRISTIANS ARE OFF TRACK

The pastor of the Biggest Church in the World is Joel Osteen!



God told us to go and preach the word everywhere.   We go on retreats.   He tells us to give the good news to all men.   We modernize our music.   He tells us to baptize and make disciples of others.   We install big screen televisions and build bigger sanctuaries to hold all the people while we tell them how nice God is and how nice they are and how life is going to just be GREAT if we stay positive and friendly and nice to one another.   I recently read a transcript of an interview between Joel Osteen, the pastor of the biggest church in America and Larry King, and I was somewhere between amused and horrified.   Osteen has no training as a pastor at all.   He inherited a big church from his father.  He had majored in television production and marketing.   So he and his pretty wife MARKET a version of Christianity-lite.   Osteen was not willing to say that even Lucifer himself might not somehow make it to Heaven!   He was not willing to tell a Buddhist that he was wrong.   In fact it became quite obvious that Osteen really doesn't actually believe in much of anything.   He just stands up in front of big crowds and dishes out homilies and long stories all of which sound like something out of "How To Win Friends and Influence People."



Christians, you cannot let Darwinism have even one inch of ground and you cannot let worldly goods or promises of miracles lead you away from the actual point of Christianity - Jesus takes our sins and gives us Eternal life, we then give him leadership of our earthly lives and seek to do His will.   It's simple.   But look at what is happening in the Emergent Church movement.   Postmodernism?   Ask yourself two questions on each point listed below.

1) Does this have anything to do with what Jesus and the Apostles actually taught?
2) Is it happening in your church?

Emerging Church - Distinctive Teachings and Goals
  • The world is radically changing and the church must radically change with it
    Emergents believe postmodernity represents a dramatic break with the past and that only an extreme transformation in the church can keep the church relevant and effective in this environment. What is needed, they say, is not just a change in methodology. We need a new kind of Christian.
  • Since the Church has been culture bound for so long we must reexamine and question every belief and practice in the Church, finding new ways to define and express these
    Visiting emergent blogs, one will find that absolutely any doctrine or moral standard can be questioned. It seems at times that emergents are engaging in a complete reinvention of Christianity accompanied by a radical redefinition of Christian terms.
  • We have no foundation for any beliefs, therefore we cannot know absolute truth
    Critics of the Emerging Church movement insist that emergents misrepresent epistemological foundationalism (the belief that we do possess some knowledge that serves as a basis for further knowledge) as requiring “bombproof certainty,” something contemporary foundationalists insist they do not hold to. What contemporary foundationalists do believe is that we can possess real knowledge that is so certain it requires extraordinary evidence to refute it. [13] D. A. Carson points out that emergent postfoundationalism is based upon yet another of their false antitheses, saying “In effect the antithesis demands that we be God, with all of God’s omniscience, or else forever be condemned to knowing nothing objective for sure.” [14] Additionally, emergents fail to consider the scriptural teaching of faith as something God-given which does possess supernaturally certain knowledge (Mt 21:21, Eph. 2:8, Heb 11:1). Emergents do not seem to realize that critiquing secular foundationalism is not the same as critiquing Evangelical foundationalism. In A New Kind of Christian McLaren’s fictional altar ego, Neo, says even Scripture is neither authoritative (in a “modern” sense) [15] nor a foundation for faith. [16]
  • Since we cannot know absolute truth, we can only experience what is “true” for our communities
    Postmodern philosophers and theologians insist that truth is only known and validated within communities (“There are no Metanarratives only local narratives”). While this implies that truth is culturally relative and that true cross-cultural communication is impossible (those outside a community must first join a community before they can understand the community’s ideas), postmodern authors communicate to people of various communities simultaneously, apparently expecting them to all equally understand their intent.
  • Since we cannot know absolute truth we cannot be dogmatic about doctrine
    Emergents see orthodoxy as “generous,” [17] that is, inclusive of many beliefs Christians have historically thought of as aberrant or heretical. Many leading emergents echo McLaren’s refusal to assert Christianity’s superiority to other world religions.
  • Since we cannot know absolute truth we cannot be dogmatic about moral standards
    Absolute stands on issues such as homosexuality are viewed as obsolete. Activities such as drinking, clubbing, watching sexually explicit movies, and using profanities are seen by some emergents as opportunities to show those who are not part of the Christian community that postmodern Christians do not think they are better than them through any false sense of moral superiority. [18]
  • Since we cannot know absolute truth, dogmatic preaching must give way to a dialogue between people of all beliefs
    Emerging Christians do not posture themselves before the world as though they were the light and the world were in darkness. Instead of “preaching” to the “lost” they join in “conversation,” with people of various beliefs. Conservative Evangelicals seem not to be truly welcome to contribute their distinctive content to this conversation since they represent the old, rotting corpse of “modernism.”
  • Since propositional truth is uncertain, spiritual feeling and social action make up the only reliable substance of Christianity
    Emergents consider propositional truth a “modern” (and thus outmoded) fascination. Postmoderns think and communicate in narratives. [19] Since the pursuit of truth is portrayed as a never ending journey with no solid starting point, they consider the only legitimate measuring rods of Christianity to be experience and good works. Without a solid footing in revealed truth, however, emergents have no firm foundation for knowing which experiences are valid and which works are good (something they do not seem to notice).
  • To capture a sacred feeling we should reconnect with ancient worship forms
    Trappings such as burning candles and events such as silent retreats are popular in the movement. Embracing these premodern forms further breaks their connection with “modern” Christianity.
  • Since sublime feeling is experienced through outward forms, we should utilize art forms in our worship
    Many participants in the movement see appreciating art for art’s sake as a spiritual experience.
  • Through conversation with them, “outsiders” will become part of our community, and then be able to understand and believe what we teach
    The postmodern approach is not to try to persuade people to believe, it is to try to befriend people into joining. This is commonly expressed as Robert Webber does when he says “People in a postmodern world are not persuaded to faith by reason as much as they are moved to faith by participation in God’s earthly community.” [20] There is a false antithesis in such statements, however. We do not have to choose between a purely cerebral attempt to talk others into believing correctly on the one hand and offering an open, unqualified invitation to our group on the other. The Bible teaches us to proclaim the gospel message with reliance upon the Holy Spirit to empower, illuminate, and convict (1 Co 2, 1 Thess 1:9). When such proclamation is absent, as it is in the Emerging Church movement, there is no prophetic voice coming from the church calling sinners to repent and believe the Gospel (Ac 2:38, 16:30-32).
  • All are welcome to join the “conversation” as long as they behave in a kind and open-minded manner.
    Emerging believers reject any posture which hints at exclusivism. Dogmatic Evangelicals, however, are not treated as kindly in the conversation as others are (something many emergents admit).
  • The ultimate goal is to make the world a better place
    The Emerging Church movement envisions a utopia in which the oppressed of the world are free, the poor are no longer impoverished and the environment is clean. This paradise is achieved through social activism. Many emergent leaders think it is selfish folly to live for the return of Christ.
The accomplishing of all of the above is seen by those in the movement as evidence that the Church is emerging to reach the culture, adapting to it. Critics of the movement see these things as signs that the Church is submerging into the culture, being absorbed by it.

~~~~~~~~~

Yep, Jesus gathered the Romans and Pharisees together and they SHARED their feelings and sang Kumbaya.  He told everyone that the Old Testament was just a bunch of analogies and myths and figures of speech to be ignored.  He suggested that we figure out what was right "for us" and then do that.   It would be good to dialogue with each other and consider alternate forms of worship.  Maybe passing babies through the fire for Molech would jazz up the meetings?  Heck, maybe temple prostitutes weren't really a bad idea.   Sure, actually the Universe is 15 Billion years old, We (Father, Son, Holy Ghost) weren't powerful enough to make it the way We wanted it when We wanted it.   And it didn't matter what was happening, heck, your son could choke on a piece of meat but don't dare use the Heimlich Maneuver to save his life if it is on the Sabbath, that would make God mad!  Better let him die and not break the Sabbath. 

OR...maybe regular Christians had better get to work teaching and preaching the actual word, making disciples, countering lies, working to build the kingdom.  The general public STILL doesn't trust Darwinism, for good reason, it doesn't sit right in your gut because it is just far too preposterous to believe.   Let's keep telling people the truth and working to be sure we know the truth ourselves.

No one who loves knowledge ever quits wanting to learn.   To learn you always have to be willing to be wrong and it is more important to you to find out what is true instead of to protect what you believe.   Crititcal thinkers are always ready to look caarefully at their core beliefs.  GO, and do likewise!!!!!!
Me? Me and my family go to a local church, we give weekly to the work of the church and we make small monthly payments to a few missionaries we know. We don't let people tells us what to give and we give cheerfully. We work in ministry at our local church according to our callings. That is the normal Christian life!