Mark These Words: Capitulation on the Diversity of Truth and Beauty Yields Apostasy, Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism

God knows.  If Christianity is about God, biblical Christianity, like Noah was about God, then it should in fact be about God.  I believe they already know.  They just won't say.  But the people of fundamentalism and evangelicalism will know in the end, either by finding out or having their hand caught in the jelly jar.  Together,they are the biggest reason for the slide toward Gomorrah.

This is God's world.  And yet out of His longsuffering, He endures all this around us.  To Him, a thousand years are as a day, so this is nothing. But evangelicalism will get the word about how bad its rock music was.  About how bad its marketing was.  About how bad its lack of separation, ecclesiastical and personal, was.  Evangelicalism, and now fundamentalism, has encouraged these things.   They close their eyes to it.  And they use modified forms of what they criticize in the extreme.  They go silent on their favorites, their D. A. Carsons and John Pipers.  Others.  And Christianity has gone down, down, down with it.

You listen to the introduction to Carl Trueman's Mortification of Spin, joking on Owen's Mortification of Sin, starting with hard rock music, ugly and profane, utterly clashing with God. They pose like they are opposing evil, meanwhile promoting it.  Two men and a woman, not their wife, bantering casually and jesting back and forth.  It is unbecoming.  They use the rock music to lead into their conversations and discussions about God, associating God with the profanity of the music.  The medium does come with a message and then drags God into it.  You can't compromise and undermine God's beauty without doing the same to His truth.  You give up one and you give up all.  It's a matter of time before the undoing of one becomes the nullification of the other.

I'm saying mark these words about truth and beauty.  I'm saying this because I expect that this warning won't be heeded.  It will either be marginalized or mocked.  A game is being played with God that He doesn't accept.  Not long ago, every Christian would be against this perversion.  It's a form of idolatry, to conform the eternal to the temporal, to straddle man's desires with God's.  There is one truth, one God, and one beauty.  Dissolving beauty will disintegrate truth, and it already has and is.  They proceed from the same God.

Men walk after their own lusts.  But they still want the benefits of the God of this world, so they borrow half or less of a Christian worldview, the portion that they want, that will yield them the solution to sin they need, while forfeiting the pleasure of God, His worship.  A new god will form out of the concession of beauty to the eye of the beholder.  You can't understand God while or when forfeiting this revelation or expression of Himself.  It reorders values and loves.  It forms a god captive to depraved imagination.  It already distorts an orthodox view of God by robbing Him of true affection.

The separation of beauty from truth shapes a god that is a lie.  He carries some of the same labels and evokes the same descriptives, but this isn't God anymore, and it is only a matter of time until the practice and then doctrine too reaches the reduction of loveliness.  The decline has already begun. And this love of God isn't love, but sentimentalism.  He won't accept this passion arising from man's lust.

I also wrote "diversity of truth" in the title, because more than one truth is already acceptable in evangelicalism and fundamentalism.  It's only becoming worse and in a steep deterioration trajectory. The abatement of truth and beauty are interrelated, because the acceptance of several truths and the concession of many or any beauties relate to the love of self and the world.  They seem advantageous in this age and in the short term, they are.

Men want what they like and they want to be accepted.  They still want to be included, even if they don't believe the same.  If men can have what they want and acceptance, but also have the degree of true doctrine that they have eternal life too, that will take that.  And they do.  And will last a very short period of time, like we see men in Old Testament Israel and Judah who did not serve the Lord with their whole heart.  These are half hearted men, who will yield soon destruction because they capitulated on truth and beauty.

Those capitulating feel justified by their numbers, even if they are conservative, because they will and do get numbers.  They have more people.  They convince themselves that it is all about the truth, but it is also about capitulation.  If someone can have Jesus and his movies and his rock music, he'll take that edition of Christianity in a heart beat, even if it misrepresents God.

So we see John MacArthur as a truth warrior capitulate to the youth culture of the Resolved Conference and the rock band at his Shepherd's Conference.   He says that music is the entrance to the Charismatic movement, the strange fire, and yet concedes himself to this out of what looks like sheer pragmatism.   It is a tiny number who haven't succumbed to diversity of either truth or beauty or both.  Now we have a country that won't fight back against same sex marriage.  The above contributes, because it abdicates to the spirit of the age.

So mark these words.  You who capitulate on the diversity of truth and beauty lead the churches, the country, and the world in apostasy.  It's you.  Not the government.  Not the schools.  You.