Monday, July 02, 2018

Woke: Evangelical Rift Caused or Influenced by Seismic False System of Interpretation of Scripture

Progressives deconstruct authoritative documents into constituent parts for the purpose of reinterpreting them.  They assign a different meaning by reading into the words of the text.  This makes a document elastic or flexible.  By doing so, they can force the Constitution of the United States into what they want it to mean.  This takes away the authority of this founding document.  Instead of adhering, they do whatever they want to do and justify it with a progressive philosophy.  This strategy or technique, most might not be aware, traces to religious origins.

Scripture claims the highest authority, divine authority, so as much as any document, the Bible invites deconstruction, contortion, and misrepresentation as a means of Satanic attack.  You can't obey scripture and do what you want to do.  Upon completion of the New Testament, early false teachers used allegorization, spiritualization, or mysticism to read what they wanted in to God's Word (rather than out of) to warrant their false teaching.  A false system of interpretation revolved around a novel understanding of God's kingdom and the church.  The false teachers deconstructed church and then reinterpreted it as kingdom.  This justified the Roman Catholic church, joining the church and the Roman empire into a kingdom commensurate to the nation Israel.  Old Testament instruction to Israel could now be read to or applied to the church.

Now the true church was catholic instead of local.  This didn't just affect ecclesiology, but eschatology, and even soteriology.  It also contorted how someone might know and understand the will of God, because the system of interpretation allowed for continued revelation of scripture.  New and contradictory teachings could be added through deconstructing the meaning of apostleship. Requirements were added to the gospel through elevating church authority, which utilized spiritualization to read into scripture what church leaders wished.

Many churches did and still do celebrate Roman Catholicism.  Constantine legalized "Christianity."  Christians wouldn't have to suffer now.  Many bought in.  Then in the Protestant Reformation a break occurred, but it didn't repudiate the false system of interpretation and its view of the kingdom.  The breach was a narrow one that focused on the doctrine of salvation, still confusing.

Evangelicalism, a modern movement, was built on the acceptance of more than one system of interpretation of scripture, due to its ecclesiology, accepting a big tent philosophy of unity.  At best, it somewhat emended its doctrine of salvation as the stake claimed for its history.  Rampant doctrinal perversion persists.  Evangelicals embrace amillennialism, postmillennialism, and premillennialism, dispensationalism and covenant theology, that yields acceptance of massive, wholesale differences in meaning.  This savages the correct view of truth.  The attack on truth itself is anchored in this evangelical position.

Roman Catholicism has retained the most extreme false system of interpretation, which is why leftist ideology finds a home there.  You might remember during the Nicaraguan civil war, where we heard about the Sandinistas and Contras in the 1980s, that Catholic priests were being killed, making it sound like a religious war.  The left used their death as propaganda for their cause.  Conservatives were killing priests.  What was happening?  The priests were communists.  Amillennialism allows liberation theology, where leftist or Marxist social theory is read into the kingdom or the church, which are interchangeable in its ecclesiology.  Think also now of the present pope of the Catholic church.  The political leanings have moved into the mainstream based upon the same corrupt system.

A characteristic of evangelicalism in contradiction to fundamentalism has been its dialogue with liberalism over social concerns.  The bridge between evangelicals and liberals arises from shared aspects of a false interpretation of scripture.  Not only does a large segment of modern evangelicalism read into scripture a necessity of political social change through a false system of interpretation, but are also now fusing this teaching to the gospel.  Conversion is tied to political renewal.  In urban settings, these social positions serve as church growth technique.  Also modern suburbanites want their church with a side of social awareness -- food pantries, soup kitchens, clothing banks, orphanages, racial reconciliation, and third world infrastructure.  This results in numerous and varied new practices in evangelical churches that mirror progressivism, which represents a view of conversion translated into the slang of urbanity -- "woke."

Now you can be saved and vote or support political leftists, who deny a biblical, Christian worldview.  This impacts everything in the church, its view of spirituality, sanctification, and worship.  All of this stems from the acceptance and this acquisition of a false system of scripture.  For almost its entire existence, American evangelicalism has accommodated this conflicting divergence.  Now it results in consent to egalitarianism, continuationism, critical race theory, socialism, and even room for same sex marriage.  It's now difficult to put all of this back in the bottle for conservative evangelicals.

I see angry dissension right now in evangelicals, especially as witnessed between Thabiti Anyabwile and Phil Johnson, among others.  They attempt to keep a modicum of civility, but there is a simmering discord.  Like professors are compelled on state campuses to use gender neutral pronouns, evangelicals must confess their culpability to national racism.  If you do not repudiate any support of the present presidential administration, conversion is questioned.

The root of the rift in evangelicalism is caused or influenced by a seismic false system of interpretation of scripture.  The two have always been incongruent, but now their trajectories have widened to irreparable disagreement.  Something's got to give.  Someone needs to go back to the drawing board to see where the train left the track.

I'm glad I'm not an evangelical, and I'm talking about the movement.  I'm happy I'm saved and believe in a true gospel, but that I'm not hijacked by the history of evangelicalism and all the baggage it carries.  You can't be a movement evangelical and be obedient to scripture.  If your intention is to honor and glorify God, you've made that impossible for yourself.  Separation is necessary.   I call on evangelicals to examine their longtime attempt to reconcile two contradictory systems of interpretation of scripture.

I regret to tell you that it far more likely that evangelicals harden into a further left direction than to break from the past and admit the error.  Pride has fueled its present course and will discourage much change for the future.  The best attempts at change will come from angry tweets and posts or some type of compromise that helps preserve the coalition, safeguarding popularity, book sales, and relevance, which are more important than the truth.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:38 PM

    Interesting. So would you church discipline someone who votes Democrat?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting is ambiguous. Is it true? It is true -- what I wrote above.

    It would have been easy in the last presidential election for someone without wisdom or spiritual maturity to get it wrong, based on good motives. It's different when it is a point of view that is pushed or supported, which amounts to false doctrine and practice. False doctrine and practice is what gets dealt with. Isn't that great? We don't want to displease God, right?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anyone reading,

    This post was not about whether someone voted or votes Republican or Democrat and says nothing about that.

    ReplyDelete