The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. (Proverbs 1:7)

Why There Are So Many Fools Teaching About God?

The online apologetics and discernment work Apprising Ministries has been documenting the growing falling away of the mainstream evangelical community; and I’ve warned you that there is a tsunami of apostasy—pushed along by 1 Peter 4:17 judgments—headed toward the church visible. Not a few of these judgments have come through evanjellyfish’s foolish embrace of the sinfully ecumenical Emergent Church aka the Emerging Church headed by the unholy trinity of apostates, Living Spiritual Teacher and EC guru Brian McLaren, universalist Emerging Church pastor Doug Pagitt, and his friend Tony Jones, the progressive “theologian in residence” at Solomon’s Porch.

Once again I offer you the following quick synopsis of how we came to live in this age that has critically obscured our reverent fear of Almighty God. Satan finally succeeded in raising up what Dr. Walter Martin, who was widely recognized as the “father of modern cult apologetics,” called the Cult of Liberal Theology. And in an onslaught against the Body of Christ beginning just around the first World War tSatan started playing the heartstrings of mankind’s selfish sinful nature like a master violinist. A veritable symphony of insipid indifference and tepid tolerance, which continues to serve the purpose of amusing the enemy of men’s souls to this very day.

Satan’s puppets, his counterfeit prophets and false teachers, began to fill the pulpits of our nation to begin to make it seem as if the perfectly just and majestic God of the Bible—Yahweh Elohim—was more and more like man. The great and awesome I AM Who once told Moses — ““Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5) has been ever so gradually been transformed into the mystical mush God. You’ve all heard of him/her/it. The innocuous, bland and nonjudgmental “god of love” that all religions supposedly lead to eventually, because mankind is just so wonderful that he/she/it truly couldn’t possibly bear to part with any of us delightful little creatures.

This limp and lukewarm mystic mush god of our age of Laodicea is the one invoked before public functions when some supposed minister begins to pray: “O God of our fathers in yonder heaven; in your providence, show us Thy tender mercies – ‘bless our mess’ – etc., etc., yak, yak…” As we begin to trace this mythological mush god’s lineage back we find men like Harry Emerson Fosdick who popularized liberal theology; Norman Vincent Peale, known as the father of positive thinking, and Robert Schuller, the heretic of that bankrupt colossal waste of money called the Crystal Cathedral, which he built as a monument to himself. That veritable shrine to the overt self-ishness and opulence of mankind that even rivals the vile Vatican City itself.

As I just reminded you in Saddleback Church Of Rick Warren Using Rob Bell Teachings Dr. John MacArthur showed us how this deadly infection was carried from Schueller into the very heart of the mainstream evangelical community:

So, you’ve got Norman Vincent Peale, who creates this kind of liberal, social gospel; his number one disciple, positive-thinker Robert Schuller; Robert Schuller develops this [seeker-sensitive] concept of the church many years ago,… His most famous disciple trained into that model is Bill Hybels, and the second is Rick Warren.  Rick Warren says, himself, that when he left seminary, he drove right to the Crystal Cathedral and was mentored there.

Earlier in his book Hard To Believe MacArthur talked about the exasperating influx into the church visible of “psychologically man-centered evangelicals.”[1] He says:

It’s interesting how this trend has come into the church. I’ve been around long enough to have seen it arrive. It blossomed, I think, most pointedly through the effort of…[the] religious personality Robert Schuller and a book he wrote a number of years ago called Self-Esteem: The New Reformation… It was an effort to replace the biblical gospel with a new gospel. And it worked.

In that book, Robert Schuller attacked the Protestant Reformation. Calling for a new reformation he wrote: “It is precisely at this point that classical theology has erred in its insistence that theology be ‘God-centered’ and not ‘man-centered.’” So, according to Schuller, the first thing we have to do is put an end to classical, God-centered theology and replace it with man-centered theology.”[2]

Have you ever heard anything so foolish? By its very definition the word theology means “the study of God.” MacArthur then goes on:

To define man-centered theology (an oxymoron), [Schuller] wrote further, “This master plan of God is designed around the deepest needs of human beings – self-dignity, self-respect, self-worth, self-esteem.”

This sounds like self-ishness to me. Dr. MacArthur is right when he says:

For Schuller, the pearl of great price is self-respect and self-esteem. He went on to say, “Success is to be defined as the gift of self-esteem that God gives us as a reward for our sacrificial service in building self-esteem in others. Win or lose: If we follow God’s plan as faithfully as we can, we will feel good about ourselves.”[3]

Is that what God really wants for us? To make ourselves feel good in our sin; to become complacent in our walk with Jesus, and to just stay in the “playpen” of Christianity our whole lives? Doesn’t anyone lament the pathetic weakness of our Christian witness today, where our words simply end up bouncing off arrogant sinners like the proverbial b-b’s off a brick wall? Doesn’t anyone weep anymore for the millions whose final destination will be eternal torment in a literal place that Jesus Christ of Nazareth Himself called Hell? The plain truth is, the Emerging Church rock star pastor Rob Bell is wrong with his Love Wins mythology.

As I close this out, for now, below in Why Hell Is Integral to the Gospel by Greg Gilbert he now brings out what’s happened to those following this mythical mystic mush god and the spiritual dead-end of progressive Christianity, which is neither progressive, nor Christian:

For some, the horror of the Christian doctrine of hell—that it is a place of eternal, conscious torment where God’s enemies are punished—has led them not just to avert their eyes and minds, but to deny it entirely. “Surely,” they say, “hell is a fictional construct used to oppress people with fear; a God of love would never allow such a place to really exist.” There’s an emotional power to this argument, to be sure. No one, certainly no Christian, likes the idea of hell.

At the same time, this doctrine isn’t just drapery on the side of the Christian worldview, something with no relevance to the structure of the faith itself. Nor is the doctrine of hell an embarrassing, unnecessary, primitive wart that we believe just because we’re told we have to.

On the contrary, the doctrine and reality of hell actually throws the glory of the gospel into sharp relief for us. It helps us to understand just how great God really is, how sinfully wretched we really are, and how unutterably amazing it is that he would show us grace at all. Moreover, the reality of hell—if we don’t push it out of our minds—will focus us, above all, on the task of proclaiming the gospel to those who are in danger of spending eternity there… (Online source)

Which is why I continue to warn about such as these I’ve been discussing here; though the progressive/liberal Christians follow a Jesus, in actuality, their glorified social reformer is a phantom who’s essentially Gandhi with a beard. You see, because they have gone through the gate [that] is wide out onto the way [which] is easy that leads to destruction (see—Matthew 7:13), a non-existent savior is powerless to help them. And so this is why, in the love of God, we will continue to pray for these deceived progressive/liberals—for whom Christ also died—because there’s still time for them to avoid hell and accept the good news of the glorious Gospel of repentance and the forgivness of sins in the Name of Jesus Christ.

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Endnotes:

[1] John MacArthur, Hard to Believe: The High Cost and Infinite Value of Following Jesus [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003 ], 3.

[2] Ibid., emphasis mine.

[3] Ibid., 4, emphasis mine.

See also:

IS OSAMA BIN LADEN HELLBOUND BRIAN MCLAREN?

TOXIC THEOLOGY OF DOUG PAGITT

DOUG PAGITT AGREES WITH EVOLUTIONARY EVANGELIST MICHAEL DOWD

ROB BELL DEFENDING LOVE WINS MYTHOLOGY

BIG TENT CIRCUS OF POSTMODERN LIBERALISM

THE EMERGENT CHURCH CULT OF POSTMODERN LIBERAL THEOLOGY

DARK DAYS AHEAD