The Wishy-Washy Church of Modern America

If the Bible claims to be the word of God and inerrant, how can you have Christianity without a firm commitment to the Bible? How can you have an anything goes religion? Imagine, believers who don’t believe, believers who have no assurance of what they believe. How wishy-washy can you get?

Once the late atheist Christopher Hitchens, famous and world renown as a great thinker, was being interviewed by the, I say minister in the loosest sense, Minister Marilyn Sewell. She was trying to defend herself in front of this articulate atheist. He was decrying Christians as the worst forms of ignorant boobs, and she didn’t want that label applied to her. She didn’t want to be known as one of those who actually believed the Bible.

So she told him,
“I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories of the Scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement – that Jesus died for our sins, for example. Do you make a distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?”

She was embarrassed to have him think she was that gullible. And did that make a difference to him and his opinion of her?

Hitchens responded:
“Well, I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead, and that by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”

Wow! An avowed atheist sees the essence of being a Christian while this so-called minister, who is claiming to represent Christianity, really doesn’t have a clue. She’s a fake, denying our Lord Jesus as much as this world renown atheist. And she claims to represent Christ?
People like her, and like Rob Bell and all of their ilk in the emergent church movement, think that by denying the claims of Scripture, and by offering a watered down version of Christianity, that the world will like them better. In truth, the world already looks at Christians as soft in the head. They already deny and suppress the truth of Scripture. But to not even believe the foundation of our faith leaves us afloat and adrift on a meaningless sea of nothing. Because they look at the Bible as something soft and pliable, there is nothing to get a hold of.

I just mentioned Rob Bell, one of the leaders of the emergent church movement. In his popular book, Velvet Elvis, he wrote that he’s a “truth stretcher.” According to Bell, truth is supposed to be “stretched” like the “springs on a trampoline,” changing and molding to the one jumping on the trampoline. But that totally destroys the concept of truth, doesn’t it?

Bell is one of the leaders of the emergent church. Yet, he claims that truth must conform to the culture and conform to the individual’s needs, when in reality Scripture is counter-cultural. When in reality, it ignores people’s felt needs and hones in on their real need – a right relationship with their creator. Yet, many of these leaders never present the Bible as something trustworthy we can stand on. If that is true then, what really does the churchy believe? What really does the Bible say? Can anyone know?

But, why would anyone want to put doubt on the Bible? Why would anyone trade in a Bible filled with truth that is a rock, our foundation to stand on, for something that is springy and squishy like Bell presents? Is it cowardice? Is it because we’re too yellow to stand for truth?

Quoting Jeff Myers of Summit Ministries,
“When Christians cave into criticism, [the world] just shrugs and adds one more descriptor: cowardly.”

What must the world think when churches and denominations abandoned Biblical teaching and ordain non-believers, women, and even homosexuals to their pulpits? How can they teach anyone the truth? Or what must the world think when some churches support same sex marriage or abortion rights? Does the world think we’re open-minded? Or Cowards?

But, this is why there is such doctrinal ambiguity within the “church.” Some churches stand on the truth of God’s Word and some don’t. What does the church really believe? Who even knows when there is such ambiguity? That should never be - We must be convinced about the Word of God. We must teach it as the absolute truth it is.