The evangelical problem
Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 3:00 pm
i have always been a proponent of the idea that one should read the scriptures and decide for oneself.
Satan's use of Scripture in tempting Jesus is clear indication that a merely cognitive level of biblical literacy does not automatically result in the formation of a Christian character.
There was a corresponding shift from the Bible to Jesus, as more and more Christians came to believe that the key test of Christian faithfulness was not the affirmation of a creed or catechism, or knowledge of the biblical text, but the capacity to claim an emotional relationship with what Prothero calls "an astonishingly malleable Jesus--an American Jesus buffeted here and there by the shifting winds of the nation's social and cultural preoccupations."
The most important shift, according to Prothero, was the shift from theology to morality. The nondenominationalist trend among Protestants tended to avoid doctrinal conflicts by searching for agreements in the moral realm. Christian socialists, such as Charles Sheldon, taught us to ask not "What does the Bible say?" but "What would Jesus do?" Advocates of the Social Gospel, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, taught that it was more important to care for the poor than to memorize the Apostles' Creed.
http://www.modernreformation.org/defaul ... d&var5=110
Christians schooled in an anti-intellectual, common-denominator evangelistic approach to faith rely upon business and consumer models to provide strategies for growth, and not to more substantial doctrine.
Other negative points of the modern day Evangelical (to highlight a few):
1. The Prosperity Gospel and the glorification of unchecked pragmatic entrepreneurship.
2. Lack of cohesive leadership and a rising chaos of its theology
3. Shift to "audience only" church participation
4. Joel Osteen
5. Substitution of entertainment for Biblical preaching
6. Erosion of Gospel principles in its Doctrine.
7. No actual evangelical "history" within the Church.
8. A majority of members seemingly required to be apathetic and uninformed.
9. and as one author has eloquently pointed out:
The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace too ordinary, his judgment too benign, his gospel too easy, and his Christ is too common
-David Wells
Does this obvious corrosive nature of modern day evangelicals simply serve as self-destructive mechanism or has it infected Christianity as a "whole"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTEU_e2qS1U
Satan's use of Scripture in tempting Jesus is clear indication that a merely cognitive level of biblical literacy does not automatically result in the formation of a Christian character.
There was a corresponding shift from the Bible to Jesus, as more and more Christians came to believe that the key test of Christian faithfulness was not the affirmation of a creed or catechism, or knowledge of the biblical text, but the capacity to claim an emotional relationship with what Prothero calls "an astonishingly malleable Jesus--an American Jesus buffeted here and there by the shifting winds of the nation's social and cultural preoccupations."
The most important shift, according to Prothero, was the shift from theology to morality. The nondenominationalist trend among Protestants tended to avoid doctrinal conflicts by searching for agreements in the moral realm. Christian socialists, such as Charles Sheldon, taught us to ask not "What does the Bible say?" but "What would Jesus do?" Advocates of the Social Gospel, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, taught that it was more important to care for the poor than to memorize the Apostles' Creed.
http://www.modernreformation.org/defaul ... d&var5=110
Christians schooled in an anti-intellectual, common-denominator evangelistic approach to faith rely upon business and consumer models to provide strategies for growth, and not to more substantial doctrine.
Other negative points of the modern day Evangelical (to highlight a few):
1. The Prosperity Gospel and the glorification of unchecked pragmatic entrepreneurship.
2. Lack of cohesive leadership and a rising chaos of its theology
3. Shift to "audience only" church participation
4. Joel Osteen
5. Substitution of entertainment for Biblical preaching
6. Erosion of Gospel principles in its Doctrine.
7. No actual evangelical "history" within the Church.
8. A majority of members seemingly required to be apathetic and uninformed.
9. and as one author has eloquently pointed out:
The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace too ordinary, his judgment too benign, his gospel too easy, and his Christ is too common
-David Wells
Does this obvious corrosive nature of modern day evangelicals simply serve as self-destructive mechanism or has it infected Christianity as a "whole"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTEU_e2qS1U