Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The price we pay for theological sloppiness…

C. Michael Patton over at reclaimingthemind.org has a great blog post on the inevitable consequences we pay for the subjectivity and theological pigheadedness that sadly is becoming more prevalent in the evangelical church. We want preachers and teachers who are celebrities and make us feel good. We eschew the hard truth. We are emasculating Christianity, in my opinion. My favorite lines:

“Sadly we have an epidemic of theological discipline in the church today. People think that they can believe and teach anything based upon a subjective experience or a provision of hope. This epidemic is caused due to lack of theological accountability. We don’t think we need people to tell us we are wrong. We don’t have any system of checks and balances; in fact, we often avoid them. We think that if we have the Bible and the Holy Spirit, we have license. There is no way to be humiliated so that we can be humbled.

Because of this lack of discipline we have people out there believing and teaching based upon wild hairs. They are prescribing spiritual medicine that they invented. Sadly the average person is the spiritual test rat. I wonder what the “faith-is-a-force” people did when they first got the idea that faith was a force that we could control. Did they consult anyone about this? Did they have theological advisers? Did they have someone who would tell them that they was wrong? Did they consult church history or biblical exegetes? Did they even have a method for validating their beliefs?”

Read the whole thing yourself here.

2 comments:

Over the Road Coffee said...

Good post!!!

Unknown said...

The answer: become a reformed presbyterian. :)