Over that last several decades, a number of Christian denominations have split in an acrimonious way. The splits have pretty much all been about the same thing. All of these denominations began as traditional Bible believing groups, but within each one there slowly developed a faction that began viewing the Bible as not fully inspired by God. These factions began accepting non-biblical beliefs and acts as normative. In particular, they began accepting the legitimacy of such things as abortion, homosexual marriage, and homosexual clergy.
As the non-biblical factions within these denominations grew stronger, and ultimately came to dominate many of the leadership positions, those who wanted to continue following biblical theology found themselves in a situation where they were not able to stop the drift. At some point, these faithful Christians felt that their only choice was to leave the denomination and form a new one. This happened to the Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Episcopal denominations, and is currently happening in the Methodist church.
The main reason these splits must occur is because the rise of “Progressive/Liberal” theology is not merely a matter of different points of view concerning what the Bible teaches. The truth is, what has grown to dominate these denominations that have split is actually an entirely different religion. These two religions have completely different worldview beliefs that are totally incompatible. There is no choice but for them to split.
While the Progressive factions insist that they represent Christianity, they actually do not. Essentially what has happened is that they have come to accept naturalistic philosophy as their authority source rather than the Bible. And since these transformations occurred within a church structure, the changes were able to be disguised by gradually redefining church vocabulary. Thus, they continued to use Christian theological terms, but redefined them to express naturalistic beliefs. The average person had no idea it was even happening.
So, for instance:
- Actual justice became social justice.
- God’s grace came to mean condoning (even celebrating) deviance.
- Salvation became helping the oppressed overcome political and economic hardship.
- Love became acceptance of every lifestyle choice.
- Tolerance became acceptance of every belief except genuine Christian beliefs.
- Racial justice came to mean some races were deserving of favor above others.
But why is this happening? I mean, we are not talking here about minor theological differences. This is all about an actual change of religions. Naturalistic philosophy and Christian Theism are not even in the same worldview category. These two theological streams represent two entirely different ways of understanding the very structure of reality.
As hard as it is to fathom, what we are seeing is a group of people who have converted to an entirely different faith, but they like the prestige, power, and comfort of the religious faith they were already a part of. So, rather than move on and join a group that believes what they believe, or going out and starting their own church or denomination, they weaseled their way into power in their current institution and simply took it over. It is no different than what we have seen happening in our educational institutions, corporate boardrooms, and government bureaucracies. It is a power play to initiate a hostile takeover.
But here’s the deal. When taking over this way, not only do these people take over an institution, they literally rip the heart and soul out of it and attempt to replace it with a different one. But since the heart and soul is ultimately the spiritual foundation of an institution, the end result is their corruption and ultimate destruction.
We see it happening right before our eyes. People are fleeing corrupted educational institutions by the boatloads. They are fleeing woke states for those that are standing strong on biblical values. And the secularized churches are massively declining while those remaining faithful to the gospel are thriving.
So why are some churches promoting non-biblical beliefs? They are doing it because they have changed from believing biblical beliefs to believing non-biblical ones. They are simply following what they believe to be true – even though it is not. And that, my friends, is what is going on.