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About Jesus Steve Sweetman The
Liberalization Of Evangelicals I
call myself an evangelical, but I’d rather be known as one who has
given his life to our Lord Jesus Christ.
I appreciate my evangelical roots for the importance we’ve
placed on the Bible as God’s message to mankind.
We’ve always viewed the canonized scriptures as being God
inspired and infallible, but that’s in the process of change.
The Bible no longer seems as important to us as it once was.
So I’ve been warning people for a while in my corner of the
world that if we don’t take the Bible more seriously, we’ll see the
end of evangelicalism as we presently know it.
There
have been some disturbing trends in the evangelical church lately
that’s reshaping our evangelical world.
I’ve heard that 57% of American evangelicals no longer believe
that Jesus is the only way to God. This
is a departure from traditional evangelical thinking. Worse still,
it’s a major departure from Biblical thinking.
If Jesus is only one of many ways to being united with God, then
we’ve got a problem with Jesus and the Bible.
Who’s right? Are
the 57% of American evangelical’s right, or is Jesus right?
If Jesus is wrong on this key point, there’s no logic in
following anything else He taught.
This
leads me to another disturbing trend I’m seeing in evangelical
circles. One reason why 57%
of American evangelicals don’t believe Jesus is the only way to God is
because many of these people don’t believe He was God in human flesh
while He was on earth. Some
evangelical emerging church leaders go as far to say that if Jesus
wasn’t God in human flesh, it would make no difference to Christianity
or to the message of the gospel. How
wrong can one be? Jesus
being God in human flesh is central to Biblical thinking.
If Jesus wasn’t divine while He was on earth, then He was just
another man espousing his personal brand of religion.
Disregard for the details of the Bible have brought these new
evangelicals to this heretical conclusion.
Personally, I can’t really call them evangelicals, and I
question their faith in Jesus.
To
devalue Jesus to a mere man is to undermine the core values of
Christianity. It takes away our most fundamental truth.
Without the Deity of Christ, we’re no different from any other
religion. If Jesus was not God in human flesh while on earth, then the
resurrection, the ascension, and who Jesus presently
is, are all in doubt. If
these issues are in doubt, the Bible is in doubt and Christianity is one
very questionable religion at best.
There’s no use even calling yourself a Christian at that point
because you’ve forsaken the Christ of Christianity.
This is exactly what some so-called evangelicals have now done.
From
my vantage point, the evangelical church is now undergoing a
liberalization that the mainline churches went through decades ago.
This is due to the fact that we no longer esteem the Bible as we
should. We once criticized
the mainline church for its departure from Biblical thinking, but now in
many respects we’re joining their ranks.
In the process we are losing our faith and our personal
relationship with Jesus, which for evangelicals was the cornerstone of
the movement. I believe the
Word of the Lord for evangelicals today
is for us to repent of this sin and return to our Lord Jesus as He is
seen in the Bible.
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