Daily Verse | John 10:10
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.”
Monday’s Reading: John 11-12
Happy Halloween!
I came across a recent survey conducted by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research called “The State of Theology.” Conducted every two years since 2014, the survey takes “the theological temperature of the United States to help Christians better understand today’s culture and to equip the church with better insights for discipleship.”
In the 2022 survey of 3,011 U.S. adults, they found that “Americans increasingly reject the divine origin and complete accuracy of the Bible. With no enduring plumb line of absolute truth to conform to, U.S. adults are also increasingly holding to unbiblical worldviews related to human sexuality.”
What was more concerning, however, was that “evangelicals” in the U.S. were also adopting views that increasingly looked like the culture around them, “evangelical” being defined according to four statements:
- The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.
- It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.
- Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.
- Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.
While more than 90 percent of evangelicals agree that God is perfect, exists in three persons, that Jesus’ bodily resurrection is real, and that people are made righteous not through works but through faith in him, it was also clear that “the overwhelming majority of U.S. evangelicals have accepted a view of human identity that aligns more with American society than the teaching of the Bible.“
In 2022, 71 percent of polled U.S. adults agreed with the statement that “Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God.” While this is unsurprising, given the influence of humanistic philosophies and worldviews in America that teach self-determinism and a view of humankind as basically good, the survey also showed that 65 percent of polled evangelical Christians agreed with this same statement.
The fact that nearly two-thirds of U.S. evangelicals believe that humans are born in a state of innocence reveals that the biblical teaching of original sin is not embraced by most evangelicals. The Bible, however, makes clear that all humans are “by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). In other words, we are not sinners because we sin; rather, we sin because we are sinners. This truth is foundational for an accurate understanding of the gospel and of our absolute need for the grace of God in salvation.
As Christianity Today sums up in an article about the results, the five of most common mistaken beliefs held by evangelicals are:
- Jesus isn’t the only way to God;
- Jesus was created by God;
- Jesus is not God;
- The Holy Spirit is not a personal being; and
- Humans aren’t sinful by nature.
What strikes me as odd is that in creating a filter of four statements that define an “evangelical,” you’d expect that an evangelical would believe that “Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.” Yet here we have a result that tells us “more than half—56 percent—of evangelical respondents affirmed that ‘God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam.'”
So are they “evangelical” or not? If 56 percent of “evangelicals” don’t agree with one of the defining characteristics of an evangelical, are they really an evangelical?
It’s a bit tricky to know what to make of the survey results because true “evangelicals” wouldn’t believe the heresies that are attributed to them.
Another interesting finding was in response to statement 23: “Christians should be silent on issues of politics.“
Twice as many Americans adults (30%) “agree” or “somewhat agree” that Christians should be silent on issues of politics, while only 15% of evangelicals agree with that statement. On the other end of the spectrum, 80% of evangelicals “disagree” (64%) or “somewhat disagree” (16%) with the statement — in other words, 80 percent of evangelicals agree that we should speak out on political issues. And 61 percent of American adults agree with them.
Evangelicals can take comfort in the fact that a clear majority of Americans support their right to speak out about political issues, along with four-fifths of evangelicals. That doesn’t mean that all so-called evangelicals will agree on a particular political position.
Keep that in mind as you make your opinions known on November 8. And in between elections, too.