It probably shouldn’t surprise us that our secular culture is being “wokeified” because a secular culture is what results when the people ignore what God has said.
When people do not accept divine guidance, they run wild.
But whoever obeys the law is joyful.
— Proverbs 29:18 NLT
What might be more surprising is the “wokeification” that’s taking place among those who are supposedly paying attention to what God says. In the last few weeks there have been stories that are alarming examples of what happens when men and women who lead churches lose their sense of God’s revealed will.
Andy Stanley, the founder and pastor of North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia, recently said that believers should not insist on biblical inerrancy because it’s an issue that keeps potential converts from coming to faith.
Stanley explains his apologetic:
“The bottom line in terms of what a person must believe about the bible in order to be a follower of Jesus, it’s really this simple: you just have to believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John are reliable accounts of actual events. That’s it. … because if you do, then you will also believe that Jesus, who claimed to be the son of God and our king, and everything we’ve stated in this series follows from that one idea.”
He notes that Christian apologists always build their case on the resurrection of Jesus, not the inspiration of the Bible, and that “our faith does not rise or fall on an errorless text” or a bible without error, but rather Christianity rises or falls on the identity of Jesus.
Without going into a long discussion about the inspiration and infallibility of the biblical texts, it is possible to agree with Stanley without agreeing with his conclusion about infallibility or inerrency. For instance, “Christianity rises or falls on the identity of Jesus.” That’s true. Our faith is not founded on the biblical text itself, but on the real, historical manifestation of Jesus, his resurrection from the dead, and his ongoing, current existence. As Paul says, “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14). It’s not the text that saves us (see John 5:39-40).
Someone who follows Jesus and is led by the Spirit but does not accept that the bible is without error is not committing an unpardonable sin. In other words, I believe that person’s salvation is secure. We don’t insist that someone who doesn’t accept biblical infallibility cannot be saved or cannot be a Christ follower.
However, such a person does leave themselves open to confusion and error because they cannot be sure what is and is not true in the scriptures, including what it says about Jesus. Such a view of scripture also leads to uncertainty about how to live as a believer, because you can’t logically determine what can and can’t be trusted in the bible. It would be very easy under the cultural pressure we face to simply declare that a biblical prohibition against homosexuality, for example, is an “error.”
While Stanley’s concern for those who are near-converts is admirable, I think he makes a dangerous compromise that unnecessarily muddies the waters for his congregants and for new believers.
Stanley’s theology is controversial but generally still within mainstream Christianity. Not so the next two stories, which take place in more radically progressive congregations.
First up is a female Lutheran pastor who led her congregation in reciting the “sparkle creed.“
A female Lutheran pastor in Minnesota has gone viral for leading her congregation in a “sparkle creed” prayer in honor of LGBT pride month in which she described God as “nonbinary” and Christ Jesus as having “two dads.”
Anna Helgen, co-pastor of Edina Community Lutheran Church (ECLC) in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis, delivered the prayer during a Sunday service live stream on June 25, when she called on members of the church to stand in honor of the “sparkle creed.”
In this prayer, Helgen recited a statement of faith known on social media as the “sparkle creed.”
“I believe in the nonbinary God, whose pronouns are plural,” Helgen said. “I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic, and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling child of God.
“I believe in the rainbow spirit who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity. I believe in the church of everyday saints, as numerous, creative and resilient as patches on the … quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in wonder. I believe in the calling to each of us that love is love is love, so beloved let us love.
“I believe, glorious God, help my unbelief, Amen.”
The “sparkle creed” may be a “statment of faith,” but it’s not based on any biblical text that I know. This is what is called eisegesis, which means reading into a text one’s own ideas. Instead of coming to the text humbly and allowing it to inform you, you come to the text to inform it — you’re telling the text what it means instead of letting the text speak for itself.
It’s clear that the creed she cites is not biblical, and it is certainly not Christianity. I don’t know what you’d call it, but it is a false religion with a Christian gloss using made up creeds to patronize a rebellious “community.”
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” — Exodus 32:1
Then there’s the “problematic” use of “Our Father” in the Lord’s prayer.
The woke Church of England’s latest assault on the tenets of the Christian religion is apparently the Lord’s Prayer, which the Archbishop of York has criticised for being “oppressively patriarchal” over its reference to “Our Father”.
During a meeting of the General Synod, Church of England’s governing body, Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell called into question the use of the Lord’s Prayer, branding the prayer offered to Christians by Jesus Christ during the Sermon on the Mount as “problematic”.
“I know the word ‘father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive, and for all of us who have laboured rather too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life,” Archbishop Cottrell said according to GB News.
“We remain stubbornly unreconciled, appear complacent about division, and often also appear all too ready to divide again… We have got used to disunity,” he added, continuing: “We think it’s normal when in fact, it is a disgrace, an affront to Christ and all he came to give us.”
The comments from Cottrell, the second-highest ranking bishop in the Church, come amid a broader push to adopt progressive beliefs from the CoE leadership, which voted to allow priests to offer “prayers for God’s blessing” for same-sex marriages earlier this year for the first time in the history of the established church of England.
Again, this is a case of taking cues from the culture rather than from the scriptures. These aren’t people who are serious about reverencing God and His Word. To say that the word “father” is problematic because some people had horrible experiences with their biological or adoptive fathers is to miss that our Heavenly Father is not a bigger version of our earthly father — He’s something altogether different. He’s the ideal of what a father should be.
To “correct” the terminology that Jesus used and taught us to pray is unimaginably arrogant. It’s a case of allowing our compassion for the misfortune of others to override our sense of propriety by changing the system or the terms or the story, as opposed to encouraging the wounded to come to the Father as he is and casting themselves on his mercy and compassion.
Never presume to come to God on your own terms. We come to God on His terms.
Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense; and they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to his command. So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. — Leviticus 10:1-2
I sincerely wonder how it is that the Lutheran pastor and the Archbishop of York can still consider themselves part of the true Christian church, but they do. They seem to take a Darwinian approach to God’s relationship to man, meaning that our theology must evolve to meet people where they’re at today.
A recent article titled, “Queering Jesus: How It’s Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools,” examines “how progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of ‘queer theology.’ Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.”
Perverse, blasphemous, narcissistic, heathenish, heretical and cultish are the ways in which queer theology will appear to traditional Christians and to many nonreligious people with a conventional notion of religion. Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament theology at Houston Baptist Seminary, described the movement as a form of Gnosticism, referring to a heresy that has surfaced in various periods of church history. Followers of Gnostic cults claimed they possessed esoteric or mystical knowledge that is not accessible to the uninitiated and the impure, Gagnon said, a belief that often leads to obsessive or outlandish sexual practices, like radical abstinence and purity, or libertinism and licentiousness.
Beneath the theological posturing about disrupting power, he said, is an insatiable will to accumulate power.
“They’re only for subversion until they’re in power,” Gagnon said. “And then they’re adamantly opposed to subversion.”
It’s a perversion of the scriptures and all authentic, biblically-centered Christians must be on their guard against the insidious nature of the woke theology that threatens to destroy their faith and reject it with extreme prejudice.