Echoes of Eden: Delusions of the Postmodern Church

By Eddie Dutra

The neoliberal theologians, who intend to repaint Christianity, say they are reacting to the errors and abuses within the church, against the false promises of the Prosperity theology and the modern Pharisees, who use legalism as a means of oppression and control. The truth, however, is that they incur in the same mistakes of them. Those of the Prosperity Gospel or those of the postmodern church philosophy lead the ministry according to peoples desire, not according to Gods interests or the true spiritual need of people. The Prosperity theology adapted to a greedy society that sees Jesus only as the multiplier of loaves and fishes and a free healer; therefore, it gave them what they wanted. The postmodern Christians changed the speech and emphasis, but reproduced the same pattern of ministry. When we compare them, both groups are alike they all use pragmatism as foundation for ministry, thus, their teachings are unbiblical, their practice unethical and its results, devastating to the Christian faith.

The new painters take advantage of the mistakes of some groups of the evangelicalism, with this, they find the opportunity to throw out the baby with the dirty bathwater they throw away the true Gospel along with the errors of the church. Such opportunism is clearly detected in their effort to establish a stereotype to represent historic Christianity as a group of ignorant and devoid-of-love Fundamentalist fanatics, while they pose as open-minded good-boy- preachers, and love givers with no trace of prejudice.

By opposing legalism, these men went to the other extreme they became libertines. Thus, their offered antidote became worse than the poison itself. The neoliberal theologians came not to bring healing to the churchs problems, rather, they aggravated it. They are opportunists who are creating a neo-Christianity under the perspectives of this new postmodern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512744811

Eddie Dutra

Eddie Dutra is graduated in Theology and Christian Counseling. He has been pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Hollywood, Florida, for 15 years.

Book preview

The Mind Behind All of This

Chapter 1

The Mind behind All of This

Of all God’s creatures, the serpent was the craftiest. Then he spoke.

— Moses

By far one of the most attacked and denigrated parts of the Bible is the first three chapters of Genesis. The origin and incidence of such attacks are not by mere chance, for Satan and his tactics are denounced there. In those chapters he is denounced as the originator of all evil in the universe, his character is revealed, and his effort to move man away from God is seen for the first time — a strategy that would be repeated to exhaustion in the following centuries.

Satan is presented as the disguised tempter, hiding his identity by embodying a serpent. According to the original Hebrew vocabulary used in Genesis, he is denounced as the most subtle, shrewd, crafty, ingenious in the use of tricks to deceive and cunning creature.

The devil employed his craftiness to deceive Eve, but it was another event, long before, which revealed his highest capacity of inducement. After all, despite the fact that Eve use to talk to God, she did not see or know Him well and she never had been in heaven. Therefore, the absurd power of the persuasiveness of Satan is better evaluated by the uprising he managed to cause within the angelical hosts. The angels lived where God dwells and knew God not by faith but by black-and-white empirical findings. Nonetheless, Satan was able to induce one-third of them to abandon their astonishing status (Jude v.6).

The term used in Genesis to describe the serpent allows the translation ‘prudent’, as some older Bible versions have used. Prudent, because he has the caution to induce without taking credit, and because he is able to be present without being identified. With no smell of sulfur or the presence of a pitchfork, Satan is interlaced with branches and leaves, so that everything matches the environment — a garden. If it was a church, he would perhaps use a nice suit (or jeans and T-shirt), for it is certain that a snake, in that other context, would cause immediate panic, — but not in the Garden of Eden. Prudent, because when Satan speaks, he does it through the mouth of a serpent, so he does not have to identify himself. If serpents doesn’t talk, he will be able to make them to speak. If Eve should find a talking snake to be weird, then he’ll get Eve to take the bizarre as normal, the unnatural as natural, and the aberration as common. He does the same in our modern society. This is his mastery.

When Satan deceives and transmutes he is doing his thing. Outside of that, he is a fish out of the water, for he has a repugnance to the truth. His nature has no trace of it. If he must use the truth, he will do so when it can strengthen a lie, because when he lies, ah… there he is at ease, speaking his own language, for he is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44).

While the taste of the forbidden fruit was still dissipating from her palate, instead of being dressed with the expected glories, Eve realizes she is, in fact, naked. The machination of her thoughts did not bring any gain but brought her a great loss. The nudity, once her nature, is now her shame. Confronted by God, she realizes that all the thoughts she believed to be the fruit of her cleverness were not hers at all — they had been planted from the outside. Now she realizes the implications: despite the fact that she had been deceived, she transgressed the law of her Creator, and in shame and fear, Eve and her husband hide from God. Then, she realizes another great loss: the presence of God that used to bring communion, now causes discomfort instead, because of her guilt. Other losses would follow: her strength, the paradise, Abel, and life itself.

As a serpent, dragon or angel of light, Satan continues disguising himself ... and deceiving. There is nothing he hates more than Jesus and the Bible. He hates Jesus, because he is the personification of truth (John 14:6), and the Bible, because the personified truth testified about it saying, Your word is the truth (John 17:17).

The serpent works tirelessly on two fronts: in preventing the truth to ever become known, and in deviating those who already know it. The latter is called apostasy, and it is the serpent’s big deal with the church. It worked with Eve and her spouse, and it is works today.

In order to thrive, Satan infiltrates his human agents. If he masquerades himself as an angel of light, it should not be surprising if his servants also come masqueraded as servants of righteousness, false apostles, deceitful workers and false prophets who present themselves dressed in sheep’s clothing when, in the inside, they are, in fact, ferocious wolves (2Corinthians 11:14, 15; Matthew 7:15).

We Were Warned it Would be Like This

In the latter eighties, studies and books on the New Age movement began to circulate among evangelicals, denouncing their predicament on the establishment of the Age of Aquarius (i.e., the post-Christian era), in substitution of the Piscean Age*⁴ (Christian era). That predicament involves the establishment of a new world order that would pave the coming of the Maitreya (who might be the Antichrist). However, despite the seriousness that this subject demand, the church turned its attention to the graphic symbols of the movement, thus launching the newest fashion of the evangelicals’ mystique of that time.

Previously, the fashion among the believers had been the searching for subliminal messages in LPs (in the Jurassic times preceding the CD). People swore that while running them in reverse, satanic messages could be heard. Then came the search for subliminal messages in animated cartoons, and with that, the ‘holy war’ of the church now turned against Disney, whose animations were supposedly compromised with this technique.

When I think about all those fashions in the church that I witnessed, I reflect on how astute is Satan in creating distractions so he can sneak in and devastate! Thus, believing to be paying a great service to Christianity, Daddy, evangelical and superstitious, pulled off the head of Mickey’s doll in his son’s room. Meanwhile, in the living room, Mommy continued sipping all the rottenness of the diabolical teachings passed through the soap operas — and a true sacrilege would be to miss one of those episodes!

The same distraction occurred with the New Age movement. We’ve chased bumper stickers with symbols of the Yin and Yang, and the peace sign,**⁵and in the meantime, we neglected the biblical doctrine being contaminated and the emptying of Christian values. We strained out a gnat and swallowed camels. Meanwhile, the new world order came, invaded the churches, lobbied pastors, and became the greatest influence on evangelicalism, without being noticed, without fanfare, and without any trumpet sounding its prophetic blow.

Suddenly, we live in a completely new world — frighteningly new. The change occurred with such speed that we were confused and helpless. But in fact, the erosion of Christian foundations was occurring gradually. In truth, the sudden changes we are witnessing today are the landslides of large portions of ground giving in under its weight, for its base was disappearing for decades. Then, the wolves in sheep’s clothing came in large packs, dressed in their elegant classic suits or in the hipster style of promising young pastors.

It was not for lack of warning. Perhaps because of naivety. Certainly for a lack of vigilance. We have been consistently advised that deceitfulness would enter our churches and threaten our faith. Jesus warned us about false teachers and false prophets, but we thought that they would always be outside of our temples and that they would appear wearing turbans and chanting Hindu mantras. But Jesus described them as ‘dressed in sheep’s clothing’, implying that they would come with Christian characteristics, credentials of pastor and quoting Bible verses.

It was anticipated that times of great deception would occur just before the return of Christ and that many Christians would give in. At that time, a terrible seduction would sweep the professing church and believers in great numbers would suffer disorientation (Matthew 24:24). The inequity would intensify and reach alarming proportions, and the love of many would grow cold. The prophecies indicate these ending times as having a resemblance to Roman paganism, Babylonian mysticism, the violence in the days of Noah, and the moral perversion of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Difficult Times

But mark this: There will be difficult times in the last days. — 2 Timothy 3:1

With Timothy, we were warned of the dark times to arrive. In 2Timothy 3.1, Paul calls it the last days, a technical term employed to indicate the time of the climax of biblical prophecies that culminate with the return of Jesus and the events that succeed it. The characteristics of this time are then described: people would be self-centered, money hungry, narcissistic, arrogant, blasphemous, mockers, enemies of the good, treacherous and inconsequential. As for their spirituality, they would make a show of religion, acting as if they were serving God (2Timothy 3:5 EXB), but, behind the scenes, such religiosity would be no more than appearance, for they would deny the true spiritual power. Such a time would then be called a difficult time because of its troubled people and their mentality.

We can infer that these times would be especially difficult for the workers of the Church of Christ, especially to the pastoral function, since these words were instructions given in a pastoral letter.*⁶

The Greek word Paul chose for difficult is chalepos, meaning hard to take, ferocious, rough, and savage. The term refers to someone bent on a dangerous and vigorous activity, resulting in extreme violence. That’s the reason the same word is used to describe the behavior of the demon-possessed men of Gadara, in Matthew 8:28. Therefore, especially for pastors, these times would be burdensome and dangerous because they would have to shepherd the church and take the gospel of repentance to one society immersed in rampant narcissism, in which entertainment plays a role without parallel in history. Since, historically, the church has never been free from the contamination of its environment, we should expect that such behavior would be seen in the House of God as well and that the main trouble would end up laying on pastoral shoulders.

Paul warned that it would not be easy to deal with a generation of complaining, arrogant, manipulative, disobedient and psychopathic⁷ believers. They are people who do not keep their word, do not meet commitments and are unacquainted with the value of honor. They are wanderers from church to church and from book to book, in search of teachers who tell them what they want to hear, for they do not put up with the healthy doctrine, preferring the sick one (2Timothy 4:3).

For Jude, they are hallucinating dreamers, clouds without rain and dangerous hidden reefs in the fellowship of the church (Jude v.8, 12), which is to say that these preachers lack rational foundation, are sellers of false hope and the very cause of the spiritual shipwreck of many. Peter joins Jude describing them like shooting stars — i.e. with no fixed whereabouts —, thus fulfilling the promise of the first Psalm that the wicked will not stand in the assembly of the righteous, but will be like chaff that the wind blows away.

Let me be straight here: I do believe our generation is the one prophesied by the apostles. What a sick and hypocritical society is this of ours! No society in human history fought so hard for the rights of animals, treating it as if they were humans, neither was there another society that has fought so hard for the right to kill human fetuses, treating them as if they are animals. It never has been fought so hard for tolerance to the different, and it never has been shown so much intolerance towards those who differ from the different. It never has been fought so hard for a better society for our families, and it never has been fought so little for our families in our society.

That this foretold hard times has been faced by the pastors of today can be statistically seen. In the United States alone, 1,500 pastors each month quit ministry permanently and 7,000 churches are closed annually.⁸ The main reason for this withdrawal is exhaustion.

We should not be surprised with that. With so many warnings, we should not be so naive about all that is happening. It is reasonable to assume that all those given warnings were to help us recognize the deceitfulness when it presented itself. It should lead us to an active fighting attitude for the faith — not to passivity.

Those predicted times already came and are the new reality. The professing church must come out of its lethargy, of this state of anaesthetization in which it is found, for we are responsible before God and men about what we believe and practice. Those who wish to persevere in the faith in this age of widespread delusion need to return to its foundations. We must turn again to the seriousness of the Holy Scriptures.

Deceivers

Paul’s warning to the young pastor in Ephesus, Timothy, echoed his previous prediction of an immediate fulfillment, years earlier, on his farewell to that church:

Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood. I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. — Acts 20:28, 29

Paul warned later that these savage wolves would be unscrupulous charlatans who would exploit the faith. These ministers of lies would always evolve in their wickedness, going from bad to worse without ever repenting; for they are as deluded as the people whom they are misleading (2Timothy 3:13 EXB).

But Paul also warned that not all wolves would come from outside: Even from your own number, men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them (v.30). Many of them were not born wolves but went through a metamorphosis. They were part of the rank of men of God, formed by great theological schools and with enviable academic degrees showing in their diplomas. All of them are catchy good guys and sons; many of them have a pious past, marked by faith and a genuine desire to serve Christ. They are pastors, writers, and their past is their credential to have granted access among the people of God. Nevertheless, there was a break with their past. For them, the changes also happened very fast. They were caught in the whirlwind of social and ecclesiastical challenges and lost their foundations.

Such a break happened due to their corruption. The dictionary defines corruption as the act compromising integrity, virtue, or moral principle; It is the state of being corrupted or debased; the loss of purity or integrity; It is depravity, perversion; impurity.⁹ Corruption also can be defined as the act of change or be changed for the worse. It occurs when there is a departure from what is pure, simple, or correct; it is the lack of integrity or honesty; it occurs when one uses a position of trust for dishonest gain; when moral perversion occurs and integrity is undermined.¹⁰

At the ministerial context, corruption usually begins with the foundation of everything: the minister’s heart and his relationship within the principles of the Word of God. It is when the Biblical teaching is consciously corrupt that, without realizing it, the minister changes from a messenger of God and an ambassador of His kingdom to an antichrist. According to John, these ministers "went out from us, but they did not really belong to us" (1John 2:19).

Lovers of Themselves

The Bible predicts that in the last days people would fall away from the genuine faith because of false teachings. These teachings come from hypocritical liars, whose consciousness have been cauterized (1Timothy 4:2), whose interests are self-gratification, and whose method is to distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them (Acts 20:30). They are masters who in their greed exploit the believers with stories they fabricate (2Peter 2:3).

They consider themselves friends of Jesus but live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Holders of a deep egocentrism, their appetites and desires come first. Their god is their stomach, wallet or mere vanity (Philippians 3:18, 19). It is no coincidence that the list of the characteristics of men of the ‘hard times’ announced by Paul, begins with self-lovers.

God warned the people about the prophets of the time of Jeremiah:

The prophets are prophesying lies in my name. I have not sent them, appointed them, or spoken to them. They are prophesying to you false visions, divinations, idolatries and the delusions of their own minds. — Jeremiah 14:14 EXB

These ‘delusions’ consisted of a contemporary and optimistic message, which was in open opposition to the condemnatory message of Jeremiah. It was a message of peace, prosperity, and welfare that sought to remove any discomfort in their listeners.

Similarly, under the guise of contextualizing the gospel, the false prophets of our days have corrupted the Scriptures and the foundations of Christianity. Their intentions, in many cases, might be good, but hell is paved with good intentions, says the adage, for there is no justification for corruption.

These false teachers adopt liberal theologies as a means to avoid the embarrassment caused by unpopular biblical beliefs or the beliefs discredited by ‘science’. But in this alleged attempt to protect Christianity in its vulnerability to the common attacks of today, they end up extirpating its viscera. In truth, since they are representatives of Christianity, they are really seeking to eliminate embarrassment to themselves, after all, who likes to be unpopular?

I Am Not Ashamed of the Gospel

An example of this effort to eliminate the embarrassments caused by the gospel is shown in the video called Bullhorn, produced by the pastor and author Rob Bell. There he portrays the action of a man who uses a megaphone and some brochures, which were improvised on a photocopier machine, to evangelize on the streets. Bell begins narrating his discomfort with the preaching of that evangelist who was quoting Bible verses about God’s wrath, saying that if people do not repent they will pay for it for eternity. Then, very emphatically, Bell says, And no one stopped to hear it more, and no one wants any of his pamphlets , and he continues, saying:

Bullhorn guy, I don’t think it is working. All the yelling, and judgment and condemnation…actually, I think it is making the things worse.

According to Bell, that man’s message is confusing to him since he cannot see any connection with the message of Jesus. Bell concludes his thought, saying his concern is that he himself might end up being painted by the public opinion with the same brush with which the bullhorn guy is.

Then, Bell begins to quote verses that describe the message of Jesus as being about love, not condemnation. He says people should be respected on their beliefs. According to him, telling somebody he should follow Jesus in order not to be condemned to hell sounds like a threat. Therefore, Bell condemns the bullhorn guy saying that heaven weeps for such creepy people like him, and makes an appeal that, on behalf of all of us, the bullhorn guy put the bullhorn down. According to Bell, Jesus and everybody else are tired of it. ¹¹

Rob Bell is not alone in his embarrassment. Many others share the same feelings as his.

I think Jesus’ family, for example, would understand Rob Bell. His relatives, who also wanted him to ‘put the bullhorn down’, experienced the same embarrassment. When they heard about the things that Jesus was doing and saying, They went to seize him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind’ (Mark 3:21). And this was way before Jesus began to dispute with the Scribes and Priests; it was before he called King Herod ‘a fox’, and before entering the temple turning the moneychangers’ tables with a whip in his hand. Oh, they did not know how much embarrassment was yet to come!

Jesus’ disciples would also understand the embarrassment of Rob Bell because when Jesus called the Pharisees and Scribes hypocrites, the disciples came to him and said, Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this? (Matthew 15:12).

I think that Jonah, the prophet, also would understand Bell because he also did not like the task of preaching a message of condemnation to the violent Nineveh. But the problem is that God was insisting on that idea.

The video continues with Rob Bell reciting Bible verses about those who love God but do not love people ¹² — a logical implication that, if the bullhorn guy loved people, he would not tell them such things.

Many things could be said in response to Rob Bell, but I think the best answer comes from an atheist, the magician and comedian, Penn Jillette:

I’ve always said that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. (…) If you believe that there’s a heaven and a hell, and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life, and you think that it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward (…) how much do you have to hate somebody not to proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? ¹³

The truth that goes unnoticed in Rob Bell’s video is that the hard message of the bullhorn guy matches the preaching of the biblical prophets, including John the Baptist, whose message was God’s way of preparing people to receive the Messiah — Jesus. What would be the consequences if John the Baptist and Jeremiah had attended the appeal of Bell and turned off their bullhorns?

Peter’s message at Pentecost was the message of the bullhorn guy. It was not a message about respecting people’s faith, but a strong message that produced anguish in his listeners:

When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart. — Acts 2:37

In this text, the words ‘cut to the heart’ literally means "to have the heart pierced", which means being "deeply distressed. It also means, to injure the mind sharply, shaking it vehemently".¹⁴ Luke, the author, informs us what was the direct result of such message: When the people heard this, they felt guilty (Acts 2:37 EXB). Such a condition caused in the mind and heart led them to ask:

— What shall we do?

And Peter responds with the message that Bell disapproves with the bullhorn guy:

— Repent. (v.38)

The voice that annoys and scandalizes Bell is the voice of the gospel that is foolishness to those who are perishing, which, however, for those who are being saved, it is the power of God (1Corinthians 1:18).

The main argument for Bell’s rejection of the bullhorn guy’s method is that no one was paying attention to his appeal. But if Jesus had followed this reasoning, he might never have preached, since it was foretold that his message would be rejected; people would ask: Who gave credit to his preaching? (Isaiah 53:1).

Rob Bell goes on to say to the bullhorn guy that the reason why all the yelling and the bullhorn are disturbing to us is because it looks like he is just trying to convert people to his religion. Then, Bell leads his listeners to conclude that if one loves somebody with an agenda, then it isn’t really love. However, opposing Bell’s point of view, Jesus said in John 3:16 that God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son. But note that, in this verse, Jesus clearly points to an agenda: that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. God’s agenda is that, by demonstrating His love to people, they come to believe in Jesus.

Rob Bell is correct when he states in his video that Jesus said he came not to condemn but to save. But he omits that Jesus also said, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God (John 3:18) — that’s the exact message of the bullhorn guy!

In his video Bell also mentions how Christianity suffers with its association to many negative stereotypes, but curiously enough, he himself presents the bullhorn guy in a totally negative and stereotypical way. The video presents him as an overweight middle-aged man, wearing clothes that presents him as an old-fashioned man. He is pictured as a man with a weird behavior, unsympathetic and isolated from the real world around him. In addition, the stereotype presented in the video is further accentuated by the contrast with Rob Bell himself: a young, cool guy, wearing a T-shirt, jeans and slippers, with a soft speech about love for all. The video clearly intends to pose Bell as a better option of a preacher to his viewers — and his interpretation as a better gospel.

Despite his efforts to share a positive message through his video, the fact is that Bell’s quest for a more comfortable message is an insult to the Apostle Paul who said, I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes (Romans 1:16).

Paul, like so many others, went far beyond of just having to deal with the mere social embarrassment of the Gospel. The story of Christianity has always been one of courage. For being not ashamed of their faith, some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated — the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground (Hebrews 11:36-38).

Rob Bell’s Bullhorn video serves to promote his book Love Wins (in fact, a small sticker with the name of the book appears in the scene when the bullhorn guy enters the elevator). In this book, it is clear why Bell is so bothered by preachers who warn about the dangers of eternal damnation, as we shall see.

In days of confusion like ours, the church needs fewer Christians who feel embarrassed with the message of their master, and more to join the song of Mark Heimermann and TobbyMac about somebody who dared not to put the bullhorn down:

He stood on a box in the middle of the city

And claimed he had a dream

What will people think

When they hear that I’m a Jesus freak

What will people do when they find that it’s true

I don’t really care if they label me a Jesus freak

There ain’t no disguising the truth.¹⁵

Chapter 2

Battles

For our struggle is not against human beings, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

— Paul

In a comic strip of Charlie Brown, Sally appears writing down the title of the research she had been assigned. While Charlie Brown watches over her shoulders, Sally considers: When writing about Church History, we have to go back to the very beginning: our Pastor was born in 1930.

Many Christians today are like Sally. Their lack of knowledge of Christian history leads them to see Christianity only in the context of their local church, their pastor, or their favorite author. These believers with no historic memory tend to view any given warning on the deviations of these men as mere aggressions motivated by dubious interests, giving to these ‘aggressors’ a get-out-here talk, like you should know that our struggle is not against flesh and blood.

This kind of approach ends up exempting the preacher from responsibility, attributing him, at most, the condition of being a victim of Satan’s deceitfulness — after all, to err is human. However, even when mistaken, we are not exempt of guilt. When Eve was confronted about her disobedience, she realizes what actually happened: "the serpent deceived me, and I ate", she said (Genesis 3:13). Thus, Paul makes the point that though Eve was deceived, she became a transgressor (1Timothy 2:14). Therefore, being deceived does not exclude the fact that we are transgressing.

There is, however, a colossal difference between victimization and complicity — there is a difference between being deceived and being a deceiver. There are those who are victims of the deceit of the devil; and those who are subordinate to demonic powers and, thus, rebelling against God’s authority. In this case, the flesh and the blood are accomplices of the satanic plans, they are the functional agents of it.

For the sake of peace and unity of the church, many Christians shy away from confronting the human agents of the deceit in the church. They miss, however, that for the true gospel to come to them, fierce battles have been faced by Christians of the past. They also overlook the fact that the responsibility of the Christian is to oppose every deviation from biblical truth. The church’s history is full of cases of good men who became lost from biblical truth, and Christianity survived only because many Christians fulfilled their duty of opposing them.

Battles are not desirable but necessary. Jude wrote, "I want to encourage you to fight hard in defense of the authentic gospel message that was given the people of God" (Jude v. 3).

The disputes against the false teachers of the gospel of today are not based on personal matters or on current disagreements, but in a condemnation written long ago, for the biblical prophets wrote about them, and this is why they are found guilty (1Timothy 2:4). Therefore, their condemnation was already predetermined centuries ago (1Timothy 2:4 EXB). This is why our struggle for the authenticity of the Gospel has to be greater than our personal preference for preachers and authors; our struggle must focus on more than the interests of our local church; our research on Church History must be more extensive than Sally’s.

In the biblical context, the words our fight is not against the flesh should not be used as an argument to avoid confrontation, but should serve as a warning to the severity of the problem. What Paul meant is that these things are not about mere conflicts between men and divergence of opinions, but about a true spiritual warfare against rulers and authorities, against the powers of this dark world, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 6:12).

‘Our fight is not against the flesh’ means, first of all, that we do not fight by human standards (2Corinthians 10:3) — it doesn’t mean that we do not have to fight! It means that the weapons of our warfare are not human (v. 4) — we shall not trust in human wisdom, but in the authority of God’s Word. We will not lie as they lie; we will not distort the Scriptures as they do; we will not slander, as they are accustomed to; we will not manipulate people, and we will not follow personal motivations. The weapons we use are the ones that have the power of God instead, to destroy the demonic strongholds — the fortresses that the devil has kept under his influence or control.

In recent decades, the church has taught a lot about spiritual warfare. It eventually attacked every conceivable source of satanic dominion except the ones which the Bible in fact teaches about. While we give ourselves to tie down imaginary entities, unravel the demons identities, and break hereditary curses, the real spiritual battle is being won by the enemy.

Paul reveals to us where the strongholds of hell truly operate: on the arguments and claims that arise against the knowledge of God (2Corinthians 10:5). Therefore, the true spiritual warfare occurs in the field of the arrogant thoughts, pretentious ideas, speculations, exalted opinions and bad intentions. It was in this same field that the serpent won the battle against Eve, in Eden. In that field Jesus won the battle against Satan in the wilderness.

With that fact in mind, if Satan makes our mind his battlefield, our best defense is to submit our thoughts to Christ to be protected. Thoughts that were not carried away captive to Christ is what has led many ministries to spiritually adrift and caused their departure from the sound doctrine. Consequently, our true spiritual warfare is to destroy arguments and every pretension, bringing into captivity every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2Corinthians 10:5) — then we would indeed be involved in a truly spiritual warfare.

Paul’s words, ‘bringing into captivity every thought’, literally means to capture the mind of another. In the original Greek, it brings the idea of forcing an opponent to surrender, surrounding him with the presence of more powerful weapons and escorting him to the place of his due imprisonment. We do this to ourselves and to others when we confront all thoughts with the biblical truth.

The Effects of Error

We should never underestimate the consequences of wrong teachings. The church entered the twentieth Century battling for the fundamentals of the Christian faith. In the late nineteenth Century, a new theology began to emerge seeking to adapt to the current presuppositions of science, such as Darwinism and the theories of Freud.

These theologians, called liberals, considered that the truth was being revealed by these theories and, as the Bible disagrees with them, they began to admit possible failures with its narrative and, consequently, deny the biblical inerrancy. By doing so, they ended up attacking the fundamental doctrines of the Bible and, as a result, the essentials of the Christian faith.

Other Protestant theologians of that time reacted by launching a collection of twelve volumes of books written by sixty-four authors entitled The Fundamentals: a Testimony to the Truth, to combat the distortions of the modernists. This work funded by Lyman Stewart was freely distributed to every minister, missionary, and Sunday school superintendent in every English-speaking country. Due to that work, in a short time, those who disagreed with the liberal theologians began to be called Fundamentalists.

To the layman, the term fundamentalism may sound depreciative today, having a connotation with religious extremism, but historically it was a reaction to the liberalism — a theology that undermines historic Christianity and turns the Bible into a mere human book.

Between rights and wrongs, fundamentalism prevailed and the evangelicals experienced unprecedented growth in the following decades.

The lessons of this conflict between liberals and fundamentalists should have been learned. However, new forms of theological modernism continue to destroy the faith of many Christians and the integrity of many institutions when concessions to the philosophy of secular humanism are made.

In his book Battle for the Bible, Dr. Harold Lindsell reveals how the Fuller Seminary, founded in 1947, was intended to be an apologetic institution. Its founder, Charles Fuller, wanted a place where people could receive a theological education of excellence. It was agreed from the inception of the school that through the seminary curriculum, the faculty would provide the ‘finest theological defense of biblical infallibility or inerrancy’, said Lindsell.¹⁶

However, because of the influence of liberal theologians on the faculty and administration, after a while this institution was completely away from its initial goal, and today, it is considered one of the institutions of theological education that has contributed the most to discredit the biblical authority. According to writer Gordon H. Clark, in his book on The Concept of Biblical Authority, the present attack on the Bible began with the reorganization of Fuller Seminary. ¹⁷

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. Pastor James Kennedy showed that almost every one of the first 123 colleges and universities in the United States has Christian origins. They were started by Christians for Christian purposes, to train ministers.¹⁸ Harvard, for example, began with donations of money and books from the Rev. John Harvard, and its initial mission statement was Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life. But the acceptance of a naturalistic worldview and the biblical compromise brought the total collapse of the Christian heritage of these institutions. Today, many of its Christian students, upon graduation, leave these schools as atheists or agnostics.

In churches and denominations, the effects of error are equally devastating. The theological deviations caused by the Prosperity Theology have destroyed the foundations of historic Christianity, especially among Pentecostals. The acceptance of this theology and the Faith movement having as its prophets, among others, Kenneth Hagin and Benny Hinn, promoted a great tolerance to heresy among evangelicals.

Now, teachings learned from paganism have free circulation in our pulpits and bookstores. Among these are techniques of intrauterine regression, positive confession, inner healing, psychotherapy and a multitude of techniques of success and motivation. And many Christians, including church leaders, are offended by any criticism of these methods. Then, with the rise of the Neopentecostalism, these deviations took exponential proportions.

It is Win or Die

As a soldier in battle, the believer has no choice; if he omits to combat the attacks on his faith, he will