Really Bad Arguments and Some Hypocrisy in Modern American Evangelical Thought

Over the past couple of weeks, I have witnessed extremely poor judgment, hypocritical decision-making, and outright stupidity coming from those who should know better. It is coming from Christian leaders, some of whom I know personally and respect. It seems to me that we have simply parked any and all discernment preferring instead adopt the infamous herd mentality. These arguments and behaviors I have read about range from Christian leaders exposing young children to anti-abortion clinic protests exposing them to the vile pictures of dead babies ripped apart cloaked in the idea that they are teaching their children mercy and justice and showing then what it is like to stand up for the helpless. The Kim Davis story continues to rumble down the tracks gathering bad argument after bad argument as it goes with Mike Huckabee being the most recent one to weigh in on the matter and come to Kim's defense. Then we witness Tullian Tchividjian's moral failure, his resignation, his application for divorce, and within two weeks, his hiring by Willow Creek Church to be their new director of ministry development. And then we discover that R.C. Sproul Jr. gave his email address to Ashley Madison in a moment of weakness. I think any man understands sexual temptation and weakness. It is bit more difficult to understand a website that, if I am correct, caters to the sexual escapades of only people who are married. The sad fact is there will likely be more to come. Indeed, it has been a difficult few weeks. What should we do? What should the churches response be to these things? What should leaders and teachers do to help fellow believers think and speak correctly about these matters?

• For starters, stop lumping Kim Davis into the Christian community. If the reports about her "Christian experience" are correct, she is involved in a heretical sect. Apostolic Pentecostalism has a variety of false doctrines, not the least of which is the outright denial of the Trinity. Just because Kim Davis chose the right side of the gay marriage issue, that does not mean she is a true believer. Pastors and teachers need to STOP teaching us that it ok to rally together around issues...like homosexuality, abortion, religious freedom, etc. The Church rallies around the truth, and Jesus Christ is the truth, His Word is the Truth. The unifying principle of Christianity is the Christ we know and nothing more.

• I wish we could oppose abortion without exposing young children to such obscene imagery. I wish we would be more discerning to be careful not to allow the methods we use to distract from the message we bring. I wish abortion protesters would stop blaming abortion on the rest of us. Stop judging your brother sinfully by accusing him of being complacent because he does not oppose abortion the way YOU think he should. Stop judging pastors who don't preach against abortion as often or how YOU think they should.

• I wish the Church would do the right thing when it comes to men like Tchividjian. He and his wife cheated on each other, refuse to forgive each other, are petitioning for a divorce, and somehow, in the middle of all this, he is deemed fit to lead ministry development at Willow Creek Church. What does the world see when they see this? For starters, these matters ought to be kept private. How can we allow divorce within our own community to reign as freely as we have, all the while arguing against gay marriage because it violates God's law? Well, divorce for any reason violates God's law and the Church has tolerated it with little more than a wink. The issue here is that some of us hate homosexual sin more than we do the sin of illicit divorce and so we elevate it to a place of higher importance. The truth is that this points out serious hypocrisy in our thinking and we must work hard to correct it. It is embarrassing and shameful that we should ignore God's design for marriage where divorce is concerned WITHIN our own communities and then wag our fingers at the world because they want to ignore God's design for marriage differently. The situation as I see it is absurdly hypocritical.

• Finally, godly men visiting adultery sites. While this story is upsetting and disturbing, it is also one that demonstrates what justice, mercy, and grace look like. R.C. Sproul Jr. was fired by his father's own ministry. Sproul Jr. had a moment of weakness. We are all sinners. We all have moments of weakness. I would NEVER point my finger at Sproul Jr. I love and respect him. Should we consider the fact that he lost his wife? Yes we should. Should we consider that he is a sinner just like the rest of us? We most certainly should. Sproul Jr. made no excuses. He took full responsibility. He lost his post. He is being shamed for all of us to see which I think is unbiblical. It should have remained private. Did he confess that he had sinned to anyone else? A fellow disciple or accountability partner? We don't know. Would he have ever confessed? Only God knows. But God has a way of bring his discipline to bear on each of us and so it is with Sproul Jr. He is a good man with a lot to offer and I pray that after a period of counsel, prayer, and healing, he is fully restored to serve the body. For he is indeed a strong servant with a lot to offer the body of Christ.

By now it should be obvious to us that the Church is infected with worldliness. Our passions rest in places other than the gospel. The gospel is often used as a device used for political expediency. We want particular practices to end or to begin or to continue. And we pour nearly all our energies into making sure our desires are realized. We want homosexual marriage to once again be illegal. We want the murder of innocent babies to cease. We insist that American Christians retain their religious freedoms so that they can avoid persecution which is unlike their fellow Christians across the globe and precisely contrary to what the New Testament says about what we should expect when it comes to this issue. Preach Christ! Condemn godless living but do it within the context of the gospel, not Americanism. Condemn the murdering of innocent babies but not in the context of making abortion illegal. Do it within the context that it is something God hates. God hates hands that shed innocent blood. Repent and believe the gospel. Homosexual marriage is not a concept Christians can accept. We must oppose it in our teachings, our thinking, and in our personal conversations. But we do so within the context of the gospel, not within the context of making it illegal again or using our Christianity as an excuse to engage in civil disobedience.

Something Else You Should Know Before Defending Kim Davis As An Orthodox Christian

In Sunday School this morning, someone sent up a request for prayer for Kim Davis, the Clerk of Court in Kentucky who refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In my last post, I pointed out what I consider to be some grievous errors in our thinking on this matter and in this post, I want follow that up with a short and direct response to those that are holding Davis out to be a Christian martyr. Before I say more, I agree with Kim Davis that same-sex marriage is immoral and not sanction by God, and therefore it is impossible, civil license or not. Only God can sanction marriage.

Now, before you run to Kim's defense, not only should you consider my last post, you should also consider this one. First of all, I do not accept the argument that Christians ought to bother themselves with the issue of religious freedom. It is NOT our duty to stand up and fight for our right to practice our religion freely. The NT says just the opposite. We can expect the culture and God-less civil authorities to persecute Christian belief because those institutions are guided and controlled by men who are hostile to God. Why we find this shocking is, well, shocking to me. Why would God-hating civil authorities want to submit to Christian principles? Truly Christian principles for Christian reasons? They don't and where it appears they do, the explanation is all too easy to understand. The order they know society requires to function without deteriorating into chaos can only be had by those innate principles that humanity shares, like the idea of morality, etc. But make no mistake about it, the embracing of these values is as superficial and hypocritical as it can be. America has been one of the biggest hypocrites as a nation in the history of nations. She has given little more than lip-service to Christ all the while increasing her level of immorality with each passing year. And she has been doing this from her very beginning. We are strangers in this world, aliens, citizens of a heavenly kingdom with a responsibility to our reigning King, whose kingdom is and is yet to come. It is the Church, the body of Christ that concerns us. As for the world, the civil government, our duty to them is to love them, to show them what godly love is by loving one another, and by giving them the truth. If we teach them to adopt Christian principles externally only, we do nothing more than create a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites. Regrettably, that is what America has been mostly made of for centuries now. So lets make sure that when it comes to this issue, our loyalty is to God and His Church more than it is to some misplaced idea about an American revival, or about changing the civil codes so that we feel like we are doing something.

It has been reported that Kim Davis is a member of an Apostolic Pentecostal church. Those churches are not uncommon in that part of the country. I grew up in West Virginia, just 15 minutes from the Kentucky border. I knew people from those churches and at one time, as a teenager, was invited to speak at one. My familiarity with Apostolic Pentecostal churches is based on several years of experience. These churches would be classified more as a cult than anything else. They are clearly not part of historic Christian orthodoxy. The website for Apostolic Churches beliefs can be viewed here.  For starters, Apostolic Pentecostal churches deny the doctrine of the trinity, holding firmly to the heresy of modalism. This alone places them outside the Christian community. The Apostolic Pentecostal churches also believe that faith and repentance along with water baptism only in the name of Jesus Christ, and the modern tongue-speaking phenomenon are all required to be saved. The churches that I knew believed that women had to wear dresses, some of them held that those dresses had to be ankle length with sleeves going all the way down to their wrists or they were committing an abomination. The churches were legalistic in the extreme.

Clearly, the Apostolic Pentecostal churches are an aberration of biblical Christianity. It is a legalistic sect rejecting historic Christian teaching, a movement entirely in rebellion of apostolic teaching not unlike the one John dealt with in his letter. Ironic I think, but damning at the same time. Kim Davis is said to be part of this community for over four years now. If this is in fact true, it means that Kim Davis is a member in pseudo-Christian community, a group that is in rebellion against Christ and His teachings. So here are the final issues as I see them.

1. Kim could issue marriage licenses without sinning in my opinion.2. Kim should resign if she cannot issue these licenses in good conscience.3. We cannot truly claim that Kim is being persecuted in Christ's name because she is not in jail for preaching Christ.4. Kim is in jail for refusing to carry out her civil duties as clerk of court, not because she loves Christ.5. Kim quite probably belongs to a cult, not a true Christian community and as such, she should not be supported by the Church. If she accepts the teachings of the Apostolic Pentecostal church, she must be marked as a heretic and given the gospel of faith and repentance in Christ.

What bothers me the most about this issue is the outrage I see from my fellow brothers and sisters. These are the same people who will give illicit divorce in the Christian community a wink and nothing more. Professing Christians can divorce for unbiblical reasons and these people just "mind their own business." But on this sin, a sin they hate more than the sin of illicit divorce, they get all worked up. I, for one, have to wonder if they are getting worked up because this sin is wicked in the eyes of God or because this sin is one of the ones they hate the most. If we are not going to tolerate gay marriage, then neither can we tolerate illicit divorce among Christians. In fact, we should not tolerate it among the world either. But we do don't we. Why is that? This hypocrisy is no different than a Christian bed and breakfast owner not inquiring as to the marital status of a man and woman renting a room while rejecting the gay couple a room claiming it injures his conscience. Either we are stupid or we have an obvious double standard. At this point I am not sure which one it is. But I am sure of this: Willow Creek has hired Tullian Tchividjian just two weeks after he filed for divorce. How can a man who has admitted to adultery recently and who is filing for divorce be in a position to be the director of ministry? And there is no outrage at all that I can tell. The bottom line is that the Church has to clean up its own back yard before and then some.