I had quite a little chat with a young college student who wanted to discuss "religious philosophy." This isn't my area. There were no others present who were willing to talk about it either. She told us all the we were apparently unwilling to think intellectually or discuss anything on an academic level. (laughing here) She makes lame attempts like that to goad people into conversations with her when she is frustrated.

She then asked if we would talk with her about how the world was creeping into the church. That did get everybody talking, but the issue got sidestepped when I suggested that teachers guiding comparative religion and world religions classes could not really know their stuff if they didn't know Jesus. She considered my statement to be "derogatory" toward those teachers.

I've been learning martial arts since 1984. In that time, I have met teachers who have had a good "mechanical" knowledge of the arts, but whose actual experiential knowledge left them inept, at best, in the "ring." It is the same way in my mind with many of the men and women who teach religion in college. I've watched and listened to many documentaries which have featured religion professors who either claimed outright that they didn't believe Jesus to be God's Son, or who danced around His divinity by saying that they were unsure of the whole thing, and those who just said that the Bible just doesn't mean what it says about Jesus because it's really "just a collection of 'stories'." The varied reasons why they think this "collection of stories" exists, whether or not they are inspired of God and/or how much influence the fact that they were penned by men are just....well..... too numerous to get into here.

The young lady told me that we still needed to respect these teachers. I agreed that we need to respect them, but allow them to get away with misleading statements about Jesus and the Bible? Absolutely not. I told her that often, teachers in world religions classes are still using outdated arguments to discredit the Bible. An example I sited for her was a teacher who taught a friend of mine that the books of the Old Testament attributed to Moses could not have been written by him because written language did not exist in Mose's lifetime. My friend pointed out to her that the discovery of the Ebla tablets near Aleppo, Syria, in the mid-1970s had disproved that statement. His teacher was embarrassed at the time, and she should have been.

The deal is, those teachers who don't have a relationship with Jesus are apt to be steeped in moral relativism, and they aren't going to give a rip if they turn someone from their faith. They don't think they are doing anything wrong because to them there is no wrong. Teachings are even worse though from some of those who claim a faith in Christ. From what I've heard many of these professors say on camera, and from what I've read that many of them have written, I can tell that they hold to a type of New Age universalism.

Their descriptions of God's character varies from a God of wrath and vengeance in the Old Testament, who gains an education along the way, changing and relating to man as a God of love, peace and redemption in the New Testament, and finally to a God who offers unconditional love to all of mankind, and who loves sinners, just as they are. That is not what the Bible says.

The hard fact of the matter is, not everyone is going to heaven. That can be contrasted however with the good news that Jesus made heaven attainable for everyone who chooses Him over sin. That's right. God's love is in fact, conditional. The only way that it isn't conditional is if you diminish what sin is, and the atoning sacrifice for sin that Jesus made for us on the Cross. That is sadly, exactly what many collegiate level religion teachers are doing these days. Some are subtle about it, and some bring their rubbish in through the back door. You don't have to go to college to hear this stuff though. There are lots of churches available who are teaching aberrant or heretical doctrine.

[“For too many people the name Jesus has become a symbol of exclusion, as if Jesus statement ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me’ actually means, ‘I am in the way of people seeking truth and life. I wont let anyone get to God unless he comes through me.’”] Brian McLaren

["My goal is to destroy Christianity as a world religion and be a recatalyst for the movement of Jesus Christ," McManus, author of a new book called The Barbarian Way, said in a telephone interview. "Some people are upset with me because it sounds like I'm anti-Christian. I think they might be right."] Erwin McManus

[“What I think I can say is, and this is where I get into trouble, I’m not so sure that when this life is over that all possibilities for salvation are over.”] Tony Campolo

["The church has been preoccupied with the question, "What happens to your soul after you die?" As if the reason for Jesus coming can be summed up in, "Jesus is trying to help get more souls into heaven, as opposed to hell, after they die." I just think a fair reading of the Gospels blows that out of the water. I don't think that the entire message and life of Jesus can be boiled down to that bottom line."] —Brian McLaren

(Sighing here) There are some rays of sunshine though.

{“Our business is to put what is timeless (the same yesterday, today and tomorrow - Hebrews 13:8) in the particular language of our own age. The bad preacher does exactly the opposite: he takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out in the traditional language of Christianity.”} C. S. Lewis

This stuff isn't hard to spot really. I don't pay attention most of the time to the next Christian "thing" out there, because most of it is just bad. The emergent church is an area however that it might not hurt to know something about, because sooner or later one is probably going to have an opportunity to witness to someone who has been schooled in this thinking.

It's a pretty good bet that when that happens, that the person one will be dealing with will have given little weight to the conviction of the Law, and how Jesus' death and resurrection can free one from that. People need to see that , "There is none righteous, no, not one:" (Romans 3:10) You can use the Law to show people there sin, where we all fall short of God's standard of righteousness, and then tell them how Jesus paid for our sins.

These are the simple facts. Children can understand them, which makes me wonder how some of these teachers and pastors fit into the landscape. What drives them to such aberrant teachings? It is as though they believe that God has finally learned a thing or two and now they can impart that "wisdom" to the rest of us. I can understand those people who have never read the Bible, but I can't understand those who claim to know Him and who refuse to accept the words of the Lord.


“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires.”2 Timothy 4:3