Sermon Tone Analysis

ATTN

SLIDE - Yogi Berra

He is the unintentional master of double speak.

He has said:

· When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

· You can observe a lot just by watching.

· It ain’t over till it’s over.

· A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.

· If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.

· Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

They are the many misspoken sayings of the baseball player, Yogi Berra.

They are called “yogi-isms” because they give the impression of meaning one thing, but are misspoken to mean something else.

In his case he doesn’t mean to say anything wrong, and, according to him, he doesn’t make them up—they just come out.

In most cases they are harmless, humorous and not meant to be deceptive.

But there is another kind of doublespeak alive in the church world which is meant to deceive.

The language is found in many mainline protestant churches.

The pastor may speak of faith and God in language is used that almost sounds orthodox, but what the speaker means is not what the listener thinks that they are hearing, and the result is theological deception.

And one of the primary expressions of cultural Christianity is liberal Protestantism.

BACKGROUND

You remember from last week where we started.

We said that we are swimming in a new American religion in this country.

Al Mohler, the president of Southern Seminary calls it “cultural Christianity” and says that it has five major tenets.

A cultural Christian believes that

· A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

· God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

· The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about yourself.

· God does not need to be particularly involved in your life except when God is needed to solve a problem.

· Good people go to heaven when they die.

You remember last week that we also said that there were several expressions of a cultural Christian.

We’re going to look at three of them: The first one is the liberal Christian.

I suppose I should begin by defining just what is meant by a “liberal” Christian.

If we are seeking the “real thing”—that is the type of Christian who has a genuine relationship with Jesus Christ why would a “liberal” Christian not qualify?

The Problem with liberal christianity.

Liberal Christianity doesn’t qualify as the real thing because of the doctrines it rejects.

Well, in the first place, they would not qualify because of THE DOCTRINES THEY REJECT.

SLIDE - The earth from space.

For instance, liberal Christianity began with a REJECTION OF BIBLICAL CREATION.

Liberal Protestantism was birthed in the 19th century out of what some felt was a need to adapt Christianity to a modern intellectual context.

Because some in the scientific community embraced Darwin’s theory of natural selection, parts of the Genesis narrative became very difficult to defend.

Seeking to ground the Christian faith in something that lay outside of an exclusive appeal to Scripture or the person of Jesus Christ, the liberal attempted to harmonize Christianity with a “modern” worldview.

As historian Alister McGrath says, the liberal sought, instead, to anchor faith in a common human experience.

Slide - Eve with the apple

And once the doctrine of special creation by God was jettisoned, the doctrine of ORIGINAL SIN wasn’t far behind.

The thought that man was created as a sinner was seen as damaging to one’s view of himself and no longer no longer necessary to the common experience of being a cultural Christian.

Slide - Jesus

And since man was not a sinner, he didn’t really need a Savior, so the next doctrine to be challenged was the DEITY OF CHRIST.

Instead of seeing Christ as the God/man, the liberal church emphasized Christ’s humanity.

Freeing Christ from the need to be divine meant that we could just see Him as a wonderful human being who taught things worthy of imitating.

And since He was not God in the flesh, there was no need for Him to do miracles or to even rise from the dead.

Slide- Christianity and Liberalism

In this mix of “brave, new, Christianity,” Gresham Machen wrote his twentieth-century classic, Christianity and Liberalism.

He responded to this wave of modernism flooding the church and argued that this liberal understanding of Christianity was an imposter.

He said that this “religion (is) so entirely different from Christianity as to belong to an entirely different category.

If you grew up in one of these theologically liberal churches you experienced a Christianity presented to you as a way of life but not as a set of non-negotiable beliefs.

The ethics of the Bible (at least some of them) were elevated over the saving work of Christ.

This is at odds with Biblical doctrine however.

According to Scripture, Jesus is our Savior, not by virtue of what He said nor even by virtue of what He was, but by what He did.

He took our guilt upon Himself and suffered our punishment on the cross.

You see, liberal Christianity is not the real thing because of the doctrines they reject.

Liberal Christianity doesn’t qualify as the real thing because of the holiness it compromises.

And it is also not the real thing because of the HOLINESS THEY COMPROMISE.

When Protestantism dumped key doctrines of the faith, behavior couldn’t help but follow.

Dean writes

In 2003, the Episcopal Church in the United States was in a crisis.

The Diocese of New Hampshire named a bishop who not only left his wife, but did so for a homosexual relationship.

The Episcopalian churches that believed in biblical authority (and therefore believed in the covenant of marriage, designed by God to be between one man and one woman) were troubled.

After realizing that reform was not an option within the denomination, which had drifted significantly to the theological left, many Episcopalian churches left their denomination and formed the Anglican Church of North America, placing themselves at first under the authority of Bible-believing churches in Africa and Latin America.

Something significant was said during this denominational upheaval that (summarized what was happening).

Realizing many churches in his own state would be leaving the diocese due to the New Hampshire decisions, one American bishop pounded his fist and exclaimed, “Their God needs to learn to change with the times.”

The compromise of clear biblical teaching on morality that we are seeing today is simply the next logical step of a church that has lost it’s connection with truth.

The liberal Christian cannot be the real thing because of the doctrines they reject and the holiness they compromise, but there is one more.

They cannot be the real thing because of the RELATIVISM THAT THEY EMBRACE.

Liberal Christianity doesn’t qualify as the real thing because of the relativism it embraces.

What do I mean by “relativism?”

The relativist says “There is no objective, external standard for right and wrong that is valid for everyone.

And so your statement that sexual relations between two males is wrong is relative to your standard of measurement, but you can’t claim that others should submit to that standard of assessment.”

This is the essence of relativism: No one standard of true and false, right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful and ugly, can preempt any other standard.

No standard is valid for everyone.

And what does this imply about truth?

Relativists may infer from this that there is no such thing as truth.

It is simply an unhelpful and confusing category since there are no external, objective standards that are valid for everyone.

Or they may continue to use the word truth but simply mean by it what conforms to your own subjective preferences.

You may prefer the Bible or the Koran or the Book of Mormon or Mao’s little Red Book or the sayings of Confucius or the philosophy of Ayn Rand or your own immediate desires or any of a hundred other standards.

In that case, you will hear the language of “true for you, but not true for me.”

In either case, we are dealing with relativism.

And liberal Christianity is shot through with it.

In 2014 Pew Research sought to discover what percentage of Christians in several different denominations believed that there were absolute standards of right and wrong.

They found that:

The percentage of those who said there is no absolute standard of right and wrong:

31% of American Baptists

48% of Anglicans

28% of Episcopaleons

29% of Evangelical Lutherans (ELCA)

28% of Interdenominational

34% of Presbyterians (USA)

22% of United Church of Christ

37% of United Methodist

believed that there were absolute standards of right and wrong.

NEED

Slide - Richard Niebuhr with this caption: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the work of a Christ without a cross.