Every era has its favorite heresy. And every heresy originated in bad philosophy coming from outside the Church.
The most dangerous heresy of the early Church was Arianism, which taught that Jesus is less than fully God. It was inspired by Greek philosophy, whose gods did not get involved in this messy world.
So Jesus, Arius assumed, was like Plato’s lesser gods and obviously unequal to the Father.
The same was true of every other heresy before today. Donatism confused primary and secondary causality. Pelagianism adopted the Greek presumption that humans are independent of God for their very being. Semi-Pelagianism posited “competitive causality” where God and man are separate agents in a zero-sum game. Nominalism presumed that there are only discrete things and no shared essences. Deism arbitrarily ruled out the supernatural.
Today’s favorite heresy started with the Sexual Revolution that disconnected sex from procreation. This was a new philosophy of nature enabled by the Pill. With its assistance, promoters declared that men are not made to be fathers, and women were not created to be mothers. Men and women are interchangeable: lesbians can father and gay men can mother. Sex is not given but chosen. All “gender” roles are governed by equality. No person can be excluded from any role because of “gender” or sex.
This dismissal of sexual difference has entered the Church through women’s ordination. Since the 1970s, women in Anglican and Protestant churches have preached and presided over the Eucharist. They have lifted the bread and said, “This is my Body.”
The result has been a feminized gospel. In these churches, the emphasis is less on salvation from sin, death, and the devil. More frequently, it is liberation from exclusion and binaries. It is a gospel of welcoming and inclusion that denounces what they call the sins of patriarchy, misogyny, and social oppression.
In the process, millions of Christian brains have been rewired. After two millennia of the Church regarding Scripture as inviolable and the Great Tradition as guardrails protecting the interpretation of Scripture, believers’ brains have now been persuaded to accept practices that contradict the plain sense of Scripture and two thousand years of tradition. No wonder that Churches that have accepted women preachers and pastors have gone on to accept, first, gay ministers who claim to be celibate, and then gay marriages. Churches that still prize Scripture defend their new practices by pointing to a biblical “trajectory” toward love and justice.
Many churches accept women’s ordination while rejecting gay marriage. They are to be commended for the latter. But they don’t realize that their ark has sprung a leak and will one day sink. It will no longer be recognized as orthodox.
For these churches are accepting principles of Christian leadership that violate both Scripture and tradition in order to satisfy cultural demands. How will they resist other cultural demands if they have already accepted unbiblical practices that have altered the gospel once delivered to the saints?
Most have already accepted the cultural demand to avoid talk of hell. Our cultured betters tell us that eternal punishment in hell is barbaric. If there were a God, they twit, this god’s love would prevent such a ghastly end for anyone.
But today’s preachers need to be reminded that Jesus was the greatest hellfire and damnation preacher in the Bible. He described it as a “fiery furnace” and “eternal fire,” an “outer darkness” with “weeping and gnashing of teeth” where the devil destroys both soul and body (Matt 13:42, 25:41, 8:12; Luke 16:23; Matt 10:28).
All this helps explain why so many churches in the Global North are shallow. They preach a therapeutic gospel where Jesus is your boyfriend to help you be happy. Seldom in their sermons does Jesus appear to warn that only the one who perseveres in self-denial until the end will be saved (Matt 16:24; 24:13). Or that the road to heaven is narrow and hard and only few are travelling it, and the path to hell is broad and easy and most are walking on it (Matt 7:13-14).
Preachers in the Global North tend to be more afraid of preaching hell than hell itself. Many dismiss hell as temporary or non-existent.
With widespread fear of hell-preaching, it is no wonder there is so little fear of God in Global North Christianity. Yet the Bible repeats from beginning to end that “fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” Without fear of God there is only foolishness.
Willingness to violate the plain sense of the Bible and two millennia of tradition proves the absence of fear of God. That’s why this era’s acceptance of bad philosophy promoting the ordination of women is a terrible omen. When the people of God refuse God’s truth, they come under ferocious judgment (Matt 10:14-15; Rev 3:13-16, 18-24; 4:1-3).
But there is hope for the compromised Global North churches. They can follow the example of Nehemiah, who led the Jewish people to repent of their departure from the covenant. Or the example of the Latvian Lutherans who changed their constitution to forbid future ordinations of women.
Forbidding women from ordination does not ban women from ministry. As Barbara Gauthier and I have shown, God has called millions of women into a multitude of ministries both in Scripture and church history. But not ordained ministry at the pulpit and altar.
Christianity in the Global North desperately needs revival. It should take some cues from the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-58). Edwards was the greatest theologian of revival in the history of Christian thought. He was also a hellfire and damnation preacher.
That Edwards was both an expert in revival and hell might seem paradoxical. But when we consider the significance of fear of God—and its absence—it makes sense. Edwards presided over several revivals in his own church and was the foremost theologian of the Great Awakening because he knew both the fear of God and the reality of hell.
Revival can come to the Global North churches, but only if they repent of their refusal to heed Scripture and the Great Tradition.
