Today’s heresy is related to my theory of proportional discipleship, that no Christian’s devotion to God should be more than one standard deviation above society in general. Today’s heresy suggests that God is bound by a similar rule. He will never say anything or ask you to do anything that’s more than one standard deviation outside your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is sacred and God will never violate it. (more…)
A corollary of the common heresy of proportional atonement is the heresy of proportional repentance. That says that you only have to repent of the bad things about you. But there are many good things about you. You don’t have to repent of them.
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To understand a passage in the Bible, you need to understand who it was written to and what it’s used for. So of course, many verses in the Bible should be understand as greeting card messages.
That means the Bible is: (more…)
One of the most common heresies about the Bible is that it was written by people who weren’t as aware as us or as smart as us. For example, some have taught that the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus was originated by people who didn’t know where babies come from. C.S. Lewis points out that all adults know where (more…)
Many modern “New Testament” churches claim that “they only go by the Word of God,” that their authority is the New Testament. Except, for the actual New Testament church, their authority was Jesus. The New Testament hadn’t been written yet. (more…)
Forget about the secret and lost gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and Judas. If 1st century Christians thought they were God-inspired, they would have made more than one copy of them, no? (Thousands of early copies of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have been preserved, in spite of official persecution from church and state).
No, there is another gospel, a different gospel with a greater appeal to conservative American Christians - and it’s even included in many editions of the Bible. (more…)
This heresy, which I’ve called proportional discipleship, mandates that a person’s commitment to the kingdom of God should not exceed the average spiritual level of the surrounding society by more than one standard deviation. (more…)
Being completely filled (controlled, dominated, etc.) by the Holy Spirit of God can be inconvenient and difficult. What if customarily you prefer to be filled with something else, perhaps yourself? What if you fear, with good reason, that the Lord of the Universe will guide you into personally-compromising places? (more…)
Another unstated but commonly believed heresy could be called spiritual neutrality. This doctrine says that the devil hates believers but rarely attacks them. (more…)
Another in the series of common yet undocumented heresies: let’s call this one “non-theistic space.” Astrophysicists theorize about alternate universes that we can’t touch. Non-theistic space contains the areas which God can’t control. (more…)
