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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Why do we allow deliberate mistranslations of the word of God simply because we are too delicate and pure to read it?
When Isaiah says our human righteousness is like “filthy rags,” he wasn’t talking about anything you get when you change the oil in your car.
When Paul said that he counted his previous righteousness as “loss,” he wasn’t talking about anything you’ll find in the lost and found.
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…)
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…)
My 93-year-old, blind, deaf, arthritic grandmother hates to be helped. We finally learn to stop replying to comments such, “Don’t go to any trouble!” “I hate to have you wait on me,” “I’m just a lazy bum.” I wonder if, when she arrives at the gates of Heaven, she will say to Jesus, “Now Lord, please don’t go to any trouble for me! I can help myself.”
