I'm a Confessional Lutheran that lives in rural Arkansas and I know several local Evangelical pastors. They are nice guys, but none of them of been to seminary or have done any deep reading in Theology or church history, but they just follow Evangelical fads. They know no other way.
@@Dee-nonamnamrson8718 Yeah, i have. He's no dummy. I doub't someone like him would be welcome in too many American Evangelical spaces. His church might not have a smoke machine and a cool rock band.
It’s too bad the seminaries are only funded by enslaving the men and women who pass through them. It’s quite understandable why many avoid them. When pastorship has such a high cash price tag most cannot pay to play.
@CornCod1 I've been a member of two evangelical churches and have attended a dozen more, and they all had sinilar theology to Truth Unites. The average church goer may not have a deep theology, but that could be said about every denomination from Eastern Orthodox to "nondenominational."
I literally have been processing the shortcomings of nondenominationalism with my wife over the last month as we've joined an LCMS congregation. Even though our Calvary Chapel isn't off the wall crazy like some nondenom churches, the absurdity of committing to theological noncommitment has been becoming more clearly deleterious to us. I also have a clearer understanding that while CC is "protestant," it really rises not out of the Reformation but out of American Revivalism. The "no creeds but Christ," "just believe the Bible," "mere Christianity" simultaneously tries to claim continuity with historic Protestantism while distancing itself from denominational commitments. Your conversation helps give more shape to what I've been processing. Keep it up guys
"The Jesus Movement ended in '74. The historic church isn't going to change." BOOM!! Thanks guys, great conversation. These are a lot of the things I have been thinking through myself lately.
Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller's book titled "Has American Christianity Failed?" really opened my eyes about the errors of Evangelicalism, and changed a lot of my convictions as a former Calvinistic-Evangelical-Non-Denom. I would highly recommend the Book to anyone getting out of Evangelicalism!
There is a push for surface unity within Evangelicalism. In order to work toward this false unity, the Evangelicals have to minimize doctrine because specific doctrines divide. This leads to theological simplicity. This is edpecially true of the mega churches whose goal is to attract as many people as possible without offending anyone.
I've been taught dispensational premillennialism for my entire Christian life. I've gotta be honest: I've been watching MUC for a year or so. I got mad not long ago when the Kozars challenged it, in passing, during a Q&A. That's when I realized I can't keep my head in the sand and hold on to convictions and refuse to listen to different views. Emotionalism is what kept me in the prophetic movement for so long.
This was such a helpful conversation. You guys touched on it, but something I would love to hear you break down more: many evangelicals would agree with the problems of the “Ted talk” churches and Steve furtick types. But the reaction most “conservative” evangelicals will take is to become extremely rigid in a systematic theology- usually covenant or dispensationalism. They are brilliant, passionate about their specific apologetics, but still completely divorced from sacraments and tradition. I can’t really put a finger on it, but it’s almost like because they have no sacraments or participatory faith, they think they can break through the squishyness of evangelicalism with intense belief statements. Calling people heretics/false teachers if they are outside of a very tight window of their chosen systematic theology. They will go to extremes to avoid the emotional stuff, only to fixate their entire existence as a church on the correct head knowledge. I’m not a theological mind, but it really seems like they share that specific empty modernity, whether conservative 50 minute expository sermon churches or Ted talk megachurches. Maybe, more specifically, I’d love to hear you break down very specifically why liturgy/sacraments in particular are needed to fix this?
Hi, we don't have an exact video on that, but we do have something that discusses it some! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wJcgGhTMnDQ.html
I attended Groeschel’s church for 8 years. Since I wasn’t a leader at my work, I pursued being a volunteer leader and, as literally all of the friends in my ladies group did, pursued a side gig after buying into the Chazown stuff where you have to figure out God’s purpose for your life. That’s where all the leadership talk takes people there if they are sincere in their desire to please God...
Error comes about when Christians are not satisfied with the objective means of grace God has provided in his word, but want to go beyond or further than what the word reveals to us.
As a newer Lutheran I am a bit confused by what your saying about "worship", my understanding is the Lutheran goes to church to receive from Christ ie receive the word and sacrament and in fact is a big shift in focus from what I do for Christ (American Evangelicalism) to what Christ does for me. Even the liturgical worship is centered around Gods word and the hymns and singing of psalms very biblical.
@@lisajones7756 You're correct that in Lutheranism the emphasis is reversed from evangelicalism, but "Gottesdienst" (the German word for "Divine Service") goes both ways! It is both God serving us (Word and Sacraments) and us serving God (thanks and praise in return). God doesn't "need" this as if He lacks something, but He does demand it of us because it is good for us.
Studying the history of academic thought in a subject makes sense where there is the ability for the academics to test the theories that they are developing. If you want to learn chemistry, you really can't go through the entire process of how people discovered things in chemistry over hundreds of years on your own without reading what others have written on the subject. If you want to specifically learn Catholic or Lutheran or whatever other flavor of theology, you can do that, but those theologies are generally untestable. You can argue forever on the nature of Christ and never be able to develop an experiment that will prove things one way or another. All religions require faith in some way, and your conclusions will undoubtedly be determined from what items you take as an article of faith. In that sense, reading other theologians who have the same items of faith as you can be helpful in teaching you what the logical consequences of your faith is, but they can only offer those answers conditionally on that faith, not absolutely. People who study theology and learn what their articles of faith imply might end up realizing that they are not too attached to their articles of faith any more, because they don't believe what the consequences are of those items of faith; thus in learning, they have logically concluded on the basis of other items of faith that they hold more strongly that some of their previous items of faith must be wrong. My point I'm trying to get at is that, in the end, all religious belief should come from how one personally experiences the divine and what items of faith they have that they hold strongest. This is quite likely to mean that the specific items of faith that you have might be shared by no previous theologian, and thus there's no real guidance for your way of thought. Reading theologians that have other assumptions is going to lead to logic that's unsound in your own system in the same way that not all the postulates of Euclidean geometry hold on a sphere, and thus the resulting theorems you get are different. I personally have come to the conclusion through the study of quantum physics that the way that God interacts with the world is through subtly altering the results of events that scientists can only assign certain probabilities to. There must be some sort of higher power that is deciding what sort of results an experiment will have when the best the scientists can say is that there are various possibilities that happen with certain probabilities. The fact that the world is constantly having astronomically large numbers of such interactions that are probabilistic in nature is what can lead to situations where very unlikely things happen, and this seems the only way in which God may be able to shape the universe in a way that makes any sense given our understandings of physics. If I were to try to talk to a theologian about what sort of things my items of faith would imply, do you think that they would have any idea how to respond? In the same way, every single believer, so long as they come to their own conclusions about their articles of faith through introspection, can develop their own theology and thus they have no reason why they should bother learning what some other theologian said unless their articles of faith align precisely.
The early Christians did not read scripture through a fundamentalist methodology. They were much more open to divine mystery, analogy, and semiotic allusion. Inspiration and the sufficiency of scripture is not the same thing as 'rationalist inerrancy'. However, we are called by the Spirit to walk in love, fellowship, and good works with our brothers and sisters in Christ who utilize that methodology. The Lord offers his children a smorgasbord of nourishment and people can be fed according to the needs of their changing lives.
@@ljdrew3233 The Holy Spirit "wins souls" by Baptism and the preaching of the Gospel. The "soul winning" of many of the groups being criticized here is not "soul winning" at all but rather manipulation or conversions to false religion (which does not save). Some may be genuine converts to Christianity. Many are not.
