A Tsunami of Compromise

In March, I woke up to the terrible news that a massive earthquake and tsunami had devastated Japan.

Today I can still see the TV images of the tsunami hitting the eastern coast of Japan. The mud, debris, and destruction were almost unbelievable to watch.

Now, there is a different kind of tsunami I want to write about. It’s one that is also causing major destruction, and it’s happening all around us as I write. This tsunami is biblical compromise in the church, and it’s creating waves of spiritual destruction throughout the Christian world.

I have written a number of blogs recently about Christian academics who are publishing books and articles—and giving talks—on topics relating to how they approach the Bible, and Genesis in particular. The blogs revealed that an increasing number of Christian academics teach that:

• Adam is just a metaphor for Israel and was not a real person.
• Genesis chapter 1 is not a material account of origins, but is supposedly about the creation of some “cosmic temple.”
• God took two animals and gave them “animal amnesia”’ so they wouldn’t remember all the death over the supposed millions of years that turned them into Adam and Eve.
• The image of God evolved in man over time.
• The apostle Paul “would have flunked hermeneutics” (the practice of Bible interpretation).
• The “apostles were lousy at exegesis” (expositing the biblical text), etc.

Over the past 150–200 years, church leaders have embraced all sorts of compromise positions about Genesis: theistic evolution, the gap theory, progressive creation, etc. These beliefs were attempts to add the secular ideas of evolution and/or long ages into the Bible. This wave of compromise is hitting the church with even greater force today.

Over the years, biblical creation ministries like AiG have been successful in showing that a person cannot consistently add evolution/ millions of years into the Bible, and demonstrating that it is inconsistant for a Christian to believe that death, disease, animals eating each other, etc. came before sin. This undermines the history in Genesis that is foundational to all Christian doctrine. The very Word of God is compromised.

Today, there is an increasing number of new organizations, books, articles, and conferences that are aggressively infiltrating institutions like Christian colleges and churches with teaching that undermines the authority of the Word of God in Genesis. One movement relegates the Bible to a fallible collection of works written in response to ancient Near Eastern writings. It also promotes evolution and millions of years.

An organization called the BioLogos Foundation (with funding from the Templeton Foundation) is headed by two professors from Nazarene universities, and it is trying to convince the church to believe in evolution/ millions of years and reject a literal Adam. It is even producing a curriculum for homeschoolers to infiltrate the homeschool movement with its false teachings.

We are now seeing an increasing number of conferences with Christian speakers who are promoting compromise positions in regard to Genesis (and the rest of Scripture).

For example, there are conferences such as the upcoming Reading Genesis 1–2: An Evangelical Conversation to be held in Chattanooga. It is described as a conference where “current scholarly evangelical work on the Old Testament presents challenges to the traditional reading of Genesis 1–2.”

Conference materials state that: “Rather than assuming that Genesis presents a historical account of God creating man from the dust of the earth, that Adam was the common ancestor of all humans, and that human creation occurred in the relatively recent past, a newer consensual reading suggests acceptance of long ages of the earth and Darwinian evolution alongside a belief in the trustworthiness of Scripture.”

Sadly, this growing wave of compromise is washing over Christian colleges, seminaries, and churches. More than ever, Bible-believing Christians don’t just have a spiritual battle with the secular world, but an enormous battle within the church.

This is one of the reasons why we just released the book Already Compromised—a sequel to our book on the youth exodus from our churches, Already Gone. This eye-opening new book exposes what Christian colleges are really teaching their students. The results are shocking.

Already Compromised is a mustread for all parents, young people, and Christian leaders. If we don’t begin to turn back the tide of the tsunami of compromise, the church in America will increasingly look like the declining church (or what is left of it) in England and the rest of Europe.

I think of the verse: “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men” (Matthew 5:13).