One need not peruse social media long these days to find themselves face-to-face with several outlets that have stirred the proverbial pot of biblical interpretation, often touting themselves as an enlightened alternative to all things cultish and cult-like. Uncanny is the cultic undertone these platforms appear to be mired in as they continually evoke a steady stream of acidic monologues heavily laden with projection and personal animus.
THE TACTIC
Often cherry-picking the most egregious personalities of various religious organizations, they appeal to the illogical fallacy of ad absurdum (the appeal to the absurd) as a means to gloss over a deeply inept exegesis of biblical texts. It is a hermeneutic sleight-of-hand, a David Copperfield that steals your watch while you are distracted elsewhere. Theology, to them, really does not matter. The Oneness of God does not matter. Obedience to a biblical call to salvation does not matter. What matters then to these self-professed reformers? Getting even with a small group of fundamentalist bullies who often have no business in the pulpit. How is this done? By declaring a proxy war against an entire systematic doctrine that they intentionally pepper with sensational bits and pieces of theological wreckage from a wide array of denominal backgrounds.
It’s the “lump-sum” game. Throw a few rotten, worm-laden apples on the top of one barrel of good apples and appeal to the human emotion of disgust and shock while pointing out another batch of apples in an altogether different barrel and saying, “Look how appealing mine are!” Alas, Snow White, see you not the bearer of such apples? See you not the futility of the falsehood of eating from something that claims to bring you a Burger King dream of “have it your way?” Too late, “I feel strange,” declares the once pure Snow White as the darkened poison of a witch’s brew pervades her body.
This is exactly the tactic employed by these wooing wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing. The most damnable misdirection of all time, plays directly out of ole Screwtape’s playbook: corrupt spirituality, all that is good, twist it toward evil, darken intellect and don’t allow for true critical thinking, make saving others the perceived end goal, and the list goes on. Behind the smiles and their sweet and charming demeanors, the hearts of these individuals beat a rhythm of vengeance that is permeated with a silent rage riddled with bitterness and animosity.
This is revealed in the pluralistic crowds that come to drink from their emotionally laden fountain of watered-down, theologically unsound doctrines of liberation. Bitter, angry, and discontent, their audience descends like sharks on blood to the feeding ground of the latest posts, videos, and monologues of these said liberators. There is no theologically grounded truth to be rigorously defended by the buzzards who often gorge on the feasts of things stripped from the bones of context. No, it is a ravenous affair of rending and tearing, gnashing and howling; hyenas who thrive in packs, afraid to take the lions head on.
THE TRUTH
These reformers “come as liberators” are well-dressed captors. They are the archetypal tempters so common in fiction. They are Honest John’s under the directive of agents of Pleasure Island, sent to woo the children into the freedom that has been kept from them, only to see the sudden, terrible demise of Lampwick and Pinocchio as the true nature of their supposed freedoms begins to manifest by their torturous transformation into donkeys, caged and sold into slavery.
The liberator was the captor all along.
Tragically, as social media continues to advance, these tactics become more strategic, more nuanced, and more deadly in a generation unacquainted with a personal investment in biblical studies whose lives are often void of prayer and who, sadly, are only half-in when it comes to their love for truth. Hearing these proclaimed liberators’ soapbox about real love, real truth, and real doctrine, they fail to remember, as Pinocchio would come to learn, that the siren call to real is often fraught with those who would prey upon the heartsick passions of those caught between two worlds.
The liberated now become the enslaved, their cages too small–their rooms to dark–for them to see the light of their own demise. They bray and stamp, they call, and they cry, not understanding the light they now follow is not the light of true freedom but that of Satan’s metamorphic game of allusion. How sad to follow a light that is not THE Light. How tragic to claim liberation, only to be chained by the bondage of self-will and deceit all wrapped up in a blanket of heavy bitterness that is assuaged by the drip-drip of love’s vocabulary that keeps the dissonance of the broken human soul at bay.
Oh, the marketplace rings now with their seductive calls. Just over yonder is Celestial City, but one must pass through the harrowing streets of Vanity Fair. Turn not aside! Listen not to their calls for liberation and their weakened alternatives of interpretation that deny the most fundamental of biblical doctrines. A new Holiness may be their bestseller, but notice the lack of John 3:5, Acts 2:38, and Deuteronomy 6:4 upon their shelves. They are a sham! They are captors! They are grievous wolves in sheep’s clothing. Walk on, Christian soldier, past these pimps and peddlers of false liberation. Endure until the end. Quit ye like men. Fight the good fight of faith. Hold fast the form of sound words.
2 Timothy 4:3–4 (KJV 1900) — 3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; 4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.