By Don Koenig
Frankly, calling oneself an Evangelical or even a born again Christian just does not mean much anymore. Most who call themselves Evangelicals have never once read God's word from cover to cover so how could they possibly know what the Bible teaches. Even when Bible study is done many now just read paraphrased versions which is not God's word at all. Paraphrased versions are just someone's best opinion about what the Bible said through their own preconceived theology. The Evangelical Church for the most part has unfortunately become biblically illiterate. Most people in the United States for good reason have been called genuine biblical idiots.
Those that attend most churches usually just believe what their pastors and leaders tell them about their beliefs rather then learning for themselves what the Bible actually teaches. Since few are being Bereans (Act 17:11) and few check out the scriptures against the teaching of evangelical leaders we now see a hodgepodge of movements that have no real foundation in scripture. One large movement is the "purpose driven" seeker friendly church growth movement that dumbs down Christianity and takes the message of salvation out of its Sunday services. In most of the churches that have bought into this movement there is no teaching on Sunday about the death and resurrection of Jesus on the cross to pay for man's sin. There is no teaching on Sunday on even why salvation through Jesus is required to be acceptable to God and there is no teaching at all about His return. I wrote about this seeker-friendly movement in three of my articles. It is the fastest growing phenomenon of this generation but its teachings are based on pop psychology, man's self worth, and socialist humanism. This distorted and dumbed down Christianity has now produced a new generation of young "Christians" who think that all truth is relative and that the foundational truths of Christianity need to be reexamined in the darkness of man's own reason. This movement is called the Emerging or Emergent Church movement and it is now taking much of Evangelical Christianity into apostasy.
Many Evangelical leaders have now also bought into the teaching of postmillennial dominion theology and by doing so they have done away with any common reading or fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Some now think the Church is going to create a paradise on earth before Jesus even returns visibly. Certain theologies have taught this view for centuries but the Bible never has.
All this is happening because even in many conservative "Bible churches" there are few that have read the Bible and even fewer who can properly discern to whom the scripture were written or why the passage needs to be understood in the context of the passage or in the light of other scriptures.
The few that have read the Bible are usually the older people in the church. The x-generation and the baby boomer generation would rather just learn about Christianity by going through someone else's book. They buy a book written by some Christian Guru, form a group and then call it a bible study. They trust the Gurus to teach them what is true and never check them out against any real version of the Bible because they would not even know where to begin to look. In a nut shell most in evangelical Christianity through their own laziness have become biblical idiots. They can not discern heresy from truth.
A recent survey said that 25 percent of Christians who say they are born again Christians, do not even believe that Jesus rose from the dead. A similar percentage believe other religions lead to God. Half of them believe that Jesus sinned. The vast majority of those surveyed do not believe in absolute truth.
It all comes down to one thing. Many Evangelicals no longer know the scriptures and/or do not know them well enough to keep them in proper context or to correlate them with other passages in the Bible. They have no discernment and are now embracing every whim of doctrine presented by gurus who interpret scripture through their own distorted preconceived theories. These new evangelical gurus use various paraphrases and take passages out of proper context to make the Bible conform to their views and the biblical idiots they teach are none the wiser. You might ask how this comes about even in the traditional Bible churches that have weekly "Bible studies. I give a prime example in my commentary on Bible studies.
We live in the land of biblical idiots