The Public Rebuke of False Teachers

James McDonald:

What an incredibly difficult thing it is to think and act like a Christian when we are so incredibly immersed in our culture. The job of thinking biblically, while the deafening noise of societal norms rings in our ears and our own personality biases our convictions, can seem impossible.

I receive some interesting comments on this blog, not all of which get posted. Especially pointed were several recent comments related to my post about Brian McLaren. I didn’t specify McLaren’s denials of the orthodox teaching on Hell (see note 1 below), or penal substitution (see note 2), or Scripture (see note 3) because the main audience for this blog is immensely familiar with McLaren’s writing. Another reason I did not detail his errors is because that has been done extensively in such helpful books as D. A. Carson’s Becoming Conversant With Emergent, and Why We’re Not Emergent by DeYoung and Kluck. (Tim Challies and Doug Wilson also have helpful reviews of McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy.)

I do not view Brian as an ‘erring weaker brother,’ worthy of sympathy or olive branches, but rather as a dangerous false teacher who repackages mainline liberal theology. (Have the past 50 years not been adequate to see how liberal theology empties churches and damns souls?)

More dangerous still is that McLaren packages his false teaching and denials of Scripture as solutions to some of the excesses currently plaguing evangelicalism—the danger being his winning over of young people who have legitimate complaints about the current church, but who lack the discernment to see that his solutions are often unbiblical even when his critiques are fair.

But why name names? Rest the rest for his response.