It is time for moral courage where Christian leaders are what they were commissioned by God to be—spiritual leaders. Leaders who are less worried about  how the world views them and more concerned about how they view the world. Leaders who defend the congregation of the righteous by exposing the lies of the world and teaching the Truth of God.          

Unfortunately, there is a neglected side of Christian apologetics which is leaving the Church exposed to the threat from the world. Generally, apologetics is thought of as defending the Faith against objections from the atheists. Of course, that is right. Sadly, even apologetics of this kind has fallen upon hard times among evangelical ranks, but that is not the point here. The concern here is the role of apologetics with a view to defending the Christian community against the lies of world. This is done by informing the Christian community not only of the truth of God but exposing the diabolical designs of Satan which so often come in the form of a lie. Unfortunately, too many present-day sermons reflect what Christian Smith calls moralistic therapeutic deism, leave Christian mercilessly exposed to the Faith-diluting strategies of the Enemy.  While evangelicals rightly talk much about the winning lost to Christ,  little is done to prevent Christians being lost to the world. This does not suggest necessarily that Christians are not going to church, but they are re-thinking the doctrines of the Faith. Evangelical leadership, for all they do that is right, are failing to prepare Christians to live in a world ruled by ideas subversive to the Christian mind and soul. These are ideas that twist the proper of ordering of proper Christian sentiments. Christians do not have some automatic immunity against such philosophical viruses. Rather immunity must be developed by serious biblical teaching that defines the Truth of God and exposes the lies of the world. This is the work of a true shepherd of the flock of God ( I Peter 5:1-4). A proper pastor not only feeds the sheep on Truth, but also identifies the noxious weeds toxic to the Christian mind and soul.  Contentless moralizing sermons punctuated with culturally crafted language simply will not do the job. Christians cannot escape the poisonous lies of the world.
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Thursday, September 23, 2021
There is such a thing as a message of “cheap grace” and the Dela Cruzes would seem to be the poster children for it. Any preacher who only offers “free salvation” but who omits “take up your cross” as a consequence (not a prior condition) of that grace is a preaching a false, antinomian, Gnostic, therapeutic gospel.

Julie Roys ran a story yesterday by Sarah Einselen about a new congregation, which apparently opened this summer, in San Diego. Living Faith Church is a small congregation pastored by a husband and wife team, Stephen and Angela Dela Cruz. The salacious part of the story is that she was (is?) a porn star and he is a business coach. They met at the former Bethany University, which closed in 2011, an Assemblies of God related school. Together they claim to run ten multi-million dollar businesses. They do not say of what sort. It is not clear whether Angela Dela Cruz is still active in the porn industry but the two are clearly capitalizing on her past to generate “buzz” and interest in this congregation. One social media ad identifies her as an “adult actress,” which is code for pornstar. Judging by what one can see from videos of the services the porn angle may be generating more outrage than new members. They are clearly meeting in a very small space with relatively few people. What is more impressive, however, is how formulaic everything is. We see three musicians on a platform singing the same awful “praise music” as every other would-be mega-church in America. The messages seem to be firmly in the middle of the American evangelical therapeutic religion. Stephen is the poor-man’s Joel Osteen and he is going to help you live your best life now.
Your Porn Life Now
For the sake of discussion, since they are clearly capitalizing on her life in the porn business, let us presume that the Stephen and Angela believe and are teaching others that a being a Christian and living a judgment-free successful life are entirely compatible.  The congregation’s statement of faith looks as if it were written by students from an AOG “university” circa 2011. Whoever wrote the confession wants to be an orthodox, Arminian, Baptistic, Pentecostal. It has a relatively high view of Scripture:
The Bible is God’s Word to all people. It was written by human authors under the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit. Because it was inspired by God, the Bible is truth without any mixture of error and is completely relevant to our daily lives.
The Holy spirit is said to be given “subsequent to salvation” and the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” is a second blessing. “This immersion into Spirit-led living provides the Christian with the power to live a fruitful, victorious life, understanding of spiritual truth, and boldness in sharing the good news with others. He also gives us spiritual gifts. As Christians, we seek to live under His daily guidance.” If Mrs Dela Cruz is impenitent about her role in the porn industry, a major source of human trafficking and exploitation and a source of spiritual destruction for many, then they are proposing a definition of the victorious higher life hitherto unknown. Without a hint of irony their statement of faith unequivocally affirms the existence of a literal hell. Salvation is said to be by grace but the statement offers nothing on the doctrines of mortification of sin or vivification in the new life.
Therapeutic Gnosticism
If the mainstream of American evangelicalism has become entirely captive to what Christian Smith, in 2009, called “moralistic therapeutic deism” much of the rest of it has become a subsidiary: Gnostic therapeutic pentecostalism. In Deism God is largely absent. In Pentecostalism, especially of the sort being marketed by the Dela Cruzes, God is a cosmic Door Dash driver. This is not old-school Pentecostalism, which was rooted in the Holiness tradition. As Marx materialized Hegel (by turning the dialectical process of history into class warfare) so the real second blessing offered by the likes of Stephen and Angela Dela Cruz is an emotionally satisfying, financially prosperous life now. Joel Osteen has routed the Azusa Street Revival. Like all the other second-rate business coaches in the world they have the secrets to success. Mind you, unlike Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos, they are not actually producing wealth themselves but they will show you how you can do it. Instead of cheesy late-night television commercials they are holding church services with the requisite praise music, which promises to give participants that shot of endorphins followed by a rousing pep talk.
This is fundamentally Gnostic because it offers a perverse salvation through secret knowledge (Gnosis). This, of course, is what the Gnostics offered in the second century. Like the Gnostics, they hijacked Christianity through redefining terms and changing the story dramatically. In Gnosticism the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was rendered a mean, demiurge tied to creation, which was said to be inherently evil. The immaterial, i.e., the spiritual, was said to be good. The key to deliverance from the material world is a secret known only to true Gnostics. They developed an elaborate hierarchy of being and promised to guide followers through the maze. The Jesus of the second-century Gnostic texts is not the Jesus of the Gospels.
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Written by John B. White |
Thursday, May 23, 2024
Brains are central to cognitive and emotional intelligence, socialization, spiritual and moral formation, and to flourishing and finding personal fulfillment as responsible citizens in communities as fathers, brothers, mothers, and sisters in families, as disciples of Christ in churches and as “salt and light” in our vocations. Damaged brains can never be undone and can affect living in significant, meaningful ways, unlike other damaged body parts.  

Do Not Conform To: The Embodied Consequences of Misguided Ends
Research shows how the biomechanics of cut blocks increase the likelihood of injuries, not unlike the horse collar tackle, which was eventually banned. Cut and chop blocking became signature techniques for teams like the Houston Oilers, 49ers, and Broncos. With this technique, bodies are conscripted, instructed, and disciplined to make commitments and perform actions that can effectively hurt other bodies. Athletes’ bodies are trained and made ready physically, morally, and spiritually to intentionally enact specific moves that can prey upon the vulnerability of others.
And when hurt, these bodies suffer not only in the game but also after the game, because bodies are inescapably connected to provinces outside the game where friends and family live and work. The field of physical suffering can also include mental and emotional pain with matters related to grief, anxiety, agony, doubt, and stress about whether a player will return to play and the future backside costs of living with chronic pain, diminishing the quality of life in mind, body, and spirit.
A Washington Post online survey of more than 500 retired NFL players “found that nearly nine in 10 reported suffering from aches and pains on a daily basis, and they overwhelmingly—91 percent—connect nearly all their pains to football.”1 Because sports are more than a game, bodies do not live in isolation, as if what happens in sports stays in sports between team members and co-contestants. To the contrary, what happens in sports extends to other spheres of life; for as embodied selves we take who we are—healthy and unhealthy—everywhere we live, relate, and work.
To compound the problem of bodies in football that goes beyond cut blocks, since this can be eliminated with a mere rule change and chop blocks were banned by the NFL in 2016, and aims at more besetting problems intrinsic to the design of football, scholars note how football as a combat-collision sport presents a perfect storm of well-documented traumatic brain injuries and other neuro-degenerative disorders (e.g., chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), post-concussion syndrome, Alzheimer’s) and physical health issues that can have long-term cognitive and emotional consequences. Medical research specifies that football leads all sports in the rate of concussions along with the even greater concern of repeated sub-concussive hits. It’s the cumulative exposure of many little and big hits across a player’s seasons of competition that can cause lasting alterations to the brain’s integrity. Furthermore, most of the public either forget or are unaware that authorities at football’s inception in the 19th century expressed similar medical concerns about football’s bodily risks. One observer wrote, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, how the sport of football singularly “brings the whole bodies of players into violent collision…the violent personal concussion of 22 vigorous, highly trained young men is not only permissible, but is a large part of the game.”2 And another as far away as San Francisco noted how “The head or skull of a contestant is quite frequently called into service, as butting during scrimmages is not uncommon.3
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