In Briefing #366’s first feature article “Do not judge”, Stephen Liggins points out that while judging others is condemned in the Bible, discernment is encouraged. But how do we go about gaining it, and how can we encourage our fellow Christians to grow in it too? With a little help from Jonathan Edwards, Archie Poulos investigates. (more…)
Category Archives: False teaching/false teachers
Guilt-edged pages?
Up front
While ploughing my way through The Shack recently (and it was a matter of ploughing!), a thought occurred to me about the dynamic at work in our culture and in our sinful hearts—the dynamic that generates books like this one and makes them such big sellers. (more…)
Nowism
Up front, Sola Panel
There is an insidious and dangerous teaching that I’ve noticed creeping into my church, threatening my Christian hope, and stifling my evangelistic effectiveness. Up to this point, it hasn’t had a catchy title.1 But I want to correct that. I’m going to call this teaching ‘nowism’, from the English word ‘now’, meaning ‘the present age’. (more…)
Out of The Fellowship
Couldn't Help Noticing
Can a Christian go to reiki?
Life
How to deal with heretics
Couldn't Help Noticing, Life, Sola Panel
The early church father, Irenaeus, was certainly not afraid to critique error. I was browsing through his Against Heresies the other day (as one does, in the Greek, without a dictionary, shortly before dictating my latest article for The Ivory Tower Review), and I came across the following passage that I felt bound to share. Irenaeus was arguing against the heresy of the Gnostics, who had an incredibly elaborate, and elaborately incredible, account of how the world came to exist. One of Irenaeus’ chief polemical methods was simply to describe in detail what the Gnostics were actually teaching, with only a few minor comments being required to point out how absurd it all is.
Dancing with wolves: When false teaching is too close for comfort
Thought
The novelty of words … becomes especially useful when the truth is to be asserted against false accusers, who evade it by their shifts. Of this today we have abundant experience in our great efforts to rout the enemies of pure and wholesome doctrine. With such crooked and sinuous twisting these slippery snakes glide away unless they are boldly pursued, caught, and crushed. (John Calvin, Institutes I.xiii.4)
Return to Colossae
Thought
Where have all the false teachers gone?
Life
At the Last Supper, Jesus warns his disciples that there will be constant conflict between those who are his and those who are of “the world”. He reminds them through his prayer that “the world has hated them because they are not of the world any more than I am of the world” (John 17:15).