Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
I think I have a real "gotcha" there.
Igzy said I should read all the Christian books, that "serious Christians do not have divisive prejudices anymore".
Yet the book "Pagan Christianity" clearly prejudices against most churches today by declaring most of their practices to be pagan. According to Igzy they must not be serious Christians.
Or maybe you and others are just blind to the truth revealed by independent researchers and thinkers like Viola and Barna. Just like the majority of Christians in the time of Luther could not see the paganism of the Catholic church, and chose to remain there rather than come out with Luther.
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Actually, not a "gotcha."
You picked one of the few books that is picking the scab on some particular things and is using some rather extreme language to talk about it.
While it is a different conversation, it is like the critiques of Christian ways in general by the "emerging" and "emergent" movements of the recent past. While the "emergent" group eventually went off a cliff in many ways, the "emerging" group made many valid observations that are in the process of being continually discussed and even have caused changes in the landscape of Christianity as a whole. While I am not sold on the idea, there are some that think that even evangelicalism as we know it will look very different in just another 20 years or so. Not because we dumped our beliefs, but because we changed the thrust of our focus.
And even if Viola's book is the extreme thing you say it is, it is not what most of the books in the bookstore are saying.
So Igzy's comment about living at the extremes remains true. You want to insist upon an extreme group and are busy trying to paint every other group as a different kind of extreme that they just aren't. You found one book and think you have won.
You haven't. You just found one book. I could show you several books that are worse in the kind of extremes that they teach. The problem is that they are generally only found in the LRC bookrooms.