Jake's Thoughts

     This week’s reading brought up so much more about the theme that really made me think hard about the issue that is liberalism within the Christian church and community. A quote from the book that caught my attention and is relevant to thoughts that I often have about liberalism and prosperity teaching says, “According to the Bible, man is a sinner under the just condemnation of God; according to modern liberalism, there is really no such thing as sin. At the very root of liberalism, liberal movement is the loss of the consciousness of sin” (Pg. 55). First off, this could not be truer. Is there a guarantee that all people who have more liberalistic ideals within the Christian church have completely lost this idea? No, but it is an issue that plagues many who follow this way of thinking and beliefs.      Looking at the false/prosperity teachers (if you choose to group them together, which I would to a certain degree) they preach all about the health and ...

     Christianity has always been a word and term that turns people off to following Jesus. One of the main reasons for that is because of the hypocrisy, hatred, and attitudes that many people who claim to be a Christian have. It is so unfortunate that this is a viewpoint for the world today. We have an issue that pushes many people away from the truth of scripture and they get drawn to a fake gospel. I bring this up because faith in Christ Jesus is vital to life, literally. The liberal thought of Christianity is cancer to real faith.       Machen makes a point to ask if we should change the name of Christianity and take it in another direction. I do not have an exact answer on that, but I do believe it was important that he elaborated on the history of the term Christianity. The word started after the death of Jesus. Machen makes that point clear. He mentions how the implication of that name was a thing prior to that, but it would not have made sense ...

I really enjoyed how Machen starts describing the purpose of this book. Even more so, the fact that he does not want to “decide the religious issue”, rather wants to “present” an issue in today’s world. It allows for a clear picture and gives an opportunity to dive into a deeper talk rather than trying to clump so much into one book.             On page 2 he talks about the rise of modern naturalistic liberalism. He mentions how it is not something that someone must look deeply into, rather, you can simply see it with a plain eye. I thought this was hilarious because he is so right. There are times where someone might want to keep their point of view hidden because they are fearful of other’s opinions. With liberalism and its development, we can see that they want everyone to buy into it. Often, those who believe it will push their opinions on someone and will not back down. They will not back down and change what they believe. ...