Liberal Religion Is Spiritual Deception

My hometown, Charlotte, NC (of which Huntersville is a suburb), is also the hometown of retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, and our local paper reports that he is coming home to liberate us from our misconceptions of Christianity. Among other things, he denies the transcendance of God, the resurrection, and heaven and hell (I don't claim to understand what thus constitutes eternal life in his

belief system). He will be speaking at a local center of hyperliberalism, Myers Park Baptist Church.

While presenting himself as the purveyor of a thinking man's Christianity, Spong is actually practicing a long-known form of spiritual deception. He is taking an historical term, "Christianity", changing its linguistic and historical content, and then claiming that he is using the term correctly, while the rest of us have distorted it.

Presbyterian theologian Rev. J. Gresham Machen, founder of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, dealt with the same deception in his own denomination during the 1930's. As he explains in his book Christianity and Liberalism, liberalism isn't a different kind of Christianity; it is actually a distinct kind of religion. Thus, the liberals that have taken over much of mainline christendom have foisted a fundamental deception on the man in the pew. As I have described in another post, God takes great offence at such deception (see Jeremiah 23:14-17).