“Have some churches and Christians left the true faith?”

Steve Brown:
Have some churches and Christians left the true faith? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life, dedicated to the message that the only people who get any better are those who know that if they don’t If they don’t get any better, God will still love them anyway. That teaching raises a lot of questions, so here’s author and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth with answers from the Bible that will make you free.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Peter.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey.

Steve Brown:
How are you?

Pete Alwinson:
Good, man. How are you doing?

Steve Brown:
I’m doing good, too. And now, better because you’re here.

Pete Alwinson:
Share the blame.

Steve Brown:
That’s Pete Alwinson, by the way. And if you haven’t checked out ForgeTruth.com you ought to. If you haven’t read Like Father Like Son, you ought to. And if you don’t read, when he finally finishes it, the book he’s working on, you should. How you doing on that book?

Pete Alwinson:
It’s coming. It’s coming.

Steve Brown:
I’m working on one too. I’m on the ninth chapter of twelve chapters.

Pete Alwinson:
Oh man, that’s incredible.

Steve Brown:
You, is it easy for you to write?

Pete Alwinson:
It’s easier for me to put messages together than it is to write a book.

Steve Brown:
Oh gosh. Like going through molasses.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s hard.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it really is.

Pete Alwinson:
But you’ve written a ton and you know, you’re able to, I’m looking forward to this one too.

Steve Brown:
You know, Karl Barth said that every time he came out with a new volume of church dogmatics, the angels got the giggles, said that old man’s doing it again.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s great.

Steve Brown:
That’s Pete Alwinson, do check out ForgeTruth.com great podcast there as well as other things. And by the way, and as you know, he comes in and we answer questions together. We love your questions. You can send your question to

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or you can e-mail your question to [email protected] and if you can help us financially, those would be the places where you could do that. And if you can, I promise we’ll be faithful. We’re a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC in Canada. Both of those organizations oversee the financial coming and going of the ministries that are members to make sure they’re ethical. And so, we have the stamp of approval, even though we didn’t need it because we were ethical before they came along. But if you’re going to help us do, and I promise we’ll be faithful and squeeze every dime for the glory of God. Pete, why don’t you lead us in prayer and we’ll get to some questions.

Pete Alwinson:
You’ve got it. Let’s pray together. Father, we come to you today on this Friday and at the end of this week, and we praise you. Lord, thank you that we could join you in this way and recognize who you are, Lord Jesus. We thank you for being our Savior. The Holy Spirit, thank you for taking the work of Christ and bringing it into our lives in such a way that you woke us up and helped us to see the truth of the gospel. And now, we come to you at the end of this week, and we ask that you would prepare us for worship, that Lord, we would be able to look with anticipation at what you will do this week-end as we meet with your people, as we fellowship, but also as we sing praises, hear your word read and expounded to us. And Lord, we just ask that we would be encouraged and motivated and reinvigorated to go back out into the everyday world and to tell people about you. Be with our listeners. Thank you for them, Lord. Thank you for their gifts. Pray that you would bless them and bless this time of Q&A now as we pray in Jesus’ strong name. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, I’m going to give you an e-mail question, and that opens up the door to talking about something that we left dangling a few programs ago. We were talking about the difference between evangelical and fundamental, and we gave a history lesson and some theological issues that were a part of it, and we just mentioned at the end there were people who have left the fundamental orthodox Christian faith, for a kind of wokeism Christianity. And we need to talk about that, along with this question, which kind of surprises me. This is, what do you think about the openness theological position?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Haven’t heard that in a long time.

Pete Alwinson:
No. Open theology. Really. And there probably have been different adherents to it. So, I guess.

Steve Brown:
You have to be careful.

Pete Alwinson:
I would say, sort of the sense that God had not, was not, it’s sort of the opposite of sovereign. God’s kind of in the flow with what’s going on.

Steve Brown:
And he’s working it out, and he’s doing it with us.

Pete Alwinson:
On the fly.

Steve Brown:
And we’re very, on the fly. He’s got perspiration on his upper lip. He’s kind of scared that we’ll do it wrong, but he’s in it with us, and we’re working it out. That’s from the pit of hell, and it smells like smoke.

Pete Alwinson:
Absolutely. So openness theology sounds psychologically gratifying for a lot of people.

Steve Brown:
It really does.

Pete Alwinson:
But it really is, as you just read the Bible, you cannot get that from the Bible. God is larger and in charge from Genesis to Revelation.

Steve Brown:
And by the way, there’s a great book, and I can’t remember the title of it, but I remember the author because he’s a neighbor of mine, by John Frame, on the openess. And it’s not a hard, it’s not a hard book. It’s not a big book. But if you’ll write Google openess and Dr. John Frame, that’s one of the best books. I mean, after you read it,

Pete Alwinson:
it’s fantastic

Steve Brown:
no other place to go.

Pete Alwinson:
It might be entitled Open Theism.

Steve Brown:
That may be the title of it.

Pete Alwinson:
But I’ve read it too, it’s fantastic. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Now, that morphs into what we were talking about before. It is very easy and I see it a lot and you’ve pointed out that after the pandemic and a lot of things that are happening in the culture. Christians have said, you know, they got a point. And so, they begin to move away from the fundamental and revealed doctrines of the Christian faith to a kind of woke Christianity that seems compassionate, that seems justice oriented, that seems to be right. How do you, what do you think about that?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. You know, and we saw that as we thought about the fundamentalists, you know, in the early part of our country in the early 1900s. It’s true to the faith, but with a hard edge, and then the evangelicals coming in to soften that edge to be more gracious, but not move away from the fundamentalists. And now, so evangelicalism we saw during the pandemic really had more at, it was more fragmented than we thought.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
That there were some that still held to the grace based theological fundamentals that never change, but that some have added to the gospel. And I think that that’s really the way we need to see it. And they were more picking up political ideology and baptizing it as Christian. And that fragmented and split many churches.

Steve Brown:
The church that I’m attending had one of its elders leave the church over this issue.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
Because the church, as you know, the church I attend is quite solid in terms of their orthodoxy. Now, does this, this doesn’t mean that we’re not concerned about justice.

Pete Alwinson:
No.

Steve Brown:
Or social justice.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
Or that we think racism is right, we don’t.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
The Bible is clear about those things. But this is a different critter, isn’t it?

Pete Alwinson:
It was so unique and it snuck up on us in that, as some have put it, they actually added it to the essential core of the gospel rather than the outworking of the gospel. So, everything you just said, we are for social justice, but people have different definitions of what is and is not social justice, and there’s some in the category of social justice that is clearly anti Scriptural. And you can’t go with it.

Steve Brown:
Listen, I would suggest, if you’re looking for some resources, that you Google Voddie Baucham. His sermons, and he’s kind and gentle and loving and humble. He’s the, a seminary head of a seminary in Africa. And he’s African American. But he, the teaching in his books and his videos, that’s incredibly good. So, if you have questions about this, try to remember that name, Voddie, V O D D I E, and I don’t know how to pronounce the, to spell the last name, but it’s Baucham.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. If you Google it, it will be very helpful to listen to that stuff and work through those issues, but we have to do that with grace and love. And you may be, have been a part of a church that has gone through such fragmentation.

Steve Brown:
Be careful.

Pete Alwinson:
Be careful. But also we do need to unite around the, as you said, Steve, the verities of the faith.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. You know, this is a question, an e-mail question that is not irrelevant to what we’ve been talking about. And it’s directed to me. Why did you change from being a theological liberal to being an evangelical?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, fascinating, because being an evangelical, being a liberal back.

Steve Brown:
Oh, was a career enhancer.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And when I became an evangelical, all we had were storefront churches. And I was joining the losers, and that’s a big deal. But the problem was what I’d been taught in the graduate school, which was an early form of wokeism, by the way, simply destroyed lives. It destroyed churches. And people left. They didn’t stay and thank me for being so in with the cool kids. They left the church. And I thought, man, either I’ve got to leave or I’ve got to find a way to have people to come and not leave. And so, it was all selfish. No, it really wasn’t. I had brothers that came alongside me and began to really disciple me to see how important the Orthodox Christian faith is. If we don’t have that, we don’t have anything.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right. And even then, even back in the sixties and seventies, there was a book, Why Liberal Churches are Dying. And it’s because they’ve lost the gospel, they’ve lost the truth.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
And that holds true today. It is those churches that teach the historic doctrines of the faith that teach the Bible that are continuing to grow because the Holy Spirit is causing the churches to grow as we proclaim the name of Christ.

Steve Brown:
Oh, that’s so true. And don’t shilly shally with that. You can shilly shally with the way you worship. You know, you can play an organ or beat a drum. You can shilly shally with the liturgy. You can mess around with the relationships, but you don’t mess with the truth. And a lot of churches are playing footsie with that, and that’ll kill you and it’ll kill your church. It’s all we have to offer to the world is the truth.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s the power of the gospel.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it really is. Well, I’m glad we did that, next time when we have a question, let’s answer it completely. So, we don’t have to go back and do it all over again.

Pete Alwinson:
There you go. There you go.

Steve Brown:
Hey guys, we very much appreciate you’re joining us on all the Key Life broadcasts and even on our talk show, Steve Brown Etc. We realize that the gift of your time is a high and holy gift. Hey, we’ve got to go. Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.