How Evangelicalism Denies the Faith

In the final analysis, perhaps the label “functional liberalism” is not clear enough. We have used it to connect the modern error with an old problem. In truth, however, functional liberalism is simply an evangelical progressivism that hasn’t yet realized what it is or where it’s headed. For every attempt to “develop the doctrine”—in all the ways the pope and the archbishop and the many Andy Stanleys of the world are currently doing—is really an attempt to “move ahead” or “go beyond” what the Scriptures say into (it is hoped) some ephemeral land of sovereign individuals who live together in nonjudgmental bliss. Whether evangelicals do this subconsciously, out of embarrassment for ideas that are now out of fashion, or whether they do self-consciously in the hopes of being more “winsome” to the world, the result is eventually the same: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death (Prov. 14:12), for, “Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God” (2 John 9).