Josh Howerton and The Evangelical Circus of Today...
Updated: 10 hours ago
I have gotten some grief online lately for criticizing Josh Howerton, one of the golden boys of evangelicalism right now. I'm not putting him in hell, and not everything he says is wrong. But the issues around him are part of a much larger problem, and that problem is evangelical Christianity in modern-day America. In this video I walk through how evangelicalism came to be, the problems it has created, and why I don't call myself an evangelical.
Around the World War I era, young men went off to Germany to study theology under higher criticism and men like Karl Barth, and many came back denying that the Bible is the word of God, denying the miracles, and denying the deity of Jesus Christ. That modernism split denomination after denomination. The men who stood on the old truths took the name fundamentalist to separate themselves from those infidels. Later a new evangelicalism came along that wanted the respect of the world and wanted to leave separation behind.
Here are the four marks evangelicalism came to be known for: no ecclesiastical or personal separation, an academic slant that tries to influence academia and politics, a worldliness that has infected the whole movement, and love emphasized over truth, the gospel of nice. God's people should be different from the world, not a cheap imitation of it.
Josh Howerton is a picture of that system. In my view he rejects secondary separation, he mocks ecclesiastical separation, and he will not plainly call Paula White a false teacher, only saying he has theological disagreements with her. Politics does not give anyone a pass on condemning false teachers. This is not just a Josh Howerton problem. It is a philosophy of ministry that tries to practice Christianity with zero boundaries, and Bible-believing Christians need to see it for what it is.
Watch the full video on YouTube: Josh Howerton and The Evangelical Circus of Today.... For more Bible preaching and commentary, subscribe to the channel at youtube.com/@spencersmith312.
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