Picking up where we left off in this series, we continue as follows.  A little melodramatic…perhaps a bit biting and sarcastic, this post.  But in order to get the full effect of just how aggrieved we should be at the disastrous panoply of doctrinal assumptions in neo-Reformed heresy, I wanted my tone to be suitably full of angst.  Thanks for bearing with, as always.

The neo-Reformed/Calvinist hoards are relentlessly on the march, the energy and rigid ideology and demagoguery of the Young, Restless, (Rich, if you are lucky enough to be a mega-church pastor), and Reformed (YRR) seem to know no limits.  They will not suffer their ideas to be challenged; they will not accept compromise (they firmly declare that the earth is really only 10,000 years old…if that gives you any indication of the kind of intellectual “objectivists” we are dealing with; really, it’s kind of a joke); they will not accept that you have any say over your own mind.  You belong to them, or you do not really exist as a human.  You are an animal, and you shall be treated like one.  You are a sheep (mutton on which they feed), or you are a wolf.  And the wolves will be wooed only so long.  Then, if they bay or bark one too many questions, they’ll be shot with extreme prejudice.  It’s okay.  The wolves obviously weren’t of the elect.  If they were, they would have sold their souls to their neo-Reformed God incarnate-in-the-stead.  The fact that they dared to hesitate to give their undying and unquestioning devotion to a mere man with less intellectual integrity than the average third grader is proof that God created them for destruction.

If their doctrinal insanity has yet to breach the four walls of your own church, count yourself lucky. Well…at least count yourself lucky for now.  Unless they can be met and defeated by men and women who are not too terrified or cowed by hundreds of years of impossibly contradictory metaphysical assumptions that have surreptitiously invaded their own theology and undercut it at the root, making their life’s work but so much chaff before the winds of the conceded reformed premises…yes, unless people who will not accept that metaphysical (and, by extension, doctrinal) contradiction can defeat metaphysical contradiction—that this is by definition a zero sum game, the winner being the one with the ostensibly bigger God, and this is always the Calvinists—then the hoards of the neo-Reformed darkness will eventually find their way to you.  In your cozy, unaffected little innocent church, with you innocent elders and sweet old folks singing The Old Rugged Cross you will hear uttered, from the musty and worn pulpit, likely from a gentle and pleasant-looking “guest pastor”, a logical and theological impossibility, an affront to both God and man and the Bible.  But it will be said in such a way and couched in such terms that unless prepared with rank reason and pure trust in your ability to THINK and trust in your own senses, it will pass into your metaphysical presuppositions and into your doctrine without so much as a question or a raised hand.  Soon, with spiritual throats cut, starting with your church’s leadership (who naturally want to stay “hip” with the latest doctrinal “truth”) you will no longer be alive to offer any alternative or fight to such egregious spiritual mysticism.  You’ll nod and shrug and give your money and property away and concede your hard earned reputation and life and love to your gnostic spiritual authority, safe and sound in the knowledge that ALL, no matter how evil it is or terrible the outcomes, is God’s will in the end.

The neo-Reformed eyes fall on your doomed soul and they pronounce in your hearing words which feign humility and sensibility and comfort and worship.  Trust me…for a loooong time you will swear that I’m full of it; I’m exaggerating, or outright lying and slandering.  The love-bombing is so powerful in neo-Reformed circles that it takes a suit of armor and a gouging out of one’s eyes and ears to not get sucked into its seductive false warmth.  You will SWEAR that I must be the instrument of the devil, impugning such sensible and obviously Godly doctrine.  Of COURSE, God is in control of us.  Of COURSE we are too depraved to ever seek Him.  Of COURSE all praise is to be for God for any good we do, because of COURSE it can’t possibly be us doing it.  It must be God doing FOR us. Because He loves us so much.

I know.  I know.  I scarcely believe that I’ve come so far to see the truth.

All of it is lies.  It doesn’t matter what you believe or think.  After a while, look around.  See that pain has now become the plumb line for TRUTH.  See how people force themselves into smothering little roles and lives, terrified to take a step out into the real world, dead in love, no care for the lost, evangelism the purview of a narrow band of “fringe members”.

Open your eyes and let yourself see, and I won’t have to prove anything to you.  You’ll do all the work for me.  Look in the mirror.  Ask yourself who you really serve.  Your own interests or those of the “church” in ALL you do?  Have your interests (personal, occupational, familial) become subservient ultimately to their interests?  Do you recoil to believe that YOU can even have your own interests?  Does saying the words “my own interests matter” in your mind fill you with dread of condemnation and God’s bitter ire?

If it does, then you are following false teaching.  You don’t HAVE to think or believe that way.  You can disagree with me, but know this:  you are miserable because you CHOOSE to be.  You CAN choose not to be.  You are following pagan mysticism; it has little to do with the philosophy that gave us Christ.  If you want to taste true freedom in Him, you need to stop enslaving yourself to gnostic liars who only want you for what you can feed them.

But anyway….

Yes, their words are sweet like frosting, with about as much nutritional value.  Words that mask the truth of what is really a theology harboring a deep disdain for God and man and the rest of Creation.  A theology which is only superficially organized, coherent and consistent, but, when submitted to true rational and even biblical scrutiny (that is, biblical scrutiny that is not based on proof-texting), is adrift on a raging and evil sea of confusion; a spiritual nightmare of incongruent and unsettling thoughts.  Thoughts and ideas that you can’t really see, can’t really put your finger on.  A fantasy land or hall of smoke and mirrors where nothing is as it seems or as it is spoken.  And when “practically” applied, brings only pain, misery, exasperation, cold love, often anger and agitation and abuse,  and a loss of control over one’s own mind and life…for it cannot save you.  Its sole purpose is to bleed you, consume your possessions and then kill you inside.  It is axiomatic that the same doctrine that tells you that YOU don’t exist cannot possibly save you.  But they will lie and tell you it can.

You will notice after a while that there are no longer opposites in the doctrinal equations.  No longer GOOD and EVIL, GOD or MAN, SALVATION or DAMNATION.  For it is boiled down to one thing and one thing only.  GOD.  If you are not GOD, you aren’t you, because it “all about God” (lie…it’s all about God AND man; the Bible exists because man exists, thus, it cannot be “all about God”, by definition).  The best you are is despised; fit for death.  All is One; and all that is not part of the One is unconscious, evil…to be exploited, used, chastised and blamed for things that it can never–according to the reformation’s VERY OWN teachings– possibly be culpable for, because it has no mind of its own.  And who is part of the “One” is determined solely by the Gnostic overlords, the neo-Reformed pastors.  Yes, they who hold the Keys to the Kingdom; which simply means that they get to say who is saved and who isn’t.  It has nothing to do with YOU.  EVER.  But the dark secret is that it has nothing really to do with God, either.   Yes, the dark secret is that not even GOD can exist in the twisted maze called reformed hermeneutics.

But none of this matters, for you are unable to see it through the poetic and melodramatic, teary-eyed sermons that are sweet across your brain like the deadly goodies baked by the witch in the Gingerbread House in the woods.  You sit there and nod.  Yes!  Finally!  You declare in your mind.  Someone who GETS the SEVERITY of SIN.

Pretty soon you are in the pot with Hansel and Gretel.  Boiling, with no way out because its all “God’s will”.  God is in control, right.  He has a plan.  Whatever happens, happens.  You’ll boil alive in the stew of neo-Reformed assumptions before you’ll ever dare take a step out of the water.  For these people really GET SIN, and you now understand that YOU are THAT SIN.  And so, better to let “God’s will” kill you and and torture everyone else around you than dare to believe that you are capable in your own mind and of your own volition of calling evil, evil.  Morality is relative, you see, when God is in control of everything.  When it’s all according to God’s plan, then GOOD and EVIL are merely different words for the exact same thing.  When “but for the grace of God go I” is your doctrine, you pretty much concede that you can’t say a damn thing.

Oh, they get sin alright.  Be happy if this is your bag.  You will never hear the end of it.  You can’t move beyond the cross.  You can’t DO anything.  That’s the point.  You can’t do anything because you don’t really exist.  YOU are irrelevant.  So, if you love hearing about your sin (as you lick the boots of the pastor and quiver in your jeans when he deigns to smile upon you …oh, thank GOD you finally have a God you can truly worship; and he looks so nice in his button down shirt and khakis and hip loafers; so royal, and yet so humble, up there behind the Plexiglass), the neo-Reformation is the right place for you, my friend.

You are blind with terror; but you pretend that this terror is proof of your acceptance.  You tell yourself that the abject terror at being sure of absolutely nothing about yourself or God is really the “peace that passes all understanding”.

You are compelled onward.  Unable to stop, but also unable—blitzed out of your mind on spiritual soma and repetitive, superficial, banal worship music, and full blown blubbering histrionics on stage—to see, to hear, to understand.  The drum line of gnostic overlords and their Vaudeville act has you in its talons.  You go to them for your each and every move, following along in the traveling show, and then your next move, too.  And the one after that, and so on and so on.

And then the cycle of terror and confusion, masquerading as “sound doctrine”, begins again for another poor soul. And so on and so on.