Christians: What do you consider to me the most dangerous and deceitful teachings in the church today?

Question

List more than one if you like --- but please give your reasons why. :)

Answer 1

OK, mine is when "claiming the promises of God" goes to the extremes. I really don't like the philosophy that some churches are teaching, that if you follow God, he wants you to have and will give you the best of everything. Seriously that creeps me out. I do believe that God wants to grant the desires of our hearts, but shouldn't those desires be for peace, for a happy family, to find God's will and follow it, etc? And what about the faithful in third world countries? If God is just there to listen to what we want and pass out candies, why isn't he giving Buicks and nice watches to folks in Tanzania? I think that kind of doctrine distracts us from the fact that God is ALWAYS good, even when life is hard, even when we can't take care of ourselves, he can. It worries me that those doctrines will actually prevent people from developing true faith or that they will lose it once something hard comes into their lives.

Answer 2

Rapture -- people think they'll have a second chance. (Btw, no need to be ecologically minded b/c Jesus will come back and BURN it all up, lol.)

Eternal Security (once saved, always saved) -- people can look back on their baptism or "Personal Moment" (or whatever) and think that whatever they do without sincere repentance doesn't matter.

Those who discredit the Trinity -- good grief, Christians in general don't question the Son (Jesus), and the Father and Spirit are BOTH in the very first paragraph of the Bible ("In the beginning God created . . . and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters"). Never mind that He didn't SEND the Spirit until Pentecost -- still existed before that.

Some that say Jesus did not, in fact, physically resurrect. (Do I really need to expound on that one -- it's the basis for our expectation to do the same thing -- He conquered death.)

Those particular churches that teach that the Bible is a collection of stories to teach right from wrong, etc., and as it was written by man it is surely fallible. Bad enough that atheists believe that (hey, their prerogative), but to have Christians disregard 2nd Timothy 3:16 ("All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for . . . ") and so on is shameful at best.

"Name it and claim it" theology is ONLY good when it is coupled with "If it be thy will" -- which in effect cancels out the human "right" to claim anything for themselves without going through God. Not "BAD" when viewed correctly, just useless.

Honestly, reading a lot of the answers before kinda depressed me, seeing how people within (supposedly) and without view our God. Is it okay to feel such a way, or does that put me in God's place?

Answer 3

Jesus not truly being God, because if this is true then it relegates the Bible to nothing more then a good book, and also like it says in the Bible that if Christ did not rise from the dead then, we of all people are most miserable, because we have no hope.

Although a close second would be that the first eleven chapters of Genesis don't really mean what they say...the implications of this is that first: Jesus lied when he traced his origins to Adam, God created death and disease because it happened before Adam's sin, Man is not the reason for pain and suffering in the world, the ten commandments untrustable, because it restates that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

Answer 4

New Agism, because so many Christians have been taken in by it since it is presented as a harmless "philosophy". However, anything that perverts the message of the Gospel and causes someone to look to someone other than God, is not something that we want to be subscribing to. New Agism is nothing more than Gnosticism, repackaged and made more palatable to Christians, yet it is still deeply rooted in ancient mysticism. This form is expecially insidious because fits Satan's profile as representing himself as an "angel of light" (2 Cor. 11: 13, 14).

Answer 5

Gosh! There's quite a few.

I'd have to say

1). Once you're saved you've got to work hard to keep your salvation. This only leads to burnout and many times backsliding due to exhaustion. We are not to finish our salvation through our own efforts but rather through depedence upon Jesus who is living in & thru us. This is true faith - faith in Him verses my flesh.

2). You don't need people, just God. "Isolation leads to insanity" - Dr. James Dobson. We won't grow in Christ alone. This teaching is both misleading and dangerous as the message of the gospel is about reconcilliation. And like Dr. John Townsend says, "The opposite of bad isn't good, it's seperation."

Good question!

Answer 6

# 1 for me is, denying the Deity of Jesus Christ, then, Replacement Theology, Name it and claim it, Once saved always saved, Praying to Saints, The Born Again Club, where people repeat a little prayer and told they are saved without a life changing Holy Spirit drawing experience.

Sorry, it is not just one for me. There are many non biblical doctrines that are dangerous.
And as far as my reason: We have these doctrines because people refuse to prayerfully seek God for themselves and read their bibles, they simply follow, like sheep, forgetting that Jesus is our Shepherd, not man... although I understand God does use man, the ultimate Shepherd is Jesus.

1Pe 2:25 For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.

2Ti 2:15 Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

Answer 7

That every syllable of the Bible is literally the utterance of God.

As a devout Christian, I find plenty of inconsistencies in The Bible. Heck, the New Testament can't even get important things 100% correct, such as the geneology of Christ, the differing accounts of Christ's baptism and resurrection, and so on. It is far more important to concentrate on the thrust of Christ's ministry, rather than argue a point in Genesis, even when it is flatly contradicted by the sciences.

I believe that the Bible is a collection of remembrances of well-intentioned people inspired by God. I believe it to carry a great deal of truth in it. However, it was only pieced together by a committee at the Council of Nicea in 350 AD, and has all the problems of a human work.

However, that does not undermine its power and overall truth one bit.

Answer 8

Good for Lexi (your first answer) for having the courage to say that. saying to love everyone and discluding that we should hate what is evil which is also part of the NT bible.

Endorsing gay marraiges and re writing the bible for that purpose is extremely dangerous.

The prosperity doctrine is extremely dangerous if it gets people away from "seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness" because it promotes the love of money, which is the root of all evil.

I would say endorsing a lukewarm lifestyle and encouraging church activities to take the place of a relationship with Christ on a personal level is also very dangerous.

Answer 9

Replacement Theology, the doctrine that the church has replaced the Jews as chosen people. Even churches that have formally renounced it teach it more subtly.

This doctrine has a direct relationship to the atrocities committed by Hitler, for one. It's an abomination.

Answer 10

"God loves you more than other people." More than any other notion, this is the most dangerous. Anyone who thinks that they have a special status (especially with divine approval) is likely to see others as something less than fully human. You can't have "better" without "worse", and "better" is likely to see "worse" as a problem to be solved.

Any "God" who can be humanly comprehended would have no partiality. The alternative guarantees violence and cruelty by justifying mistreatment of the "inferior". Far more energy is spent on "correcting" the sins of others than on self-examination and internal reform.

A related teaching is "No salvation outside of OUR church." Again, the appeal is to "specialness", and the exclusion of "outsiders". Terrible things are done in the world. The whole idea of "holiness", separateness is to state, "We refuse to do the terrible things that others do. We insist on doing good things that others don't respect." It is not to separate "good guys" from "bad guys". When religion is more about identity than about making the world better ("building up the kingdom of heaven"), it becomes idolatrous and demonic. Jesus himself said, "Whoever is not against me is for me." That means people should judge based on how others live and act, not by doing a creed check.

"What you believe is more important than what you do." One of the most unfortunate consequences of the Protestant Reformation is the artificial distinction between "faith" and "works". People do things based on what they believe, if they don't, it's not real faith. A faith that contains a moral mandate requires action, otherwise it's dead, useless. And if that moral mandate spreads misery and suffering rather than alleviating it, the faith is inhuman. People who excuse their mistreatment of other people because they serve a "higher" cause are either liars or deluded.

"This is not the real world." Uggh. It is a perversion to pretend that the world we find ourselves in is an illusion and that "reality" cannot be directly perceived. Sure, our senses only detect an approximation of what the world is really like, but it's a really consistent approximation, and the only world we can reliably interact with, despite the occasional illusion. We can't perform experiments or learn in a dream world. We figure things out here and now. To treat our world and the people and things we find in it as an allegory, a test, a rehearsal for the "real thing" is an insult to humanity. It is very telling that the theology of the afterlife has few details. We just know that we'll be very, very, very happy or very, very, very unhappy. It is bizarre to contrast three-score-and-ten of one thing after another with an eternity of nothing much going on. The way we treat people today matters, not because of our karma point score but because they are people just like us.