“The peculiar theological and religious ideas which Freemasonry holds and aims to inculcate while positively non-Christian, are expressed in terms of Christian theology, not to express the Christian ideas or to show their harmony with Christian thought, but to give them a Christian coloring the more effectually to deceive, mislead and hoodwink the neophyte, the conscientious member, and the non-Mason into whose hands Masonic literature may come, and also to intensify the task of the Mason to learn the real sentiments. Thus the biblical and Christian appellations of God are employed to denote the Masonic deity, who is specifically known as the Great Architect of the Universe. It employs the terms regeneration, illumination, resurrection, justification, and other terms of Christian theology to express not the Christian ideas, but under which to hide the Masonic religious operations. These terms have a peculiar and a specific Masonic meaning, and in studying this institution we must not permit ourselves to be misled by this use of Christian theological terms, as many a Mason is misled by them to believe that Freemasonry is a Christian institution.”
Martin L. Wagner
Freemasonry; An Interpretation — pg. 153
I post this because this is such a ubiquitous and common tactic consistently employed by the enemies of Christianity. Barthianism employed this tactic to advance its cause of abominating the Christain faith. J. Gresham Machen exposed this technique in his book Christianity and Liberalism. More books like that should be written covering how other heresies attack the Christian faith by the technique cited above. We are seeing this happening again in the Church now in several expressions. The whole WOKE crowd has given us WOKE-ianity in place of Christianity using the same language and jargon. R2K is another heresy in the Church that is using the cover of twisted Christian jargon to cover its traitorous existence. Another example is the Alienists (they have a foot in the WOKE camp while often denouncing WOKE-ism at the same time) as the Alienists deny the basic building blocks of Christianity by denying that Christianity begins with hearth and home by insisting that hearth and home is a social construct. All of these us the same technique Wagner limns about above. There are others of course. Arminianism in its various forms is not Christianity but yet it keeps itself afloat by using the language. Pentecostalism likewise (most people don’t know it is a variant of Arminianism) is a boil on the body of Christianity that uses the language without the substance.
What happens is people hear the jargon that these people use and they let down their guard and accept these deceivers as brethren and so the Christian faith is diluted and worse yet bastardized.
Further, there are so many who practice this kind of deception that we who call them out are cited as narrow-minded and uncharitable since we are such purists who will never accomplish anything because we refuse to make a league with those who could help the cause. Yet we alone seemingly understand that a little leaven leavens the whole dough.
The above quote goes a long way towards explaining what is wrong with the Church right now. We are not careful thinkers. We have allowed linguistic deception to become the coin of the land. We are not precise in our thinking and in not being precise we allow in blackguards, mountebanks, and various rubes into our midst and worse yet make them leaders.
Because of this, the Church will not see Reformation.
