Category: Apologetics

Colossians 2:8 – See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, which are based on human tradition and the spiritual forces of the world rather than on Christ.

Hebrews 13:9 – Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings

 Ephesians 4:11-14 – 11 And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, 12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the [e]edifying of the body of Christ, 13 till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; 14 that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting,

I Tim. 6: 20-21 – O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid irreverent, empty chatter and the opposing arguments of so-called “knowledge,” / which some have professed and thus swerved away from the faith.

These are but a few passages wherein there is a warning to the flock of Christ to be on guard against deception that arises from false teaching and doctrine. Packed inside these pleas to not release the one true faith due to strange teachings, deceitful plotting, so called “knowledge” and empty deception is the necessity to be familiar with the faith once and forever delivered unto the saints (Jude 1:3). As you know the ability to fall for vain philosophy and empty deception is premised on the fact that somehow we did not know the faith well enough to avoid being carried away by all kinds of strange teachings.

In the Colossians passage the phrase “takes you captive” is used. In the older KJV it is translated,

Beware lest any man spoil you – The Greek word here means to plunder. Literally to “lead away as spoils of war… to seduce.” These grifters would strip Christians of their Christian faith/worldview as an army would rob a country of all that was valuable. The difference though is that while a army is a force dominating from the outside, these who would spoil the Colossians are subversives. They take captive by hollowing out the content of the faith and replacing that content with other content. This is why the Holy Spirit can say in the Ephesians passage that this happens by the “trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting.”

Paul by inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the Colossians passage says that the subversion will come based on appeal to “human tradition, and the spiritual forces of the world, rather than on Christ.” This reminds us that in the end there are only two worldview. One that is based on revelation found in Christ and the other always founded on human traditions and spiritual forces that deny or twist God’s revelation. Paul picks this idea up again in 2:22 when he warns the Colossians again against the false teaching that was being pushed was “according to human precepts and teachings.”

In the NT, the strange teachings, the vain philosophy and empty deceit and trickery of men was often aligned with what we have taught on here before. Paul and the NT writings were waging war against Judaism, Gnosticism and even, at times, a combination of both as in I Timothy.

As history has unwound we have seen though that there always arise other strange winds of doctrines that would take us captive. Other vain deceits arise that would take subvert our faith and so take us captive.
These vain deceits and trickery end up re-defining the Christian faith while retaining all the language. This is what both the Gnostics and Judaizers were doing in the 1^st century. They retained all the language but they reinterpreted it … they re-defined it by the means of vain philosophy and empty deceit.

The Rabbis were especially good at this kind of deceit.

They deal, for example, with a Mosaic legislation that prohibits the seduction of a woman. They start with asking how a woman is to be defined. They then proceed to define a woman as someone who had to be a certain age, because prior to that she is not a woman. They would then proceed to say, “Well, then if a man seduces a female who is younger than that age, it doesn’t count as fornication or seduction.” On that basis they would redefine God’s Word and gain an acquittal on that score.

You see, via such “so called knowledge” and “trickery of men” people are taken captive.

C. S. Lewis wrote something of this ability to take clear meaning and turn it inside out so that men are taken captive and are blown around by every strange wind of doctrine.

C.S. Lewis wrote about a man who ordered milk and eggs from a waiter in a restaurant. After tasting the milk he commented to the waiter that it was delicious. The waiter replied, “Milk is only the secretion of a cow, just like urine and feces.” After eating the eggs he commented on the tastiness of the eggs. Again the waiter responded that eggs are only a by-product of a chicken. After thinking about the waiter’s comment for a moment the man responded, “You lie. You don’t know the difference between what nature has meant for nourishment, and what it meant for garbage.

What does it take on our part to not be taken captive by Lewis’s waiter redefining reality by means of the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting?

Well, like C. S. Lewis’s customer we have to have two abilities.

1.) We have to know what reality really is.
2.) We have to be confident in what we know that we know.

This is the only way we “avoid irreverent, empty chatter and the opposing arguments of so-called “knowledge.”

This then takes us to what you have heard me push a million times and that is knowing what we believe and why we believe it and what we don’t believe and why we don’t believe it. This is the only way that I know wherein we can successfully embrace these scriptures read this morning. The ability to avoid irreverent, empty chatter and the opposing argument of so called knowledge is only found in the ability to be able to identify irreverent empty chapter as irreverent empty chatter.

All the statistics support me that the contemporary church has lost this ability. I would contend that the church is so weak today because it not only does not have this ability but worse yet it hates those people who do have this ability and who seek to use it for the health of the church.

Well, what of it then. If we are to take these passages seriously in 2026 what must we identify as “so called-knowledge, as Paul puts it. As we said, in the 1^st century the “so-called knowledge” was the worldviews of Judaism, and Gnosticism that was taking people captive. But what about 2026? What are the false worldviews that are taking people captive?

Well, we have spoken of some of them over the years. We have especially tried to expose R2K thinking as “so called knowledge.” Likewise, in years past we tried to expose Doug Wilson’s so-called knowledge labeled Federal Vision.

Today, in the time remaining, I’d like to expose another version of a so-called knowledge that is swallowing alive the conservative Reformed churches and is consequently reinterpreting Christianity in a non-Christian direction. That vain philosophy and empty deceit is called “Cultural Marxism.” Cultural Marxism has entered the Church and is reinterpreting Christianity through the lens of Cultural Marxism.

Of course, the enemy insists that such a thing as Cultural Marxism does not exist. This in spite of the fact that book upon book as been written on the subject. However, one tool of the grifter is to insist he is not grifting and in denying the existence of Cultural Marxism the grifter advance his grift. It’s the old line… “Nothing to see here, folks, move along.”

In the time remaining I cannot say everything that needs to be said about this but I will try and hit the highlights of this worldview that is swallowing whole the historic Christian faith.

Cultural Marxism is a variant of what we might call classical Marxism. Classical Marxism taught that utopia could be arrived at by violent revolutionary change that moved social orders through different economic ordering via a evolutionary unfolding of history. This was prompted by the instigating of economic class warfare where those economically oppressed peoples would rise up against their economic oppressors to the end of ending all property with the result that their would be economic equity.

What you need to take most from that is the model of “oppressed vs. oppressor.” This is the Marxist antithesis. It opposes the Christian antithesis of “sinner” and “righteous.” For the Marxist sin is defined as being an oppressor and righteousness is defined as liberating the oppressed. Already, we see a movement away from the God-centeredness of historic Christianity to a man-centeredness. The role of the Christian is not to proclaim Jesus Christ in his offices of Prophet, Priest, and King, but rather the role of the Christian is bring in social justice as defined according to a non-Christian standard.

When we think about this oppressor vs. oppressed standard we see it coming into the Church by means of a unseemly feminism. In the modern conservative church women are seen as being oppressed as evidenced by the historical Christian and Biblical teaching of the explicit gender roles of men and women, including the forbidding of women serving in leadership roles as Pastors, or Elders. All of this is now being rejected in favor of a position that either gives women the office or gives them the authority of the office without having the name of the office. In the conservative church now men who hold to the older paths are seen as the oppressors who must be disciplined for holding to the older paths.

This push of Cultural Marxism in the conservative Church is not new. 51 years ago, “Christianity Today,” then thought of as a conservative Evangelical magazine platformed Virginia Ramey Mollenkott who could publicly argued that when properly understood, the Bible supports the central tenants of feminism and took on the more traditional evangelicals who triumphantly cite New Testaments instructions of the submission of first century wives and church women as proof that it is forever the will of God for women to remain subordinate.

The basic strategy that Mollenkott argues is that the culture of the Bible must be deabsolutized. A reading some Biblical literalists might have trouble with. Because Patriarchy is the cultural back drop of Scriptures, she argued, it is absolutely basic to any feminist reading of the Bible that one cannot absolutise the culture in which the Bible is written. We cannot assume, she told the 360 women at the conference, that because the Bible was written against the backdrop of the patriarchal social structure, patriarchy is the will of God for all people in all times and in all places.

This is what Cultural Marxism does… it seeks to de-absolutize the Bible of its patriarchal context because women in that context are allegedly always oppressed. Dr. Mollenkott and all “Christian” Cultural Marxists who work with her are doing the Lord’s work by de-absolutizing the Bible. The dirty secret here though, is that by deabsolutizing the patriarchal culture of the Bible what is happening at the same time is a new absolutizing of Cultural Marxism of the Bible where either egalitarianism or matriarchy is the the cultural backdrop against which all the Bible needs to be read.

So, in Cultural Marxism worldview, as it is creeping into the Church sin is found in being the oppressor and righteousness is in being oppressed. In that categorization, Christianity is in sin because it has been, per this worldview, the oppressor throughout history. So, in this worldview, the oppressed must be released from the Christian faith. In the Biblical faith sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.

Indeed, for Cultural Marxism, Christianity is the embodiment of oppression and is a chief enemy. Historic Christianity stands against the oppressed sexual deviants. Christianity was associated with the colonialism movement of the 19^th century where indigenous people were putatively so sorely oppressed. In 2017 a scholar named Bruce Gilley wrote a book arguing that Colonialism had many positives. The Cultural Marxist went ape crazy and tried to destroy Gilley primarily because colonialism was associated Christianity and the white man.

However, Christianity, is seeking to adapt to Cultural Marxism, even in the heretofore conservative churches. This is also seen by denominations giving up foreign missions due to the historical ties to colonialism. Christianity oppressed people and so it’s outreach must be ceased.

Other examples could be given. The whole endeavor to replace the oppressing white man in the West is because of how Christianity has shaped and informed the white man. The conservative denominations participated in this when it celebrated MLK50, the anniversary of the death of the godless Martin Luther King. But you see, MLK was oppressed and in order to shed Christian Oppressor status many Evangelical had to go out of their way to celebrate a wicked wicked man.

Now, do you see how this ties in to the passages? The modern conservative church is reinterpreting Christianity in a Cultural Marxist direction. The modern conservative church is de-contextualizing the Bible of not only patriarchy, but also of heternormativity (as seen in the inability of the PCA to discipline Rev. Greg Johnson for admitting that he was “same-sex attracted” or for his PCA church hosting the Revoice conference in 2018 which aimed to support and celebrate celibate sodomite Christians”).

All of this and so much more is evidence that the heretofore conservative orthodox denominations have been carried away by all kinds of strange teaching. Their Christianity has been reinterpreted through an alien worldview. They have retained the language but they have let

certain men creep in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now we have only scratched the surface of what Cultural Marxism is. I think I will do a few more lessons on this in our Labri sessions once they start in a few weeks. I think it is important for you to be aware how this worldview operates so that you won’t be taken captive through philosophy and empty deception, which are based on human tradition and the spiritual forces of the world rather than on Christ.

In summary we see the formerly white hat conservative denomination being taken over by Cultural Marxism as evidenced by;