GENUINE FAITH IS NOT A BLIND LEAP:
  IT MUST BE COMMUNICATED AND RECEIVED RATIONALLY

     Unfortunately for our society, entire church leadership systems have failed to examine their own intellectual foundations and have bought into the split-reality world view of Post- Modern man.  Sometimes they have even done this under the erroneous impression that it is necessary in order to reach Post-Modern people.  But in so doing, whether intentionally or not, they have followed the world by placing faith in Christ into that non-reason faerie realm along with the UFOs and mother earth.  They have ignored a great body of evidence and accepted conclusions which have been directed into place by starting assumptions hostile to the Bible for reasons not truly intellectual, but moral.  Churches do this when they teach that even though parts of the Bible “have errors,” or “cannot be understood at the most natural meaning,” some "spiritual truth" still manages to shine through.²⁸  This is called Neo-Orthodoxy, and it comes in many shades of intensity across the spectrum of modern Christendom.  It is essentially modern Existentialism couched in Christian terminology.  It is a way of doing things more than a belief system of itself, thus many genuinely converted believers might find themselves affected by it to varying degrees in the way they approach the gospel, evangelism and their own relationship with God.  But the effect is spiritually toxic.  Neo-Orthodoxy at its essence, whether one calls it that or not, uses all the grand old rituals and holy words that evoke emotion in people, but with meanings that have been subverted and sometimes blatantly changed from historic definitions into something more “relevant to the modern situation.”  IT IS THE ULTIMATE TOOL FOR BOTH RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL MANIPULATION.  With it both right and left-wing politicians and theologians have had great success in the last eighty years leading people into beliefs and activities, using Christian terminology, that any casual study of Christ and the Apostles would show to be anti-Christian.  Under it, even far less radical church leaders have failed to see the importance of foundations, to the point that essential work in the superstructure is collapsing from lack of balance because it has been built over a mire of wave tossed sociological sand.
     This split universe view is drummed into us every day by popular culture -- the education, arts and entertainment elites, as well as by religious sources.  It is for this reason that New Age occultism is on the rise, and that Western Civilization has lost its once Judeo-Christian moral consensus.  We are sitting on the floor, rubbing our sore rumps and backs, asking for the Ben-gay and wondering what has happened to us.
     Pastors and church leaders committed to a biblical ministry philosophy battle the results of this world view crisis, often without understanding what it is they are fighting.  Because in order for there to be real communication, both inside the church and to the world, there must be an assurance that the words we use have the same meaning to the hearer as they have with the speaker.  Many church leaders still act as if this is a given.  But anybody who has truly understood the history of how we have had the rug pulled out from under us; anybody who is at all in touch with how young people have been taught to perceive reality in the public schools and on the university campus, or in the New Theology controlled churches or in the arts and entertainment of general culture, must realize that we cannot count on people truly understanding what we mean when we say "good," "evil," "sin," "Christ," "salvation" or even "God" anymore.  We might be saying the word "Christ," but they might be understanding something more inclusive, even to the point of an eastern mystical "Christ consciousness," and not the Jewish Messiah at all!  I have often faced this communications barrier to varying degrees.  This is why our age is called the "Post-Christian Era."