INTRODUCTORY COMMENT
In Romans 12:2 Paul wrote: Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind...’
In Ephesians 4:17-18 he wrote: ‘So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.’
As Christians we must reclaim the fact that our minds and our thinking are important. It could well be that the abdication of the Christian mind in favour of emotion and experience is the reason that it has been so easily seduced by the many isms currently impacting the church.
These studies cannot teach you everything about the beliefs they present; nor can they address every ideology that affects us. What they aim to do is to alert you to some of the powerful ideas that are sometimes subtly and sometimes blatantly attacking the foundations of Christian faith, undermining Christian confidence, changing the focus of Christian thought, and setting the Christian adrift on seas of uncertainty. They aim to challenge you to throw off these seductive thought patterns and return to a Bible based, Christ centred mindset, in which there is also a return to the joy, peace and assurance which has always gone hand in hand with the true knowledge of Jesus Christ.
These studies aim to equip you to define and defend the Biblical faith in the presence of alternate ideologies, and to enter into discussion with those who have embraced alternate views.
I trust that the brief content of these studies will serve to alert you to the dangers inherent in these ideologies, to demonstrate how easily the Christian mind has been seduced and held captive by them, and to motivate you as a disciple of Jesus Christ to allow him alone to be the Master of your mind.
These studies seek to identify and describe key features of each ideology, compare and contrast them with the Biblical teaching as understood by conservative, evangelical theology. They seek to discern to what degree we as individual Christians and as the church corporately have been impacted by these ideologies, and then try to determine what we can do to reverse or prevent this impact.
[These studies are an expansion of a booklet, The Seduction of the Christian Mind, self-published by the author in 1999, and also published by GLS Publishing in 2001.]