Apologetics

In their article "Psychology And The Church" Bob and Gretchen Passantino remarked that because the church has not fulfilled its Biblical obligation to "nurture, protect, admonish, and mature its members"people have turned to worldly psychotherapy, which contradicts Biblical counseling. They also said that the church has been integrating modern psychology, which poisons the Word of God. 

About 1970, pastor and Christian counselor Jay E Adams started the Biblical Counseling movement. Dr. Adam's beef was that, instead of the church, which is best equipped to handle people's problems, counseling people, churches started palming people off to secular psychologists and psychiatrists. 

Since its early years, the church has been struggling to maintain fidelity to the Word. Back then, the apostle Paul and his boys toured the churches to check to make sure they followed the Lord and not the world and get them in sync with God's precepts. 

Fast forward to the 20th century, when churches started operating under the influence of modernism/liberalism.  Most of the mainline Presbyterian churches in the 1920s were influenced by liberalism, a prevalent movement in the early 20th century, when people were reading modernists like Virginia Woolf, who was considered one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century. Her novel To The Lighthouse was required reading in my college course Psychology in Literature. Reading it, I thought someone had transcribed rantings and ravings from inmates at a mental asylum! One element was man bashing/hating. I remember this modernist writingsomething about a man's boots – that it was all he was about. 

Ms. Woolf inspired modern feminism. 

As defined on philosphybasics.com:  Modernism was essentially conceived of as a rebellion against 19th Century academic and historicist traditions and against Victorian nationalism and cultural absolutism, on the grounds that the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life (in a modern industrialized world) were becoming outdated. The movement was initially called "avant-garde", descriptive of its attempt to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo. The term "modernism" itself is derived from the Latin "modo", meaning "just now".  

In the 1920s, Princeton Theological Seminary, once a bastion of fidelityto scripture, copped out and compromised its principles by reorganizing its board to include members tolerant of liberalism. Princeton then started training ministers to reflect the worldly trends of the worldly mainline Presbyterian churches. 

One of the Princeton professors, J Gresham Machen, challenged this selling out to the world. He argued that liberalism doesn't teach a lesser form of Christianity, but an entirely different religion! Professor Machen, tried by presbytery as a rebel, founded a new school, Westminster Theological Seminary in order to teach God's unadulterated Word. 

The church can make a difference in the world and in people's lives. But first it needs to clean its own house and be true to scripture.  

"You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its savor, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men. Youarethelightof theworld.A cityona hillcannotbe hidden.  Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a basket. Instead, they set it on a lampstand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.…" -Matthew 5: 13-15