The topic of good stewardship prompts me to reflect on an important aspect of stewardship that has suffered some neglect: the stewardship of the truth that the Church has received from God through his Word.
In his book, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism, the Christian apologist Douglas Groothuis describes how the postmodern ethos has impacted both culture and the Church.1 Most significantly, postmodernism, in its war against any grand theory (metanarrative), has rejected the notion of objective truth, reducing it to the preferences of the individual or a group.
This relativisation of truth has profound implications in academic and social disciplines such as ethics, race, gender, the arts, politics, etc. Regrettably, the postmodern sensibility has permeated contemporary Christianity, Groothuis observes, including evangelicalism.
Theologians and scholars such as David Wells and Mark Noll have long lamented about the dangerous erosion of doctrinal emphasis and theological rigour in evangelical churches. Writing in the early 1990s, David Wells observed that:
Evangelicals today only have to believe that God can work dramatically within the narrow fissure of internal experience; they have lost interest (or perhaps they can no longer sustain interest) in what the doctrines of creation, common grace, and providence once meant for Christian believers, and even in those doctrines that articulate Christ’s death such as justification, redemption, propitiation, and reconciliation. It is enough for them simply to know that Christ somehow died for people.2
The sad consequence of this erosion—this replacement of rigorous orthodoxy with Christianity Lite— is that churches (and Christians) become vulnerable to heresies and alien ideologies masquerading as biblical Christianity.
We see this subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) invasion of secular and pagan ideas in evangelical churches in the West—from wokeism to social justice to New Ageism and even occultism.
The churches in Singapore are not spared. Here are some examples.
- There is a church which has resuscitated the ancient heresy of antinomianism, with its unbiblical teaching on grace, and its cavalier attitude towards sin and the moral laws of God.3
- There are Christians and churches that are drawn to some of the teachings and practices of a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.4 Some of the key personalities of the movement, such as Bill Johnson, the pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California, have spoken at conferences here.
- There is a small group of Christians in Singapore who promote “Progressive Christianity”, which is basically the old theological liberalism dressed up in a postmodern garb.5
- And there are a few churches here which claim to be ‘woke’, and have thrown their weight behind the social justice movement, without understanding that the ideologies that fuel it are not derived from the Bible, but from The Communist Manifesto.6
The Church has been given the responsibility to exercise responsible stewardship of the truths they have received through God’s Word. Although this is the responsibility of all of God’s people, bishops, pastors, theologians and leaders (including church boards and church councils) are held especially accountable.
There are two aspects to the exercise of responsible stewardship of God’s truth.
The first is to teach it faithfully. Writing to Titus, Paul exhorts the young pastor to: “… teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1).
But responsible stewardship of God’s truth also involves exposing and rebuking false teachers or heretics. In listing the criteria for the appointment of elders, the apostle writes: “He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9).
The Church has not only been given the responsibility to exercise responsible stewardship of the truths they have received through God’s word. She has also been instructed to “contend” for the faith. In Jude 1:3, we read:
Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.
To contend for the faith is to “fight strenuously for [the defense of] the faith” (AMP). It is to defend and safeguard biblical orthodoxy in the face of the powerful seduction of secular ideologies and religious heresies.
The history of the Church is filled with examples of bishops, clergy and theologians who contended for the faith against every false doctrine, often at the cost of their lives.
One of the insidious sins that plagued the early Church and prevented it from exercising responsible stewardship of God’s truth is the deadly sin of tolerance.
In Revelation 2, we read the Lord’s serious indictment against the church in Thyatira, a church which was otherwise known for its “love and faith and service and patient endurance”: “But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel …” (2:19-20).
Once bishops, pastors, theologians, and leaders turn a blind eye to false teachings for whatever reason—doctrinal neglect, political expediency or fear of backlash—and allow “destructive heresies” (2 Peter 2:1) to infect the Church, they have failed to be good stewards of God’s truth.
They have disobeyed God’s specific instruction to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.”
1 Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay: Defending Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (InterVarsity Press, 2000).
2 David Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Eerdmans, 1994), 131.
3 See Roland Chia, ‘The New Antinomianism: A Critique of the New Theology of Grace’, June 2024, https://ethosinstitute.sg/the-new-antinomianism/.
4 See Roland Chia, ‘What is the New Apostolic Reformation?’, July 2022, https://ethosinstitute.sg/what-is-the-new-apostolic-reformation/.
5 See Roland Chia, ‘Progressive Christianity: A Primer’, October 2022, https://ethosinstitute.sg/progressive-christianity-a-primer/
6 See Roland Chia, ‘Woke’, Jan 3, 2022, https://ethosinstitute.sg/woke/.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor of Christian Doctrine at Trinity Theological College and Theological and Research Advisor at the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.