In an obvious attack on the Bible, Oprah’s spiritual guide, Eckhart Tolle, argues in his mega-bestseller book A New Earth:

“The Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our time; but you won’t find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, stories. What do all these have in common? They are made up of thought. Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is truth. That’s why Buddhists say, ‘The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.’ ”

Of course, this has always been the pat mantra of those who don’t want to believe God had anything to do with the Bible. They say, “It’s just a bunch of stories written by men.”

Tolle stupidly reasons, “Beyond the realm of simple and verifiable facts, the certainty that ‘I am right and you are wrong’ is a dangerous thing in personal relationships as well as in interactions between nations, tribes, religions, and so on.”

Just how is society supposed to operate without any definitive standards for moral behavior? Is it a simple, verifiable fact that stealing is wrong or should all of us go on what we personally feel is right regarding other people’s property?

In today’s Chicago Tribune was a story about a truck driver who’s charged with siphoning 100 gallons of diesel fuel from an underground tank at a Speedway gas station in Chesterton, Ind.

He was said to have commented at the time of his arrest that “the trucking industry had fallen on hard times because of gas prices.” A spokesman for the local police department stated, “Even though this may make him a hero in some people’s eyes in trying to buck the system, it does not excuse a crime.”

*****

Addressing Christendom’s envelopment by post-modernist thinking (i.e., the rehashing of the ancient lie dating from the Garden of Eden that ‘truth is relative’), Jordan confirms, “You were not trained in your education in the world to get what’s true out of facts and objective things. The whole mindset is to look at facts and objective things subjectively: ‘How do they come across to me?’

“And it’s in my inter-relationships--in my experience with them—that I then decide how I’m going to feel. ‘Am I going to believe it’s right or am I going to believe it’s wrong? Am I going to believe it’s good for me or am I going to believe it’s bad for me.’ That’s General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless. Those shows are caricatures of the way the world thinks, and that gets over into the church of Believers.

*****

The most destructive area where post-modernism reigns in the lives of most Christians and they’re most often not even aware of it is in the bible versions issue. The vast majority of Christendom has no idea that the King James Bible is the only accurate English translation and that all the other bible versions come from satanically corrupted manuscripts or, in the case of the New King James Version, was inaccurately rendered.

Jordan says, “For the last 30 years I’ve fought the battle about the bible versions and the battle was lost 20 years ago. In fact, in just one of those funny ways that truth works, evangelicalism out there thought they had put that issue to rest and then, in the early ’90s, along came this little lady from Ohio, Gail Riplinger.

“Just a little, petite, quiet, sickly little lady with some real physical problems. She was a college professor and her illness put her in the bed for 6-7 years where she couldn’t work but she had the college professor rights to the library and she did all this research.

“And because she’s a researcher in her professional life, she understood how to do first-hand primary research and she wrote that book, New Age Bible Versions, and when that thing came out (in 1993) it blew the socks off all these scholars.

“You had guys like Norman Geisler, who’s supposed to be this great Christian apologist, running around like a chicken with his head cut off. And you got some dried-up prune out there in Arizona, Jim White—he couldn’t have gotten an audience on State Street with a bunch of mission bums on his own, but when took up the cause and wrote a bunch of stuff, and tried to be a champion about it, people tried to promote him and gave him a ministry just to try to sink Ms. Riplinger.

“It was fascinating to watch how that stuff worked and see it all just blow up in their faces. They went around and said, ‘Well, she’s just a Home Economics teacher.’ Home Ec?! I mean, give me a break! If they knew anything about what they’re talking about!

“It’s that silly kind of stuff that grown men, with more degrees than they’ve have temperature, and with reputations as being Christian celebrities, stoop to when they got no idea . . . They go around and dumb, old, stupid Believers out there just think, ‘Oooh, he said it, it’s got to be true!’ They’re worshipping their little god, their little hero, and it’s nonsense.

“I’ve watched these men and I’ve read the books they write, and I’ve listened to Riplinger and them debate in person and I know enough about the subject material to know if somebody’s telling the truth or not or whether they’ve got their facts in a row, and she just quietly blows them out of the water. Some times they don’t even know they got blown out of the water it’s so easy!

“You look at all that and you say, ‘Wow, amazing!’ and it just is! It just came at them out of nowhere. They thought they had the battle won and then, ‘Boom!’ here all this stuff comes out.

“To this day, you still just mention her name and people go absolutely bonkers. You go home tonight and watch John Ankerberg on the TV and little John’s credited by grace people as being a great champion for the faith. Call him up on the phone and ask him about Gail Riplinger and watch the steam come out of his ears.

“Watch him lose his grace and his white hair turn red. And his sweet Christian manners turn into attack-dog tactics. And you say, ‘Well, why is that?’ Well, good men are always reasonable and when they’re not, there’s something stickin’ ’em and she stuck ’em out of the blue.

“You know what the real problem with that was and is? These guys said, ‘She’s not qualified to do what she did,’ and she said, ‘Excuse me?!’ They say, ‘Well, you don’t have degrees in the field.’ Excuse me?! Did you understand what a Master’s degree and a PhD degree is? Those are what are called ‘research degrees.’ You get a Bachelor’s degree, an undergraduate degree, and now you’re supposed to know how to think. Heh, heh.

“The universities say, ‘Now that we’ve taught you how to think we want you to go think about this,’ and you get a Master’s degree by doing two years of semi-original thinking on a topic. Research. And then you do two more years and they give you the post-hole digger’s degree for original thinking into this area that nobody has researched or written about.

“Have you ever read a doctrinal dissertation? That’s where a guy writes a paper to present a view, and in order for it to pass muster—for you to get the degree—you have to demonstrate in that doctrinal dissertation that you’ve read what everybody else has said about this subject.

“Supposedly you’ve considered all the wisdom out there on this subject and come to a conclusion about it. Well, you know what happened to Ms. Riplinger? She actually did the original research that these (other bible scholars) thought they did.

“You see, if you go and read what Joes says that Bob says, and what Bill says Bob says, and then what Mike says that Bob says . . . If you read what they say Bob says that’s not first-hand. That’s what they say Bob says.

“But if you just read what Bob says, that’s first-hand. That’s what Riplinger did. And you know what she found out? She found out that Joe didn’t always tell the truth about what Bob said.

“Joe would say what she thought Bob said. Then Bill would say what he thought Bob said and tell you why he thought Joe was wrong. And Mike would tell you what she thought Bill meant about what Bob said and what Joe meant about what Bob said and nobody would read what Bob said. Does that sound confusing? It’s supposed to. That’s academia.

“And then you get this little lady that came around and just read what Bob said—went out and told everybody what Bob said—and you know what happens to these other guys? They’re relegated to irrelevance. But they’re the heroes. They’re the celebrities. The Bible Answer Man (who has a nationally-syndicated daily Christian radio program) builds everything he does on what these guys say.

“Well, who cares what Bob said, or some little lady telling you what Bob said who doesn’t have anybody backing her and she’s a woman to boot. You know, it’s, ‘Surely God can’t tell us anything through a woman,’ and she blows the socks off these people and sucker-punches them from left field.

“They weren’t prepared for it and so they go to reeling. And all that stuff has to do with the fact that when you don’t have objective truth to rest in, then all you have is things based on your experiences.

“And if you’re going to get truth out of your experiences and go by, ‘I’ve got a relationship with these Christian celebrities over here and I trust them because of their celebrityship,’ then your evaluation of what truth is is going to be based on who tells you what and who you think they are, rather than what you read in a Book and do on your own.”