In the Book of Revelation, Jesus speaks to a church that is lukewarm in this manner:
Revelation 3:16
So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.
In my mind, those included in this bunch will be liberal theologians, who mistakenly suppose that somehow the Bible’s historical narratives are not true, but merely metaphorical, and who believe that evolution is somehow compatible with Biblical Christianity (see related articles below).
On this second point, Richard Dawkins is on point – I am glad that he sees through the illogical position that you can somehow hold that both God is the creator and evolution is true.
In a recent WSJ article entitled Man vs. God: Two Prominent Thinkers Debate Evolution, Science, and the Role of Religion, Dawkins takes to task the mush that popular religion writer Karen Armstrong dishes up, desribing her logical predicament well:
“Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: “Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn’t matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism….”
“Well, if that’s what floats your canoe, you’ll be paddling it up a very lonely creek,” Dawkins warns. “The mainstream belief of the world’s peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again.”
Al Mohler has an excellent discussion of this (A Tale of Two Atheists), and rightly concludes:
Clearly, this “certain class of sophisticated modern theologian” refers to those theologians who embrace theological non-realism. Dawkins clearly lumps Karen Armstrong in the same category of deluded theologians.
That is, if God is, at best, redundant in this world except as a subjective panacea disconnected from history and science, then God ‘has nothing to do,’ as Dawkins relates, and liberal theologians who agree are assigning God to the realm of ‘doesn’t have to be real to be true.’
