7 minute read.
Faddism generally refers to the tendency of people to follow certain trends or fads in a short-lived, non-critical, and overenthusiastic manner. It can also imply a lack of stability, consistency, or depth in one's choices, views, or behaviors, often jumping from one popular trend to the next frequently. Faddism is prevalent in various fields including fashion, diets, technology, pop culture, and more. It focuses on the form over the content, and often lacks a well-reasoned or rational basis. It can either be a harmless pursuit of novelty or can lead to potential harm if people blindly follow hazardous or harmful fads.
I have been a software engineer for many years. What did not take long to figure out was that software languages, systems, and related "lingo" or "jargon" followed the pathway of faddisms. Everyone thinks that their language or other doo-dad is the next best thing to sliced-bread. People jump aboard in streaming hordes. For many years, I compared it to people and religion. Often times, computer technologies would be presented as though they were some kind of engineering salvation filled with graces that would spare you from the technological hells of other technologies.
Therefore—software engineering doctrines and dogmas have a lot in common with religious doctrines and dogmas—namely—human pride, arrogance, and ego. This includes how things are named. In software, someone would invent a new jargon phrase that would be cute or clever; selected because it appeals to the juvenile programmer looking for the next thing to be right about or excited about. Many programmers simply follow after wherever they see other programmers headed towards. They want to be cool. They want to be accepted. They want jobs. And perhaps the next cool thing is their ground-level entry way to hop on the bandwagon and make money before everyone figures out how awful and terrible the technology actually is.
Those who invent Christian fads operate under the same juvenile emotional drivers. They invent cute or clever sayings and then put them out for others to consume. Sometimes it will catch on, the book will sell, the video will go viral, and the next thing you know people are climbing aboard. And they won't be buying in because they are especially good and scriptural exegesis or thinking deeply enough to tear the clever thing down properly. No—they'll see the "sounds nice" or "sounds right" bits, form the brain-wiring (washing) and then start viewing scripture at a surface level through the lens of the fad. It's the same thing they've always done before: Same dance, different partner.
Send in the clowns ...
So—enter Christian faddisms. Everyone is vying for their "revelation" to take off and draw in a bunch of unsuspecting nit-wits who are fad chasers. The scripture tells us this.
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief.
The lesson ought to be obvious: Don't let that "new theology" that slams other theologies as wrong, bad, terrible, horrible, and otherwise fill you with too much joy and laughter as you suck in the swill. You might just find that the end of it is grief—eternal grief!
Just about every Christian movement and fad coming at you does so with some snake-oil propositions:
- - We're like the early church (validation)
- - Those guys are not (invalidation)
- - Believe us — Reject them (faddism's desire)
Discernment
Another mark of modern movements and fads is that they like to appeal mostly to the scriptures of the New Testament. The Old Testament is left gathering dust on the shelf; "That's old!"
NOTE: There are people today who will actually tell you that they don't need the Old Testament because they have the New and the New is all they need!
This belief is not universally representative of members within a specific denominational or religious group. However, the Marcionism [a] movement, dating back to early Christianity, advocated for this belief, suggesting the Old Testament was inconsistent with the New Testament's teachings. Today, it is more a matter of personal interpretation and belief rather than an official stance of specific groups. Some progressive Christians or those focusing on the message of Jesus in the New Testament might share this view. Others might be from theologically liberal or "no law" denominations.
It will be the rarest of exceptions for movement people and faddish followers to be given an exegesis where the New is based on the Old and then proving theologies from the Old and on into the New. In all honesty, this has been what has separated what people like Dr. Mike Heiser did from the faddies—such people started a "new thing" by demonstrating what had been lost, which is the inclusion of an ancient near eastern context and worldview. From there, the Old Testament became a wider and richer exegesis and the the New Testament had a more detailed foundation.
And this is how proper, responsible, and sane exegesis happens. One frames the data context wherein the Old Testament lives and then allows that framework and worldview to be in the mind of first century disciples and later apostles. Such a context allows us to properly appreciate the rich depth of the theological story as well as implications expanded because of the additional worldviews and contexts brought to bear. Current movements and fads work in the opposite direction.
The Future going Back <<<===
It's the opposite of Back to the Future. It's the Future going Back. It is the 21st century mind saying, "I have a new thought" and then cherry-picking New Testament scripture while not only ignoring exegetical work so far, but flat out making any former exegetical findings the relative "bad guy". One cannot be the new good guy unless one spins up a bad guy, which means that anything mainstream in terms of theology must become the bad guy.
This is the common pathway of every heretical cult. I want you to pay special attention to the footnotes below. They demonstrate this very thing in action, but that it happened very early on in the church. I want you to pay special attention to the notions of the "movement of grace" where there are clear parallels between what Marcion and they believe. It's the same dance. You've just never actually met the partner.
And the moral of the story is?
Put what scripture says and not what someone tells you what it says as the basis of your beliefs, theologies, creeds, doctrines, dogmas, and so on. Stop letting other people sales-hype you into believing their made-up concocted theology and you just blindly allowing it to form a filter over your mind as you read scripture.
You may never get out of the trap if you allow this to happen to yourself. Being aware of a trap and how it works is the first step to evading it. The second step is having the courage to free yourself from the trap. It is emotionally, pridefully, and egotistically hard (if not impossible) to get free once trapped. Most of the time it requires a miracle. BUT—miracles is the business God is in and He wants you in the Kingdom, loyal to Himself and extracted from lies of people and hellish beings.
Footnotes
[a] Marcionism was an Early Christian dualist belief system that originated in the teachings of Marcion of Sinope in Rome around the year 144. Marcion believed Jesus was the savior sent by God and Paul was his chief apostle, but he rejected the Hebrew Bible and the God of Israel.
Marcionists believed that the wrathful Hebrew God was a separate and lower entity than the all-forgiving God of the New Testament. This belief was in contrast to the monotheistic readings of the Bible.
Marcion proposed his own version of the Christian canon, which consisted only of a version of the Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul's letters, all of which were modified by Marcion to fit his theological views. His canon did not include the Old Testament, which was a drastic departure from both the Jewish and the nascent Christian tradition.
The Church [b] declared Marcion a heretic and rejected his canon, and his writings are lost to history. However, they were widely read and numerous enough that critics, especially Tertullian, were able to reconstruct and refute them. Despite this, the movement was fairly successful and survived Christian persecution until the 5th century and possibly the 6th century.
[b] When referring to Marcion being declared a heretic, this typically refers to the early Christian Church, sometimes also called the "proto-orthodox" Church. During this time, there was still considerable diversity in Christian beliefs and practices. The process of defining "orthodox" Christianity - that is, what beliefs and practices were officially accepted or rejected - was still ongoing.
The first known formal denouncement of Marcion came from the Church in Rome in 144 AD under Bishop Anicetus, but his views would continue to be a discussion point in early Christian communities and among Church fathers for several decades. Multiple Church figures wrote artifacts and theological works criticizing Marcion's beliefs, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus.