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Is the Western Church Syncretistic?

It's almost Easter, but here I am writing about a serious topic - how the Western church has become syncretistic i.e. it has mixed the surrounding culture in with its culture to form a mix of biblical Christian beliefs and secular beliefs. Here are some areas where I think we are being invaded by the surrounding world view:

  • A certain cynicism about miracles, so healing is thought not to be real, but in someone's imagination. This is a result of secularism, and what Paul Hiebert called 'the flaw of the excluded middle' in his article on the subject, which shows that Westerners don't believe in the middle realm between supernatural and natural. The Bible, however, constantly mentions dreams, angels, unclean spirits, and so on, which are very much to do with this middle realm
  • A kind of intellectual belief in evolution that makes us want to believe any advance is good, not only in technology, but also in morality, world view, spirituality, and so on. There is no biblical basis for this. In fact the Bible tends to view many so-called 'advances' as moves away from God. For example, when the people of Israel asked for a king, so they could be like other nations, the prophet Samuel (in 1Sam 8) told them very clearly what that would mean for them, and it wasn't an upgrade!
  • Post-modernism tends to make us believe that every culture is valid and shouldn't be messed with. The Bible, however, is very clear that no culture is privileged (including Western) and that all cultures come under the scrutiny of Scripture. In other words all cultures have both good and bad in them. All peoples and nations, therefore, need to hear the gospel, which will need to be contextualised by finding the sweet spot where both truth and relevance are optimised
  • In this age of social media many of us have fallen foul of fake news alerts. For instance, someone recently told me that Bible translation probably isn't needed any more because English is so widely spoken (!). That is just nonsense. The number of first and second language speakers of English, worldwide, is about the same as that of Mandarin! You can see a very good table representing the figures here. English has comparatively fewer first language speakers, and more second language speakers. By the way, not many of those who speak English as a second language would be proficient enough to read and understand the Bible in English, and in any case, why wouldn't they want to read it in a language they know better, probably speak at home or in the marketplace? It is also one of many cultural identifiers i.e. someone who speaks a language also sees it as 'theirs' in the same way they see their artwork, music, and so on as 'theirs'
Nevertheless, we in the West still have more opportunity to hear the good news that anywhere else in the world. There might be a higher proportion of believers in the global South (though I dislike this label, as plenty of hot places near the equator are unreached), but that doesn't mean they have the same number of churches, missions, and resources. The danger is, however, that we have become so syncretistic that we no longer believe the Bible is our main source of authority. As soon as we start to look elsewhere we are in danger of losing our distinctiveness. I fear it may already be too late to go back...
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