Years ago, I attended culinary school at Asheville-Buncombe Technical College in Asheville, North Carolina. My chef was a Frenchman who was “old school”, not given to the then popular trend of nouvelle cuisine. The instruction was excellent, inclusive of all the important elements of classical French cookery as well as the relevant business and dining room facets of food service. Our class, on certain Fridays at noontime, treated the lunching public (usually it was a treat) to the elegance of American, French, and Russian styles of dining room service with an emphasis on French service, of course. Within French service there were two formal types of menus: Table d’Hote, set complete meals, and À la Carte, a variety of choices of entrée (main dish) and entremets (side dishes) from which our patrons could “pick and choose”. Since 1985, when I graduated, I have worked with some very good cooks who, invariably, had developed their own preferences, whether certain methods of cookery, favorite foods and flavors, or styles of management, and rightly so. Each was his own authority, an artist in his own right expressing himself in the culinary medium. The theological, however, is not the culinary. Theologians may postulate independently and differently from one another at various levels of expertise and specialization. But in the theological, unlike the culinary, there exists the inviolable, the standard of authority established not by men but God. It is acknowledged that the theology of Scripture as purview provides for the variant but not for the deviant; the deviant is provided by another. It is to this I turn.

            § The spirit of the age is an evil ubiquity homing in on all things antichrist latent among us. I see it in our day’s automaton obsession with the completion of its global circuit of political and spiritual unity. It bears, in the minds of its acolytes, a foregone conclusion of salvation applicable to any and all the deepest, most troubling issues of our day. The organization, Common Path Alliance (C.P.A.), a proponent of the syncretistic C5 paradigm of missions contextualization, describes itself as “…a group of partners dedicated to joining the worldwide movement of God….” The group’s mission statement is the following: “We exist to unite people who have been divided by religion by seeking our common path to God.” C.P.A. obviously has joined a movement (generally known as “Insider Movement”) for many ministries, organizations, and even churches espouse a similar mission statement. The chart entitled “The Straight Path” on the C.P.A. website, a chart heretical and the reason for this, my refutation, is indicative of the movement’s theology, a theology that is an embodiment of the spirit of the age that serves well the ambition and methodology of their mission but not the LORD. It is a disservice to his Word!
            Before addressing the chart, it is important to recall basic elements of hermeneutics that pertain to the C5 paradigm of missions. They are indigenization and syncretism. My Bible college text says, “Indigenization is the use of various forms of communication and transmission found in the culture to which a speaker or writer is bringing his message” (Mickelsen 172). An example of this is the apostle John communicating in terms of light and darkness, a philosophical idea popularly understood by his reading audience. For instance, he wrote, “And this is the judgement: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (3. 19). In no way did his figurative language diminish the truth about the Son of God, rather, it explained it. Mickelsen, within his text, immediately addresses its antithesis: “Syncretism [and the C5 paradigm] on the other hand, is an invalid procedure by which the content of the gospel is changed or partially assimilated by a hostile worldview found in another culture” (172). In this case, the Insider Movement diminishes the biblical identity of Jesus to accommodate the theological hostility of Islam. For instance, to ease their acceptance in Islam, Insiders do not speak of Jesus as the Son of God even though his true identity is central to the gospel. Instead, as a consequence, inadvertently or not, they perpetuate the outrageous belief among Muslims that, if it were so, if he were the Son of God, he would be the result of sexual intercourse between God, the Father, and Mary, the virgin. This is syncretism.
            Consider the following two hypotheticals. The theological hostility of this heresy to the gospel is like the inappropriate behavior of a disgruntled patron in a French restaurant. He insists on ordering À la Carte despite his awareness that the menu is strictly Table d’Hote. Rebuffed, he takes matters into his own hands, orders two complete meals, and adds to one meal another meal as if it were a side dish. The result is the subsumption of the one into the other, the one no longer itself that has become a subordinate element in the other. Another way of looking at this is through the lens of deductive reasoning. The proponents of IM (Insider Movement) seem to hypothesize like this: “Since Muslims read about Jesus in the Qur’an, and Jesus is in the Bible, then Islam and Christianity intersect in Jesus.” Even though the concept finds no affirmative premise in Scripture, and, despite the fact the Qur’an denies the deity of Jesus, the thought is logical and is utilized as a cogent, “evangelistic” IM tool for reasoning with Muslims. This approach appeals to the IM heterodoxy among missions, and it may be convincing to an average Muslim, but its result is truth distorted, the theological subsumption of Jesus. The action of heresy is like that of a wave that eventually breaks onto the shore and then washes back into the ocean. Subsumption theology has the same sort of action; it “breaks” onto a specific audience and then washes back into the body of Christ. For instance, a church near me, far from any Islamic enclave of Muslims, Christ the Rock Community Church in Menasha, Wisconsin, propagates this heresy.