Recently a leader from a quasi-conservative faction of a cultic group made the statement that he doesn’t reject all of historic Christianity but that he only wants to be able to “tinker” with the parts with which he doesn’t agree.

The problems with this sentiment are:

#1 How is it decided who can “tinker”?

#2 How is it decided how much “tinkering” can be done?

I mean, there are certainly people who have & still would like to “tinker” with such staple doctrines as: the deity of Christ, the sinlessness of Christ, the virgin birth of Christ, the Trinity & others. On what basis will these first “tinkerers” deny other “tinkerers” from tinkering with anything?

Instead, we should be very leery with “tinkering” at all with the historic Christian Faith.  Having made that declarative, some people will complain & try to claim that the Reformers “tinkered” with the historic Christian Faith & so we should be allowed to as well…otherwise we are theological “wimps”. First off, the Reformers did NOT “tinker” with the historic Christian Faith – they opposed the adulteration of the historic Christian Faith that was happening via Papal Catholicism. 

Somehow we have reached the point where many factions have taken the phrase “reformed & always reforming” & made it into “apostatizing & always apostatizing”. They continue to “tinker” & “tinker” until someday what they are advocating will be nothing like the historic Christian Faith.  It is no wonder then that we now have so-called “Christian” leaders advocating a “new kind of Christianity”.  This is also the reason I call some of these other factions, quasi-conservative – because while they claim they want to come down in the “middle” of two “extremes”, they really are part & parcel of the liberal faction.  The liberal faction will subsume the quasi-conservatives because they are both operating from the same premise; that the historic Christian Faith has failed.  It is just that the quasi-conservatives think it has failed to a lesser degree.