Originally Posted by SemperFideles

I'd like to think that was the case but it's not simply the Osteen's teaching this. The reason Osteen gets so much traction is because his views are largely mainstream I fear.

My experience, such as it is, is that Churches will talk about sin because it is obligatory to do so. You can't escape that the Scriptures talk about it. But I was in a large PCUSA Church visiting family this past October and the basic message of a baptism for some kids was that God wanted to help parents "...raise G-rated kids in an X-rated world...." (His words exactly). When he got to the Sermon he actually spoke about sin but sin was more of a lack of self-realization than anything else.

There is an interesting interview that Mike Horton did with a Theology Professor around the August timeframe. I'll try to get the link to the MP3 but the WHI site is down right now. The professor was arguing that many Evangelicals labelled "Arminian" today are mis-labelled as Arminius had a much stronger view of the necessity of grace than most today.

I think it's borne sadly out as Shane Rosenthall has a habit of going into Pastor and bookseller conferences and asking questions about basic Christian beliefs. It's frightening what comes out of the mouths of people.

Churches of today aren't like the Arminian-leaning Churches of yesteryear that used to have a modicum of doctrinal grounding. People used to here the stories of the Scriptures and heard about sin and what the Cross did. The combination of the neo-Pentecostal movement and the Seeker-sensitive approach has removed all doctrinal expression from many pulpits.

People "encounter" God today and, as the short article on the home page notes, most have a view of God equivalent to moralistic, therapeutic Deism. You find a lot of people that find "spirituality" is important but, if you ask them to explain what "fills up" that spirituality in terms of doctrine, they honestly can't explain it. They're simply excited about being excited and spiritual about being spiritual. They have a sense that sin is bad and Jesus died for some reason but they can't really articulate it.

Don't get me wrong, as far as identifying different strands of Arminianism goes, I think it was a good article but I think we need to recognize that most American Christianity has flattened out to a form that does not really fit into the five points of the Remonstrants or the others. There are always going to be some that fit the categories well but a vast majority today are simply "Spiritual". They honestly wouldn't detect any difference between the different strains and, like the Emergent Movement, would be content to just meld them all together into a mishmash of spiritual ideas.