New Age of Heresies

This is a brief post that could swell into a monograph pretty quickly (I don't have the time to write such a book maybe someone will feel the call!).
A new age of heresies not unlike what the Early Church faced is upon us.   It's now not unusual to see scholars and pastors who claim evangelical roots that have moved from orthodox understanding of the faith to new ideas (justification; inspiration of Scripture; historicity of Adam; deity of Christ; to name a few; and now we can add sexual ethics to the list).  What is also troubling are those who are concerned with these movements are viewed as intolerant extremists.   In this new era of the evangelical movement in North America,  Early Christian documents will become more and more important as guidelines on how to deal with false teachings and false teachers.  1, 2 Timothy; 2 Peter/Jude; Revelation, 1-3 John are great texts and will provide a much needed corrective to more extreme forms of the missional and liberation/social justice movements.  When I read this part of God's Word, it seems to me the inspired writers are clearly guilty of circling the wagon and they don't seem to be wringing their hands about it.  What they saw was the need to protect the Church from the lies of the devil and those who were deceived by him.  NT writers in the General Epistles (and other texts, of course) felt like the OT watchmen whose responsibility it was to alert the town of impending danger.  In NT terms, it's the danger of the impending wrath of God against ungodliness and the proclamation that Jesus is the One who delivers us both from the wrath to come (1 Thess 1:10) and this present evil age (Gal 1). As Paul puts it in 1 Tim. 3:15, "if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth."  
Maybe what we need to do is emulate the Early Church, shed some of the overemphases of the missional movement,  and recover a robust view of the Church as "bulwark" (or in German  "Festung") of the Truth.