I’ve been reading an excellent book by Thomas Horn (Blood on the Altar: The Coming War Between Christian vs. Christian). I sought further help on one of his subjects, the Emerging Church, online. So I internetted an interview between two giants in the faith: John MacArthur (Author of 150 books, pastor, radio preacher, president of Master’s Seminary in Los Angeles) and Phil Johnson (Retired U.C.-Berkley law professor, father of the “intelligent design movement.”) They’re both in their 70's now, but their hands are on the pulse of the church—and they’re very, very concerned about the church’s faithfulness to Scripture. I thought I would focus on their concern and highlight part of their interview here.
One of the biggest threats to God's church is, would you believe, a church movement called the “Emerging Church.” So let’s start by defining it. Wikipedia says: they are post-Protestant, post-evangelical, post-liberal, post-conservative, and post-charismatic. Further, the movement hates preaching; they believe instead on “conversation” with people. This is to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature, its vast range of standpoints, and its commitment to dialogue. VERY important note: There is no central doctrine. What those involved DO mostly agree on is their disillusionment with the institutional church--and they support the deconstruction of modern Christian worship. They believe, instead, that there are radically diverse perspectives within Christianity. They say they are creating a “safe” environment for those with opinions ordinarily rejected by modern conservative evangelism. They believe that non-critical interfaith dialogue is preferred over dogmatically-driven evangelism. The movement “went public” in November 2004, when they were spotlighted in an article in Christianity Today. (I'm not saying Christianity Today likes their stance). But they’ve been around since at least 1996.
The second way to get to know how the Emerging Church is turning fundamentals on their ear is by a few relevant quotes from their founding father, Brian McLaren. In a separate interview, after he "mistakenly" spoke of God in the male gender, he had this to confess: “This is as good a place as any to apologize for my use of masculine pronouns for God…I avoid (their) use because they can give the false impression…that the Christian God is a male deity.” On the subject of the atonement, Jesus’ sacrifice for us, he calls it a “violent view,” because it presents God as the “greatest existential threat to humanity.” On the return of Christ, a reader from Sweden asked: “If Jesus isn’t coming back…what about judgment or the resurrection?” His answer was psychobabble, but you can tell he's giving it a thumbs-down: “Jesus does say ‘I will come again.’…but I think it’s a mistake to assume that when he says those things, he means what we mean…with all our dispensationalist, premillennialist…or whatever categories. The hyperbolic imagery of the New Testament, moon turning to blood..etc. is political language, signaling the fall of powerful political luminaries. Also…Jesus didn’t come just to evacuate us from earth to a future heaven but to show us how to live and make this world more and more beautiful by following Jesus’ example which would eventually lead to God’s “kingdom come on earth.”
You can see the attack on foundational Scripture going on.
Another leader, Rob Bell, also attacks fundamental doctrine: he doesn’t believe Scripture was inerrant when he mentions his greatest discovery—“the Bible as a human product.” He also denied the reality of hell and promoted universalism (its definition: yay, everyone gets saved!) in his book Love Wins.**(see note below). In summarizing the movement’s view, he says “This is not just the same old message with new methods. We’re rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion…” Mr. McLaren agrees; he believes in inclusivism—that other religions lead to salvation. For instance, he does not think we should convert Buddhists to Christianity; we should make “Buddhists followers of Jesus.” (Buddhism is usually atheistic, so a “Buddhist Christian” is an oxymoron. Acts 4:12 doesn’t apply any more, I guess.)
Now that we’ve read a bit of this strange group, let’s let John MacArthur tell what he thinks. He’s smarter than me anyway. He first distinguishes the emerging church movement from Modernism. Modernism was a product of the Enlightenment during the Renaissance in which they made human reason, not Scripture, the determinant of ethics. He says “out of that came the worship of the human mind, and (in effect,they were saying), the mind trumps God.” The Emerging Church, on the other hand, is post-modernism…In both cases, they assault the Scripture. (This movement) is a denial of the clarity of Scripture....(supposedly) we can’t really know what the Bible says. Whether it’s about sin or virtue...they don’t like rules, so their ‘out’ is…(they say) “Well, it (Scripture) is not clear.” This is just another way to set the Bible aside.”
Scripture claims to be clear, however, and God holds us responsible: ”A wayfaring man though he be a fool need not err.” (Isaiah 35:8). Dr. MacArthur also charges their leaders that “the reason they deny Scripture (clarity is because) men loved darkness rather than light (John 3:19). The light is there, they hate the light, they run from the light. The issue is not that Scripture is not clear, it is crystal clear.” Dr. MacArthur charged them with running from the light because he believes they’re heretical—which he says later on in the interview.
I would like to take the topic of homosexuality to get a thorough example of their approach. I’m sure you know (unless your head is in the sand) that the homosexual agenda is that we should all tolerate, all agree with them, not finding anything morally wrong. Scripture, however, won’t let us do that. It’s condemned in Leviticus 18:22:
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.
As Romans 1 points out, it is among the worst deviations that men come down to, after God “gave them up” in their insistence to defy Him.
Scripture is crystal clear on this subject, is it not? Not according to Emerging Church leader Mr. MacLaren who says: “Many of us don’t know what we should think about homosexuality. We’ve heard all sides but no position has yet won our confidence…that alienates us from both the liberals and conservatives who seem to know exactly what we should think…the biblical arguments are nuanced and multilayered, and the pastoral ramifications are staggeringly complex.” The phrase that sticks in my craw--"no position has yet won our confidence." Our judgment trumps God, evidently.
But Dr. MacArthur insists that the truth is clear; it’s bad for the practicing homosexual, but it’s still the truth. He says, “the truth is what I will defend. It’s not personal. I’m not mad at people. I’m not trying to protect my own little space. That doesn’t make me popular in all circles, it creates just the opposite.” He maintains that it’s impossible for Christians to agree with the latest world's view: “there is no possible accommodation …Christianity would have to be reinvented to accommodate itself to any pattern of (worldly) culture thinking.”
But Brian McLaren, a founding father of the Emerging movement doesn’t believe MacArthur has good motives. He was asked again where he stands on the homosexuality issue in Leadership Journal in January 2006 (Leadership Journal is also produced by Christianity Today). His answer was anything but crystal, since he switched the subject to attacking motives of the questioners instead. He first accuses conservative Christians of, quote, “wanting to be sure that we conform to what I call “radio-orthodoxy,”(a slam on radio preacher MacArthur and others), i.e. the religio-political priorities mandated by many big-name religious broadcasters.” After spreading this bit of slander, he says “I hesitate in answering the homosexual question…there is more to answering a question than being right or even honest…we must understand the question beneath the question…we want to be sure our answers are appropriate to the need of the moment…We fear that the whole issue has been manipulated…by political parties…whatever we say gets sucked into a vortex of politicized culture-wars rhetoric... I know what you guys' motives are, and I condemn them." (If their motives are to defend Scripture, that's reprehensible, I guess). He's unconvinced that God has enough love in Scripture to be appropriate "for the moment." (There is a warning to Christians here, too: Pay less attention to depending on political parties to maintain Christianity. He has a paranoia about that, some of it justified).
Really, a big question he touched on is, how do you evangelize the homosexual? They hate the church, feeling condemned if they just enter a conservative one. So they never attend. They avoid us; if we approach them, they may push us away, since we're already stereotypes to them. So we do not know them, unless they're family. The Emerging Church has decided to, as Dr. MacArthur says, capture these ignored people by “sanctifying the culture. But the Bible doesn’t adapt to culture. It confronts culture. The Emerging Church, on the other hand, not only is unwilling to believe the clear statement of Scripture, but it wants to let the culture define what Christianity should be…whatever the current sin that needs to be tolerated in the culture is, they’ll buy into.”
Dr. MacArthur then talks again about big movements in history. He summarizes Pre-modernism: “there is truth and it comes from God, it has a supernatural source…men believed in God or they believed in the gods.” Modernism (which I’m figuring covers 1750-2000), he says, summarizes as: “there is truth and we can find it by human reason…not revelation from God, not the Bible, but human reason.” But Modernism wasn’t a good idea in practice: “the world got worse than it has ever been…the totalitarian world…fascism, Nazism, Communism, and the massacre of millions and millions of people in the name of human reason.” (The Lutherans didn’t have any trouble grabbing a gun to obey Hitler). Getting up-to-date, he says: “Now the idea of post-modernism says, “We give up. There may be truth, but we can’t know it. It may be from God, but we can’t know…so we embrace mystery…you have your truth, I have my truth…truth is whatever you think it is, whatever you want it to be, it’s intuitive, it’s experiential..but it’s not universal and it’s not knowable, universally knowable.” Mr. Johnson, the interviewer, responds, “That’s why these days the highest values, the sole-remaining virtues, are things like tolerance, ambiguity, mystery..” (To me, this “mystery kick” opens the door to searching in the occult; people still want plain answers to life's issues, which they're not getting in this psychobabble.) Dr. MacArthur says, “Oh, Brian McLaren says ambiguity is really a good thing (Mr. McLaren has been quoted as saying, ”Certainty is overrated”)...it gives people a license to invent their own religion, really…no one is permitted to challenge it…it is wonderful if you want to sin without any guilt. And I think that’s at the bottom of this…they hate the light because their deeds are evil.”
He also charges, “It’s not a theology; (they say they) don’t teach…and the word “sermon” scares them… no, we want to have a conversation. But the only part of the conversation they don’t like is when you say, ”That’s wrong. That’s sinful.” So their conversation...never has an objective…that’s another way to negate the Word of God. You can deny that it’s from God. But don’t tell me God has spoken but He mumbled. The worst thing we could do would be to soften the edges of what really is clear in Scripture.” (They claim) “the Bible is irrelevant, you can’t stand up for an hour and exposit the Word of God, you’ve got to tell them stories… To quote one of their leaders, “The bible (small “b” is their idea) is no longer a principal source of morality as a rulebook. The meaning of the Good Samaritan is more important than the Ten Commandments —even assuming the latter could be remembered in any detail by anyone…” A bit of sarcasm on the Ten Commandments there. These guys should work for the government, the way they diss true religion. By the way, some of the most revealing McLaren quotes are on this website: http://carm.org/brian-mclaren-quotes-ignorance-bliss-theology.
Dr. MacArthur feels that (they should say) “since we don’t know what it means, why would we teach? Nobody has a right to impose on anybody else their ideas.” They take a sort of reverse humility in confessing their ignorance. To turn truth on its head, they believe that if someone claims to know what Scripture means, they have committed an act of pride. “It is an attack on the clarity of Scripture and they elevate themselves as if this is some noble reality…which they call humility…(it’s) a celebration of ignorance.”
They also have this feature: “They’re really, really aggressive at tearing down the church, tearing down historic theology...that have been a part of the church’s life for centuries…that’s the lowest level of assault there is. Anybody can shred and destroy without having to build something back in its place…(they) just shred what people believe and walk away, leaving chaos everywhere…the egotism of it is pretty frightening. And the church is filled with people who have no foundation.”
He gives a few words of warning to those looking for a church home: "I don’t think a person should go to a church that isn’t answerable to a doctrinal statement…(if you do), you need to get out of there because you’re at the whim of a guy who can invent anything he wants any time. This entrepreneurial approach to the church is a very serious breach…" (There) “may be Christians who are seduced by this; in their ignorance they are the children tossed to and fro, carried about by every blowing wind of doctrine.” (Ephesians 4:14). Mr. Johnson, the interviewer, says: “And every man does what’s right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6). Dr. MacArthur maintains that young people from a denominational church that often lacks life and fails to exposit Scripture, these are the likely victims of this movement: “I don’t think it’s nearly as appealing to the non-churched people as to the marginally churched young people…they are reacting to the superficiality and…the legalism of (their church).”
Dr. MacArthur speaks again to the clarity of Scripture. (Jesus) “says things to them in His day like this, ‘Have you not read? Have you not heard what Scripture says?’ He didn’t say to them, “Oh, look, I know why you’re having a tough time with Me, because the Old Testament is so hard to understand.” Then he brings up the example of the Gentiles, who were totally ignorant of the Old Testament…”Paul (assumes they are smart as he) builds these massive cases of understanding the Christian gospel based on the sacrificial system from the Old Testament…to come along and say that the Bible is not clear is then to accuse God, and (accusing) the Scripture itself of claiming something for itself that it can’t deliver. (Charging God like that is) pretty serious.”
**Note: Mars Hill Churches was the focus of the Emerging movement. But Rob Bell was removed as senior pastor of his Mars Hill church in Michigan four years ago. Their current senior pastor says the church lost 1000 members through his quotes and what was revealed in the book Love Wins. Mark Driscoll was removed from a separate Mars Hill pastorate in October 2014. The reason given was that "he was running an intimidating and hostile workplace." It was also revealed that church money was used to pump up his book sales so he could make the NY Times Bestseller List.
The Mars Hill Corporation is dissolving; they still have money left over that was supposed to go to Ethiopia and India to help the poor that was never sent. But there are still many, many churches that still run on these philosophies.
Acknowledgement: Thomas Horn, Blood on the Altar
Christianity Today
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