The online apologetics and discernment work Apprising Ministries has told you that apostatizing pretending to be Protestant evangelicalism is paying a heavy price for its foolish embrace of the sinfully ecumenial Emerging Church aka Emergent Church—which has grown into a full-blown neo-liberal cult operating within its walls; and what we’re now dealing with is an upgraded Emerging Church 2.0 complete with its new version of Progressive Christian theology that they’re referring to as “big tent” Emergence Christianity.

You need to understand that this Liberalism 2.0 is the theology EC guru Brian McLaren has begun to lay out in his latest book A New Kind of Christianity. If you wish to understand how the church visible has become so muddied then it’s also important for you understand that the Emerging Church was a Trojan Horse that unloaded corrupt Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM) ala Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster, with an able assist from his spiritual twin Dallas Willard, within the mainstream of evangelicalism.

What has happened is that for a good fifteen years now evangelical churches have used their Young Adult and Youth ministries as spiritual guinea pigs in “alternative” worship services where the warped and toxic teachings of Emergent Church leaders have been used; e.g. mystics like EC rock star pastor Rob Bell and heretical quasi-universalist Emerging Church pastor Doug Pagitt who heads the Emergent Solomon’s Porch where the equally heretical Tony Jones happens to be his “theologian in residence.”

And this is the reason why I even have to cover messed up mystics like Mike Morrell and obvious unbelievers like Living Spiritual Teacher and Progessive Christian scholar Marcus Borg. I introduced you to Morrell previously in Mike Morrell On Matthew Fox, John Wimber, And The Emerging Church where I told you his Twitter bio explains that he’s:

Futurist @KedgeForward. Grad Fellow, Strategic Foresight MA @RegentU. Provocateur-In-Residence, David Group Int’l. Journalist. Nu-media publicist. Opti-mystic. (Online source)

Morrell is “Partner/Foresight Professional” for something called KedgeForward, whose KedgeForward blog, which I first cited in Richard Rohr And The Emerging Church As The Third Way; also a piece which ran in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in September of 2004 called Tie That Binds ‘Emergent’ Church informs us:

Michael Morrell keeps the emergent church network informed with a Web site that promises ‘the best Jesus-infused sites you never knew about.’…[and] has become one of the movement’s linchpins, connecting thousands of previously disconnected people and emergent groups through the Internet…

 As an editor for “the Ooze,” Morrell keeps in touch with the central people and ideas sparking the movement… (Online source)

The point being, Morrell is deeply involved with the leading voices within this neo-liberal Emergent cult, which often calls itself “the converstion”; however the truth is, it’s always only been their own monologue amongst the likeminded. And today Morrell wanted to make sure we knew as he asked:

(Online source)

The link takes us to the “official wbsite” of Marcus J. Borg, who is as Christian as I am Mormon; you see, like Marcus Borg, the faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) also uses the same words as those of us who’ve actually been regenerated and then hold the doctrines of the historic, orthodox, Christian faith. The problem is, the meanings of these words vary greatly for each; and no informed Mormon would ever make the mistake of considering me a member of their non-Christian cult.

Suddenly however, weak-kneed professing evangelicals appear unable to tell the difference between someone like myself and an apostate (at best) like Marcus Borg. Certainly, as you can see in Do We Believe In The Same Jesus Philip Clayton?, progressive/liberals such as EC guru Brian Mclaren’s “big tent” builder Clayton can’t. That’s why I asked him the following question on his blog, which as far as I know he has yet to answer:

To be clear, I said of a liberal/progressive like Marcus Borg: “We don’t believe in the same Jesus.” And you said, “I don’t think that would be the impression of the neutral observer on this site.”

So this neutral observer would think that someone like myself who holds to the full Deity of Jesus Christ, in addition to His full humanity, and Marcus Borg who believes Jesus was simply a man, believe in the same Jesus? (Online source)

As I showed you in Marcus Borg And Christians Who Don’t Believe In Jesus his doctrine concerning Christ Jesus of Nazareth—God Himself in human flesh—and for that matter, Borg’s heretical position concerning cardinal doctrines of Christianity in general, is crystal clear. What is not generally known, beyond those of us who’ve read many of his books, is how it is that Marcus Borg has come to believe what he believes, which is why I’ve brought these things to your attention in this post.

Due to my studies into Comparative Religion, and the mytic strains within them, Borg’s post Mystical Experiences of God intrigued me since it’s my contention that the practice of meditation in altered states of consciousness—transcendental i.e. transforming—is actually laying the foundation for a Global Religion, which will one day be headed by the Anti-Christ. That’s why I’ve been warning Christians to stay away from the growing fad of Contemplative/Centering Prayer, which is itself transcendental meditation-lite.

Courtesy of the unbelieving Marcus Borg, you’re about to see yet another example of the spiritual suicide one commits when they abandon the proper Christian spirituality of Sola Scriptura in favor of the deceiving spirituality of the self (see—2 Timothy 3:2). In this post, which originally ran on the website of  The Washington Post, Borg informs us:

My most formative religious experiences were a series of mystical experiences. They began to occur in my early thirties. They changed my understanding of the meaning of the word “God”-of what that word points to-and gave me an unshakable conviction that God (or “the sacred”) is real and can be experienced.

These experiences also convinced me that mystical forms of Christianity are true, and that the mystical forms of all the enduring religions of the world are true. (Online source)

Notice above that for Marcus Borg 1) “religious experiences” from “a series of mysticial experiences” were what changed his “understanding,” i.e. the source of his transformation, and 2) these “experiences” then caused him to believe “the mystical forms” of various pagan religions “are true.” I showed you in Through Rob Bell “The Great Enlightened Ones” Tell Us Man Has Divine Greatness that in his sermon I will say it again, and again, and again the Elvis of the Emerging Church put it this way:

When you read the great enlightened ones; meditation, centering prayer, reflection—in every tradition you can find the mystics—and what’s always at the heart of the spiritual lives, the everyday lives of the great ones was always a period of time.

Whether it’s prayers, chanting, meditation, reflection, study—whatever you call it—what is it essentially; it’s taking time to breathe. (On file at Apprising Ministries)

Like I said before, as far as I’m concerned, if one doesn’t recognize here that—along with Marcus Borg—Bell is praising “the mystics” for their supposedly superior spiritual understanding, which is but a reimagined Gnosticism, I personally believe it’s simply because they just do not wish to see. And this is precisely the problem: Mystical experiences are self-authenticating because there is no way to verify them outside of what mystics like Marcus Borg and Rob Bell tell us they, or outrightly pagan mystics, are allegedly experiencing.

In cloing this, for now, this is why I left the below comment in the combox of the aforementioned post by Marcus Borg; outside of here, it’s not likely to see the light of day:

(Online source)

See also:

SEDUCING SPIRITS SOUNDING THE SAME

TRANSFORMING CHRISTIANITY THROUGH EASTERN-STYLE MEDITATION

USING CONTEMPLATIVE/CENTERING PRAYER AS “CHRISTIAN” MEDITATION

THE “DEATH” OF THE EMERGING CHURCH AND BIG TENT CHRISTIANITY

PHILIP CLAYTON AND THE EMERGING CHURCH 2.0

LIBERALISM 2.0 THE NEW PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY  

ACTS 29 NETWORK AND REFORMED COUNTER REFORMATION SPIRITUALITY?