Kent contacted me today at Apprising Ministries to point out I had inadvertantly misspelled his name in the title of the original of this article, which of course I was glad to fix. However, in reading throught the material again it served to remind me of just how foolish this all of this spurious speculating about Truth in the neo-liberal cult of the Emergent Church really is.

…always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth. (2 Timothy 3:7)

BEING PROVOCATIVE WHILE BUILDING STRAW MEN

Paul Washer put it quite well in his Spirit-drenched sermon What Is Christianity. The philosopher that Brother Washer is referring to is Miquel de Unamuno (1864-1936):

We are born twisted, we are born wrong, we are born self-absorbed and self-loving. We are born idolaters; we desire to be god, and not submit to God’s Truth. I remember one time I was debating a man from Spain…their chief philosopher, at least among the old school guys, is a man by the name of Unamuno. Now Unamuno wrote a book called La Vida Es Sueno: Life Is A Dream.

And in his book, his basic philosophy is this: “The greatest virtue a man can possess is that of seeking the truth. The greatest arrogance a man could ever demonstrate is claiming to have found it.” So I’m debating with this fellow from Spain, and he’s a brilliant man, and we’re going back and forth…and his whole thing is just coming from Unamuno… “I’m a seeker of the truth.”

Finally I stopped and I said:

Sir, I have finally figured you out… I understand you… I now know why you desire to be a seeker of the truth, but at the same time you desire never to find it. Because the moment you find the truth, you’re going to have to submit to it. And that is what you refuse. This is not a battle of the intellect; this is battle of the will. You desire to be god and lord over your universe. And the moment you accept the truth of God as absolute truth, you are no longer your own god. (18:36-20:33)

On Mlive.com reporter Paul Kopenkoskey contributes this informative piece where he begins, “The History Channel originally wanted a university professor steeped in Dead Sea Scrolls lore to ferret the authenticity of Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel, ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ The 15 minutes of fame went to Kent Dobson instead.” And what is of particular interest here is that instead of defending the Christian faith on that program last year Dobson opts to be provocative and says:

the ancient scrolls are mum on whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child. (Online source)

O, very titillating stuff; but you see, more importantly the inspired texts of the Bible themselves, from which the scrolls are but copies, are “mum” on this kind of foolish speculation. But this is more of the fruit produced by the mystery embracing Emergent pseudo-Christianity of Rob Bell. “It’s healthy for Protestants to be exposed to a Jesus they wouldn’t have been exposed to,” said Dobson, 30. “Opening their eyes to a new perspective of Jesus is good, even if they, in turn, reject it.”

In fact, Pastor Bell chimes in as well:

“There are so many Christians who are terrified of going to some places the Bible demands that you go,” said Dobson’s friend and former boss, the Rev. Rob Bell, founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville. “He’s fearless in asking why some of these (Bible) texts don’t line up.” (Ibid)

But it was just this kind of straw man philoso-theology straight out of Colossians 2:8 that first opened my eyes to this rebellion against the Bible by the new cult of liberalism that is the Emergent Church. As a pastor-teacher myself who deals in apologetics, while answering these kinds of objections by Emergents I found myself using the same answers that I would with unbelieving skeptics.

I tell you in the Lord that the Truth is there are answers to these questions and the Truth is men that like Dobson and Bell just don’t like the answers. And after all, Dobson himself says, “We can say, ‘I don’t like the conclusion,’ but it doesn’t matter. It’s still the truth.”

And yes Kent, you’re right…it is…