For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

Was The Bible Actually Written By Man?

This is further example of the type of teaching Concordia University Wisconsin has allowed into its halls which I began to bring out in Concordia University Wisconsin: A Lutheran Home for Rob Bell of the Emergent Church and Still So “Virgilicious”? By now the following quote from Rob Bell and his wife Kristen is familiar to many of you who are concerned with the vital work of exposing heresy in your evangelical churches I do here at Apprising Ministries:

The Bells started questioning their assumptions about the Bible itself – “discovering the Bible as a human product,” as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat. “The Bible is still in the center for us,” Rob says, “but it’s a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it.” (Online source)

Let me address two things here. 1) Students from CUW continue writing me thereby keeping this issue alive. Interestingly, they don’t deny that Rob Bell’s teaching are used within CUW, rather what they want to say is that Rob Bell isn’t Emergent. Uh-huh, right. Well that previous quote happens to come from a Christianity Today magazine article dated November 1, 2004 called “The Emergent Mystique” and Rob Bell is the featured pastor. Like I’ve said many times, if I were Rob Bell I wouldn’t want to be tagged with the Emergent label either. But to paraphrase the old saying, if it looks like Emergent, and it does; and if it sounds like Emergent, and it does, then it’s Emergent.

And 2) what Bell just said is a tacit denial of the evangelical Protestant doctrine of the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture. Yes, in Bell’s timid and tentative “style” he attempts to obscure this with the statement “the Bible is still the center.” But this is then undermined as Bell goes on to point out that he’s “discovering the Bible as a human product,…rather than the product of divine fiat.” That is what he’s talking about as he says, “The Bible is still in the center for us,… but it’s a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it.” Right, this way we can go on and interpret the Bible “in community” so in true neo-orthodox fashion we can then call only the parts that “speak” to us divinely inspired.

With this spiritual cyanide in mind we now consider the following quote from Dr. Marcus Borg, Fellow of the Christ-hating Jesus Seminar. This comes from his 1997 book The God We Never Knew:

The next step in my understanding of the Bible took place in seminary. There I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product. I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity. As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God (25).

The Guilt By Association Is Pretty Clear

Sound familiar? Yet this was written seven years before the Rob Bell made his comment in CT. Guilt by association? Um, yeah. We already know from Bell’s book Velvet Elvis that he is familiar with, and even recommends, the work of Borg e.g. footnote 1 – “Marcus Borg explains this idea extremely well in his book The Heart of Christianity” (180) And so let’s read a bit more from Marcus Borg, who is a progressive Christian; O could we just get a few more titles and descriptors:

As such [the Bible] contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God. The creation stories in the book of Genesis were Israel’s stories of creation, not God’s stories of creation. I realized that whatever “divine revelation” and the “inspiration of the Bible meant (if they mean anything) they did not mean that the Bible was a divine product with divine authority (ibid.)

How does Dr. Borg know this? He doesn’t. Can Dr. Borg prove any of this filthy spiritual bile? No, he can’t. But now let’s see where his “revelations” led him:

Seminary also introduced me to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. I learned from my professors and the readings they assigned that Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world… I also found the claim that Jesus and Christianity were the only way of salvation to be troublesome. (ibid.)

Anyone, and I mean anyone, who thinks that Dr. Marcus Borg is a Christian seriously needs to have his spiritual head examined. He has just denied virtually everything that Christians believe! Yet this is how pathetically weak the American Christian Church is that we cannot even recognize a wolf who is barely even in sheep’s clothing. And so we have to ask: Can you really not see Rob Bell has placed himself on this exact same path? This is a spiritual deception and men cannot simply pick and choose the parts of the Bible they happen to like.

God the Holy Spirit is very clear when He warns us about those who do not love the Truth – because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false (2 Thessalonians 2:10-11, NASB) Can you see that? These people do not receive the love of the Truth and so as they fall away into apostasy when God sends upon them a deluding influence it shows us they were never saved in the first place. Could this be actually be happening to Rob Bell?

If we care about Bell, and just as importantly, if we care about others like the young minds at CUW whom he is infecting with his Emergent spiritual disease, then we will warn Rob and all who listen to him. The Lord has impressed upon me that there are some of you out there who have known Rob Bell for years and deep in your heart you know. You know you have seen his slide from orthodoxy and from the way he once taught at Calvary Church. Then I urge you, now is the time to come forward and share your stories…before it’s too late…and Bell becomes just another Borg.