The website DefCon posted the following quote from Dr. John MacArthur of Grace to You. Even though I have a couple of points where I don’t agree with MacArthur I am still pleased to recommend him to people as one of the finest teachers of the Bible that Jesus has given His Church in our gelatinous evanjellyfish generation.

MacArthur is dead on target below when he says:

The reason behind postmodernism’s contempt for propositional truth is not difficult to understand. A proposition is an idea framed as a logical statement that affirms or denies something, and it is expressed in such a way that it must be either true or false. There is no third option between true and false. (This is the “excluded middle” in logic.) The whole point of a proposition is to boil a truth-statement down to such a pristine clarity that it must either be affirmed or denied. In other words, propositions are the simplest expressions of truth value used to express the substance of what we believe. Postmodernism, frankly, cannot endure that kind of stark clarity.

Why is this you ask? The answer comes with crystalline clarity through the precision laser light of God’s Word:

“This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” (John 3:19-21, NASB) 

You’d do well to remember this the next time you hear one from the Emergence rebellion against Sola Scriptura in favor of empty existentialism like Rob Bell extoling the virtues of ambiguity and mystery. For it as Bob DeWaay has written:

Rob Bell is a very articulate spokesman for the postmodern theology characterizing the Emergent Church… [His approach to Christianity] is based on a mysterious original: “The Christian faith is mysterious to the core.” His misuse of the term “mysterious” results in a semantic sleight of hand that confuses readers through a major category error. “Mystery” in the Bible means that which could not be known had God not chosen to reveal it. For example, Paul claims God revealed to him the “mystery” that God was saving Jews and Gentiles through the gospel and making them co-heirs in Christ. Once this is revealed, it is no longer mysterious or unknowable.

But Bell means something entirely different. Bell writes “The mystery is the truth.” This comes in a section where he poses what he considers unanswerable questions. Rather than using the term as Paul did to mean, “what would not be known had God not revealed it to His apostles and prophets” (Ephesians 3:3-6), Bell uses it to mean “that which cannot be fully known or answered, the ‘mysterious.’” That is equivocation, and it is not acceptable.

The Leap of Faith

Rather than to search the Scriptures to find a valid doctrine that God has revealed through the Biblical authors (systematically taking into account ALL God has spoken on a given topic), Bell jumps on a theological trampoline and invites others to join in the experience. His “jump” turns out to be the very “leap of faith” that was proposed by 20th century existential theologians who had, like Bell, given up on the belief that truth about God that comes from God can be validly known.

Bell says, “It’s not so much that the Christian faith has a lot of paradoxes. It’s that it is a lot of paradoxes. And we cannot resolve a paradox.” So the “jump in the air” turns out to be a leap into the dark—the unknown and unknowable. Paradoxes are like square circles: you can talk about them but such talk reveals precisely nothing. (Online source)

See also:

APPRISING MINISTRIES AND CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY/MYSTICISM

THE EMERGENCE GOSPEL OF GOOD DEEDS

ROB BELL AND CHRISTIAN UNIVERSALISM

IS ROB BELL EVANGELICAL?

THE TERMINOLOGY TRAP OF “SPIRITUAL FORMATION”