Thus says the LORD:”Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’ I set watchmen over you, saying, ‘Pay attention to the sound of the trumpet!’ But they said, ‘We will not pay attention.'” (Jeremiah 6:16-17, ESV)

Apprising Ministries has been maintaining that Mainstream Evangelicalism Is Now On The Rapid Slide To Apostasy because of its ongoing embrace of the egregiously ecumenical Emerging Church aka Emergent Church—morphing into Emergence Christianity—(EC).

There’s No Such Thing As Being Just A Little Bit Pregnant

As I said in Know Your Bible this EC was a Trojan Horse containing a semi-pelagian (at best) rebellion against Sola Scriptura designed to unload its highly subjective Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM) ala Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster and his spiritual twin Dallas Willard.

You can follow some of the corrupting results of this spurious CSM in Contemplative Spirituality Growing Within Mainstream Evangelicalism. One is EC heroes like Rob Bell opened the door to the mainstream of the visible church for unbelievers like Living Spiritual Teacher and “Progessive Christian” scholar Marcus Borg.

What’s important to note here is that this so-called “Progressive Christianity” Is Neither Progressive Or Christian. No, it’s really just old liberal aka modern theology in hipper clothes; and this EC cult is itself simply a re-interpreted version of liberal theology, a postmodern theology i.e. a post-liberalism.

This is critical to understand as we approach the subject of a pet EC issue, affirming that a lifestyle of having sexual relations with another of the same sex i.e homosexuality is also a viable one for the Christian. In other words, those in so-called monagamous and supposedly life-long relationships with their same-sex partner are not in sin.

And no doubt wolves in sheep’s clothing will surely try and get you to focus upon how nice and thick their wool coats appear, but if you can’t recognize the difference between fleece and fur, then you’re in grave danger of losing your spiritual life to these fools arrogant enough to defy the Word of God with their Humpty Dumpty language.

Being an SBC minister I remember the battles fought in the convention to oust what the late cult-expert Dr. Walter Martin, an SBC minister himself, called the Cult of Liberal Theology. Have we so quickly forgotten that this modern theology sought to make the Christian faith relevant to its own culture circa 1950s?

Here’s your wake-up call: The postmodern EC is attempting to do the exact same thing right now and homosexuality is one of its tentacles. Now maybe you’ll have a better perspective upon vipers like “queer inclusive” ELCA “pastor” Nadia Bolz-Weber and the ELCA And Homosexuality.

Simply put, the point is this: The mainline denominations sold out to liberalism; they embraced ecumenicism, CSM, bowed to the feminist movement ordaining women, out went the doctrine of Hell because, “I’d never send one of my children to a place like that,” and next comes ordination of homosexual clergy ripping them apart right now.

If you think that above progression was a move of God, then you seriously need to have your spiritual head examined. This brings us to these self-appointed outlaw preachers currently Turning God’s Grace Into An Idol. This growing, largely Biblically illiterate, group of “preachers” is now sprouting up around head Outlaw “Gay Affirming Pastor” Jay Bakker.

Interestingly enough, Bakker’s partner in spiritual crime is Khad Young. In an earlier post Outlaw Preachers, Beer, And The Bible there’s a link to an Ann Arbor.com report where we’re told:

Khad (pronounced Chad) Young, founder of the church of sorts, calls himself an outlaw preacher. Young is the son of a Lutheran pastor, and he attended Lutheran schools his entire life. When he started college at Concordia University, he didn’t find himself “plugged in” to the activities on campus.

Inspired by Jay Bakker, son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Young set out to start a church he and his friends felt comfortable in… (Online source)

The Same Wrong Methods Will Only Produce The Same Wrong Results

There’s good reason why you’ll see not a few of these outlaw posers around the ELCA. Consider the following from Rev. John A. Frahm III in Gospel Reductionism Redux:

The confessional/conservative element of the Missouri Synod won the battle against liberalism, right?   Sort of.  Perhaps the proponents of the historical-critical (or higher critical) method of biblical interpretation (or criticism) are largely gone (at least from our seminaries). But some of the harmful theological currents from the 1960s and 1970s remain…

One of the most injurious theologies to arise in the LCMS during that chaotic era was called “Law-Gospel reductionism,” as named by Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, and was later shortened to “Gospel reductionism.”   Gospel reductionists declared that the Gospel rather than Scripture was the standard for doctrine and practice in the Church.   Scott R. Murray comments:

In the 1960s some theologians began to invoke Law-Gospel as the ruling or the only hermeneutical presupposition in Lutheran theology.  They adopted this hermeneutic as a replacement for the old inspiration [of Scripture] doctrine, which they had decisively abandoned in this period  [Scott R. Murray. Law, Life, and the Living God: The Third Use of the Law in Modern American Lutheranism. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2002; p.103].

Part of the slippery nature of this controversy was that on the surface it sounded Lutheran — “Law and Gospel.” It also seemed to have a strong mission emphasis.  That’s good Lutheran terminology.   But that’s how it often happens when an error comes into the Church – use the standard terminology in a twisted sense [like Rome and the LWF did in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification].   This is called equivocation… (Online source, bold his) 

What would happen is those disgruntled with the Missouri Synod would end up being absorbed by the ELCA and these spiritually poisonous snakes have now injected their venom into that dying body. Don’t think I’m not sympathetic; for EC vipers are right now killing the spiritually obtuse within the SBC, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be coming for you.

Because Frahm is dead-on-target when he says:

Concern for sound doctrine is not merely a matter of being “conservative” or “liberal” (as if doctrine is on a sliding scale) or about the purity of a political ideology.  It is about truth versus falsehood, orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy, what creates and nurtures faith versus what destroys false and grounds it in a false object.  It is about nutritional food for the soul vs. no nutrition or even poison.  Jesus warned about the leaven of the Scribes and Pharisees?  How little leaven (yeast) can radically change a lump of dough?  A rifle fired a small degree off target over a long distance can dramatically miss the target with enough time and distance.  Even the Great Commission instructs us to teach “all things” Jesus has commanded – no quickie catechesis. (Online source)

You can read brother Frahm’s article in its entirety right here. But know this, it’s not merely a Lutheran issue; note carefully below as Dr. Martin lays out liberalism’s progression, because this is precisely the methodology used by this EC postliberal cult. They learned well from the seducing spirits among their evil forebears and are right now busy spreading the same doctrines of demons:

It begins with a corrupt bibliology, a corrupt view of the nature and the inspiration of Scripture. They have a corrupt theology because once you are picking and choosing from the Bible what you want, your theology has to suffer from it, because your human reason is corrupt… every major theological seminary that has turned from orthodox Christianity began with disbelief of Biblical doctrine. There wasn’t a single exception.

This corrupt Bibliology then lead them to the next step. Their theology began to be touched by it, their view of the Cross, the Virgin Birth were both immediately questioned; then came the miracles of Christ… And finally they had emptied the Gospel of all its content; they were simply using the outward shell so that they go on collecting money from the people and the churches; because they knew that if the people in the pew knew that they were apostate, they’d throw them out. So the strategy was hang on to the trust funds; hang on to the money we’ve got; hang on the properties we control, and we will gradually educate the laymen into this new approach to theology.

And then finally we will take control of everything. The gradual process of feeding you theological poison until you become immunized enough so that you don’t know what’s happening to you. And when you wake up to what’s happening to you, it’s too late they’ve got everything. That is not a baseless charge, I stand prepared to prove that the Cult of Liberal Theology in the United States has deliberately and consistently followed this methodology to entrap, control and dominate the denominations and the churches of the United States and our educational institutions. (The Cult of Liberalism, available from Walter Martin Religious InfoNet) 

See also:

THE SIN OF HOMOSEXUALITY IS DIFFERENT

NON-GOSPEL OF BRIAN MCLAREN AND ROB BELL

EMERGENCE CHRISTIANITY—A POSTLIBERAL CULT SLITHERS INTO EVANGELICALISM

APPRISING MINISTRIES WITH A PEEK AT THE COMING SOTERIOLOGY OF EMERGENCE CHRISTIANITY

DR. WALTER MARTIN ON APOSTASY

JOHN MACARTHUR: WHEN BEING “NICE” IS WRONG

THE NEW CHRISTIANS WITH CHRISTIANITY WORTH BELIEVING—NO SOLA SCRIPTURA: YES, WOMEN PASTORS AND QUEER CHRISTIANS