Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!
(2 Corinthians 13:5)

Paying A Price For  False “Decisional Regeneration”

You probably know that back on July 28th ‘Vampire’ Author Anne Rice ‘Quits’ Christianity; as The Christian Post reported at the time:

Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice declared Wednesday that she “quit being Christian.” The long-time “Christ-haunted atheist” wrote in her Facebook fan page that she found it “simply impossible … to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.”… (Online source)

Below Apprising Ministries gives you the link to where Anne Rice made her own now infamous announcement as she tweeted:

(Online source)

The link above takes us to the Facebook page of Anne Rice:

(Online source)

You can see that Rice informs us:

As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

Notice carefully that Rice is supposedly quitting “being a Christian” in “the name of Christ.” This is a current pet postmodern argument, which is designed to drive a wedge between the bad “Christians” i.e. those who hold to what the late cult expert Dr. Walter Martin (1928-1989) would so often call “the historic, orthodox, Christian faith” and the “Jesus” of the mush god of man-centered “evangelicals.” And I’m using quotation marks around those words because the relentless onslaught of postmodernism, with its irrational philosophy, has been pretty successful in clouding the original meanings of these words.

For those of us familiar with the sinfully ecumenical neo-liberal cult of the Emerging Church we weren’t surprised to have Emergent Church guru Brian McLaren himself announce: My Take: Why I support Anne Rice but am still a Christian; and  hey what do you know, the anti-capitalist counter-culture Red Letter Christian EC leader even manages to weave in a plug for his latest book, complete with a link to its Amazon page. More on McLaren’s man-centered musings in a moment; but first, heretical quasi-universalist EC pastor Doug Pagitt—a McLaren minion—does his guru even better in his own man-centered musing Anne Rice Quits Christianity – I have thought of that too.

By all means you go right ahead Doug Pagitt; so, who’s stopping you? That aside, Pagitt meticulously manages to hawk an entire chapter of his prior book, as well as two links to it; including a pitch that we “can buy the entire book at Local book stores or here on Amazon,” where he provides a second link. I’m just sayin’, see these counter-culture posers for who they actually are. Now, concerning Anne Rice herself, the other night she also tweeted:

(Online source)

This above link brings us to the National Public Radio story Writer Anne Rice: ‘Today I Quit Being A Christian’, where by her own testimony Rice admits that, “Although she was raised Catholic, Rice rejected the church for the first time when she was 18.”[2] Although she didn’t realize it Rice ends up revealing the heart of the matter here when we’re told:

Rice says she tried her best to ignore the facets of Christianity she didn’t support and concentrate on the ones she did. (Online source)

If one has actually accepted God the Father’s Gospel of repentance and the forgiveness of sins in the Name of God the Son—Christ Jesus—they are a regenerated Christian i.e. born again by God the Holy Spirit; by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, in the finished work on the Cross of Christ alone. As such they are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17), have been baptized into Christ [and] have put on Christ (Galatians 3:27), and have become part of one body in Christ, and individually members one of another (Romans 12:5). In the Name of Christ, these make up Christianity and comprise the Church of Jesus Christ.

The genuine Christian loves the Church, and its doctrine aka Christianity; as Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck have pointed out:

Christ loves the church, gave Himself up for her, and makes her beautiful. The church submits to Christ, grows in beauty before Him, and obeys His commands. The two are one—now in preview, and later in fullness, but still they are one. They are inseparable as husband and wife. [3]

Scripture tells us that — We love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19); and furthermore, God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:5). So as Christians we love the Church, as well as its expression known as Christianity, because Jesus Himself loves the Church. It’s well past time to come out of the postmodern wonderland of Humpty Dumpty language; and since more and more squishy evanjellyfish leaders today so love quoting pithy sayings to each other, well here’s one just for you: The Bible says what it means, and it means what it says.

Which brings me back to Brian McLaren. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who better epitomizes 2 Timothy 3, which informs us that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self (verses 2-3). From where I stand men like McLaren and Doug Pagitt, with their false gospel in the postmodern version of Progressive Christianity they call Emergence Christianity, look like they’re seeking friendship with world; and as such, they are lovers of mankind and the pleasures of this world rather than lovers of God (2 Timothy 3:4). And so McLaren rushes in to defend Rice:

Anne explains that, “My faith in Christ is central to my life.” She is still “an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God.” “But,” she says, “following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been or might become.” (Online source)

But the sad fact of the matter is, faith in a Christ is what Rice has; it’s the same one as progressive/liberals like McLaren love, a “Jesus” who is but a barely bigger version of themselves. And so, but of course, their Jesus—basically Ghandi with a beard—just has to be interested in what they, and their worldly friends, are interested in. While discussing people like Anne Rice in his message Apostates, Be Warned, Part 2 Dr. John MacArthur is dead-on-target when he says:

there is another reason why people defect and that is because the teaching of Jesus is hard. John 6:60, “Many therefore of His disciples when they heard this said, ‘This is a hard statement, who can listen to it?’” A few verses later as a result of this, “Many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore.” The demands of Jesus were hard, that’s really what I was driving at in the book Hard to Believe, which reflects the teaching we did, particularly on Luke 9, “If any man come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow Me.” The message is hard, hard teaching. (Online source)

So when Brian McLaren mews, “when a person quits Christianity in the name of Christ, what do you call that person”; we have our answer: A defector; an apostate, one who has been around the Truth but never embraced it. In the case of Anne Rice she’s told us in her statement that she’s one of those MacArthur tells us “defect from the gospel because they don’t want to be alienated from the people around them.” Personally, I agree with Christine Pack of Sola Sisters who writes in her post Anne Rice Rejects “Christianity?”:

The issue is that Anne Rice is not a straying sheep…she is in much greater peril than that. She needs life-giving truth, and she needs to repent of her idolatrous view of God and humble herself before the one true God…the One I fear she has never known.
(Online source)

The truth is we should not be affirming Anne Rice in her apostasy; no, if we really love her, we will be praying that she will finally accept the Gospel of repentance and forgiveness of her sins in Jesus Name. 

________________________________________________________________________________

End notes:

[1] I cover this further in Mysticism And Postmodernism, The Emerging Church, And Evangelicalism.
[2] http://tiny.cc/2b6p5, accessed 8/4/10.
[3] Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck, Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion [Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2009], 12.

See also:

WHAT DOES THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH TEACH ABOUT THE DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION?

ROMAN CATHOLICISM: ANOTHER GOSPEL OF BAPTISM AND SACRAMENTS 

HAS THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH REALLY CHANGED?

A LOOK AT THE GOSPEL

THE NON-GOSPEL OF THE EMERGING CHURCH 2.0 

BRIAN MCLAREN INVITES YOU ON HIS QUEST TO DESTROY CHRISTIANITY

DOUG PAGITT, THE EMERGING CHURCH, AND AFFIRMING HOMOSEXUALITY