In a very interesting, and timely post today at Pyromaniacs, Phil Johnson places some excerpts “from an editorial Charles Spurgeon published in The Sword and the Trowel in 1871, more than a decade before the famous Downgrade Controversy.” If you don’t know, this was Spurgeon’s dealing with what the late cult expert Dr. Walter Martin labeled The Cult of Liberal Theology.

And I would also heartily encourage you to pay close attention to Johnson’s comments interspersed throughout this piece; they are really most enlightening, fitting quite well as applied to the egregiously ecumenical Emerging Church aka Emergent Church, which is a cult of postliberalism—now morphing into Emergence Christianity (EC).

My friend Chris Rosebrough of the Fighting for the Faith program and I have been referring to this EC as essentially an upgrade of original liberalism, a Liberalism 2.0 now spreading the virus within throughout the hard drive, as it were, of mainstream evangelicalism. And Johnson is dead-on-target as he informs us that unlike today’s evanjellyfish:

Spurgeon makes no effort to disguise his passion for the truth, hide his contempt for the skepticism of the day, or otherwise tone down his rhetoric in order to mollify people who were demanding that he be more “charitable” in his treatment of unorthodox opinions.

He also had nothing but disdain for the notion that uncertainty is a mark of holy humility or a sign of intellectual sophistication that ought to be cultivated. (Online source)

I know that I, for one, second the conclusion Phil Johnson reaches at the end of his post as it concerns Postmodern Apostles of Doubt e.g. like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell:

Twenty-first century postmodern “emerging” types in the church love to try to paint themselves as the polar opposite of modernists. The fact that Spurgeon’s criticism of early modernism so perfectly refutes the rhetoric of the postmodern innovators shows why that claim is bogus.

Far from being the antithesis of modernism, “evangelical postmodernism” is really nothing more than Modernism 2.0. (Online source)

See also:

IS ROB BELL EVANGELICAL?

THE EMERGING CHURCH SOWING ITS NEO-ORTHODOX CONFUSION ON SCRIPTURE

NEO-ORTHODOX APPROACH TO THE BIBLE PERFECT FIT FOR EMERGENCE CHRISTIANITY

THE EMERGING CHURCH HIGH-JACKING EVANGELICALISM

WE’RE SO SORRY, UNCLE ALBERT, FOR “RED LETTER CHRISTIANS”

DON’T BE FOOLED BY THOSE WHO ONLY SAY THEY LOVE SCRIPTURE

MIKE GENDRON: THREE COMMON ERRORS OF FALSE TEACHERS