The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel, who are prophesying, and say to those who prophesy from their own hearts: ‘Hear the word of the LORD!’ Thus says the Lord GOD, Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! (Ezekiel 13:1-3)

Christians Who Don’t Really Believe 

Apprising Ministries reminds you that years ago in his classic textbook The Kingdom of the Cults Dr. Walter Martin (1928-1989) spoke of the critical importance of scaling the language barrier when discussing Christianity with professing Christians within the various cults because: 

The well-trained cultist will carefully avoid definition of terms concerning cardinal doctrines such as the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the Atonement, the bodily resurrection of our Lord, the process of salvation by grace and justification by faith. If pressed in these areas, he will redefine the terms to fit the semantic framework of orthodoxy unless he is forced to define his terms explicitly. [1] 

How sad that I’m finding I now have to employ techniques which I once used for evangelizing non-Christian cultists with people who are associated e.g. with the Emerging Church and Brian McLaren. For example, in Brian McLaren Invites You On His Quest To Destroy Christianity I showed you that in his latest book A New Kind of Christianity (ANKoC) McLaren confides that there was a time when he “began losing faith” in the way he once read the Bible.  

But then he goes on to tell us that he was so fortunate to be able to learn a new way to approach the Scriptures “from Christian scholars” such as Roman “Catholics” like fellow Red Letter Christian and mystic “Richard Rohr” as well as “Protestants” like Progessive Christian scholar “Marcus Borg.” However, the problem is Rohr is a slave to apostate Roman Catholicism who believes, “The world is the Body of Christ and Spirit is hidden in material reality, just as in the prototypical Jesus.” [1]

And Marcus Borg, like Brian McLaren himself, is a Living Spiritual Teacher as well as a self-described “non-exclusive Christian” who teaches 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.”[2] To deny the Virgin Birth as Marcus Borg has clearly done is to deny the Deity of Christ. So in other words, at this time when judged by God’s Word in Holy Scripture, these men are not to be considered believers; but rather, treated as apostates. Yet these are the people that EC leaders like Brian McLaren always go to.

If you’re following after these Emergent Church fools, then I suggest you make some time in your Contemplative/Centering Prayer to meditate hard as to why that is. But here’s the point: There are those who think the EC is dead; however, what’s happened is we’re now witnessing an upgrade to the Emerging Church 2.0, which claims its “big tent” Progressive Christianity is the historic Gospel of Jesus Christ bringing His kingdom to the earth now. From monitoring the buzz across the Twitterverse I told you in Brian McLaren Addresses TransFORM East Coast Conference that it was as if he was one of the original Apostles.

Long-time EC networker Mike Morrell would even tweet to guru McLaren after his talk at TransForm East Coast:

@brianmclaren: #Trans4m is emergence come full circle – about being church, but having contemplated theology, God’s Kingdom & justice (Online source)

Which brings us to the key point of this piece: As you can see in Big Tent Progressive Christianity As Liberalism 2.0 this EC 2.0 has been cobbling together a new postmodern form of liberalism they are calling Emergence Christianity; and one of the main venues that’s dispensing and distributing this spiritual poison is the Transforming Theology network of Dr. Philip Clayton. In that aforementioned article I told you about an important upcoming EC conference called Big Tent Christianity: Being and Becoming the Church (BTC):

On September 8-9, 2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina, we will be offering a first-of-its-kind national conference, “Big Tent Christianity: Being and Becoming the Church.” Thanks to a generous grant from the Ford Foundation,… (Online source)

So 1) the EC’s BTC received “a generous grant from the Ford Foundation“; and 2) BTC is a “national conference,” which is hardly consistent with an organism that’s dead. And the following from the BTC website reveals how this all ties into apostates and unbelievers such I discussed above. Notice carefully what “several leaders on the cutting edge of ‘Big Tent’ style ministry” will be talking about this September:

Brian McLaren and Philip Clayton on “Today’s “Big Tent”: Being and Becoming the Church”… Diana Butler Bass, Phyllis Tickle and Bill Leonard on “Transcending Left/Right Thinking” [and] Tony Jones and Harvey Cox on “Frontier Thinking of Big Tent”
(Online source)

I’m not familiar with Leonard; however, obviously each of the rest listed above are in line with the “big tent” version of Progressive Christianity that Brian McLaren began laying out in his book ANKoC. You should know that Harvey Cox is a well known liberal theologian; and yet just look at the familiar names enthusiastically endorsing Cox’s latest book The Future of Faith:

This important book has not only helped me understand the past, present, future of this amazing phenomenon called Christianity . . . it has also motivated me to keep working to help make actual the possible future Cox envisions.
—Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christian

The Future of Faith is a tour de force. As passionate and challenging as his classic, The Secular City, Cox’s new book invites the faithful, the skeptical, and the fearful intp a spirit-filled version of Christianity that can renew a hurting world.
—Diana Butler Bass, author of A People’s History of Christianity

Cox brings the eye of an historian and the heart of a theologian to explain where we’ve come from and where we’re going. The Future of Faith is an essential guide to that future.
—Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners and author of The Great Awakening

Harvey Cox has been a voice of both reason and faith in our cynical times. Now, he offers a fresh vision for the resurrection of a new global Christianity that will restore our faith both in ourselves and in the divine.
—Deepak Chopra, author of Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment [3]

Gathering Around Teachers Who Will Tell Them What They Already Wanted To Believe

A quick aside for you, when a pantheist proponent of New Spirituality aka New Age like Deepak Chopra can sign on to your “big tent” supposed “resurrection of a new global Christianity,” it’s safe to say that you’ve now departed from anything even remotely resembling the historic, orthodox, Christian faith. Yet Brian Mclaren gushes that he’s “working to help make actual” the utopian “future” this Liberalism 2.0 will supposedly usher in. So now you know what Brian McLaren and Philip Clayton will cover in “Today’s ‘Big Tent’: Being and Becoming the Church” at BTC.

Next we add to this murky mix the critical thinking skills-numbing corrupt Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM), such as that taught by Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster along with his spiritual twin and Southern Baptist minister Dallas Willard under the guise of so-called Spiritual Formation. And what we end up with is the rapid rise of the sinfully ecumenical Emerging Church 2.0; which is now a full blown cult that is openly operating within evangelicalism spreading its warped and toxic new form of postmodern liberal/progressive theology.

It’s gets worse as we consider such of these named above have, for years now, been slithering deeper and deeper into the mainstream of squishy evanjellyfish through the popularity of the EC within Young Adult and Youth groups; and soon you personally will witness firsthand the terrible impact they’ve already had upon your own youth. This now brings us to the idea of the BTC forum “Transcending Left/Right Thinking”; translation: We will head deep into the wasted Wonderland of Humpty Dumpty language and the mental off-roading that is postmodernism.

With the irrational philosophy which undergirds postmodernism words lose their fixed meanings and out goes the Law of non-contradiction: Simply, A cannot be non-A, in the same way, and at the same time; and we’re told we need to embrace paradox. Let me explain to you what they mean by transcending; you’ll hear them say things like, “We need to learn to read the Bible more than literally.” But first of all this is actually a meaningless sentence; you see, literal is as real as it gets, there is nothing more real than real. This is an example of the irrational philosophy inherent within Eastern religions.

Lord willing, I’ll have more on this later; but in closing this out for now, the so-called “spiritual disciplines” of CSM, such as Contemplative/Centering Prayer (CCP), are themselves rooted in Eastern religions. These neo-Gnostics of CSM claim they experience “more” i.e. a “deeper reality” in their meditation in an altered state of consciousness of CCP commonly known as “silence and solitude” than we mere mortals silly enough to adhere to the proper Christian spiritiuality of Sola Scriptura. Among the delusions they receive is the idea that in this deeper reality of postmodernism truth is “irreducibly plural.” [4]

So this is what Diana Butler Bass, Phyllis Tickle, and Bill Leonard will be driving at in their forum about transcending left/liberal and right/conservative categories at the upcoming BTC. This is because in order for progressive/liberals such as these to gain acceptance within the mainstream Protestant community, they have no choice but to enter into Humpty Dumptyesque word games and hope that truth really is somehow plural. And here’s why; you see, out in the real world, doctrines that contradict each other simply cannot all be true. Now they could all be false, but they cannot all be true.

And so I’ll leave you with something that I covered previously in Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up? Therein, adapting the format of an old TV program called To Tell The Truth where you may recall there were three guests in studio who would each be making the claim that they were a certain person; but only one of them would actually be the person they claimed they were, as the other two were impostors. If you remember, a large part of the fun was watching as this celebrity panel would have to ask questions to try and figure who the real person was; and often they were deceived by the panelists.

However, when it comes to the Person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth and Who He is, we’re dealing with eternal consequences; wrong answers land one in a literal place Jesus called hell. The posers in the EC will tell you as long as we follow God in the way of Jesus our beliefs don’t really matter; but as always with false teachings, Jesus has a different opinion and says — “if you believe not that I am — ye shall die in your sins” (John 8:24, literal Greek). So below I will first let the “Jesus” of progressive/liberals on the left like Marcus Borg believe in, which will be followed by the Jesus of biblical revelation conservatives on the right know.

In doing so you’ll see the question of moving beyond “left/right thinking” and into some big tent plurality with unbelievers still dead in their sins is singularly absurd for the regenerate Christian:

Jesus of the Left

I am the Jesus of today’s liberal/progressive theology of inclusive, politically correct, universalism. I am only a human man. I was not born of a virgin, nor did I actually rise from the dead. Unfortunately as a Jewish Rabbi, I attracted such devoted followers that even after my death they wanted to keep my spirit alive so to speak. And so they went and built this elaborate theology around me, which is largely based on the writings of that rascal Paul. Sadly, they ended up making me into a god.

I taught that the most important thing we can do is to love one another. You see, that’s all that matters because we are the brotherhood of man. No one should ever criticize what another person honestly believes about God. After-all, we are all Father/Mother God’s children. And even though we may take different paths of religion in this life, and all religions please God if they are sincere, in the end we’ll all be with God because everyone is already saved. Man is too good to be condemned and God is too good to condemn him. As long as you love one another it really doesn’t matter to God what you believe about him. He’s just delighted if you even believe in him.

And so, “don’t worry; be happy.” You need to feel good about yourself. Every religion reserves a place for me as I’m the most popular Jesus because I’m not going to make any demands of you. The only choice believing in me requires that, if you are going to follow my teachings, then you will have to look at the Bible as being the same as all the other religious literature. You don’t really need to be any more concerned with the Bible than you would be with any other religious teachings. Although it does teach some truth about God, the Bible isn’t any more important that any of the other holy books of other cultures and religions. I teach that all of them contain a way to God and that all religions eventually lead back to God; so, I’m not exactly clear on why I had to go to the cross.

Jesus of the Right

I am the Jesus of the historic, orthodox Christian Church, which I purchased with My Own blood. I Am the one true and eternal God incarnate—God the Son—second Person of the blessed and Holy Trinity. I am the very Creator of the entire universe and the only Savior of hopelessly lost mankind. There is never a time that I did not exist as I am the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.

And in the fullness of time I was born of the Virgin Mary and clothed with human flesh. Then while on My planet I lived the sinless life necessary of you to come and be in the Presence of God the Father. In My Father’s will and for His glory, I willingly sacrificed My perfect life for yours, and shed My blood on the Cross as an offering for the sins of all who believe in Me and will be regenerated by God the Holy Spirit.

I bore the wrath of Almighty God that you deserve and as I died in your place I said: “It is finished.” I was buried, but on the third day, I rose again from the dead in the same Body so that you could know that I am the One I claim to be. Now you can trust in Me because by My resurrection you know that I am able to save all those who by God’s grace alone, place their faith alone, in Me alone and my finished work on the Cross. I say that in all the universe there is only one God; you are not Him, nor will you ever be.

_________________________________________________________________________
Endnotes:

[1] http://tinyurl.com/2vlrj8x, accessed 7/1/10.
[2] Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion To A More Authenthic Contemporary Faith [New York: HarperOne, 1997], 25.
[3] Harvey Cox, The Future Of Faith [New York: HarperOne, 2010], back cover.
[4] http://tinyurl.com/pnev6d, accessed 7/1/10. 

 See also:

THE NON-GOSPEL OF THE EMERGING CHURCH 2.0 

LIBERALISM 2.0 THE NEW PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY  

THE EMERGING CHURCH AND THE NEW PROGRESSIVE THEOLOGY ON OTHER RELIGIONS  

THE EMERGING CHURCH AND THE NEW PROGRESSIVE THEOLOGY ON CHRIST 

RICHARD ROHR AND THE EMERGING CHURCH AS THE THIRD WAY

LEONARD SWEET, FRANK VIOLA, AND THE THIRD WAY

A GOOD REASON FOR A MASS EXODUS FROM EVANGELICALISM…OR TO RECAPTURE ITS ORIGINAL MEANING