Earlier in the fall of 2007, I was invited by Rev. Ken Silva (SBC) of Apprising Ministries to serve as a correspondent for his online apologetic ministry. This past December, I finally responded to his invite and committed to writing 1-2 articles on the Emerging Church every month starting in January 2008. However, due to my busy January schedule and the extremely busy Spring semester here at Southern Seminary, I thus have yet to publish anything. I sincerely apologize for not living up to my self-proclaimed commitment and for my lack of foresight into my schedule.

Please know that my first responsibility is to my seminary studies; at the same time, please also pray that what I share with you here would be a fruit of and an overflow from the countless hours I spend reading the Scriptures and books on theology.

Emerging Missional Fallacies

On that note, I am excited to write to you concerning the Emerging Church and postmodern theology! In this opening half of the year, I will share with you how I came into contact with Emerging theology and the things that have led me to confront evangelical accommodation in today’s postmodern culture. Although I was very eager to write to you about the beliefs of Emerging churches, I found it necessary to write appealing to Emerging pastors to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

For there are certain pastors who have crept unnoticed into the church that are reading their own personal desired interpretation and ideas into the Bible’s text, ideas that are not necessarily extra-biblical but rather extra-textual to the passage preached on. These usually result from careless exegetical fallacies that remove the text from its original context (cf. D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996). More specifically, I am concerned about ordained ministers of God’s Word are eisegeting an Emerging missional ecclesiology into the New Testament – where as 2000 years of biblical scholarship have found no explicit “missional” meanings in such passages whatsoever.

(Read the rest of this article.)

I was just skimming through David Well’s new book, and found this in the first chapter:

The loss of truth is being offset by increasingly adventurous experiments in worship and by various attempts at recovering a lost sense of mystery. My view is that this kind of offsetting is an illusion. There is no offset for the loss of truth. There can only be a cover-up of what has taken place. When our knowledge of God’s truth is diminished, our understanding of God is diminished, and no amount of contrived mystery through ancient liturgies or gathering in the presence of dim, flickering candlelight can compensate for the loss.

Emergents too, are standing outside the house that Ockenga, Henry, Graham, Stott, Lloyd-Jones, and Schaeffer built in that earlier generation. The difference is that they are standing outside the house, whereas the seeker-sensitives, the marketers, still imagine they are living inside it.

David F. Wells. The Courage to Be Protestant. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. p. 18, emphasis mine.

Jonathan Edwards Joins the Conversation

Jonathan Edwards was an innovative and creative thinker who sought the conversion of those with whom he worked and lived. He was, by no means, a recluse, who kept to himself and offered no concern for others. Preaching became his passion, as did conversion. Yet, Edwards offers the emerging church with some extremely important measures to consider. First, do not compromise theology for culture. Second, make preaching primary. Third, doctrine is important. And, fourth, God admires the virtues of morality and piety.

The emerging church offers a future for reaching the young generation. If they listen to Edwards, a biblical conversion and growth can take place.

William D. Henard (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)
Paper Presented to The Academy For Evangelism in Theological Education
(Ashland, Ohio - October 4, 2007)

(HT: Ed Stetzer)

The more I read literature from Emergent “pastors”, the more I scratch my head — because I simply cannot understand what they mean and cannot figure out the point of what they are saying! It is like a veil is being pulled over my eyes, blinding me from comprehending what Scripture has actually said; I equate it to going back in history to a time where gnosticism and paganism has veiled Christ’s disciples from seeing His truth.

Thus, I find it necessary to post the following quote concerning spirituality and sexuality, from Doug Pagitt in Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches, Chapter 4: The Emerging Church and Embodied Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), page 140:

“The question of humanity is inexorably linked to sexuality and gender. Issues of sexuality can be among the most complex and convoluted we need to deal with. It seems to me that the theology of our history does not deal sufficiently with the issues of our day. I do not mean this as critique of past times, but as an acknowledgment that our times are different. I do not mean that we are a more or less sexual culture, but one that knows more about the genetic, social, and cultural issues surrounding sexuality and gender than any previous culture.

Christianity will be impotent to lead a conversation on sexuality and gender if we do not boldly integrate our current understanding of humanity with our theology. This will require us to not only draw new conclusions about sexuality, but will force us to consider new ways of being sexual. For sexuality is not separate from our spirituality. If we have a theology formed in a worldview that sees sexuality as sin, our means, intentions, and explanations of sexuality will be affected. We must engage our entire humanity in our spirituality; this includes our sexuality.”

Mark Driscoll (Pastor of Mars Hill Church - Seattle, WA), concerning the underlined quote responds at the SEBTS Convergent Conference with this stark but direct comment:

“I don’t know about you, I’ve been in ministry a while, I think we’ve tried all of it! I don’t think there’s anything new. I don’t know about your counseling load, I can’t possibly conceive of another way to have sex that someone hasn’t already tried!“

Ahhh :@ Amen, Mark, Amen Further, it is appears that Pagitt actually misunderstands the Bible’s theology about the kind of sexuality that’s formed by a Christian worldview. Scripture does not see all sexuality as sin, but simply any sexuality that is outside of God’s ordained use — for biblically, it is only within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman that any sexual behavior is biblically acceptable. Let us be clear where God’s Word has been clear: all homosexual sexual behavior is sin; all heterosexual sexual behavior outside of marriage is sin; all sexual lust is sin (Genesis 18-19; Leviticus 18:22, 20:13; Matthew 5:28,15:19-20; Mark 7:20-23; Romans 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; 1 Timothy 1:9-10; Hebrews 13:4).

My heart breaks as Emergent cult leaders, like Doug Pagitt and friends, make Scripture out to be unclear and non-authoritative, when the Bible is explicitly and authoritatively clear about those ways of being sexual that are acceptable to God. Any new questions that may arise out of today’s postmodern contexts must find their answers in Scripture and nowhere else. We certainly need a theology that can not only answer questions produced in this world, but one that that is equipped to generate proper questions — a Christian theology, not a man-centered sex-crazed pagan theology.

And the questions generated by our Christian theology should not ever be, “Has God really said..?”

This afternoon, I and about 10 other guys had great time of fellowship, sharing, and discussion with Tom Ascol, Exec. Dir. of Founders Ministries at the aptly named Founders Cafe at Southern Seminary. The time of fellowship was initiated by our dear friends at Said At Southern, talked for over an hour discussing our personal journeys to Southern and to Calvinism, as well as the future of the SBC as related to a Baptist ecclesiology and Reformed theology. I was very much blessed by the discussions, and was reminded of what we are contending for and defending against — the greatness of the glory of God’s grace in the face of Jesus Christ.

Shortly after our discussion, I felt it would be timely and appropriate to post this quote which contains a theology that is oh so popular and attractive to today’s post-everything generation. Much can be said about the quote below, but I’ll try to share it as is without much commentary so that the message that is preached about embodied theology could be as clear as mud.

I have posted the quote in its entirety, including the paragraphs prior to and after the sentence that Mark Driscoll recently quoted at the Convergent Conference at SEBTS.

Driscoll contends, “If you read Romans 1, this is by definition paganism and idolatry…”

When we come to grips with the idea that the world is not made of little hard pieces of substance behaving in determined ways, and that the light exists as both wave and particle, and that it is impossible not to affect the world by living in it, we should be encouraged in our theology.

The idea that, at the smallest level, all matter is made of energy packets and not “little hard balls of matter” is a fascinating notion that requires not only different theological conclusions but different assumptions. The idea that there is a necessary distinction of matter from spirit, or creation from creator, is being reconsidered. This notion that the difference in waves and particles is not what we assumed allows us to understand the engagement of God in the world and the interrelationality of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and creation in new and more helpful ways. We are allowed and encouraged to have an understanding that includes creation in the kingdom of God.

I contend there to be no better religious understanding of this world than Christianity. Christianity is ideally suited for our understanding. The presuppositions of Christianity and these discoveries of the “quantum” world will well inform one another.”

Doug Pagitt. Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches, Chapter 4: The Emerging Church and Embodied Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), 142.

I’m just exploring, I tell you — I am not converting!