Opus 2022-168: Emerging Again

I have been finding new voices in the spiritual war that is trying to overwhelm us.  They are not something that emerged yesterday, just new to me.  If you are looking for truth and inspiration then just start looking.

Two terms have been floated around by these apologists.  The first is Progressive Christianity.  They make it clear that these people are not Christians.  They are typical liberals in the sense that they keep changing their name to protect the guilty.  This is the movement that came out as the Emergent Church.  Their leaders must have realized that a growing number of people were catching on so they came up with Progressive Christianity.  It seems like their mission in life is to infiltrate the genuine church and destroy the spiritual lives of believers.

This brings us to the second word that is being thrown around:  Deconstruction.  The way it is used is to help insecure believers deconstruct the beliefs that they had and move away from a faith in the Biblical Jesus.  I find this word so appropriate.  

I have written before about deconstructionism.  It is a real term in the world of philosophy.  It has a core principle that all things are relative.  Thus a word may mean something to you but mean something totally different to another person.  This is not just the normal problem we all have in being accurate and communicating what we think.  This is a foundational principle that the words actually don’t have a standard definition.  Now take that to the rest of your life.  There is no absolute truth.  Facts are not as important as feelings.  Reality is subject to your imagination.  The roots of this are anti-God.

This is a great philosophy for these people.  It allows them to say things to you using your own vocabulary, build up a trust because you feel they are on the same page with you and then manipulate you into spiritual disaster.  They are perfectly okay with lying by simply meaning different things than you do.  The lying comes from the fact that they know what you mean and know they are deceiving.

Be alert.  The liars are not just in the media and politics.  The sad truth is that they are also common in the church.  The only real defense is to know your Bible well enough to recognize distortions when they are laid on you.

homo unius libri

Opus 2011-166, Labels: Postmodernism Really Isn’t

I was listening to Alistair Begg as usual.  He was repeatedly referring to “modern man.”  I said to myself that he should be referring to “post-modern man” instead.  That got me thinking about labels.

We are in what is called the “post-modern” age.  This would correspond nicely with the idea that we are now in a “post-Christian” age.  The two harmonize well.  The modern age was the age of science.  Logic, reason and the scientific method would solve all our problems.  Truth existed and we were on a journey to discover it.  Progress was real.

On one side this was based on the Judeo-Christian world view.  No other religion has allowed the development of what we consider science.  The scientific method depends on an understanding that the universe was created by an immutable God.  Because He is a god of principle and is eternally unchanging, the universe He created also has those qualities.  Thus, pure water will always boil at 212º F at sea level.  You can take it to the bank.  In all other religious systems the gods are free to be capricious and adjust the world to fit their whims.

The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, although many of its thinkers rejected God, was only possible because its philosophies were based on an understanding of the world based on the God of the Bible.

Post-modernism claims to have moved beyond that.  No longer can you know truth because truth is not absolute.  Truth is different for everyone.  Thus the Bible is a well meaning but corrupt work and Jesus is just one view of truth, no more valid than the ideas of Gandhi.  This is well illustrated by the heretical arm of the Emergent Church movement.  Here are a few more quotes from An Emergent Manifesto of Hope,

p. 228, “The modern age was ruled by science and structures of control....In the past modern milieu, the humanities are asserting themselves,...”

p. 228, “...in the world we live in now, facts alone are not adequate.”  (EO)

p. 191, “But Christianity’s idea that other religions cannot be God’s carriers of grace and truth casts a large shadow over our Christian experience.”

p. 203, “The more we lean into the tension between competing truths, the closer we are to the heart of God.”

One of their favorite illustrations would be the Blind Men of Indostan  explaining what an elephant is.  We only see part and miss the whole.

I believe this should be relabeled as either “pre-modernism” or “deja vu paganism.”  This philosophy does nothing more than adopt the ideas of eastern religions that are syncretic and pagan.  It is not a moving forward but an attempt to turn the clock back and reestablish the rule of sun and earth worship.

You cannot be truly Christian and truly post-modern.  On one side or the other you are not a true believer. 

Pagitt, Doug and Jones, Tony, ed.  An Emergent Manifesto of Hope.  Grand Rapids:  Baker
    Books, 2007.

homo unius libri