Thus says the Lord: "Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.
But they said, 'We will not walk in it.'" --Jeremiah 6:16

 

20 September, 2007   comments: (0) Postmodernism   The Emerging Church: Old, Worn and Deadly I've been spending an usual amount of time this week researching the Emerging Church Movement, and I'm always fascinated when I run across any of their blogs that want to claim ownership of John Piper for their movement. I've found a similar pattern in the Church Growth Movement, whose pastors often link to John Piper. Everybody wants to own a piece of Piper it seems. In this post, I'm not going to try and answer who actually does "own him", nor am I going to stake any ownership claims of my own. What I will do however, is provide some evidence to the two aforementioned movements, which should suggest that some reevaluation is needed if they're assuming that they've found a backer in this popular preacher. In the case of the Emerging Church, they may be surprised to hear the title of this post being used by him to describe some of their foundational thought. There's one Emergent activist who often makes his way around the blogosphere mentioning Phil Johnson and I, and letting everyone know how wrong people like us are for our misunderstanding of 'Truth'. Usually this is accompanied by some mocking or reconfiguring of my blog name ("old truth"). To this Emergent follower, 'truth' is the person of Jesus Christ, and we believe that too actually, but he insists that this is where the definition ends. This is all very convenient then for anyone who wants to make up their own rules for Christianity. It takes any pressure off of the need for having right beliefs, and puts all of the focus on a nebulous and undefined concept called "Jesus". Then they imagine everyone having unity while worshipping differing ideas of who and what "Jesus" is. John Piper talked about some of this in his critique of the Emerging Church Movement given to the 2005 PCA General Assembly: Consider [the early church father] Athanasius over against the so-called Emerging Church - I mean that wing of it that minimizes doctrine and wants to say: propositions about Christ are not as important as loving Christ. But reading the story of Athanasius (who was exiled five times from his bishopric in Alexandria for defending the deity of Christ) has made it clear to me again that loving Christ includes loving true propositions about Christ. What was clear to Athanasius was that propositions about Christ carried convictions that could send you to heaven or to hell. There were propositions like: "There was a time when the Son of God was not," and "He was not before he was made," and "the Son of God is created." These propositions were strictly damnable. If they were spread abroad and believed they would damn the souls that embraced them. And therefore Athanasius labored with all his might to formulate propositions that would conform to reality and lead the soul to faith and worship and heaven. I believe Athanasius would have abominated, with tears, the contemporary call for "depropositionalizing" that we hear among many of the so-called "reformists" and "the emerging church," "younger evangelicals," and "postevangelicals." I think he would have said, "Our young people in Alexandria die for the truth of propositions about Christ. What do your young people die for?" And if the answer came back, "We die for Christ, not propositions about Christ," I think he would have said, "That's what the heretic Arius said. So which Christ will you die for?" To answer that question requires propositions about him. To refuse to answer implies that it doesn't matter what we believe or die for as long as it has the label "Christ" attached to it. Athanasius would have grieved over sentences like "It is Christ who unites us; it is doctrines that divides." And sentences like: "We should ask, Whom do you trust? rather than what do you believe?" He would have grieved because he knew this is the very tactic used by the Arian bishops to cover the councils with fog so that the word "Christ" could mean anything. Those who talk like this - "Christ unites, doctrine divides" - have simply replaced propositions about Christ with the word "Christ". It carries no meaning until one says something about him. They think they have done something profound and fresh, when they call us away from the propositions of doctrine to the word "Christ." In fact, they have done something very old and worn and deadly. . . . Continue reading more from this article. Those are some strong words for those Emerging Church followers who think and talk that way. It's the spreading of that kind of dangerous fallacy that makes me want to warn people about the Emerging Church Movement every chance I get. Not all of them believe that way of course, but what's troubling to me is that, even the ones who don't, usually have no problem linking to the sites of the ones who do, and recommending their errant books. It's as if they either don't understand the deception, or, their aims of promoting the movement have taken a higher priority than expressing their concerns. How about those in the Church Growth Movement who love to put John Piper in their blogrolls. Perhaps they should take a look at this page over on the Truth Matters blog. Piper's message there is "the Gospel is relevant with barely any contextualization" (we quoted John Murray earlier this year - saying the same thing related to today's common notion of 'relevance'). And really that's a message that the Emerging Church folks need to comprehend as well. Now some would say that I have no right trying to put any claims on John Piper either, since there are things that I disagree with him about. For example, all you have to do is watch this video to understand that he and I have differing opinions about worship. I also have issues with some of the leaders that John Piper endorses. One such case is Mark Driscoll, who has some history with the Emerging Church Movement, and whose relationship with Piper is probably the source of much of this Emerging confusion about Piper. But while it's true that I have very important differences with him, you won't find Piper speaking out with great urgency against foundational matters relating to the way I believe, as he does to those two movements, as clearly evidenced above. I'm not trying to own Piper, and I also don't have to agree with him on everything to point out that today's postmodernists ought to take a closer look at the man, before claiming him as an advocate of their innovative new way of defining a 2,000 year old Christianity. My survey of their blogs this week, has revealed a lot of confusion and false assumptions along these lines. Posted by: Jim B.   Link: http://www.oldtruth.com/blog.cfm/id.2.pid.389   Be the first to post a comment about this article        Home  |   About  |  Videos   |  Calvinism