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January 2020

The Emerging Church and its Ultimate Goal

 Our Lord Jesus, before He ascended to Heaven, spent a great deal of His time warning the disciples of the wolves who would enter into the sheepfold.

 This is how emerging advocate mathematician Eric Temple Bell, defined the Emerging Church, “Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.”  The Emerging Church movement has many assumptions to examine because it buys into popular cultural notions of right and wrong, truth and error.  These popular cultural notions, however, have been shaped and molded by philosophical influences decades and centuries in advance.  It is precisely these notions that become assumptions under which popular culture operates today.  Yesterday’s philosophies are today’s politics and the Emerging Church movement is a political movement to be sure.

 Indeed, one of the difficulties in examining contemporary religious movements is the numerous philosophical influences involved.  The Emerging Church movement exhibits traits of many of the following philosophies: communism, existentialism, postmodernism, relativism, subjectivism, pragmatism, humanism, and philosophies have their own underratedness that is difficult enough to discern.  The task becomes proportionately more difficult enough to discern. Like mining for ore, we may be able to trace some nuggets in the stream of current activity to the originating vein of thought.

        

Acts 20:26-32 “Wherefore I take you to record this day, that I am pure from the blood of all men.  For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.  Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.  For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock.  Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them.

 Therefore watch, and remember, that by the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears.  And now brethren, I command you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and the give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified”.

 The Emerging Church is modern day Gnosticism. What is Gnosticism?  The definition of the word Gnostic is derived from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “to know.”  It basically wants you to believe the lie — any lie, regardless of what religious setting you are in.  Once you mix the truth with the lie, you become a gnostic, controlled by the prince of the power of the air.

   

 Basically, the Gnostic believes in acquiring special, mystical knowledge as the means for salvation.  According to Gnostic beliefs, there is a Great God that is good and perfect, but impersonal and unknowable. The creator of the universe was actually a lesser deity, a cheap knock-off of the “true God”—who wanted to create a flawless material universe but botched the job.  This is what you find in every form of Gnosticism and esoteric groups. They teach their adherents that there are two gods, one good and one evil.  They teach Yahweh / Jesus is the evil God and that Lucifer, the devil, is the good god. That they are both fighting for the souls of men.

   

 They teach that instead of having a utopia, we ended up with a world infected with pain, misery, and intellectual and spiritual blindness; all matter is now corrupt and evil.  However, when the lesser deity created man, he accidentally imbued humanity with a spark of the “true” God’s spirit, making man an inherently good soul trapped in the confines of an evil, material body.

The Gnostic Jesus

 Contrary to a message of salvation through Christ alone (Acts 4:12, “Neither is there salvation in any other for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.”), the Gnostic Jesus brings a message of self-redemption.  Man only needs to examine his inner “spark” to find the knowledge needed to free himself from his material body and reach God.  This alleged purity of heart is the exact opposite of what is stated in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things an desperately wicked who can know it?”

 Today, Gnosticism has evolved and branched out from the exclusively spiritual into the secular and scientific. Psychologist C. G. Jung praised Gnosticism as superior to traditional Christianity as a way of thinking.  Another form of Gnosticism denies the existence of God altogether, while embracing an eternal flawed universe.  This atheistic form of Gnosticism doesn’t see the material world as totally evil, but as flawed and incomplete.  Mankind becomes the “deity,” and has the right to improve the human body and the world through their own wisdom.

 Christianity and Gnosticism are mutually exclusive — it is easy for a Gnostic mindset to seep into our own thinking if we’re not careful (1st Peter 5:8). “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour.”  The Gnostic is pursuing goodness, but instead of seeking to be regenerated by Christ, they grab hold of a man-centered purpose for living.  Gnostic thought makes man “wise in their own eyes” (Isaiah 5:21), something that is also pointed out in (Proverbs 3:7), “Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the Lord, and depart from evil.” 

 Gnostic thinking claims that deeper truth can be found apart from God.  But Proverbs 1:7 says “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”  Instead of searching our corrupt, flawed “inner selves for answers, we should instead test everything against the revealed Word of God.  In the end, if it is God’s truth alone that can be trusted.

Isaiah 8:20, “To the law and to the testimony if they speak not according to this world. It is because there is no light in them.” 

   

 From the very beginning, the battle between good and evil has been a battle of the truth.  The serpent, in the Garden of Eden, began his temptation by questioning the truthfulness of God’s previous instruction by questioning the truthfulness of God’s previous instruction.  “Indeed hath God said, ‘Ye shall not eat from any tree of the garden? . . . Ye surely shall not die!  For God knoweth that in the day you eat thereof your eyes will be opened, and ye will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:1, 4, 5).  And this has been his tactic ever since, casting doubt on the revelation of God.

 The Emergent Church is this same form of Paganism.  One emergent pastor, Doug Pagitt is a Universalist, that everyone will go to heaven, no one will be damned. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Buddhist, a Hindu or a Muslim.  That’s just classic Universal-ism.

 What you have here is a form of false religion.  A form of paganism that basically wants to be thought of as Christian because it gains a certain ground.  But the underlying bottom line of this whole emerging movement is they don’t believe in any doctrine, they don’t believe in any theology.

 Another emergent pastor, Brian McLaren says nobody has ever gotten it right, so let’s not make an issue out of anything.  Let’s just be open to everything. Let’s not take a position on theology or for that matter, on morality or behavior because hey, there’s no judgment anyway so we’ve all going to end up in God in some ethereal, eternal relationship.  And that’s just non-Christian. It is blatantly, flagrantly non-Christian.  It’s as non-Christian as any false religion.

 God’s people have one function, to guard the truth, to proclaim the truth and to live the truth.  That’s not the mission in a seeker / emergent church. God has this word for those who may be involved in Christ-centric, Bible-centric Church.

Revelation 18:4 -5, “And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plaques.  For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.” 

Printed with permission of Today, The Bible & You located at P.O. Box 1722, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma 74013, Phone No. (918) 279-1136. The name of the original article in the January 2020 issue of Today’s Front Page was “The Emerging Church and its Ultimate Goal” www.JohnBarela.com