Echoes in Eternity

As many people by now know, Rob Bell made a bit of a stir by releasing a video (see below) to promote his new book (which comes out in a month, I believe). In the video, Bell strongly implies that orthodox view of hell is not an accurate one and leans pretty close to the edge of universalism. Only time (and a thorough vetting of his book) will tell if he indeed steps into that theological wasteland. Plenty has already been said about it, some good, some a bit knee-jerkish for my tastes, but Kevin DeYoung's and Trevin Wax's are the best.

Rob Bell is right about one thing: what you believe about heaven and hell says a lot about what you believe about God. That’s why theological error of this magnitude cannot go unchecked. The God of the Vimeo clip is not a God of wrath, not a God of eternal recompense, not a God who showed us love in sending his Son to be a propitiation for our wretched sins, not a God whose will it was to crush the Suffering Servant in an exercise of divine justice and free grace. Indeed, says Bell—even if he says it with a question—such a God could not be good.

We don’t have to guess if Bell will say something dreadfully, horribly, disgracefully wrong.

He already has.

LOVE WINS. from Rob Bell on Vimeo.

This is what the Emergent Church is now reduced to, calling Jesus' knowledge into question because the modern idol of science tells us that He couldn't be right. Next step: the resurrection as metaphor.

I, for one, am thrilled to see this new development, as it allows all to see what truly drives the Emergent Church (the idolatry of the Enlightenment over against the eternal truth of God's Word) and makes them easy to ignore and lump in with the rest of the dying mainline churches. It's a cult that has already long passed its half-life. Good riddance.

This Emergent post reminds me that just because we may say the name of Jesus and call ourselves Christians doesn't necessarily make it so. Many will say to Him "Lord, Lord"...

After all, even the demons said "You are the Son of God" to Jesus. Something else is required beyond being Captain Obvious.

Greg Boyd, he of Open Theism fame, wrote a blog post yesterday which gives a hint to where his doctrine is leading him. And it ain't pretty. When someone slips into serious theological error, it seems like it isn't long before that error is merely the tip of the iceberg. I wouldn't be surprised if I heard Boyd preaching some deep heresy within the next five years, if he is so unable to discern the difference between good teaching and spiritual death now. May God pull him from that path.

Doug Wilson has a followup post to his previous one on the difficulties of discerning the difference between false teachers and false dichotomies.

One of the first things to distinguish is someone who wants to go the same place you do, but has a different view about how best to do it, from someone who wants to go somewhere completely different, but wants to use the same methods you are using. Distinguish principles and methods -- where you are going is more important than how you get there. This is not to say that how you get there is unimportant; it is simply less important.

So if one man wants to drive to the East Coast in a Ford, he has more in common with a man who wants to do the same thing in a Chevvy than he does with another man driving to the West Coast in a Ford. Couple this with the fact that it is possible to pass someone on the road who is going the opposite direction, and at the precise moment when you do that, you are in exactly the same spot. Further, somebody else who is going to the same place you are might be a hundred miles behind you.

And sometimes it is hard to tell, when you are in the same spot, if you actually are headed in opposite directions. The whole thing can be quite confusing.
...
Now in this context, what statement is being made when you team up with somebody? A lot depends on the nature of the yoke. If you are bringing someone on to the local session, you ought to be saying that you believe there is a fundamental like-mindedness. If you invite someone to your conference, it means at the least that you want to be friends and that you believe his ministry is going more good than harm. Or maybe it is doing more harm than good, but not by much, and you want to play the role of Priscilla and Aquila to his Apollos (Acts 18:26) simply because the trajectory is promising.
...
In order to sort all this out, you have to have a sharp and clear distinction between the fundamentals and the secondaries, and you have to have the right kind of suspicious mind concerning your own rascal heart. Rascal hearts find just the wrong thing to do at just the wrong time, just like raccoons can find the garbage cans.
...
Now, with this said, what issues are fundamental in our day? This is key -- one of the common mistakes is that of thinking that the decisive point in the 16th century has to be the decisive point today. This is yet another failure to read the narrative right. Principles are constant, but plot points aren't. But, lest this point be mistaken, as it always is, our Protestant fathers in the 16th century were right to take the stand they did, and the pope and his Council were wrong.
...
Where is the battle now? What are the issues that threaten the purity of the gospel now? Where are the compromises now?

The real rot that we must contend with begins with Darwin, not Bonaventure, and any and all accommodations with Darwin. Darwin gave modernity the mechanism it needed to throw off the authority of God's Word, and the sovereignty of the Lord Christ. Darwin is foundational to the secularist modernity project, but there is more. He is also foundational to the postmodern goo cauldron that is our culture today, and every form of what I have called pomosexuality. It is striking that postmodernists never want to be post-Darwinian.

Doug Wilson has a good post on differentiating between false teachers and the practical problems it can pose.

Now let's sort this out. Or, rather, let's have a go at sorting it out, because it is not as easy as it looks.

Tullian Tchividjian is the pastor of Coral Ridge, which oversees Knox Seminary, which just hired Bruce Waltke, the theistic evolutionist, because he resigned from RTS, because his position on evolution was very similar to that of C.S. Lewis, who is everybody's hero, including mine, and the aforementioned RTS employs John Frame, who is a stalwart of the faith, but has views on worship styles that I find discordant with mine, but he had to leave Westminster West, which has an R2K thing going, and Scott Clark there at Westminster West is on a jag against me because I deny justification by faith alone, which I don't, but that's another discussion, and even though he is in the URC he is very concerned about this frenetic virus (FV) spreading in the PCA, whose major rock star right now is Tim Keller, who is okay with women deacons, which I oppose, but John Piper is willing to work with Keller, which shouldn't be surprising, because he was also willing to work with me, even though I met Mark Driscoll once when he was in college at Washington State University. Still with me?

The problem is a thorny one, and it is an enormously practical problem.

"I was trying to mold God into what I wanted Him to be - which is so arrogant - instead of submitting myself to Him and allowing Him to mold me into the person He created me to be." - Kathy Ireland

Recently, I've been thinking about how comfortable a Christian should be with their doctrine. I don't mean how confident he should feel. I believe Christians should feel a reasonable level of confidence in their doctrine as long as it is solidly and historically built on Scripture and they are willing to reconsider it if given Biblical warrant. What I mean is this: is it a good thing to be personally comfortable with your theological beliefs? Or, should your doctrine make you squirm sometimes? I would say yes. A Christian should not be perfectly untroubled in their natural self with some of the ideas of God shown in Scripture. But rather than undermine our confidence in them, it should strengthen us to know that it isn't of our own longings that we come to them. If a belief is counter-intuitive to what one would expect or hope to see in Scripture, then in most cases it's all the more likely to be true.

Of course, all of this hinges on the doctrine of human depravity. If our flesh is not sinful and rebellious and our moral compasses are not utterly broken, then doctrinal discomfort may be a warning sign rather than a confirmation. But, if we are morally destitute and spiritually dead on our own, then it would make sense that we would have a natural inclination to wince at certain doctrines. As John Calvin himself said about the doctrine of election, "I confess that this decree must frighten us."

In another sense, however, we should be comfortable with our theology. After all, Paul says something similar in 1 Corinthians 1:18-24. For those stuck in their sinful flesh, they will understandably find the Gospel and related doctrine foolish. But to those who are saved and have the Spirit of God, it will be wisdom surpassing all wisdom.

This thought was brought to bear just this morning as I read a letter written to Brian McLaren which he then posted on his blog.

[R]ather than accept the idea that Christ is so violent that He feels compelled by His own internal moral character of punitive justice to punish sinners by torturing and tormenting them ... literally without end, I would reject Christ's authority in this matter altogether by assuming the theologically liberal view that He made an outright error in the accuracy and validity and veracity of His teaching in this matter. This is justified by asserting that Christ was also human and could and did make mistakes in His teaching because in becoming human, one of His divine attributes that He gave up was His omniscience and infallibly [sic]. This is referred to as the Kenosis theory of the Incarnation based on the passage where it says Christ "emptied" Himself in the incarnation. I can not be a Christian [if] I must believe that I must believe that hell is literally never ending suffering for people who are kept in existence, alive and conscious of their torment literally forever. Even it means that Christ will condemn ME to hell for believing as I do, I find it impossible to believe such a morally repulsive and repugnant doctrine. THIS WOULD INDEED MEAN GOD IS MORE VIOLENT THAN ANY HUMAN COULD EVER BE AND TURN GOD IN TO A MALEVOLENT BEING WHO IS FUNDAMENTALLY HOSTILE TO HUMAN BEINGS WHO ACTUALLY HATES US.

Clearly, the author views himself as the ultimate authority on all things moral. And as such, he thinks that his doctrines must make him comfortable. Unwittingly, he has given himself over to idolatry, fashioning a god that looks remarkably like himself and subverting Genesis 1:27. It is not for the clay to become the potter.

"The real future, as I see it, isn't an intramural conversation among Evangelicals (as many think), or even among Western Christians (as others think), but rather an expanding conversation among progressive evangelicals, missional mainline Protestants, progressive Catholics, and postcolonial Christians from around the world. Its future may or may not still use words like emergent, emerging, etc., but the cat is out of the bag. Deep questions are being raised, and when that happens, you can take two predictions to the bank, one of them being that you can't get the questions back in the bag, and the second being that some people will try.

The latter will say, "I was OK when we were talking about making church more up-to-date, culturally relevant, and successful (i.e. large), but when we start asking deeper questions - about theology and justice, for example - I'm checking out." Now I've never been against making the church more up-to-date, culturally relevant, and effective, as beset as that project is with dangers, toils, and snares. (The obvious alternative - keeping the church out-of-date and culturally irrelevant and ineffective - has its problems too.) But I've repeatedly laid my cards on the table: I don't think the problems in the Christian religion are cosmetic. I think we have some deep issues to deal with - issues of theology, justice, narrative, and identity." - Brian McLaren

So not only does McLaren think that traditional theologically conservative evangelicals aren't part of the solution but merely the problem, he also thinks the problem with Christianity is its foundation, rather than some of its fruit (or some of its members) and the methods involved. And here I thought he wanted a conversation with us. Instead, he admits that he only wants to talk in his own personal echo chamber where no one seriously questions his "progressive" form of Christianity. Didn't the whole Emerging Church movement grow around the premise that the problem with evangelical Christianity was that it had no room for dissenting questions or views?

The other sad thing I note is that he continually thinks he's original, like he is asking questions that no one has ever asked (or answered). Either he's intellectually dishonest or a solid seminary (or just an honest study of church history in general) would have done him a world of good. Probably a little of each.

Brian McLaren has rightly been excommunicated by Christians for his latest heretical piece of garbage. He responds to the negative reaction to his book with a piece on the Huffington Post. He explains the reaction from Bible-believing Christians this way:

[Christians'] consciences are in conflict with their beloved religious authority figures on several key issues -- ten of which I raise in my book -- but they continue to press the punishment button when instructed to do so.
...
I'm a Christian. I love God, Jesus, the Bible, prayer, worship, serving others -- the whole package. But when my conscience tells me that I'm hurting people by complying with religious conventions, I don't keep pressing the button. I start asking questions. That's why I wrote my book, and that's why I'm willing to get into trouble for it.

So, basically Christians who speak out against him are not authentic nor do they actually believe that he's wrong, but they are just listening to their leaders (or are one of those power-hungry leaders themselves) rather than their consciences. He represents the conscience of all Christians, apparently. That's not condescending at all.

He has declared war on the Church, so war it is. Not one faithful Church should allow him inside their doors, not one faithful Christian should waste another breath debating him (not that he ever is willing to debate, since debate is sooo modernistic). As Jesus said, he should be treated as a first century Jew would treat a tax collector or Gentile... avoid him and the idolatry he promotes. It's no coincidence that those idols are the environment, homosexuality, slander, Palestinian terrorism, etc. When God turns you over to a debased mind like Paul speaks of in Romans 1, He usually sends you all the way. He doesn't just confuse your conscience like a magnet does a compass. He takes your moral compass and shatters it. Reject Him and He doesn't just say "ah, okay, have a nice life." He REJECTS you.

Pray for McLaren, but don't eat with him.

A useful post by Pastor Wilson this morning...

I prefer love over lies, peace over war, the taste of butterscotch over the taste of spinach, Christ over Baal, the straight over the crooked, the Navy over the Army, the Greeks over the Persians, the hills over the plains, two weeks of sunshine over two weeks of gray fog, feminine women over effeminate men, and I put all those things in one sentence for a reason. John Stott once wrote that fuzzy thinking was one of the sins of our age, and he was right. And Dorothy Sayers argued in her great essay on the lost tools of learning that we must learn how to make careful distinctions.
...
I prefer peace over war, and I am not glad that others prefer war over peace. But if the cause were just and I had to go to war, I would prefer to be in the Navy than in the Army -- and I am very glad that others prefer the Army over the Navy. This means that these are different kinds of preferences. I prefer Christ over Baal, and those who prefer it the other way will perish eternally. That preference is therefore not six of one and half dozen of the other, as it is with the butterscotch and the spinach.

The universe that God made is layered, textured. The universe that idolaters want to live in is flat, and every preference is treated like every other preference, and it is all just your opinion.

And this is why we should react very differently to different kinds of appeals within the church. One says to throw away the basic distinctions you learned at your mother's knee, and move on up into the higher realms of a new discipleship. This kind of sanctification is as hollow as a jug. Feed the poor instead of fighting for the unborn. Help abused women instead of opposing homosexual marriage. Love the downtrodden instead of fighting over the infallibility of Scripture. Where did that "instead" come from? This is the logical failure that causes the emergent church to be demerging into fuller forms of disobedience.

But the other way says that what we have already attained is good, sound, and holy, and we should add to it "this." This is maturation, and growth in true godliness. When we repent, let us repent of sins that God calls sins, and when we grow let us grow in His goodness. It is the difference between hearing a preacher of righteousness and, in the former case, trying to listen to a scold.

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of Christ without a cross. - H. Richard Niebuhr defines theological liberalism

As some of you likely already know, Brian McLaren, the leader of the Emergent Church movement (at least, what's left of it), released his new book, A New Kind of Christianity, this week. Formerly, McLaren has made a living from asking questions without giving any real answers. All that changed with this book. As Tim Challies put it, McLaren "appears to love Jesus but hate God... In this book we finally see where McLaren's journey has taken him; it has taken him into outright, rank, unapologetic apostasy. He hates God. Period."

Several Christian leaders have offered reviews and thoughts about the book, but I found Kevin DeYoung's the most penetrating of all. You can read it all here. DeYoung's closing words summarize McLaren's heterodoxy perfectly.

The message of McLarenism is pretty simple: God is love and wants everyone to be kind and inclusive and care for the poor and the environment. This is what Jesus was like, and we should be like Jesus. This is, of course, not wrong in so far as it goes. The Liberal/McLaren emphasis on the kingdom is right, their concern for the “other” is right, much of their ethics is right. But McLarenism, like liberalism, cannot be right. It has its emphases all out of proportion, its right statements thrown out of whack by all that is missing. In McLarenism there is no original sin, no wrath, no hell, no creation-fall-redemption, no definite future, no second coming that I can see, no clear statement on the deity of Christ, no mention of vicarious substitution or God’s holiness or divine sovereignty, no ethical demands except as they relate to being kind to others, no God-offendedness, no doctrine of justification, no unchanging apostolic deposit of truth, no absolute submission to the word of God, nary a mention of faith and worship, no doctrine of regeneration, no evangelistic impulse to save the lost, and nothing about God’s passion for his glory. This is surely a lot to leave out.

McLaren’s Christianity is not new and certainly not improved. I don’t believe you can even call it Christianity. It is liberalism dressed up for the 21st century. We can only hope this wave of liberalism fades as dramatically as did the last.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! - Isaiah 5:20

I rarely mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since there is little new under the sun in regards to that topic, but this made my blood boil just a little. Brian McLaren pretends to be "generous" toward those he disagrees with (if you can get him to be honest about his disagreement, that is), but then he goes on "fact-finding" missions to Israel and only talks to those stuck in the same echo chamber as himself.

McLaren learned that Palestinians do not want a “two-state solution” but instead desire to “live in peace with Israelis” and want “Jews, Muslims, and Christians to learn to live together as neighbors.”

Really?!?! I suggest that next time McLaren visits Israel, he should visit the widow of Danny Haran and mother of Einat and Yael. She can tell him what happened to her family at the hands of those peace-loving Palestinians.

We live in a time where obvious evil is rare. Then again, evil has almost always been subtle. Few people recognize evil for what it is when it's occurring. Slavery, Nazi Germany, Soviet communism, abortion-on-demand, etc. "World opinion" supported all of those before it denounced them (it still hasn't quite done so with abortion). So it's easy to get lackadaisical about fighting evil when it isn't readily apparent. But that is actually when it is most important to fight evil. In hindsight, everyone agrees that the Rwandan genocide was terrible, but how many spoke up against the daily hatred of Tutsis going out over the radio waves in the months and years prior to the 1994 genocide? A few prophetic voices would have gone a long way then. Likewise, we need to stand up against false teachers and evil prophets like McLaren before we find that through our silence, we have aided and abetted the destruction of Israel and the murders of thousands of innocents.

As the late Richard Weaver would say, ideas have consequences.

Kevin DeYoung has an excellent piece regarding the Gospel in (it appears) response to Shane Claiborne’s recent letter to unbelievers in Esquire. Read Claiborne’s piece first then check out DeYoung’s response. It’s spot on.

The New Gospel generally has four parts to it.

It usually starts with an apology…

…

Then there is an appeal to God as love…

…

The third part of the New Gospel is an invitation to join God on his mission in the world…

…

And finally, there is a studied ambivalence about eternity…

…

This way of telling the good news of Christianity is very chic. It’s popular for several reasons.

1. It is partially true. God is love. The kingdom has come. Christians can be stupid. The particulars of the New Gospel are often justifiable.

2. It deals with straw men. The bad guys are apocalyptic street preachers, Crusaders, and caricatures of an evangelical view of salvation.

3. The New Gospel leads people to believe wrong things without explicitly stating those wrong things. That is, Christians who espouse the New Gospel feel safe from criticism because they never actually said belief is unimportant, or there is no hell, or that Jesus isn’t the only way, or that God has no wrath, or that there is no need for repentance.

…

4. It is manageable. The New Gospel meets people where they are and leaves them there. It appeals to love and helping our neighbors. And it makes the appeal in a way that repudiates any hint of judgmentalism, intolerance, or religiosity. This is bound to be popular. It tells us what we want to hear and gives us something we can do.

5. The New Gospel is inspirational. This is what makes the message so appealing to young people in particular.

…

6. The New Gospel has no offense to it. This is why the message is so attractive. The bad guys are all “out there.” This can be a problem for any of us. We are all prone to soft-pedaling the gospel, only presenting the attractive parts and failing to mention where Christ does not just comfort but also confronts. And it must confront more than the sins of others. [emphasis added]

…

This is no small issue. And it is not just a matter of emphasis. The New Gospel will not sustain the church. It cannot change the heart. And it does not save. It is crucial, therefore, that our evangelical schools, camps, conferences, publishing houses, and churches can discern the new gospel from the old.

Or is he just a Christian who sees things in a unique way? Phil Johnson over at Pyromaniacs attempts to answer that question based on a recent interview that Rob Bell did for the Boston Globe. In it, Bell says the following:

Q: OK, how would you describe what it is that you believe?
A: I embrace the term evangelical, if by that we mean a belief that we together can actually work for change in the world, caring for the environment, extending to the poor generosity and kindness, a hopeful outlook. That's a beautiful sort of thing.

Q: Is religion a part of that?
A: At the heart of the Christian story is resurrection, the belief that this word is good, and that, as a follower of Jesus, a belief that God hasn’t abandoned the world, but is actively at work in the world. Even in the midst of what can look like despair and destruction there is a new creation present.

There you have it, the gospel to Rob Bell is rank moralism, nothing more. Al Mohler recently wrote this on the false gospel of moralism:

In our own context, one of the most seductive false gospels is moralism. This false gospel can take many forms and can emerge from any number of political and cultural impulses. Nevertheless, the basic structure of moralism comes down to this -- the belief that the Gospel can be reduced to improvements in behavior.

Sadly, this false gospel is particularly attractive to those who believe themselves to be evangelicals motivated by a biblical impulse. Far too many believers and their churches succumb to the logic of moralism and reduce the Gospel to a message of moral improvement. In other words, we communicate to lost persons the message that what God desires for them and demands of them is to get their lives straight.
...
The seduction of moralism is the essence of its power. We are so easily seduced into believing that we actually can gain all the approval we need by our behavior. Of course, in order to participate in this seduction, we must negotiate a moral code that defines acceptable behavior with innumerable loopholes. Most moralists would not claim to be without sin, but merely beyond scandal. That is considered sufficient.

Moralists can be categorized as both liberal and conservative. In each case, a specific set of moral concerns frames the moral expectation. As a generalization, it is often true that liberals focus on a set of moral expectations related to social ethics while conservatives tend to focus on personal ethics. The essence of moralism is apparent in both -- the belief that we can achieve righteousness by means of proper behavior.

The theological temptation of moralism is one many Christians and churches find it difficult to resist. The danger is that the church will communicate by both direct and indirect means that what God expects of fallen humanity is moral improvement. In so doing, the church subverts the Gospel and communicates a false gospel to a fallen world.

The Gospel is not "come be a better person and save the environment while doing so." The GOSPEL is "come die to yourself and self-wrought mortification and put your trust in Jesus, that you might truly live." Rob Bell denies this gospel and thus denies Christ.

He also denies God's sovereignty and omniscience:

Q: What have you learned from thinking about suffering?
A: For a lot of people, dominant questions center around, ‘Why is this happening? Why me? Why now?’ Unfortunately, the religious voice often enters into the discussion at an inappropriate time – ‘God just planned this.’ Really? Your God planned this, not mine.

This is just more of the Open Theism that is so rampant among today's Christians. "God doesn't control every little detail, He just adjusts to changing circumstances on the ground." Deism is what I call it. Or, as Phil Johnson says in his post:

Bell has no agenda to "restore the true meaning" of the term evangelical, much less encourage a revival of true evangelical belief. In fact, Bell has made a career of attacking historic evangelical convictions—laying siege to the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the wrath of God against sin, the authority and perspicuity of Scripture, the necessity of the virgin birth, the coherence of the biblical testimony about the Resurrection, the exclusivity of Christ, and whatever other historic Christian doctrines Bell finds politically incorrect.
...
If any popular figure "in the evangelical movement" (or on its copious fringe) deserves the label "heretic," it is Rob Bell. The guardians of evangelical politeness don't like that kind of candor, but when a secular newspaper like The Boston Globe is publishing pieces implying that the best, most promising alternative to right-wing civil religion is a mish-mash of Open Theism and performance art—and that whatever "evangelicalism" is, it must be one or the other of those two abominations, it's time for people with historic evangelical convictions to speak up clearly and make the biblical message heard again.

----------
Here's a bit more from pastor-blogger Jared Wilson. The highlights:

The problem with Bell's definition [of evangelical] is not that it outlines a practical faith or that anything he's highlighting is bad or wrong, only that what he outlines contains no object of faith and highlights work to do rather than work completed. And I don't know about you, but work completed is always better news than work undone.
...
Jesus doesn't need you or me to be embarrassed for him or his followers. He doesn't need our help. We don't have to butter people up before we bring him out. He's not a time share or Amway or something.

If I get hit by a bus just after preaching a Jesusless exhortation to hold hands and be sweet to change the world with positivity, you have my permission to wish the bus had hit me before I preached.

Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! And woe to you too, Rob Bell.

Yesterday, Tony Jones posted this sad statement on the shape of the Emerging Church. Sad in that it looks like there is little that now separates it from all of the other dying liberal American churches, or for that matter, Unitarian Universalists. Upon reading it, I immediately thought of Titus 1:15-16. One has to be incredibly spiritually warped to deny what God says clearly yet infer where there is no warrant. Reading the entire Bible as a discourse on human sexuality is a disturbing hermeneutical method, to say the least.

I've been thinking and saying that 2009 would be the year in which the Emerging Church would cease emerging and in fact shrivel up and die. I've seen some signs that evangelicals are tired of talking about it and want to just move on with more important things like living out the Kingdom. Furthermore, in the past few months, the Emergent leaders have begun to fully display their orthodoxy after years of avoiding any straight answers. In response, many of those Christians who had enjoyed a blissfully ignorant flirtation with the movement came to the realization that what they were involved in had some huge problems after all and perhaps resembled a cult more than a church. So, now that the lines are drawn in the sand and the EC rules for joining their club are actually in writing, play time is over. Plus, the Emerging church has never been about evangelizing the lost and the unsaved. Rather, it's been about gaining converts from within the Christian world (particularly those with fundamentalist pasts). That's a well that dries up eventually.

Apparently, this guy agrees that the death knell is ringing for the Emerging Church. He gives some reasons for its demise:

Tony Jones received quite the response to his denial of penal substitution (which he then backed off from in subsequent posts). In response, he made a few subsequent posts to defend himself and clarify his position on the matter. More accurately, he either changed his mind since Friday or, like a good postmodern, isn't willing to deny something even though he doesn't find it true or biblically accurate.

Yesterday, on Doug Pagitt's radio program, Pagitt and he further discussed this issue and specifically "cul-de-sac Calvinistas" (to use their term) who are on a dead end street of Christianity or something along those lines. Pagitt is actually the more intellectually honest or informed of the two. While Jones claims that the "New Calvinists" are just a small sect of Calvinism and that the larger, "true" movement of Calvinism wouldn't agree with the new guys on the block (like Piper, Driscoll, etc.), Pagitt disagreed and acknowledged that all Calvinists would affirm penal substitution atonement (PSA). That said, Pagitt is even more resolute in his dislike of PSA than Jones, even calling it something worth teaching against because it is "dangerous" to Christianity. So basically, Pagitt believes it's a false teaching. That in itself is quite the revelation: an Emergent claims that there is at least some truth and some lies. In that respect, Jones seems much more postmodern than Pagitt, not wanting to have any certainty about anything. It's an informative (if ultimately saddening) discussion...

Listen here.

UPDATE: For those coming here from Tony Jones' link, his martyrdom is unfairly or dishonestly grasped. Jones: "But because I don't afford the penal substitutionary theory the status of crushing all other atonement theories, I've become the scourge of the Reformed blogosphere." It wasn't for this reason that I (or those other bloggers on his list of fellow "Edict" givers) mentioned him. I have no problem with saying that there are many correct and useful atonement theories. The Bible affirms this view. However, Jones didn't just lower the importance of penal substitution, he flatly DENIED it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For years, the Emergent church leaders (Pagitt, McLaren, etc.) have done their very best to avoid talking doctrine or getting nailed down on any theological positions. But so far in 2009, it appears that they're turning over a new leaf. For the latest example, Tony Jones published this blog post on Good Friday. And it's not pretty...

One key to my understanding of the crucifixion is the beginning of Jesus' ministry. At about the age of 30, Jesus arrives at the Jordan River and is baptized by his cousin, John. He then retreats into the wilderness where, after a 40-day fast, he's tempted. Really tempted. That is, the result of Jesus' interaction with "the tempter" was not foreordained. Nor did Jesus know that he was divine in such a way that he wouldn't cave in to the temptations before him. Had Jesus been cognizant of his divinity, he would not have been truly tempted.

Some people today may find it compelling that some Great Cosmic Transaction took place on that day 1,980 years ago, that God's wrath burned against his son instead of against me. I find that version of atonement theory neither intellectually compelling, spiritually compelling, nor in keeping with the biblical narrative [emphasis mine].
...
Instead, Jesus death offers life because in Christianity, and in Christianity alone, the God and Creator of the universe deigned to become human, to be tempted, to reach out to those who had been de-humanized and restore their humanity, and ultimately to die in solidarity with every one of us. Yes, he was a sacrifice. Yes, he was "sinless." But thank God, Jesus was also human.

The hope he offers is that, by dying on that cross, the eternal Trinity became forever bound to my humanity. The God of the universe identified with me, and I have the opportunity to identify with him.

Today, and every day, I hang with him on that cross.

Rather than post it in its entirety on here, I will give the link to a recent article I wrote for the Zeal for Truth blog. There is some good discussion in the comments area. All similarities in my questions to those posed by Bryan McWhite on his blog are purely coincidental.