Concerns Regarding the Emerging Church Movement? Part 2

Approach to the Culture

The Emergent/Emerging Church won’t state clearly what they believe. Saying that Jesus didn’t have a mission statement is ridiculous. He did, namely what is revealed in the authoritative Word, the Bible. And there are a lot of things that the Bible teaches that are covered throughout the entire thing that need to be clearly stated because it would be easy for people to incorrectly interpret what the Bible says. I know I have done this myself!

In order for something to be true there has to be a set of absolutes. Like this is a car...so saying this is a car would be true. This isn’t something that found it’s beginning in Modernism as the Emergent/Emerging Church teaches.

In my last post LeRon Shults said this:

“Why would Emergent want to force the new wine of the Spirit’s powerful transformation of communities into old modernist wineskins?”

He couldn’t have given a better opportunity to segway into what a great theologian stated in 1913 in response to Modernism taking over the older Victorian philosophical approach to culture and theology. Check this out and judge for yourself if what they were proposing sounds vaguely familiar to LeRon’s statement above even though it was said almost 100 years ago!

(In the following quote Warfield is speaking from his opposition's perspective.)
“[These] are times of of transition. The Victorian [Modern] age is gone; and the assumptions on which Victorian [Modern] religion was built up have been dissipated. What was thought to be the bed-rock has become shifting sand. A new world has come into being, a new world which is asking questions. The repetition of old answers can serve no purpose. New answers must be framed, and these answers must be couched in the 'terms of modern [postmodern] thought.'…[Young men of this age] think in other terms; they must at least attempt to express what they think in the terms of the though-world in which they live. And, indeed to be perfectly frank, if Christianity cannot be expressed in terms of this new thought-world, Christianity is doomed. Men of the time are under the stress of a great obligation, therefore, at least to attempt to pour the old wine of Christianity into the new bottles of modern [postmodern] thought.” (Emphasis added, and I put in brackets some application to more contemporary terms.)

B.B. Warfield in a critical review of a book called “Foundations. A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought.” The works of B.B. Warfield Volume X, pg. 320