Emerging Stuff: The Revised Edition

If.
Then.

These two words make up one of the stronger tools in the English language (as well as many other languages, as a matter of fact) and are used to create what's called a “conditional sentence,” implying that the occurrence of the second half of the sentence is contingent on whether or not the first half takes place.

• “You will often run in, in religious communities, in faith communities, to the idea “if you would just repent, then God would...”
• “For the first Christians, repentance was never 'if you would just do these things, then God would do these things'. It was 'do you understand what God has done?'”
• “Repentance was never trying to get God to do something because God has already made peace with all things.”

On the surface level, all of that stuff sounds fantastic. If you look at it closer though, it's pretty far off base.

The man's name in the video is Rob Bell. He is seen here in a clip from his recent tour “The Gods Aren't Angry.” He's gotten pretty popular lately through his Nooma videos and his Zondervan-sponsored “Everything is Spiritual” tour. Although he doesn't actually call himself an emergent, Rob Bell's doctrinal viewpoints are very similar to the those of Brian McLaren, one of the members of the board of directors for the organization “Emergent Village.” The emergent village is the large umbrella organization for what has become known as the “emergent church.”

I'll go ahead and say it...the emerging church looks pretty enticing to my generation. It's edgy. It's different, nonconformist. Andy Crouch said it best in Christianity Today when he wrote the article “The Emergent Mystique”:

"Gentlemen, start your hair dryers--not since the Jesus Movement of the early 1970s has a Christian phenomenon been so closely entangled with the self-conscious cutting edge of U.S. culture. Frequently urban, disproportionately young, overwhelmingly white, and very new--few have been in existence for more than five years--a growing number of churches are joining the ranks of the 'emerging church.'"

Like the video clip, emergent theology sounds pretty good on the surface. If you quickly listen to the short segment above, it sounds a lot like the grace preaching that we know and love. Listen a little bit closer though and you find a drastically different view on what the death of Jesus really means. Here are some more statements from nationally prominent emergent leaders Brian McLaren and Rob Bell:

"I don’t believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many (not all!) circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish contexts … rather than resolving the paradox via pronouncements on the eternal destiny of people more convinced by or loyal to other religions than ours, we simply move on … To help Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and everyone else experience life to the full in the way of Jesus (while learning it better myself), I would gladly become one of them (whoever they are), to whatever degree I can, to embrace them, to join them, to enter into their world without judgment but with saving love as mine has been entered by the Lord (A Generous Orthodoxy, 260, 262, 264)."

-Brian McLaren, More Ready Than You Realize

When I hear this, I feel like I'm being told that it's ok to put Jesus in a pantheon. I feel like I'm being told that the differences of eternal destiny between Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam don't really need resolution; all they need is to add a little bit of Jesus in and everything will be fine. Now, this is just one guys opinion, but I don't really think the messages of Jesus, Gautama, Muhammad, and the Vedas are very compatible. If the Jesus that you worship fits in with these guys, chances are you're not really worshipping the Jesus of the Bible.

"What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archaeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births?...

What if that spring were seriously questioned? Could a person keep on jumping? Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live? Or does the whole thing fall apart?”

-Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis

Rob has a reason for asking if we can keep jumping. In fact, there's a whole chapter in his book called “Jump.” Rob makes an analogy. If Christianity were a trampoline, we could imagine our doctrinal points, our theology as the springs. These springs are orthodoxy. Our ability to actually live out the faith is the membrane, the springy part. The bouncy part is orthopraxy. According to this analogy, it's possible to insinuate (which Bell does) that a couple of springs can be removed and the trampoline will still function.

I love Mark Driscoll. He's one of my favorite pastors. I heard him say something in a sermon the other day that went something like this. There have been lots of great, brilliant, theologians throughout history. You've got your Martin Luthers, your John Pipers, your Jonathan Edwards. And then you've got the random guy who walks into church on a Sunday morning in 2009 and announces that he's figured out some great theological conundrum. We'd probably laugh at him. Mark's absolutely right. There are just some things that we don't understand. It's because of these things that we don't understand, these passages that we interpret to mean different things, that we have different denominations. We may disagree on the small things, but to be a Christian, you have to agree on the big points. The big points are things like the sinfulness of humanity, the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, the grace of the Father in sending Jesus, the Resurrection. Things like that.

Some things just aren't worth arguing over and it's just more productive to not fight with each other over them. The big points don't fit into that category. Do you have communion every time you meet, or do you do it in intervals, or do you just do it every so often? Not a big deal. What if the virgin birth never really happened and it was just made up to make the story more appealing to the current audience? That is something worth fighting over. If Jesus wasn't born of a virgin, then Jesus is a descendant of Adam and is still under the curse. If Jesus is still under the curse, then he is still subject to human sin nature. If Jesus is still subject to fleshly sin nature, then he would have sinned. If he sinned, then he is no longer an acceptable sacrifice for our sin and our faith is in vain.

"I believe people are saved not by objective truth, but by Jesus. Their faith isn’t in their knowledge, but in God."

-Brian McLaren

This is another big idea in emergent theology—Postmodernism, the idea of relative truth. Basically, truth that isn't even really truth at all, truth that isn't absolute. What may be true for one person isn't necessarily true for another. Everything is relative. The problems with this point of view are pretty obvious when you put Postmodernism up against scripture:

• Scripture is the Word of God.
• Jesus is the living embodiment of the Word of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” John 1:1-5
• The Word contains all the prophecies about messiah, including the prophecies about the virgin birth: “Therefore the Lord Himself with give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Isaiah 7:14
• Jesus said that God's Word is truth: “Sanctify them by Your truth. You word is truth.” John 17:17
• If Scripture is the Word of God, Jesus is the living Word, and the Word is the truth, then Jesus is Himself the truth: “Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.'” John 14:6
• Jesus is THE truth.

Saying that we aren't saved by truth means that we aren't saved by Jesus, because Jesus is truth. Our faith depends on us knowing the reality of who Jesus really is: the Son of God, the Living Word, Immanuel, the Truth, the Sinless Messiah, born of a virgin and fulfillment of all the prophecies concerning Him. If He were to not fulfill even one of them, then He is no longer messiah and is no longer capable of saving us from our sins. Our faith would be in vain. Saying that being a Christian is possible in the absence of the virgin birth just doesn't work. It destroys who Jesus is and therefore destroys the Gospel. On several occasions Jesus asked people who they said He was. Knowing who He is, knowing His identity, is crucial to our salvation.

The general idea behind Bell's speech “The Gods Aren't Angry” is this: for thousands of years mankind has given sacrifices to various gods because they feared retribution. God sent Jesus to show the people that He was never mad at them in the first place. Now, armed with this new knowledge, mankind can go back to the peaceful relationship they should have had with Him all along. This view unduly elevates fallen man to a state of holiness and acceptability to God and brings God down to the level of tolerating and glossing over sin, making Him unjust and no longer holy.

God has no tolerance of sin. He's never glossed over sin. Sin has always required the spilling of blood, from the very beginning. When Adam and Eve sinned and were hiding in their nakedness, what did God clothe them with? Animal skin. That death of those animals is the first death of a sacrifice for sin. Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin (Hebrews 9:22). God demands it.

“You will often run in...to the idea 'if you would just repent, then God would...”

There's a reason that that idea seems to pop up a lot. It's in the Bible. And it's pretty much verbatim in John 1:8-10: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.” There's the If/Then statement. Also, in Romans 10:9: “that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” There are several take home points here:

• We have to confess our sins, meaning that prior to salvation through the grace of Jesus' death on the cross, we are in a state of sinfulness, unacceptable to be in the presence of God.
• To say that we don't have any sin makes God the Father a liar, and the Word isn't in is. Remember, Jesus is the living embodiment of the Word.
• Confessing the Lordship of Jesus is a requirement. Believing God raised Him from the dead is a requirement.

With these facts straight, we can be sure of this: Jesus didn't come to let us know we were fine with Him in the first place. We are saved by the Truth: Jesus and His grace toward us. Believing that God only sent Jesus to show us we should have been relating to Him peacefully all along says that we had no sin, which calls the Father a liar. It just doesn't work to see the death of Jesus this way.

“For the first Christians, repentance was never 'if you would just do these things, then God would do these things'. It was 'do you understand what God has done?'”

At first glance, this looks like the doctrine of grace. This looks like endorsement of the belief that we can't do it (salvation) ourselves. In reality, taken in the context of the entire message, Bell isn't saying that we can't do it ourselves. He's saying that the point of the cross is that we never needed to because God didn't see anything wrong with us in the first place. This view of what happened on the cross sees Jesus as no more a gesture of goodwill so that mankind would understand that a lamb didn't need to be killed every time we did something wrong.

Scripture contradicts this as well. Romans says very clearly that we've all sinned, and it also very clearly defines the reason for Jesus sacrifice and what His death on the cross means to us:

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." Romans 3:23-26

Jesus was propitiation for our sins, not just a show that God put on to make us feel good about ourselves. Sin has a price, and it's death: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Jesus died so that God would be able to justify us. Contrary to popular belief, there are a few things God can't do:

• God Cannot Sin.
• “This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.” 1 John 1:%
• God Cannot Tempt.
• “Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone.” James 1:13
• God Cannot Tolerate Sin.
• “Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; Nor His ear heavy that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; Your lips have spoken lies, your tongue has muttered perversity.” Isaiah 59:1-3

God the Father, showing us His grace and mercy, sent Jesus to pay our price so that He could clothe us in righteousness and justify us before Him. If we believe that Jesus died just to show us that God was never mad at the sin in our lives, then we leave ourselves with two options. Either God is not truly holy because He can tolerate sin (which makes Scripture a lie, blasphemes God, and invalidates the bible), or God is truly holy, we had no sin in the first place, and God sent Jesus to prove our own holiness to us (according to John 1:8-10, if we say we have no sin then we make God a liar, which again invalidates His holiness and blasphemes Him). Neither of these approaches work. The only conclusion we can reach about Jesus death from these verses is this: that we were, in fact, sinners before God, in need of a savior because God despised our sin. In His grace, He loved us and sent us Jesus. Jesus was required as payment for our sins, the price of the debt that we could never pay. Through the grace of God by the death of Jesus on the cross, the Father now sees us as righteous when we believe on Jesus because of the shedding of His blood. A transaction occurred on the cross. Our freedom was bought. It was more than just a show.

“Repentance was never trying to get God to do something because God has already made peace with all things.”

This is what Jesus had to say about the effect his coming to earth would have in regards to temporal peace: “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to 'set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law' and 'a man's enemies will be those of his own household'” (Matthew 10:34-36). Jesus said that His presence would cause families to divide of the controversy He would cause. This is true. It happens every day around the world. In some countries, if you accept Christ as Lord, then your family has a funeral for you.

Also in James 4:4-5: “Adulterers and Adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, 'The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously'?”. Our culture, our world today, loves to assimilate things into itself. America itself is built on inclusion. Sometimes, the Christian faith just doesn't mix with the world, and when we concede key points like the virgin birth or the sinfulness of mankind to make our faith seem more plausible or friendly to the world, God is not at peace with that. To befriend the world is to make an enemy of God. Some things are just not flexible. Some things are absolute.

“He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.” John 3:36

Think back to an earlier mentioned verse: Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. When you believe in Jesus, you have the Life; you have Him now. Our soul is redeemed already and we just wait for the redemption of our bodies when He returns. Our corrupted bodies may die, but our soul already has the eternal life that God promised us if we believe in Jesus. We presently possess that. Inversely, if you don't believe in Jesus, the present tense still applies; the wrath of God currently abides on you. Think back to the passage from Isaiah. Sin has caused God to hide His face from us, to turn away because of the blood and iniquity on our hands. The wrath of God is the absence of God's help and intervention, the turning away of His face from us. Jesus pays for our sins when we believe and, through His grace, closes the gap of separation between God and us that our sin created.

Truth is important. Knowing who Jesus really is, why He really died, and what really happened when He did is important. It's so important that it determines the validity of what we call “Gospel.” The views put out by the emerging church don't always line up with what scripture says about who Jesus is and what He did, and that's why I've written this.