EMERGING APOSTASY

“...There shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies...”

The following quotes are from leaders and well-known supporters of the Emerging Church Movement. The documentation and context can be found in Roger Oakland’s critical analysis of the movement, Faith Undone.

“The emerging church movement has come to believe that the ultimate context of the spiritual aspirations of a follower of Jesus Christ is not Christianity but rather the kingdom of God....[T]o believe that God is limited to [Christianity] would be an attempt to manage God. If one holds that Christ is confined to Christianity, one has chosen a god that is not sovereign....The gospel is not our gospel, but the gospel of the kingdom of God, and what belongs to the kingdom of God cannot be hijacked by Christianity.”

“In my case intimacy with Christ has developed gradually over the years, primarily through what Catholic mystics call ‘centering prayer.‘ Each morning, as soon as I wake up, I take time—sometimes as much as a half hour—to center myself on Jesus. I say his name over and over again to drive back the 101 things that begin to clutter up my mind the minute I open my eyes. Jesus is my mantra, as some would say.”

“I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product. I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity. As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God....I realized that whatever ‘divine revelation’ and the ‘inspiration of the Bible’ meant (if they meant anything), they did not mean that the Bible was a divine product with divine authority.”

“The book of Revelation is an example of popular literary genre of ancient Judaism....[I]nstead of being a book about the distant future, it becomes a way of talking about the challenges of the immediate present. It becomes a book of warnings and promises....If Revelation were a blueprint of the distant future, it would have been unintelligible for its original readers, as well as the readers of all succeeding generations....But if Revelation is instead an example of the literature of the oppressed, full of ever-relevant warnings and promises, it presents each generation with needed inspiration and wisdom and encouragement. In this light, Revelation becomes a powerful book about the kingdom of God here and now, available to all.”

“For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.”

“My goal is to destroy Christianity as a world religion and be a recatalyst for the movement of Jesus Christ....Some people are upset with me because it sounds like I’m anti-Christian. I think they might be right.”

“It has been fashionable among the innovative [emerging] pastors I know to say, ‘We’re not changing the message; we’re only changing the medium.’ This claim is probably less than honest....[I]n the new church we must realize how medium and message are intertwined. When we change the medium, the message that’s received is changed, however subtly, as well. We might as well get beyond our naïveté or denial about this.”