Troubling Quotes By Leaders in The Emerging Church Movement

Tony Jones

(The following are quotes by popular Emergent Church Leaders. All these quotes should alarm Bible-believing Christians because of the direct attack on fundamental orthodox Christianity as we've know it since Christ! It is an all out assault on the absolute truths of the Bible and a repetition of questioning what God has said in His holy Word. In fact, it's nothing more than Satan's ole question to Eve: "“Has God indeed said..?" (Gen. 3:1))

• “We do not think this [Emerging Church Movement] is about changing your worship service. We do not think this is about…how you structure your church staff. This is actually about changing theology. This is about our belief that theology changes. The message of the gospel changes. It’s not just the method that changes.”  –Tony Jones (“A New Theology for a New World.” A workshop for the 2004 Emergent Convention in San Diego)

• "I now believe that GLBTQ [Gay, Lesbian, Bisexuals, Transgender, and Queers] can live lives in accord with biblical Christianity (as least as much as any of us can!), and that their monogamy can and should be sanctioned and blessed by church and state." –Tony Jones (http://blog.beliefnet.com/tonyjones/2008/11/same-sex-marriage-blogalogue-h.html#more)

• “I am not sure I believe in God exclusively as a person anymore either…. I now incorporate a pantheistic view, which basically means that God is ‘in all,’ alongside my creedal view of God as Father, Son, and Spirit.” –Spencer Burke (A Heretics Guide to Eternity, p. 195)

• “I don’t think we’ve got the gospel right yet….I don’t think the liberals have it right. But I don’t think we have it right either. None of us has arrived at orthodoxy.” –Brian McLaren (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/november/12.36.html?start=4)

Brian McLaren

• “Ask me if Christianity (my version of it, yours, the Pope's, whoever's) is orthodox, meaning true, and here's my honest answer: a little, but not yet...To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall...But we keep seeking." –Brian McLaren (A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 333)

• “The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can’t be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not" –Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis, p. 32)

Rob Bell

• "A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better...This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear." –Rob Bell (Love Wins, Preface, VI)

• “Ultimately, I hope Jesus will save Buddhism, Islam and every other religion, including the Christian religion, which often seems to need saving about as much as any other religion does.” –Brian McLaren (quoted in The Truth War by John MacArthur, p. 35)

• "Our message and methodology have changed, do change, and must change if we are faithful to the ongoing and unchanging mission of Jesus Christ.” –Brian McLaren (A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 214)

• “What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry’s tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was 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? …Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?” –Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis, p. 26-27)

Dan Kimball

• “The old paradigm taught that if you had the right teaching, you will experience God. The new paradigm says that if you experience God, you will have the right teaching.” –Dan Kimball

• ““Emergent doesn't have a position on absolute truth, or on anything for that matter. Do you show up at a dinner party with your neighbors and ask, 'What's this dinner party's position on absolute truth?' No, you don't, because it's a non-sensical question." –Tony Jones (http://theoblogy.blogspot.com/2005/11/national-youth-workers-convention.html)

• “Let me offer 10 suggestions for reclaiming the Bible for contemporary readers…Drop Any Affair You May Have with Certainty” –Brian McLaren (Adventures in Missing the Point, p. 81-84)

• “For Jesus, heaven and hell were present realities. Ways of living we can enter into here and now. He talked very little of the life beyond this one…” –Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis, p. 147)

Spencer Burke

• “When I say I'm a universalist, what I really mean is that I don't believe you have to convert to any particular religion to find God. A I see it, God finds us, and it has nothing  to do with subscribing to any particular religious view." –Spencer Burke (A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p. 197)

• “What's more, I'm not sure I believe in God exclusively as a person anymore either....I now incorporate a panentheist view, which basically means that God is "in all," alongside my creedal view of God as Father, Son, and Spirit....As I see it, we are in God, here on earth. This is how our relationship is defined. God does not just have to be reached up to; he is hear as the surrounding Spirit." –Spencer Burke (A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p. 195)

• “Anytime someone makes you feel guilty about how you are living, that is part of the old system (pre-Christ).” –Rob Bell (http://www.sfpulpit.com/2007/11/21/rob-bell-the-gods-should-be-angry)

QUESTION: "How would you present this gospel on Twitter?" (posed by Christianity Today to Rob Bell)

• ANSWER: "I would say that history is headed somewhere. The thousands of little ways in which you are tempted to believe that hope might actually be a legitimate response to the insanity of the world actually can be trusted. And the Christian story is that a tomb is empty, and a movement has actually begun that has been present in a sense all along in creation. And all those times when your cynicism was at odds with an impulse within you that said that this little thing might be about something bigger—those tiny little slivers may in fact be connected to something really, really big." –Rob Bell (Interview in Christianity Today: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/article_print.html?id=81195)

Donald Miller

• "If we hold that Jesus wanted us to “believe” certain ideas or “do” certain things in order to be a Christian, we are holding to heresy. In that bar on Hawthorne, I finished the last paragraph and felt a kind of sickness at the thought of whether or not I was telling the truth. But after further consideration, and after rewriting the book, I realized the formulaic version of Christianity was irrational, and for that matter, unbiblical." –Donald Miller (http://www.donaldmillerwords.com/searching.php)

(In response to this, compare with John 8:24 and Matthew 10:38.)

• "That statement, 'The methods change, but the message stays the same' is actually a lie." –Shane Hipps (teaching pastor at Rob Bell's church, in interview with Rob Bell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6QiyElRG3c&feature=related)

• "Maybe some evangelicals should tear the book of Romans out of their Bibles and read a Romans-free Bible for a few years. Then they can paste it back in." –Tony Jones (from his blog at tonyj.net, February 26, 2008)

Doug Pagit

• “God is going to judge the life and repair, and restore and heal the life of everybody in the same way.” –Doug Pagitt (in an interview with Todd Friel on Way of the Master Radio)

Compiled by Charlie CampbellDirector of The Always Be Ready Apologetics Ministry
http://www.alwaysbeready.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=142&Itemid=0