Conversing with the Emerging- Part 3

In general, the ECM is marked by its uncertainty about Scripture, its lack of clarity surrounding Scripture and meaning, its unwillingness to accept the clear teaching of Scripture, and its overall ambivalence towards absolute truth statements as found in Scripture and formalized doctrinal statements as articulated from Scripture. This attitude regarding the Word of God is the prevalent one throughout the history of the church as it has battled attacks from within.



"The entrapment of the gospel by the culture is not a relatively new phenomena in the history of the church. It is much older than the capitulation of confessional churches that went on during the Enlightenment."1 The early church fathers have fought these battles to preserve the integrity of the gospel and a right understanding of the person and work of Christ in the face of internal pressures to accommodate the truth for the sake of cultural appeasement and unity at the expense of truth. Thus, we have preserved for us the majesty of the creedal statements as produced by the great church councils of the past.



Robert Shindler, a minister and friend of C. H. Spurgeon noted a similar pattern of apathy to apostasy starting with the early Reformation. It begins the same when solid men with good intentions grow careless in defending the faith. They begin to stress moral principles and minimize the central tenets of the gospel. When this happens the next steps are predictable and always dangerous. "The next steps always involve questioning or redefining the atonement, softening the difficult parts of the gospel, balking at the exclusivity of Christ—and ultimately putting every vital truth of Christian orthodoxy up for grabs."2






1Gary L. W. Johnson and Ronald N. Gleason, Reforming or Conforming (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2008), 221.
2Ibid., 223.