F4F | The Death of Emergent Solomon's Porch

Fighting for the Faith

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Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith. My name is Chris Roseborough. I am your servant in Jesus Christ.

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This is the channel that compares what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God. Now, I've been around the block a few times.

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I've been doing apologetic work, polemics, discernment work for at least a quarter of a century, probably a little bit longer.

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All that being said is that I am able to remember actual very pitched battles that were necessary to be waged for the purpose of defending people against false teachers and false doctrine, especially those that had become all the rage that a lot of people were buying into in mass and that was just legitimately permeating through the visible church.

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Most notably was the emergent church movement. I and a handful of others legitimately on the internet were on a daily basis in the front line battles against the emergent church movement and the false theology that they were bringing to bear.

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And unfortunately, they were all the rage. They were the bees knees and the folks in the emergent church movement.

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I mean, they had New York Times op -ed pieces written about them,

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ABC Nightline stories written and broadcast about them. And what was fascinating at the time, the way the messaging was working is that people were legitimately arguing that if your church was going to survive and you wanted it to be around in 10, 15, 20 years, then you are going to have to chuck and get rid of anything that the church has historically done or traditionally done.

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And what you're going to need to do is embrace the new practices and new theology and new philosophy that were being put together by the leaders in the emergent church movement.

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And it was all about a matter of survival. This is how it was pitched. If you want to be appealing to the generation of people that the church isn't appealing to anymore, then you've got to change.

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That was how the message went. Well, sometime before Christmas in December of 2023, the flagship emergent church cohort,

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Solomon's Porch, which was planted by arguably one of the most notable leaders within the emergent church movement, that would be

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Doug Padgett, it had its final service and it's now no longer a thing.

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It has, as a congregation, died. Which then kind of begs the question, were the people who were arguing that everybody needed to change and be like what the emergent church was and had become?

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That was all about survival, remember? Well, they became extinct.

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They became irrelevant rather quickly, I would note. And so, what we're going to do on this installment of Fighting for the

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Faith, we're going to listen to a recent interview on Homebrewed Christianity on their

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YouTube channel with Doug Padgett and Tony Jones. And if you've never met these fellows or you've never even heard of them,

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I would note that's probably because you're young. But we older folks who've been around. I still have the wounds, the battle scars, and the stories that I can tell in fighting these fellows and why they needed to be fought.

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And going back and doing a little bit of a postmortem regarding this, I think is vital because Christians are prone to fads, just like they were two decades ago.

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They're prone to them today. I would note the whole demon slayers thing. No one's going to be talking about the demon slayers in 10 years.

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They're not going to be around. They're not going to be a thing. There'll be a new crop of different things and a different theology and a different era that's going to be raging through the church at that time in 10 years.

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But we'll all be looking back and going, you guys remember Isaiah Saldivar and Vlad Savchuk and Alexander Pagani?

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Oh yeah, I remember those. Where are they now? That's how this is going to go. But I'll explain to you along the way biblically, what are we supposed to do when things like this show up?

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And I'll give you some arguments against the postmodernity and the emergent church movement along the way.

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But it should be an interesting episode just due to the fact that the emergent guys are working on a historical podcast, going back through and historically documenting the movement.

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But I would note that the homebrewed Christianity guys who are producing that podcast haven't called me up or sent me an email inviting me to talk about my participation, at least historically in opposing the emergent church movement and why

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I did, because that's actually part of the narrative. But alas. So I'll have to tell you part of the story here now.

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So let's whirl up the desktop. And here's my web browser. Here's Trip Fuller.

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And from a recent installment of Homebrewed Christianity, which kind of tells you a little bit about their view about how theology works.

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You can concoct and homebrew your own theology. No, you can't, and I'll explain why. But let's listen as he introduces this episode of his

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From the Homebrewed Christianity podcast. And then we'll listen to a couple of things along the way.

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Today on the podcast, we have a special episode. We have a return. Return. 1 ,600 episodes ago, there were these two individuals that joined the podcast,

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Doug Padgett and Tony Jones, and they are back. They are back, and we are going to have an amazing conversation, one that really is grounded on the fact we've been friends a whole, whole long time.

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And here's why. Doug Padgett was part of the emerging church movement, integral in organizing and launching it, and is part of that whole movement.

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His home church that he planted, Solomon's Porch, played an integral role. It's also the church Tony ended up going to and was a part of for quite a while, and just a few weeks ago, it had its last worship service.

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And I thought, that is a conversation worth having. Yeah, it is, especially considering the fact that everybody back two decades ago was saying, if your church wants to survive, they need to adopt these practices and become like Solomon's Porch.

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If you haven't seen video of Solomon's Porch, let me see if I can show you at least some video.

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This is taken 10 years ago. This is what Solomon's Porch looked like, and Doug Padgett would preach kind of in the center here, out here, where normally the pews would be, and would preach in the round, if you would.

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But just to kind of give you an idea of the vibe of the place. Let's take a look. Yeah, I mean, it looks like one of those, you know, when the

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Beatles went to India, kind of thing. You know, just really a weird vibe altogether.

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But this was cutting edge stuff, you know, 17 years ago. But again, they're no longer a thing.

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So, let's go forward then in the podcast. Actually, before we get to this part,

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I want to go on a little of an excursus here, okay?

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Now, if you're not familiar with the emergent church movement, and what was, you know, kind of how philosophically what was going on, kind of ticking under the hood.

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So, we can take a look at something like Brian McLaren's book, A New Kind of Christianity, Generous Orthodoxy.

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But this was a book that kind of came out early on. And the name of it was

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Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? And this was by James Smith. And the subtitle was

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Taking Derrida, Leotard, and Foucault to Church. Derrida, Leotard, and Foucault, these were postmodern philosophers.

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And postmodernism is not a friend of Christianity at all. It is a wicked enemy of Christianity.

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And so, the basic idea that was happening was, is that they were looking at the fact that there were a lot of Gen Xers, and I don't even think

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Millennials were old enough at this point to really be a demographic that people were, you know, looking at as far as, you know, their church participation.

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If there were Millennials in churches, it's because their parents made them be there. But all that being said, so they're looking at the

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Gen Xers going, why aren't the Gen Xers, you know, attending church in the same proportions as the boomers did and the

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Gilded Age folks before them? Well, and so, they basically came up with this idea. Well, they've been heavily influenced by postmodernity.

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And so, we need to rework Christianity in a way that makes sense to a postmodern mind.

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This was the argument. And so, Jones and Padgett and these guys, they were ardent students of Derrida and Leotard and Foucault.

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Just listen to this portion of the interview, because I want to point something out here. I know,

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Tripp, your audience includes a lot of, you know, Millennials who probably really identify with the deconstruction movement, the exvangelical movement.

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Of course, those were not really—we use the term deconstruction a little bit, but it was because we were all reading Jacques Derrida and Jack Caputo was like one of our guys who came to our events and stuff.

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So, no, he said we were all reading Derrida and Caputo and, you know, in this book that was promoted at the time,

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Taking Derrida, Leotard, and Foucault to Church. Here's the issue. These are philosophers, and they were the ones who created language deconstruction.

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I would actually say they didn't really—they didn't invent it. They reignited the concept of language deconstruction, which was legitimately pioneered by the philosophers that brought us

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Nazism. I'm not making that up. If you haven't heard my lecture from 2011 on, you know, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated into the community,

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I make those connections between the postmodern philosophers and the

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Nazis. It's a fascinating connection. But all that being said, let's take a look at a biblical text in this regard.

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Colossians chapter 2. God the Holy Spirit, through the Apostle Paul, gives us a command.

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See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy. No one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

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Yeah, so you're going to note something here. We have a direct warning about being taken captive by philosophy.

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And at the time that the Emergent Church came out, everybody was talking Derrida, Foucault, and a whole host of other postmodern philosophers, and how we need to embrace their language deconstruction, and change, and modify, and reform the church to make it relevant to a postmodern mindset.

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That was the claim. But Scripture orders us to not be taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world.

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And I would note, if you know your philosophers, then a good way to describe what happens in philosophy is that every generation of philosophers that comes up, they engage in something called philosophical patricide.

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They kill the fathers. And so, you know, philosophies come and go, and the reason why they come and go is because they come in vogue.

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You kill the philosophers that came ahead of you, at least rhetorically, and then you take your place as the preeminent philosophy, and that lasts all of a day or two.

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And then the generation that you taught philosophy to, they come and they kill you, and then they take your place.

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Fascinating how that works. But we're specifically warned in Scripture about not being taken captive by philosophy.

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And I would note, you cannot take Derrida, Leotard, and Foucault to church, because taking their language deconstruction into church results in the destruction of the language of Scripture.

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And I would note, if you want to get an idea of how bad the fruit is of these postmodern philosophers, this article in Wikipedia might be helpful.

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It's talking about the French petitions against the age of consent laws in France.

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And so, this is in 1977, and in May of 1977, these petitions to get rid of the age of consent, which would have been a boon for perverts, best way

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I can say it. So, let's take a look at the names of some of the prominent

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French intellectuals who signed this petition in May of 1977 to get rid of the age of consent laws.

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So, important signatories in May of 1977 included

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Michel Foucault. It included Jacques Derrida.

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You're starting to see a thing here. If your philosophy is noted for its –

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Jean -Paul Sartre is here as well – if your philosophy has as one of its fruits the removing of the age of consent laws that protect children from sexual predators, something wrong with that philosophy.

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It doesn't mix with Christianity. It's not supposed to. Again, the scriptures tell us that we are not to be taken captive by philosophy.

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Listen again to what Tony Jones here says. Angelical movement.

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Of course, those were not really – we use the term deconstruction a little bit, but it was because we were all reading Jacques Derrida, and Jack Caputo was one of our guys who came to our events and stuff.

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But I think – So, these guys were like carrying the virus of postmodernism and language deconstruction and calling it the importance of being relevant.

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And I would note that the video we saw from Solomon's Porch, I don't think anything could be more postmodern than the way things were set up at Solomon's Porch.

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But again, two decades ago, everyone was saying you needed to listen to these guys and do what they're doing if you want your church to survive.

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And so, let's listen to how they discuss some of their history. Here we go. That's publicity.

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And I think that if the story in American religiosity right now is people leaving organized religion, leaving the church, whatever, at the time, we got media attention in the emergent movement because Doug and the others who were leading

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Solomon's Porch were doing such innovative things. And they lent themselves to florid prose in the

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New York Times and still photos of like, this isn't your grandmother's church.

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Headlines like that. A lot of those kind of things. And he's not exaggerating.

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These guys were like rock stars. And, you know, the world was paying attention to him.

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Watch this. This is from 17 years ago. This is a Nightline story about the emergent church.

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Nightline continues from Times Square. Once again, Martin Bashir. Now to finding

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God a whole new way in the North country. Churches are always looking for novel approaches to bring young people into the fold.

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But a brand new breed of church is pushing the envelope in a whole new way. In our series, Faith Matters, ABC's Laura Marquez reports from the

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Twin Cities in Minnesota. These are all the things we've come to expect from a religious service.

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Faith, reverence, and rock and roll. That's what you get at Spirit Garage in Minneapolis along.

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Note here, 20 years ago, this was not standard stuff.

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With earplugs if you want them. One of our taglines here is come to a church that feels more like Saturday night than Monday morning.

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The setting resembles a coffee house more than a church. And in the serious world of religion, Spirit Garage has a sense of humor.

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For instance, on the stage that fills in for an altar, there's a radial tire in place of a regular evergreen advent wreath.

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It's kitsch. People love it. So, you know, maybe twist or turn things just a little bit here and there. Give it some new life and some new meaning.

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When, you know, oftentimes some of these symbols and things just don't really connect. We want to try and take that which is old and that which is now and kind of try and mash them together a little bit.

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I've always felt uncomfortable in traditional churches. So I was seeking something that wasn't the norm when

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I started. Growing up in the traditional church, the comfort level was familiarity of the music of the liturgy. Not so much that I felt like I really belonged or that I had a real faith there.

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Here, the people are real. The faith is real. The music is, you know, from the heart. My comfort level is higher. Oh, Mary, don't you cry.

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Don't you cry. Spirit Garage is not unique. It's part of a growing movement called the Emergent Church, a loosely connected group of Christian churches rebelling against the cultural war going on in this country when it comes to religion.

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We're looking. OK, and this is Brian McLaren. If you've never heard of him, you're blessed for some kind of a new moral center.

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Brian, we're looking for some kind of a new moral center. And just to give you an idea of the hubris of these fellows, they legitimately were trying to reform the doctrine of the church, not merely its practices.

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And I would note that practice and doctrine actually oftentimes go hand in hand.

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And where you have bad theology, you're going to have bad practice. And so McLaren is here, a spokesperson, talking about the

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Emergent Church very early on in its inception. McLaren is pastor of Maryland's Cedar Ridge Community Church and one of the movement's most active leaders.

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This is an interesting moment because we have been in a religious cold war for so long, polarized between religious conservatives, religious liberals, and those two in many ways define themselves almost in reaction to each other.

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And then there's a whole group of us who are just tired of that polarization. We're tired of it for a lot of reasons. We think that there's some real strengths on each side.

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And so to have to choose one set of strengths and and ignore the other set to us just doesn't make sense.

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We'll be with you and also with you. But how each member of the Emergent Church movement tries to merge those two sides of Christianity varies greatly.

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Spirit Garage, for instance, is sponsored by a mainline Lutheran church. But other... That would be the ELCA. ...have

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no such formal connection to traditional denominations. I look at us as an R &D department of people who are trying to innovate and experiment, make a lot of mistakes,

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I'm sure, but hopefully we'll discover things that can serve the church at large and be of use to the church. An R &D department.

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Now, one of the things that Brian McLaren did very early on, this book put out by Zondervan is about as postmodern as you get, and the name of his book was

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A Generous Orthodoxy. And just listen to the subtitle,

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Why I'm a Missional Evangelical Post -Protestant Liberal Conservative Mystical Poetic Biblical Charismatic Contemplative Fundamentalist Calvinist Anabaptist Anglican Methodist Catholic Green Incarnational Depreciate Hopefully Emergent Unfinished Christian.

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And you read a subtitle like that and you sit there and go, what is he even saying?

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Because you'll note that some of these words, they are... You can't reconcile them with each other.

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They are mutually exclusive. And so what is he doing here? This is postmodernism, you know, where you can just take a little bit of this, you can take a little bit of that, and cobble together and Frankenstein together your own

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Christianity. And that's exactly what he did. And in The Generous Orthodoxy, he talks about how you can be a follower of Jesus and still attend the mosque and be or still be a

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Buddhist. You can be a follower of Jesus in the way of Buddha, just nonsense like this.

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And where do you come up with nonsense like that? From Derrida and Foucault and the postmodern philosophers, you know, the ones who are trying to get rid of the laws for age of consent in France, those guys.

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Okay, that's how you come up with just a completely bizarre thing like this.

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And I would note that, you know, if you want to get an idea of just how rebellious these folks were, let's watch this next clip here.

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From Tony Jones himself, what exactly is, I know it's hard to define, but what is emergence Christianity?

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Yeah, that's a good question. Well, you know, we just had a conference last month that a lot of people came to, and I still think it's interesting that maybe 10 years into this movement of emergence, even the name is shifting, and how people understand its impact on the church is changing.

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Really, in the late 90s, a lot of us who maybe were seen to be heirs of what had gone before, of big suburban megachurches and things like that, just felt like the whole thing that was laid out before us,

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Christianity in America, it really wasn't working the way we thought it should be working.

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And so people came at some kind of... they wanted to kind of reform or rethink the church, and people really came at it from two different avenues.

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Some people came at it from like, the church is broken, we need to fix the way we do church.

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Some people came at it from like, the way we understand the gospel is broken, we need to rethink the gospel.

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I came at it from that latter one, but other people came at it more from like... So we've got to rethink the gospel, you know, the central core doctrine of the

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Christian faith. We've got to rethink that. The method of how we do church, and we all kind of converge at this place of saying, let's rethink the whole thing.

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And so the last decade has kind of been a journey of trying to rethink that. Yeah, so to completely rethink

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Christianity. Here's where a little bit of help from the Scriptures is going to come into play.

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Jude verse 3, Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation,

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I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

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There's no such thing as a rethunk Christianity. There is Christianity, and then there are counterfeits.

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And so myself and others, we were constantly battling these guys and pointing out that this is completely incompatible.

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This whole worldview and this rebellion that they were leading to rethink

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Christianity shows that they weren't teaching the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

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They were concocting their own Christianity and somehow had the hubris to think that they had the ability to do so.

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Another text along these lines, 1 Timothy chapter 6,

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Paul admonishing young pastor Timothy, teach and urge these things, the things that are sound. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our

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Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he's puffed up with conceit and he understands nothing.

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He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicion, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.

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So you'll note the scriptures warn us about those who don't teach the truth, who do not teach what's in accord with sound doctrine.

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And the emergent church movement cannot be said to teach anything in accord with sound doctrine, far from it.

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In fact, again, note here, Brian McLaren's Generous Orthodoxy, another book we've already kind of hinted at this here.

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Brian McLaren back a while ago wrote a book called A New Kind of Christianity.

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And so he's concocted Christianity 2 .0. This is his own creation.

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It's his own thing. And I can tell you, you know, from the interviews I've seen and the things I've seen him say on podcasts since the publication of this book, he legitimately believes that this is what needs to happen, is that we need to rethink the whole thing and come up with a new kind of Christianity.

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His hope was that this book would kind of create a wave of people buying into this new doctrine, this new theology, this new way of approaching things, that it was completely dependent upon the postmodern philosophers,

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Derrida and Foucault and others. Yeah, it's a bonafide mess.

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And Tony Jones himself, he was heavily involved in that too. This is the cover of a book that he wrote quite a while ago.

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The New Christians. The New Christians. Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, written by Tony Jones.

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The New Ones. You know, the ones that have, like, they've just completely put their own thing together.

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It's really legitimately a mess. So you kind of get the idea of just how screwed up this is.

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But if you want to get a further idea of just how screwy this is, one of their pied pipers, a guy who just absolutely was a darling.

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McLaren loved this guy. He made regular appearances at conferences and events put on by Doug Padgett and Tony Jones.

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And that's this fellow by the name of Peter Rawlins. And let me show you an interview with him back in the heyday of the

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Emergent Church Movement done at Calvin University. And this is just mind -bogglingly weird.

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Here we go. Welcome to Inner Compass. I'm Shirley Hoekstra. Many people went to church at one time in their lives, but there wasn't enough in those services or fellowship to keep them there.

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And a new style of church is growing in North America and Western Europe. One that has turned away from many aspects of traditional

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Christianity. So today we're going to talk with one of the prominent authors of the Emergent Church Movement. Join us on Inner Compass.

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Weird stuff. Inner Compass. What does that tell you about where they think the voice you need to be listening to is?

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It's inside of you rather than in the scriptures. From the campus of Calvin College, this is Inner Compass.

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Exploring how people use faith and ethics to guide them through critical issues of today. My guest today is

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Peter Rawlins, philosopher and founder of the Icon Emergent Community in Northern Ireland. His books, How Not to Speak About God and The Fidelity of Betrayal.

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Listen to those titles. How Not to Speak About God and The Fidelity of Betrayal.

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I mean, let's talk about the flames of snowflakes. Let's, you know, it's weird stuff like this is all this postmodern mumbo jumbo that they were constantly engaging in this language deconstruction and then taking two opposite things, sticking it together.

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And they sounded so profound, but it was just nonsense. This is pseudo profundity.

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Caused quite a stir in the Emergent Church Movement in the U .S. and the U .K. So we've asked him to come and talk about them and the movement.

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Welcome, Peter. Thanks for having me. So how do we define this Emergent Church Movement? Okay, that's a difficult question.

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And in some respects, there's as many definitions as there are people who are involved in the movement. Isn't it interesting?

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You know, you can define the Christian faith pretty simply. But the

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Emergent Church Movement, it was a moving target. Oftentimes, those of us who were fighting against it, when we would talk amongst ourselves, would say it was like nailing jello to a wall because there was like no backbone to this thing.

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There was like no hard points. And just when you think you understood it, it would morph and move and squish and change definitions.

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It was really weird. I suppose one way of approaching a definition is to say that there is a concern with the emphasis on belief.

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So often churches, what's important is what you believe rather than how you believe it. There's no parable that talks about two rabbis who are arguing.

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By the way, this parable about the two rabbis doesn't show up in Scripture. This is midrash kind of stuff that shows up in the

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Talmud. About a passage in the Torah. And they've been arguing for 20 years and sometimes they change their minds and sometimes they disagree, but they've never been able to find unity.

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And finally, God gets so annoyed by listening to these guys constantly talking about this passage that he says to the angels, I'm going to go down and I'm going to tell them what this verse means.

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Get it over with. Yeah, absolutely. So God comes down, parts the clouds, says to the rabbis, I've listened to you argue for 20 years.

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I'll tell you what it means. And in a rare moment of unity, the two rabbis turn around to God and say, what right have you to come down from heaven and tell us what it means?

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You go back to heaven and let us argue about it. Now, what I love about this Jewish parable is that what's important is not the

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God's eye view, not the right interpretation, but the fact that you're engaged in a dialogue, that you're being Israel, you know, you're fighting, you're wrestling.

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Sound doctrine doesn't matter. What matters is that you're having a dialogue. Yeah, as long as you're in conversation in community, that's all that matters.

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And you sit there going, that doesn't make any sense. It's not supposed to make sense.

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It's supposed to fry your brain so that you no longer hold to what the scriptures teach. I hate to say that, but that's really what's going on here.

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Scripture says this, though, in 2 John, many deceivers have gone out into the world.

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Those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh, such one is the deceiver and is the antichrist.

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So, watch yourself so that you may not lose what we have worked for, but may win a full reward.

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Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ doesn't have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the

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Father and the Son. And if anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting, for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works.

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Titus says it this way. In Titus chapter 1, we get one of the qualifications, if you would, of the pastoral office, and a pastor must be able to hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught.

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Innovation is not welcome within the Christian faith.

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It's the faith once for all delivered to the saints. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and to rebuke those who contradict it.

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There are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers, deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party, and they must be silenced since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach.

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One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, and lazy gluttons.

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This testimony is true, therefore rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth.

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Peter Rawlins is one of these fellows who's completely turned away from the truth. Oh, he found a Jewish parable, which then teaches us it doesn't matter if we have right belief or not.

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What matters is that we're having dialogue and that we're in dialogue regarding these things and God can't come and tell us what we should believe or not believe.

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Is it any wonder that for years, if you go into the podcast archives of Fighting for the

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Faith, I would hold this guy up, Peter Rawlins, and say he engages in some goofy stuff and he does it every single year.

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Here is his video that he recently put out, less than a year ago, called

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Atheism for Lent, and this is a standard practice of his. See if this makes any sense to you. Hello there,

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I hope you're keeping well. I am talking to you from Belfast. Behind me you can see Harlan and Wolf.

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One of those cranes is called Samson and the other is Goliath, and that's where the Titanic was built. I'm also just down the road actually from where the

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DeLorean car was manufactured. So two very tragic events. A good background to promote a third tragic event, and that is

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Atheism for Lent. Atheism for Lent. So what he does every year for Lent, you know, some people give up chocolate, some people give up fatty foods.

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He gives up belief in God, you know, just for the

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Lenten season. Atheism for Lent is a de -centering practice that I've been running now for a couple of decades, and it's a de -centering practice because unlike centering practices that are designed to maybe make you feel more integrated into your world and into your life, a de -centering practice is one that disturbs and disorients you.

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Now, interestingly, of course, so much developed... Which of Jesus's apostles practiced

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Atheism for Lent? Huh?

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Did Jesus teach us to embrace de -centering practices? You know, the

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Scripture says, the fool says in his heart there is no God. And since faith and trust in Christ, who is

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God in human flesh, is the central part of Christianity, being an atheist for any amount of time, you risk your salvation, don't you?

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Element arises from a type of de -centering. You know, you have that, obviously, in physics and the idea that Copernicus de -centered us literally by saying that the earth revolves around the sun.

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You see that, obviously, in biology with Darwin, who de -centered us as subjects. This is pseudo -theology.

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This is not theology. You've heard of pseudo -psychology? This is even pseudo -science.

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Yes, Copernicus gave us the heliocentric universe, the solar system.

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Nope, no problem. Okay, fine. But it wasn't because he was trying to, because he thought that the beneficial experience of having a de -centering practice, it was just based upon observable science, you know, things like this.

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You see this in Freud, who kind of de -centered the idea that we are in control of ourselves with the idea of the unconscious.

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But in all disciplines, you'll find de -centering can be very, very beneficial. So, I've developed a series of de -centering practices for people, and atheism for them is one of them.

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It begins on the 22nd of February, so very soon. And basically, it's designed, you know, there's a number of things going on.

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I won't take too much of your time. One of them is, it is an intellectual course in one way, so you're going to get a lot of material.

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Every day, you get a reflection. And not only do you get a reflection, you get... So, you get like daily devotions during your atheism.

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What is this? Supplemental material, if you want to go deeper into the reflection. So, you're going to experience over 40 different amazing primary thinkers.

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But it's not primarily an intellectual exercise. It's an existential exercise. Oh, okay.

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It's designed to be a type of loss and a type of disruption.

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Now, traditionally, we think of theism and atheism as diametrically opposed, right? That's the popular view.

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Popular view! That's the definition! An atheist denies the existence of God.

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A theist affirms the existence of a deity. Oh, that's just the popular view.

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Oh! On YouTube, you'll see a theist and an atheist debating on either side of the stage.

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But the truth is, theism and atheism have always been wed together in a very powerful dance.

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Wed together in a powerful dance. As a

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Christian, the scriptures are clear. It's the fool who says in his heart there is no

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God. Full stop. In fact, oh man, this is the kind of stuff that just drives me nuts.

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If we go to like Romans chapter 1, okay? The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

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For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. Scripture, God doesn't believe in atheists, by the way.

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For God's invisible attributes, namely his eternal power, divine nature, they've been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made so that men are without excuse.

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For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him. But they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.

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Claiming to be wise, they became fools and they exchanged the glory of immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, animals, and creeping things.

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I would note that atheism is a suppression of the truth and that everybody knows that God exists.

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That's what the scripture says. All of that being said, we are warned against atheism in the scriptures and you cannot be a

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Christian and an atheist at the same time. That's right.

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That's just not a thing. And I don't care what the Theothonatos Movement said all the way back in the 1960s and J .J.

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Althauser's philosophy. J .J. Althauser's philosophy in that Theothonatos Movement of the 60s was a precursor of postmodern emergence.

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And so, you know, there's a good chance like in the next decade or two something like this might make a resurgent comeback.

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And so, you need to be aware of this kind of nonsense because what we're dealing with at its core is an irrational philosophy that legitimately is disconnected from the real world.

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And it's not real. This is not knowledge. This is pseudo -knowledge. This is something completely different.

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And again, the scriptures warn us to not be taken captive by philosophy, including postmodernism.

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So, you listen to the major luminaries of the emergent movement now, and you sit there and go, how did anybody take these people seriously?

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How? Because they were openly leading a rebellion, openly leading a charge to redefine

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Christianity, yet when you read the scriptures, Christianity cannot be redefined. It's the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

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So, you know, I would note here that now no one's embracing the emergent church movement.

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This is the whole enterprise is defunct, and they're writing the history of it now.

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Over at Trip Fuller's podcast, they're going to be doing an entire, you know, multi -episode, maybe 20, 30 episodes of interviews with different people going back through the history of the emergent church movement, because it's dead.

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It's not alive anymore. There is no emergent church movement. Now, like any dandelion, it's spread its seeds into the wind, and it's had an impact on the current rebellion that's taking place in the visible church.

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But as an organized thing, it's not a thing anymore. And those who were saying that we needed to change how we were doing church, or we would die and we would no longer be around because we had to be relevant and embrace what the emergent church was doing,

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I would note the flagship center emergent church, Solomon's Porch, founded by Doug Padgett himself, isn't even around anymore.

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It's gone. And so, I would note, Scripture's pretty clear on this, that we are to preach the

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Word in season and out of season, and we are not to abandon sound doctrine and sound teaching, even when it's not in vogue.

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And we are not to follow cleverly devised myths, nor are we to be taken captive by philosophy.

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We are to preach the Word, and the historic Christian faith once for all delivered to the saints.

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That's what we are to defend, and we are not to be swept away by the pseudo -theology of the day, which is exactly what the emergent church was.

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And so, I'm looking at this going, everybody who held their ground and said, no, we're not going to change what we teach.

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We're not going to change what we do. We're going to continue to be faithful in Word and in practice to Christianity, to the historic

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Christian faith. They've all been vindicated. And everybody out there who said, you've got to change or you're going to die, well, they're the ones who ended up dying.

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You live by the fad, and you die by the fad when it wanes, which is why we're to preach the

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Word in season and out of season. Hopefully you found this helpful. Hopefully it wasn't too convoluted, but I would know anytime dealing with the emergent church movement, it's pretty hard to pin it down, and it is just a complete convoluted mess because it's not real knowledge.

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It's pseudo -knowledge. It's not real theology. It's pseudo -theology, and all the purveyors and prognosticators and all the people, they've been proven to be wrong.

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It's just flat out wrong. It's the churches that are faithful that are the ones that are still around.

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Just keep that in mind. So, hopefully you found this helpful. If so, all the information on how you can share the video is down below in the description.

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And until next time, may God richly bless you in the grace and mercy won by Jesus Christ and His vicarious death on the cross for all of your sins.