The Emergent Failure

“God seems to tolerate pretty much all sins…”

The above quote is from a comment made to a posting on another blog. What follows is my response to that comment.

I don’t know what “bible” you are reading. The Bible I read, the one containing the 66 books recognized from ancient times by the whole church. (Catholic and Protestant alike) clearly teaches that God does NOT tolerate ANY sin. It is the lack of tolerance on God’s part towards sin that made a Saviour necessary; which makes the Gospel necessary (I Corinthians 15). The love of God never over rides God’s intolerance for any and all sin. That’s what the Gospel is; God expressing His love, yet in a way that that maintains and affirms His intolerance of all sin. It only takes one sin to go to hell (James 2:10).

God’s providential dealing with us and our sins while we are yet alive in this world is one thing. How He will deal with those sins in the day of judgement is another. Sin will be dealt with; either at the cross of Christ, or before the judgement seat of God in that last day. Of course if you don’t believe sin is “sin”, you can delude yourself that you are off the hook and all is OK…

There is a lot about Biblical Christianity that an unbelieving world finds “odd”. That’s nothing new. On Mars Hill unbelieving Greeks scoffed at the idea of a resurrection from the dead. We’re not here to make the “odd” “not odd” for an unbelieving world. We are here to bear witness to what God has said in time and space, ie- history, in His objective word. If your post-modern mind rebels at the use of the word “objective”, that is nothing more then an example of your post-modern rebellion against the God who created you. Modernity rebelled against that God too. What you have done in your embrace of Post-modern epistemology applied to Christianity and Scripture is to fail to bear witness against the baals of post-modernity in the same way the old liberalism failed to bear witness against the baals of modernity. To embrace the epistemology of either modernity or post-modernity is a failure of Biblical witness and a compromising with the baals of the age. For me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Modernity has its sophistry against which we rightly protest. Post-modernity has just as much sophistry as modernity. The failure of the emergent movement is the failure to protest that sophistry too. In that failure is the failure of the emergent movement to bear authentic Christian witness, and in some cases to put ones self outside of the Christian religion all together.

Kyrie Eleison!