You can't make this stuff up: "All we are saying is give sex a chance!"

Cheesy gimmicks by flamboyant preachers are an unfortunate by-product of "contextualization," the watchword of the "Emergent" crowd and other pop culture evangelicals. In the case of Ed Young, however, the gimmickry is rapidly degenerating from Belgioso to Velveeta.

Evangelical pastor Ed Young believes Christians should practice what they preach, which is why he and his wife Lisa plan to spend 24 hours this Friday in bed on the roof of his church, streaming the marathon bed-in live on the Internet.

No, the Youngs won't be having sex, though that's an important part of the message they're spreading to members of their megachurch in Grapevine, Texas. Instead, the couple will be hosting an open discussion about marriage, relationships, sex and other topics covered in their new book, "Sexperiment: 7 Days to Lasting Intimacy with Your Spouse," which explores ways for married Christian couples to develop and maintain healthy sex lives. 

"Tragically, culture has kicked the bed out of church and God out of the bed," Rev. Ed Young told the Christian Post. "It's time to bring God back in the bed and put the bed back in the church. That's what this bed-in is all about."

Starting at 6 a.m. on Friday, Jan. 13, the Youngs plan to begin streaming their daylong discussion of sex and intimacy on their book's official website, the Christian Post reports.

They're also encouraging audience members to submit questions or discussion topics via Facebook and Twitter as they present their views on marriage, some of which continue to raise eyebrows.

One belief in particular, the "seven-day sex challenge" for which "Sexperiment" is named, gained national attention when the Youngs introduced it to parishioners in 2008.

The couple challenged Christian couples to have sex every day for a week in the belief that open and active sex lives, strengthens the bond between married couples and reduces temptation for pornography and other addictions.

The challenge has certainly proven successful for the Youngs, who have been "happily married" for nearly 30 years, working together to run the church Ed founded. Preaching to a congregation estimated at around 30,000, Young's influence continues to grow as he hosts a weekly television program and promotes the numerous books he's written prior to "Sexperiment."

According to WFAA-TV News Dallas, which conducted an investigation on Young in 2010, the pastor earns a salary worth about $1 million per year and generates untold profits from various intellectual property holdings including books, sermons, television programs, and mailing lists obtained from church marketing websites.

Such an outrageous publicity stunt is as hip as last century's headlines. Pastor and Mrs. Young seem to be taking their cue not from Jesus, but from two gurus in drag.

James K.A. Smith on the new "evangelical" universalism

Old school universalism ("many roads lead to God") has pretty much worn out its welcome among the pantheon of heresies and heterodoxies. But, as James K.A. Smith observes, there is a new form of universalism now emerging (pun intended) and its adherents claim to be of the evangelical persuasion. Unlike their predecessors, these "evangelical universalists" have no objection to the unique claims of Jesus Christ. Their objection is to certain ideas of God which run counter to their "hope" and "imagination."

Let's attend to these two specific sorts of claims. I would note that both of these intuitions are fundamentally anthropocentric strategies--outcomes of what Charles Taylor (in A Secular Age) calls "the anthropocentric turn" in modernity. A couple of thoughts:

1) The "I-can't-imagine" strategy is fundamentally Feuerbachian: it is a hermeneutic of projection which begins from what I can conceive and then projects "upwards," as it were, to a conception of God. While this "imagining" might have absorbed some biblical themes of love and mercy, this absorption seems selective. More importantly, the "I-can't-imagine" argument seems inattentive to how much my imagination is shaped and limited by all kinds of cultural factors and sensibilities--including how I "imagine" the nature of love, etc. The "I-can't-imagine" argument makes man the measure of God, or at least seems to let the limits and constraints of "my" imagination trump the authority of Scripture and interpretation. I take it that discipleship means submitting even my imagination to the discipline of Scripture. (Indeed, could anything be more countercultural right now than Jonathan Edwards' radical theocentrism, with all its attendant scandals for our modern sensibilities?)

2) The "at-least-I-hope" strategy might seem less problematic. Doesn't it just name what all of us secretly desire? Indeed, wouldn't we be quite inhuman if we didn't hope in this way? (Then you get Winner's obnoxious suggestion that any of those who continue to affirm divine judgment are really trying to "guard heaven's gate," taking a certain delight in exclusion, as if they saw heaven as a country club. I won't dignify that with a response.)

But whence this hope? Can our hopes ever be wrong? Let's try an analogous example: I love my wife dearly. She is the best thing that ever happened to me, and our marriage has been an incredible means of grace in my life. I can't imagine life without her; indeed, I don't want to imagine life without her. And I want to hope that we will share this intimacy as a husband and wife forever.

But then I run into this claim from Jesus: "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven" (Matt. 22:30). Should I nonetheless hope that marriage endures in eternity? Should I profess that I can't know this (since Scripture seems to suggest otherwise), but nonetheless claim that somehow hoping it might be true is still faithful? Or should I submit even my hopes to discipline by the authority of Scripture?

The new universalism is not the old universalism. Fair enough. But those of us who reject even the new universalism aren't gleeful about it. We might even wish it were otherwise. But we also recognize that even our wishes, hopes, and desires need discipline.

Unfortunately, the one thing the "new universalists" have in common with the "old universalists" is an aversion to anything remotely resembling discipline. After all, if we're all going to end up in the same place in the hereafter, what's the point of fine tuning our lives in the here and now?

Bell's great leap backward

Of the myriad of critics taking aim at Rob Bell and his new book, Love Wins, one of the most outspoken is Kevin DeYoung, whose detailed critique clocks in at 21 pages in .pdf format. Mark Galli cuts Bell more slack than others, but still finds the trajectory of his theology problematic. Albert Mohler laments the (re)emergence of worn out Protestant liberal theology to which Bell's apparent rejection of the traditional doctrine of hell inevitably leads.

The linchpin statement from Bell's book which seems to be at the root of the controversy could bear some additional scrutiny.

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. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. 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.

The point no one seems to be making is that the heart of Bell's argument is a straw man. The picture he paints of "a select few Christians" spending "forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven" and "the rest of humanity" spending forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better" is, at best, a generalization from a particular or, at worst, a caricature. His problem with the doctrine of hell in general seems to be rooted in a moral conundrum over a particular hyper-Calvinist belief in double predestination. This may explain why the most strident critiques of Bell's work have come from hardcore Reformed types.

There is a considerable chasm between rejecting a particular understanding of predestination and abandoning the doctrine of an eternal hell altogether. But Bell seems eager to leap across that chasm with an alternative to traditional teaching that is a bigger caricature than the one he finds so objectionable. In the end, however, it is a great leap backward; just another example of the "Emergent" crowd shadow boxing against imagined enemies and imagining themselves to be purveyors of "fresh" insights and "cool" ideas which are, in reality, nothing more than recycled heresies just as easily refuted today as they were at Nicea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon.

Pepsi and Doritos sink to new low

H/T to Francis Beckwith.



What makes this particularly rancid is the fact that there are probably a few "Emergent" churches that think would be a "cool" idea!

Andrew Marin is out of his league

Marin: "What? Me accept criticism?"

Robert A.J. Gagnon is a serious biblical scholar who literally wrote the book on the Bible and homosexuality. Andrew Marin (pictured) is an upstart of the emergent persuasion (although he apparently disavows the term) who, like so many of his generation, is not given to accepting rebuke and correction from his spiritual elders. When Gagnon weighed in critically on Marin's book, Love is An Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community, Marin snidely dismissed the critique as coming from a jealous egomaniac. To date, the upstart has not so much as returned the elder's Facebook messages, much less reply substantively to his critique.

All of us who hold Scripture authoritative in matters of life and doctrine owe Gagnon a debt of gratitude for torpedoing what was a nascent movement within the evangelical community, led by Marin and others of his generation and attitude, to abandon biblical principles in favor of a more saccharine approach to "engaging" the "gay community." In a missive released yesterday, Gagnon responds to the public statements Marin and his followers have made in response to the original critique. It is an amusing, if not somewhat painful, examination of the mind of someone who, whatever his original intentions, has quickly descended to the depths of arrogance and immaturity and, with regard to engaging substantively the issue in question, is way out of his league.

Embellishments of the "evangelical" variety

After noting the current flap between Mike Adams and Donald Miller over the latter's alleged embellishments of his autobiography, I was reminded of two other cases of embellishment which do not fit the "oldline liberal" or "Emergent" template. The first is the now infamous case of Christian comedian Mike Warnke, who claimed to have been a former Satanist priest before coming to Christ. In his "autobiography," The Satan Seller, Warnke provided lurid details of drug use and occult rituals, all of which, it turned out, were entirely fabricated. Warnke lied about his background in order to promote himself as an "expert" on Satanism, a hot topic in the evangelical world during the late 1980's and early 1990's. He got exactly what he wanted: notoriety in the evangelical community, becoming a near iconic figure until his lies were exposed in a lengthy article in Cornerstone magazine in 1992.

Fast forward to post-9/11/01. The topic was not Satanism, but Islam. Who better to educate evangelicals than a former Muslim turned evangelical Christian? Enter Ergun Caner, a Turkish-born former Muslim who claimed, among other things, to have been trained to be a terrorist. In the celebrity culture of the Southern Baptist Convention, Caner's star rose rapidly, eventually landing him the coveted office of President and Dean of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. But, like Warnke before him, Caner's claims about the extent of his involvement with the forces of darkness have turned out to be fabrications. After a lengthy -- and controversial -- investigation by a committee of Liberty's board of trustees, he has been removed as "dean" of the seminary while retaining his position on the faculty. Precisely what happened to his title as "president" is somewhat unclear. Amazingly enough, he continues to have his defenders, such as Tim Guthrie of SBC Today, who makes the astounding claim that the result of the investigation was Caner's "exoneration."

These episodes of embellishments of the "evangelical" variety level the playing field a bit with regard to the Adams/Miller kerfuffle. Obviously, autobiographical embellishment is not unique to one side of the theological spectrum. What both sides might benefit from is a commitment to integrity and truth.

Is Donald Miller stretching the truth?

Mike Adams has taken his beef with popular "Emergent" author Donald Miller a step further. In a column last week, Adams critiqued Miller and other leading voices of the "Emergent Church movement" for their general aversion to absolutes. This week, in a column provocatively titled "White Like Lies," Adams singles out Miller for a more specific aversion to a more specific absolute, namely, the truth.

As I was reading Don Miller’s fictional biography Blue like Jazz, I found the following on page 79:

“I was a fundamentalist Christian once. It lasted a summer. I was in that same phase of trying to discipline myself to ‘behave’ as if I loved light and not ‘behave’ as if I loved darkness.”

Some may be confused about the derisive quotes around the word “behave.” Don Miller is using them here to remind us that Christianity is about a relationship, and not about rules. He continues:

“I used to get ticked about preachers who talked too much about grace, because it tempted me to not be disciplined. I figured what people needed was a kick in the butt, and if I failed at godliness it was because those around me weren’t trying hard enough. I believed if word got out about grace, the whole church was going to turn into a brothel. I was a real jerk, I think.”

So when did Don hit his all-time peak of intolerance? It was when he arrived at Summit Ministries, according to his million-selling fictional biography:

“I hit my self-righteous apex while working at a fundamentalist Christian camp in Colorado. I was living in a cabin in the Rockies with about seven other guys, and the whole lot of us fell into this militant Christianity that says you should live like a Navy SEAL for Jesus. I am absolutely ashamed to admit this now.”

The only problem with this story is that it isn’t true. Oddly, Don came back to visit that Christian camp just a few years ago. When he did, he was confronted with his very public and untruthful account his time at Summit Ministries.

In response, Don just said it wasn’t a big deal. He fabricated the story just to make a point. He was confronted privately but was unrepentant, which was not too surprising. Remember that Don thinks Christianity is not about rules. It’s about a relationship with God.

So I guess Don can bear false witness, in violation of the Ninth Commandment, if he thinks it will bring himself and others closer to God.

My personal impression of Blue Like Jazz was that it was an entertaining, if often theologically fuzzy, read. While some of the "fundamentalists" Miller disparaged in the book sounded somewhat contrived and caricatured, I had no reason to believe the stories he told about them and his interactions with them were not based on actual events. Adams makes the astounding claim, apparently confirmed by Miller, that much of Blue Like Jazz is entirely fictional. This casts Miller's work, if not Miller himself, in an entirely different, and most unfortunate, light.

There is nothing particularly wrong with an author embellishing his own autobiography, provided he lets the reader in on his secret from the outset. Had Miller included a disclaimer at the beginning of his book, informing readers that his account of events was intended to be creative and provocative while not necessarily historically accurate, he would have avoided the questions which are now bound to be raised concerning his credibility.

The "Emergent Church" is, as many of its critics have noted, little more than a repackaged version of oldline Protestant liberalism. In that light, Miller's embellishments are perfectly understandable. Protestant liberalism views the Bible as a collection of embellished stories. What harm, then, could come from a few more embellished stories? After all, stretching the truth in order to propagate a larger truth is merely following in the footsteps of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Or do you mean to say you actually believe that stuff about Jesus healing the sick, feeding the five thousand, and rising from the dead?

I was told, by the way, that Miller had posted a response to Adams on his blog, but it has apparently been withdrawn. I hope he offers his side of the story in detail soon.

Mike Adams insults the Emergents (Good for him!)

Mike Adams is not impressed with the leading voices of the "Emergent Church," particularly those who like to write trendy books.

Today, I was reading a book called Blue Like Jazz by a guy named Don Miller. About 100 pages into the book I came across this quote: “I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway?” After hearing the author admit that he didn’t know anything I tossed his book in the trash and lit a cigar. Then I sat down to write this column.

I wish I could say that Don Miller is just another author getting wealthy peddling a watered-down version of Christianity that appeals to people who want a little religion but have no desire to change their behavior. But Don Miller isn’t an isolated case. He’s part of the so-called Emergent Church movement that is making significant inroads among young Americans.

Rob Bell, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a good example of what passes for a leader in the Emergent Church movement. He assumes the position of a pastor, one I’ve always assumed is supposed to lead people to God, without any real idea of where he’s going. He says the following in one of his best-selling “Christian” books:

“Our words aren’t absolutes. Only God is absolute, and God has no intention of sharing this absoluteness with anything, especially words people have come up with to talk about him.”

Heartening, isn’t it? According to Miller, we can’t know anything. According to Bell, we can’t know anything about God because he won’t tell us with things like words. Go ahead and toss your Bible in the trash along with Blue like Jazz. It’s just a bunch of words from a bunch of people.

Brian McLaren, one of the best-selling authors and leaders of the Emergent Church movement, doesn’t seem to have many answers either. He once stated “I am no doubt wrong on many things. I am very likely wrong in my personal opinions on homosexuality.”

That’s weird. The Emergent Church guys pride themselves on being open-minded. But one of their leaders clings to one of his views even after he decides it is “very likely wrong.” That used to be called stubborn, or narrow-minded. Now it’s hip.

Such biting criticism will certainly not go over well with the thin-skinned "Emergent" gurus. But more scandalous (in the eyes of the "Emergents") than the critique itself is Adams' frequent reference to the "Emergent Church movement." As anyone familiar with the Emergent/Emerging/emerging/emergent Church/church knows, the "growing, generative friendship" that is Emergent is not a movement, but a "conversation." Post-moderns would never attach themselves to so modern a term as "movement." That would imply adherence to a universal set of principles or propositions, the very kind of rigidity that Emergents reject out of hand.

For Adams to call the "Emergent Church" a "movement" is to insult the participants in the "conversation."

Good for you, Mike! Keep up the good work!

H/T to Stand Firm

Tooley on Emergent: So wide an emptiness

Add Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy to the list of those not lamenting the demise of the "emerging church."

Is, or was, the emerging church merely a passing fad primarily for bored yuppies smugly unhappy with their conventional suburban churches and pining for a spiritual theater more hip and supposedly more relevant? One Sojourners writer, quoting a blogger, credited emergents for their contributions to "women's issues, conversations about sexuality, environmentalism, anti-foundationalism, [and] social justice." But those "conversations" have been mainly only that. Not for nothing do emergents usually insist they are not a movement but a "community" or an ongoing "conversation."

Brian McLaren himself, in his own short piece for Sojourners, readily agreed with the need to "shift away from white, Western, male hegemony and homogeneity." He also wants to emphasize that while the "the postmodern conversation" occurs in the West, the global South is more interestingly having its "postcolonial conversation." It's not clear exactly what McLaren means by "postcolonial." Now a frequent speaker to liberal Episcopal Church audiences, he almost certainly does not sympathize with global South Christians rebelling against liberal Western church sexual and theological trends.

More revealingly, McLaren noted that "theological conversations about the shape and purpose of the gospel, along with issues of justice -- racial, environmental, and economic -- are far more urgent and important than arguments about what goes on in church services, as valuable as church services are." Himself a Baby Boomer guru for mostly much younger emergents, McLaren has become increasingly a Jim Wallis-type Social Gospel proponent who prefers activism to doctrine. Championing Palestinian liberation and Obamacare have been two of his most recent causes.

Far more biting is a subsequent Sojourners commentary from "urban-monastic" Shane Claiborne, a young author and lecturer popular among college age evangelicals who heads a Philadelphia, almost Quaker-like spiritual center called "The Simple Way." He is an Anabaptist enthusiast who urges his listeners to reject the world through anti-materialism and aggressive pacifism.

Claiborne regretted that the emergent church became "narcissistic, and often became little more than theological masturbation: feels good but doesn't give birth to much." He surmised that overly loquacious emergents like to "talk about talking about theology" and have "repeated some of the mistakes of fundamentalism (only with more tattoos)." Claiborne aptly observed that emergentism seemingly "has no real life or DNA of its own," but is primarily an endless circle of spiritual self reflection. He wonders why so much ink and talk is spilled on so wide an emptiness.

McKnight on McLaren

Scot McKnight weighs in on Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity and finds nothing new.

Brian believes in an old saw—namely, the Constantinian Fall of the Church, the event and era in which the Greco-Roman narrative was developed. In short, this narrative teaches that humans were created in a Platonic, ideal, and perfect world in Eden; then the Fall occurred, which tumbled humans into the Aristotelian and real world of becoming (which is bad). Out of this becoming world, one can either escape or be saved into the Platonic-ideal heaven, or choose eternal perdition in a Greek form of Hades. Brian will later call this the "Greco-Roman soul-sort narrative," by which he means that life in the here and now is about sorting out the saved from the damned. McLaren's soul-sort narrative is a caricature of a narrative that no responsible thinker really believes or teaches in the bald, insensitive, and barbaric ways described in this book. It's a caricature of Romans 5.

The Greco-Roman narrative is directed and determined by a god whom McLaren calls "Theos," who is not that distinct from the Greek Zeus or the Roman Jupiter. Theos is much different from the Hebrew Elohim, the Lord of Genesis 1-12. How? This Theos loves spirit, state, and being, and hates matter, story, and becoming, since, once again, the latter involve change, and the only way to change or move from perfection is downward into decay. "As soon as something drops out of the state of perfection, Theos is possessed by a pure and irresistible urge to destroy it (or make it suffer)," Brian claims. Theos is "perfectly furious" about humans telling stories, because that is "something that should never happen in the world of Theos." There's more: "Theos stands above, holding his thunderbolts ready to strike, ready to melt the whole damned thing down to primal lava, ready to set it all on fire to purge all that is imperfect, so only perfect purified being remains."

This is, according to Brian, "conventional Christian theology."

The Theos-driven narrative is one in which salvation is equivalent to atonement. Justification and redemption and salvation happen "when Theos finds a way to forgive this fallen, dropout, broken, detestable creation for its descent from perfect holy being into pathetic detestable becoming." Because humans are immortal and partake in Theos's essential nature, the damned must suffer eternally while the saved experience God's joy forever.

I kid you not—this is how Brian sums up conventional theology. "This is," he says, "the 'good news' taught by much of Western Christian religion (not all of it, thank God), the religion in which I was raised, in which I have done my life's work, of which I am a part today."

McLaren's "New Kind of Christianity" is more of the same old kind of liberalism

Brian McLaren is at it again. As if we needed any more concrete evidence that the "emergent" guru has jumped the shark, his new book, A New Kind of Christianity, brings his blatant apostasy out in the open for all to see. Kevin DeYoung, at the end of a lengthy review, sums up the essence of "McLarenism."

Well, 6000 words later, what is possibly left to say? Hopefully not much. It would not sadden me in the least if I never talked or wrote about the emergent movement again. I don’t think any of us will be talking about the “great emergence” twenty years hence, let alone a hundred. All that remains is to highlight one final irony.

For all the talk of being new (xi) and at the same time ancient (255), McLarenism is neither. It is old fashioned liberalism. McLaren, despite his historical plundering, has no right to claim he is in [the] tradition of Martin Luther because he finds “sustaining inner strength,” or in the tradition of the Wesleys because “our hearts can be ‘strangely warmed’” (227). This is like saying I’m in the tradition of Ignatius because I have strong convictions. It doesn’t work. McLaren stands in the tradition of Ritschl, Harnack, Rauschenbush, and Whitehead, plain and simple.

Other reviewers have reached similar conclusions. Mike Wittmer devotes considerable space to answering the "ten questions" around which McLaren's book is built while Trevin Wax sees the book as good for the "emergent" movement because it will force others to come clean about their own beliefs. Tim Challies has the best (and likely most controversial) assessment of McLaren himself as one who loves Jesus but hates God.

When all is said and done, however, I believe DeYoung speaks not only for himself but for many others in his desire never to talk or write about the emergent movement again. As the old adage goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. McLaren and his ilk are merely the latest version of the worn out liberalism which first wielded its ugly head about three centuries ago and died its most recent death with the collapse of mainline Protestantism at the end of the twentieth century. The emergent movement wants to breathe new life into this stinking carcass but, thanks be to God, it has already failed in this endeavor.

Introducing Post-Emergence: New blog keeps track of "Emergent" fables

My friend Rafe Spraker has started a new blog focusing on the fables, follies, and other falsehoods of the "Emergent" movement. Be sure to check out Post-Emergence, and note the masthead photo montage, featuring ++Rowan in his druid outfit.

Nothing new in the "New Gospel"

Kevin DeYoung breaks down the four basic components of the so-called "New Gospel."

It usually starts with an apology: “I’m sorry for my fellow Christians. I understand why you hate Christianity. It’s like that thing Ghandi said, ‘why can’t the Christians be more like their Christ?’ Christians are hypocritical, judgmental, and self-righteous. I know we screwed up with the Crusades, slavery, and the Witch Trials. All I can say is: I apologize. We’ve not give you a reason to believe.”

Then there is an appeal to God as love: “I know you’ve seen the preachers with the sandwich boards and bullhorns saying ‘Repent or Die.’ But I’m here to tell you God is love. Look at Jesus. He hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors. He loved unconditionally. There is so much brokenness in the world, but the good news of the Bible is that God came to live right in the middle of our brokenness. He’s a messy God and his mission is love. ‘I did not come into the world to condemn the world,’ that’s what Jesus said (John 3:17). He loved everyone, no matter who you were or what you had done. That’s what got him killed.”

The third part of the New Gospel is an invitation to join God on his mission in the world: “It’s a shame that Christians haven’t shown the world this God. But that’s what we are called to do. God’s kingdom is being established on earth. On earth! Not in some distant heaven after we die, but right here, right now. Even though we all mess up, we are God’s agents to show his love and bring this kingdom. And we don’t do that by scaring people with religious language or by forcing them into some religious mold. We do it by love. That’s the way of Jesus. That’s what it means to follow him. We love our neighbor and work for peace and justice. God wants us to become the good news for a troubled planet.”

And finally, there is a studied ambivalence about eternity: “Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in life after death. But our focus should be on what kind of life we can live right now. Will some people go to hell when they die? Who am I to say? Does God really require the right prayer or the right statement of faith to get into heaven? I don’t know, but I guess I can leave that in his hands. My job is not to judge people, but to bless. In the end, God’s amazing grace may surprise us all. That’s certainly what I hope for.”

All of this may sound appealing, and it is, especially in an age which seems to idolize uncertainty and non-judgmentalism. But it is precisely this appeal that makes the "New Gospel" problematic.

It shouldn’t be hard to see what is missing in the new gospel. What’s missing is the old gospel, the one preached by the Apostles, the one defined in 1 Corinthians 15, the one summarized later in The Apostles’ Creed.

“But what you call the New Gospel is not a substitute for the old gospel. We still believe all that stuff.”

Ok, but why don’t you say it? And not just privately to your friends or on a statement of faith somewhere, but in public? You don’t have to be meaner, but you do have to be clearer. You don’t have to unload the whole truck of systematic theology on someone, but to leave the impression that hell is no big deal is so un-Jesus like (Matt. 10:26-33). And when you don’t talk about the need for faith and repentance you are very un-apostolic (Acts 2:38; 16:31).

“But we are just building bridges. We are relating to the culture first, speaking in a language they can understand, presenting the parts of the gospel that make the most sense to them. Once we have their trust and attention, then we can disciple and teach them about sin, repentance, faith and all the rest. This is only pre-evangelism.”

Yes, it’s true, we don’t have to start our conversations where we want to end up. But does the New Gospel really prime the pump for evangelism or just mislead the non-Christian into a false assurance? It’s one thing to open a door for further conversation. It’s another to make Christianity so palatable that it sounds like something the non-Christian already does. And this is assuming the best about the New Gospel, that underneath there really is a desire to get the old gospel out.

Paul’s approach with non-Christians in Athens is instructive for us (Acts 17:16-34). First, Paul is provoked that the city is so full of idols (16). His preaching is not guided by his disappointment with other Christians, but by his anger over unbelief. Next, he gets permission to speak (19-20). Paul did not berate people. He spoke to those who were willing to listen. But then look at what he does. He makes some cultural connection (22-23, 28), but from there he shows the contrast between the Athenian understanding of God and the way God really is (24-29). His message is not about a way of life, but about worshiping the true God in the right way. After that, he urges repentance (30), warns of judgment (31), and talks about Jesus’ resurrection (31).

The irony of the "New Gospel" is that it is nothing new. Paul's steadfast witness for the true Gospel often flew in the face of a myriad of half-truth counterfeits even in the church's earliest days. The prevalence of a watered-down, milquetoast "New Gospel" which cannot speak a word of redemption and transformation to a dying culture is one of the major reasons why the Manhattan Declaration is such a necessary restatement of the whole Gospel at this point in time. The "Old Gospel" is still the only one that boldly asserts the promise of God to make all things new.