Recriminations on Every Side

If you'd like to know what the "emergent church" is trying to emerge from, point your ear at some of that movement's harshest critics.

Ligonier Ministries has made this video available for your viewing pleasure. If you would like to hear the entire message, you may purchase it at their website. (Don't worry, gentle readers, content on the good ol' B&D will remain free of charge.)



In the video, after defining post-modernism as a rejection of truth ("all the rest of it is really decoration,") radio host Al Mohler says this: "Today’s liberals were evangelicals yesterday, and what we continually have are break-offs in which people who are the sons and daughters of the ones who rejected the liberalism, you know, bring it in in a different way and in a new form, and… just to be short, let me tell you that if you get the truth-question wrong, you’re going to be abhorrent in every dimension of the life of your church and in your personal understanding of Christianity."

I think Mr. Mohler is making a mistake if he is afraid of an abhorrent understanding of Christianity. What should terrify him is a comforting, rigid understanding rooted in the assumption that Truth is simple and well within our grasp.

In the New Testament, I see a Jesus who is radical, angry, contrarian, heretical and furious with the intellectual and moral pretension of the pious and powerful. I see a Jesus whose messy, confusing message is offensive and upsetting to almost everybody. It is abhorrent. Objectionable. Repugnant.

If you want someone who will tell you what you want to hear and confirm the rightness of your doctrine, Jesus is not your man. He is perfectly unacceptable. He is an utter scandal.

Despite the best efforts of the pious to sanitize and domesticate this scandal, there is a contagious fury burning in those red letters, a fury against everything we stand for and everything that comforts us.

If we follow someone so utterly obscene, our church will be abhorrent and we will remain always among the marginalized. Exactly where we should be.

On this virtual spot I am going to explore that abhorrent Christianity.