Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Al Qaeda Supports Emergent Church

Over on the blog page of the Brethren Revival Fellowship there is a link to this article in Townhall.com, home to some right-wing "thinkers" like Bill Bennett, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt:

The greatest threat to world peace is radical Islam. If not for the United States, millions more would be suffering under the tyranny of sharia law all over the world. Our Muslim enemies know post-Christian Europe has already lost the will to fight. Africa, Asia, and South America seem to be already lost. Russia, China, and India would rather trade than fight…for now. And the United Nations continues to be irrelevant.

Only the United States, and more specifically, only the conservative, evangelical Christians of America are who stand between radical Islam and their quest for global domination.

If the world is to be saved from Muslim conquest, it will be America who does it. And if America is to be saved, only conservatism can do it. And if conservatism is to be saved, it will be those Bible-believing patriots who do it–those conservative, evangelical Christians who are the bedrock of the American way of life.

Why? Because only Christianity has the intellectual and spiritual horsepower to defeat radical Islam and prevent the world from returning to the darkness of the 7th century. After all, the story of the birth and growth of Western Civilization is pretty much the story of the birth and growth of Christianity. The divide between East and West today, fundamentally, is the divide between Islam and Christianity. Christians and Muslims know this, it’s the secularists who don’t get it–or at least won’t admit it.

That’s why anything that helps to further separate the West from its Biblical roots ultimately weakens the resolve of the West to fight. Anything that helps the ACLU to further de-Christianize America, to further silence the Christian voice like the current hate-crimes legislation or the fairness doctrine, and to further weaken the Church and devalue the Bible as the religious left has done for decades, are things that empower our enemies and weaken our allies.

A post-Christian, post-modern, secular-socialist America will be no match for a radical Islam fueled by petro-dollars and threatening the use of nuclear weapons.

But an America where the church is strong, resolute, and courageous? That’s a different thing altogether.

Which is why al Qaeda supports the emergent church.

The emergent church is an ally in the war against radical Islam–al Qaeda’s ally. Not in the sense they are supplying bullets and bombs to Osama, of course, but in the sense they are weakening our conviction to fight.

If those in the emergent “we’re-a-missional-not-an-institutional” church had their way, American church buildings would be just like European church buildings – empty. And the church, the people themselves, would be so intellectually, morally, emotionally, and spiritually lost, confused and uncertain, that they would be incapable of doing hardly anything more than inviting their Muslim oppressors in for a cappuccino and a good conversation about the sociology of knowledge, the absurdity of propositional truth, and the misplaced certitude of the Muslim metanarrative. All the while, no doubt, nodding in agreement that America probably deserved to die and mumbling something about carbon footprints.

The term “emergent church” refers to a loose association of people who share common values and attitudes toward, well, everything. It’s Christianity for postmoderns who don’t like truth, knowledge, science, authority, doctrine, institutions, or religion. They claim absolute or objective truth is unknowable, that the only “truth” that can be known is rooted in communities of shared subjective experience–the infamous “it’s my truth” of relativism.

And if nothing is objectively true, if no text has a meaning independent of the reader, then the truth claims in the Bible are no more authoritative than the funny papers. Hence, there’s no emphasis on core beliefs, essential doctrines, statements of faith or the institutions built to defend and propagate them–especially the institutional church and its Bible colleges and seminaries.

Bottom line, it’s feelings over thoughts, the heart over the head, experience over truth, deeds over creeds, narratives over propositions, the corporate over the individualistic, being inclusive rather than exclusive, with none of that offensive “in versus out” language, such as those who are “saved” and those who are “not saved,” or even the most divisive of all referents–“Christian” and “non-Christian.”

The emergent church and its allies on the religious left are to Christianity what termites are to wood. They devour it from the inside out, little bit by little bit, and you don’t notice it until it’s too late–unless you look for the droppings...

One has to wonder if this article is linked because the blogger agrees with the content. I suspect he does. One also has to wonder what connection the blogger sees between his Church of the Brethren heritage - we are a peace church afterall - and the militaristic venom falsely labeled Christian here. I challenge anyone to make a connection between anything the gospels tell us about Jesus and what is being said here.

Update: The post has been taken down from the BRF blog.

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