National Association of Evangelicals Asked to “Unsign” the Covenant of Civility

Over at the blog “My Word Like Fire” (link here), John Lanagan has written a short blog post where he asks: Will NAE disavow “Covenant of Civility”? In case you didn’t know, NAE is the National Association of Evangelicals, currently headed by L. Roy Taylor. In no uncertain terms, Lanagan puts him to the point:

L. Roy Taylor,
It is my understanding that you have signed the “Covenant of Civility.” As you may know by now, Assemblies of God General Superintendent George O. Wood has asked that his name be removed from this document.

I respectfully ask that you, as President of the National Association of Evangelicals, do the same.

You see, Brian McLaren and other signatories have added their signature to the document. I applaud Lanagan’s letter written to L. Roy Taylor, and here’s why: Scripturally we cannot support joining hands with those who deny some of the basic tenets of the Christian faith.

I was a musician before I was saved, and I often think of things in musical terms. If two people were singing in unity, it meant that they were singing the exact same pitch or note. If they were singing “in harmony”, it meant that the two notes were not the same pitch, but they complemented each other. Finally, if they were singing in “discord”, or in dissonance, then the two notes being sung would have a rather grating effect.

This is what we have going on when you have people such as the Superintindent of the AoG and the President of the NAE signing a document with the likes of Brian McLaren and others who cannot agree with us on the core tenets of the Christian faith.

Scripture explains it like this:

2Co 6:14-18 (ESV) Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? (15) What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? (16) What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (17) Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, (18) and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.”

I hope that more men will step forward and take their names off such a document. It may seem fruitful from a pragmatic sense to sign such a document, but as Ken Silva has pointed out over at Apprising.org (link here), this will only serve to help those who wish to silence those of us who hold to orthodox Christianity.

This sounds to me like a warmed over version of Catholics and Evangelicals Together. Am I wrong?

Review: Brian McLaren’s “A New Kind of Christianity”, Pt. 1

Brian McLaren (part of the emergent “conversation”) has recently published a new book called “A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith“.

McLaren published the book in 2010 with HarperCollins, and it’s been quite a hit. As of mid-April 2010, it’s currently #484 at Amazon.com for book sales, and #4 in the “Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Christian Living > Faith” category.

Brian describes himself inside the back jacket cover as “an author, speaker, pastor, and networker among innovative Christian leaders, thinkers, and activists.” He also says “here you will find a provocative and enticing introduction to the Christian faith of tomorrow.”

My disagreement starts there. What McLaren presents isn’t an introduction to the ‘Christian faith’ at all. While McLaren may be describing what he thinks faith will look like in the future, he has intentionally mischaracterized much of evangelical Christianity, presenting a straw-man view that modern Christians worship a faulty idea of God that’s derived from the “Greco-Roman” lens. Once McLaren sets up the straw man at the beginning of the book, he proceeds to prop it up and knock it over in each chapter.

Each of the 10 questions gets one chapter of discussion. Yet once McLaren asks the questions, he often dodges direct answers, or using Hegelian dialectic methods, he sets up “thesis/antithesis/synthesis” answers that often employ gross mischaracterizations of evangelicals. He seems to practice rather long-winded exercises in “missing the point.”

This isn’t orthodox Christianity. It’s doubt.

Brian slowly introduces his brand of liberal post-modernistic poison, until by the end of the book the views he expresses are at direct odds with what Christianity believes, all the while calling it “an introduction to the Christian faith of tomorrow.”

I plan over the course of several serialized blog posts to show how Brian’s opinion of the Christianity of the future isn’t a true picture of biblical Christianity, but is instead a picture of wolves running amok in the church.

Just to give you an example of the anger that seems to seethe just below the surface of his book, consider the following:

On page 191 of Chapter 18: “Can We Find a Better Way of Viewing the Future?”, Brian  mischaracterizes conservative Christians, especially those who hold to an eschatology that Jesus is coming back soon with the world being consumed by fire. He seems to reject both ideas as old-fashioned and in the way of the Kingdom work that needs to be done. (Yet both ideas of Jesus’ imminent return and the destruction of the earth are both Biblical: See Revelation 22:20, and 2 Peter 3:12)

Listen to what he says on page 192:

Those of us raised in dispensationalist circles can regale one another with stories about scary “left-behind” sermons, sometimes illustrated through huge and serious wall charts and dramatized in B-rated movies. These sermons often climaxed with warnings about the second coming, when Jesus will return like “a thief in the night” – initiating the “Rapture” when “born-again Christians” will (we were told) be miraculously evacuated to heaven and the rest (includign the children of “saved” parents) will be left behind for a nightmare apocalypse. As a boy of about eight, having come home from school and found the doors locked and nobody home, I once spent nearly an hour sitting on my back porch, deeply dejected and with rising panic, sure that the Rapture had occurred and I was a child left behind. Who knew a third-grader could feel such terror and despair?

To the uninitiated, this all might sound pitiful or laughable, like wild conspiracy theories shared on strange Web sites or middle-of-the-night AM radio. But surprising numbers of mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics have also been thoroughly catechized in this eschatology through televangelist broadcasts and books (and newer B-grade films) in the Left Behind Series, which have broken sales records around the world. If they only focused on speculation about who the antichrist is (I remember hearing it was Khrushchev, then Henry Kissinger, then Saddamm Hussein, and now apparently odds are being placed on Barack Obama!), their eschatological hobby might be harlmess enough – like a crazy uncle obsessed with UFOs. But in recent decades, dispensationalism and it’s eschatological cousins have become significant factors in the foreign policy of the richest, most consumptive, and most well-armed nation in the history of history, and that’s where things get even scarier than a B-grade movie.

Here’s where McLaren really begins to mischaracterize Christians:

If the world is about to end, why care for the environment? Why worry about global climate change or peak oil? Who gives a rip for endangered species or sustainable economics or global poverty if God is planning to incinerate the whole planet soon anyway? If the Bible predicts the rebuilding of the Jewish temple (or requires that rebuilding for it’s prophecies to work in a dispensationalist framework), why care about Muslim claims on the Temple Mount real estate? Why care about justice for non-Jews in Israel at all – after all, isn’t it their own fault for being on land God predicts will be returned in full to the Jews in the last days? If God has predetermined that the world will get worse and worse until it ends in a cosmic megaconflict between the forces of Light (epitomized most often in the United States) and the forces of Darkness (previously centered in communism, but now, that devil having been vanquished, in Islam), why waste energy on peacemaking, diplomacy, or interreligious dialogue? Aren’t those simply endeavors in rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? And since even Jesus can’t set the world right without taking up the sword and shedding swimming pools of his enemies’ blood (recalling our discussion under the Jesus question), what’s so bad about another war, and maybe even a little torture and genocide now and then? If God sanctions it, why can’t we?

McLaren’s idea of writing a scholarly approach to “Christian Faith of tomorrow” seems to involve mischaracterizing Christians, setting up and knocking down a laughable straw-man argument that we view Scripture through a “Greco-Roman” lens, spewing forth vitriol at fellow Christians – all the while holding forth a smug attitude of false humility and piety.

Reader be warned! This book is not about the coming Christian faith. It’s McLaren’s attack against the faith that’s already been delivered to us.

In the next segment, I will be discussing Question 1, “What is the Overarching Story Lline of the Bible?”

Paul Washer’s book – “The One True God” is a great read.

Paul Washer’s “The One True God”

A close friend of mine recently gave me a copy of Paul Washer’s workbook called “The One True God.” I am a fan of Paul, not for his delivery style, or his enthusiasm, but for his desire to know God, and for his clarity of doctrinal thought. Paul is someone who “rightly divides the Word of Truth”, and I am overjoyed at having this workbook in my posession.

Paul’s desire in the book is to get believers to have an encounter with the One True God through Scripture. He does a great job of meeting his desire, because this workbooks is full of Scripture. It doesn’t hurt that the version he chooses to read from is the NASB – my personal favorite.

I began studying chapter 1 of the workbook, which is on Deut. 6:4 (God is One), and the concept of the trinity. The workbook is very thorough, and the Scriptures used were from books in both New and Old Testaments. Paul’s aim is having you go through the Scriptures instead of just giving you answers.

I was very satisfied with the beginning of the study, and I plan on continuing to use the study for my own enrichment and for assisting my church.