The following was sent to us from a friend in the U.S.A. The news article was written by Roy Henzel at Midwest Christian Outreach.
~ Chris at SRN
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Emerging Church (EC) author David Fitch ("The Great Giveaway") has thrown down the gauntlet.
News Source From [AR-talk] Emerging Church Leader Rejects Evangelical Theology:
Emerging Church (EC) author David Fitch ("The Great Giveaway") has thrown down the gauntlet. EC leaders like Brian McLaren are studies in manipulative evasion. McLaren makes wild assertions, and then, when people express alarm, he clarifies what he means in such a way as to suggest that others deliberately or negligently misunderstood him--but never in such a way as to totally clear himself of doubts about his orthodoxy.
David Fitch, on the other hand, is comparatively direct about his heretical views. In his blog post for today, "Theological Issues Confronting the Emerging Churches - Yet Another List"
(http://thegreatgiveaway.blogspot.com/2006/03/theological-issues-confronting.html),
he attacks the doctrines of the inerrancy and perspicuity (clarity) of Scripture, endorses the New Perspective on Paul's confusion of justification with sanctification, accuses the standard evangelical position on justification by faith of being responsible for a variety of evangelical shortcomings (primarily in the area of social justice), and labels the doctrines of substitutionary atonement and salvation through Christ alone
("Exclusivism") as "modernist answers" (which, by his definition, are "inadequate").
What we have in Fitch, McLaren and others is at best a revised Neo-Orthodoxy, and at worst the reemergence of old style 19th Century Liberalism in the sheep's clothing of evangelicalism. They are seeking and finding a new generation of young people and, to whatever extent they succeed in eventually representing mainline Evangelicalism, they are threatening it with complete apostasy.
Ron Henzel
Senior Researcher
Midwest Christian Outreach
(http://www.midwestoutreach.org)
"No wonder, then, that they honour the false equally with the true. For everyone becomes like the first teacher that he comes across, without waiting to learn anything from anybody else. And there are some of them who, even if they meet with more than one teacher, are yet so unintelligent and slow-witted that even by the time they have reached old age they are still incapable of understanding the steps of an argument. ... In the old days such people used to be set to menial tasks. ... What will be the end of it God knows!"
-- Galen (c. A.D. 130-200), "On the Natural Faculties," I, 14, ¶ 12.
