Postmodernism and the Church

Seminar, postmodernism in the church, and, last week we had an excellent presentation by Doctor Craig Hazen and, this morning we have the blessing of being ministered to by Troy Lambert, who, graduated from Cal Baptist with his bachelor's in English and History. He got his master's from Chapman University in film and television. That's the postmodern connection. and he is an adjunct professor at Cal Baptist in films, art and culture, speech, and English composition, but most importantly, Lambert, Troy Lambert is, a believer that loves the Lord Jesus Christ.

He's been an active member of Reformed Baptist Church of Riverside over here on the corner of Iowa and Blaine, and we've actually crossed paths in the past. some of our evangelism team is, crossed paths with Troy and their evangelism team out at the Riverside Market night and things like that. And so we're just really excited to have Troy out. he's recently, he and his wife Melissa have recently had a baby.

They've named Jackson here about 4 or 5 weeks ago. There you are, 4 or 5 weeks ago, and, And he's been staying up late at night with his baby, and when he describes his tribulations and trials, I just get this morbid glee when he describes having to stay up in the middle of the night with his little baby. And, any parents that have been through that probably just think that this is a wonderful thing that you get to experience, but we're just very thankful for Troy coming on over and blessing us.

Why don't you guys welcome Troy Lambert.

OK, great. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mike.

It's a pleasure to be here. I bring greetings from the church on the corner right across the street. In some ways I feel like a sister church because we know a lot of you and I know some of us over there. let's pray before we begin.

Dear Father, we, are so grateful that you have allowed us to wake this morning and to Be alive and most importantly, for those of us who know you, as, and know Christ and are saved in the work that he did on the cross, Lord, we're thankful that we have salvation. And Lord, not just salvation for a heaven to come, but Lord, salvation that gives us grace each day to live lives that glorify you, Lord, that by your spirit we have the power. To live a life that honors you and brings light to this world, Lord God, and we pray even this morning as we focus on your church and the postmodern influence that has been upon it of late.

We do ask that your word would be preeminent, for we know, Lord, that your word is truth, and we know that your word has spoken, your word was revealed in flesh, and your word is even with us today as we, open up the Bible.

And so we do ask that you would minister to our souls, to the glory of your name. And as your name we pray this, Jesus, amen. Well, I have to say it was a beautiful drive here this morning. I don't know if you got a chance to see the mountains with the snow on it.

This is always my favorite time of year when we get those first couple of storms, and we're thankful this year we did get a couple of storms. And just to see that snow on there, it is, very refreshing. I don't know, I'm not a transcendentalist, but, I do look at nature often and say praise the Lord. It is, it is a real blessing to see that and it's a blessing to be here, as I said, we're going to continue in our discussion of postmodernism.

I, I had a chance to listen to what Dr. Hazen said last week, and he touched on a lot of it, but it's a, it's a squishy subject. He alluded to that. If you, if you're still going, OK, now what is this and why are we talking about it, that's OK.

I was exposed, I think, to postmodernism when I was in college over 1112 years ago now. I can't believe that. And there's some exciting thoughts there because oh what's this new concept and especially when you're studying literature and film, it's very prevalent and sometimes it's exciting to look at and then sometimes you go, now what exactly are we studying here? and it's, it's very interesting and the connection there in the film world, I, I, I think maybe this might bring, I hope, a better understanding, at least in the secular realm of postmodernism.

Some of you might be familiar with the author Clive Cussler. He's written hundreds of books, I think, or he claims to at least, and one was Sahara. They made a movie about it a couple of years back. Well, it's interesting, I don't know if you followed it in the papers.

Most of us don't get the LA Times, but the Times was following this particular case because Clive Kessler was being sued by Paramount Pictures over the flop of the movie that he had made. It's, it's interesting that Paramount Pictures came out, the, I think Sahara came out. Two years ago and it lost about $100 million. Now, for you and me, that's a lot of money.

in Hollywood, if they have one or two flops a year like that, they're OK. but for me, that's a lot of money and Paramount for some reason took interest in this and said, hey, we can't lose this money. and so they sued Clive Kutzler over an interesting claim that he had made. It turns out that before Cussler signed a contract, his manager had told him, You need to stop claiming how many books you've sold.

Oh no, no, no, no, because on his website he claims that he sold 100, I think it's 100 million copies of his books over the last 20 years, and his manager was saying, you need to be careful with this. Don't make such a claim because we're not quite sure if you sold that many. But it was all over his website and he began to push it in vocal conversations, perhaps when it comes to meetings and talking to people by saying, it's now upwards of 125 million copies that I've sold worldwide.

Well, it's interesting that after the flop happened and Cussler was very intrusive in the process of making the movie, they didn't like each other, that Paramount hired an auditor to go find out how many copies did he really sell.

And after that audit, it turned out that he had sold nearly 45 million copies. Now that's a lot of copies. I don't want to discredit him, but 45 million compared to 125 million, there's a little bit of a gap there I'd say. Well, Paramount felt the same way, and they said, we're going to sue you because we thought you were a more prominent author than you claimed to be, and because you weren't, that's partly why this movie failed, let alone if you've seen it, it's not that great of a movie.

But it's interesting that when Kessler actually was put on the stand in the court case, that all this information was brought up by Paramount's attorney and said, What do you have to say about this discrepancy and how many copies are sold. you said 125 million. It's really 45 million, and his quote was this. It just struck me.

Well, it doesn't really mean anything when I say that. What? What do you mean it doesn't really mean anything? There's hard facts here.

We could stack them all up right here. 125 million books would take this whole room and more, and a stack 45 million, it'd be a lot smaller. We could visibly see that. But it's interesting in this postmodern worldview shift that has happened over the last few decades that someone can interestingly say.

Well, that doesn't really mean anything. I was just saying that. I think that also might bring to mind that in our culture, we find this relativism. We've had a president say, well, what's really the definition of is?

I, I think we all get that. I think my one month old son gets what is is. David Bowie, now some of you might remember him, a rock star, still, he's still around, but I found this interesting quote. He said, I don't necessarily know what I'm talking about in my writing.

All I do is assemble points that interest me and puzzle through it. That becomes a song, and people who listen to that song must take what they can from it and see if information they've assembled fits in with anything I've assembled, huh. Now I have to admit I do like a couple of David Bowie songs, but I've often wondered what he was trying to say. We can be heroes.

does he really mean that? But it's, in the world that can be expected. you might say, well, that's always been around. People have always been relative, and it's true because of our sinful natures we've since Adam and Eve said, Well, did God really say that?

should we really not touch the fruit or is it just not look at the fruit or not walk around the fruit, what is it there? We've done that as human beings, but there definitely has been a shift in a cultural worldview, especially in the West, to go from concrete. Ideas and concrete thinking to very abstract thinking to fit whatever you want to get out of this world, but that's expected. That's the world that's man at his sinfulness will do whatever he can just to stay doing what he wants to do, however he wants to please himself.

But when we think about Christianity, And we think about postmodernism, we think, well, can those two really exist? there are Christians who will claim I'm a postmodern Christian. What does that mean? How does that work?

It's sad when you find certain quotes, and I've been studying this for a few months looking at various authors who would claim this postmodern worldview, and you start to see what their thinking is, and it's really sad. It doesn't, it doesn't fit with what the Bible's teaching. I found this quote from the wife of Rob Bell. Some of you might be familiar.

He wrote a novel that a novel hybrid called The Velvet Elvis. Some of you might be familiar with it. Some of you might have read it, but his wife when she was being interviewed in Christianity Today, said, I grew up thinking that we figured out the Bible, that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means, and yet I feel like life is big again.

Like life used to be black and white, and now it's color. And I think that's a very telling quote. Now I've never met her. I haven't read much of her, but that quote reveals a lot in that she doesn't think that we can know what the Bible's saying, and that in some way, and I don't know how, but she feels liberated in being able to go, well, I'm never going to be able to know it.

So I'll just let it all go and wow, I feel so free now. And it's interesting. Another quote here. Dan Kimball, some of you might have heard of him, he's written a book called The Emerging Church.

He's a pastor of a church up in Northern California, I believe it's called Vintage Faith, and he said that the church must deconstruct, reconstruct, and redefine biblical terms. That's where we're at. So over the next hour here, I'd like to just chat with you about the idea of what is postmodernism. And, we've got our, PowerPoint here with all the different ideas floating around.

The gentleman in the top right hand corner really is the guru of this movement. some of you might have heard Emerging Church, emergent Church. We're going to talk about all that. His name is Brian McLaren, by the way, and we'll have a few quotes from him.

But we need to to see what are these guys saying. Does it jive with Christianity? Does it jive with what the Bible says? And so let me click through here.

Just hit the right arrow, I guess. Or do I hit the center button? oh. Or maybe the bottom one.

I know. All right, PowerPoint, is it hooked up there? Well, when we get to the next frame here, we'll talk about it. But I want to talk about 3 points.

We're going to look at postmodernism and its effect on the church. And then we'll look at the idea of emerging and emergent. What does it mean? emergent is emerging, but not everything emerging is emergent.

What? Well, you'll figure it out. It's postmodern. And then we'll also look at finally, what does the Bible say the church should be doing?

How do we address these things? Do I need to maybe hold it down? No, it seems to be on. Well, maybe you could just go to the next frame for me.

I'll just say next frame please. All right, so let's define for a moment postmodernism. We, we looked at a couple of examples of it in the world and how people can basically bend the truth, to fit however they feel, but I think as Dr. Hazen commented on last week, there's definitely a core issue about truth, and the idea within postmodernism is that truth is relevant.

There really is no or a concrete truth that we can believe in. There's no absolute truth, and he said, as I think most of us would agree, that if you say there is no absolute, you're making an absolute in itself there, and so you contradict yourselves. Postmodernist says that truth is not found, but it is constructed socially, so. You and we have to be careful here because not all postmoderns walk around going, I don't know anything.

I'm stupid. I don't know. Some of them are very bright people, but what they do, they cleverly construct for themselves. Well, within Riverside our truth is this.

But if I were to go to Indiana, well, the truth might be a little different because of the way they live and definitely when if I go to Europe, the way they look at truth, it's going to be just a bit different because of the way they live and their culture and so forth. really it's bigger than that because they also like to say it's within, the Western world or the Eastern world or in the third world and within those communities they have to construct for themselves their own truth.

Each society. Culture and subculture develops their truth so that the members and their community will adhere to it.

So that's why you can bring up an argument against them. Well, if that's true, then how can you say Hitler was wrong for killing 6 million Jews and 4 million other people he didn't like. Well, that's a, that's a lame argument that, because, because in, in Europe they had laws and those laws said that you can't kill people for just any old reason and, and that's, that was their truth. But the problem is that logic doesn't go that far.

OK. Why did they have laws that say they can't kill people? Well, because human beings have rights, and those intrinsic rights of a human, well, they can't kill each other. Well, why do human beings have rights?

Why is there something intrinsic within a human being that says you can't kill another human being because you don't like him? Well, because we're alive and we live and and that's a human's right. They can't, it starts to break down because you're either an evolved animal and there is no such thing as rights and we can do whatever we want. The law of the jungle rules, even if we for a moment construct certain laws that restrict that.

Or perhaps even as some of our founding fathers, though not many of them were Christians, but they did have a worldview that God existed, said that all human beings are created equal with inalienable rights, because God made them. They were image bearers of God. And so if you strike down your other man, well, in a sense you're striking down the creation of God, and that's wrong because God created life and we shouldn't take that. that stands up a lot better, doesn't it?

That's, that is your Christian worldview. And in the West, we still live with a Christian worldview. I think Francis Schaeffer said, to the extent that the West borrows. The Christian worldview takes God out of it.

It's like genetic engineering where you take the cell, you extract the nucleus, but you still say, Well this is real and I've created this. No, you didn't. You just manipulated it. And the same way in society is the laws and and the way that we live culturally, it is still to a certain extent the remnants of a Christian worldview, but it has changed.

There's definitely a shift that has happened. Part of this is that in the modern worldview, and Dr. Hazen touched on this for a moment, the modernist worldview that came out of the Enlightenment, that came out of the rationalistic thinking. that mankind had in the 17th and 18th century was that mankind, yeah, we are image bearers and in fact we just found out that we're even better than God because we can do anything.

We can figure out truth. We can know everything. That's where these utopian ideas of the 1800s came about and people moved out into Missouri to set up their own new societies and they moved to Utah to set up a new society and this is going to be perfect. This is going to be great because we're human beings and we can do it.

Well, that only lasted for so long because as man advanced and began to scientifically look at things, which was exactly what God had created mankind to do. what do you think Adam was doing in the Garden of Eden? He was scientifically analyzing animals and then naming them and saying, look at this lion, Eve, isn't this thing amazing? And wow, look at this tiger.

They're somewhat related, but we'll call that tiger, we'll call that lion. It was an early form of classifying creatures as scientific. And that was exactly what God created mankind to do, to explore His creation, to glorify Him in doing that. But by the 1900s, early 1900s, a war happened, a horrible, horrible war happened called World War I.

We call it that now. At that time it was called the Great War. And Europe was ravaged, torn apart. It was horrible.

I had the privilege years ago of being in London and going to the Imperial War Museum, and they had an exhibit you could actually walk through of trench warfare, and the way they set it was amazing. You walk in and you're in a trench, and you can peek through a viewfinder and you look out across no man's land to the German side and you see bombs going off and Got just a sense, just a small touch of what that would have been like. Of course there were no real shells. There was no smell of blood and death.

There was, no cursing and just, death all around. But you get a sense of how horrible it was. And men started asking questions. Well, wait a second, I thought we were in the age of enlightenment.

I thought we had figured it all out. I thought we were going to be able to end all wars and make a world that is better for humanity. What happened? So I'm getting a bit off of what I wanted to talk about, but the point is that there was a huge shift because of the horrible wars in the 1900s.

And mankind began to ask ourselves, man, can we really know anything? We thought we knew it, but we don't. And that's the birth of existentialism. And then that led into German nihilism and so forth and all these ideas of what is it to be alive, what is it to be a human?

Why are we here? And unfortunately, to a certain extent they were coming to the end of themselves. They were seeing themselves as flawed men, as hollow men, as some of them began to refer to themselves as, as men without substance. And instead of fleeing to a holy God who could save them and restore their souls and give them life, They went the other way.

They went to nothing. They went to just really, well, life is life and I'm here now and I'm gone tomorrow. And unfortunately that worldview has caught on and by the 70s and and 80s it started being referred to as we're no longer in the modern world. Most real people don't think we're going to be able to find answers.

We're not going to be able to find truth. Maybe truth doesn't even exist. And then a lot of them started saying, even if it did exist, who cares? We're flawed, we'll never know it, so let's just try to do the best we can.

And that is really that postmodern shift. There's no absolute truth, even if there was, we're never going to find out what it is and thus everything's relative. We recognize everyone's truth as equal. I can't say that my worldview is better than your worldview.

I can't say my religion is better than your religion because they're all made up anyways just to make you feel better. So how can we do that? And so we began to redefine what tolerance is and what pluralism is. Pluralism existed in a Christian worldview.

if you think about America and its founding on the idea of religious freedom, that was unique. Europe warred over, we're a reformed state, no, we're a Catholic state. No, we're a, Dutch reformed state, no, we're, and back and forth, back and forth, not fully getting the idea that some of those reformation ideas were bringing that, it was about the just shall live by faith alone and that, wow. The church has controlled the Bible for so long and now we need to let that word free and allow people to read it for themselves and allow the Holy Spirit to move them and save them.

People were getting that idea, but unfortunately on the state and political level, no, we must be a Catholic nation. No, we must be a reformed nation, and they started warring and fighting and establishing religion. And so when the Pilgrims and our other founding fathers came here, they said, Let's just say you can be free to be what religion you want to be with the idea that you can't con you can't, what am I trying to say here? You can't convert a soul.

You can't go up and sit there and grab something and say, you be a Christian, OK? unfortunately, I think some of them had seen some of the Muslim marauders of the Iberian Peninsula in Spain come through and force people, you must be Muslim. in Eastern Europe and some of those you must believe this way and unfortunately some Christians were behaving that way. You must believe this way.

You can't do that. You might get somebody to extrinsically say yes, OK, I accept what you have to believe, but intrinsically they're going to go, I don't believe that, but I want to live, so I'm not going to, I'll just go along with the flow. So a Christian worldview allows for the idea of many different ideas because we know that man is sinful and man will pursue whatever he wants to pursue to be free from God and to do whatever he wants to do. He thinks it's freedom, but it's not.

And so unfortunately, Pluralism has changed. Instead of just the idea of, of, of respecting each other but not having to say, Well, you're right and I'm wrong, now it is every single religion, every single idea has to have equal platform, and you can't say that you're different than that. And there's a problem there because some religions can morph. You can have a Buddhist and a Hindu and a, some other eastern religion living near each other and they really don't have statements of truth of saying this is the way it is.

They just, Buddhists really, I, I've known some of them will just say, well, if you want to believe that, that's fine, and this is what I believe and that's where we're at. But unfortunately, and actually I should say fortunately for us, the Bible makes some very strong statements of truth that says this is the word of God. Jesus came and lived among us. He died and rose again, even as Doctor Hazen was referring to in 1 Corinthians 15 last week.

Paul is making a very strong statement there that Jesus did all this. And if he didn't, we're to be pitied among all other people. Because if it's not true, what the heck are we doing here? Why are we wasting our time?

There are better country clubs in Cornerstone. There are better country clubs than Reformed Baptist Church in Riverside. But we know it to be true. And so you can't, anyways, that's that's one of the biggest problems within the postmodern world.

And what we see now is that as postmodernism deconstructs and tries to redefine for itself in this world how we live and, and what is true and what's not true and how we're going to exist with each other, unfortunately we see this starting to influence the church. Because some people go, hmm. If we live in a world that won't accept an absolute truth, then how am I going to absolutely say that they have to know Jesus? How am I going to absolutely say that unless they repent of their sins they're going to hell, I won't jive with them.

They're not going to listen to me. So what can I do? How can we reach these people? And instead of, as we're going to talk about in a little bit here, taking the time to sit down with people, that's what the great commission is, isn't it, to To go and make disciples, to, to, to live with them, to walk with Him, to have coffee with them and, and work through some of these and then define for them.

What does it mean to say a holy God has been offended? What does it mean to say that I'm a sinful creature no matter what I do, even if I walk an old lady across the street, if I don't have the grace of Christ in my life, I'll still go to hell. Why? That doesn't make any sense.

I just did a good thing. See, we used to live. We had a unique privilege to a certain extent in America to live in a world that had a Christian worldview. You could Live in a community.

And, not be saved. Grow up, go to high school, go to college, and have in your mind the basic truths of what Christianity was because your grandma was a Christian or your uncle was a Christian and your mom was a Christian, and you went to church on a somewhat regular basis growing up and so you had the idea of what the basic idea. I'm not saying you understood truth, but you had a basic idea of it. And then when you're 25, you were walking down the street and you heard someone preaching and all of a sudden something grabbed you and you're like, oh man, yeah, I am a sinner.

What the heck am I doing? I've just been living for myself. This is horrible. Lord, save me and you've become a Christian because you had at least a concept of what that truth was.

But we live in a world now that more and more and more people don't understand what sin is. They don't know that word. They, they, they know it in the sense of some television show of some prudish fake Christian on there going, Oh, we are sinners. Oh look at those prudes.

They're so stupid. But what does that mean? They don't know what God means because maybe they grew up around a Hindu community or maybe they grew up, not even in an atheistic. Understanding and just like God, he's this guy who sits in the clouds with a big beard and just throws bolts at people when he's mad at them.

No, that would be Thor. Sorry, that's not God. But unfortunately people don't have a Christian worldview. I can't remember who it was, but I was listening to a preacher not too long ago talking about that idea that within Certain communities, especially, I, I think it was in, in the idea of back in England in the 17 1800s, people grew up with a Christian worldview.

They weren't necessarily Christians, but they knew who Jesus was, they knew who God was. I know who it was. It's a guy named Ichabod Spencer. He was a pastor in Brooklyn, New York in the early to mid 1800s.

Most people have never heard of him. I just happened to come across this book and he wrote down all of his conversations with people who he was evangelizing, who was sharing Christ with. and it was interesting because a lot of them were people who went to his church, because that was the thing to do. That was the worldview at that time.

You went to church, but Many of them were unconverted souls. And so as you work through these conversations, they would say, yeah, I know Jesus did this, and I know that, that all I have to do is embrace them, but I, I just can't. I just, I want to, but I can't, and he was patient to share with them. We don't live in that world now.

There's still pockets. maybe Riverside is a pocket. The Lord's blessed us with many churches here that teach the teach the Bible, so there might be a unique influence here. But if you move into more urban areas like Los Angeles or Philadelphia or downtown San Francisco, chances are when you're sitting at Starbucks and you start to talk with someone about Christ, they'll either think you're cussing or they'll think you're crazy.

Christ, what do you mean? Yeah, I've heard of him, but who cares? And they have no concept of who he is. So we have to work with that.

That's where we're at. So the effects of postmodernism on the church is because we live in a different world now, but it's not a world that can't be reached. I want to real quickly say, let's see here, that, yeah, great, it's working. Oh, I was going to say there's a couple of books here that Well, we'll get to this in a moment, sorry.

1 Timothy chapter 3 verse 15, you don't have to turn there, but you're welcome to look at it if you'd like. But it we're just, I, I want to look at this one verse. What is the church? my, my topic for today is to talk about postmodernism and the church.

What did God establish when he sent Christ here to establish the church, the living church of God? Well, in 1 Timothy chapter 3, verse 15, it says that the The church of the living God is a pillar and a buttress or a ground of truth. Now unfortunately some of those within the Roman Catholic Church twist that to say that that means that the Pope gets to say what is true and what's not true and that he is the, he is that pillar, but that's not the case here. If we look at what Paul is saying to Timothy, who was an Ethesist nowhere near Rome.

He was saying that the church that you're working with, and the church that is in Jerusalem and the church has been established over here in, in, Corinth and so forth, the, the living church. All of us who represent Christ, and then also all of us to come together corporately at our local church. The church is a pillar and a ground of truth. Churches are to broadcast and be grounded.

We're to be this pillar, this, this tall, large, looming entity within our communities that proclaims truth. And they were also to be grounded. A pillar can't stand on its own. It must be grounded in truth.

And that's a, that's a great charge to us as Christians. Over and over, Paul reminds Timothy in this first book, that he must preach the gospel and stick to the scriptures. Paul warns that there will be a coming apostasy that you will, you will see it from that point on to now, we will see people leave the faith and twist the faith. But he says that you must have a passion and a concern for truth, and that is the word of God, as well as a concern.

Paul was very concerned for Timothy that as a leader he would not get caught up in these false teachings. And Paul concludes with Timothy in chapter 6 verse 20, 0 Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babbles and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing that some have swerved from the faith. really, there's nothing new under the sun.

was Timothy facing something different that we face now? No. He, he was a pastor of a church there in Ephesus. And he, he had people who were truly saved.

He had those who were interested in what was going on, but weren't saved. He had the world pressing in among him going, Who are you guys? think about some of those, Ephesians were really upset that Paul and Timothy were there. They started rioting in the streets because they were ruining their business.

Their little goddesses to Artemius or Diana, depending if you're Greek or Roman., their sales were plummeting because people were coming to know Christ and we got to get rid of these guys. they had the same pressures we were facing, but in many ways it was a different name. Postmodernism, we call it today, is really nothing new. It's what Satan used with Adam and Eve.

He took the word of God, and then he twisted it. He said, Is this really what God said? It's an attack on God and it's an attack on His word, but it's very subtle. It's very attractive.

It's very intellectual. It's very interesting to look at. So let's look real quickly here at some of the influences that it has had on the church. Now you can go to other studies.

You can read other people, and they'll probably have many influences, but I just wanted to look at 4 of these real briefly this morning. The first one here is that These postmodern thinkers believe that we live in such a different world now that we're never gonna be able to reach this culture unless we change the gospel somehow. In fact, you can see that quote up there. That one of the first ways that we see is that they want to change it to become more experiential.

It needs to be an experiential gospel. We need to feel it. It needs to be touchy and feely because if postmodern, postmoderns don't believe in absolute truth. Well then, why would they want to come to church?

Because we teach absolute truth here. So if you present those truths too harshly, you're going to push people away. They're not going to be attracted. So what's their conclusion?

Well, don't preach the truth openly. let's, let's, in order to reach the lost, we must give them what they want. We, and we know that they want to have a religious experience. They want to feel good.

Man is dead in his sins. There's a certain sense that we've lost something. And so if you come to some environment where it's just really Emotional and maybe the windows are darkened and we'll put some stained glass back up in there. Maybe we'll put a crucifix up on the wall and my wife and I were earlier this year in France and we went to Notre Dame.

It's this huge cathedral and you walk in and it's breathtaking. it's huge. How did they build this, 500 years ago and and they've got this. Oh, not that day, but they do have it sometimes.

This music, all these chants and candles burning in the corners and different catacombs you can go off into and graves, and it is, it is an experience. But is it true religion? Dan Kimball writes here. He's the gentleman who wrote the emerging church.

He's one of the leaders in this, in this movement. He says the basis of learning has shifted from logic and rational, systematic thought to the realm of experience. People increasingly long for the mystical and the spiritual rather than the evidential and facts-based faith of the modern world. Kimball goes on to say that the old paradigm taught that if you have the right teaching, you'll experience God.

That's, that's the old paradigm. The new paradigm says that if you experience God, you will have the right teaching. That's a dangerous statement. I don't, I don't, I want to retress what he's saying there.

He's saying that the old thinking that old Christian thought that we used to have was that in order to know God, You had to go to the word of God to know Him. That's, that's old. Let's get rid of that. That's not true anymore.

You need to experience God. And then you can have the right teaching. There's a problem there. It's getting a cart before the horse.

God has said that the way we know who he is, is by his word. That's how he's revealed himself to us friends. If we're going off of our feelings, if we're going off of experiences, Then they're more, I hate to say it, more. Experiential places in the Cornerstone or the Reformed Baptist Church.

In fact, Disneyland's a better place. I, I think I've ridden the Jungle Cruise or Indiana Jones and had a, a moment. I, I've been to Yosemite, and I've had a moment. I've been to the edge of the Grand Canyon and gone.

Big Mind little canyon big, can't compute, must turn away. Turn back again, big, we, yeah, human beings like experiences. It's wonderful. But are we going to get truth out of that?

Are, this statement here is almost a modern idea that somehow man's going to be able to get truth. It's going to be able to know God because we just experience Him. It's dangerous, friends. Because there are religions out there that have rituals that really could make you feel good.

look at Martin Luther, when he went to Rome for the first time, he was so excited. He gets to climb up the Scala Santa on his knees praying Hail Marys all the way up to the top, and he can earn somebody's salvation who died before him., Rome was full of these things. You could go to see the bone of Peter and get a blessing. You could go and see the tooth of Paul and get a blessing, it's, and it's an experience.

Notre Dame was an experience. There's some caves in Tibet where the wind blows in a certain way that man, you'll be changed for life. I don't know why. it's, but it's an experience.

You can go to certain Hindu temples in India with incense and candles and, and the light striking in a certain way and the cobras just in a trance and it's an experience. You might feel you've obtained something, but you've only attained a moment. You've only attained something that you'll have to keep attaining time and time and time again. How refreshing it is that Jesus said, I will come and give you water that you will never thirst for.

I will give you bread that you will never hunger for. Oh, that is the, that's the, those are some of those amazing essentials of Christianity. We don't have to search anymore. We don't have to strive for experiences anymore.

Christ has come and he is, he's as, as we say in this wonderful season, he is Emmanuel. He is God with us and he's revealed himself in his word that when we study it and know it, oh, all of you who are Christians have had these moments, haven't you? They, they are better than any Tibetan cave or right at Disneyland where you're just reading the Bible. Lord, teach me what you mean here and OK, what is that?

And all of a sudden Wow, Lord, you get tears in your eyes. That's better than anything in the world, Lord. I never knew how precious you were. I thought I knew you were precious last week when I was reading Romans, but now I'm reading in 1 Corinthians, you're precious.

You're amazing. So we have to be careful. It isn't just experiences. It's a gospel.

The postmoderns will say the gospel must be all about feelings and experience. How do those feelings are right? How do if what you're experiencing is true? There have been people, you can go talk to some occultists who have experienced the supernatural.

And because they've experienced it, they somehow, even though they might have a postmodern world, say, well, that's my evidence that it's true. But there's some frightening things they're dealing with there. So the next thought here is that, well, if it's an experiential gospel. It also needs to be a mystical faith, and we've touched on some of that, but all truth claims and doctrine are evaluated by those experiences.

I know this to be true because I feel it. I feel like God told me this was true. See, if you're starting to live that way, you're becoming a mystic. we all unfortunately fall that way sometimes because it's difficult sometimes.

It's the Lord, does the Lord want me to go here? Does he want me to do that? Lord, we have to be careful though. Our feelings are very subjective.

If you challenge their experience, some of these people in this movement, if you challenge them and say, well, according to scripture though, that's not right, they'll get all huffy and. You're being judgmental. You're being critical of my faith. I feel this.

This is making me feel special. Yeah, but the Bible says. really our, our ground has been swept out from under us, hasn't it? If, if, if the church is to be a pillar and a ground of truth, and then all of a sudden they say, well, the Bible is subjective and, I can't, I have to go off of my feelings, not what the Bible's telling me.

so we've just been karate kicked and sideswiped and what doesn't mean that that's true, but it's difficult to talk to these people. We've got a quote here. Oz Guinness, he's been investigating this movement. He says, they believe faith is true because it works and because they feel it is true in their experience, because they sincerely believe it is true for them.

The Christian faith is not true because it works. It works because it's true. Yeah, I agree. Amen.

See, once again, we get the cart before the horse. I love that the Christian faith is not true because it works. It works because it's true. We see some of this mysticism revealed in their worship experiences.

If experience is the chief goal of our personal spiritual life, then it should be so for our public worship. The music should arouse emotion and provide an experience rather than convey truth. Worship is not about adoring God, but about nourishing ourselves with religious feelings. It's like those Gregorian chants.

I don't know what they're saying, but they're, it's moving, and you think back. To, before the Reformation, when the, when the Roman Church controlled really the gospel and controlled the truth., messages were in Latin and if you're in Germany or if you're in England, you don't speak Latin but you go because you have to and you go because it's an experience and it feels a lot bigger than you are in your little peasant thatched roof house. And somehow you're going to get some experience there.

Peter Rawlins, he is one of these emergent leaders in Northern Ireland.

He's the pastor of a church called Icon, ironically. We at ICANN are developing a theology which derives from the mystics, a theology without theology to complement our religion without religion. See, some of these guys make statements that are a lot more stronger than others. If you read, if you go to Dan Kimball's website, it just looks like a, a Gen X church that's trying to be hip for the kids, but some of these guys like Brian McLaren and Peter Rawlins, they'll make these radical statements.

they are moving towards a Christianity without Christ. Well, they'll, they won't say that. They'll say, well, we want to live in the way of Christ. We want to live in the way of Jesus.

But really what it boils down to, in a moment we'll get to this point is a social gospel. the problem here is that if we're working with an experience, if we're working with mysticism, and we don't have truth, eventually we're going to get to what we call An inclusive message. If you can't make a statement that says that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Well then how can you say a Buddhist doesn't have it right?

How can you say a Muslim isn't right in what they believe? Now here's our friend Brian McLaren. His quote was interesting to me. He says, Although I don't hope all Buddhists will become Christians, and he puts the term in cultural Christians, I do hope all who feel so called will become Buddhist followers of Jesus.

I believe they should be given the opportunity and invitation. I don't hope all Jews or Hindus will become members of the Christian religion. But I do hope all who feel so called will become Jewish or Hindu followers of Jesus. Kinda scratch your head there.

What? if he's talking about culture, obviously that's something that Christianity has learned a lot even in this last century. We don't want to go into Africa and make them become English Christians. We want them to be African Christians.

Their, their, their culture is, is their culture, and we want them to experience the word of God and who Christ really is. But they can worship them in, with their style of music and with their dress the same as you go to China. We don't want to make them American Chinese Christians. We want them to be Christians and they happen to be Chinese, and so their potlucks will be a lot different than our potlucks.

and probably better. But we have to be careful here. What are we saying? Are we saying that the Christian religion shouldn't tell a Buddhist that once you've experienced Christ, once you've tasted that living water, The bread that you'll never hunger for, that you can still dabble within your Taoism, that you can still have certain experiences that are ritualistic and will make you feel a little better.

No, that's empty. That's gone. Those are those old forms that have passed away, those old religious ideas, they, they don't hold anything anymore. You've now found Christ.

So we have to be careful. We see an inclusive idea here. People can be saved by being good followers of their own religion if they do it sincerely. There was this other quote here from McLaren.

It says, it bothers me to use exclusive and Jesus in the same sentence. Everything about Jesus' life and message seemed to be about inclusion, not exclusion. Now to a certain extent I would agree with him there, but he adds this to it. Maybe God's plan is an opt out plan, not an opt in one.

If you want to stay out of the party, you can, but it's hard for me to imagine somebody being more stubbornly ornery than God is gracious. The clear implication here is that we are all in unless we opt out. So we move to the 4th idea I wanted to look at here that postmodernism has influenced some of Christian thinkers is it does become a social gospel in many ways as you start reading some of these books. you start to see, wow, how does this differ from liberalism in the late 1800s that Spurgeon was fighting against in London and, and the ideas that were sweeping across America and that we need to reach out to the poor and that it's really not so much about who you believe Jesus is, but we need to follow what Jesus says and and feed the hungry and and and heal those who are sick and so forth now.

As Christians, and sometimes unfortunately, I think the church has separated ourselves from reaching out to people. So our pastor often says, we, we need to reach out in the name of Christ with a cup of cool water. somebody's hot in the desert and they're thirsty, we don't want to just go up to him, you need to know Jesus Christ or you're gonna go to hell. No, Jesus didn't even do that.

He went and sat down at the well, just so happened that the lady he wanted to talk to was coming up there. He must have had some. Idea she was gonna be there. She dips her, her, bucket into the well and say, hey, can I have a drink of water?

Well, sure, and sipping on the water and starts chatting with her. there are effective ways of engaging people. but unfortunately this social gospel is starting to creep in where this almost becomes the purpose. It's not about glorifying God necessarily.

Rob Bell, the author of Velvet Elvis and many other books, says that salvation. Did it come up? No, it didn't. Salvation is the is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its Maker.

This has huge implications for how people present the message of Jesus. Yes, Jesus can come into our hearts, but we can join a movement that is as wide and as big as the universe itself rocks and trees, birds and swamps and ecosystems. God's desire is to restore all of it. Now the unfortunate thing here.

Is that what, I don't like pollution. I don't like it when I see a hungry person in a country, the starving kids in the Sudan. I don't like it when I see, wars happening all around. I don't like seeing sin ravaging the world, and I don't think any of us as Christians would say that.

But more and more what we're seeing in this movement is that the whole point of God's salvation is not necessarily for the soul so that a human can be restored back to the position of a of a true God bearer, an image bearer of God worshiping God and bringing glory to God, but that the whole The idea of redemption is to see the world brought back into order, to see pollution done away with, to see people, fed, and more and more it becomes that's what you should be doing. Don't worry so much about the, the nonessentials of who Jesus really was or what, the, what a Christianity is all about or who God really is.

You're never really going to know that. But let's do what's practical.

it is, it is a form of pragmatism. Let's do what we practically can do right now. And I know there's a guy hungry across the street in those apartments. I'm going to go over there and take him some food and I'm going to go over here and talk to this person, and, and bring him a pizza because he's hungry and more and more and more it becomes all about doing something, instead of actually knowing Christ for who he is.

It becomes a distraction. So those are 4 of the ways that we've seen this influence, and I've just touched on them briefly, guys. I'm sorry that we can't really delve into this more and more, but hopefully over the next couple of weeks, the other speakers, can, can talk more about this. But I want to move into an area here that to help you if you go to Bereans now, I think you can actually find a section called Emerging.

Brians is very good about always being on the cutting edge of movements, whether they're good or bad, but they do have an emerging section there, and you might go, Well, what do you mean by emerging? Haven't we always been here? Or, didn't didn't Christ emerge and now we're continuing? Maybe we're continuing Christians not emerging.

The idea though does come with this worldview shift from a modernistic, hey, we can grasp who God is, we can grasp truth, we're we're rational creatures to this postmodern view of we're in a new world now and where people think differently, so the church needs to change. The church needs to emerge and become a postmodern church and not stuck in this rational modern idea. Now I said earlier that emergent is emerging, but not everything emerging is emergent. What do by that?

Well, emergent, that word there on your left, is really more or less a brand name that is a there's a website called Emergent Village, I believe, and on there you can find McLaren and others like him who are continuing what they call a conversation, a discussion. What should Christianity look like now? How, how should it, how should it exist? And a lot of them are coming up with these very, we, for lack of a better words, liberal ideas, very postmodern ideas of what the gospel is.

Now emerging though is more of a generic term. It's a term that talks about a movement of people who realize, yeah, we do live in a different world and so how are we going to engage them? Some of them end up with more liberal ideas and some of them end up with somewhat conservative ideas. One of those is a gentleman by the name of Mark Driscoll.

Some of you might have heard of him. he's a pastor up in Seattle, I believe it's called Mars Hills Church, and if you read his confession of faith, the church's confession of faith, it'd be very similar to your confession of Faith. they, they are doctrinally sound, if you will. but there might be some things you might not agree with in the way that they reach out to people, but he says here this quote, I'll just touch on a couple of points of it.

He says that at one point, especially in the, in the 90s, he was a part of this whole emerging and emergent movement, idea, but he had to begin to distance himself from one of many streams in the emerging church because of theological differences. See, there were people in the early 90s. I, I remember them, I was just out of high school myself, who started seeing things were different. That talking with those in college, there was this mass relativism or there was this wanting for experience over truth.

And you saw that, but how am I how am I going to reach these people? How am I going to talk to these people? And so a lot of people started asking questions. The world has changed.

What are we going to do about it? How are we going to reach out to them? And some began discussing it. And then quickly you see these things split and so a lot of times if you hear them referred to as emergent, it's going to be more of a liberal theology.

And those who claim to be emerging Christians like Dan Kimball, a lot of that you might not agree with, and then there are those within Mark Driscoll's circles who, he was just at a John Piper conference. I believe he's, he's preached alongside Al Moral, Al Mohler and RC Sproul, some guys that we would consider as sound teachers, and they realized that, yeah, he, he doctrinally is there, but he also is in the urban city of Seattle, Seattle's one of the most un-Christian, not, not necessarily in practice, but they're just Washington itself, I think is like 2% Christian.

It's a very unchurched area and so he's like, how are we going to reach these people? So he's done some radical ways of reaching out to them.

Some of them we'd agree with, some of them we wouldn't. Does that make sense to a certain degree? So the problem is, and I bring this up, it is a problem. You will hear we are an emerging church and you have to dig deeper because it doesn't really necessarily mean anything.

It's very postmodern. You might go, OK, you're emerging, and you grab it. So does that mean you're liberal and they squish up over here? No, I believe that Jesus is real and I believe in truth.

OK, so why do you say you're emerging? Because I want to reach people. OK, but why don't you just say you're a Christian? Well, because that's not cool.

And honestly, a lot of it does fall down on that level because a lot of them are very youth-based. They see, and we see it too, that the new generations coming up, those in junior high, those in high school, those in college now. they just have no concept of God, and they're just all about experience. They're all about MySpace and PlayStation and having fun and just finding pleasure.

They're the ultimate hedonists. We've we've raised a very great group of self-esteemed hedonists in this country. Because that's all they see, what, if there's no purpose, then I want to have as much fun as I can. So how do we reach those people, and so a lot of these emerging churches will say, well, we want it to be cool, we want it to be hip, we want to have these touchy feely things, and they use buzzwords and sometimes they use experiences.

They're still preaching the truth, but it becomes, I like to call it seeker sensitive 2.0. Because they feel they're going to be able to reach people in that way. All right, I'm seeing that I've got maybe 5 minutes here, so I knew I had too much information. If you look at I think here we've got, we'll skip this one.

Dan Kimball says this. The thing that seeker sensitive churches removed from the churches are the very things postmodern nonbelievers want to experience. The postmodern wants to reconnect with the past. They want traditions and religious symbols rather than slick excellence, polished performances, and state of the art structures for our modernity.

And so he's saying the same thing we've seen here, that they want these experiences, but they don't want God in it. They don't want real truth in it. So what does the Christian church do? Let me move here towards the end.

Well, If we look at the days of Timothy and Paul, they lived in a pluralistic society. They lived among the Greeks who worshiped knowledge. They lived among the Romans who worshiped Julius Caesar, and they lived amongst the Ephesians who had a great temple. In fact, It's it's amazing that Timothy had a church where one of the seven wonders of the ancient world existed.

And so, this temple, the temple to Diana or Artemi, Artemi, Artemis, it was this huge temple, and it was a comp it everyone worshiped Diana. So what do you do as a Christian? Do you show up there and say, OK, Diane is cool and she's a great experience, and you can go into that temple and experience all you want, but just say that, just, just believe in Jesus too so you can be saved. No, Paul went to them, as it says in Acts 19:9-10.

For 2 years before they rioted, was preaching the word of God to them. It says there and boldly spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. And then towards the end there we can see that after 2 years, all of the residents of Asia, now this might be a certain amount of hyperbole, maybe not everybody heard this, but All of the residents of that area heard the word of God. Did Paul twist and conform and try to make it a squishy touchy-feely experiential mystical religion?

No, he knew Jesus, and he knew Jesus was true, and he knew if he was true, then he could change lives and I'm not going to back down from this. I'm going to preach it boldly. And he, well, I'm sure the Lord gave him wisdom and in some instances when he met a Jew who knew a lot of the Old Testament, was able to reason with him through the Old Testament to show him that Christ was the Messiah. But I'm sure when he met an Ephesian who loved Diana and loved going to the temple prostitutes and, and buying idols and put them all over their chariots.

I'm sure that when he sat down with them, that he said, OK, now what's the deal here with Diana? And let me tell you about who God really is and let's work through it. And I'm sure some of them it didn't happen overnight. It took months, 2 years here it says.

To share with them, they didn't change the truth. He didn't back away from who God is just because they didn't have a concept of what it was. He was patient. He knew the power of the Word of God, and he knew that it would take the Holy Spirit to convince their hearts.

So today as Christians within the church, as we see this influences on postmodernism, I'm more and more convinced that though I want to love them and I want to talk with them and share with them, I really want to challenge them. You're not doing the world a favor. You're not helping them. In fact, you're making things worse.

Now you'll have a conversation with them. I know some people who even had conversations with Brian McLaren, and he's, he's slippery. He'll say things that sound Christian, he'll say things that sound good, and he'll even turn it around as a question. In fact, the lady I spoke with said that she asked him a question and he answered with a question.

And unfortunately that's the way the devil loves to answer, and I'm not saying Brian McLaren's the devil, and I'm not saying that some of these people might not have a sincerity within them, but they do need to be careful, and we need to be careful that we are rooted upon the sound rock of Christ on His word, that we as members of a Bible believing Christian churches that are pillars and grounds of truth to our community, that we're Pillars wherever we're at, at work, amongst our friends and neighbors, even reaching out to people we don't know at Starbucks across the street.

Will we be that pillar of truth? Will we broadcast it? Will we live it?

As if it has changed our lives, as if we are rooted on it, as if we will not be swayed from it, no matter what intellectual argument, no matter what postmodern idea, no matter what experiential thought can come along the way, will we stand on the word of God and proclaim it, though none go with us. Or will we begin to change it? and that's a danger we need to look into. My time is gone.

I appreciate you so much for, for listening. if you have questions, I know you've got to switch over, but I'll be around and we can chat about it. There are a couple of websites you can go to. I think Mike had said last week that, there's some of the books from John Piper.

it's an excellent book. I have it, and you can even go to john Piper's website desiringgod.org and listen to them cause they had a conference last year that you can download them for free. you can go to monarchism.com or.org, whichever it is, and they have tons of articles written from all different types of people about, about these thoughts and ideas and about how we don't need to be, the world has, there's a different thinking out there, so we need to be careful not to just think that, well, we've, this, the four spiritual laws have been effective since 1950, so they're going to be effective on a college campus today.

No, they're not.

People don't believe in truth. So if you walk up and you give them a little booklet that says, here are the four spiritual laws. You need to sit down with them and go through it and just don't think that they're going to pick it up and understand it. And if you use that, I'm not bagging on it, but I'm just saying we can't always think that one mode of evangelism that worked at one point is going to work now in the sense that people we're dealing with are different.

Greeks, Romans, Ephesians all had different worldviews, but many of them came to know Christ and it's because Paul and Timothy and other Christians we never even heard of took the time to share about the blessed salvation that is found in our. Savior Jesus Christ, do you believe it? Is it true to you? Let's live it.

Let's be lights for the name of Christ and to His glory. Let's pray. Father, we thank You for this time. Lord, we're challenged by your word.

We're challenged by the fact that Paul was so bold and so desirous to see lives changed. He saw the, the drugged out lives of temple prostitutes stumbling down the street, and his heart ached for them that they need to know Christ. He saw the intellectual, scholars. And and on Mars Hill in Athens and, and, and thinking that they had found everything in life, and yet he saw them lost in their ways and shared Christ with them.

And Lord, he even had an opportunity to go before the ruler of that world, Caesar himself, and share and live a life wholly before you, Lord God. Lord, we're just humble residents of Riverside and the surrounding areas. We might not have an opportunity to stand before world kings or before religious leaders, but Lord, we are around a A lot of lost people, a lot of people who are, are, are getting caught up and just experiencing life and finding pleasure in it thinking that that's it.

Oh Lord, how wrong they are.

And Lord, how right you are. Please, we pray, give us the strength to stand for your truth. Give us the desire to hide it in our hearts. And Lord, we pray that You would empower us with your Spirit to live the life that will glorify You and Lord, may even be used to change those around us who don't know you.

We lift this to you in your precious name, Jesus. Amen. Thank you so much, Troy, for coming out to share and Great message, man.