In 2008, Lighthouse Trails wrote an article titled “Association of Christian Schools International Adds Spiritual Formation and Promotes Contemplative Authors.” The article challenged the ACSI because of its obvious contemplative propensities and how that was going to affect millions of students worldwide. You see, the ACSI claims to be the “largest Protestant educational organization in the world” with nearly 24,000 member schools and affecting over 5.5 million students throughout the world.1 By the way, those figures are substantially higher than the 2008 figures – 5,300 member schools and 1.2 million students. The question is, since ACSI’s challenge by Lighthouse Trails in 2008, what has the organization done with its contemplative leanings? The answer to that question can be found in an upcoming event that ACSI is holding.

In July of 2013, in Colorado Springs, ACSI will be presenting the “ 2013 ACSI Leadership Academy.” The theme at this year’s annual event is “Spiritual Formation: Christian Schools Matter”! The keynote speaker will be Dr. James C. Wilhoit, author of Spiritual Formation as if the Church Mattered (a copy of this book will be mailed to every registrant). Each registrant will also receive one semester hour of graduate credit from George Fox University (one of the most contemplative colleges out there today).

In our 2008 article, we suggested that ACSI “may be heading into the troubled waters of contemplative spirituality.” We stated this because listed under the ACSI “Spiritual Formation” section of their website were the names of contemplative books that ACSI was recommending. Our article focused mostly on Cultivating Christian Character by Michael Zigarelli. Zigarelli’s book, as we pointed out, contained the names of many contemplative figures. One in particular stood out, interspiritualist mystic David Steindl Rast. You can read our 2008 report to learn about our concerns over Zigarelli’s book and ACSI’s promotion of it.

That first article we wrote about ACSI was written in January of 2008. Later that year in March, we wrote “ACSI (Association of Christian Schools) Recommends Brian McLaren and Defends Mysticism.” We stated:

ACSI is telling attendees of the Early Education Conference on April 19, 2008 to read Henri Nouwen’s book, In the Name of Jesus for preparation for the conference.1 (p. 3) Now, we are sorry to report that ACSI is recommending to its 5300 member schools Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian (ACSI has since removed these links)

Our March 2008 article discussed then ACSI president Ken Smitherman and how he defended mysticism, referring to several mystic proponents in his defense statements. We explained:

In Smitherman’s March letter [his defense against our January letter], he tries to distinguish between what he calls “occult” mysticism and Christian mysticism. But by directing people to read Dallas Willard, Henri Nouwen, Michael Zigarelli, Rob Bell, and Brian McLaren, he is promoting the very thing he says is wrong.

Basically, as we showed in our March 2008 article, the president of ACSI was a contemplative advocate and wasn’t hiding the fact. By September of that year, we posted a third article, “ACSI (Association of Christian Schools) Searches for New President – Will This One Be a Contemplative?” Ken Smitherman was leaving ACSI, and a new president was going to take his place. There was hope, we thought. We could only speculate, but we could not help wonder if ACSI decided they didn’t want to go in the contemplative way. Our September article stated:

We hope that ACSI will put in the place of president someone who understands the dangers of the contemplative prayer and emerging church movements and someone who will seek to uphold the Word of God at all costs. This is an organization that works with and serves thousands of Christian schools worldwide representing 1.2 million students. If they present contemplative spirituality as an acceptable and beneficial belief system, the spiritual damage to countless students will be devastating.

The last article we posted about ACSI was in February 2009, “ACSI Chooses New President.” Dr. Brian Simmons, from Indiana Wesleyan University was chosen to be ACSI’s next president. In our 2/2009 article we stated:

The school where Simmons is currently working, Indiana Wesleyan University, is one of the schools listed on the Lighthouse Trails Contemplative Colleges page. In general, the Wesleyan denomination (as with many other denominations) has been influenced significantly by contemplative/emerging spirituality. . . As for Brian Simmons, time will tell what influences he will bring to ACSI. Let us pray that he does not share Ken Smitherman’s . . . affinity for contemplative spirituality.

Four years have passed since Brian Simmons took over the leadership of ACSI. (He actually resigned in 2012.) Dr. Daniel Egeler took over the role of President of ACSI. Lighthouse Trails has been occupied with many other stories, and ACSI drifted into the background. But on March 29th of this year, we received an e-mail stating:

Dear Lighthouse Trails:

I received a copy of an upcoming ACSI Leadership Academy that will be held this summer July 18-21. The title of the academy made my hair bristle: Spiritual Formation: Christian Schools Matter. The keynote speaker is none other than the infamous Dr. James C. Wilhoit. I have removed the flyer so no one will know about it. But I want to let my school administrator know that this is not something that would be beneficial, especially with the title of the conference.

Obviously, the person who wrote us is part of one of ACSI’s member schools. We commend this person for spotting danger and attempting to do something to protect his/her school.

Regarding James Wilhoit’s book, Spiritual Formation as if the Church Mattered (the book that ACSI will be giving out to members), the book is packed with references of and quotes by some of today’s most staunch and influential contemplative names: Dallas Willard (who wrote the foreword), Adele Ahlberg Calhoun, Ruth Haley Barton (trained at the interspiritual Shalem Institute), David Benner, Kenneth Boa, Richard Foster, Emilie Griffin, Brother Lawrence, Henri Nouwen, Eugene Peterson, Pete Scazzero, Klaus Issler, and Marjorie Thompson (Soul Feast). (Refer to our research site for information on these names.) The book is basically a primer on contemplative prayer and emerging spirituality and backs up the teachings of the names which it includes. Wilhoit is currently a professor of “Christian Formation” at Wheaton College. (update: 4/2/13 - sent from a LT reader after this article posted. James Wilhoit's book on Lectio Divina: http://jimwilhoit.com/discovering-lectio-divina.html).

It is sad to say that ACSI’s current president, Daniel Egeler, is continuing on with Ken Smitherman’s role of taking ACSI down the contemplative path. If your children (including college age children) attend a Christian school, it would be a good idea if you found out if that school is an ACSI member school. If it is, please talk to that school’s administrator or president and alert them to the direction ACSI has gone .Lighthouse Trails will gladly send a complimentary copy of A Time of Departing to any ACSI administrator or president that is willing to read it. Just e-mail us at editors@lighthousetrails.com if you know an ACSI member school administrator who says he or she would like a copy.

As you may recall, Lighthouse Trails did a special report a year and a half ago titled “An Epidemic of Apostasy – Christian Seminaries Must Incorporate “Spiritual Formation” to Become Accredited.” In that report, we documented how Christian accreditation associations were requiring Christian schools to include Spiritual Formation programs/emphasis in their schools in order to receive accreditation. If you haven’t read that article, we encourage you to do so. It is one of the keys in understanding how our Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries have fallen into spiritual deception. As for ACSI, it offers member schools a certification program, which Christian schools now seek. Put two and two together, and you will end up with the same scenario that has happened with Christian accreditation as we explained in our Epidemic of Apostasy article. In other words: ACSI offers certification (e.g, teaching certification) + ACSI promotes contemplative spirituality = ACSI eventually requiring recipients of ACSI certification to include contemplative (i.e., Spiritual Formation) in their education. It’s really that simple, and it’s really that dreadful.

Click here to use the ACSI member school search tool to see if your own school is listed. With 24,000 member schools in ACSI, most likely it is. This includes all levels of education: elementary, high school, college, university, and seminary.

To Lighthouse Trails:

My church just started advertising a “Contemplative Communion” service for Good Friday. My pastor is really into contemplative prayer, spiritual disciplines, etc. Since I’m a faithful reader of your site (and the BIBLE!), I know that this is bad news. I wanted to mention the contemplative communion thing to you folks in case you feel it might be good to warn people about it, especially this close to Easter. There’s more info on the Shalem Institute’s website.

Thanks for speaking the truth!!

__________

Our Response:

There is actually a story behind the story regarding Shalem Institute’s ecumenical “Contemplative Communion” Good Friday service. Because we have followed Shalem Institute for many years now, it is no surprise to us that they are holding a contemplative service. Shalem’s contemplative roots go back to its beginning. And when we say contemplative, we mean contemplative in its “purest” form, meaning interspiritual, universalistic, New Age/New Spirituality, and so forth. But the story from our vantage point (actually a two-fold story) is that first, mainstream Christianity (United Methodist, Episcopal, etc) has stepped over that line onto the New Age playing field, and second, largely because of one key figure who was trained at Shalem, the evangelical church is right behind them. In other words, Protestant Christianity is beginning to fulfill the “prophecy” from occultist Alice Bailey, whose “spirit guide” told her that the Age of Aquarius (or Age of Awakening for mankind – to know he is Divine) would come to the world, not around the Christian church, but rather through it.

Shalem Institute, located in Washington, DC, was founded by two interspiritualists: Tilden Edwards and Gerald May. We first heard about Shalem before Lighthouse Trails even began, when we were handed an unpublished manuscript by Ray Yungen in the year 2000. In that manuscript, later to be published as A Time of Departing,Yungen revealed that Shalem Institute played a major role in bringing contemplative prayer to the Christian church. Below is an excerpt from A Time of Departing:

Ray Yungen (pp. 65-67, A Time of Departing): If the contemplative prayer movement has a major alma mater, it would be the Shalem Institute (for Spiritual Formation) located in Washington D.C. The Shalem Institute is one of the bastions of contemplative prayer in this country and has trained thousands of spiritual directors since its inception in 1972. To understand the interspiritual proclivities in the contemplative prayer movement, I invite you to take a good look at this organization. Founded by an Episcopal clergyman, the Reverend Tilden Edwards, Shalem’s mission is to spread the practice of mystical prayer to Christianity as a whole.

Dr. Edwards himself makes no effort to hide his interspiritual approach to Christianity. One example was a workshop he did titled: Buddhist Contributions to Christian Living. He promises that if one wants to live in the divine Presence, then consider that:

“Some Buddhist traditions have developed very practical ways of doing so that many Christians have found helpful . . . offering participants new perspectives and possibilities for living more fully in the radiant gracious Presence through the day.”

An individual who had a particularly large influence in the Christian counseling field is the late psychiatrist and author Gerald May. May, who passed away in 2005, was also a cofounder and teacher at the Shalem Institute. . . . one finds a direct affinity between May and Eastern mysticism.

In the front of his book, Simply Sane, he states upfront: “The lineage of searching expressed herein arises from scriptures of the world’s great religions.” He then gives thanks to two Tibetan Buddhist lamas (holy men) and a Japanese Zen Master for their “particular impact” on him.

The influence of Eastern spirituality is also depicted in his book, Addiction and Grace, which is considered to be a classic in the field of Christian recovery. In this book, May conveys that “our core . . . one’s own center . . . is where we realize our essential unity with one another with all God’s creation” (emphasis mine).

Of course the method for entering this “core” is the silence, which May makes obvious when he explains:

“I am not speaking here of meditation that involves guided imagery or scriptural reflections, but of a more contemplative practice in which one just sits still and stays awake with God.”

May is even more upfront about his Eastern metaphysical views in his book, The Awakened Heart, where he expounds on the “cosmic presence” which he explains is “pervading ourselves and all creation.”

One might defend May by saying he was just speaking of God’s omnipresence. But May was firmly in the mystical panentheistic camp. There can be no mistaking his theological underpinnings when May revealed his meaning of “cosmic presence” in such statements as:

“It is revealed in the Hindu greetings jai bhagwan and namaste that reverence the divinity that both resides within and embraces us all.”55

Like [New Ager] M. Scott Peck, May started with Zen Buddhism back in the 1970s. He was still in tune with it some thirty years later when he wrote the foreword to a book called Zen for Christians. In it, he wrote: “I wish I’d had this book when I began to explore Buddhism. It would have made things much easier.”56

Later in A Time of Departing, Yungen quotes Shalem founder Tilden Edwards as saying the following: “This mystical stream [contemplative prayer] is the Western bridge to Far Eastern spirituality.”

That is the very core of why Lighthouse Trails continues warning about the contemplative prayer (i.e., spiritual formation) movement that has literally knocked the evangelical church off its feet (only she doesn’t realize it).

There are two key players within the evangelical camp who have been heavily impacted by Shalem Institute, one directly and one indirectly: Ruth Haley Barton and John Ortberg. Barton was trained at the Shalem Institute and later became the Associate Director of Spiritual Formation at Willow Creek. There, she teamed up with John Ortberg to create Willow Creek’s curriculum on Spiritual Formation. While Richard Foster was bringing contemplative prayer into the church through his 1978 classic Celebration of Discipline, Barton and Ortberg were bringing it in through a side door, the highly influential Willow Creek. Today, both Barton and Ortberg are actively doing their part in bringing about this paradigm shift to evangelical Christianity.

If one would like to see what the evangelical church is becoming, one only needs to take a look at Ruth Haley Barton today. After she left Willow Creek, she went on to start her own organization, The Transforming Center. There, her program trains thousands of pastors and church leaders how to become contemplative.

Again, from Ray Yungen:

The following scenario Barton relates could be the wave of the future for the evangelical church if this movement continues to unfold in the manner it already has:

“I sought out a spiritual director, someone well versed in the ways of the soul . . . eventually this wise woman said to me, . . . ‘What you need is stillness and silence so that the sediment can settle and the water can become clear.’ . . . I decided to accept this invitation to move beyond my addiction to words.”6

By “addiction to words” [Barton] means normal ways of praying. She still uses words, but only three of them, “Here I am.” This is nothing more than The Cloud of Unknowing or the prayer of the heart.

Like Richard Foster, Barton argues that God cannot be reached adequately, if at all, without the silence. (p. 172, A Time of Departing)

On Ruth Haley Barton’s website, it states:” Our passion is to see every church become a center for spiritual transformation.” We believe it would be profound to know how many evangelical pastors, who are holding Good Friday services this coming Friday, have been influenced by Ruth Haley Barton or Richard Foster. Most likely the majority of them have a copy of Celebration of Discipline on their bookshelves. If your pastor is one of those who does, take a look at Shalem Institute, and we believe you will be taking a look at the near future of evangelical Christianity.

A number of years ago, one of our colleagues contacted Gerald May via e-mail and asked him if he believed that Jesus was the only way to salvation. He answered emphatically, “Absolutely not!” This is the face of the Christian of the future, a future that is at the threshold right now.

By Heather Clark
Christian News Network

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma – The popular craft chain Hobby Lobby has been granted a full rehearing of its case challenging Obamacare’s abortion pill mandate.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals announced on Friday that Hobby Lobby’s appeal will go before the entire court as per the company’s request. Cases are customarily held before a panel of three judges, except in what are called en banc hearings.

“It’s extraordinarily rare for the court to do that,” stated Kyle Duncan of The Beckett Fund, which is representing Hobby Lobby in the courts. “We think the takeaway is that the court as a whole recognizes how important the case is and wants to devote their full attention to it.”

“We are grateful that the court granted Hobby Lobby’s petition,” he said.

The court plans to hear the case soon as the company has until July before it will begin to be fined as much as $1.3 million a day for noncompliance. Click here to continue reading.

By Ray Yungen

Scores of books and writings by authors and teachers of contemplative prayer have been written. Basically, these authors echo Thomas Merton, and in understanding Merton, we can understand the whole movement. It is essential to see that although Merton and his proponents have an apparent devotion to God and a strong commitment to moral integrity, they have attempted to marry biblical principles to a mysticism that is, through the Desert Fathers, derived from Eastern religions.
I recall coming out of an interspiritual center once where the creed was all religions are one. I thought to myself, I’m sure I am viewed as someone who gets up and smugly cries out, “only my religion is true!” It’s true that I’ve come to this conclusion, yes, but why? Simply put, because the prophets and apostles of my religion made that unmistakably clear. None of the biblical champions of God were interspiritualists—absolutely none! Paul, the apostle, illustrated this in the following account:

And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men. And they called Barnabas, Jupiter; and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker. Then the priest of Jupiter, which was before their city, brought oxen and garlands unto the gates, and would have done sacrifice with the people.

Which when the apostles, Barnabas and Paul, heard of, they rent their clothes, and ran in among the people, crying out, And saying, Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein: Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. (Acts 14: 11-16, emphasis mine)

Paul said this because he knew that these other gods were not God at all—only Jesus Christ could be worshiped, only He died for humanity’s sins. Needless to say, other faiths do not embrace this. Hindu and Buddhist karma and Islamic submission are only, at best, futile, vain human efforts.

In contemplative-promoting literature, one can find numerous statements that either belittle or actually condemn the gospel message of Jesus Christ. Here are two examples:

Unfortunately, over the course of the centuries, this [Christianity] has come to be presented in almost legal language, as if it were some sort of transaction, a deal with God; there was this gap between us and God, somebody had to make up for it—all that business. We can drop that. The legal metaphor seems to have helped other generations. Fine. Anything that helps is fine. But once it gets in the way, as it does today, we should drop it.1

The fundamentalist continually waves one or two out-of-context gospel passages in front of us, stretching them beyond all valid interpretation and meaning. Thus the quotation “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6) is often used to declare that no one except the Christian can attain to God-or for that matter be “saved.” This we know is nonsense. When the Divine Mother gathers up her harvest during the decades ahead, the chaff of fundamentalism will be separated from the good wheat of the new consciousness and left by the wayside.2

Interspiritualists look with great disdain on the concept that God is confined to one religion. One statement that demonstrates this repugnance was made by an Anglican bishop. He maintains:

The problem with exclusivism is that it presents us with a god from whom we need to be delivered rather than the living God who is the hope of the world. The exclusivist god is narrow, rigid, and blind. This god pays no attention to the sanctity and personal holiness of people outside the Christian fold. This god takes no loving and parental pride in the lives of great spiritual teachers who spoke of other paths to truth, figures like Moses, Siddartha [Buddha], Mohammed, and Gandhi. . . . Such a god is not worthy of honour, glory, worship, or praise. This god offers no hope for a world deeply divided along religious lines, a world crying out for peace and reconciliation.3 (emphasis mine)

At this point, we must return to what the apostle Paul said: “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of devils [i.e., pagan mysticism]” (I Corinthians 10:21).

No longer is the contemplative movement confined to just the Roman Catholic church and mainline Protestant camps. With a sincere desire to find a deeper walk with God many conservative, evangelical Christians are now exploring and embracing the spirituality of the people I have profiled in A Time of Departing. This pursuit oddly covers the whole gamut of evangelical Christianity from charismatic to Baptist. Only the most discerning and biblically grounded Christians seem aware of the dangers of the contemplative prayer movement. A lack of discernment or a misleading view of Scripture can open the doors to becoming a contemplative evangelical. The list of these evangelicals is growing, and you may be surprised who is involved in swiftly moving the evangelical church toward a new mystical paradigm. (from chapter 3 of A Time of Departing by Ray Yungen)

Notes:
1. Robert Aitken & David Steindl Rast, The Ground We Share (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1994), p. 45.
2. Frank X. Tuoti, The Dawn of the Mystical Age (New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing, 1997), p. 86.
3. Michael Ingham, Mansions of the Spirit (Toronto, ON: Anglican Book Centre, 1997), p. 61.

In 1922, liberal pastor and theologian Harry Emerson Fosdick stated the following words in his sermon titled “Will the Fundamentalists Win?”:

“It is interesting to note where the Fundamentalists are driving in their stakes to mark out the deadline of doctrine around the church, across which no one is to pass except on terms of agreement. They insist that we must all believe in the historicity of certain special miracles, preeminently the virgin birth of our Lord; that we must believe in a special theory of inspiration-that the original documents of the Scripture, which of course we no longer possess, were inerrantly dictated to men a good deal as a man might dictate to a stenographer; that we must believe in a special theory of the Atonement-that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alienated Deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner.”

Fosdick considered the doctrine of a blood atonement a “slaughterhouse religion”1

What this line of thinking is saying is that while Jesus’ going to the Cross should be looked at as an example of perfect servanthood and sacrifice, the idea that God would send His Son to a violent death on the Cross is barbaric and would never happen. Thus, Fosdick (and those who adhere to this reasoning) rejects Christ as a substitute for our penalty of sin (“the wages of sin is death” – Romans 6:23).

In Roger Oakland’s book, Faith Undone, in the chapter titled ”Slaughterhouse Religion” (see extract below), he shows where contemplatives and emerging church leaders hold to the same view. This is easy to understand how they could be like this when one understands the underlying panentheistic nature of contemplative prayer. In other words, contemplative mystics believe that man is divine (i.e., that God/divinity dwells in all creation – all humans in particularly). If man is divine, then he does not need to have anyone make atonement for him. A substitutionary death (taking a sinner’s place) on the Cross would not be necessary and in fact, would be an insult to man’s own divine nature. It would be humiliating. Like contemplative mystic monk Thomas Merton said (quoted by Leonard Sweet in Quantum Spirituality), if we really knew what was in each one of us, we would bow down and worship one another. He and other contemplatives say that man’s biggest problem isn’t a sinful nature; no, it’s that he does not realize he is divine. Do all these pastors and professors who promote contemplative figures realize this is what they are really promoting?

During this time of the year, when so many churches are holding Easter services (traditionally in honor of the death and resurrection of Jesus), how many of these same churches are clinging to contemplative/emerging spirituality without even comprehending what it really stands for (and some do realize it). If Jesus’ going to the Cross and shedding blood was merely an act of service and sacrifice, an example for others to follow, and was not actually a substitutionary payment for the sins of humanity, then why celebrate Easter and the resurrection? It would make no sense. Those churches who cling to contemplative/emergent ideologies and practices should reevaluate this. While they cling to one (contemplative), they’re on the road to denying the other (the atonement) . . . even if they don’t realize it.

Below is an extract from Faith Undone on “Slaughterhouse Religion”:

“The Cross is Barbarity & a Slaughterhouse Religion – So Says Emerging Church Leaders”

by Roger Oakland

In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace. (Ephesians 1:7)

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. (II Corinthians 5:21)

The heart and core of the Christian faith is based upon Jesus Christ’s shed blood at Calvary as the only acceptable substitutionary atonement for mankind’s sins. The Gospel message requires this foundation. The Bible says the wages of sin is death—thus every person alive should receive the penalty of spiritual death because none of us is without sin, since we are born with our sin nature intact. Satan hates the Gospel message. He understands what the Gospel means, and his agenda is to deceive mankind from understanding and believing so they can suffer eternally with him. While Scripture is very clear about the necessity of Christ’s death in order for us to be saved, some believe this would make God a blood-thirsty barbarian. Embedded within the structure of the emerging church is just such a belief.

Precivilized Barbarity

Many in the emerging church movement would vehemently object if someone told them that emerging church leaders don’t like the Cross. They would jump up and say, “Yes, they do. I’ve heard them talk about Jesus and His going to the Cross. They say they love the Cross.”

Some emerging church leaders do say they love the Cross, but an underlying theme is gaining momentum among them. It says Jesus’ going to the Cross was an example of sacrifice and servanthood that we should follow; but the idea that God would send His Son to a violent death for the sins of mankind—well, that is not who God is. A loving God would never do that! Such a violent act would make Christianity a “slaughterhouse religion.”1 Liberal theologian and pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, the late Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), believed that the doctrine of the atonement, where “Jesus suffered as a substitute for us” because of our sins, is a “precivilized barbarity.”2

In his book, The Modern Use of the Bible, Fosdick says that Jesus’ going to the Cross should be seen as an example of a life of service and sacrifice and not compared with “old animal sacrifices” and “made ‘a pious fraud’ played by God upon the devil.”3 In Fosdick’s book Dear Mr. Brown, he states:

Too many theories of the atonement assume that by one single high priestly act of self-sacrifice Christ saved the world.4

Fosdick ends that statement with a pronounced—“No!” He insists, “These legalistic theories of the atonement are in my judgment a theological disgrace.”5

Fosdick considered the idea that God would actually send His Son to die on a Cross to take our place to be the basis for a violent and bloody religion. He rejected the biblical message of an atonement and substitutionary sacrifice.

Fosdick was the pastor of Riverside Church of New York City from 1925 to 1946. While he has been long gone, his ideologies have remained intact and have drifted right into the emerging church. In October 2006, Riverside Church held the 5th Fosdick Convocation in honor of their former pastor. Two of the emerging church’s most influential teachers were there as speakers in honor of Fosdick—Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo.6 As I will show you, McLaren resonates with Fosdick’s view of the Cross.

False Advertising for God

In an interview, Brian McLaren questioned the idea of God sending His Son to a violent death, calling it “false advertising for God”:

[O]ne of the huge problems is the traditional understanding of hell. Because if the cross is in line with Jesus’ teaching then—I won’t say, the only, and I certainly won’t say even the primary—but a primary meaning of the cross is that the kingdom of God doesn’t come like the kingdoms of this world, by inflicting violence and coercing people. But that the kingdom of God comes through suffering and willing, voluntary sacrifice. But in an ironic way, the doctrine of hell basically says, no, that’s not really true. That in the end, God gets His way through coercion and violence and intimidation and domination, just like every other kingdom does. The cross isn’t the center then. The cross is almost a distraction and false advertising for God. (emphasis added)7

What an extraordinary example of faith under attack and the consequences of thinking outside of the box. If McLaren is right, all those who have ever lived and believed in Christ’s atonement have been misled and wrong. McLaren has taken the freedom to reconstruct what faith means by distorting the Scriptures, or worse yet, saying the very opposite of what the inspired Word of God says. This is blasphemy! McLaren also states:

And I heard one well-known Christian leader, who—I won’t mention his name, just to protect his reputation. ‘Cause some people would use this against him. But I heard him say it like this: The traditional understanding says that God asks of us something that God is incapable of Himself. God asks us to forgive people. But God is incapable of forgiving. God can’t forgive unless He punishes somebody in place of the person He was going to forgive. God doesn’t say things to you—Forgive your wife, and then go kick the dog to vent your anger. God asks you to actually forgive. And there’s a certain sense that, a common understanding of the atonement presents a God who is incapable of forgiving. Unless He kicks somebody else.8

That God Does Not Exist

This idea of rejecting God’s judgment placed on Jesus Christ instead of us is not exclusive with Fosdick or McLaren. In fact, such rejection is integrated into the teachings of many others. In 1991, William Shannon (biographer of Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton) said:

This is a typical patriarchal notion of God. He is the God of Noah who sees people deep in sin, repents that He made them and resolves to destroy them. He is the God of the desert who sends snakes to bite His people because they murmured against Him. He is the God of David who practically decimates a people … He is the God who exacts the last drop of blood from His Son, so that His just anger, evoked by sin, may be appeased. This God whose moods alternate between graciousness and fierce anger … This God does not exist.12

So in other words, according to Fosdick, McLaren, and Shannon, Jesus should be seen as a model of sacrifice to follow in our own lives, but to view God the Father as a judge against sin is not a proper view of God. Those who reject the atonement realize the greatest threat to their heretical views is those who take the Scriptures literally and seriously. Fosdick explains:

Were you to talk to that fundamentalist preacher, he doubtless would insist that you must believe in the “substitutionary” theory of atonement—namely, that Jesus suffered as a substitute for us the punishment due us for our sins. But can you imagine a modern courtroom in a civilized country where an innocent man would be deliberately punished for another man’s crime? … [S]ubstitutionary atonement … came a long way down in history in many a penal system. But now it is a precivilized barbarity; no secular court would tolerate the idea for a moment; only in certain belated theologies is it retained as an explanation of our Lord’s death … Christ’s sacrificial life and death are too sacred to be so misrepresented.13

This is another perfect example of how the emerging church turns doctrine it doesn’t understand into a mockery against Scripture and God’s plan of salvation. God’s ways are not our ways and to expect them to line up with our own human reasoning is ludicrous:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Former Catholic priest Brennan Manning has been a major influence in emerging spirituality. In his 2003 book Above All (foreword by singer Michael W. Smith)he quotes William Shannon almost word for word, regarding the atonement:

[T]he god whose moods alternate between graciousness and fierce anger … the god who exacts the last drop of blood from his Son so that his just anger, evoked by sin, may be appeased, is not the God revealed by and in Jesus Christ. And if he is not the God of Jesus, he does not exist.14

Dying for the Sins of the World

Marcus Borg [was] Distinguished Professor in Religion and Culture and Hundere Endowed Chair in Religious Studies at Oregon State University. He is a lecturer and the author of several books, some of which are Jesus and Buddha, The God We Never Knew, and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But not Literally. While most would not consider him an emerging church leader, his thinking has greatly influenced the movement and its leaders. Brian McLaren says he has “high regard”15 for Borg; the two of them participated in a summer seminar series at an interspiritual center in Portland, Oregon, in 2006.16 Rob Bell references and praises him in Bell’s popular book Velvet Elvis.17 Walter Brueggemann, a professor at Columbia Theological Seminary and one of the contributors for Richard Foster’s Renovare Spiritual Formation Study Bible, considers Borg an essential part of the emerging spirituality. Brueggemann states:

Marcus Borg is a key force in the emerging “new paradigm” of Christian faith.18

Borg explains in his book The God We Never Knew that his views on God, the Bible, and Christianity were transformed while he was in seminary:

I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product. I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity. As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God.… I realized that whatever “divine revelation” and the “inspiration of the Bible” meant (if they meant anything), they did not mean that the Bible was a divine product with divine authority.19

This attitude would certainly explain how Borg could say:

Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world.20

If what Borg is saying is true, then we would have to throw out John 3:16 which says God so loved the world He gave His only Son, and we would have to dismiss the theme of a blood offering that is prevalent throughout all of Scripture. In the Old Testament, it is clear:

For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. (Leviticus 17:11)

But Borg rejects this emphasis:

To think that the central meaning of Easter [resurrection] depends upon something spectacular happening to Jesus’ corpse misses the point of the Easter message and risks trivializing the story. To link Easter primarily to our hope for an afterlife, as if our post-death existence depends upon God having transformed the corpse of Jesus, is to reduce the story to a politically-domesticated yearning for our survival beyond death.21

What is behind this mindset? Listen to one New Ager describe what underlies this line of thought:

Jesus was an historical person, a human becoming Christ, the Christos, is an eternal transpersonal condition of being. Jesus did not say that this higher state of consciousness realized in him was his alone for all time. Nor did he call us to worship him. Rather, he called us to follow him, to follow in his steps, to learn from him, from his example.22

Harry Fosdick would resonate with this. When he says, “Christ’s sacrificial life and death are too sacred to be so misrepresented,” he means that Christ is an example to be followed, not an innocent sacrifice for our guilt and thus worthy of praise and worship. Satan wants desperately to be worshiped and adored as God. He hates all that Jesus’ death stands for. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, purchased with His own blood the lives of those written in the Book of Life.

The Bible says, “without the shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22), and also, “He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself” (Hebrews 9:26). Are we to reject these Scriptures and other ones as well that speak of the atonement because it doesn’t sound logical? Scripture tells us that the carnal mind is at enmity with God. We need to recognize that the Bible is God’s revelation of Himself to man. It is our final authority, and we must adhere to the truth of its teachings.

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.… And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. (I John 4:10, 14)

(from chapter 11 of Faith Undone by Roger Oakland – for entire chapter and endnotes, click here.)

By Heather Clark
Christian News Network

As the U.S. Supreme Court weighs two important cases on homosexual marriage, scout leaders and parents of scouts have announced the formation of a coalition to keep the ban on open homosexuality in the Boy Scouts of America. The coalition converged in Orlando, Florida over the weekend, where 15 scoutmasters representing 13 states spoke to the media. “We don’t think sex and politics should be injected into Boy Scouts,” declared John Stemberger, a former scoutmaster who now works as an attorney. “This change is not needed; it doesn’t change any existing problems and could cause even more problems.” Others present warned that if the Boy Scouts of America changes its policy on open homosexuals, then it can expect to see a lot of parents pulling their sons out out of the organization, as well as leaders resigning in a mass exodus. Click here to continue reading.

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