"A Generous Heterodoxy?"

"All Scripture is breathed out by God..."
2 Timothy 3

This is a central tenet of Christianity! When postmodern icon Brian McLaren describes the bible as a collection of narratives to teach us how to be good people and not biblical truths he is bordering on the heretical. And when Rob Bell question's the authenticity of the Virgin Birth, though suppositionally, he's gone over the edge.

This is the problem I have with the Emergent Church. Anyone following along seems to have to spend a lot of time defending or correcting the "leaders" and I think it smells too much like a universalistic belief system and therefore cannot be regarded as Christianity. Christ followers hold as fact: the Virgin birth, that Jesus is the Savior, the Christos, the only path to salvation and the Father is through Him and the divine inspiration and authority of the Holy Scripture. No if's, and's or but's. When you break the bible down into a bunch of nice stories instead of biblical fact Jesus becomes man and loses His deity.

I believe many nascent church movements are wrongly labeling themselves as Emergent because they think they're doing church in a new way; being missional, taking the Gospel to the streets, opening up their homes for the neighborhood. Thing is, this is an ancient way of doing church. In fact it's the first way it was ever done. With this in mind I'd say they are more correctly labeled an Apostolic Church, following the foundations laid down in the New Testament.

I'll end with an excerpt from Dr. Albert Mohler's article "A Generous Orthodoxy--Is it Orthodox?":

...Orthodoxy must be generous, but it cannot be so generous that it ceases to be orthodox. Inevitably, Christianity asserts truths that, to the postmodern mind, will appear decidedly ungenerous. Nevertheless, this is the truth that leads to everlasting life. The gospel simply is not up for renegotiation in the twenty-first century. A true Christian generosity recognizes the infinitely generous nature of the truth that genuinely saves. Accept no substitutes.

You can read the complete article at Albert Mohler's website.