There are no constant unchanging Xtian outlooks or values;
it follows the whims and fancies of the current times.

That's what this article describes.

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I have always had this quaint hope that one day people who identify themselves as "Christians" would start living the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Our former president was the most self-identified "Christian" chief-executive in American history. He was also - beyond a doubt - the least "Christ-like" one.

Lenny Bruce once said, "Thou Shalt Not Kill means JUST THAT". Lenny understood some simple truths. So many religious people just don't get it.

Read Thomas Merton.

Read Dorothy Day.

They got it.

Will Christians finally go bact to Christ? It's a nice thought.

Judge Sonia Has Her Day

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY

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I read the Xtian's New Testament about how their Founder and Chief Propaganda Officer Paul aka Saul a renegade rabbi student told them that they should live. Sounded like a kibbutz to me but,no, the heresy of the Protestant Ethic was implemented as a protest against the Catholic custom of buying and selling forgiveness for sins, etc.

Remember Jim Bakker who created the first Xtian amusement park was a first year Bible student too. HE DID FEDERAL TIME!

TALK ABOUT A BUNCH OF HYPOCRITES!
Their boy is ridiculing the Pharisee who wants everybody to LOOK AND SEE HOW PIOUS AND HOLY IS ME!
But that is what they do.

I thought I would try to join a Xtian church but when they asked me to fill out a credit check and an automatic withdrawal for my checking account ( which I have never had!). I decided I had better go somewhere else.

BAD EXPERIENCE!

And if you show up just to see the show, you are stared at and treated like a pariah instead of receiving the warm welcome many of their signs outside promise:" ALL WELCOME" AND MY FAVORITE WAS " JESUS LOVES YOU AND SO DO WE" but they should have added:"IN GOD WE TRUST BUT ALL OTHERS BRING CASH!"
PTL -- PASS THE LOOT!

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Darwin would smile--not because they have accepted evolution, but because they are evolving.

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Most of what passes for christianity in america is not christian at all.

Not only that the whole point of the christian faith is sin and death, if christians don't believe Sin entered the world through Adam then there goes the entire purpose of the new testament.

Quite frankly I would like to see articles go in and expose the fallacies of modern "christians".

Really today's christians are rallying around a mythology whos only purpose is social identity and the comfort of life after death, even if they are all collectively deluded. Life in capitalist america for the poorest is still harsh in the number of hours worked with little leisure time. Marx had it correct, religion is a sign of the oppressed working classes and those that fear passing into non existence forever, so they delude themselves otherwise.

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There is no god. All religion is just a way for con artists to scam the gullible.

Tax churches just like any other business and regulate their ability to collect money through taxation.

Nationalize their hospitals and require them to follow all civil rights protections

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The documentary "Jesus Camp" was on the A&E channel the other day, and it exposed just how mean-spirited and coercive these religious groups are. You can't watch those small children being bullied and brainwashed without feeling outraged that our government allows this criminal activity to go on year after year.
People have a right to belive in gods, leprechauns and unicorns if they wish, but they don't have a right to impose those beliefs on helpless children. America desperately needs laws to protect kids under 18 from organized religious indoctrination, especially those "camps" that take kids away from home.
We also should demand that the ridiculous tax breaks now granted to religious organizations be stopped once and for all! It's grossly unfair that tax dollars are forcibly taken from rational people to support the primitive beliefs of people who can't get though life without an imaginary friend. Let's make churches pay taxes like the profitable businesses they are.

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As a kid growing up, my family's Lutheran church had an openly gay (male) assistant pastor, and another one who was a divorced woman, and we all were just fine with evolution, and instead of using church money to build our own church, we time-shared with the Catholic church and spent the money instead on building housing for low-income families in the neighborhood. Sermons weren't about hell; they were about helping and taking care of others, and about how Reagan was a misguided fool. This is the Christianity I grew up with, not the crap that so many people today (and especially in these pages) associate with Christianity. Am I still a churchgoer? No. But every one of those lessons is still relevant, and still right.

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And the time for the three western "monotheisms", Judaism, Islam and Christianity are way past their use by date, which was somewhere arount 1,000 CE.

All three of these religions are methods of dividing the single human race into warring factions. Look at the Middle East. What a f*cked up mess and it is all because the Jews say their imaginary deity gave them some land thousands of years ago. (Actually that deity told them to steal it from the people living there and to exterminate those who were already there - it's all detailed in Genesis and Exodus.)

The Muslims think that anything they lay their eyes on belongs to their miserable deity and anyone who doesn't agree is canon fodder of the first order.

The Christians know that everyone else is going to hell and the nuttier among them are hoping to get the final battle started in the Middle East which will bring Jesus back. Only this time he's not coming as a baby in a manger, but on a war horse slaughtering everyone in his sight.

All three of these monstrosities need to be eliminated from the face of the planet - then we can start to have peace. Then we can start to understand that, "there's no hell below us and above us only sky",. No gods and no religion would be a great start.

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When we're talking about Protestants, words like "Evangelical" and "Mainline" are adjectives that describe church style rather than the names of institutions. Worship styles and theological emphases morph over the years - even within such rigid institutions as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches (in the case of these churches, new theologies are read into the past by finding some quote for some church father somewhere that contains suggestive rudiments of the new theology, and then proclaiming that the new theology is what the church has always believed, even though nobody in the rank-and-file knew of these beliefs until the Pope or council proclaimed them).

Evangelicalism as we've known it was an attempt to express Christianity in 20th century terms - it shared the 20th century's unfounded assumptions of language, like the correspondence theory of truth, and the Newtonian world view that said everything moved according to fixed laws and was therefore predictable. The "four spiritual laws" of the evangelical Gospel is nothing more than an attempt to express faith and repentance as a systematic process - like a technical writer's version of the book of John.

Those assumptions have come up busted, and so religion changes. Few people can really give an account of how structuralism was overthrown by deconstructionism, and how cognitive science pointed out the obvious over-exaggerations of deconstructionism and suggested new ways of understanding language and symbols as tools that organize experience to fit the structure of human neurology. Nonetheless, it's filtered down enough that most college-educated people know that "absolute truth" is a slippery subject, that people from different cultures are prone to misunderstanding each other, and that morals adapt over time.

I'm not sure, though, that the "emergent church" is going to take over evangelicalism. A number of colleges are "evangelical," but open to evolution and science. As a result, most of these schools are treated with skepticism by the majority of evangelicals, and become more associated with mainline Protestantism - while the hardcore evangelicals found new schools like Liberty University, where young earth creationists get honorary doctorates.

I think that "emergent churches," to the extent they even exist, will simply mix in the ecumenical movement and become indistinct from liberal Protestantism. (There is a "post-liberalism" that seems almost indistinguishable from "post-evangelicalism," anyway..."emergent church" seems redolent of "Neo-Orthodoxy" and theologians like Karl Barth in many of its emphases.) Evangelicalism will remain as a shrinking movement of literalists.

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I am not sure whether the Emerging Church represents a challenge to evangelicalism or not. Protestants in America have been reacting to traditional evangelical theology ever since the Puritans landed. It is the nature of the church when an emphasis is being neglected or overlooked a new group (or denomination) will seek to make correction. The Emerging Church holds promise for some people but as an emphasis it will have a limited shelf life. The Emerging Church is all over the board as to what it is proposing, except that the people who use the phrase mostly want a new face on evangelicalism. May God's peace be with them. Various forms of evangelicalism, whether hard-line Calvinism, restorationism, dispensationalism, pentecostalism, or, what is most common, generic evangelicalism, will continue. The key for most of us is whether the groups are agreed on the essentials of the faith. Persons who get excited about the article being discussed seem to be hoping that the evangelical expression of the faith, in which persons seek not only to live a Jesus life style including compassion for all persons, but also understand the Bible to be truth-revealing--that this form of Christianity will cease to exist, are not understanding the times correctly.

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pbs had a piece on a church in africa touting a combo of christianity and islam rolled into one...

the attention getter what that the iman/pastor had a hummer parked in front of his church... ironic???

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When people have an axe to grind because they suddenly find that Biblical Prophecy puts the finger on them personally, they will do whatever it takes to make themselves look squeeky clean.

The best way to do that is to confuse and confound what is said in the Biblical Prophecies. Tear them apart and make them look stupid. Rewrite the Bible using previously discarded parchments which disagree with each other and then say, "We have a better and more understandable Bible now". Then some observant non believer sees some of the blatant contradictions in this new line of money making versions and poors contempt on it.
What has actually been happening with this "New Emerging Church" is in fact to brutally (in disguise of course) cut the guts out of Christ's Messiahship and make Christianity to be just another religion like Buddhism and every other eastern religion. Do not get me wrong here, there are many honest believing people in those religions and I am not condemning them, just that the real Christianity is quietly being pushed off the scene. But, this has been prophesied that it would happen. It would take too much wording to show it here but the evidence is both prophetic and historical.

Because of the falsity of "so called christianity" most folks are turning away from something they see as rubbish and just a cloak worn by people who would demand from others standards that they themselves make all the excuses that they themselves should not be bound by those rules.

In the time of Christ, he was up against exactly the same problems. The hyrachy (sorry about the spelling) had installed hundreds of rulings for just one commandment, take for instance the Sabbath. there are some 240 words in that fourth commandment yet they had well over 2000 laws on how it was supposed to be kept.. This was a bondage placed on the rest of the people but the leaders had little loop holes for themselves to get around those bondage rulings. Actually, it really wasn't that different then than it is today. So to get around it, they have refabricated "new religion" and they call it the "Emerging Church". it would be a whole lot better to get back to the original. Which by the way, was totally different than what we are led to believe is "Christianity" today. I has not improved but gone down the shute. It is actually worse than barbarianism. But it still has that "don't do as I do, just do as i say mentality."

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...that I could refrain from ridiculing. It seems a rational choice for evangelicals, whose focus is on conversion, to make; many more people become potential converts as a result. Good for them.

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Christian revolutionaries evangelize by their works not their words. We do not turn are symbols are words into golden calves. What would the world be like if after 9-11, the US did not apply the law of retaliation as Christians are taught? The “emerging church”, “and the Holy Spirit entered into their hearts that they would agree to turn their land over to the beast”. One can not change what one does not see. Just as a few hundred years ago there was a reformation and many Christians changed their view of their relationship to God. A few hundred years from now this age will be called the time of the reconciliation. Here is a kicker, the first sign of the reconciliation, is the reconciliation of Shia and Sunni. Then watch out for the Trinity on earth as it is in heaven.
Christians in there quest for Christianity to often chant in public. How will I know that I am a Christian, perform some Acts, but do not let your rituals overcome your faith. Christians fail to understand that a man with the Soul of God called Jesus walked in this place to open a door. Your sins shall be forgiven, now what are you going to do?

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I liked this article, but I think the author paints with just a little too wide a stroke of the brush. Some parts of the evangelism described are good. I think that Christians need to hold Scripture and tradition in one hand, and intelligence and common sense in the other, and keep working and praying that they are brought together properly.

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christians.

i am pretty sure that those of us who have battled the bible thumpers will welcome this new way of thinking as its going to pull christianity out of the dark ages.

finally.

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This article could have been better written, but it does capture a broad sense of the Emerging church conversation. If people want a good example of one of their prominent (and, incidentially, frakkin' cool) theologians, check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1djiyWjjNIE

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I think the 8 points are basically correct, but they over-emphasize differences with a particular element of Christianity and miss some important aspects of the movement.

The article makes it sound like the emerging church is ditching Christian tradition. This is simply not so. It is a corrective to some of the shortcomings of Christianity (evangelical and liberal) in the modern area. In doing this, it draws upon older Christian traditions. You will hear a lot of prayers from earlier eras in emerging churches, for example.

Also, the emerging church draws on many strains in Christianity - Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. It brings the best of the various traditions together with a sensitivity to how Christ is working in the world here and now. And emerging church ideas are influencing all three of the major traditions.

I see it as a reform movement within Christianity focusing on what it really means to follow Jesus Christ, and moving away from rigid adherence to structures and theological constructs.

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We're way post-Renaissance, have science, have gone to the Moon and Mars and Venus and even Titan. We've identified how evolution works, have a periodic chart, harnessed atomic energy, and have seen nearly all the way to the Big Bang... and STILL people are enthralled by religion.

This simply shows that people are far too stupid to come up to present time or to get with the program.

Don't expect much. Religious 'values' are always yesterday's 'values', they belong to a culture that's not yours, and they mostly originated from a time before your 24th g-g-g-g grandparents were even born.

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But other than that, He seems perfectly willing to change his tune whenever the donations stop rolling in...

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Candy coating the christian hokum and calling it something new is nothing new. Just look at all the subdivisions, sub sub divisions, etc. of the cult now. The name may be different, but the poison will remain the same. Look at the HISTORY of christianity, folks. It ain't pretty.

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Christians think they are no longer under Mosaic Law, because Paul referred to his background as a former Pharisee and previous adherence to Mosaic Law as "so much garbage."

Nothing in the synoptic gospels suggests a break with Judaism. Jesus was called "Rabbi," meaning "Master" or "Teacher," 42 times in the gospels. Jesus' ministry was a rabbinic one. He went to the synagogue (Matthew 12:9), taught in the synagogues (Matthew 4:23, 13:54; Mark 1:39), expressed concern for Jairus, "one of the rulers of the synagogue" (Mark 5:36) and it "was his custom" to go to the synagogue (Luke 4:16).

Jesus himself said:

"Do not suppose I have come to abolish the Law and the prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill...till heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or tittle pass from the Law till all is fulfilled. Whoever, therefore, breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven...unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:17-20)

Jesus also upheld the Torah in Luke 16:17: "And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for the smallest portion of the Law to become invalid."

Nor do these words refer merely to the Ten Commandments. Jesus meant the entire Torah: 613 commandments. When a man asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus replied, "You know the commandments." He quoted not just the Ten Commandments, but a commandment from Leviticus 19:13 as well: "Do not defraud." (Mark 10:17-22)

Jesus' disciples were once accused by the scribes and Pharisees of violating rabbinical tradition (Matthew 15:1-2; Mark 7:5), but not biblical law. Jesus never says anywhere in the entire New Testament that the Law is abolished; this was Paul's theology.

Sometimes Christians cite Matthew 7:12, where Jesus says "Do unto others..." and this "covers" the Law and the prophets. But Jesus was merely repeating in the positive what Rabbi Hillel taught a generation earlier. No one took Hillel's words to mean the Law had been abolished--why should we assume this of Jesus?

If Jesus really came to abolish the Law and the prophets, Simon (Peter) would not have resisted a divine command to kill and eat both "clean" and "unclean" animals (Acts 10), nor would there have been a debate in the early church as to what extent the gentiles were to observe Mosaic Law (Acts 15). When Paul visited the church at Jerusalem, James and the elders told him all its members were "zealous for the Law," and they were worried because they heard rumors Paul was preaching against Mosaic Law (Acts 21).

None of these events would have happened had Jesus really come to abolish the Law and the prophets.

Paul says if anyone has confidence in the Law, "I am ahead of him."

Would that mean Paul places himself ahead of Jesus, who said he did not come to abolish the Law and the prophets? Would that mean Paul places himself ahead of Jesus, who said whoever sets aside even the least of the Law's demands shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:17-19)?

Would that mean Paul places himself ahead of Jesus, who taught that following the commandments of God is the only way to eternal life (Mark 10:17-22)? Would that mean Paul places himself ahead of Jesus who said that it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for the smallest portion of the Law to become invalid (Luke 16:17)?

Paul may have regarded the Law as "so much garbage," but it should be obvious JESUS DIDN'T THINK THE LAW WAS "GARBAGE"!

Christians believe in Paul, not Jesus. Bertrand Russell called Paul the "inventor" of Christianity.

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Bottom line: God is Eternal and the Infinite. While it is difficult for the carnal mind to accept that, mathematicians and engineers are quite comfortable with the concept. God does not change as yesterday, today and tomorrow are all one the same. Thus, if the Bible is truly written under the inspiration of God, as it claims to be, and not by ancient fallible men, true Christians must stay with what is written there. It is not a "living document" in that you can change it to agree with current society's morals, it "lives" because it is the instruction manual given by a living God. The only variable here is the proper interpretation of what has been written in the Bible. And here, main stream Christianity has indeed erred some. But any "new" religion is an effort in futility. God has warned of dire consequences for those who attempt to add to, or remove from, what is written in the Bible.

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The church has always changed to accomodate the times. It's how they stay in business; after all you can't keep getting people to give you money if you piss em off.

This endless accommodation of the churches, and religions in general, is the only proof anyone should need to see religions as nothing more than elaborate scams to rob and control the people. They will do whateer they need to do to remain close to the money.

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History shows us that religious unification is a bloody affair, the product of persecution and successfully waged war.

These tools worked to keep the Church unified up until the Protestant Reformation. The reason it didn't work with that heresy? The many long years of war failed to produce a clear victor, and by making the population of Europe thoroughly sick of squabbling religious sects, gave rise to a new secularism at odds with religious control of any sort.

The result of the failure of war and persecution to stamp out heresies has been four centuries of progressive schisms unchecked by the tools of state. It also gave rise to a new secularism within a war-weary European population. That secularism is embedded into the US Constitution, which forbids any state-sponsored religion.

19th and 20th Century evangelism in the US hasn't avoided schisms. Splintering into smaller and stranger sects continues. Many of these schisms are disputes in points of theology, and in theory could be reconciled by some sort of conclave (in practice, a very difficult proposition). But there is a very large rift in Christianity which is far more basic, and is not about to be mended by any means short of violence.

This rift is the division of Christians into, on the one hand, those who permit God to do the judging, themselves attempting to follow Jesus' teachings of compassion to all humans, and on the other, those who take the judging into their own hands. The latter group is characterized by intolerance, hatred and cruelty to those whose viewpoints differ from their own. The latter groups tend to subscribe to biblical literalism, whereas the former usually accepts the bible as metaphor.

There can be no peaceful reconciliation between these two trends within Christianity. The differences aren't merely theological, but based on temperament and emotion. There has been even some suggestion by neuropsychologists that the difference may be biological, grounded in differences in the brain. And so, in the absence of successful religious war, talking about an "emerging Church" is wishful thinking.

Predicting the future is no easy thing. But my guess is Christianity will continue to spew ever more radical and strange heresies; it will become so fundamentally divided that it will be absurd to speak of it as a single religion at all.

Christianity's diversifying sects, all proclaiming the absolute truth of radically conflicting theologies, undermines the authority and credibility of all of them. The absence of Christian unity and the means to stamp out heresies will just about guarantee that secularism will continue to gain ground in Western societies.

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is people who want to put the "Christ" back in "Christian".

Stunning.

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.

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One thing I would like to see are the end of the money centered megachurches. Many good people are seeing these so-called churches and their leaders as far from the simple concepts of Christianity. When I was younger and a more active Roman Catholic, I felt more from a simple service in a small church than in a large cathredal. I would like to see more churches be more concerned with the poor, the sick and in need of counsling rather than a fancy place and decorations.

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Either drink the Kool-Aid and buy into the sky god or walk away. Why people want to rewrite the old book of Jewish Fairy Tales (thanks Bill Maher).

I agree with the fundies on this thing- get with the program or get off of the bus. If god were perfect, the word would be clear and well understood and we know that is not the case among the churches. Ask 3 theologians and get 15 answers.

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The trouble with living past thirty---it's perspective. The new "emerging" church, sans the science and gay rights issues sounds more like a re-run of what in the early 70's was called Neo-Orthodoxy.

For now, I guess it's out with Calvin and in with Barth. Toss in, as a go, the two issues mentioned above. Sprinkle it all with a little charismatic worship style since ".. theology is language bound..." and we have ourselves another go at it. Hopefully, this time around the church, once emerged, will skip trying to beat everyone into line with the laws of the land.

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{{ mergents are insisting that God be understood as totally gay and loving

Whaaa-aa-aaat?

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As long as tax-free organizations need me to pay for the privilege of having my brain pissed in, they're not getting my cash. Do the right thing? Pay your fair share.

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