I did not want to go here, into posts about false teachers in the churches that relate to the topic of mysticism, but now I feel obligated to try at least to identify some of it because it is certainly a great danger to Christians. Contemplative Prayer is one such movement, but the Emerging Church may be the umbrella under which that and other teachings alien to Christianity are being imported into the Church. The Emerging Church is described as a Postmodern movement, which means it rests on experience and rejects the idea of absolute truth. That alone of course makes it alien to Christianity.
Just another brand of apostasy we can recognize within the Great Apostasy that is preparing the world for the final One World Religion under the Antichrist. There are so many kinds of false teachings I couldn't possibly track them all, though maybe I can at least touch on the major ones. There are of course Christian leaders who are exposing these things, such as Pastor Joe Schimmel; and John MacArthur has identified many strands of it in his sermons. Justin Peters is another source of information. And Andrew Strom whose film on Kundalini in the churches I linked in the upper right margin is another.
So now I'm watching a film about the Emerging/Emergent Church and noting names associated with it, some I've heard of but others that are new to me. It was made by Elliott Resch who also made one about the Seeker-Sensitive and Purpose-Driven movements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF-CHA4Z2FQ
One glaring problem with this Emerging Church movement that jumps out at me right away in this film is that it has some influence in a whole slew of denominations and the Roman Church is one of them. "Father" Richard Rohr is a name I ran across when checking up on Contemplative Prayer. He's the one who said it's about being constantly in touch with God and with everything surrounding us, which sounds uncomfortably like Pantheism but at least isn't Christianity. The precipitating incident that caused me to leave the Charismatic Movement way back in the nineties was that women in the parachurch group I belonged to prayed for the Pope as if he was part of the Church.
Other names the film identifies as leaders of the Emerging Church are Tony Jones, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Peter Rollins, Phyllis Tickle. Two pastors who have adopted much of this movement in their churches are Rick Warren and Marc Driscoll. ,
Phyllis Tickle calls it a move of God. Some define it as wanting to rethink "how Church is done" along with others who want to rethink some of the major doctrines of Christianity. Apparently much of it comes out of a dissatisfaction with the "conservative economic and political" character of the Church.
So much for two millennia of carefully wrought doctrine by the greatest thinkers of the Church. And the film then goes on to show how the movement encourages doubt in all the foundational truths of Christianity such as the virgin birth and the resurrection and so on.
I'm only half an hour into what is a three-hour film and I can't take any more right now. I'm glad I saw this much because I had known very little about the Emerging Church and now I know it's such an extreme heresy nobody should talk about its leaders as "brothers." Sure, pray for them, heretics can change their minds, but there should be no hint of accepting them as fellow Christians.
