Is God's Truth Still Emerging? with Chris Quintana (Part 1)

Gary: Welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring T.A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael. We’re glad you could join us. In today’s program, Tom begins a two-part series with guest, pastor Chris Quintana.  Here’s TBC executive director Tom McMahon.

Tom: Thanks, Gary. Today and, the Lord willing, next week, we’re going to address the subject of the emerging church. Some people call it emergent church. My guest to discuss this topic is Chris Quintana. Chris is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Cypress, which is located in Orange County, California, and Chris has been featured in the video series Wide Is the Gate, which is an apologetic documentary that deals with trends in the church that have drawn many Christians away from the Word of God.

Chris, welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7.

Chris: Well, thanks so much for having me, Tom and Gary. I appreciate it. Very much looking forward to the show.

Tom: Now, Chris, before we get into what the emerging church is and the spiritual damage that it’s doing to the body of Christ, I’d like to get your perspective as a pastor, as a shepherd of the sheep, regarding how you deal with protecting your congregation from the flood of false teachings and other corruptions of the Scripture that seem to be coming from every form of Christian media. 

You know, Chris, most pastors - it’s my guess, but I would say on the average, spend less than a couple hours a week teaching their congregation, especially…it happens especially among evangelicals that most of their members get spiritual input from Christian media, maybe more so than from their church. So given what’s being promoted today on Christian radio and TV, that can lead to confusion at least, and deception at worst. So, Chris, how do you handle that sort of thing?

Chris: Make people familiar with what the problems are. We do that here, and the best way to do that is to hold fast to God’s Word. How else will you be able to identify error if you’re not familiar with what the Scripture says is accurate and true? I learned that from my pastor before me, a man who just loved to teach the Word of God, and we were at all times studying through the Old and the New Testament, and book by book, chapter by chapter, verse by verse… Interestingly enough, so much of the Old Testament is filled with why Israel ran into the problems that it did, and that was they quit heeding to God’s Word, and they quit listening to Him when the prophets spoke. And so it was an ebb and flow of their history, and no different now. If you get away from the Word of God, you fall for just about anything.

Tom: Right. You know, Chris, it grieves me, and it’s a sad commentary… You know, I know being a pastor…I’m not a pastor; I’m not a shepherd of the sheep, although my calling is certainly - there may be some aspects of it that relate to that. But I see the dilemma for many pastors, and that is - you know, Chris, don’t take this wrong, but in some ways, it’s a bit like herding cats, you know? So the problem is (at least, this is what I hear) the last thing a pastor wants to do - well, he wants to keep peace onboard. He doesn’t want to rock the boat, and apologetics has a way of doing that, right? If you from the pulpit, for example, say, “Well, this individual or that individual,” naming names, and all of a sudden you’ve got people out there that… You know, as I mentioned earlier, maybe they’re spending more time listening to TBN or to some other Christian program or channel or whatever, they’re going to get a lot of other information, and as soon as you being to point out some things, that creates a little bit of division.

Chris: Sure. Interestingly enough, we’re watching in the church right now wisdom has been turned on its head. Discernment is something that Paul spoke about favorably, and now when somebody refers to somebody as being “discernment ministry,” it’s used as a pejorative. And discerning what is accurate and what is not accurate is one of the first things that any church should be doing! So…

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Chris: …including the people that are sitting in the pews! It’s incumbent upon them to hear what the Word has to say to them. They should be studying themselves so that there is an accountability of those that are teaching. But we’re getting more and more in the celebrity mode of pastors nowadays, and so nothing that they say is questioned. And we have, unfortunately, a church that is biblically illiterate. And yet we have more things at our fingertips, resource-wise, to help us to know accuracy versus error than at any time in human history, and we seem to be being dumbed down by the day. I just think of Paul for the reasons that you had mentioned - can you imagine the kind of negative press he’d be getting nowadays? And yet without the way that God used him and his writings, we wouldn’t know much of doctrine and theology in a Christian sense if it wasn’t for his ministry, and right now I don’t think he’d be welcomed in the church.

Tom: Yeah. I think about how our Lord Himself, chiding the Jews for their lack of faith by - what? turning to a Samaritan woman, turning to a Gentile centurion, you know: “Greater faith have I not found in Israel.” But Paul, as you mentioned, Chris, he went to the Greek city of Berea, and Luke, who’s writing the Book of Acts, commends these Jews, okay - not believers - these Jews in the synagogue in the Greek city of Berea for being Bereans! In other words, for searching the Scriptures, checking Paul out, what he had to say - that should take…give us a head’s up: wait a minute, this is where we need to be, and it’s a sad commentary on today that that’s not happening as much as it should.

Chris: Sure. Isn’t it interesting the people at Berea, when they first met Paul, didn’t probably think that somewhere down the road to be a Berean would be something other than a noun, or of a way of describing a type of people; and I think it’s a fantastic way of looking, as he says, that they were more fair-minded, more noble than those in Thessalonica, and the reason why, of course, he says is because they searched the Scriptures to verify the things that Paul had said. Terrific! This is what all should happen.

Tom: And we could go back to Isaiah: “To the law and the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, there is no light in them.” It doesn’t mean they don’t have some things correct, but there’s another admonition to check things out.

Chris: Well, if we were to say that before Rob Bell, he would say, “Well, you know, you’re going to become irrelevant if you’re quoting a 2,000…” or in that case, “a 2,700 year old book.”

Tom: Yeah, there’s a part of the problem, which we’re going to get into. You know, Chris, let’s start with the background of the emerging church movement: first of all, how would you define it generally?

Chris: You know, it’s funny, because I do get the question asked a lot, and sometimes people will use “emerging” and “emergent” interchangeably, and it’s kind of a nebulous term. The way I try to make it for people when I’m teaching on the topic, and I’ve done that here at our church and then conferences and stuff like that, when I say “emergent,” then I put it in the category that the people that are out there denying the essentials of the faith. So when I say “emergent,” when I’m talking about emergent teachers (and I know that we’ll get into some of the names of those guys as we progress), emerging…you may have other people that are coming up with different views of church. They may not have left what we would consider orthodoxy of salvation by grace through faith, substitutionary atonement, those kinds of things, and those are more the emerging, and they would use that term to say, “Well, we’re coming out…we’re in this postmodern world, and so we’re emerging in - coming out of that old thing.” So it’s at all times reinventing itself.

So when I’m talking with someone - I used to put Mark Driscoll in the emerging camp. He’s all new, and he’s flowery, and all that other stuff, but he wouldn’t necessarily - I’ve never heard him deny the essentials of salvation like McLaren, or Pagitt, or Jones, or those guys, which I could put in the emergent camp.

Tom: They seem to have - and this is what I want you to comment on - they seem to have a better idea with regard to how they’re going to witness, how they’re going to interact with the culture. You find that being a problem?

Chris: No, I don’t see that as being the problem if you don’t lose the message, and you don’t show open hostility towards what has been. Very similar - Paul would have been considered…“Hey, he was emerging when he went into the Gentile world.” Okay, you can find any way to justify what you’re doing. The question is are you giving people some kind of a program - methodology kind of a framework to define what church is? And instantly what ends up happening is the focus comes off of the Word of God, which is really what should make a church a church. Instead it’s gotten into all of the mechanical things. I believe this is exactly the kind of thing that was happening at Ephesus when Jesus addressed them in the seven churches. They were very mechanical on the outside. They had left their love of Him - which, by doing so, you lose a love for His Word, as well. I should say you left it, you don’t lose it. The Scripture’s very clear on that: they had left their first love, not lost it.

Tom: Mm-hmm. The other thing about this approach, at least from my view, is - you know, emerging church? Well, we find and have found that it isn’t just a matter of cozying up to the culture, it’s a matter of merging with the culture. You know, you mentioned Mark Driscoll. He started out as a - within this movement, but then he rejected it. And yet some of his modus operandi was still consistent with what the culture would accept or find acceptable, but certainly not [unintelligible] - I’m talking about his language, you know, the issues that he deals with…somewhat problematic.

Chris: Right.

Tom: But again, the question is where do you draw the line? You want to witness to the culture, but as soon as the culture doesn’t see a difference, then what’s the point?

Chris: Right. Right. The lines get so blurred. We see that all the time, and it was one of the things that Scripture makes very, very clear: the church should always be distinguishably different from the rest of the world. Now we seem to be trying to blur the lines. 

You know, I’m always…people are sending me information constantly, because they know that I watch this kind of stuff, and it used to be something that I would be appalled at. Now I’m just kind of used to it. And it’s times when churches will work totally, completely - what’s a good word for it? - I guess you would just say secular music, some of it outright offensive secular music, into their “worship service.” It’s just one of many examples that you can look at, and you would say, “How in the world would I know that I’m even in a church if all I had was that little snapshot of time?” And so when that kind of worldliness is welcomed into the church, we know that we have a serious, serious problem.

Tom: Mm-hmm. You know, as an example - this may sound like…a little off the path, but it’s not. Sometimes when I speak about music and music that’s come into the church - and, boy, if you want something that everybody’s got an opinion about, okay? Well, folks, here’s my opinion: what I do is I play a concert or a section from a concert by Hillsong United, and for the sake of an older audience, I turn the sound off. But there are two things that I encourage them to look at: number one, if you didn't know who this was and what they claim to represent, you would say, “Wait a minute, this is secular not only in terms of the way they go about things…” I mean, it’s almost like a pagan ritual. But then you look at the audience, and you see these young people, I mean, going crazy! Absolutely going crazy, and this is supposed to be worship. So this is…to underscore your point, Chris, and we’re not talking about music here, but this is a part of it. When young people are drawn to that, this becomes their form of worship, and it’s so incredibly pagan…forget about the words, okay? Because you could put good words to anything and it can just come off as being so antithetical to the Bible, to worship, what true worship is about, and so on. So there’s an example. You’re going to attract young people by going to the devices that certainly at least are of the flesh, and perhaps worse, and what do you end up with? You end up with pagan worship.

Chris: Right. And…yeah, then it permeates the rest of the church. This has happened in our lifetimes. We’ve watched church growth programs that you can purchase. And so, you know, they want to know, “How can I be big like the guys down the street?” 

“Well, send away x-number hundreds of dollars for your membership monthly, and we’ll send you church in a box. Just add water.” And so everything looks the same. It all comes out the same, it all has the same programs, and what you have at the end of the day are people that are highly entertained. It’s very sensual as far as your senses are concerned, but there’s nothing in the way of substance, and so you have people that lead incredibly carnal lives, because there’s nothing over the pulpit that tells them that there’s a standard of holiness that we are to live to - not by works, but simply by the relationship that we have with God through His Son by the Holy Spirit. We’re called to be different. But that’s not being spoken about much in the church. We’re entertaining people now. 

Tom: Now, Chris, the emerging church movement, it’s not a hierarchy; there’s no headquarters for it, but they do have leaders. They have people that write books that promote this thing not only through their own churches, but also conferences and so on. These leaders are very influential. You know, most young people would know at least some of them - that is, when I say young people, I’m talking about those who, you know, call themselves Christians, professing Christians. 

Now, I want to mention some of them and have you comment on just what comes to mind, their particular influence. Let’s start with perhaps the most well-known, at least in terms of the books that he’s written, Brian McLaren. 

Chris: Mm-hmm. Certainly kind of…you could almost call him the Grand Poobah of the emergent, and he was there at the beginning - that was kind of coming out of the Leadership Network with Bob Buford and those guys. He was seen as kind of the professor, because he had already had some kind of a name and he had a church. But this is the guy that talks about - I remember listening to an audio, and I just couldn’t believe my ears, and I still use it whenever I’m talking about emergent - but he talks about that our understanding of hell and the cross is…as he puts it, it’s false advertising, and that God won’t forgive unless He takes it out on somebody else, and that’s his view of atonement. And so he’s very much universalist, and, you know, he likes it - he uses all these little catchy phrases about having conversations and dialogue and all the emergent double-speak, and it sounds so high-minded and brilliant, but there’s no substance to it. And so what he does is in a very flowery language kind of way eviscerates the very foundational truths of Scripture, so no personal responsibility for sin, no judgment, no any of those kinds of things, but he’s referred to as an evangelical. And last time they published one of those things, I think he was one of the top 25 evangelicals in the country.

Tom: Yeah, what’s stunning about him - shocking, I think - it’s not like he came out of the New Age and he’s trying to figure out Christianity from his New Age background, he grew up Plymouth Brethren! Conservative, very conservative Bible…biblically conservative, and so on. So he knows what he’s changing. He knows what he’s corrupting, although he wouldn’t use that term.

Now, Chris, how about Dan Kimball? 

Chris: Dan Kimball’s an interesting character. He’s the guy who just advocates for some of the - I guess you could say he’s one of the better advocates for what we call contemplative spirituality, or getting back to that kind of Middle Ages, heavily liturgical kind of worship services, so candles and meditative practices from the very beginnings of the mystical church - not only the Middle Ages, but I mean way, way back in the first few centuries. People that are familiar with the topic would know that even back to the Desert Fathers, and what is really Eastern in its meditative practices, and they slap Christian labels on it. He’s big in that, but he’s not what you’d expect. Most of the time those are kind of old, cardigan-wearing, grey-haired guys, and he’s nothing of the sort. He looks like a surfer, and so he…

Tom: Well, he may be a surfer, because he’s from Santa Cruz area. As a matter of fact, his church - he was a youth pastor I believe at Santa Cruz Bible Church (Bible Church), and if you look at his story, he brought out one of the first books on the emergent church movement, and he just gave his own experience. He’s watching this group on television, and he had an epiphany, because they were using acoustical guitars, and it was darkened, and they had candles, and so on. So as a youth pastor, he thought he’d try this out on his youth group, and some of the young people that he was having problems with came up to him and said, “Hey, man, this is like spiritual!” 

So that’s what started, according to him - I’m just giving it to you from his book - this is what started him on what we would call “bells and smells”: incense, candles, darkening the room, having an altar with candles, and so on. So this was…you know, he started out - what was he looking for, as you mentioned, and he’s going back to even, in a contemporary sense, to the Roman Catholic Church, to the Orthodox church, to these rituals and accoutrements, you know, that are purely sensual, but not spiritual.

Chris: Right. This is, to me, this is neo-Gnosticism - nothing more, nothing less. These people who say, “We’ve got a better idea, better, deeper understanding; we know this, we know that. Your old dead denominations are no longer cutting it, so we’ve got to get away from the hierarchy and the structure, and we need to get back to more simplistic, monastic…” You hear those words thrown out all the time. I think of Shane Claiborne when I start talking like that - you know, one of Tony Campolo’s acolytes. That same kind of…it’s all external, and it’s all visual, and it’s…of course, there’s no substance.

Tom: But they try and make substance out of it. Tony Jones, for example - you mentioned earlier Desert Fathers, mysticism, and so on - I would say his books kind of lead the way, especially in terms of rituals and so on, whether it be the prayer labyrinth, or whatever program it might be.

Now, this is attractive to young people, because it is sensual, it is different, and what do you say to that?

Chris: Well, I’ll put it this way, and I say this around here to my leadership and to my people (and sometimes I get a really weird look when I say it till I explain myself), but I really - I try to think like the devil, and that’s a way of trying to say, “How do I think he would try best to trip me up or the church up?” What do we want to do in making ourselves aware, as Paul would say in 2 Corinthians, that we don’t want to be ignorant of his devices, of which he has so many? So we want to know how he does things. 

Now, if I’m talking about young people who are trying to build their worldview as young people, give them something that is different to their eyes, different to their understandings, and stands out differently from everything else, even though it’s old and rewrapped, it’s in a modern context, and give it - with the right people and the right charisma behind the leaders and everything else, and they’ll gravitate towards it. That’s exactly what we see, and that was the same bait that the Gnostics used in Paul’s time: “We have a better, deeper revelation. We know better.” And you know, a kid in their adolescence aren’t going to know that this is nothing but rewrapped Romanism, and that’s the sad part of it. You can just dress it up in a particular way, and if I’m the devil, that’s exactly what I would want to do. I know that there is death at the end of that, and you look at the people like - a guy like Dan Kimball, and you look at who he says are his major influences, and names like Dallas Willard come up, and Henri Nouwen, and people like that, and their spirituality that he’s mimicking leads them to universalism in their spirituality, and these are guys that are teaching heretical things! And so you basically want to say, “Whatever it is that is catching your attention at this point, extrapolate all the way out everything that they teach - where does that road lead is what you want to know.

Tom: Yeah. Yet Kimball’s book is heavily endorsed by Rick Warren, so…

Chris: There’s a shock.

Tom: Yeah, wow. Well, you know, let’s…we’ve got just a minute here. One of the other big names that we need to talk about briefly is Leonard Sweet. What can you tell us about him?

Chris: Wow. You know, he’s kind of - I guess you could almost say where…he would be kind of like the guy taking (somewhat) of the mantle of a guy like Brian McLaren. He’s the guy that people are talking about; he’s writing the books. I think he has very much the same worldview as McLaren, though he’s a little bit harder to nail down. But he’s getting into mystical aspects that are just taking it to the next step of what we would call panentheism -God is in all things. And it’s amazing how many Christians you will encounter, people that claim Christianity, that say that God is in all things: pan-en-the-ism. God is in all things. That’s not what the Scripture teaches! God is - by His Holy Spirit, he is in those who have been regenerated. It’s why Jesus had to say to Nicodemus in John:3:3Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
See All..., “You must be born again.” So only those born of the Spirit can say that they have God in them, but we have Christians saying that God is in all things. Well, that’s not biblical, and that’s very much Leonard Sweet’s whole thing, and his whole view is promoting that worldview.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Chris, we only have a minute to go here. My guest has been Chris Quintana. He’s the pastor of Calvary Chapel in Cypress in Orange County. Chris, we’re going to pick up with this next week, the Lord willing, and we’ll continue on with some of these issues that people say, “Well, the emergent church, it was just a trend, just a fad; it’s going away.” Has it? Well, we’ll deal with that next week. Chris, thanks for being with us.

Chris: Thanks so much. Enjoyed it.

Gary: You’ve been listening to Search the Scriptures 24/7 with T.A. McMahon, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. We offer a wide variety of resources to help you in your study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials and a free subscription to our monthly newsletter, contact us at PO Box 7019 Bend, Oregon 97708. Call us at 800-937-6638, or visit our website at thebereancall.org. I’m Gary Carmichael. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you can join us again next week. Until then, we encourage you to Search the Scriptures 24/7.