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- June 25, 2008 by David Cloud, wayoflife.org; - According
to emerging church theology, the object of the church's mission
on earth is not the preaching of gospel but the building of the
kingdom of God on earth. It is earth-minded and mocks a heavenly-minded
orientation. It gets more excited about solving the "AIDS
crisis" and saving the polar bears than winning lost souls.
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- Emerging church writings say very little about the salvation
of the soul, but they say a lot about the salvation of society
and creation. Their activism runs toward all sorts of very liberal
social-justice concerns--environmentalism, animal rights, you
name it--anything except the winning of souls. If there is any
emphasis at all upon the winning of souls, it is a secondary
thing.
- They use terms such as "missional" and "holistic"
to define this agenda.
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- The Emergent Village says:
- "We see the earth and all it contains as God's beloved
creation, and so we join God in seeking its good, its healing,
and its blessing" (Emergent Village web site, http://www.emergentvillage.org/about-information/values-and-practices).
- Tony Campolo claims that believers are saved in order to
change the world:
- "Our call is to be God's agents, TO RESCUE NOT ONLY
THE HUMAN RACE BUT THE WHOLE OF CREATION" (Campolo, "Why
Care for Creation," Tear Times, Summer 1992).
- Rob Bell, author of Velvet Jesus, says:
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- "The Bible paints a much larger picture of salvation.
It describes all of creation being restored. ... Rocks and trees
and birds and swamps and ecosystems. God's desire is to restore
all of it. ... A Christian is not someone who expects to spend
forever in heaven there. A Christian is someone who anticipates
spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth. THE
GOAL ISN'T ESCAPING THIS WORLD BUT MAKING THIS WORLD THE KIND
OF PLACE GOD CAN COME TO. ... To make the cross of Jesus just
about human salvation is to miss that God is interested in the
saving of everything. Every star and rock and bird. All things"
(Velvet Elvis, pp. 109, 110, 150, 161).
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- The environmental part of the emerging church's agenda is
not just to keep the air clean and the streams pure; it goes
far beyond that to a position that is akin to earth worship.
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- In May 2008 Pastor Jeffrey Whittaker attended Brian McLaren's
Everything Must Change tour at Goshen College in Indiana, and
he witnessed the environmental frenzy first hand ("A Pastor
Reports on McLaren's Everything Must Change Tour," June
2, 2008, http://herescope.blogspot.com/).
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- The very first session was titled "Focusing on the Wounds
of Our Planet." They sang a song based on Francis of Assisi's
poem "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" and watched a DVD by
the Sierra Club "exposing the immoral mining techniques
used by energy companies in West Virginia." Then they were
treated to a song that cried out against "our rape of Mother
Earth." The second day's session began with another environmentalist
song that said mining is a "scar cut across the face of
Mother Earth." They were constantly reminded that "catastrophic
consequences due to global warming are upon us." Another
session opened with the "Hymn of Remorse," which bewailed
the supposed desecration of the earth. "We repent for covering
your colorful earth with gray cement ... for cutting down trees
... for scarring your earth .. Lord, have mercy, can we be restored?
What of the lands of tribes and nations who lived here first
... the noise of traffic is drowning out the songbird's song..."
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- By no stretch of the imagination can such a position be supported
by the Bible. From the very beginning God gave man the right
to use the earth.
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- "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful,
and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,
and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth"
(Genesis 1:28).
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- Man has a divine right to subdue the earth and use its resources,
to cut its trees and mine its ore and pump its oil. This does
not mean he has the right to destroy the earth and make it into
a filthy cesspool; no one in his right mind is in support of
polluting the air and water and such things. But God has given
man the right to use the earth's resources in a responsible manner.
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- The environmentalist movement is not based on proven science;
it is not merely the push for reasonable conservation; it is
a blind religious faith. Its most zealous proponents are gullible
tools in the hands of one-worlders who intend to use the environmentalist
cause to increase their authority at a local, national, and global
level. When Marxist globalists jump on the environmentalist bandwagon,
you have to know that something other than love for a clean earth
is driving the agenda.
- Jonah Goldberg has wisely observed:
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- "At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship.
It's a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment.
... Environmentalism's most renewable resources are fear, guilt
and moral bullying" ("The Church of Green," Los
Angeles Times, Op-Ed, May 20, 2008).
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- As for "global warming," it is not an established
fact. In reality, it is nothing more than a weak theory; and
many scientists do not believe it. In March 2008, for example,
more than 100 prominent environment scientists presented papers
at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York
City. They concluded that global warming is a natural process
rather than the result of human activity. Joseph Bast, president
of the Heartland Institute, said: "The purpose of the conference
is to provide a platform for the hundreds of scientists, economists,
and policy expert s who dissent from the so-called 'consensus'
on global warming" ("Scientists Meet in NYC to Challenge
Gore, UN," WorldNetDaily, March 4, 2008).
- The radical environmentalist agenda is simply not based on
proven science. Take the frenzy to ban plastic shopping bags,
for example.
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- "Scientists are attacking the global campaign to ban
plastic shopping bags, saying the activists' claim that the modern
conveniences are responsible for the deaths of 100,000 animals
and one million seabirds is based on a 'typo' in a 2002 report
[by the Australian government] and there is no scientific evidence
showing the bags pose a direct threat to marine mammals. [The
report was derived from a Canadian study in Newfoundland that
only sited the death of marine mammals by discarded fishing nets
and made no mention of plastic bags!] Researchers and marine
biologists have told the London Times plastic bags pose, at best,
a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales,
dolphins and seabirds" ("Anti-plastic Crusaders Stuck
Holding the Bag," WorldNetDaily, March 9, 2008).
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- It takes more energy to make and recycle paper shopping bags
than plastic ones, but banning plastic bags makes the environmental
activists felt better and that is what is really important.
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- Consider the frenzy to save the polar bears.
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- "The U.S. government just put polar bears on the threatened
species list because climate change is shrinking the Arctic ice
where they live. Never mind that polar bears are in fact thriving--their
numbers have quadrupled in the last 50 years. Never mind that
full implementation of the Kyoto protocols on greenhouse gases
would save exactly one polar bear, according to Danish social
scientist Bjorn Lomborg, author of the 2007 book Cool It! Yet
about 300 to 500 polar bears could be saved every year, starting
right now, Lomborg says, if there were a ban on hunting them
in Canada. What's cheaper, trillions to trim carbon emissions
or paying off the Canadians to stop killing polar bears?"
("The Church of Green," Los Angeles Times, May 20,
2008).
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- The common sense evident in this paragraph is what is often
missing in the environmental movement.
- The movement is also shot through and through with duplicity.
There appears to be a willingness to say anything and ignore
any inconvenient fact as long as by so doing you can further
your cause.
- "During the 2000 presidential campaign, for example,
much was made of Houston becoming the 'smog capital of America.'
But Houston's overall air quality was improving at the time.
Houston became the nation's smog capital only because Los Angeles's
air improved even faster, passing Houston in a race of positives.
Perhaps the commentators who spoke as though Houston's air were
getting worse did not understand the issue. More likely they
did not want to understand-for cleaner air would violate the
rule of Good News Bad" (Gregg Easterbrook, "Bad News
Good, Good News Bad," Brookings Institute, Spring 2002).
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- Environmental activists have claimed that more U.S. cities
are violating air standards, but what they don't say is that
the EPA standards have grown progressively stricter and that
the pollution levels have actually gone down dramatically. Data
produced by the Environmental Protection Agency shows that between
1976 and 1997, ozone declined 31 percent; sulfur dioxide, 67
percent; and nitrogen oxide, 38 percent. In that same period,
the population rose 25 percent, the gross domestic product doubled,
and vehicle-miles traveled increased 125 percent!
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- Activists have claimed that pollution is rising at runaway
levels under President George Bush's watch. "Yet the overall
number of bad-air days has actually been falling steadily. In
2001, there were fewer than half as many air-quality warning
days across the country as in 1988. Los Angeles has experienced
just one Stage 1 ozone warning in the past five years, an incredible
decline. During the 1970s, Los Angeles averaged about 100 Stage
1--alert days per year" ("Why Bush Gets a Bad Rap on
Dirty Air," Time magazine, May 22, 2003).
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- Further, the environmentalists too often focus their attention
on America and other developed countries rather than the countries
that are really and truly raping the earth. America has made
great progress. Its water and air is cleaner than in a generation
and its forests are more widespread than even in the 19th century.
Bald eagles and peregrine falcons are off the endangered list;
black bear and coyotes and moose and buffalo and deer and other
wildlife are increasing dramatically. The Brookings Institute
web site recently observed: "Arguably the greatest postwar
achievement of the U.S. government and of the policy community
is ever-cleaner air and water, accomplished amidst population
and economic growth" (http://www.brookings.edu/articles/2002/spring_energy_easterbrook.aspx).
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- If an environmental activist wants to spend his energy on
saving the earth, let him leave America or England or Switzerland
where environmental consciousness is high and the people have
plenty of resources to solve their problems, and move to Russia,
India, or China, to name some countries that are true environmental
disasters, and dedicate his life to solving their problems.
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- The fact is that the environmental movement's dire predictions
have been proven wrong for more than a half century. It has being
crying "the sky is falling," but it has not fallen.
There has been no silent spring. During George H.W. Bush's term
of office in the early 1990s environmentalists were threatening
a "new silent spring" of dead Appalachian forests.
In fact, the forests have made a wonderful comeback.
- [Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist
Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists
and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL
IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT
IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION
OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. http://www.wayoflife.org
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