Mystic-babble and psycho-babble: the “new way of being church”: Part 1 No history, no resurrection, but still Christian?

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As I sit writing a sermon for this season of Lent, focusing on the historicity of the resurrection from 1 Corinthians 15, I received an e-mail from the PCUSA Presbyterian News Service, which sadly highlighted the essence of an underlying problem. In this news story, we have the promotion of three major speakers at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary – Marcus Borg (of the Jesus Seminar), Brian McLaren (of the Emergent Church) and Diana Butler Bass (author). The news story is relatively benign and talks about the promotion of "new ways of being church". What is being promoted? These are writers and promoters of a "faith" that is ultimately humanism in the skin of Christianity. Not long ago, theological liberalism was hidden and worked in secret. Today it is flaunted openly, even within more conservative non-denominational circles as with Brian McLaren. It is fashionable today among those who refer to themselves as "progressive" to avoid almost all definition, to be malleable, fluid, un-categorizable, obscure, mystical, but rarely dogmatic. There are core dogmas among these speakers though: Exclusivity of religious traditions is evil and must be shunned in favor of pluralism – all religious traditions, while maybe not equal, faithful adherents can reach the ultimate goal (heaven, nirvana, whatever). Truth claims about ultimate realities must be discarded as failed aspects of modernism – except in certain scientific views of reality, such as a wholesale acceptance of Darwinian evolution. The true goal of all those who are truly "religious, mystical, spiritual, etc." is good works – which predominantly looks like the agenda of the Democratic Party. History is malleable and can be reinterpreted to mean almost anything we postmoderns want it to say. The dogmatic assertions of historic Christianity must be "spiritualized" to mean almost anything we want it to mean. Assertions such as Jesus rose from the dead can mean almost anything except that the
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