The Hidden Triumph of Romantic or Imaginative Religion

I was very disturbed to learn recently that Dr. Peter Jones is apparently quite enamored with Lewis and the other Inklings.

While listening to various speakers at a recent conference about Romanticism that his website offers as MP3s, I was amazed at the contrast between some of the speakers. One speaker was followed by another who extolled the opposite of what the previous speaker was warning against, without any apparent awareness of the problem by either. One speaker from South Africa did a wonderful job of elucidating Gnosticism; yet another speaker—I think originally from Britain—extolled Robert Webber’s book, Ancient and Future Faith, which is one of the foundational books of the Emergent Church. Another speaker, apparently with Jones’ total support, extolled Lewis and the Inklings as leading the way in showing how Christians can do cultural apologetics through stories.

This situation is terribly discouraging because I felt that Peter Jones was really very aware and balanced in his exposure of neo-paganism. How can one expose neo-paganism and not recognize what is perhaps the major form in which it is entering the Church?

But in one way, it’s not a surprise because Dr. Jones is connected with other Christian leaders who are well-known apologists and who also are enamored with Lewis, such as John Warwick Montgomery and Michael Horton—and even apparently R. C. Sproul.

What a mystery this is.

Unfortunately, this is all very familiar from our years of experience in the Anglican/Episcopal Church. We’ve already encountered everything I’ve heard about in the Emergent Church years ago in the Anglican/Episcopal Church. And all the syncretistic writers whom I saw exalted in the Episcopal Church are now being exalted in the Evangelical and even in the Reform churches.

We feel like the need to expose the roots of this movement, especially among young people, is becoming an urgent necessity and call on our lives. And this call is growing as the Emergent Church rises more and more into dominance.

It’s so alarming to see people getting sucked into the kind of evil and darkness that the Lord Jesus Christ rescued us from. Fellow Christians are becoming enamored with the terrible distortions of the San Francisco LSD movement, the siren music of rebellion, and the love of paganism and the occult. Although it seems like it’s the intellectuals who are most vulnerable to this deception, it's spreading through the culture like a dark spiritual tsunami because Oprah and various other media personalities and programs are popularizing these ideas. This malignancy focuses especially upon the children.

God help us.