To the UK Anabaptist Defenders of Steve Chalke
The fundamental abrogation of the biblical Gospel of Jesus based on substitutionary atonement has nothing whatsoever to do with the abrogation of biblical Christianity in the Fourth Century.
- Departure from Apostolic Christianity took place in the Patristic era beginning in the Second and Third Centuries and was not an overnight Fourth Century development as you wrongly imply in your hallow generalisation.
- As is self-evident from the New Testament itself, substitutionary atonement was central to the faith of the Apostolic Church. Predictably, rather than examine this fact scripturally you express a “hope” that this will not be argued biblically, ‚ but in the name of some erroneous idea of a “bigger picture” of your own invention you introduce a list of arguments of your own manufacture against penal atonement without reference to the Word of God.
- From Severetus and the Zwickau false prophets to the modern day cultic Pennsylvania Dutch Amish, there has always been a lunatic fringe among those defining themselves as “Anabaptists”. From Menno Simons onward there is and has also always been biblical Anabaptists (whose faith was and is predicated upon penal atonement). You represent a lunatic fringe. I know Mennonites and Anabaptists who hold firmly to penal atonement and who look upon your rejection of it ‚ with a sense of complete and utter disgust.
Steve Chalke is a demonstrable heretic. Whether he is a backslidden believer gone into apostasy or someone who was never regenerate to begin with I do not know. What I do know is that according to the clear and fundamental teaching of God’s Word Jesus took my sin and paid the price in my stead in order to give me His righteousness and He arose from the dead to give me Eternal Life. Galatians chapter one tells me that Steve Chalke and you are accursed of God for preaching another Christ and a different gospel.
Steve Chalke is identified as the emergent church guru of the UK as Brian Maclaren is identified as its guru in the USA. The Emergent Church (the door into which is the “Purpose Driven” marketing/psychology con job) was seen for what it is in the public scandal of Sheffield’s Nine O’Clock Service. Brian Maclaren rejects the basis of God’s Word in propositional truth, while the New Testament teaches the diametric opposite. The death and resurrection of Christ must be objective propositionally true as an historical fact or the Gospel is void of plausibility.
Like the Toronto/Pensacola deceptions, what we see today in the Emergent Church is but a New Age mysticism influenced by Eastern Religion and Ecumenical seduction masquerading as Christianity in a paradigm shift. Christianity is re-written as a Post-Modern religion in the 21st Century the same as the post-Nicean church fathers re ” “wrote it as a pagan-influenced platonic religion in the 4th Century. They perverted Apostolic Christianity into a Patristic religion; you pervert it into a neo-pagan influenced post-modern religion.
Steve Chalk is an agent of hell and you are his advocate. Whatever your beliefs are, please find another name for it. The name Christianity is already taken.
Sincerely,
Jacob Prasch
Moriel