I'm not familiar with this so-called "Emerging / Emergent Church Movement."
Based on post #1 in this thread, I have no idea what it is. Are you talking about the many denominations that have been started in the Americas, like Pentecostalism, Charismatics, Mormonism, non-denominational, etc.?
Extract: The Darkest Hour
Copyright © Robert Chisholm 1986, 2011, 2017 All Rights Reserved
Emergent Causality
Today, even though we may not easily understand it, there is a profound philosophical determinism coming into the church itself, which though it cannot be said to be non-dualist at the present time, it will have the same effect as non- dualism has had on those who have rejected a true knowledge of God, in order to embrace a self-deterministic life. While duality is implicit in the mind of all believers, namely that it is God Himself who created that which was not as though it were, the emphasis on self-fulfillment of this emergent philosophy in the churches, will simply reinforce self-interest, and this will in the end inevitably lead to a denial of God and Christ, even by those who take His name. This will not be a denial of a name, but rather a lifting of the physical attributes of men, bodies and souls, in such a way that duality; of the separateness of God from the things He has created, will be lost in the minds of most men, including the church itself. This will give rise to an irresistible universalist understanding of salvation, as well as help to prepare this world to receive a physical, visible and undoubted mere man, as God. It is the very evidence of the activity of Satan in this world of men, beginning with the very first efforts in the Garden of Eden.This ambition, predicated on the back of a promise can be traced throughout civilisations of every age. It has given rise to conflict and fear, in the hating of men, yet at its heart lays its real power, that of self.
Inside The Church
In my own understanding, I see this philosophical quagmire increasingly evidenced in the teachings of some of the most well-known leaders of the emergent church. What this tells me quite plainly is that a growing number of believers are embracing a complexity of deception which will have only one outcome. It also tells me that an increasing number of believers have no discernment at all. If Truth were a mere matter of intelligence, the smartest man would lead. Unfortunately, those men and women who are leading this emergent church movement are not as well informed as they may believe. In the vanity of their minds, they must think that they can outwit the enemy, by using his instruments of persuasion to motivate and discuss a new more perfect way for men to live and thereby prove their faith in Christ. If they had just a seed of discernment, they would reject the philosophies of this world which they are embracing, and lay hold of the foolishness of the Cross. The lie of Satan is predicated on the words, “For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen 3:4)
We can easily miss the impetus of this deception of Satan. We often say that Adam desired to be independent of God as a response to this promise of Satan. What we miss in this claim is that the Scripture tells us plainly that Adam was not deceived. Yet this promise of Satan holds a grain of truth. This is because the effect of Adam’s disobedience did indeed separate him from God, along with Eve. Independence from God was a separation from God, through sin and death. It is also true that they did come into the knowledge of good and evil. It was to make of man the central agent in deciding what is good and what is evil. The expulsion from the garden was the very evidence of this. If Adam had reached out at that moment and eaten of the tree of life, he would have done so precisely because of this newly acquired knowledge.
Adam received nothing for his disobedience at all, and the only reality, besides spiritual death, was expulsion from the garden of God, and a life of slow decline and eventually physical death. Genesis 3:22 speaks of the immediacy of the false promise of Satan, whereas the fullness of the lie has long been in the making. The Scripture clearly warns us that Satan himself will be cast down from heaven to be present with the Man of Sin and the False Prophet in an end-time reign of terror. To that end, the church is embracing relativism, where dualism; as an acknowledgement that the greater mind of God gives rise to the lesser minds of men, is being replaced by a non-dualistic philosophical embrace, that it is the man himself, who is after all his own god. Not by declaring that God is dead. Rather by asserting that men have become entirely justified as a god in their own lives. If this suits Satan’s ambitions, it is because when men are finally in this mind of complete rebellion towards God, Satan can become the god of mankind.
Post-Modernism & Relativism
In looking at the church in these terms, of a post-modern perspective, we could say that the lifeblood of postmodernism is relativism. The idea behind this concept, so far as the church is concerned, is simply that the knowledge of God cannot be acquired without experience, It must begin with something. The something is the proverbial where you are at, and the starting point is an a posteriori assumption based on experiential sources that we haven’t arrived at wherever it is we are going. This is not a succeeding by a claim of obedience to the leading of the Holy Spirit alone, it is an arriving by means of a conversation, necessitated by the underlying paradigm itself. It may seem too simplistic to write in such terms, but I believe that this philosophical model is the very impetus that is contributing to deception in the churches. This philosophy will necessitate the embrace of all traditions, denominations and cults. It is essentially the character of Satan himself. It is the true meaning of sorcery, regardless of its outworking because it is an intentional deception in order to promote individuality.
The inevitable a priori reality in projection is that a relative understanding of faith in Christ Jesus will mean that knowing God will be proven through time, in a shared conversation about experience and personal meanings. Personal testimony and a good confession of faith will have no value so far as truth is concerned. In such a vacuum of spiritual reality, all behaviour can be justified, and sin set aside. What this means is that philosophical enquiry will replace real revelation of God, not only through the Scriptures themselves, but directly, by being taught by the Holy Spirit. In such a space men are able to learn God by their own shared efforts. It will be a space in which no one will be able to say it is a lie. Everything will have to become true. At its root, therefore, it is the same belief system which is expressed in psychoanalytical Gestalt and Emergent world views.
The emergent church view, of what will constitute truth, as well as a Gestalt and emergent view of humanity, may well be dualistic in their conceptual, philosophical necessity, but in their outworking, they will be individualistic and self-orientated, both physically and psychically. To that, psychology itself and faith in God, are becoming experientially non-dualistic, in that they both prescribe, or will prescribe the same animate confidence in the physical body itself. In the case of the church, this will mean a pressing into mysticism. In the case of Gestalt Emergent theories, it will say psychoanalytic occult thinking dressed up as a reasonable concern, and a shared life experience between the practitioner and the participant.
At the same time neurophysiology through the development of the scientific paradigm; which has focused on neurological and pathological realities, cannot be rejected, nor the benefit that such research has afforded in the development of object-oriented and behavioural psychological schools of thought - more directly through Psychoanalytic thinking and especially Jungian Archetypal Models.