"This Personal Jesus thing..." Yeah, "God is no longer a problem for us."

In the words of Ingrid Schlueter of SliceOfLaodicea.com "This is what American evangelicalism has become." We think that the Emerging Church Movement is something that came about with out any relation whatsoever to the current evangelical movement. That somehow it is something that occurred because the world has infiltrated the church. But it must be realized that the ECM didn't come over night. The movement was brought upon by the Evangelical movement itself.

--- e.g. This Personal Jesus Jesus thing.

Michael Horton : HT

In the American Religion, as in ancient Gnosticism, there is almost no sense of God’s difference from us-in other words, his majesty, sovereignty, self-existence, and holiness. God is my buddy or my inmost experience, or the power-source for living my best life now. God is not strange (i.e., holy)-and is certainly not a judge. He does not evoke fear, awe, or a sense of terrifying and disorienting beauty. Furthermore, all the focus on making atonement through a bloody sacrifice seems crude and unspiritual to Gnostics when, after all, the point of salvation is to escape the physical realm. All of this is too “Jewish,” according to Gnostics from Marcion to Schleiermacher to the “Re-Imagining Conference” of mainline Protestant leaders (especially radical feminists) who explicitly appealed to Gnosticism in their screeds against “men hanging on crosses with blood dripping and all that gory stuff.” The god of Gnosticism is not the one before whom Isaiah said, “Woe to me, for I am undone!” or Peter said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” To borrow a nice phrase from William Placher, it represents “the domestication of transcendence.” God is no longer a problem for us.