As I said yesterday, I believe John Piper’s book Contending for Our All is exceedingly relevant for our day, especially in light of attacks on truth by the emergent movement, as I think the following excerpt will demonstrate. Piper’s study of Athanasius and the Arian heresy 1700 years ago demonstrates the truth that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Loving Christ includes loving true propositions about Christ

What was clear to Athanasius was that propositions about Christ carried convictions that could send you to heaven or hell. Propositions like “There was a time when the Son of God was not,” and “He was not before he was made,” and “the Son of God is created” were damnable. If they were spread abroad and believed, they would damn the souls who embraced hem. And therefore Athanasius labored with all his might to formulate propositions that would conform to reality and lead the soul to faith and worship and heaven.
   I believe Athanasius would have abominated, with tears, the contemporary call for “depropositionalizing” that we hear among so many of the so-called “reformists” and “the emerging church,” “younger evangelicals,” “postfundamentalists,” “postfoundationalists,” “postpropositionalists,” and “postevangelicals.” I think he would have said, “Our young people in Alexandria die for the truth of propositions about Christ. What do your young people die for?” And if the answer came back, “We die for Christ, not propositions about Christ,” I think he would have said, “That’s what the heretic Arius said. So which Christ will you die for?” To answer that question requires propositions about him. To refuse to answer implies that it doesn’t matter what we believe or die for as long as it has the label Christ attached to it.
   Athanasius would have grieved over sentences like, “It is Christ who unites us; doctrine divides.” And sentences like: “We should ask, Whom do you trust? Rather than what do you believe?” He would have grieved because he knew this was the very tactic used by the Arian bishops to cover the councils with fog so that the word Christ could mean anything. Those who talk like this—“Christ unites, doctrine divides”—have simply replaced propositions about Christ with the word Christ. It carries no meaning until one says something about him. They think they have done something profound and fresh, when they call us away from the propositions of doctrine to the word Christ. In fact they have done something very old and worn and deadly.

—John Piper, Contending for Our All, 63-64