Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church
Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church
D.A. Carson
All the statement are either Dr. Carson giving an negative perspective on the Emerging church or him quoting leaders of the emerging church that he disagrees with.
In Great Britain, churches of the Baptist Union used to emphasize “believing” before “belonging” – reflecting their historical roots in the believers’ church tradition. But today the leaders of the Baptist Union encourage its member churches to reverse the priorities: first “belonging,” then “believing.” This parallels the priorities of the emerging church movement, even though the “emerging church” rubric has made only marginal headway on this side of the Atlantic. (p. 13)
He [Spencer Burke] became equally disenchanted with three-point sermons and ten-step discipleship programs, not to mention the premillennial, pretribulational eschatology in which he had been trained. (p. 15)
Spiritual McCarthyism, Burke asserts, is “what happens when the pastor-as-CEO model goes bad or when well-meaning people get too much power.” (p. 16)
History, Burke argues, has shown Christians to be wrong about many things: slavery, whether women could vote or own property, and much more. “Given a less-than-stellar track record, is it really so heretical to think that the evangelical church may be wrong about homosexuality as well? (p. 16)
Every time I put on a mask for the sake of my reputation and career, I’m guilty of a sin far more serious than not believing whatever I’m supposed to believe.” (p. 17)
Modern…attempts to tie each passage off neatly into propositional statements that capture truth are backfiring and emerging generations see through the charade of our modern forms of exegesis. We are not simply autonomous knowers given the ability to decipher truth for others. Jesus understood that it’s not only the truth that changes us, but also the journey of seeking truth. (p. 23)
Emergent is a gathering of wanderers. …. A reformation built around mission and relationship instead of thoughts, systems, and ideals. (p. 24)
The majority view, however, is that the fundamental issue in the move from modernism to postmodernism is epistemology – i.e., how we know things, or think we know things. Modernism is often pictured as pursuing truth, absolutism, linear thinking, rationalism, certainty, the cerebral as opposed to the affective – which in turn breeds arrogance, inflexibility, a lust to be right, the desire to control. Postmodernism, by contract, recognizes how much of what we “know” is shaped by the culture in which we live, is controlled by emotions and aesthetics and heritage, and in fact can only be intelligently held as part of a common tradition, without overbearing claims to being true and right. Modernism tries to find unquestioned foundations on which to build the edifice of knowledge and then proceeds with methodological rigor; postmodernism denies that such foundations exist (it is “antifoundational”) and insists that we come to “know” things in many ways, not a few of them lacking in rigor. Modernism is hard-edged and, in the domain of religion, focuses on truth versus error, right belief, confessionalism; postmodernism is gentle and, in the domain of religion, focuses on relationships, love, shared tradition, integrity in discussion. (p. 27)
For almost everyone within the movement, this works out in an emphasis on feelings and affections over against linear thought and rationality; on experience over against truth; on inclusion over against exclusion; on participation over against individualism and the heroic loner. For some (as in the subtitle of Yaconelli’s book), this means a move from the absolute to the authentic. It means taking into account contemporary emphases on tolerance; it means not telling others they are wrong. (p. 29)
Rather, he [McLaren] focuses on philosophical pluralism, the stance that asserts that no single outlook can be the explanatory system or view of reality that accounts for all of life. (p. 31)
Q: How are we to respond to the issue of homosexuality? A: McLaren asserts that there is no good position, because all positions hurt someone, and that is always bad. Moreover, homosexuality may be seventy-five different things. By way of analogy, consider schizophrenia, which, though it is a complex and not uncommon disease, is not mentioned in the Bible. The closest thing to it in the Bible, phenomenologically, is demon-possession. But are we prepared to say that every instance of schizophrenia should be labeled demon-possession, so as to preserve biblical categories? Similarly, contemporary homosexuality is a complex phenomenon, and it is not entirely clear that what we mean by homosexuality in any particular instance entirely lines up with what the Bible says about homosexuality. McLaren insists that by such cautions he is not making a judgment on homosexuality itself, one way or another, but on how to treat people.
(p. 34-35)
In other words, at the heart of the emerging reformation lies a perception of a major change in culture. This does not mean that the emerging church movement is wrong. It means, rather, three things.
First, the emerging church movement must be evaluated as to its reading of contemporary culture. Most of its pleas for reform are tightly tied to its understandings of postmodernism. The difficulty of the task (granted the plethora of approaches to postmodernism) cannot exempt us from making an attempt.
Second, as readers will have already observed from the survey provided by this chapter, the appeal to Scripture in the emerging church literature are generally of two kinds. On the one hand, some emerging leaders claim that changing times demand that fresh questions be asked of Scripture, and then fresh answers will be heard. What was an appropriate use of Scripture under modernism is no longer an appropriate use of Scripture under postmodernism. On this gentler reading of evangelicalism’s history, traditional evangelicals are not accused of being deeply mistaken for their own times, but of being rather out of date now, not least in their handling of the Bible. On the other hand, the emerging church’s critique of modernism, and of the evangelicalism that modernism has produced, is sometimes (not always) so bitter that evangelicalism’s handling of Scripture can be mocked in stinging terms. ….
Third, granted that the emerging church movement is driven by its perception of widespread cultural changes, its own proposals for the way ahead must be assessed for their biblical fidelity. In other words, we must not only try to evaluate the accuracy of the emerging church’s cultural analysis, but also the extent to which its proposals spring from, or can at least be squared with, the Scriptures. To put the matter differently: is there at least some danger that what is being advocated is not so much a new kind of Christian in a new emerging church, but a church that is so submerging itself in the culture that it risks hopeless compromise? (p. 43-44)
In short, many Christians have yet to come to grips with the fact that we ourselves are part of this rapidly changing culture, and we cannot help but be influenced by it.
The more radical forms of reader-response theory, fed by postmodern hermeneutics, insists that the social location of the readers is the single most important factor in determining their conclusions as they read. Such a stance holds that any interpretation – whether of a text or a culture –says more about the social location of the readers than it does about the text or the culture. (p. 51)
My argument will develop along four lines: the emerging church’s tendency toward reductionism, its condemnation of confessional Christianity, some theological shallowness and intellectual incoherence, and a particularization of those three issues.
(p. 57)
For instance, when Brian McLaren talks about contemporary evangelism, he insists that because modernism is passé, many forms of evangelism have lost their usefulness. Gone is evangelism as sales pitch, as conquest, as warfare, as ultimatum, as threat, as proof, as argument, as entertainment, as show, as monologue, as something you do. Evangelism is disciple making and is bound up with conversation, friendship, influence, invitation, companionship, challenge, opportunity, dance, something you get to do. (p. 58)
So considered, postmodernism is nothing but the popularization of one strand of modernist thought, which itself was a reaction against other strands of modernist thought. In any case, I see the analysis of modernism itself within the emerging church movement so stylized and reductionistic as to represent a major historical distortion. (p. 60)
Here again is that antithesis: the Christian message is an invitation “extended to human beings- not just human brains.” I could happily live with this if he elsewhere said that the Christian message is an invitation to human beings – not just human emotions and aesthetics. (p. 66)
My third criticism can be stated briefly. The almost universal condemnation of modernism, and of Christianity under modernism, is not only historically skewed and ethically ungrateful, but is frequently theologically shallow and intellectually incoherent.
It is intellectually incoherent because, in the spirit of postmodern toleration, most emergent publications go out of their way to find good things about every other “ism” – Buddhism, say, or Islam or the Aztec Indians or tribal animism. The one “ism” about which some appear to find it almost impossible to say anything positive, especially in the publications of emerging leaders, is modernism (as they understand it). Thus the intellectual stance they have adopted as part of gaining openness and less absolutism becomes quasi-absolutist in its condemnation of modernism. (p.69)
One might have thought that the world of polytheistic paganism would have had no trouble adding one more religion, this religion that came to be called Christianity. But Christianity proved impossible for paganism to swallow, precisely because Christianity was absolutist. (p. 90)
In other words, Christianity provided a frame of reference that began with God and his revelation, and thus to a particular history of a particular people, and ultimately of one individual, yet claimed universal exclusiveness. (p. 91)
Postmodernism therefore insists that objective knowledge is neither attainable nor desirable. (p. 97)
Weaknesses of Postmodern Epistemology
- Many postmoderns channel the discussion into a manipulative antithesis. The antithesis is this: Either we human beings can know something absolutely, perfectly, exhaustively – on might say omnisciently – or we human beings can at best glimpse some small perspective on something or other without any mechanism for discovering whether our perspective is an important part of the whole, a distorted view of the whole, or a skewed view of the whole, and so forth – precisely because we have no way of knowing what the whole is. (p. 104)
In short, hard postmodernism leans on the antithesis I have just described and concludes that all human knowing cannot be knowledge of what is objectively true, because it never has a sure, omniscient vantage point. Soft postmodernism leans on the antithesis in order to affirm that all human knowledge is necessarily perspectival (after all, we cannot escape our finitude), but probes a little farther to suggest ways in which human beings can know some true things, even if nothing exhaustively.
(p. 106)
I hold that it is possible and reasonable to speak of finite human beings knowing some things truly, even if nothing exhaustively or omnisciently. (p. 116)
Postmodernism shares the same beginning point, of course, but seeks to empty modernism of its certainty. And God? Especially in hard postmodernism, he is no more than the belief structure of a particular social group. He has no more reality or truth than the belief structure of some other group. Every religious view is as right or wrong as every other religious view. If there is a real God out there, we finite beings have no means of knowing it or him with genuine certainty. To claim anything more would be to abandon postmodernism – and, equally bad, it would mean being intolerant. So let your religious life be personal, your own story, and make sure you use it to do good (even though the definition of “good” is now notoriously plastic). (p. 123)
Elsewhere, McLaren elaborates, “The church must present the Christian faith not as one religious army at war against all other religious armies but as one of many religious armies fighting against evil, falsehood, destruction, darkness, and injustice.” (p. 134)
In separate chapters McLaren explains (to use the subtitle of the book) “Why I am a missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/Calvinist + Anabaptist/Anglican + Methodist + catholic + green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished Christian. I have read these chapters with considerable care, and I must try to explain a little of why this is an attractive + manipulative + funny + sad + informed + ignorant + winsome + outrageous + penetrating + resoundingly false + stimulating + silly book. And I have used each of these words with more precision than McLaren has used with his. (p. 162)
So in what way doe McLaren see himself as a Protestant at all? He is a Protestant, he says, in the sense that he is committed to “pro-testifying” – something that Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox are all doing when they are at their best. In that sense, his Protestantism, he acknowledges is a kind of post-Protestantism. (p. 173)
And then, in what appears to be remarkable theological chutzpah, McLaren hijacks the famous TULIP anagram. T will call to mind Triune Love instead of the typically Reformed emphasis on God’s sovereignty; U mow means Unselfish Election, since we must embrace election not to exclusive privilege but to “missional responsibility” (though in the best of Reformed theology I have never seen these opposed); L calls up Limitless Reconciliation; I now means Inspiring Grace; and P sands for Passionate, Persistent States. I suppose that having a TULIP entitles McLaren to say he is a Calvinist, for all the same reasons that he is entitled to call himself a Fundamentalist. (p. 180)
Given this mindset, repentance has to be redefined as well. It no longer has to do with renouncing evil. The call to repentance is the call to fulfill our natural potential, to improve ourselves by acting like God. (p. 186)
When the Scriptures encourage us to know so much – when they can even say that they are written in order that we may know (I John 5: 13), indeed know the certainty of the gospel story (Luke 1: 3- 4) – only an oxymoronic humble arrogance (or is it arrogant humility?) could keep telling us that we can’t know, making students uncomfortable with what Scripture actually says on these matters. (p. 200)
One can be biblically unfaithful by being much narrower than Scripture; one can be biblically unfaithful by being much broader than Scripture. (p. 208)
The reason why he wants people to believe certain things and act in certain ways is not simply because they are part of a confessional community or because it is good for them or because this happens to be their particular heritage of spirituality, but because this is the truth. (p. 232)