Baptist Press Article Re: the Emerging Church
Well, read the link above (the title of this post) and let's discuss this. I am deeply disturbed by this mentality and am amazed at the comments from a seminary president that seem to be so illogical and downright nasty. I think "emerging" is a term that seems to spark controversy, but like most titles, it is used most often by those who define themselves as "not that". It's like Fundamentalist. Fundamentalists don't usually call themselves that, it's a term used by those who are not fundamentalists to describe people not like them.In the same way, people are beginning to use "emerging" like they use "postmodern" or other terms that become curse words by a simple change of inflection. My professor Dr. Gibbs is fond of pointing out that the church is always emerging, so the term is given not so much as a title, but as a sort of shorthand way of understanding that we're talking about where the church in the West seems to be going. Christians who begin to take the view that we should view this culture the same way missionaries in China or Africa would view the contexts they find themselves in are developing new ways of understanding church. This happens constantly and there is no reason to fear it or denounce it.
I want to make one thing incredibly clear (to both of you who read this blog ;) the only reason to feel threatened by anything new is when you have developed a siege mentality. When we develop an institution, we feel the need to defend it against all assaults. Although I applaud the heart that wishes to protect the gospel from outside attacks, I have to say that it is the wrong attitude to have. We must not work to protect the gospel because it is not ours to protect. In fact, if we think the gospel is ours, it is only our version of the gospel. Mohler and Carson are doing more to defend the 1+2+3 version of the gospel developed that argues with someone enough until they agree with it than they are the actual gospel.
The gospel is God's, not ours. It is wild and cannot be tamed. All attempts to do so result in our diminishment, not the gospel's. We were confronted by the gospel and accepted it, but our relationship does not stop there! We never fully "get it". The older I get, the more I realize that God has so much to show and teach me about himself that it will truly be a lifelong endeavor and I won't even scratch the surface.
The problem comes when we think we "have" the gospel and we can now "give" it to someone else. This is a dead message, not the firey living entity as the Bible pictures it. We should approach it humbly and when we share it, we ask people to enter the story as we have done. The story is not over yet, though, and the gospel is still transforming us. This means that the people we share the gospel with will enter at a different point than we did. No matter how extensive we make a "gospel presentation", if we refuse to couple offering the message with offering ourselves we are not offering the gospel.
The gospel is good news and is the story of how God created us and offers us fellowship with himself. I'll get off the soap box in a second, but when I read those comments about the emerging church, they just seem to be mean-spirited and unwarranted. I have to ask myself what would cause such an attack. I worry whenever anyone gets too excited about "defending" God and his Word, because what they usually mean is "attacking." I also worry because it seems a very demeaning attitude toward God to think that he needs us to defend him. We are called to be the prophetic voice in this culture (and every culture) but that doesn't mean starting fights in the name of God to defend him against outsiders (you may remember the Crusades).
Ok, I'm stepping down from the soap box now. I want to know what you think about the article.
posted by Wayj @ 12:19 AM
6 Comments:
okay. since i am one of your two (and i know how it feels from my blog), i'll step up for a comment.
i am always impressed by McLaren, so i know i am baised, but i tried to look at the article from the middle, not being one of the emergent generation. what i found was two fold.
politics, the power struggle of any organization, attempts to slash the opponent at irrelevant points to discredit the differing message. i was impressed with how McLaren sidestepped the topic of homosexuality, because it was not related to the task of explaining the "emerging" idea.
second, the message of jesus and life of jesus are dangerous to stagnation. if you imbrace the message of the gospel, the last tendency i would see is to be stagnet. maybe going insain from effort and learning to understand grace, but standing unchanged, unadaptable?
we both love going "anti", but i caution that desire as being truth without love. if we carry the gospel, we carry both at the same time. a juggling act i have a hard time accomplishing.
Yeah, I think the thing that disturbs me the most about Mohler's and Carson's comments are exactly that they miss that their version of propositional truth is only a few hundred years old. Now, we can't negate that innovation, but we are also not bound by it. God worked a lot before and will continue to work regardless of the intellectual paradigm we try to place him in.
I am always amazed at the arguing techniques even the most educated can stoop to. In his blog about postmodern culture, Mohler even uses words like nonsensical and gibberish. He says that we should investigate postmodernism missionally, but any missionary that entered a culture and told all of its people they had their heads up their asses wouldn't get very far.
I very much have a heart for the Southern Baptist Church to be what God would have it become, and I do not pretend to know what that is completely. I do know, however, that the culture has become spiritual as the church has become scientific and business-like. I think it's no coincidence that top leaders denounce current systems of thought and people opt for other methods of spirituality. People talk about Christ constantly, but people today just don't think he'd be found in the church. That's our fault, not the culture's.
Lesslie Newbigin (whom everyone MUST read!) is fond of saying that the church is the hermeneutic of the gospel. We are the only translation of the Bible the world will likely read, and how we act determines their response towards us. Are we going to choose the path of love, while not letting go of the truth, or are we going to argue for the preservation of a 300-year-old thought system that increasingly does not apply to the current world?
I can't believe I have found this blog. I just started a blog because of a theological discussion I had with my brother. My husband assures me all the time that my thinking isn't wrong, just because someone else judges it wrong. I always try to emphasize one's very personal relationship with God. It is so easy to concern ourselves about others' salvation instead of our own relationship with God. Your discussions are very interesting. I found the BP article very cerebral and boring, but I think I got the jist. I did read the entire article. I believe the reporting was solid. I'm just so happy to hear voices that sound like mine. I'll continue to check out your blog. I just started mine today and it will not be all about this subject but it is a subject very dear to me at this time because I feel like my own Baptist religion and Christianity are being minimized and distorted and it just seems to become a larger and larger issue. I know I'm all over the place but thanks for listening.
Hey Jared...It's Jenny--I met you over Christmas break. I have been reading you blog and really enjoying, but all of my brain has been used up by school lately so I haven't commented.
I'm very glad that you linked to this article; I enjoy reading McLaren and have wondered what people like these guys think of him. I have to say I was kind of surprised by their arguments because they seem to be missing the point of what he's saying. (Maybe that's why one of his books is called Adventures in Missing the Point.) Anyway, I think it's funny that they are attacking it as a movement but cannot figure out who the 'participants' are. Most interesting to me, though, is first the assertion that McLaren relies more on tradition than Scripture. Then another accusation is that the movement is not assertive enough about Christianity being true and authoritative. Well, it seems that McLaren more has a problem with what institutional, present traditional 'Christianity' has become. That implies to me that he lessens the traditions and institutions that make it a religion today. In his writings, McLaren is adamant, however, about what Jesus said and did. So is he holding to traditions to much or too little? I certainly don't agree with everything that McLaren says, but what I enjoy is that he does ask the questions and leave them open to be answered, inspiring dialogue that sure seems to get farther than the 'demanded answers'.
Okay, last thing--'A responsible theological argument must acknowledge that difficult questions demand to be answered.' What is this? Maybe I don't know enough about responsible theological arguments. Why did Jesus so often answer questions with questions if they demand to be answered? What happened to 'my thoughts are higher than your thoughts' if we can answer all the difficult questions? That statement seems to fly in the face of a lot to me.
Julie, thanks for stopping by! Feel free to post as much as you like.
Jenny, I think you are spot on. It's interesting that they appeal to Scripture over tradition, especially when Baptists have a specific (and relatively new) tradition about how to read Scripture. A lot of those arguments are more to do with a cohesive theory regarding the Scripture rather than the Scripture itself, if that makes any sense.
This is the problems of modernity that we have to work hardest against. In our pursuit of universals, we negated the contexts. If there's one thing that the Incarnation should tell us, it is that God trusts the context. Jesus came to a specific people at a specific time in history and we are left to work out what he meant for us and what he meant for them. It was no different in the past few centuries when the push to develop these metanarratives was on and Christians felt the need to answer the "scientific" questions regarding the faith.
So, we have a theory about the Bible from start to finish that must cohere and conform and anything that seems contradictory is explained away. I don't want to get too far into this, but I'll just say we can't replace our theory of the Bible with the Bible. The Bible is always saying surprising and even shocking things and when we refuse to acknowledge that we make it a dead piece of work.
The other thing I think you are totally on target about is the whole fighting against the "emerging" church and not knowing who's in it. I think some of the church leadership would be shocked to know the amount of people in their churches that would identify themselves with this kind of thinking. It really is a group of people trying to engage with the culture and seeking to draw from all places (Scripture and the church's history/tradition) in order to better incarnate the gospel in a specific time/place. They're not actively attacking anybody, they're just worried about what God wants them to do in the communities he placed them.
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