Emerging or Emergent: Which one will emerge?

I have been doing a full-scale hort-load of reading lately on the topic of Emergent / Emerging as a church movement and while it seems to have been a hot topic about six months ago (more importantly a few years ago when it was born in the Anglican church in England) I still find it intriguing as a topic. Mostly because I consider myself “enlightened” by a world view that combines (1) a need for Biblical understanding in the context in which it was written, as well as (2) challenged to hear how that affects my life today in a planet that exists more than 7,000 years since the first history recorded in the Bible (not including creation stories.) This doesn’t make me emergent, by all means, but it does mean, I think, that I am interested in many of the same Christian issues (I will call them) that are currently being discussed. There are a few issues, though, within the Emergent movement that are of particular concern to me. But before I get into that, I would like to quote a person from within the Emergent “conversation” (a term the emergent movement likes to use to describe theological discussions) Dr. John Piper, describing the difference between Emergent and Emerging:

“The single greatest concern for me is their attitude towards doctrine… I've talked with some emergent types and tried to understand even their concept of truth, and you can't get your hand around it… Now let me clarify one other thing. I said earlier that emergent and emerging aren't necessarily the same… Emerging might be used by some people—like Mark Driscoll—to describe a proper reaction that is taking place against some of the negative things going on in the church, but a reaction that doesn't throw away the doctrines… The Mark Driscoll "emerging" type would put a very high premium on biblical faithfulness, truth, doctrine and propositions. But the emergent types would not put premium on that, but would explicitly say on their websites that they regard that kind of emphasis as harmful.”

Now, I have struggled to understand this difference for some time now. I have read authors who seem to use the terms interchangeably. For a while at least, one of those authors was Brian McLaren. But it seems that, not completely unlike the rift that historically separated the Catholics from the Protestants, or the Calvinists from the Wesleyans, or the splitting of the Pentecostal movement, there seems to be a segmentation brewing between Emerging believers who value doctrinal proposition, Biblical faithfulness and truth, and those Emergent folks who, to borrow a phrase, think the “evangelical world is majoring too much on clarity.” So how does this change the price of beer (how does this really matter?) Read on to read a few of my concerns.

Emerging believers seem to carry the same general reactions to “church as usual” that Emergent folks tend to battle with, but their conclusions still seek to be in harmony with the Bible as a foundational instrument in Christianity. This is a funny thing to say if you imagine a version of Christianity could exist without a foundational relationship to the Bible. But the fact is that the nature of that relationship is a core “topic of conversation” within the greater Emergent movement. For example, an employee / leader of Emergent Village (the group that is currently leading the movement from an organizational perspective) recently blogged a frustration in that a secular news group defined Emergent’s relationship to doctrine as “unorthodox” (meaning not based on the authority of Biblical scriptures.) This kind of made the employee angry seeing as he has written books on behalf of the movement and feels that he is backing up his “conversations” with scripture. You can see here that it is a clear struggling point in the movement. So, when you are thinking Emerging, you might want to be thinking about a group of folks that want to get away from “church as usual” (I am oversimplifying here… as they itemize this list of frustrations far better than simply “church as usual”) but that also value Biblical faithfulness. Said another way, they are cool with doctrine and while we may not agree with all of the conclusions or their interpretations, they may come to some valid views that pass the litmus test of being in agreement with the whole of scripture but are not necessarily the commonly accepted traditional view (mind you not all views are really “new” and more importantly not all Emerging or Emergent views are in agreement with scripture, but we will get to that.)

To me, Emergent is the slightly scary brother to the more acceptable (but still nebulously defined) Emerging believer. Why so scary? Let’s take a look at my concerns:

The claims are overstated, hyperbolic, (unfair) generalizations, lacking in scholarly objectivity and evenhandedness that renders much of its early writings full of egregious errors.

Wow, what a claim! Someone punch me now for being so arrogant as to say this! If it were true, who would read such ridiculous Emergent commentary, which must be to say that I am crazy for saying it!? Or maybe I am just quoting Brian McLaren’s preface to his generally accepted Emergent book “A Generous Orthodoxy.” Yep. In an effort to sound humble, I am sure, he started off his book by saying that his book was laced with this kind of writing. Wow, huh? Some are quick to respond, “Well, at least he is keeping it real,” or “Now, that is genuine and approachable.” The trouble is, even if I start a sentence saying, “I really hope this doesn’t totally come off as painful, but I am about to punch you in the face,” does it forgive me for punching you, or more importantly does it make it less painful?

Emergent authors tend to promote the idea that humility means unloading concepts like certainty, proof, argument, and trading them in for dialogue, conversation, intrigue and search (to paraphrase McLaren from his book “Adventures in Missing the Point”.) The problem with this statement is that McLaren is building a straw man here. At first glance things like dialogue, conversation, intrigue and search feel like good things. Why wouldn’t they be? The trouble is that you don’t have to throw out certainty, proof and argument (apologetics is a slightly more acceptable term without a negative connotation that makes defending or discussing your faith sound like a battle) to embrace them. It is, honestly, an author’s linguistic grammatical trick to pit two things against each other and use positive versus negative terms to subjectively make your point. Like the authors of “Why we are not Emergent”, I firmly agree that we ought to have an “AND” where McLaren puts and “OR” to simply make his point. Oddly enough McLaren seems to not believe his own writing. A while later in his book “The Secret Message of Jesus” he recalls for the reader his writing that we should unload concepts like “certainty”, but in this book he says, “In one of my previous books I said that clarity is overrated… but here, I want to say, clearly, that…” So it seems that in the Emergent movement you can reject clarity on points you disagree with, but when you are ready to make a point yourself, it is time to embrace clarity. It is my opinion that whether intentionally or unintentionally McLaren, a person who was an English Major in college, is fully in command of his writing skills and so, at best, if he doesn’t know what he is doing to mess with people, we should just be most careful to notice these contradictions and guard our minds if we read what he writes, OR at worst he knows what he is doing, and other Emergent folks should call him to task for what seems to be cheap manipulative language. Not to single out McLaren (though I believe we need to tread lightly into his writing for these and other reasons), but even authors like Rob Bell like to trade in clarity for ambiguity at opportunistic times. Rob Bell in Velvet Elvis wrote that the “Bible is open-ended.” But the fact is that I have listened to an uncountable number of his sermons on MP3 and he asserts on a regular basis contextual statements about the history behind a set of scriptures. So, in those cases, Rob on one hands wants us to believe the Bible is open-ended, and in his teaching he wants us to embrace his less-than-open-ended perspectives (I reference Rob Bell because he and his wife reference Brian McLaren as having shaped their developing theology by reading his book “A New Kind of Christian.”) As a final example in this category, McLaren wrote on a Christianity Today blog, “I am no doubt wrong on many things. I am very likely wrong about my personal opinions on homosexuality.” This sort of attitude is confounding. Admittedly I prefer the attitude that simply says, “I don’t know” or “I am looking into this,” over the perspective, “I am likely wrong.” It makes no sense to cling to something you believe you are likely wrong about. But it seems that McLaren knows this about himself and continues to bring a skeptical confusion into the “conversation” anyway when he writes in his book A Generous Orthodoxy, “They’ll say I am being evasive, cowardly, afraid to take a stand and (that I) write smoke. No one can blame them.”

In the worst case of all, there seems to be theology running around the Emergent camp that definitely fails the litmus test of compatibility with scripture. Again, not to pick on McLaren but he seems to find his way into the middle of a lot of controversy, McLaren writes the forward to Spencer Burkes book “Heretic’s Guide” where he says of its contents “any honest reader can find much truth worth seeking.” The book outlines the oddest if not fully heretical attempt at reinventing doctrine that doesn’t seem to jive with the rest of scripture:

“Could it be- beyond religion, reason and conventional wisdom- grace is something to be opted out of rather than opted in to? It is not something you get but something you already have?”

Burke also writes…

“When I say I am a Universalist, what I really mean is that I don’t think you have to convert to any particular religion to find God. As I see it, God finds us, and it has nothing to do with subscribing to any particular religious view.”

In defense of McLaren, we have no idea if he finds these particular statements to be “truth worth seeking.” But endorsing the book with such a message contained within it seems a bit pluralistic or Unitarian at best, to me. But this seems to go along with the being the norm for McLaren. My best guess is that he simply doesn’t want to alienate anyone by taking or expressing his opinion on stuff. But that reality seems to put McLaren squarely in the middle of the Emergent (rather than Emerging) group.

Finally (for this blog entry) I would like to say that in the Emerging believer realm, there are good things going on. Albeit, I don’t believe they are truly new by all means (comfortable living room furniture in the church experience is not a postmodern thing, but a first century church thing, since the church primarily met in home for the first few hundred years of the Christian faith.) As well, I believe that the distinction will grow between what is Emerging and what is Emergent. To quote John Piper…

“I just kinda kept going back on my heels, like, I don’t understand the way these guys think, and so there are profound epistemological differences - ways of processing reality - that make the conversation almost impossible; just kind of going by each other. My question sort of is, how profitable would it be to press on with that when your worldviews seem to be so different and your ways of knowing seem to be different, the function of knowledge in transformation, what the goals of transformation are - all those are so different that I’m not sure we would get anywhere.”

In the mean time, my prayer is that apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, and those in eldership will continue to watch the gate on this stuff, not swallowing these ideas whole, but examining them for congruence with the Bible as their foundation.

Like it says in James 3:1, “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.”

My prayer is that any coming judgments will render itself as a grace-filled corrective guiding by the Lord through his church, rather than a hard discipline for having led people away from the Lord by focusing on Biblically incompatible doctrines simply because they asked provocative questions.

Post-thoughts: It is worth mentionging that there seem to be plenty of people that really love Jesus, are tired of "church as usual" and that consider themselves "emerging." I think because emerging beliefs are still "unsettled" categorically, there is room for people to call themselves emerging and still not fall into agreement with the more unorthodox doctrines coming from that movement. The jury being out on emerging doctrine is a valid reason to remain associated with the "emergent conversation" as an active participant or even as observer. Equally so, there seems to be an element of the movement who are not as much unsettled and in persuit, but rather choose their words carefully so as to keep things intentionally nebulous. These folks appear "generous" in their orthodoxy, but in reality simply come from the camp of eternally skeptical, unconvinced by people as well as scripture. They are wandering around a smorgasbord of world religious views, chews, but never swallowing, and surely never sitting down, calling their commentary and questions "a conversation" but not truly getting conversant. (More on that in the next blog.)