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[Mike Abendroth]

Absolutely Not!
A critical look at the emerging church movement

by Phil Johnson
2006 Shepherds' Conference
Grace Community Church, Sun Valley, CA

I've been assigned the impossible task of explaining and critiquing the
emerging church movement in one 75-minute session. It will save some time if
I start by being totally candid with you:

I don't suppose anyone who knows me expects me to be very positive about the
emerging church movement. I'd love to stand up here and spend the first half
hour or so listing features of the emerging church that I think are
admirable. I do think there are actually a few valid and important points
being made by people in the movement, and I'll get to them, but I'd rather
not start there, if you don't mind.

(By the way, I realize it would be very stylish if I took the other
approach. If I gave you an ambiguous review and a totally dispassionate
analysis, so that when I finished you couldn't actually be sure whether I
think the emerging movement is a good thing or not, that would fit perfectly
with the postmodern paradigm favored by emergent types. And I'm sure a lot
of them would congratulate me for it. But that would not reflect my own
honest perspective, and I'd prefer just to be totally frank with you. So
that's what I'm going to do.)

My goal in this hour is not to persuade people who are already sold on the
emergent idea that it's a bad idea. My aim is to help conservative pastors
of established churches who are committed to biblical principles by making
you aware of some of the things that are going on in the so-called emerging
church movement. And I hope to explain why I believe it is worth the
struggle to resist these trends. Because you will invariably be confronted
with pressure to embrace some of the philosophy and style of the emergent
movement in your own ministries. And judging from what I know of church
history--especially recent church history--it will be a difficult struggle
for some pastors to resist.

About the Nomenclature . . .

Before I start to describe the emerging church movement and outline some of
its main characteristics, I want to mention that there's been quite a lot of
debate about what name we ought to use when we speak of this movement. For
the sake of this seminar, I'm pretty much just going to refer to it as "the
emerging church movement," in keeping with popular usage. I couldn't think
of anything else to call it without inventing some circumlocution that would
only confuse matters. So I'll refer to it as the "emerging church movement,"
but I want to add a long disclaimer here to acknowledge that none of those
three words actually fits the thing we are describing very well.

Emerging. In the first place, I object to the implications of the word
emerging. This movement is not some beautiful new butterfly coming out of a
cocoon. Although people in this movement sometimes claim to represent the
next great step forward after the failure of modernism, my assessment would
be that what we are really seeing here is the collective dying gasp of every
major modernist idea evangelicals and fundamentalists have stood against for
the past century and a half.

Virtually all the literature, style, and philosophy associated with the
emerging subculture are shot through with conspicuous elements of
worldliness, man-centered worship, the narcissism of youth, liberal and
neo-orthodox theology, and the silly, ages-old campaign to be "contemporary"
at all costs.

And I hope you realize that very few of this movement's most obvious
features are truly inventive. The philosophy and even some of the novelties
of style are really not that much different from what was happening during
my junior high school years in the youth group of the liberal Methodist
church I grew up in. We had the candles and contemporary music and every
kind of religious paraphernalia you can imagine--but not the gospel.
Methodist church leaders, who had abandoned the gospel years before
desperately sought a way to make the church seem "relevant" to a younger
generation in its own language. There has always been some segment of the
church or another that is desperate to keep up with the shifting fads of
culture and looking for novel ways to adapt Christianity to the spirit of
the age. That has been true at least since Victorian times. Spurgeon wrote
against it.

Although that philosophy been tried repeatedly in various forms, it has
never genuinely contributed anything to the growth or effectiveness of the
church. If the pattern of history holds true, my prediction is that the
emerging church movement will be dead and irrelevant even before the current
generation gives way to the next generation. That's what inevitably happens
to movements that are tailored to the tastes of a specific generation. At
most, they have about a 15--or 25-year lifespan. So in my judgment, the term
emerging will almost certainly prove to be a major misnomer in the long
term--and quite possibly even in the short term.

Church. Second, questions have also been raised from within the movement
itself about whether it's really appropriate to speak of "the emerging
church." Brian McLaren is without question the leading American figure and
most prolific writer in the movement. He said last summer that he now
prefers to speak of the emerging "conversation."

That would actually be fine with me, because in some ways the movement isn't
very churchlike in its attitude toward structure and authority. (I'm tempted
to propose nomenclature of my own: "the emerging free-for-all," because that
actually seems to fit what is happening in the movement even better than the
idea of a "conversation.") But I think it's worth noting that the best-known
spokesperson in this movement has indicated that even he thinks the word
church really doesn't fit the movement very well.

Movement. That's not all. In some important ways the emerging subculture is
not really even a movement in the classic sense. There are no clear leaders
or universally-recognized spokespersons who would be affirmed by everyone
associated with the emerging church. The closest to a dominant figure would
be Brian McLaren, and he is so controversial and so prone to making
disturbing statements that many who have adopted the emerging style or
otherwise identified with the emergent movement say they don't want their
ministries or opinions to be evaluated by what he says. And I don't blame
them.

On top of that, this is a movement that hates formal structure, so it has
been resistant to any kind of definition or careful boundaries that would
make its shape easy to discern or describe. It's a movement that is
purposely foggy and amorphous, fluid and diverse--and most in the movement
want to keep it that way.

That ambiguity is a major aspect of the emerging subculture's love affair
with all things postmodern. The lack of clarity and the absence of any clear
consensus in the movement is also the main strategy for self-defense against
critics. No matter what you criticize within the movement, practically the
first response you are going to hear is that "not everyone in the movement
holds that opinion." And in most cases, that's probably true. It's a
movement that loves ambiguity and diversity and despises clarity and
organization.

Nonetheless, last year Brian Mclaren and a few other leading emergent
figures banded together to form an actual organization called, simply,
"Emergent"--also known as "Emergent Village," or (as you find it on their
website) "Emergent-US." So the terminology becomes even more difficult.

Emergent--the organization, is actually different from the "emerging church
movement." Until last summer, you could use the word emergent as a kind of
shorthand term to signify the phenomenon itself, but now that's the name of
an actual organization. And at times there even seems to be a bit of tension
between Emergent, the organization, and the "emerging church movement."

According to a June 8 news release from the organization, Tony Jones was
appointed "National Director" of Emergent. Others within the emerging church
movement practically saw that as a betrayal of the spirit of what they stand
for. So a week later, the organization issued an update on their weblog in
the form of a memo to the rest of the emerging church movement. The memo
said this:



Some of you read the last post regarding the recent appointment of Tony
Jones as "National Director." Before the official press release was sent out
the decision was made to instead use the title "National Coordinator." This
felt more in keeping with both the spirit of Emergent and the overall
purpose of the role.

Here you begin to see why "the emerging church movement" is
next-to-impossible to define. But I hope you can also begin to get a flavor
for what makes the so-called "emerging church" different from the historic
churches of the past. What we have here is a large and growing subculture on
the fringe of the evangelical movement that has been profoundly influenced
by postmodern ways of thinking, discourse, and attitudes.

I dealt with "postmodernism" in a seminar here at the Shepherds' Conference
last year and the year before, so I don't want to cover the same ground
again. If you feel you are totally in the dark about postmodernism and what
it looks like, you can get a CD of that message or download the transcript
of it from the Internet. I'm pretty sure it's freely available somewhere on
line.

It includes a partial critique of one of Brian McLaren's books, A New Kind
of Christian, because that book is essentially a plea for Christians to
embrace postmodernism and adapt to the postmodern way of thinking--not to
fear and resist it. We need to conform our perspective and our style of
discourse to the postmodern fashion, McLaren says, in order to reach a
postmodern generation.

That is, I believe, the central idea that drives the emerging church
movement--although many in the movement might balk at the label postmodern,
and (in all fairness) many people in the movement would also want to add
several paragraphs of qualifications and clarifications to make it clear
that their own assessment of postmodernism would not necessarily be
completely positive.

But there's no question that the movement is self-consciously and
purposefully trying to accommodate or adapt to or otherwise indulge the
postmodern climate of the age we live in. And that is why some of the
essential features of faith and assurance that you and I might think are
absolutely essential to communicating the gospel clearly and in a strong,
biblical way are sometimes actually held in contempt by people in the
emerging subculture. I'm speaking of features such as authority, strong
convictions, doctrinal precision, clear definitions, and candor. All of
those things run counter to the values prized by postmodernists.

So naturally, one of Tony Jones's first duties as "coordinator" for the
Emergent organization was to write a long weblog entry explaining why the
group found it necessary to have a "coordinator" and a board of "directors"
and an actual staff and organization and a real, tangible hierarchy.

It honestly did not surprise me that he would feel obliged to write such a
justification for the organization's existence (or that many in the movement
were demanding that kind of explanation), because for the most part, the
emerging church movement (like the postmodern culture it imitates) is highly
suspicious of (or even contemptuous of) things like organizational charts,
or structured definition, or even the idea of authority itself. Obviously,
all of those things are necessary in any kind of formal organization. But if
you understand postmodernism, it makes perfect sense why postmodernists
would nevertheless resist the clarity and authority that comes with any kind
of formal organization.

All of that is to say that the word movement is also not quite right, and
even most insiders don't like the implications of the word movement. But for
lack of better terminology, I'm going to continue to refer to the "emerging
church movement," and I hope that for clarity's sake and for time's sake you
will indulge me in that shorthand usage of three terms that really don't
quite fit. (If it's a comfort to anyone in the movement, every time the
expression "emerging church movement" appears in the notes I am using, I
have put it in quotation marks.)

I have to say, by the way, that one of the really fun things about watching
the "emerging church movement" is keeping a score card of how quickly every
discussion melts down into a dispute about words and terminology. Many in
the movement are recent college grads who learned the postmodernist
technique of deconstruction as their primary method of interpreting language
and ideas. That's what postmodernist lit teachers have been teaching for 15
years or so now. Emergent types have learned the technique well, and they
use it to good effect.

Definition

So with that as background, let me attempt to give you something that
approximates a definition of this movement--this thing--that we all agree
resists any kind of precise definition.

Some important disclaimers. I hope you won't be surprised or dismayed when
people who are devoted to the emergent subculture point out that my
description of their movement is an oversimplification. They are also going
to complain that some of the things I criticize don't apply in every
exhaustive detail to every person or every congregation in their movement.

Remember: I know that, and I have already acknowledged it. But I still think
there's great value in giving you a description of the broad contours of the
movement, and that is what I am going to try to do.

Some in the movement will complain that I haven't read enough of their
literature; I haven't interacted enough with the right emergent bloggers; or
I haven't visited enough of their gatherings to be a competent critic of
their ideas.

All I can say in response is that I have read as much literature from the
movement's key writers as I can get my hands on; I have interacted directly
with people in the emerging movement as much as my time and schedule will
permit; I have already put many of my criticisms of the movement in the
public arena repeatedly, and I have invited (and received) lots of feedback
from people who are devoted to the movement. I have done my best to be fair
and complete. And I assure you that I will continue to study the movement.

But I don't agree with the notion that in order to be a reasonable and
credible analyst of a movement like this, you have to remain neutral
indefinitely and never become a critic. There is simply too much in the
movement that warrants criticism.

As I said, I just want to be candid and clear for you. I wish time allowed
me to be as nuanced as I would normally like to be. On the other hand, I
think a tendency to over-nuance and over-qualify everything has already
spoiled some otherwise potentially helpful critiques of this movement.

A definition (of sorts) in four parts. So allow me to give you a
broad-brushed description of the "emerging church movement," mainly for the
benefit of those who are still having a hard time getting their minds around
the concept of what this thing is. This won't be the kind of pithy
definition you can take down in a single sentence, so don't even bother
trying. But I will try to keep it brief enough to be manageable.

So here's my definition:

1. The "emerging church" is a convenient name for a broad-based and growing
assortment of similar or related movements that have flourished in the past
half-decade--mostly on the fringe of the evangelical movement. "Emerging"
congregations in one way or another tend to be keenly attuned to the
postmodern shift in art, literature, and public discourse.

(Incidentally, Postmodernism itself is not easy to define, but in general it
refers to a tendency to discount values like dogmatism, authority,
absolutism, assurance, certainty, and large, commanding, exclusive
worldviews--which postmodernists like to label metanarratives. Postmodern
values would include things like diversity, inclusiveness, relativism,
subjectivity, tolerance, ambiguity, pragmatism, and above all, a view of
"humility" that is characterized by lots of qualms and reservations and
uncertainties and disclaimers about whether anything we hold in our belief
system is really true or not. Those are the very same values that are
usually held in high esteem in the "emerging church movement.")

By the way, I think its a mistake to see the emerging subculture as nothing
more than the next generation's version of the "seeker sensitive" church. It
is that, but only in a certain sense. In some ways, the "emerging church" is
a reaction against and a departure from the shallow, mass-movement
professional showmanship of the slick megachurches like Willow Creek and
Saddleback. Emergent types tend to value authenticity over professionalism.
Many of their churches--perhaps a majority of their churches--are home
churches or otherwise small-group gatherings that are informal and
unorganized almost to an extreme.

Understand: this is a very diverse movement. Some in the movement might even
say they are wary of postmodern influences, while others are advocating that
Christians ought to embrace postmodernism enthusiastically. But, either way,
they would all pretty much be keenly aware that postmodernism has molded the
way contemporary people think, the way public discourse is carried on, the
way public opinion is shaped, and the way judgments are usually made about
truth-claims. Therefore, they argue, the church must adjust its message
accordingly. And normally, in practice, this means some level of
accommodation to postmodern preferences.

2. Now, here is another vital aspect of what distinguishes "emerging church
movement": Most congregations in the movement would describe themselves as
missional, by which they mean they stress the importance of evangelistic
outreach by involving themselves in the lives of unbelievers in the
community outside the narrow circle of the church. They point out that the
way believers live is one of the most potent and persuasive aspects of our
testimony to unbelievers--if not the single most important thing of all.

There's nothing essentially wrong with that idea, of course, as long as we
also communicate the truth of the gospel clearly and distinctly with words.
The problem arises when you factor in the postmodern tendency to distrust or
despise every kind of clarity, certainty, or authoritative truth-claim. It
has often meant, in practice, that the emphasis on "missional living"
results in an evangelistic strategy where gospel preaching is downplayed or
deliberately omitted. (And I'll probably have more to say about that if time
permits.)

3. Here's another (similar) feature of the "emerging church movement":
Emergent-style churches show a preference for "narrative theology" as
opposed to systematic doctrine. The story of the gospel is ultimately more
important than the theology of it. The simple narrative of salvation history
must not get lost in the careful parsing of theological words and ideas.

Obviously, There's an important germ of truth in that idea, too. The four
gospels do tell us about the life of Christ in narrative format. They are
collections of anecdotes and incidents from His life, not systematic
doctrinal treatises about soteriology, or hamartiology, or any of the
other-ologies by which we tend to categorize our theology.

People in the "emerging church movement" place a lot of stress on that fact,
and in my assessment they tend to go quickly overboard. The fact that so
much of Scripture is narrative doesn't alter the fact that much of it is
also didactic--and vice versa. Here, I think their obsession with
postmodernism has got the better of some of our emergent friends, and they
have simply reacted against rationalism by running to the opposite
imbalance.

4. In this same vein, people in the emerging church movement often don't
hold the idea of propositional truth in very high regard. And this one of
the key points many of them want to make: A proposition, by definition, is a
premise that is either true or false. There is no third choice. (That is one
of the most basic laws of logic, known as the law of the excluded middle.)

Postmodernists simply don't like handling ideas with that kind of clarity.
So there's a tendency among emergent types to denigrate or devalue the very
idea of propositional truth, logic, and rationality.

I contend that you cannot teach truth at all apart from propositions of some
sort. Boil any truth-claim down to its pure essence, and what you have is a
proposition. You cannot even tell stories without propositions, so if you
were serious about dispensing with propositions altogether, you would have
to forfeit narrative theology, too.

Now again, I think there is a germ of truth underlying this aspect of
postmodernist thinking. Truth is more than merely a collection of
propositional statements. Most of understand that there is a vast and
important difference between knowing Christ and knowing facts about Christ.

On the other hand, knowing Christ in a true and saving way must necessarily
involve knowing true facts about Him. You don't really know Him at all in
any biblical sense if you don't know the basic facts about His deity, His
death, His resurrection, and essential parts of the story like those. So
there is a sense in which the propositional aspect of the truth about Christ
is vital. Al Mohler says it this way: "while truth is always more than
propositional, it is never less."

By the way, the suggestion that we try to deal with truth in
non-propositional form is not anything new with the "emerging church
movement." It's an idea that was floated as one of the key tenets of
neo-orthodoxy at least 65 years ago or more.

I would argue that the assault on propositional truth ultimately entails the
abandonment of logic completely. It is an irrational idea. Francis Schaeffer
said the same thing. He regarded neo-orthodoxy's attack on propositional
truth as the theological equivalent of suicide. He said when we abandon
rationality in that way, we have crossed "the line of despair." We might as
well abandon the quest for truth itself. And in effect, that is the result
of the postmodernist perspective.

5. Here's a final element in my abbreviated description of the emerging
Christian subculture: Most insiders like to portray their movement as an
answer to the influence of philosophical modernism; a departure from
modernism; something wholly distinct from modernism. As you know, modernism
has assaulted the church for some 150 years, at least. It has always,
consistently been hostile to evangelical truth.

Some actually believe the "emerging church movement" is so much the polar
opposite of modernism that when you criticize their movement, they will
accuse you of blithely and unthinkingly buying into the errors of "modern"
thinking. They will often label you a "modernist." And among other things,
they will accuse you of parroting a brand of philosophical foundationalism
that owes more to Rene Descartes and Cartesian foundationalism than it owes
to the Scriptures. Lots of naive people have been drawn into the movement by
sophisticated-sounding philosophical arguments like those.

That claim is based on the assumption that postmodernism itself represents a
correction of the philosophical errors of modernism, rather than just a
further step in a wrong direction.

How any Christian can uncritically adopt that view of carnal, worldly,
humanistic philosophy is an utter mystery to me. It ought to be obvious to
people in the church that postmodernism poses at least as much a threat to
the truth and the clarity of the gospel as every other humanistic philosophy
that has preceded it in the long parade of human foolishness that has
brought us to the postmodern moment in which we are living.

Postmodernism is just the latest, and possibly the worst, in a relentless
procession of bad ideas that ought to have conditioned the church to despise
and distrust the folly of human wisdom (which, by the way, is what Scripture
commands us to do).

Modernism at its very core and inception was an overt attempt to subvert and
defeat the truth of Scripture with humanistic rationalism. Modernism failed,
and failed miserably.

Postmodernism is not really a significant departure from modernism; it is
just a similar attempt to subvert and defeat the truth of Scripture by
glorifying irrationality, and by portraying all truth as hopelessly
paradoxical, ambiguous, unclear, uncertain, unimportant, or otherwise
unworthy of all the concern and attention philosophers have given to the
idea. Postmodernism abandons the hope of finding any absolute or
incontrovertible truth, and instead, the postmodernist looks for amusement
by playing with words and language, and by questioning every assumption and
challenging every truth-claim.

That's no answer to modernism; it is a further step in the same wrong
direction.

So my assessment of the "emerging church movement" is that far from being
the antithesis of modernism, this sort of "evangelical postmodernism" is
really ultimately nothing more than Modernism 2.0.

I have been trying to highlight that point for the past six months or more
on my blog by posting excerpt after excerpt from Charles Spurgeon's
criticisms of 19th-century modernism. (All that material is still online if
you want to review it. Just do a Google search for three words: Spurgeon,
modern, and postmodern. That will be enough to get you started.) It is very
eye-opening to see that every one of the arguments and biblical points
Spurgeon made against the so-called "evangelical modernists" of his day can
(without any modification whatsoever) be applied against the "evangelical
postmodernists" of our day.

Far from being antithetical, the two movements are ultimately just one and
the same. The "emerging church movement" is this generation's version of
what our grandparents knew as modernism--updated in some ways, but
ultimately, it's essentially the same. Postmodernists today are using the
same arguments and the same strategies that the modernists of the Victorian
era employed. The results will be exactly the same, too.

You can begin to understand, I hope, why I insist that this topic demands to
be dealt with with the utmost candor and clarity, rather than with evasions
and equivocations. And I make no apology for that.

The "movement" is not monolithic

Before we move on, I want to reemphasize something important and elaborate
on it just a bit: What I just gave you was a quick, broad-brush description
of the "emerging church movement." There are lots of nuances and differences
within the movement. Not everyone in the movement is saying exactly the same
thing. 

I already indicated, for example, that attitudes toward postmodernism vary
within in the movement. Practically everyone in the movement will insist
that they do not uncritically embrace every aspect of postmodernism, and
that they are only trying to adapt their language and worship style in order
to reach postmodern people. Listen to what emergent leaders say about
postmodernism, for example, and you will see that they don't all agree among
themselves completely about what's good and what's dangerous about
postmodernism. Even Brian McLaren, who used to speak of postmodernism in
glowing terms, lately seems to be trying to avoid references to the subject
and now occasionally even denies that he himself is a full-on postmodernist.

So there are vast differences in style and opinion within the "emerging
church movement"; the movement itsef is in flux and I want to acknowledge
that.

For example, the British flavor of evangelical postmodernism tends to be
somewhat less superficial than its American cousin. British emergents are
normally more concerned about substance as opposed to style. They would tend
to stress the missional aspects of the movement and see their philosophical
and doctrinal differences with mainstream evangelicalism as secondary. One
of the outstanding British figures in the "emerging church movement," Andrew
Jones, recently wrote an appeal to American emergents, urging them to get
their act together.

I'm not suggesting that the "emerging church movement" in Britain is
ultimately any more doctrinally sound or any less postmodern than the
American version. It's not. But it is, perhaps, a little more serious.

Then you have Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill in Seattle, who this time
last year might have been singled out as the quintessential "emerging
church" leader. But last spring he wrote a letter to other pastors in his
branch of the movement in which he said, "Let me agree that much of the
church today is incredibly frustrating. Personally, when I hear so many
young guys denying substitutionary atonement and the like after drinking
from the emerging church toilet I turn green and my clothes don't fit."

Since then, Driscoll has spoken out several more times against the doctrinal
ambiguity of the "emerging church movement," and it is clear that he rejects
the movement's hostile attitude toward doctrine and propositional truth.
Driscoll even appears to have stopped referring to himself as "emergent,"
and he and the movement currently seem to have something of a love/hate
relationship going.

Assuming Mark Driscoll is still (more or less) part of the movement, he
would definitely represent the "conservative" wing. (He has recently
published tributes at his blog to Robert Schuller and Bono, the rock
musician, so the word conservative would apply to him only in a relative
sense.)

That reminds me of a couple of other things I wanted to mention but can't
really take time to elaborate on. This may help you more than anything I
have said so far to understand the flavor of the "emerging church movement":
Bono--the Irish rocker and politico of U2 fame--seems to be the unofficial
icon of the movement. If you've been tuned into pop-culture at any time over
the past two decades and know anything about Bono, that might help you to
grasp something about the look and feel of the movement. (My favorite fact
about Bono is that he named one of his sons "Elijah Bob Patricus Guggi-Q.")

Anyway, Emergent types seem to quote Bono all the time. I would say that he
sometimes seems to be the chief theologian of the "emerging church
movement," but in all fairness, that honor belongs more to John R. Franke
and Stan Grenz. Grenz, sadly, died at a fairly young age about a year ago
when an aneurism burst in his brain. But he and Franke are the two academic
theologians who have done more than anyone else to blend postmodernism and
theology into a kind of quasi-evangelical doctrine.

Again, I can't elaborate on this at length in our short time frame, and I
don't want to take anything away from the scholarship and writing style of
either John Franke or Stan Grenz, because intellectually, both of them were
blessed with more brilliant minds than mine. But I am disturbed by the
accommodations both men made to postmodernism, and I think the fruit of
their work is manifestly disastrous.

However, if you want to begin to understand how anyone might try to write a
theological justification for the irrational agglomeration of unorthodox
ideas that is circulating in the "emerging church movement", read the book
these two men jointly authored, titled Beyond Foundationalism, subtitled
"Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context," published by Westminster John
Knox Press just five years ago.

Becoming cognizant of emergent

Now, if you men represent a typical cross-section of conservative
evangelical pastors, in all likelihood, most of you had probably never even
heard of the "emerging church movement" eighteen months ago. The issue more
or less began to come to the forefront of discussion and debate in the
evangelical movement after a cover article on the emerging church phenomenon
in Christianity Today in November of 2004.

Since then, critics of the movement have multiplied, and the movement has
become the focus of intense debate and controversy. Most of the critics are
deeply and legitimately concerned about the overall direction of the
movement and its long-term influence on the rest of the church. Over the
past six months, this has probably become the dominant issue in the agenda
for evangelical discussion and debate--in an era when the evangelical
movement was already troubled by (and not quite sure what to do with) issues
like "Open Theism," "The New Perspective on Paul," and various other
relatively recent controversies.

It would be easy, actually, to critique the emerging church movement by
reviewing some of Brian McLaren's books, starting with A Generous Orthodoxy.
The problem with that approach is that McLaren clearly does not speak for
everyone in the "emerging church movement." Whenever critics try to analyze
the movement by examining what McLaren has written, people within the
movement simply dismiss the criticisms by suggesting that whatever McLaren
says is his own opinion, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the movement
itself.

That's partly true and partly a deliberate evasion. The emerging subculture
clearly fosters an environment where theological mavericks like McLaren are
pretty much encouraged to throw whatever bizarre and even heretical notions
they like on the table for discussion. So I do think Brian McLaren is fair
game, and because he is such a large figure in the movement, I can't really
ignore him.

On the other hand, it's also true that although McLaren has had a profound
influence in the shaping of the emerging church, he doesn't necessarily
speak for everyone identified with the movement. To critique Brian McLaren
is to critique Brian McLaren. It doesn't necessarily go to the heart of the
movement itself. So I'm going to say a few words about Brian McLaren and
then move on to other issues.

About McLaren . . .

I gave a fairly lengthy review of one of Brian McLaren's books (A New Kind
of Christian) in the seminar on I did on postmodernism last year, so you can
read that transcript or listen to the recording if you want to understand
more of my objections to McLaren.

I will also say that McLaren's book A Generous Orthodoxy is one of the
absolute worst books I have ever read from Zondervan (and that's saying
quite a lot). Frankly, I think it raises grave doubts about whether Brian
McLaren is really "orthodox" in any sense of the word. He borrows a lot from
neo-orthodoxy--and that, I think, is probably the only sense in which he is
entitled to apply the term "orthodox" to himself. He does claim to accept
both the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene creed, but he also makes it clear
that he doesn't ultimately put much stock in the actual propositions that
are affirmed in those or any other creeds, and he spends most of the book
arguing against the idea that our defense of the Christian faith requires us
to defend any of our actual doctrines.

Most of all, Brian Mclaren is hostile to the idea that we can claim any
degree of certainty about any point of truth. This is, by the way, not an
obscure idea in Brian McLaren's works. This is one of the key points he
labors to make almost any time he gets a platform to speak. He makes it
clear over and over in all his books and lectures that he despises every
hint of certainty or assurance. He thinks it is inherently arrogant and
unspiritual to speak dogmatically about any point of spiritual truth.

And nothing epitomizes cocksure arrogance more in Brian McLaren's mind than
radio preachers. He says it makes him angry to listen to Christian radio and
hear preachers who seem so sure that the doctrines they believe and teach
are really true. Authentic "humility," in Brian McLaren's opinion, must
start with a refusal to insist on the absolute truth of any given
proposition. And (other than his absolute contempt for overconfidence) he's
not really even absolutely sure about the things he himself writes about.

McLaren portrays faith and certainty as opposing concepts. He says prefers
the idea of confidence rather than "certainty," but he carefully qualifies
himself to make clear that he will only tolerate a relative kind of
confidence. He himself is not "absolutely certain" about anything.
I should add that McLaren wants it made clear that he is not saying no
absolutes exist. He's only saying that if they exist, we can't know them
with any kind of absolute certainty. And therefore, he says, we should never
proclaim anything unequivocally. And he himself generally follows that rule
(except when he is railing on the certainty with which radio preachers tend
to speak.)

Brian McLaren says, "Certainty is overrated . . . History teaches us that a
lot of people thought they were certain and we found out they weren't." In a
different interview, he said, "When we talk about the word 'faith' and the
word 'certainty,' we've got a whole lot of problems there. What do we mean
by 'certainty'? . . . Certainty can be dangerous. What we need is a proper
confidence that's always seeking the truth and that's seeking to live in the
way God wants us to live, but that also has the proper degree of
self-critical and self-questioning passion."

McLaren himself is not sure about whether it's proper to speak of
homosexuality as "sin." He recently published an article where he recounted
how someone asked him where his church stood on the issue of homosexuality,
and his answer was a lengthy apologetic for his own ambivalence on the
issue. Here are his exact words:

Frankly, many of us don't know what we should think about homosexuality.
We've heard all sides but no position has yet won our confidence so that we
can say "it seems good to the Holy Spirit and us." That alienates us from
both the liberals and conservatives who seem to know exactly what we should
think.

Then he added this:

Perhaps we need a five-year moratorium on making pronouncements. In the
meantime, we'll practice prayerful Christian dialogue, listening
respectfully, disagreeing agreeably. When decisions need to be made, they'll
be admittedly provisional. We'll keep our ears attuned to scholars in
biblical studies, theology, ethics, psychology, genetics, sociology, and
related fields. Then in five years, if we have clarity, we'll speak; if not,
we'll set another five years for ongoing reflection.

That, frankly, is Brian McLaren's approach to everything. He has been
pressed on several occasions to name any doctrines or truths that he feels
are sufficiently clear to be proclaimed dogmatically or preached with
conviction, and he has made it absolutely clear that conviction and the full
assurance of faith are things he holds in high contempt. 

He even has the audacity to ask for a universal moratorium on preaching
about the sin of sodomy. Apparently, he thinks the rest of us should be
silent about the matter until he makes up his own mind about it. (And he
clearly even hints that he might never actually form a settled opinion on
the matter. In fact, I can already tell you that if he follows his own
epistemological convictions, he won't. He can't.) 

So when Brian McLaren claims adherence to the ancient ecumenical creeds,
that claim, by Brian McLaren's own admission, is dubious. He's not really
sure about anything he believes. 

By any historic evangelical standard, McLaren's religion is not authentic
Christianity at all. And it does frankly raise major questions about the
whole "emerging church movement" when he is given so much credence by people
in that movement. 

He is in almost every way an exact replica of Harry Emerson Fosdick, adapted
to suit the 21st-century zeitgeist. Most of you will understand exactly what
I mean by that. 

Enough about McLaren. 

My three main concerns 

What else could possibly be wrong with the "emerging church movement"? (I'm
not going to try for an exhaustive list. I wish you could see the stack of
books I had to read over the past year as I prepared for this seminar. It's
literally a two-and-a-half-foot-high stack, and fully half of them are
recent products of the Zondervan imprint called Emergent-YS, indicating the
involvement of Emergent (Brian McLaren's organization) and Youth
Specialties, an organization that for years published the infamous
evangelical satire magazine Wittenburg Door. Youth Specialties is also well
known for publishing books of activities--outrageous games and grotesque or
messy contests--for youth groups. Their literature has been a major
influence in evangelical youth work for almost three decades now, and if you
have ever been in youth ministry, you are probably familiar with them. These
days, they are one of the main cheerleaders for the Emergent idea.) 

I have friends who have suggested that the emerging church idea is the
predictable fruit of churches that tailor their youth ministries to whatever
style is currently fashionable, hold alternative church services for the
youth in a separate building ("the youth building") and never incorporate
them into the actual life of the church itself. They've grown into adulthood
while their styles and preferences were catered to in a special "church"
service all their own. The actual church service was something they weren't
expected to like. Many of them were never really exposed to worship in the
context of the actual church, with real adults. They were deliberately
entertained instead, and thus they were conditioned to think that way. They
grew old, but they never grew up, and now even as adults, they want to
continue to play at church, but outside the mainstream of the historic
church. (My friend characterized the emerging church worship style as
"Church services for the ADHD generation." Read the Christianity Today
account of Emergent's national convention and you will understand why he
said that.) 

And while that is not the background of everyone in the emerging subculture,
I'm sure there area lot of people who fit that profile, including some of
the key leaders in the movement. You'll see what I mean if you read the
Christianity Today article on the emerging church in the November 2004
issue. 

Anyway, I could probably come up with a very long list of issues that
concern me about the "emerging church movement," but since we have so little
time to pursue this, I have decided to boil it down and give you a short
list of my top three current concerns about the "emerging church movement."
We can cover these very quickly, because I think you'll understand my
rationale for these concerns just based on what I have already said. 

So here are the three things that disturb me most about the general drift of
the movement: 

1. It fosters contempt for authority. The New Testament idea of church
government is not anarchy. It's not even democracy or mobocracy. The church
is certainly not supposed to be the sort of populist organization where
everyone has an equal voice in everything that happens.

The contempt for structure in the "emerging church movement" is a
thinly-veiled aversion to authority. You will see that if you simply examine
the angry comments that were posted at the Emergent-US blog when it was
announced that the new organization would have a "director." Blogs and
discussion forums associated with the movement were assaulted with
complaints and angry criticisms. One member of the movement said, "A
director?!! Nobody's going to direct me! That's why I left the traditional
church." Another guy wrote: "I think we are going in a horribly dangerous
direction. We aren't becoming a 'conversation,' we're becoming an
institution. A 'National Director?' for a conversation? Give me a break . .
.. I have a feeling we're going down the Anakin Skywalker path here, folks."


The whole movement's approach to Scripture is another major reflection of
the widespread tendency within the movement, to show contempt for every kind
of authority in the church. Brian McLaren insists that Scripture does not
actually claim authority for itself. It claims to be profitable, he says,
but not "authoritative." 

As a matter of fact, the whole movement seems devoted to dialectical
approach to truth. This, I think, explains the movement's aversion to the
idea of preaching and its preference for the idea of "conversation." There's
an underlying assumption that this is the best way to arrive at the truth:
You have a thesis, and then an antithesis, and the truth is supposed to lie
in a synthesis of those two contradictory ideas. That synthesis becomes the
new thesis. It's answered by a new antithesis, and the synthesis of those
ideas becomes the new thought. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thesis,
antithesis, synthesis. It's a never-ending cycle. 

That's the perspective of truth and epistemology proposed by the German
philosopher Hegel: the dialectical method. All truth is ultimately
determined that way. So it's fluid; never absolute. Truth changes all the
time. 

The dialectical method may indeed be a fairly accurate description of how
public opinion develops. But we ought to know as Christians: That's no way
to discover truth. Right? 

Scot Mcknight (who is an apologist for a number of the movements that are
currently trying to expand the whole concept of evangelical Christianity)
has written a sympathetic analysis of the "emerging church movement" that is
worth reading if you want a decent description of the movement from a
sympathetic perspective. 

Scot McKnight says this: "[People in the "emerging church movement"] want to
open up questions. They're asking questions about how we should understand
our relationship to scripture: Is it inerrant? Is it true? And many of the
emergent people are saying that [Scripture may not be absolute and
authoritative and inerrant, but] it is the "senior partner" in the
conversation." McKnight calls that "a healthy category." I don't think it
is. I think it's just more evidence of how the "emerging church movement"
fosters a contempt for authority. 

Here's a second major concern I have: 

2. It breeds doubt about the perspicuity of Scripture. You understand the
principle of perspicuity? It speaks of the clarity--the
"understandability"--of the Bible. The Westminster Confession of Faith says
it like this: "All things in scripture are not alike plain in themselves,
nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known,
believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened
in some place of scripture or other, [so] that not only the learned, but the
unlearned, in a due use of ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient
understanding of them." Perspicuity. The Bible is not too hard for us to
understand.

The entire postmodern epistemology (their view of how we acquire knowledge
of the truth) deliberately glorifies uncertainty. I already gave you some
quotations about this from Brian McLaren, but you can read almost any writer
in the movement and you will find this theme is relentlessly pressed. 

The article in Christianity Today last year about the emerging church, for
example, is a classic example of this. One of the central themes running
through that article is the message that people in the "emerging church
movement" have abandoned certainty, assurance, and strong convictions. They
aren't dogmatic about what they believe, because they aren't really sure of
what they believe. 

The obvious implication here is that Scripture just isn't clear enough for
us to say what it means with any kind of confidence. 

In fact, that's more than an implication of the article. It's pretty much
what these folks are expressly saying. Listen to this paragraph about the
husband-and-wife pastoral team of one of the leading emergent-style churches
in the country. This is about Rob and Karen Bell, who founded Mars Hill in
Grand Rapids: 

They found themselves increasingly uncomfortable with church. "Life in the
church had become so small," Kristen says. "It had worked for me for a long
time. Then it stopped working." The Bells started questioning their
assumptions about the Bible itself-"discovering the Bible as a human
product," as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat. "The Bible
is still in the center for us," Rob says, "but it's a different kind of
center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it." 

"I grew up thinking that we've figured out the Bible," Kristen says, "that
we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I
feel like life is big again-like life used to be black and white, and now
it's in color." 

Ultimately, the emerging church message begins to sound like an echo of the
voice of Satan in the garden: "Hath God said?" 

This is a huge issue--in some ways the pivotal issue. The overwhelming
message coming from the "emerging church movement" often sounds like a flat
denial of the clarity and perspicuity of Scripture. That is a denial of one
of the basic tenets of biblical Christianity, Protestant history, and
evangelical conviction. 

Yes, parts of Scripture are "hard to be understood." The apostle Peter
acknowledges that in 2 Peter 3:16. But the essential message is simple and
clear. The wayfaring man, though he be a fool, doesn't have to be confused
by it, according to Isaiah 35:8. God has made Himself plain enough that
there is much more than merely mystery to the Christian faith. 

Quickly, here's a third thing that disturbs me about the "emerging church
movement": 

3. It sows confusion about the mission of the church. I'll just sum up my
final point with this one observation: The "missional" emphasis in the
"emerging church movement" seems to be entirely focused on an effort to
adapt the church to the culture, with very little stress on the church's
duty to proclaim a message of repentance and faith in Christ that calls men
and women to forsake the world. 

In other words, the "emerging church movement" seems to be all about the
conversion of the church, rather than the conversion of the sinner. 

In fact, I found little or no emphasis on conversion in any of more than a
dozen books I read about the "emerging church movement". (Sometimes,
emerging church writers adopt the language of postmodern narcissism and talk
about "recovery," but that's as close as they usually get to discussing
conversion.) It is simply not a major theme of discussion in the emerging
conversation. 

This is a glaring flaw in a movement that calls itself "missional." 

The true mission of the church is embodied in the gospel message and the
Great Commission. It is truth that demands to be proclaimed with clarity,
and authority and conviction, and if you refuse to do that, even if you
insist you are being "missional," you are not fulfilling the mission of the
church at all. 

Those are some of my main concerns about the "emerging church movement." Can
I make one of those absolute statements that make postmodernists grind their
teeth? There is absolutely no sense in which I would commend this movement
to you, encourage you to join the so-called "conversation," or wade through
the mounds of trendy literature in search of valuable helps and insights
that might help your church. 

Spiritually speaking, that literature points down a dead-end street into a
blind alley on the bad side of town. I am convinced that this movement is
going to be a serious detriment to the testimony of the church as a whole, a
source of great confusion for many Christians, and another in a long series
of movements that will surely undermine the work of the gospel rather than
advance it. And I have no doubt whatsoever that those predictions will be
proven correct within the next 10-20 years, if not sooner. 

What about those "valid points"? 

At the beginning I said I think some valid points have been made by people
in the "emerging church movement," and some of you might be thinking
everything I've said since then makes that compliment ring rather hollow.
That's good, because I didn't want you to get the idea that if I commended
something that has been said by someone in the "emerging church movement,"
I'm endorsing the movement. 

But in closing, I will say that I do think some of the points that have been
made by people in the "emerging church movement" are good and valuable, and
worthy of heeding. 

For one thing, they are right to reject the professionalism and big-business
approach to ministry that has been popularized by most of the influential
megachurches. 

They are right to point out that millions of American evangelicals live
lives of gross hypocrisy and narcissism, ignoring the needs of the poor
while indulging themselves with entertainments and luxuries while the church
struggles, and many pastors live barely above the poverty level (if that),
and our Christian brothers and sisters struggle in many parts of the world
because they don't even have clean water or basic medical care. We have the
resources, and yet we are too prone to spend them on ourselves. I often
think American evangelicals will have a lot to answer for when we are called
to give account for our stewardship. 

They are right when they complain about the way the evangelical movement has
sold its birthright for a mess of Republican Party porridge. I obviously
don't agree with those who think a commitment to left-wing politics would be
the right remedy. But I do think the evangelical movement should cut its
ties with all political parties, get out of party politics completely,and
get back to the business of preaching the gospel. 

And they are right when they suggest we have not done enough to reach the
outcasts and counter-cultural people in our society. I think their approach
to reaching those segments of society is all wrong and largely
counterproductive, but to adapt a phrase from D. L. Moody: I like the way
some of them are trying to reach those people a lot better than I like the
way many evangelicals simply ignore the task of evangelism. 

Let me say that we can and should heed all those things without buying into
the agenda of the "emerging church movement"--and certainly without
abandoning the task of preaching the gospel with clarity and conviction. I
hope we can take that challenge to heart, and minister accordingly, and look
to Christ as the only true and trustworthy pattern for church ministry. 

It's not really that complex an issue, when you see it in that light.

 

 

Charis, 
  
Mike Abendroth 
  
"Make us choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to
be contented with half truth when whole truth can be won.  Endow us with
courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy, that scorns
to compromise with vice and injustice and knows no fear when right and truth
are in jeopardy."

 - West Point Military Academy Cadet Prayer 

 

HYPERLINK "http://www.bbcchurch.org"www.bbcchurch.org 
  

 


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