On what I think about the Emergent Church Movement. (an answer to a friend)
Well… I’ve got a lot of mixed feelings on it. On the one hand, the artistic end, the focus on beauty and aesthetics, music and communicative preaching, can be great. The Church used to have all of that, and today we need more of what we’ve lost along the way.
On the other hand, the purposeful lack of clarity in doctrinal matters and the forceful promotion of an understanding of God that can come off as pretty agnostic is a major weakness. We don’t want throw the baby out with the bathwater, but maybe we need to focus less on the bathwater and more on the baby. Brian McLaren for example is fond of saying that he doesn’t know what the gospel is, and he’s not sure if any of us really know. To me that means he shouldn’t be teaching others about the gospel until he figures some of those things out.
Also, the emergent emphasis on uncertainty has lead to an emergent openess to other religions that seems out of focus with the more obvious teachings of Christ. Maybe there are some hard things in the Bible that would lead us to reserve judgement on a matter, but that doesn’t seem to be one of them. Jesus is very exclusive in His teaching. He is the truth, to the exclusion of other ‘truths’.
Christianity is not a communitarian religion. It really is about a community, but one that is found in Christ, and in relation to Him, through faith. And faith is not just believing something in general, it is believing certain things in specific, in the context of believing a certain person. Faith has an object, and that object is the person and work of Jesus Christ. A faith without an object is not a faith in anything in particular. Having a community and having that community have a ’story’ says nothing about whether or not the community is a good community, or whether or not that particular community’s story is true. Having a community is not a good in and of itself, it is good to the extent that that community is a community of faith, and that the faith that community shares in is true. The idea that community is a good in and of itself apart from the centering foundations of knowing what true love is and knowing who the source of that love is, is to prize the relationships with men above the relationship with God, and that is always a lesser that harms a greater good.
Also, when the focus of a community, especially a religious one, comes to be the social action of that community, or even the ethics of that community, be it by personal introspection and mystical practices or by outreach and service of others, these things are the works of the law. Just as Jesus taught, these things are not to be neglected, but they are not the essence of the Christian religion. That we are justified by grace alone though faith alone, apart from a mere legal righteousness gained by performing loving works, seems to be one of the most important parts of Christ’s message. The good works that we do are the secondary expression of that true and vital faith through which we have that blessed union with the righteousness of Christ, that He gives us to wear, though it is not the ground of our standing before God. God does not love us because we are good, he loves us in spite of our falleness. We are sinner’s saved by grace. By the righteousness of another. And so though He teaches us to be conformed to the likeness of His own perfect love, it not why He loves us. His love is internally motivated.
So an inordinate focus on works combined with the downplay of faith in its form and function as that by which we know and are known by Christ, implies that our labors are of greater import than His grace. Emergent churches are, in this way, very legalistic, in that they require great love, and no faith, and love is the works of the law, being love God and love your neighbor as yourself, and faith being to believe God and everything He has taught you in His word. The confusion of all these things leads me to think of the Emergent movement as simply another movement toward less of Jesus and more of men, be it called community, or openess, or spiritual. Christ and Him crucified is our faith, and we should not compromise that even under the rubric of becoming ‘followers of Jesus’. If becoming a follower of Jesus costs us Jesus, we have nothing left.
Christopher Neiswonger
Excellent post! It really helps me to hear from like minded Christians, who are standing firm and remaining faithful to the word of God.
My church used to be rock solid but it has given into the postmodern/emergent mood. It is extremely discouraging! To see men who you admired just give up and go along with the flow… it has made me extremely sad. It is so hard to stand firm when everyone around you is being carried away, it can really make you start to doubt yourself. Not to mention that for all their love rhetoric the pomo emergents turn out to be very unloving of anyone who raises concerns about the direction the movement is going. I think its because of all the false antithesis that the emergent books are filled with. They leave no room for fruitful discussion, because they paint every Christian who doesn’t go along with them as a hateful modernist vampire Christian who only wants to beat people over the head with propositional truth claims.
Anyway…. I just wanted to say thank you for your thoughts. I don’t feel quite as alone after reading them. I pray that there is a backlash coming against this spirit of compromise and I pray that it is coming soon!
God Bless
T
I really don’t know what to think about the emergent movement. I have difficulty harnessing enough energy, time, and interest to figure out what they are trying to say. My initial impression is, however, faddish.
All I know is I get tired of having to learn all new songs every year.
Sean,
Well at least all of the songs have only three chords, so it’s not so taxing on the memory. And most of them have about four lines of lyric so the vagueness is a big plus. Songs that are definitively Christian in some way could offend the non-christian members of the Church. And faddish? Sure. But it’s a fad that comes around every generation or so. In the 1930s and 40s we just called them liberals. They weren’t big on the veracity of scripture or the resurrection and such but they were big on social action and after church potlucks. I’m really fine with both, I just don’t see why I can’t keep orthodox Christianity and reserve the right to a nice lunch.
The music is always deeper and more full in the generations when the theology is taken seriously and this translates into a vigorous artistic expression. That’s why Luther’s generation produced Bach and ours produces ‘oh what a friend we have in Jesus’. The theological blood that makes for that kind of creative muscle doesn’t flow in our veins. An emptiness of head always carries an accompanying emptiness of heart.
That’s why when well meaning Christians speak of going back to singing the old hymns, because of their magnificence and holy gravity, I understand the sentiment and why they think going backward is a good answer, but we can’t forget that hymns were a new idea at the time of the Reformation, and it was the glory of the thinking that served the fires of creation. We still need to write new songs. Every generation keeping that Reformation ideal of speaking to each people the same sacred truths in the culture in which they exist.
But if we lose sight of the sacred truths themselves, the form loses its context. Music has meaning only within a hermeneutic of Divine grace and the glory of God. How much more music for worship? And so as we lose the understanding, we eventually lose everything. Beauty has its appeal in relation to the ultimately beautiful and apart from God all things are mediocre.
Neiswonger
In the past three weeks, God has brought to me what is happening in our church. We raised two kids here and our parents attended too for many years(my 88 year old mom still does). Little by little we see this church “emerging”. We heard today that someone was going to speak at our church and they were given a list of words that they could not use..ie..hell, sin etc. In reading as much as we can about this movement, we are amazed at how this crept..shifted upon us. Saddleback is our church’s model, we have been totally encouraged to do all these different books in our home study groups and our youth are doing labyrinths! we have also learned that half the elders have “shifted” toward this emergent “trend” too. What do we do? We live in a small town and there aren’t many choices. We feel so isolated as not many have come to this knowledge of what is happening. Help!