I think we do have to “revalue” (not ignore) 2000 years of traditional belief and church history. I live in the southeastern United States, in the rural “Bible Belt.” To hear locals tell the history of the church, you would think it fell from the sky in the late 1890’s. I cannot speak to what Christians all over the world believe, but from a glance at popular religion titles in any major Christian bookstore in the U.S., history is compressed; from Jesus, to Paul, to Scofield. I cannot say with absolute certainty, but I would lay odds that most hymns that get sung in the Bible Belt are from the 1890’s - 1930’s, as well. So the theology, worship themes, aesthetics, language, and rhetoric gravitate toward that time period. If anything, I hear in the emerging church a call to be aware of more - not less - church history.

For me, the hope that the emerging church offers is that we will be able to reach back to our global, ancient roots. To stand up in a southern U.S. church and talk about Augustine as an early African theologian upon whom much of our contemporary beliefs rest - that’s a sign of the Holy Spirit, IMHO. Is it postmodern? I don’t really care.

I also see a lot of hope in forming more cooperative and less hierarchical relationships between laypeople and clergy.

All of these trajectories bear a lot in common with postmodernism, and they certainly overlap at points. But I don’t see it as tossing tradition and history out the window. I see it as regarding *privileged* history with suspicion.