This is my first post to this site, though I’ve been lurking here for quite some time, and I’ve found nearly all the conversations stimulating and encouraging.  This article to me is fascinating as well, though I must say having read this article that this portrait of emerging church is somewhat different from what I have encountered so far, even though I’ve only encountered it in bits and pieces.  A few thoughts come to mind as I read this, and I’d like to offer them as an attempt to better understand the dynamics of emerging church:

1) N. T. Wright may well be recovering for us a "human, Jewish Jesus," but even he, I think, would not advocate a "lengthy theological
transition from apocalyptic prophet to second person of the trinity."  For me, anyway, the glory of the gospel is that transition is stood on its head.  God has acted in history in the person of Jesus the apocalyptic prophet.  Israel’s prophets (Eze. 34) and poets (Ps. 23) looked to God as a Shepherd to lead them, not only through paths of righteousness, but out of exile into a restored Israel.  The theology of the Gospels, as N. T. Wright himself writes, is that Jesus is God acting to restore Israel (Mark 6:34; John 10).

2) I view myself as a follower of Jesus, the second person of the Trinity.  That may be a mysterious thing to say, but I don’t see why that would be problematic in the emerging church.

3) I have a hard time reconciling Arianism’s supposed continuity with first century Judaism with a portrait of Israel’s God as a "largely unknowable, utterly singular First Cause while picturing
Christ as a usable model of human moral development."  I don’t think any first century Jew would view his/her God as a "singular First Cause" or the Messiah as a "usable model" of anything, let alone moral development.  N. T. Wright, I think, has gone to great lengths to undermine the misrepresentation of Judaism as a moralistic religion.

4) Christians professing the Nicene Creed have sung "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," but I thought the emerging church would have a fuller, more robust interest in Jesus as a "just ruler" as well.  It is precisely that notion that ought to feed our concern for social justice and ending oppression.

5) Tolerance and open-mindedness may be prized by postmoderns, but they are by moderns as well.  They are as old as the enlightenment.  Besides, I’m not sure that we want to simply identify the emerging church’s values with those prized in postmodernity.  If we do, the emerging church will cease to be counter-cultural in any significant way.

6) I have no problems with the desire to see our mission on earth to be the renewal of human society, with the church as "the new humanity," so to speak, but in order to do that, we have to acknowledge the world as it is, desperately fallen and depraved.  If we are truly to engage in this fallen world with the gospel to see that renewal take place, we must open our eyes to the depravity all around us—muslims being killed in Iraq, girls raped by the hundreds in Ethiopia, terror and oppression in Sudan, and the list is endless.  That’s not to mention rampant drug use, pornography addiction, adultery, alcoholism and domestic violence in the nice little suburbs of America.  The world looks like this because human beings live in it.  Paul saw a "crooked and depraved generation" and called us to shine like stars in it (Phil. 2).  Yet we must first admit the darkness both out there in the world and within our human nature. 

My impression has been that it was the emerging church that has been more willing to acknowledge the darkness, while traditional evangelicalism has been too willing to pretend its not there. Amy I mistaken in my understanding of what’s going on in the emerging church?  Thanks again for the stimulating article.

Scott