See Brian McLaren et al response to Don Carson et al… a very refreshing response.
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Let's Examine the Claims Made
He comes out strong with a set of very responsive dogmatics - no to relativism, yes to respect for scripture, tradition, and core protestant theology.
But here is the ugly bit…
“there is no single theologian or spokesperson for the emergent conversation. We each speak for ourselves and are not official representatives of anyone else, nor do we necessarily endorse everything said or written by one another.”
“We ask our critics to remember that we cannot be held responsible for everything said and done by people using the terms “emergent” or “emerging church,” any more than our critics would like to be held responsible for everything said or done by those claiming to be “evangelical” or “born again.”“
Why sure you can! Define some sets of belief and subsets and then you can classify yourself more accurately! I’m a “Reformed Baptist” which is a subset of “Baptist” which is a subset of “Protestant” which is a subset of “Christian”. Emergent is a great word - the mystery of the Church revealed. The historical and spiritual emergency of _the_ church, which has been overcoming hell for over two-thousand years. It’s an essential Christian theological position.
So why name the movement emergent? Why not any other core christian doctrine? Why not faith? Why not hope? Why not love? Emergent implies other theologies/churches/movements are not emergent (ask a linguist if you disagree) which would also seem to imply that these theologies/churches/movements were not really part of the catholic church. In fact, it would be very divisive it were not for the fact that noone knows whether or not anyone is “emergent” or not. “We are emergent. No, we are!”
So yeah, I’m still sticking with my origonal statement that emergent just means modern when used to describe a church, theology, movement, etc.
Common Sense
So we should hold you to account for everything a Baptist says?
Of course we wouldn’t. We know that there is a wide spectrum of Baptists with a range of theological and political views.
With a new movement, which is more grass roots than led, it would be a mistake to expect uniform theology or to attack a movement based on knowledge of a limited set of proponents.
You should hold me
You should hold me accountable to those things in which I claim to believe.
For instance: you should not tolerate me saying that partial submersion is the preferred method of baptizing able-body believers, as that is clearly not within the scope of baptist teaching.
If I said I am 99.5% in sync with the 2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689) and that I was a 5 pointer Calvinist, you should have some extremely good idea of what I believe.
Want to find some KJV-only free-will snake-handling independent baptist church, go ahead, they aren’t going to agree anywhere nearly as much to the 2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith, and certainly wont be happy with the late Mr. Calvin. "AHA, even you don’t fully agree with .05% of the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith." True, but I don’t belong to that congregation, and I believe most of it, which is intself a committment.
One thing I will not do is allow myself to be lumped in with people teaching the gospel of prosperity, the gospel of self-reliance, the gospel of self-worth, or any of a million other lies. If I am, I’ll make every effort to unlump myself ASAP by further clarifying my beliefs.
Even though the emergent movement does not know everything about how/why/for what they/we are emerging, participants of the movement should at least be able to agree on the minimum theological committments that the movement embodies. Put it this way: if you show up to the theater, you may not even know what movie to see, but you know in which way the line goes.
emergent means modern?
When I say emergent I am referring to a church that is emerging from modern thought into a more post-modern worldview. I am an "ex-Reformed Baptist" and I think I can understand what you are trying to say. “What label do you wear?” “What is your dogma?” What we are trying to do as a movement is shed these trappings of modern religion so that we can better know a real and living God. Modern thought says that everything must be compartmentalized into tidy little groups (Ex. Christian-Protestant-Baptist-Reformed-Five Point-Calvinist"); where the post-modern or emergent thought says that God is safe, but not tame. He is truly wild and our constraints don’t limit Him, they only limit our knowledge of Him. We are trying to throw off the artificial constraints of modern Christianity and denominationalism and re-incorporate the truly ancient practices mixing them with new expressions of our faith. While questioning every aspect of our faith we are leaning more heavily on the Scripture for our answers. The reason that there is not one voice, or one set of beliefs is that as Post-modern people we don’t take anything as truth just because someone said so (not even among ourselves) we question, we explore, we turn things over to look at the bugs crawling on their undersides. I think we have finally come to the place where we understand that we can never fully understand God. He is just too big… so we explore and experience Him instead of trying to understand Him.
(btw you might be interested in reading THIS.)
"Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant—" Phil 3:8 (MSG)
i love it...!!
Jeremy, i LOVED reading your post, especially the following:
"post-modern or emergent thought says that God is safe, but not tame. He is truly wild and our constraints don’t limit Him, they only limit our knowledge of Him."
i got goosebumps when i read that mate as it articulated my sense of why i am here and what i am trying to emerge from and into - hopefully a more passionate, compassionate relationship with Yahweh & Christ. i’m not sure how many share your sentiments but as for me, i name u "Emerger of the week".
have a good weekend all! ~ mutant down devon.