I came across an article today from Kristen Scharold that has run on the Relevant Magazine online forum as well as the First Things website. The piece reviews the book Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be) by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck. I haven’t read DeYoung and Kluck’s book, but it turns out that isn’t such a big deal when dialoguing with Scharold’s piece. DeYoung and Kluck are writing a friendly critique of the emergent church, though Scharold’s writing makes it very unclear as to what, if any, interactions DeYoung and Kluck have had with actual emergent people (it might be in their book, but it’s certainly not evident in this article). Scharold, meanwhile, attempts to belittle emergent Christians with connections and generalizations that make it painstakingly clear she has no connection with, or experience of, that which she belittles.
Then again, Scharold might say that “connection” and “experience” are soft emergent terms and have nothing to do with knowing the truth.
Please read her article before reading my response. You might want to have them open in different tabs or windows, if you want to refer back to her piece. My interaction flows with the chronology of her article.
Scharold claims that emergent Christianity, like a “dull story – with its postmodern self-consciousness, lazy plot line, and forced cultural references – alludes to some facts about [itself], but it doesn’t reveal anything about what [it] actually believe[s]… [it] lacks the commentary and the narrative of traditional Christian doctrine.” That’s quite an onslaught, Kristen, though not necessarily an accurate one.
The emergent movement is discovering ways in which “the narrative of traditional Christian doctrine” has strayed entirely from the biblical narrative, and in these situations has sided with the biblical narrative. (Note that the discoveries themselves are not always made by emergents, but they’re the ones adopting them. A good example would be the discovery of the actual theology underlying Paul’s Letter to the Romans as determined by NT Wright, EP Sanders, and James Dunn. Those guys aren’t “emergent,” per se, yet emergents have been the Christians best suited to adopt their scholastic advancement. Why? Because emergents don’t have long-held doctrines of human nature, election, and atonement that are wrapped around a particular approach to the book of Romans.)
So when Scharold says that emergents lack the narrative of traditional Christian doctrine, maybe she means emergents lack a doctrine that honors the assumptions of Augustine and his theological descendants above all else.
Scharold mentions that the authors of the book she’s reviewing, Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck, do not think of their “emergent sparring partners” as “bad guys.” They even see the movement rightly critiquing the Church in certain areas. However DeYoung and Kluck find that “defining the emerging church is like nailing Jell-O to the wall.” (By the way, I’m sure sixteenth-century Catholics would have never made such statements toward Luther and his Protestants, right? Hmm…) They find it difficult to locate the ‘what’ and ‘who’ of it all, according to Scharold.
If they haven’t already, I would recommend that DeYoung and Kluck read The New Christians by Tony Jones. Jones answers those “mysteries” in a clear manner in the book. Also, if they haven’t already done this and are feeling really wild, DeYoung and Kluck could attend emergent gatherings. My guess is that they would find that every emergent community is different from the next one, and that, even within a particular community, there is a range in theological beliefs among members.
But isn’t that true of many Christian groups – even those sects with laundry lists of catechisms and confessions? If you really pressed individual members of a normal Evangelical congregation, you’d find plenty of theological variation. For as much as some denominations would rather its members learn to recite denominational creeds and catechisms than to venture down the “dark” paths of their own spiritual questions and doubts, even the most conservative Christianity doesn’t work that way – not these days. This idea of learning the company lines first, and then assuming that all of your answers can be found in the company lines… all it does is relegate a person’s questioning and doubt to a shameful internal conversation. Straying from this model is a sign that people are more serious about finding Jesus, not less. The hope that many emergents hold is that the orthopraxy of caring enough to question will lead to a stronger, more accurate orthodoxy, which, in turn, will propel us toward an orthopraxy that is even better yet.
Scharold says that, “because emergent beliefs are so amorphous – as a result of complying to postmodernism – it is impossible for its teachers to assert their beliefs absolutely.” Scharold tosses the emergent movement in with postmodernism and therefore assumes that it is spinelessly relative. This is problematic. For starters, very little about postmodernism is relative. Subjectivity and relativity are different things, and deconstruction is its own thing. But let’s have the brains to realize that most of culture does not operate in the ivory towers of academia; it thrives on a low-culture level.
The world is changing, but it has far less to do with a Descartes-Derrida philosophical transition as much as a Gutenberg-Google shift. The world has undergone a shift in the nature of communication – from the Print Age into the Electronic Age, and anytime the world undergoes a shift in communication epochs, culture is overhauled (due to the increase in available nature as well as some of the existential questions that naturally arise when people live through such a dramatic shift). In other words, people develop a stronger bullcrap meter.
During the last shift in communication epochs, the Church responded to culture (now empowered by the benefits of the Print Age) with a little movement you might know as the Reformation. So here we are, in another shift, now empowered by the Electronic Age and the increased bullcrap meter that comes with it, trying to build on the Reformation in some ways, while also looking to also improve the key shortcomings of the Reformation. And you know what? There will someday be another shift, and people with increased bullcrap meters will both advance and retract statements made by “those crazy emergents from way back when.”
Martin Luther and Rob Bell shake hands on this idea: we are always reforming. So when Scharold claims that Bell, McLaren, and others have written off historical doctrines she is missing the big picture. And when she mentions the “hesitant” and “approximate” nature of their theological statements, she fails to see the beauty in that. What Bell and McLaren are doing seems more Lutheran than Luther himself in their commitment to continuous reformation. Which is a great idea when you consider how much Christians have screwed up in the past.
We can thank our misunderstandings of Scripture, and some of that “traditional Christian doctrine” that Scharold seems to favor, for leading us into the Crusades and the Holocaust, the demeaning of a gender Jesus intended to liberate, a justification for slavery, a doctrine of individual election rather than Bride of Christ destiny, an escapist view toward the created world (which fueled our environmental pillaging), and so on.
It sure seems like we need a hefty serving of humble pie. If you read through our list of doctrine-based sins and conclude that what is truly important is upholding traditional orthodoxy, I can’t stop you. The entire emergent movement can’t stop you. But when I consider our past, I think, “Oh my God, we need to fix this. We need Jesus to save us from our religion.”
If you don’t share that conviction, I wouldn’t expect you to follow me down my trail of emergent-type questions and “hesitant” conclusions. But I believe a lot of people are seeing what I see. And those people are returning to some core doctrines – the resurrection, the Kingdom, etc – and working from there. They’re taking a very close look at the life and ministry of cross, and theologizing through a new lens. It’s not Augustine’s lens. It’s not Calvin’s lens. Certainly their lens is limited, and they’re going to make their own lens-based mistakes. But is the need for revision (“re-vision” in the truest sense) really so debatable?
They’re trying to find truth. And truth is a person. (For more details on that thought, try the Fourth Gospel.)
Scharold claims that the emergent movement “has intentionally not built itself on any foundation – an effort to avoid proposition, metanarrative, and tradition.” Here’s the question, though: whose tradition? Whose propositions? When one of the fundamental elements of the emergent movement is the need to deconstruct false theologies and reconstruct something more faithful to the biblical narrative in their place, the role of tradition is limited. But when we’re talking about the tradition of faith and faithfulness – an appreciation for the faithful individuals and faith movements that have carried on the Bride of Christ, I’ve found emergents to be highly respectful and interested in preserving the spirit of those who have gone before them.
But what happens? Brian McLaren writes a book (A Generous Orthodoxy) that is centered on seeing the best in all of these movements and sects of the Church, and a crowd of naysayers rises up against McLaren. I guess every Christian group likes it when McLaren sees the best in them; it’s just when he compliments another tradition – especially if it’s one against which they’ve Protested – that they get a bit riled up.
Explaining her need for a guiding dogma, Scharold quotes DeYoung: “Some of us long for teaching that has authority, ethics rooted in dogma, and something unique in this world of banal diversity. We long for Jesus – not a shapeless, formless good-hearted ethical teacher Jesus, but the Jesus of the New Testament, the Jesus of the church, the Jesus of faith, the Jesus of two millennia of Christian witness with all of its unchanging and edgy doctrinal propositions.”
Here’s where the wheels come tumbling off of Scharold’s wagon. She presumes that it is her dogma and no one else’s that best connects with the “Jesus of the New Testament.” She longs for “the Jesus of two millennia of Christian witness” – seemingly ignorant to the hijacking biases and agendas that shaped the development of theologies now considered “timeless” and, in many churches, interchangeable with Christ’s message. Maybe she has little interest for the role of Gnosticism, Platonism, and an anti-Jewish agenda in the formation and development of Christian theology.
Like Scharold, I am completely interested in serving the historical Jesus. Unlike Scharold, I’m willing to admit that he is not (entirely) Augustine’s Jesus. Like Scharold, I’m interested in submitting my life to the gospel. Unlike Scharold, I have come to realize that, in order to faithfully follow Jesus’ message, I need to rebuke the dualism of Platonic philosophy and Hellenistic culture rather than adopting it and letting it molest my hand-me-down adaptation of the Jesus story. Like Scharold, I desire to submit myself under strong, in-depth, biblical teaching. However I recognize that means coming to terms with the first-century culture to which Jesus and other New Testament writers were speaking rather than relying on teaching methods that merely study the biblical languages and figure out how to take parsed Greek words and configure them to ensure they will allign with a Reformed doctrine and fit through the John Calvin-shaped hole in our hearts. Please.
Kristen Scharold wraps up her book review by noting that Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City attracts twenty- and thirty-somethings while preaching a message that is anchored in the Westminster Confession of Faith. (I won’t argue with the fact that Keller’s teaching is anchored in that document. That’s what I’m trying to explain.) In a little bit of a love affair, Scharold boasts that Keller contextualizes doctrine without changing doctrine, and quotes the Apostle Paul and Bono in the same breath – but “not to win cool points” (a pithy, matter-of-fact qualifier that is downright laughable given the way that Scharold uses the cultural savvy of emergents to signify the faddish nature of their movement and dismiss their sincerity).
I’m not looking to pick a fight with Tim Keller. He is leading a very influential church – certainly ministering to a “young, urban congregation,” as Scharold puts it – and I know people who have used his church as a place to recover from poor spiritual experiences while growing in their faith. And I believe that, for the most part, Keller has been fair toward emergents.
But I think that Keller and emergents are operating under some different assumptions, and I think Keller would agree with me here. Keller is, in fact, preaching the Westminster Confession of Faith and historical Reformed theology. The emergent church is not. No, the emergent church is suggesting that Reformed theology (like many theological traditions) has flaws that need to be addressed if we’re all going to move forward in a stronger orthodoxy. The emergent contention is that some of the gospel story got marred in the transition from an ascending Jesus to some of the councils, creeds, and confessions that greatly shaped the Church we’re working with today.
In the process of finding the historical Jesus amidst the rubble of Platonic dualism and a Hellenistic culture that tried to do away with the embodied, holistic, Hebraic, Kingdom-minded message of the Rabbi Yeshua, emergents are after a different kind of “historical” than are the sort of Christians who see Jesus… through Paul… through Luther… through Augustinian assumptions… through Platonic thought and a Greco-Roman worldview.
Such a committed historical process takes time because it is difficult. Emergents should be given more time to search and discover. And it’s important to note that emergents are not the only ones working on re-discovering the Rabbi Yeshua. With an Anglican Bishop (NT Wright) and a Wesleyan-Methodist bible scholar (Ben Witherington III) also contributing to this excavating process, emergents are just one component of a large group of Christians who realize that we have some ideas to re-think. (Maybe the foremost reason emergents take so much heat is because they’re the only group that has formed during this season of discovery.)
Scharold’s book review-meets-editorial piece is driven by her misunderstanding that emergents are changing doctrine because it seems hip and relevant (as opposed to the Tim Keller approach of being hip without changing doctrine). The truth is that doctrine is changing because that’s what a living story does. (Luther would have said the same – “semper reformanda” is central to his message.) In that ongoing process, many emergents simply wish to approach the historical Jesus through their own unique-but-skewed lens, draw some doctrinal conclusions (some more confident than others), and contribute to the future of the Church.
And if Scharold ever decides that the tradition and history she possesses is not as tradtional and historical as it gets, she’s welcome to join in the process.
