We turn to D.A. Carson’s book Becoming Conversant with the Emergent Church. It’s mostly a critical book, but he does give some attention to what they’re doing right. That’s part of why I listen to him; spending time thinking about two sides of a matter helps a person be accurate, so Carson gets credibility points. Similarly, I believe there’s a place for both critical and empathetic engagement with people’s perspectives, a skill often neglected, and I felt like Carson’s relatively good at giving appropriate space to each.
Here’s what Carson appreciates as the emergent church’s strengths: They attend to reading the times, trying to go about being God’s people in a way that fits what’s happening now. They push for authenticity, for a church that’s filled not with comfortable clichés, facades and shallowness, but with encounters with a living God. They recognize our own social location as part of the culture we swim in, always having biases like everyone else that slant our perceptions of the truth, rather than as if Bible-believing Christians sat pristinely apart from ‘The Culture’, able to judge all things with divine impartiality. The movement is deeply concerned with evangelizing outsiders, such as artists or others shaped by postmodern assumptions: people who would find traditional evangelical culture alien and perhaps offensive or suffocating. And finally, emergent church types are probing links with tradition, seeking refreshing changes from recent practice while pursuing solidarity with historic Christianity through adopting practices learned from Christians in other eras and branches of the tree.
Great stuff, this. Where’s the catch? I think the following lively rant excerpted from Becoming Conversant nicely covers Carson’s sticking points. He’s critiquing McLaren’s book A Generous Orthodoxy, but the criticisms extend beyond that book:
Every chapter of this book succumbs to the same elementary analysis. Every chapter has some useful insights, and every chapter overstates arguments, distorts history, attaches exclusively negative terms to all the things with which McLaren disagrees (even when they have been part of the heritage of confessional Christianity for two thousand years), and almost never engages the Scriptures except occasionally in prooftexting ways. Even the closing chapter, “Why I Am Unfinished,” manages in brief compass to express attractive humility, misrepresent what “orthodoxy” has meant in the past, give a new definition of “orthodoxy”, cite a couple of biblical passages that have nothing to do with what he is talking about, and very seriously understate what believers ought to know, should know and can know, if we are to judge such matters not by postmodern epistemological preferences but by what scripture actually says. (180-181)
To boil it down, the main problems as Carson sees them seem to be:
1. An anemic take on Christian knowledge
2. Imbalanced, distorted, reactionary arguments
3. A loose and convenient handling of scripture
Knowledge anemia
I’m only half-way there with Carson on the subject of Christian knowledge. I believe the problem at hand is that the Emergent Church identifies to some degree with postmodern philosophy, which (at least in its stronger forms) in turn wages war on the notion of objective truth (and knowledge thereof), notions that (in some form at least) permeate the Bible and its reasoning. From what Carson says, emergent writers generally seem pretty happy to tone down the objective smack-you-in-the-face truth language. Many seem to think it’s a good idea to slip away from thinking in that sort of category, and don’t talk much about how far is too far a slip. Some of this sensibility seems to have to do with a desire to reach postmodern people with the Way of Jesus, but I get the sense that they really agree with the postmodern philosophy to some extent, and see changing our notions of truth as being on the ball, not as an act of marketing (Emergent folks tend to take issue with evangelistic methods that smack of sales and marketing).
Why do I say I’m only half-way there with Carson? Partly due to the respect for ambiguity I share with people like McLaren (see my last post). And in fact I find a lot of stuff in life ambiguous, especially when it comes to theological questions. Some of that is probably obtainable knowledge that I haven’t obtained just yet (or even that I’ve been reluctant to accept). But it also seems to me that folks tend to think they know all sorts of things that they don’t actually know—that they haven’t come to believe by as trustworthy means as they think. This becomes clearer in a pluralistic context, where many different people become confident of many different things, and often for reasons with which most of us can sympathize. In this context, I find it really refreshing when a group of Christians can go public about their uncertainties and intellectual fallibilities and get on with following Jesus anyway, providing a warm place where us doubters aren’t so inclined to fear that we’re second-rate Christians on account of our persistent questions and vigilance against certain forms of deception. Not only can such an environment help many of us get past our insecurities, it can also rightly draw folks who have these sensibilities about ambiguity I’ve mentioned who thirst for spiritual depth. So I’m actually attracted to the way that Emergent types are trying to be wary about flinging around lots of Truth language without careful attentive reflection or culturing overconfidence in our persuasions. I’d say we could benefit from more of this sensibility (if well-balanced).
But Carson does have a very important point that Emergent people may be going too far with this, and that there is serious danger there. The story of the Jesus followers as I’ve encountered it in the Bible seems very tightly tangled up with important actual facts, facts that people everywhere needed (and presumably still need) to understand correctly and believe. It involves truth that stays true for everybody, truth that often offends people, turns them away, and makes life more difficult and uncomfortable for all of us. Jesus got himself in trouble through his habit of telling that kind of truth like it is. For my part, I do believe that I have a chronic tendency to tiptoe around saying things that might rub people wrong about Christianity, without considering whether said possible wrong-rubbing would not so much be because they wouldn’t understand, but rather because on an important level they would. I also don’t like the notion that anyone would be judged for fancying the wrong ideas; I don’t want dogmatism to cramp anyone’s free and comfortable exercise of their minds, and I’m sympathetic that likeable people with decent motivations can make all sorts of mistakes in their reasoning and judgment. But as I read scripture (Galatians 1 or 1 Corinthians 15, for example), it does look as if there’s serious danger in theological mistakes – even mistakes that don’t result in obvious immorality. Are we trying to take the easy way out on this? That would be a lot like us, now wouldn’t it?
Imbalanced, distorted, reactionary arguments
Have you ever had an ideological itch? Like, there’s something about certain notions and ways of thinking that really bug you. Sometimes exactly what that something is is hard to put your finger on. You want to scratch it, and scratch it good, and make the itchy thing go away. If only itchy things were so easily dispensed with.
I think McLaren has an itch, an itch that has to do with conservative thinking and theology. I think I have the itch too. I bet a lot of emergent types do. There’s a certain satisfaction in scratching your bug bites, in scratching the whole vicinity nice and hard. But doing so can make matters worse. In reading McLaren’s works, I had a lot of itch-scratching moments, where part of me said “Yea! Yea! You’re nailing it!” but another part muttered “But isn’t this kind of unfair?” Here’s an example from pages 129-130 of A New Kind of Christian:
The preoccupation with being saved sometimes strikes me as strangely selfish. I think we’ve talked about this before: Do you think that God would want a heaven filled with people who cared more about being saved from hell than saved from sin? Who cared more about getting their butts into heaven than being good? Who cared more about having their sins forgiven than being good neighbors? Who in fact became worse neighbors precisely because they became so religious in their concern about their own personal souls?
I think our definition of “saved” is shrunken and freeze-dried by modernity… this all strikes me as Christianity diced through the modern Veg-o-matic… The way conservative Christians talk about “personal salvation” seems to try to persuade by exclusion. In other words, the argument says, “You, the ‘unsaved’, are on the outside and I’m on the inside. I’ll tell you now to get inside if you want.”
Proselytism and conversion that center on fears surrounding the afterlife scare me. I think they scare me because A) I see a real case for that sort of thinking, B) I fear that this sort of thinking will make me a slave to fear, where my lifestyle is controlled by fear for others and I must scare them and work to get them into the same sort of slavery, though it will alienate many who I love, and C) that sort of fear might encourage us to value the regenerating, reforming, renewing side of the gospel less (except insofar as it helps convert people, but not for its own sake). So it feels good when McLaren scratches our collective itch.
But at the same time, I know that generally the people I’ve known who focus on the gospel of eternal salvation and who fear for their unsaved friends are not mere slaves to fear, that they are often very good neighbors, that they are driven by love for others rather than club spirit, and that the ultimate focus of this sort of conversion is generally on a commitment of humility and trust toward God, laced with sincere repentance from sin, rather than selfish consumerism concerned with fire insurance or jumping through the hoops to get the candy in the sky. Whatever his intentions, and in spite of his warm style, when McLaren scratches our itch by writing things like the quote above, his words risk unfairly insulting and alienating a broad swath of our brothers and sisters in Christ. Arguably, such words may also encourage us to forget about (or at least back-burner) the John 3:16 part of the gospel. Thus, we stir up reactionary infighting in the church, we risk getting seriously off track with key doctrine, and if we think too much in caricatures, we risk skewing our worldviews so we recognize truth even less when we see it. Not good!
Carson sees people like McLaren as carrying on an “angry young man” routine, where disgust with one extreme leads to over-compensation, swinging recklessly toward the opposite extreme. I’m not convinced we can boil down the Emergent Church phenomenon to merely one big party of reactionary angry young man swinging (maybe Carson doesn’t either), but I think he’s right that there’s a lot of that going on.
Loose and convenient handling of scripture
This one’s big and sticky. Consider D.A. Carson’s most alarming sight-bite of the book: “I have to say, as kindly but as forcefully as I can, that to my mind, if words mean anything, both McLaren and Chalke have largely abandoned the Gospel” (186). Gee golly! Reactionary is one thing, but what’s this all about?
Steve Chalke, A key emergent leader from the British side of the pond, is quoted saying the following:
The fact is that the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse—a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. (The Lost Message of Jesus, 182-183)
Chalke is attacking what’s formally known as “the theory of penal substitutionary atonement” (I’ll call it the TPSA): the idea that Jesus died to pay the penalty we justly owe for our sins so that God’s wrath would justly be satisfied and we could be saved. Most of us Bible-believing Protestants were taught it by another name: the gospel (more or less). McLaren also takes issue with the TPSA; from what I can tell he wants to conceptualize the gospel differently (primarily as the message Jesus proclaimed, that the kingdom of God is at hand), and to take the TPSA off of its current pedestal. I’m not sure whether he still has space something along the lines of the TPSA figuring significantly in his understanding of the gospel. I’m not sure he knows either, being the theological explorer/adventurer/wanderer/architect that he is.
Now I really do resonate with Chalke’s core sentiment: my intuitions and the TPSA disagree in a number of ways, and I’d rather not swallow it if I don’t have to. For example, intuitively it doesn’t seem to me like punishing the innocent in place of the guilty actually satisfies justice – not even if it’s a volunteer. And it’s encouraging in a way to have people questioning the unquestionable; it makes me feel less afraid of revealing and thinking through my own misgivings. Chalke’s scratching our itch. But his alarming language seems to ignore prominent facets of the Biblical story that are broadly understood by Christians and that counteract the “divine child abuse” picture, and that make it difficult to stray too far from the TPSA while being receptive to the direction of the Bible. Conservatives read things like this and feel the core of our faith has been brutally libeled; the strong language seems to distort matters (consistent with the reckless angry young man routine) in order to rationalize denying key doctrine.
I still want to dig a bit before I have a firm opinion of what’s going on here. Chalke, McLaren, and respected Bible scholar NT Wright (who I’m told doesn’t distance himself as much as Chalke from the TPSA and yet identifies Chalk’s view with his own) all have more to say on the debate that I haven’t read. As far as “abandoning the gospel” is concerned, I’m inclined to believe that anyone who trusts in Jesus as their Savior and Lord will be accepted by him, whether their theology about just how Jesus saves is rock solid or deeply distorted. I don’t see evidence that these men have up and stopped trusting in Jesus, nor that they no longer encourage others to do so. Nevertheless, bad theology can still be disastrous whether or not it ends up being fatal—especially in the mouths of teachers.
But back to the issue of handling scripture in general. I do feel like McLaren is a bit loose with the Bible sometimes (especially around the subject of God’s wrath). The issue tends to be a sort of slipping past scripture, where he makes an attractive case but important objections from the Bible come to mind, and he just doesn't seem to go there. The critical thinker is then left uncertain whether he has a good answer to those objections or not. This is particularly worrisome given that he has his sights set on reinterpreting those scriptures in bold new ways. I really like the idea of bold new ways and bold new thoughts, but boldness can quickly turn into folly if one isn’t careful.
It’s kind of annoying. I want teachers with whom I resonate, who can seriously sympathize with my reactions and predispositions, and who I can trust to faithfully and reliably dish out truth with wisdom and balance, bearing in mind the whole picture in scripture. McLaren’s about the best person I’ve found in the former two but currently strikes me as rather patchy on that last requirement. Despite the fact that I rarely get around to reading book recommendations, I'd like to find more authors who will let me have my cake (reliable truth) and eat it too (resonance etc). Any suggestions?
And what are your reactions to all this business?
Bibliography
Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001).
D.A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Chruch: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).
Steve Chalke and Alan Mann, The Lost Message of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003).
