Oh, that’s pretty sad.
But it’s late and I have to get up early to take a child to the doctor’s and then I have two projects due next week, so afternoon has to be worktime, and if I’m to blog anything, well, that will have to do. And sorry about the delay in approving comments. I was out and about all afternoon.
I was actually going to save this for a couple of months, and will, indeed, probably return to the subject when October rolls around, but since the topic of Emergent Christianity has popped up on a couple of Catholic blogs over the past week, as well as reaching a sort of energize peak on other Christian blogs, mostly because of these sarcastic posters created by some vigorous anti-Emergents.  I thought I might as well take a crack at it now.
If you don’t know what the heck Emergent Christianity or the Emerging Church Movement is, take a gander at the Wikipedia article which gives a good intro:

The emerging church is a controversial[1] 21st-century Protestant Christian movement whose participants seek to engage postmodern people, especially the unchurched and post-churched. To accomplish this, “emerging Christians” seek to deconstruct and reconstruct Christian beliefs, standards, and methods to accommodate postmodern culture. Proponents of this movement call it a “conversation” to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature. The predominantly young participants in this movement prefer narrative presentations drawn from their own experiences and biblical narratives over propositional, Bible exposition. Emergent methodology includes frequent use of new technologies such as multimedia and the Internet. Emergents communicate in open dialogue rather than the dogmatic proclamation found in historic Christianity.

Critics of the movement are often conservative, evangelical theologians and pastors who disagree with the movement’s embrace of postmodernist philosophy, believing such a worldview leads emergents to unorthodox theology, relativism, antinomianism, universalism, and syncretism. These critics frequently associate emergent theology with the liberal theology that has historically been at odds with Christian fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Emergent Christians often see themselves as bridging the divide between conservative evangelical Christianity and liberal mainline Christianity. The label “Emergents” to describe people who identify with the emerging church is generally used by critics of the movement in an attempt to domesticate the diversity of the movement. This makes mounting critique easier despite the reality that those within the broad emerging church phenomenon do not label themselves as “emergent”.

I’m not an expert on this by any means – all I know is what I read in Christianity Today – but it’s an intriguing movement to me for a couple of reasons: first because it is a sort of open, dynamic thing, and part of that openness sometimes involves being a little bit open to certain aspects of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Note all the qualifiers, because I welcome the openness, but I hesitate to make too much of it. Secondly, it interests me because of the second paragraph in that Wikipedia entry. I always find intra-Protestant squabbles sort of intriguing (I obviously find intra-RC squabbles interesting as well. I raised in a politically-minded household. So sue me.) because I always am just dying to jump in and obnoxiously query, “So how do you decide whose personal interpretation of Scripture is right?” Because I’m just mean that way.

So now you’re wondering…why all the “wait until October” business? What’s that all about? Well, it’s because one of the books Michael brought back from BEA way back in May was a copy of Brian McClaren’s Everything Must Change, to be published by Thomas Nelson in October. 

McClaren is one of the leaders of the Emerging Churches, much reviled by the parties in that second paragraph up there, and as I read through his book on the way to Maine, I thought, “Oh, this is going to make the haters happy. Not.”

I’ll give a more detailed review when the book actually comes out, but I’ll just summarize by saying that Everything Must Change is basically a call for Christians to place, for lack of a better terms, social justice concerns at the center of faith. He examines global poverty and the mechanisms he claims drive it and challenges Christians to see that their choices matter, are reflective of their faith in Jesus, a Jesus he says calls his followers to, first and foremost, build the kingdom of God on earth.  His central motif is of “framing stories” – in that Jesus calls us to live within God’s framing story, not Caesar’s. A couple of quotes that will give you a sense:

Jesus’ good news alerts us to our derangement and dislocation from our true place in God’s world and God’s stoy. It presents to us a new framing story that Jesus called ‘the good news of the kingdom of God,” and that, I’ve proposed, we might  call the transforming story of God’s divine peace insurgency, God’s unterror movement, God’s new global love economy, or God’s sacred ecosystem.

If we resituate ourselves in this new story, if we find identity, meaning and purpose in this good news, we find ourselves beginning again, born again, facing a new start. As recomposed, resituated de-deranged people, we can begin rebuilding our societal system, not as a suicide machine, but as a beloved community, the kind of garden city envisioned in John’s Apocalypse (Revelation 21:1-4)(155)

Through his good news, his framing story of the kingdom of God, Jesus recruits heroes to join him in deconstructing the acutely suicidal machinery of theocapitalism. Thus he inspires those heroes to build a new kind of prosperity system that we have called God’s love economy, a new way of living as part of God’s sacred ecosystem.

See what I mean? The Calvinists are going to be thrilled. If they can stay awake, that is.

(For the thing is, this is, as you might be able to tell from these brief excerpts, a sort of eyes-glaze-over book. It’s full of charts and systems and diagrams and neologisms. It’s earnest and detailed in a way that leave you, at the end, feeling ironically even less hopeful than you were before.)

There’s a lot to say about this, but for now, I’m just going to note a couple of points:

1) Challenge is good. Rethinking the Gospel in light of contemporary events is good. Being very aware of how we, as Christians are allowing ourselves to be defined by culture, society and economic desires rather than the Gospel is a daily call. Who is my neighbor? Jesus has the answer. Listen.

2) But McClaren irritates, I can tell, probably because he seems to have a massive ego, and if he doesn’t, an editor should probably intervene and smooth out the passages in his writing that leave that impression: the impression that in his constant worldwide travels, seeing things that no one has apparently ever noticed before, Brian McClaren has figured out that everything has gone wrong at some point – and one can’t help feeling it was with the Apostles – until Brian McClaren has come along to straighten us all out. After 2000 years of wandering in the desert, now we’ve got Brian and we can get it right.

3) Which brings me to the final point: the theology that I read in these books is really remarkably thin because too many of the writers, McClaren in this book specifically, refuse to take into account, for all of their postmodernism and dynamism and openness, anything but some variation of contemporary Protestant thinking. It strikes me as essentially an exercise in reaction against the Reformation paradigm of soteriology, ecclesiology and even systematics, but it’s a reaction that looks primarily to the contemporary world and whatever its sociologists, psychologists and economists have to offer instead of considering other Christian answers, namely 2000 years of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. When I read McClaren, it was like I was constantly envisioning him skating up to a precipice where he just might open himself to wondering if there is anything to learn about the Christian stance toward the poor, the sick and questions of injustice from the Christian traditions that have been dealing with it, globally, for millenia…but he doesn’t. This book is all about economics and government and the relationship of the Christian to both, as well as to her fellow human beings, mediated by those institutions, and I found myself at points just begging the man to start with City of God and do some deep study of Catholic political philosophy. Not that such a study would explain everything or give easy answers or be a simple prism, but it would be another prism – an historically-grounded prism offered by, yes, Christians.

Now, you may think I’m skirting around the big issues – Jesus inspires his followers to build a new kind of whatsit?  – but as I said, that’s for another time. What some – like Mark – have been picking up on, is a teeny-tiny glimmer of nascent Catholic sensibility in Emergent. Perhaps there is, but I think it is mostly on an aesthetic level, for lack of a better term. There’s a recognition that maybe the Reformation interpretation of Christianity isn’t correct, but as you can see from what McClaren is saying about the nature of salvation and Jesus’ purpose, he, at least, actually seems to be moving away from what we might broadly call “orthodox” Christianity, in that he seems to be defining it all in terms of our earthly experience rather than any kind of existential, cosmic transformation or identification, and for some reason, either out of ignorance or a reflexive closed-mindedness to anything Catholic or Orthodox, doesn’t really seem to consider that the experience and wisdom of the foundational Christian community has anything much of interest to say to him.

Because, you see, the language of this book, unsurprisingly, is all about “Christians.” What Christians are doing now, what they’re getting wrong, what Christians have gotten wrong in the past.

All the while, never considering that the “Christians” of which he speaks make up, in actuality, a minority, both in time and numbers, in that large group that has called itself “Christian” for two thousand years. So why not take a look at what the foundational and majority expression of Christianity – historical Catholicism and Orthodoxy –  has had to say about all of this?

Well,…you can only emerge, so far, I guess.

A couple of Emergent notes from Ignatius Insight. First, from an interview with Dr. Francis Beckwith:

The emergent church charges traditional Evangelicals with corruption as well, but in this case the corruption is Enlightenment rationalism and an overemphasis on American culture war issues such as abortion and homosexuality. But both groups are simply taking the Protestant Principle to its logical conclusion. For this reason, unless Evangelical critics of these movements are willing take a more modest view of sola scriptura and a more charitable posture toward tradition, they do not have the resources to respond to these movements in an effective way.
From an interview with evangelical theologian Dr. Brad Harper:
IgnatiusInsight.com: What do you think of the “emergent church” movement, especially its attempts to appropriate certain aspects of traditional/ancient Christian practice?
Dr. Harper: Perhaps the “emergent church” is even more difficult to define than Evangelicalism. Some insiders even want to make sure we distinguish between the “emergent” church and the “emerging” church. To be honest, the importance of most of that is beyond me. What is clear is that there is a transformation in the American church today which, in my view, is much more profound and systemic than the transformation that took place in the 1960s and 70s, illustrated by the “Jesus Movement.”
At the risk of severe oversimplification, I believe that this new transformation is fueled by the dramatic cultural paradigm shift from modern to postmodern, not by the antiestablishment and social progress inclinations which were more at the heart of the revolution of the 1960s and, I believe, much more tame. The result is that many younger Christians desire a faith experience that is much less rationalistic and individual and much more experiential, communal, and multidimensional. One of the results of this is the resurgence of many of the “traditional/ancient Christian practices” you refer to. But in my opinion, most of the young Christians drawn to this kind of church experience are unconcerned or ignorant of the traditional or ancient origins of these practices. They just know that when they walk to the front of the church, light a candle, kneel, and pray before an icon of Christ, they connect with their faith in a way that is more holistically experiential than what they have grown up with in the Evangelical church.
At the theological level, there are a whole lot of important issues at stake in the emerging church which I don’t have time to address here. As a result, the movement has found both welcome acceptance and severe critique from Evangelicals. Nevertheless, the movement is here to stay in one form or several.