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Is the Emergent Church Biblical?

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the emergent church in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library


If the chairman doesn’t mind, I’m going to torpedo a couple of his comments. First, I am under no illusions whatsoever you have come because I’m speaking. It’s the topic. If I had chosen to speak on the significance of Greek accents in Reformation manuscripts or opsimathy as an educational desideratum, I guarantee we wouldn’t have had this crowd. It’s the topic.

Moreover, in the three domains I have allegedly torpedoed, I am sorely tempted to think Dr. Vanhoozer hasn’t read the books because I tried astonishingly hard not to torpedo them but to evaluate them and said virtually as many positive things about them as I did negative in all three cases, not least for example, in the new perspective on Paul. I don’t think the new perspective is entirely wrong, and so on, with respect to the emerging church.

The term emerging church is entirely opaque. It means different things in different circles around the world. In missiological contexts, it has to do with the church in the so-called Two-Thirds World. A friend of mine named Art Patzia wrote a book called The Emerging Church, and he was talking about the church in the first century. It was really first-century church history.

Since 1993, the expression the emerging church or the emergent church has referred to a movement founded originally by two men and now has gone national and international, although in its international proportions, the terminology changes somewhat. There are informal links nowadays through blogs and personal contacts and so on, and in North America it is the emerging terminology that has predominated.

The movement.… Most people in the movement don’t want to call it a movement; they want to call it a discussion, but I will use both terms. The movement, the discussion, is astonishingly diverse, which means it is very difficult to avoid criticism no matter what you say about it from someone who lives in some other part of the movement.

If I make any generalization whatsoever, I am sure you can find an exception, and if you happen to live in that exception, then you will accuse me of lack of fairness with respect to describing the movement. It’s one of those sorts of discussions, and everyone feels his or her particular patch of the movement is the most important one, and thus, I have overlooked that which is of transcendental significance.

My emails in the last six months, I have to tell you, have been astonishingly interesting. The concern of the movement is, in many respects, much larger than those who identify with the movement. One of the problems in assessing it is that there are people who call themselves emerging who really don’t fit the dominant emerging pattern, and there are lots and lots of people who don’t call themselves emerging who do fit the pattern. It’s amorphous, in other words, for a lot of different reasons.

It is, in many respects, a self-understood reformed movement. That is to say, not that it is moving toward Reformed theology, but it is a movement that is aiming to reform things, not simply to do missional things (we’ll come to that in a moment) but to change the way things are done. In large part, the motivation for such changes is a perception that culture is changing.

It’s partly generational, partly epistemological, and partly aesthetics, but there is a perception that culture is changing. Therefore, there must be changes in how we do church, how we bear witness, how we evangelize, how we engage in corporate worship, and so on.

It is, as far as I can see, only secondarily a movement to rethink what the Word of God says. In this respect, it is rather different from, let us say, the Magisterial Reformation. The Magisterial Reformation perceived there were things that were taking place in the church that were moving farther and farther away from Scripture, so at least in part, it was not only an attempt to reform the church; it was an attempt to reform church by the Word of God, to call people back to the Scriptures.

You get a little bit of that overtone in some of this movement, but far more is it a perception that we as Christians must change because the culture is changing. In other words, the dominant perception of why we must reform things is not because there is a perception of how far we have moved from the stability of Scripture but how far the culture has moved from yesterday. It seems to me that drives a great deal of the movement.

The movement protests against at least two major things. On the one hand, it protests against what it calls traditional evangelicalism. It finds traditional evangelicalism too focused on truth as a category, too propositional, too merely traditional, in many respects fundamentalist, too absolutist, too driven by notions of exclusion. You have to believe before you belong, and as a result, it is offensive to many people now in a postmodern world.

But there is also deep suspicion in this movement of the megachurch movement which is not exactly traditional evangelicalism. Most people at Willow Creek don’t think of themselves as traditional evangelical. At least they didn’t 25 years ago. They are becoming traditional today; nevertheless, 25 years ago they didn’t.

The new emerging people are suspicious of that sort of movement as well but for different reasons. They think it is too polished, too performance oriented, too showman-like, too much of a division between the performance at the front and the rest of the people who are there, not sufficiently relational, and really, in fact, designed for the Baby Busters, for Generation X. Whereas we have moved on beyond even the Busters to Generation Y and beyond, and with this is a whole new profile of expectations.

The catch-all word for these cultural changes is postmodernism, but postmodernism is perhaps in this discussion even more slippery than emerging. The term postmodernism covers a vast arena of possibilities. Some think of postmodernism primarily, for example, in terms of consumerism, so for example, Crouch. Others think of it in terms of aesthetics. Still others think of it in terms of epistemology, which in America is the dominant theory. In Europe, it is much more bound up with literary theory and literary criticism.

The term is itself astonishingly plastic, but at the risk of hopeless generalization, by and large the postmodernism that emerging church leaders want us to acknowledge by the way we do evangelism and do church wants to emphasize feelings and affections over against cerebral rationalism, not denying the place for thinking (Don’t misunderstand me; they’re not foolish) but to expand on how we go about finding out about things, to push experience over against truth, to underline inclusivism rather than exclusivity.

That generates, for example, in the Baptist Union in England an insistence that belonging precedes believing. Usually, in believers church traditions, people have to believe, and as a result of believing, they belong, but now there is an emphasis on belonging, coming in, and participating … even at the Lord’s Supper. (Who knows? You might actually confront God there.)

In that context, gradually, by a kind of socialization, by a kind of corporate work of the Spirit, you come to believe, while the church is avoiding, at almost all costs, telling people they’re wrong. There’s a heavy emphasis on participation and a heavy buying into a new doctrine of tolerance.

I’m going to take a small excursus here. That one’s worth thinking about for a moment. It’s not usually acknowledged, but in my view it’s very important. The old doctrine of tolerance thought of tolerance very much in line with the famous dictum of Voltaire. “I may hate what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

In other words, you had to begin by acknowledging the other person was wrong, as it were, insisting on it, in fact, but then insisting also the person had the right to be wrong and to defend his or her views. The new tolerance, however, driven on this reading by a certain understanding of postmodernism is very reluctant ever to say anybody is flat-out wrong.

That is intolerant, so without saying they’re wrong, if you disagree with them just because you have your worldview or your sub-group or your culture or your confessional element or whatever (“This is right for you, and that might be right for them, and neither is in any place to say the other is wrong”), that becomes tolerance.

In my view, this new understanding of tolerance which prevails in much of the Western world is both epistemologically bankrupt and morally corrupt. I insist on putting it that strongly. It is epistemologically foolish, because the very notion of tolerance is incoherent unless you disagree with somebody in the first place. How do you say, “I cannot possibly say you are wrong” and “I tolerate you”? You have to disagree with somebody before tolerance makes any sense at all. If you can’t say they’re wrong, then there is nothing to tolerate.

Moreover, it is morally corrupt because the one place where such people do have strong antipathies there they are not tolerant. If somebody disagrees with their view of tolerance and says, “I frankly think your view of tolerance is just right up the creek; I think there are some people who are wrong,” then you are branded intolerant, and there is no patience whatsoever for such intolerance; such people need to be silenced.

This is becoming worldwide. Thus, the official statement of the UN is, “We tolerate all perspectives except intolerance.” In other words, the one thing they actually disagree with is their understanding of who is intolerant, and that person must be silenced. In my view, the emerging church people by and large, with some wonderful exceptions, have bought into that view of tolerance as well, and that has a bearing on how you go about saying who is right or who is wrong or what’s right or what’s wrong and so forth.

This movement tends also to work out in official disapproval of hierarchies, a heavy emphasis in the local church on relationships, diversity, discussion that is free and easy. For quite a long time, for example, Spencer Burke and others ran a website called TheOoze.com. It’s a great title, isn’t it? It’s gone now, but in The Ooze there was free and open discussion about everything.

Everybody could put in his or her two cents worth and talk about any of the difficult subjects that often emerge and just sort of go with the flow or ooze this way or that way in the flow. It’s a wonderful sort of image, isn’t it? Within this framework, therefore, nobody would ever feel threatened by being told they were wrong.

That’s a hopeless caricature because it needs to be said in the strongest possible terms the movement varies from being essentially historic Christianity with certain agendas on how to communicate cross-culturally to young urban postmodernists, especially on the Coasts, all the way to stances that are really difficult to align with any form of historic orthodoxy. It is an astonishingly broad movement, and because of that, it is difficult to make sweeping generalizations.

Let me list some of the things for which the discussion, the movement, is, in my judgment, praiseworthy. If you’ve already read the book I wrote, I’m not telling you anything new here. I’m merely summarizing a lot of things. What you’re really waiting for is the discussion, and we’ll get to that in due course.

For those of you who haven’t read the book and since the vast majority of people buy books and don’t read them.… Believing as I do in the fall, I believe that corollary. Therefore, let me at least proceed with some of the praiseworthy features and then some of the features I find a little more difficult.

1. The praiseworthy features of the movement.

A. The people in the movement are really trying to read the times.

Whether their reading is always good or bad is another issue, but they are trying to read the times, and that is surely something we are as Christians morally obligated to do, not least when the times are changing quickly.

We used to train our missionaries to think cross-culturally because they were going to be crossing cultures, but here at home our pastors don’t need to be trained cross-culturally, do they, because they’re just going to the same old boring WASP background from which they came. Of course, that’s just not true anymore, is it?

Our megalopolises are now wonderfully multi-ethnic, and quite apart from that, even within a singularly WASP community, times are changing so fast the community has a cultural profile, in many respects, really quite different from the cultural profile of one generation back, let alone two or three or four generations back. Thinking cross-culturally or thinking analytically about culture and trying to understand what’s going on.… Surely that’s a good thing even if we may not always agree with all of the choices that are being made.

At the risk of a personal account, I first thought about writing the book The Gagging of God not because I wanted a medal in a domain about which I know far too little, but it came out of my university missions. I’ve been doing university missions for 30 years, and I was finding the questions were changing all around me.

When I was in Britain for a sabbatical year in the early 90s, I gave some talks on hermeneutics at some conference or other, and one charming young woman from the University of Cambridge came up to me and said, “You just have to come and talk to some of the Christian students I know in my own English department. They’re losing their faith, and there’s nothing left for them. You have to come and talk with them.”

By this time, I was booked solid until I left. I had no time to squeeze anything in. I just tried to brush her off, but she begged and cajoled and wheedled, so finally, as much just to get rid of her as anything, I consented to do it. Then I thought very little about it. She sent me a little note reminding me of the date.

What I didn’t know was this young woman (bless her socks) had posted signs all around the University of Cambridge saying, “Professor D.A. Carson, God and the Possibility of Truth,” without any acknowledgment of me being a Christian or anything like that and then hired the biggest hall in her college.

The first I knew was when I walked in. I was expecting a handful of undergraduates, and there were 350 people. They were packed in so tightly that even up on the platform they were all around me. About 10 percent of them were dons. That is, lecturers. Suddenly, I thought, “This one is going to be a hot one.”

Mercifully, I had done some preparation so I waffled on for my designated hour. Then there was about another hour and a half of discussion. I will never, ever forget the first question. It was from some don I had never met from another college, seated on the floor behind me. The first question was, “You mean, you think if God is a talking God (that is, he can communicate with us in words), it changes everything?”

Amen. What do you say at that point? Yet, you see, what was to me such an elemental part of Christianity was something that was so entirely alien that he was wrestling with this as some deep thought that had to be explored. You suddenly realize you’re in another profile. You start working through these kinds of things to ponder how best to get them across to a new generation of students who are bringing different pieces of baggage.

At the risk of a couple more personal illustrations, when I first started university missions, if I were dealing with an atheist, he or she was a Christian atheist. That is, the God he or she disbelieved in was the Christian God which meant the categories were on my turf, but no longer is that the case. In fact, I’ve started picking up in the last few years some questions I have never heard in my life.

My favorite came from a Yalie about two years ago when I was doing a university mission at Yale. The student came up to me and said, “The thing I find hardest about Christianity is that God always wants to be number one. I mean, if one of us wanted to be stroked all the time and had choruses sung to him and wanted to be praised and got really out of sorts and was said to be jealous if he didn’t have it, wouldn’t we say he was some sort of megalomaniac, some sort of real nutter? Why should I be interested in a God as self-absorbed as that?”

I had never had that question asked to me before. I’ve had it asked three or four times since then. What that indicates, of course, is such a change in the populace that the kinds of images of God, the kinds of expectations of what is good or bad, the kind of vision of the summum bonum has all changed. It has all changed.

Anything that helps us and encourages us to raise questions about where the culture is going.… Those sorts of things have got to have a certain kind of intrinsic goodness to them right from the very beginning. Even if you want to disagree with some of their results, the fact they’re raising the question should not threaten us in the slightest.

B. They regularly place a huge emphasis on authenticity.

In my judgment, that’s a very slippery expression. Nevertheless, who wants to be inauthentic? Most of us have been in churches where inauthenticity has abounded from time to time, where you come out after the hymns.… This can happen both in a stale old church with a wheezy pipe organ or in one with loud guitars and drums.

It can happen in both frames of reference where you think, “Good grief! What was that all about?” It can happen in a liturgical context where, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and evermore shall be, world without end” almost defines boring, and it can happen in one of these slap-happy type things where the aim is to be innovative in every second sentence that it just becomes cutesy and dumb.

You walk out and say, “Where was God in all of that?” Haven’t you ever been in a church service where you wonder if this is real at all? If God walked out and left, you’d never miss him. An emphasis on authenticity is, again, surely a good thing. Who am I to want to argue with that? On the other hand, part of authenticity is, after all, itself culturally driven. In other words, what we read as authentic is partly driven by our expectations.

I’ve lived for nine of the last 30 years in England, and I don’t know how many times I’ve preached in Wales, but let me tell you, quite frankly.… This mustn’t get out. This could do me a lot of damage. Most English preachers do not go down in Wales and most Welsh preachers do not go down in England. There’s an Englishman here, a Scot actually.… You know exactly what I’m talking about.

The English come across as linear and low-key and understated and logical. Think of John Stott. The Welsh, by contrast, have to sort of let it all hang out. It’s the Celtic background. It’s emotional and intense and so on. A John Stott does not play well in Wales. He just doesn’t because he is viewed as.… Well, he’s English and probably doesn’t have all that much of the Spirit either because otherwise there would be some tears now and then. Things like that.

I’m in the peculiar position where my parents were both born in the UK. My mother was a boring Londoner. What can I say? On the other hand, I was brought up in French Canada, so I have some of this romantic heritage built into me, too, and with a little bit of encouragement I can let fly.

My job, you see, in England is to restrain myself. When went back to England to preach at Cambridge after I had been away a couple of years, I actually had one or two senior members say to me afterwards, “A little over-enthusiastic, but we’ll train you again in a few months.” The snobbery is unbelievable!

On the other hand, when I go to Wales, they can put up with me. I may not be genuinely Welsh, but at least I can let fly somewhat because of this French background. What am I saying by this? Each side is viewing what is authentically spiritual partly in terms of culturally driven expectations.

This business of pursing the authentic, although it is a good thing, is far more slippery than people realize. I have been in Scottish churches amongst the so-called “Wee Frees” where they only sing psalms and if you crack a smile, you’re probably doomed to one of Dante’s lower circles of hell.

On the other hand, I have been in some of those circles where there has been, in my view, an intense work of the Spirit of God going on, I have also been in charismatic churches where I have known something of the same, and I have been in both where, quite frankly, I was bored to tears and could hardly wait to get out of there.

If you ask me to put my finger on exactly what it is, I would be very hard pressed to do so. I am quite sure, however, it is not merely a culturally driven thing, but most of our expectations in this domain are culturally driven. That’s a very tough one. Nevertheless, the pursuit of the authentic surely has to be a good thing. You don’t want to have the artificial in your relationship with God, do you? We can come back to that, if you like, more in discussion.

I’ll give you one more example. I just came back from Australia and this national conference of Baptists. They had a small contemporary band that was playing only contemporary stuff, and it was doing so in a particularly contemporary way, with faces screwed up with intensity and all the various other forms of facial and bodily enthusiasm that goes with that particular genre, whereupon I heard some senior saints in that heritage confront the leader of the band afterwards and say, “It was just performance. It was all acting. It was disgusting!”

I know perfectly well from their point of view, his stance was inauthentic. It was, “Sit there and sing one more hymn and be boring. You might like it, but that’s because you’re old.” What you have here is, in part, a culture clash again as to what is authentic. These are very difficult things to analyze appropriately and deeply and well. Nevertheless, the pursuit of the authentic I still insist is a good thing, even though in my view it is being pursued, in my judgment, in some pretty blindsided ways.

C. I will shortly criticize the movement for its (in my judgment) misunderstandings of postmodernism, but it also has some shrewd takes on it here and there.

There is far more (I don’t know what else to call it) subjectivism. There is an offense taken in many circles by claims of exclusivism. Many people are uncomfortable with truth claims that either imply or assert the opposite is wrong, and so on.

In my view, that doesn’t allow you to duck what Scripture says, but it does mean you have to be careful about how you present such things and do so with more sensitivity. The very fact they have picked up on some of these things, though I might disagree with some of their profile of postmodernism, is, nevertheless in my judgment, in many respects a plus.

D. Some of them are just being cutesy, following the latest fad, but many of them (not all of them, by a long shot) are driven by genuine missional concerns, especially missional concerns to people who are often overlooked by suburban evangelical churches.

Sometimes those missional concerns are real down-and-outers. Sometimes they’re for people in segments of the society who are massively unevangelized, for example, in the arts or in mass entertainment and mass media, and so on.

There are not many evangelicals who are doing effective work in those sorts of domains, and these people glory in going after those sorts of people. There’s something to be said about that, too, isn’t there, that should be praised.

E. They seek the right to talk to anyone about anything.

There’s something admirable about that. At the risk of giving away a trade secret, every year if I’m on campus at all when we come up to graduation, I go through the list of MDivers who are graduating and look over which ones, as far as I know them, have the potential to talk to anybody, because quite frankly, not all of them do, at least not initially.

Some will make wonderful pastors in Lincoln, Nebraska. Some of them will be really terrific in a black church on the south side of Chicago. Some of them will be just great in a fledgling Hispanic church somewhere. Some of them are born rural, will live rural, and will die rural, and others are urban the same way, but the ones I look for are those (I don’t care what background they have) who can talk to anybody. I want them.

In some cases, I have been shamefully manipulative in trying to get them into urban contexts and the like. You know, “God loves you, and I have a wonderful plan for your life.” One of the best was two or three years ago, a Haitian chap. Do you know which major city in North America has the least percentage of churches per capita? Any idea? Phoenix, Arizona.

Of course, we think of Phoenix and we’re actually thinking of Scottsdale or we’re thinking of Camelback (white, suburban, middle class), but Phoenix is amazingly multi-ethnic and has fewer churches than any other major metropolitan area in North America. That’s where he has gone. The church has backed him up. He can talk to anybody. He’s of Haitian background, and he really can talk to anybody, and the church is beginning to grow and so on.

If that’s part of what this movement is about, on that front, too, I’m interested in people who can talk to anybody, but it has to be said there are other people who talk endlessly about talking to anybody, but in fact, they’re just merely talking in in-house jargon for popular consumption. It’s easy to feel good about yourself if you’re talking about talking with anybody. That’s also true. Life is complicated, isn’t it?

F. There is, in the movement, a willingness to question tradition.

That can be both good and bad. Willingness to question tradition in the name of pursuing what Scripture says and reforming our current traditions by the Word of God surely has to be a good thing. On the other hand, a certain kind of iconoclastic, tear-it-all-down and then pick and choose at the end is another form of selfishness.

I would go so far as to say it’s another form of self-idolatry, and I think the movement does some of both. I think that’s, again, part of the problem, but insofar as it is willing to at least raise some questions and not simply stay in a rut, I’m not threatened by it entirely. I’m not threatened by it at all so long as the answers toward which it presses are more and more in line with Scripture.

Let me say one thing by way of transition here. It needs to be said in the most forceful way possible many of the virtues I have just outlined in the movement are found in many churches that would not in any way identify with the movement. In other words, I don’t want to give the impression that the virtues I’ve just outlined are exclusive to the movement so that if you want the virtues you have to have the movement.

I think of a church like Capitol Hill Baptist in DC or Redeemer Presbyterian in New York or Camelback Bible Church in metropolitan Phoenix and a whole lot of other churches, as well, which are wonderfully good at drawing in complete biblical illiterates, seeing them genuinely converted, seeing people transformed.

I think of Churchill Heights Baptist in Toronto. Until 25 years ago, Toronto was, of the major cities in North America, one of the most amazingly WASP cities that I knew. According to the UN, it is now the most multi-ethnic city in the world. It’s just unbelievable in 25 years. Most churches have just not coped with that speed of change, but Churchill Heights Baptist has. I love going to that church.

They were 300 or 400 a few years back, and they’re now pushing 1,500 or 1,700. The last time I was there, which was a year and a half ago, they told me they had people from 85 different language groups in the church. They have something like 15 or 17 pastors/elders. I didn’t spot any two from the same country. I mean, they might have, but it would have been accidental. There was one white dude in the whole bunch.

The church is a delight. It’s a great church, and it does not think of itself in any sense as belonging to the emerging movement. It is broadly Reformed and is strong on doctrine and confessionalism and all the rest and pretty contemporary in its style of worship, but even there desperately concerned to get things in line with Scripture and not just to be cutesy, incorporating some elements of liturgy now and then but doing things other ways. It’s just a very interesting church.

It is very important to distinguish, it seems to me, the strengths from the movement, not to think of the movement only in terms of its weaknesses but to recognize the strengths of the movement. You can find in a lot of churches of different backgrounds in different corners of the country that are doing it pretty nicely, thank you very much, and it would be a huge mistake and a huge disservice to a great deal of confessional evangelicalism around the country to think it is only this movement that has these lists of virtues.

2. The weak features of the movement.

Let me come, on the other hand, to some things I find more than a little troubling.

A. For all that most of postmodernism’s authors appeal to either explicitly or implicitly, I find their discussion of postmodernism remarkably out of date, sometimes ignorant, sometimes categorized by massive antitheses that just aren’t true.

They’re just not the way it is. Sometimes mere sloganeering.

If you want to see a really prejudicial antithesis in this regard, look at Robert Webber’s most recent book on the profile of the young evangelicals. It is cartoonish. I don’t know what else to call it. If a student presented a profile of evangelicalism along those lines, he’d flunk here. There are these people belonging to traditional evangelicalism, and all the negative things possible are said. There are these people belonging to the megachurch, and boy, are they a bunch of twits. The young evangelicals look like this, and everything is rosy and glowing.

Where’s the evaluation in that? It is so schematized; it is so prejudicial that it is amateur. That’s just the kindest word I can use. I could use words that are a lot less kind, but the kindest word is amateurish. People with any sort of discernment should not get snookered by that kind of analysis. It’s just unfair. It’s unrealistic.

Moreover, a lot of contemporary postmodernism is changing its face. It’s changing its face partly because it’s so diverse in different parts of the world. Henri Blocher pointed out to me a year or so ago that a book published by les Presses universitaires de France that came out of a conference of the Sorbonne in 2002 or thereabouts brought together some of Europe’s leading intellectuals to talk about the drift of intellectual thought in Europe today, mostly western Europe. It had a lot of leading lights and some names you would recognize and some you probably wouldn’t.

The resulting papers were published in this book of just over 500 pages and they managed to get through the whole book without using the word postmodernism even once. From Henri’s perspective, postmodernism in Europe is dead. From my perspective, I don’t think that’s true either. I think what the French mean by postmodernism is a bit different from what we mean here, but here in America, we’re churning out dozens of books a year that treat postmodernism in one fashion or another.

It does trouble me a bit at the very moment when the movement is morphing and changing and becoming less dogmatic and a little more flexible, that’s the time when we’re all jumping on the bandwagon and calling up these leaders. I see more references to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and Brian McLaren than I do to more contemporary people like Kevin Vanhoozer.

This means, at very least, the discussion is 25 years out of date. There’s a danger of just sort of jumping on the bandwagon late and misreading the culture. That’s part of it. There are lots of implications of this for ministry. I’ll come to some of the practical ones in a few moments.

B. The movement as a whole really badly maligns modernism.

I don’t think it understands modernism very well at all. Modernism is a bad word. Every time you say anything is modern you’re supposed to sigh, and every time you hear anything postmodern you’re supposed to clap. If you went through the book and every time you heard either of those words you sighed or clapped, I guarantee in 99 cases out of 100 you would be aligning perfectly with the context.

That is, whether something is being cheered or put down. Every once in a while, there’s some tiny caveat about how postmodernism may have some nasty elements. I mean, we don’t want relativism, do we? But I can’t find anything that is said about modernism except, “Well, yes, we can produce jet planes,” but that’s about it. Modernism is absolutist. It started all the wars. It is exclusivist. It’s arrogant and on and on and on.

Because we are sinners, there is no doubt in my mind we can turn any epistemology into corruption including postmodernism, and there is no doubt in my mind both postmodernism and modernism have different forms of love of self-autonomy, but that’s part of the entailment of the fall, isn’t it?

I mean, what do you expect? We’re sinners. Nevertheless, the caricature with which these things are drawn in the literature is a horrendous distortion of history. To read McLaren or Spencer Burke or many others is to gain the impression that every single modernist, up until they were overthrown by the brilliant and humble and righteous postmodernists, thought truth is coercive and absolute, the universal search was for universal truth, that absolutes defined everything.

Since I read that in my scattered reading of earlier sources, every time I’ve come across any writer in the long modernist period who exhorts toward humility, toward all the things we don’t know and all the things we can’t be sure of to different degrees of certainty, then I make a little note, and my list is getting long.

It’s a caricature. It just isn’t true. There are some elements of it, if this were purely a philosophy of religion discussion, I would be more than happy to go into it at length. If you want to push harder in discussion, I’d be happy to do so, but as a caricature, it’s pretty appalling, and it becomes finally manipulative because it is saying if you go down that route, you’re doing this and you’re bad, and if you’re going down this route, you’re doing that and you’re good.

Whereas, the fact of the matter is, from a Christian perspective, there are good and helpful and useful postmodernists and there are bad and corrupt and devilish ones. I would say the same thing about modernists, too. In neither case do I want to align myself with either heritage completely. I’m a Christian, and in my view, a well-formed Christian epistemology won’t quite buy into either camp.

In fact, I would go further and say, if push comes to shove, a chastened postmodernism and a humble modernism actually meet in the middle. I’ll come back to that one in a minute. It seems to me some of our debates are becoming very futile in this domain precisely because that elementary fact is not sufficiently recognized. We’ll come back to that one.

C. Many errors in the church appeal to certain segments of the church.

Openness theology does not seduce Christians in the Reformed heritage. It’s going to seduce Arminians. On the other hand something that does not seduce Arminians is going to seduce Christians in the Reformed heritage. You can pursue this in many, many domains.

Those who are most likely to be attracted to liturgical Anglicanism are those who have had it up to here with empty-brained public meetings that have no liturgy or no form or no structure at all. “Well, nice to see y’all today. Everybody say hi. I didn’t hear you say hello loudly enough. Would you like to say hello again?” Suddenly, a bit of 1662 looks eminently desirable. You have to say that.

Likewise, what sort of things does fundamentalism find itself attracted to? One of the things I discovered as I began reading the literature is probably about 80 percent of the leaders in the emerging church movement came out of astonishingly conservative backgrounds. I don’t just mean conservative theologically, but conservative culturally and so on.

McLaren himself describes himself (it’s a lovely expression) as having been parked on the most conservative twig of the most conservative branch of the tree of evangelicalism. When that happens to you, the wise thing surely is to get off the twig and stretch out on the branch a bit and find a little bit more about the whole tree. The unwise thing is to take a running jump and find a vine and swing to some other extreme of the tree.

It seems to me, at least in part, that’s what the movement has done. It is constantly reacting to some pretty right-wing cultural experiences and viewing all of evangelicalism as belonging to that camp. It’s, in part, an overreaction. Again, I could give you lots and lots of examples, but I’ll just give you one.

McLaren, at one point, talks about how he was protected from ever seeing a dirty movie, and therefore, hadn’t really come to grips with the sweep of what is going on in the culture, and the first time he ever went into a movie house to see anything that was even slightly risquÈ, there was a frisson of shaded guilt in the background and so on.

Quite apart from the fact 1 Corinthians 8 does say something about not offending your conscience, and therefore, the conscience needs to be retrained, that is surely not the experience of all evangelicals today. In our home, we were very careful as our kids were growing up as to what the children saw on TV. We had a couple of rules: never more than an hour a day on TV from a list we controlled, and they were never allowed to watch it alone. That is, one of us had to be present, which meant we never, ever used the TV as a babysitter and we always knew what they were seeing. There were some rules there.

As the kids got a little older, if my 13- or 14-year-old daughter wanted to go off with one of her friends and see a movie that was rated one slot above where she was, then we had an inflexible rule in the family. The rule was, “Yeah, you can see it after you’ve seen it with me and we’ve talked about it. Then you can go and see it with your friends.”

I don’t know how many movies she and I saw together, but a fair amount. Then we’d trot off to whatever my budget could afford (McDonald’s or something like that) and have this conversation. “What did that angle shot try to say? Who was the good guy and who was the bad guy and how do you know? What were the values of the producer? What’s being applauded?”

After a few times, the novelty of this experiment with dad wore off. “Oh, Dad. You’re ruining another one.” For a while, that was simply the family decree. “I don’t give a rip whether you think I’m ruining it. If you want to see it with your friends, you have to see it with me first. That’s the price.”

Eventually, we got beyond that stage, and the first time she said to me, “Dad, I’d like to go and see that film, but I don’t have time to see it with you and my friends are going,” I said, “Okay. Go on. Have a nice time.” I’ve forgotten even what the movie was. She was 16 or 17, and it was R-rated. She came back, and she said, “You and Mom ought to go see it.” I said, “Well, maybe.” Two or three weeks later, her mom and I did go and see it. We came back. “Well, what did you think?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“What do you mean you’re not telling me?”

“You’ll just get angry. You think I’m going to ruin it.”

“Oh, no. Dad, I want to know.”

“No. I’m not going to tell you.”

That sort of psychology worked well with my daughter. It never worked with my son. Reverse psychology never worked with Nicholas. If I ever said to him, “No, I’m not going to tell you,” he’d say, “Good.” You have to choose your kid for your particular style. After about three weeks of her begging, then we did have this conversation, and since then, we’ve had a more adult, even-keeled assessment of these things.

I’m not the only parent who does that kind of stuff! Evangelical-land is not all “Let them see anything, and the Devil take the hindmost,” or “All rules, and you must never darken the door of a theater.” There are some positions in between, and a lot of us live in them, but the caricature is pretty appalling and accounts in part for the great swing on the vine.

D. The group as a whole is singularly unable, it seems to me, or unwilling to make careful and humble, biblically faithful evaluative judgments as to what is good and what is bad in postmodernism.

What is it in postmodernism that is good and what is it that is simply unacceptable for any historic Christian confessionalism? We could push that one at great length. I’ve talked about it in the book at length, but in my view, that’s one of the most serious weaknesses of all.

E. Some arguments, some positions, some presentations are so historically and definitionally sloppy, the kindest thing I can say about them is they’re manipulative.

My prize piece of evidence in this regard is A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian. Oh, does that subtitle play well!

I mean, “I’m above it all. I take the best of it all.” It plays really well with a certain kind of profile, doesn’t it? In some ways, because it’s destroying mere stereotypes, there is something to be said there. I mean, there are some things to learn from other traditions. Which one of us would want to deny that? On the other hand, when you actually read the arguments in the book, if you know anything about history and how those movements have been framed, they’re enough to seer your eyeballs.

“Why I am evangelical. Because evangelicals have passion, and I love passion.” Nothing about evangelical understanding of the gospel or the solas of the Reformation or evangelistic priorities or its particular views of ecclesiology and all of the flexibility in that regard or its insistence on soteriology over ecclesiology. Nothing. It’s passion. You could say the same about Hitler, couldn’t you? It’s just manipulative. That doesn’t make him an evangelical.

“Why I am Roman Catholic. Because there’s dignity in liturgy, and they take Mary and Holy Communion seriously.” Well, if they want to take Mary seriously, I agree, but the caricature between dismissing Mary as some sort of irrelevant non-entity that is portrayed versus a real veneration for her, is, nevertheless, short of worship.

Quite apart from the fact that I’m an evangelical and I wasn’t brought up in a home that dismissed Mary, not in the slightest. Yet, at the same time insisting that in Scripture there is only one mediator between God and human beings, namely the man Christ Jesus, is a pretty important step to make.

At no point are we encouraged in Scripture to go to Mary because Jesus is a bit of a hard case and Mary is an old softie who will actually get you an inside track. If that’s what is meant, which has been at the heart of a great deal of Mary worship, then there is something that is being lost in the discussion.

If you want to see what happens when Roman Catholicism elevates Mary too far, go and spend a bit of time in Poland. I was brought up in French Canada, and I’ve lived in an intensely Catholic society, but let me tell you, the Quebecer are a bunch of amateurs compared with the place Mary has in a country like Poland and, secondarily, in a country like Slovakia. It is deeply troubling to someone who has an exclusive veneration for Christ. The thing at least has to be raised, doesn’t it?

“Why I am Reformed? Because I believe in the Reformation’s slogan, semper reformanda, “always reforming.” I mean, that’s a great slogan, and we surely always want to be reforming ourselves by the Word of God, but you can scarcely use that to define Reformed thought, can you?

Nothing about the solas. Nothing about the outworking of “by grace alone through faith alone.” Nothing about the locus of the Canon or how it interacts with a particular notion of church government that focuses on alleged apostolic descent through a bishop group and a pope. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Semper reformanda. What that does, then, is authorize constant change as I define change under and in a postmodern world.

At the end of the day, although he says, “Why I am this” and “Why I am that,” he doesn’t have the right to make the claim. It is a manipulative argument. It is not an honest argument. If he actually thinks those things make him any of those things, he really is a foolish man indeed. If he doesn’t think so, he’s a manipulative man. Those are the only options, but they’re not valid arguments, and we shouldn’t be seduced by them.

F. The movement as a whole doesn’t listen very well to the great storyline of Scripture.

The great storyline of Scripture is what gives coherence to theology. Unless you work out what creation means, what the fall has done, what the human problem is, how we must answer to God, what sin is, how God has disclosed himself in great acts, in great truths, in great relationships, and supremely in the person of his Son, and where history is going.… Unless those big things are put down, then a lot of the small pieces are very easily distorted.

One of the leaders, who shall remain nameless, in email communication with me, told me one of his favorite authors was Walter Brueggemann. Now Walter Brueggemann is an immensely creative writer. He’s a very interesting chap to read. I like reading Walter Brueggemann, but there are few writers who I simultaneously enjoy more and want to throttle more frequently than Walter Brueggemann.

The reason for this is that one of Walter Brueggemann’s methodological principles as he handles stories, especially, or Scriptures, generally, is that he refuses to read any particular biblical narrative within the context of the whole book, let alone the whole biblical narrative. For example, when he’s reading Genesis 3 he’s reading Genesis 3 stripped out of Genesis 1 to 3 or Genesis 1 to 11 or all of Genesis or all of the Canon.

As a result, he can reinterpret it in wonderfully suggestive and evocative and creative ways. How this rebellion against God.… “God is a bit of a dictator here in any case, and now there is a newfound freedom that’s found in all of this, because you make good and evil for yourself. This is what makes you become God. Even God admits it. He comes out at the end of the chapter and says, ‘Look! They have become gods like us! They now see good and evil.’ ”

The whole story gets redefined. It’s wonderfully creative. There are some smashing insights, except none of them will work if you just put that story right back in its context. In linguistics we have long been taught a text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text, but in extended narrative the same rules apply.

Brueggemann can get away with all of his creativity very largely because he refuses to ground what he’s giving us of any particular text in the text of the corpus, let alone the text of the Canon. Unless you have that kind of canonical storyline firmly in place, the dangers are, in my judgment, immense.

G. The movement as a whole needs to avoid sectarianism.

I know that will sound like a strange charge since what they are really saying is everybody else is sectarian and they are the ones who are drawing in from everywhere and they don’t want to be sectarian, but historically, of course, a lot of groups have gone down that route.

The Plymouth Brethren didn’t want to have denominations. They were just going to be Christian Brethren, but eventually, they became defined, in fact, by their particular associations of magazines or whatever, and they had degrees of Closed Brethren and Open Brethren. Some Brethren think they’re the only church in town, and so on.

It is difficult to find a non-denominational denomination that is more denominational than many branches of the Plymouth Brethren today, and that has happened again and again and again in time. This group, it seems to me, is simultaneously trying to say it’s the most catholic of all while saying, unless you join them, you really don’t understand the culture and you’re going to be marginalized and left on the side. That strikes me as an astonishingly sectarian approach.

Let me conclude, and you can take this anywhere you want it to go. A year or two ago I was giving some lectures on something or other at a Christian university. Not this one. An undergraduate in the university came to me. He was fourth-year, serious, pretty well read for an undergraduate, thought through. A nice guy. I liked him immediately.

What he said to me, in essence, was, “I hear what you’re saying, but I’ve gotten far enough into the literature on postmodernism and the emerging church that every time I come across a statement in Scripture that has an exclusive claim on truth (‘Unless you believe that’ followed by a proposition) I’m, frankly, uncomfortable.

It just sounds to my young postmodern ears exclusivist, narrow, bigoted, and manipulative, and there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to think that because I do believe the Bible is the Word of God, but I don’t know how to escape it, because that’s my gut reaction every time I come across those sorts of texts. What do I do?”

He’s not the only one. He was merely the most articulate of this new generation that is saying that sort of thing. I told him what I wanted him to do was to go home and use a concordance and make a list of all the biblical passages that used true or truth anywhere and another list that says, “We are convinced that …” or “We know that …” or “You know that …” or “We are persuaded that …” or things like, “I write this to you, Theophilus, that you may be convinced of the things you were told,” and things like that that speak of certainty and so on.

Make a list of a whole lot and read them all through several times. Eventually, that’s what I put in the appendix in my own book. If you don’t read anything else in the book, just go and read those lists. Read them right through. Just read them through very carefully, slowly. Read them right through, and if you’re squirming in embarrassment over them, then I have a question for you that I had for him: What is it that is so skewed in your thinking that you have the right to be embarrassed before the repeated claims of the Word of God?

What this means is you really need to change something in your own epistemology. You need to change something in your own approach so you are comfortable with what Scripture says and rejoice in it because this is what God has disclosed. There’s something screwball about a system that is making tens of thousands of our young people uncomfortable when they read their Bibles. At that point, you see, we really have to go back to basics again and listen carefully to what Scripture says.

All right. I’ve rabbited on long enough. Now is the time for questions, comments, and personal abuse. Let me lead in prayer first.

Our Father, we confess, first of all, we do not understand anything compared with what we ought to understand and we obey even less, so as we try to come to terms with this movement, this conversation, to understand it aright, see it in its diversities, forbid in us either an overbearing condescension or superciliousness or triumphalism ourselves, an unwillingness to learn.

Forbid, also, that we should be too eager to follow every fad that comes by but learn again and again and again and again to rethink and rethink and retest and retest in the light of your most Holy Word. We ask in the name of him who is the Word incarnate, our blessed Jesus, in whose name we pray, amen.

Male: I want to, first of all, thank Don for letting the inner Welshman out for us to enjoy. I’d like to ask the first question while we’re looking for hands. Could you say a little bit more about how the modern, the chastened modern, and the other postmodern epistemologies are divided while our hostility has come down.

Don: Yes. You’re quite right. I said I was going to say something about that, and then I ducked it just because I was running out of time. Modernism does seek truth (there’s no doubt about that), but the kind of chastened modernism you get in the best of such thinkers recognizes the limitations imposed by human finiteness, the limitations imposed by the evidence we have by the limitations and corruptions and foolishnesses of our theory, huge discussions of how scientific theory corrects itself with time, and so on.

At the end of the day, even in a modernist framework it’s possible to come out with a kind of chastened modernism that recognizes that because we’re finite, we’re not omniscient, we do make mistakes, quite apart from biblical insights into our foolishness and our moral cupidity and things like that, our knowledge in some sense must be held in a certain kind of suspension. Our science is, in principle, corrigible. Likewise, the claims I make with respect to what I understand of Scripture …

I do want to say I believe firmly Scripture teaches the deity of Christ. I also want to say, in principle, that doctrine, like any other, is corrigible by Scripture. I think at this point you’re going to have a hard job correcting me by Scripture, but at the end of the day, I want to say that. There’s a kind of chastened humility that confesses truth (“We believe that …” “I know that …”), but it is the knowing and the believing that is appropriate to a finite human being who is not making claims of omniscience.

On the other side, on the postmodern side, you can begin with a strong form of postmodernism that is so locked into the view that all claims are merely totalizing, in Michel Foucault’s terms. They have no necessary referent outside. Language is self-referential, as in Derrida. You can get the strongest possible forms of that so at the end of the day you really can’t say something objectively true about something that is extratextual very easily.

On the other hand, there are softer forms of postmodernism today which embark on some form of critical realism (I don’t like the expression much, but I understand what it means) or that acknowledge you can approach truth asymptotically. You can’t know truth in the same degree or completeness or totalism that only omniscience can know, but you can approach it asymptotically so that you can say truly, within the limitations of what knowledge means in a finite world, that certain things are true.

Then you would also have to say, as soon as you’ve admitted that, that our asymptotic approach is so far out for some domains, either because we haven’t known enough or we haven’t thought about it, that although there are a lot of human beings who say a lot of stupid things, if you’ve looked at it and seen how complicated it is you might be inclined to be far more humble in your claim, and so on. That could all be worked into a chastened kind of postmodernism.

Suddenly, you have this coming from two quite different sides coming to the place where we are admitting we can know something as human beings but that our knowledge is corrigible, that we are not making claims of omniscience, that we are shaped for good and evil by our culture, by our language, by our surroundings and so on and still make claims for knowledge. Then, within that framework, you can then say certain kinds of knowledge are absolutely essential for saving faith, for example.

Male: A quick follow-up. If you were going to send McLaren an epistemology book for Christmas, which would it be?

Don: Undoubtedly, Vanhoozer’s Is There a Meaning in This Text? I think that’s a complicated question, too, in all fairness. I have recommended that book to maybe 20 or 30 people over the last few years. I’ll send you the bill for the commissions in due course. On the other hand, there are other people to whom I would not recommend that book, for all kinds of reasons.

It might be too complicated for some, or it already assumes quite a lot of Christian givens for others. Sometimes people need demolition jobs. I’ve sent some people Ellis from Princeton, who is not a Christian but has some scathing things to say about postmodern readings of texts. Sometimes you need a demolition job first before you can get to the next stage.

Some people come out of a science background, and I’ve even (may God have mercy on my soul) recommended an essay I wrote, “Maintaining Scientific and Theological Truths in a Postmodern World,” because a lot of people have been working on things like that in this day and age. I’m just one of many. What I would recommend would really depend on who it is I’m recommending something to.