Keeping Up with the Conversation: Understanding the Emergent Movement and the Emerging Church

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on understanding the emergent movement and the emerging church in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.

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The phrase the emerging church or the emergent church really only goes back about 15 years. That’s all. It was promoted initially by two men who have since diverged radically. We’ll come to that in due course. Those of you who have read my book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, I warn you now I’m going to repeat some of the material in there, because some in the room won’t have read any bit of it, and I have to fill in some of the gaps.

When the movement began, emerging and emergent were synonyms. Nowadays, emergent tends to be associated with the name of Brian McLaren, whose name will resurface, and those immediately around him, and emerging seems to refer to everything else. The movement today is astonishingly diverse.

For some people, at the level of mere description, it means being an evangelical in some sort of ordinary mold and adding a few candles, reciting the Apostles’ Creed, and maybe having a journaling center over in a corner. For others, it’s a pretty major rewriting of a lot of theology, yet the whole spectrum calls itself emerging. The heart of the issue from those who are inside the camp can be put briefly. A new culture is emerging. There are changes happening.

Just as when we train missionaries to go overseas to a new culture we help them to rethink how to address Buddhists, for example, or how to address Hindus in northern India or how to come to terms with the different forms of Islam, what you find, let’s say, in Morocco versus what you find in Kyrgyzstan, which are really quite different animals in many respects.… We recognize these cultural differences and see that there are changes and adaptations that have to be made.

Now, the argument is, our own culture is changing so fast that, in a sense, we have to prepare everybody to become missionaries. Hence, the emerging church movement has often been associated with another word: missional. To my knowledge, that word was first coined in 1989 on the lips of Tim Keller, where he meant something a little bit different, but now it has come to have a wide set of associations.

The emerging culture, it is argued, must be addressed and met by an emerging church, the church that is adapting to meet this emerging culture. It’s a missionary enterprise, and our concerns are missional: how to speak the Word of God to a new generation, often characterized by that very plastic word called postmodern.

Now of all of the slippery terms in the English language, that’s probably the slipperiest of all. That doesn’t mean it means nothing. It just means it has a lot of different associations depending on who is using the term. By and large, the emerging church crowd see themselves as over against two different trajectories. I won’t say opponents, although sometimes their tone makes you think of opponents.

The one trajectory is what they would call simply the traditional church. That probably includes most in this room. The second trajectory they see themselves over against is the big seeker-sensitive crowd, the megachurch, seeker-sensitive, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels sort of crowd. They would say that the traditional crowd is interested in truth, proposition, getting converted before in any sense you can get in.

It’s linear. It’s direct. It’s propositional. It focuses on the antiquarian. It assumes a whole lot of things about knowledge, and so on, that the postmodern generation doesn’t buy into, especially the Baby Boomers before the Gen X crowd. They see themselves as over against the Gen X crowd … the Rick Warren crowd … over against showmanship, the big presentation, the terrific graphics on the screen, the top-flight orchestration, and a kind of pageant.

Over against that they want, from their own point of view, their own perspective: authenticity, fellowship, intimacy, welcoming people in before they’re told they’re out, having people come in, as it were, before they’re given a whole lot of the truth that we perhaps would say makes them in. If the traditionalists say, “Believe in order to be in,” the new crowd starts saying, “Come in in order to learn how to believe,” and this in the name of missional concerns.

Out of this, then, has come a stress on the following things. Now this is not a universal list. Some pick and choose from this list, but this will do to get the discussion rolling. There’s a lot of emphasis on feelings and affections as opposed to reductionistic linear truth. We come to know things by a lot of different ways, it is argued, and not simply by reason.

Hence, also an emphasis on experience over against proposition, inclusion versus exclusion, being very reluctant to tell others that they’re wrong, and if we do so, to do so in a context in which we’re all wrong. We’re all equally wrong. We’re all horribly wrong, but not, “You’re wrong, and I have a message that’s right.”

Often it succumbs to a new definition of tolerance. I’ll come back to that one. Tolerance is not a word that has always meant the same thing across the ages. In fact, next year I hope to finish writing a little book on tolerance just to track out how tolerance has changed across time. The emerging crowd has bought into a certain definition of tolerance that I shall question in a few moments.

There’s a lot of emphasis on participation, a lot of talk about narratives. The Bible is a narrative, and you have a narrative, and the trick is how to sort of read your narrative into the Bible’s narrative and get the Bible’s narrative into you. Anything to avoid talking about truth propositions and linear thought, so we now deal in the domain of narratives. Instead of preaching with three points, you now have a narrative with three moves, and that sort of thing.

It tends to be suspicious of individualism. It tends to be anti-individualistic. It is concerned about consumerism, and increasingly, its most powerful voices are very “green,” very interested in ecology and the like as part of Christian faithfulness. It speaks much of witness of life rather than witness of word. It works out pretty frequently in suspicion of hierarchies, and at various times it has worked through the plasticity of discussion.

There was, at the beginning of the movement, a website that is now gone called TheOoze.com. Isn’t that a great name? The idea was that anybody could get in there and sort of slither around to different positions and say anything and comment anything and make any comment, whether it was on homosexuality or doctrine. There was no solid voice. There was no witness or confessionalism that was the bottom line, “This is what we believe.” This was TheOoze.com.

Nowadays, although some of the leaders don’t like to call it a movement and prefer to call it a conversation, nevertheless, it is a movement with its own websites, its own featured speakers blurbing each other’s books (as we all do, from various corners), and with their own publications, their own conferences. It is, in fact, what anybody else would call a movement even if they don’t want to use the word.

Now it’s very important to recognize that usually when large movements like this come along, they’re not either directly from the throne room of God or right from the pit of hell. It would sometimes be nice, I think, if they were unambiguously one or the other, because then you could either bless them or damn them and get on with life, but most movements that come along require discernment and evenhanded fairness, evaluation.

Before you come along and just slam everything you don’t like, you have to ask, “What’s good in this? What’s helpful? What’s at least clarifying?’ Even if you finally come out with a generally negative evaluation, it’s also important to recognize that when something comes along that you find somewhat distasteful, it is frequently showing up a weakness in the church.

In other words, you can sometimes get a huge emphasis on, let’s say, the Holy Spirit and experience if you have a church that never talks about the Holy Spirit and doesn’t say anything about Christian experience. Then you get a pendulum swing. Instead of people looking for the center, they swing off to some extreme in some other direction. This happens in many, many domains of life and thought and morality. It happens in church history again and again. It’s easy to document.

So one of the things we ought at least to ask before we start venturing some criticisms is, “What is this movement telling us about confessional evangelicalism in North America?” Let me list some areas where they’re not entirely wrong, although even in these areas where they are more right than wrong I have some questions.

First, they are trying to read their times. They’re not merely thinking defensively. They are trying to read their times. Cultures are different. There is a need for a cultural hermeneutic. The times they are changing, and they’re changing fast, whether we like it or not. Now that doesn’t mean, we’ll see in due course, that we change our gospel, but they are changing.

You can get at this in a lot of different ways, but let’s go back to my missionary model. For about 10 years, I worked with the World Evangelical Fellowship. It was only part time, but part of my job was to call senior pastors and theologians together from all of the continents of the world (except Antarctica; we never had a penguin). They came from different denominations and different backgrounds, but they were confessionally pretty strong, and they were experienced, and so forth.

I assigned papers on an agreed topic. They wrote them and sent them back in. Then I made copies and sent them all back out. Then we met somewhere together, usually in Britain because London is a great air center, and then we talked through all of these papers at great length and took criticisms from everybody about everything. They went back and revised them. Then they came back to me, and I edited them down, and out popped a book. We did it five times and produced five books over ten years, one book every two years.

What was fascinating was just watching these blokes come together in the room before you actually start the discussion. In comes the German and shakes everybody’s hand. If he goes out to the car to pick up something, he shakes everybody’s hand on the way out too, very likely, and when he comes back in shakes them again.

Then in come some from the Latin countries. “Brother!” Mwah! Mwah! Well, I can manage that. I’m French Canadian in background. Just give me a little warning and I can crank that one up. The Arab world is a little different. There it’s more commonly three kisses, and I never remember which side to start on, which sometimes gets embarrassing when you get close.

Then in comes the Indian, and it’s a lot of this. Then the Japanese, hands down and it’s bowing, but how far down you bow depends on who has more education, who has more money, who’s older, and who has the more prestigious job, and I never remember all of the rules. You just bow low and be done with it.

I shall not soon forget the time when Pablo Perez from Mexico, all 300 pounds of him, descended on a lovely little Englishman in a Harris Tweed coat in a corner. He was descending on him to give him a glorious buss on both cheeks, and the little Englishman, whose name you would know if I mentioned it, looked up and said, “Have we been introduced?” And in comes the American and says, “Hi, everybody! Sorry I’m late.”

That’s just the culture before you start the discussion. There are cultural differences, and we’re becoming more familiar with that in our multinational cities today. There are some things to learn about these sorts of differences. Then when you get into discussion.… I was always in the chair, so I was trying to make sure everybody had his or her say. I recall on one occasion I turned to a lovely Japanese man who shall remain nameless. He hadn’t said, “Boo” for about half an hour.

I said, “What do you think about this question?” Well, in a shame and honor culture, you mustn’t word anything in such a way that anybody gets put down. It has to be worded so that nobody loses face. So he says, “Well, I have been wondering if it is possible that the blessed apostle Paul might perhaps have been suggesting such-and-such.” It’s understated. Nobody loses face. He’s not saying that Joe Bloggs is wrong.

The guy from Northern Europe says, “Oh come on! That’s a stupid exegesis. Clearly, what the Word said is such-and-such.” Then the poor little Japanese guy is so intimidated he wonders what sort of band of barbarians he has fallen into and he won’t say “Boo” for another half an hour, and that’s before we’ve really had very much serious discussion. Isn’t that the way it works?

There are changes going on in the culture. Don’t kid yourself that they’re not. If we could only just all be like me, we’ll be happy. So insofar as this group is at least asking the questions, whether you like all of their answers, don’t write them off too fast. Second, they are concerned to push for authenticity. Now that’s a slippery word. I know that. One person’s authenticity is another person’s ridiculous behavior, but let’s be honest with ourselves.

There are Sundays when we come out of our churches, and although we’re barely willing to admit it even to ourselves, we wonder where God is. We’ve gone through all of the motions and done all of the right things and nobody has shocked anybody, but haven’t there been times when you’ve come out of church services and just felt that maybe God chose to be on the other side of the universe that weekend? Deep down you feel guilty and all the rest.

Insofar as these people are at least raising questions about authenticity and corporate worship and in relationships with God, it’s not a bad question to ask, although I respectfully submit I think most of their answers in this domain are wrong. Third, there is an attempt on their part to understand some of the parameters of postmodernism around us, and not all of their analysis is wrong in this regard. I think some of it is, but we’ll come to that.

Fourth, many of the best of them, though not all of them, have concern to reach what might be called the “way-outs,” the people who are way out there. There are certain segments of our society that are largely un-penetrated by the gospel. The media, by and large (there are some wonderful exceptions, but the media, Hollywood); often our biggest urban centers on the coasts, the university world; often the arts. There are a lot more science types than there are arts types who are believers.

I once did an informal survey. It was entirely informal. There’s no scientific accuracy to the figures I’m about to give you. This is just impressionistic, but I suspect that if a careful study were done, this would be pretty close. I started looking at churches that were next door to major universities and then checked out both the students and the faculty who were attending those churches.

What departments did they come from? Did they come from, on the one hand, computer science, physics, geography, biology, mathematics, business, and all that kind of area, or the soft sciences, the social sciences, including English literature, history, social science, anthropology, and so on? Then I worked it out on a per capita basis for the size of the departments in the university.

My experience has been that something between six to one and eighteen to one come from the former group, which is another way of saying that the artsy types, by and large, are not being addressed with the gospel very effectively or very well, and many of us don’t have a clue how to go about it. We despise them, and they despise us. How do you beat that? It’s not a bad question to raise some of those concerns.

Then, finally, there is among them (again, this can so easily be perverted) a certain kind of willingness to question tradition. Some wag has said that the last seven words of the church will be, “But we’ve always done it this way before.” The only piece of liturgy some people know is, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and evermore shall be, world without end. Amen.”

So a willingness to question tradition and seek, at least nominally, to go back to Scripture is not all bad, even though, let’s be quite frank, sometimes they’re turfing out the baby with the bathwater, as we’ll see. There are some things to learn from tradition too. Now before I go on, let me probe a little farther. Let me just ask first, because I don’t know you very well. I’m from the frozen North. As they say in Canada, we belong to the “frozen chosen.”

How many of you are comfortable with what you know of postmodernism? Do I need to unpack postmodernism? How many think that I need to unpack a bit more of postmodernism, and how many here are so tired with it you don’t need any more unpacking? Let’s take the first one. How many want some more on postmodernism? About half. Well, let me say something very briefly about it at least.

I think that modernism and postmodernism (premodernism too, for that matter) are all most helpfully discussed in the domain of epistemology; that is, how you think you know anything. People sometimes discuss postmodernism in the domain of consumerism and style of life and all of that, but I think that actually those words at their core have to do primarily with how you think you know. In a premodern period.… For our purposes, that will be from the time of the biblical documents, the first century, all the way to just about this side of the Reformation. Inevitably, these overlap.

In a premodern world, most people in the culture believe there is a God who knows everything, and that means all human knowledge is necessarily a subset of his knowledge … by definition, if he knows everything. That means all of our coming to know anything is in some way bound up with revelation; that is, how God, who knows everything, lets us, his finite image bearers, come to know some small part of what he knows. That is what premodern acquisition of knowledge looks like. It’s premodernism.

That could come about by how God discloses himself in nature (so you have the rudiments of science) or what God has disclosed in his Word (so you have the Bible); how God may do so through the life of Christians who can teach lessons by their living, borne along by the Spirit; how God bears these things by his Spirit into our lives in conviction and illumination and a whole lot of other things.

All of that is part of a premodern world. It begins with God. It sounds wonderfully biblical so far, doesn’t it? Let’s all become premoderns. I sometimes say I don’t really belong to the sixteenth century; I belong to the first. Yet because we’re sinners, we can corrupt any system, and there’s ample evidence of how we managed to corrupt the premodern structure of things.

It can be seen to be so open that the angels are doing their bit and spirits are doing their bit, and the relationship between this God who’s doing things and revealing things in this ordered world of his is so plastic that science really isn’t possible, and there is a constant drift toward the magical and the, quite frankly, super-spiritual, the magical that somehow begins to love relics and incantations and so on. I’m not saying it has to go that way; I’m just saying that historically it did go that way pretty often.

Modernism is often associated, in the first instance, with a man like RenÈ Descartes, a French Catholic thinker, who was not himself a skeptic, but he noticed that in the University of Paris and elsewhere there were rising numbers of skeptics in the first half of the seventeenth century who didn’t buy into this God-centered universe in the world. They were either deists or some few of them were actually atheists.

So he was trying to find some way to bring them to solid Catholic faith. He couldn’t use the old arguments, because they required shared assumptions that were not held by these atheists anymore. So instead, what he did was doubt everything systematically to see if he could come to some solid basis that would enable him to build up entire structures of thought.

Of course, then he came up with what every first-year student in philosophy learns: “I think; therefore I am.” In fact, he tied this to a whole lot of other things I don’t need to go into, and nobody buys into his more complex philosophical structures today, but that’s a useful way to begin. Notice, then, how this becomes a kind of slogan that almost defines the shift from premodernism to modernism. Here are six things very quickly.

First, it begins with I. I think. It doesn’t begin with God and his knowledge; it begins with me and my knowledge. Therefore, I’m assessing God, not God revealing something to me. I stand in judgment of God. Now the arguments for the existence of God have to begin just with my smallness and finitude.

Second, he was looking for foundations. He was looking for basic bedrock, and from that he could build everything up from there. It was what came to be called a foundational structure.

Third, it assumed that truth is findable by such individuals. We can actually find the truth if we can have a finite knower, seeking for the truth, looking for a decent foundation that everybody agrees to. Truth is achievable, knowable, and good.

Fourth, it was based on methodological rigor. You have a foundation. Then you have really good methods. Every discipline has its methods, whether it’s history or organic chemistry or nuclear physics. If you write a dissertation, even to this day, you have to establish what your method is, and your execution of that method has to be rigorous.

Even if you get good results, if you’ve been methodologically sloppy, you flunk, because the whole heritage of modernism is to be rigorous at the level of method. Then it was held that truth is transcultural. So in the domain of chemistry, if you discover that a water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen and you discover that in Quito, Ecuador, you know what? It’s also true in Nashville, Tennessee.

It doesn’t matter where it is. True truth is true everywhere for every culture, for every place, for every language, for every time, and that makes a kind of camaraderie, an international core of scholars who all come to see what the truth is. Truth is transcultural, transhistorical, translinguistic, transethnic.

Then, increasingly, it also became materialistic. That is to say, it moved increasingly toward thinking that all that is is in the material world, but it didn’t start out that way. Certainly Descartes himself was a Catholic. Now then, the move to postmodernism severely modifies all of those six, and if you see that, then you have a good flavor of what postmodernism is.

It starts with the I all right. It recognizes the I, but it thinks, “Yeah, but the I is knowing. The I is so different.” Look at me. I’m a 60-year-old white middle-class North American male. That means I was not brought up in a thatched roof in Papua New Guinea with a grandfather who was a cannibal. My sense of humor is different. My language is different. My categories for thinking.… They’re all different.

So the I is so different that the way we think, then, is surely going to be different. If you know different languages, you know that’s the case. I was brought up in French and English. There is no word in French, believe it or not, for home. If you say, “I’m going home,” you say, Je vais chez moi or Je vais chez nous. There is au foyer, the hearth, the foyer, but no actual word for home. You get around it. There is no single word in French for home, so you say it other ways.

What do you do in Japan? There’s no distinctive word for sin in Japanese, so if you say in Japanese, “All men are sinners” (at least that’s what you think you’re saying), they hear you as saying, “All men are criminals.” They have no distinction between crime and sin, which means you’re busy trying to say, “Well, all men are criminals in the mind of God.” Well, does that just mean God is a bit perverse in his assessment since we’re not really criminals? Do you see? There’s a lot of unpacking to be done.

So the postmodern looks at the I and says, “Yeah, but the I is so finite and so limited that inevitably it skews how you know things.” Moreover, all of the foundations we built are themselves culturally constructed, so postmodernism becomes massively anti-foundational. There are no commonalities. If you argue that there are any, then you’re just being naÔve.

Instead of assuming that truth is achievable and good, postmodernism in the strong sense (there’s a weaker sense we’ll come to) argues, “Well, there’s truth for your heritage and cultural group, but there might be a different structure on truth in another cultural group too. To think that there’s a universal truth is not achievable, and even if there were, it wouldn’t be good, because it would merely be manipulative.”

As a result, there are different methodologies when people learn. Methodological rigor is not it. Even in your knowledge of people who have come to faith, how many have come to faith, a genuine knowledge of God, in your experience, by a strictly logical, coherent, well-ordered apologetic? I can think of a few I’ve led to Christ that way, but not most.

Most throw in some sort of screwball experience the Holy Spirit has used, or there’s just no traction anywhere until they lose a spouse or a child, or there’s no traction, and then they see some horrible evil, and suddenly they have a category for evil they didn’t have before and they have to do something with it. This happens all the time.

So much of our acquisition of knowledge even in the scientific domain is not just linear. You accumulate a whole lot of information and … Flash! “Oh, I wonder if it’s that way?” As a result, those who worry about epistemology start recognizing that methodological rigor is not all that easy. Methodological testing after the fact is a little easy, but methodological rigor in acquiring knowledge is not.

Therefore, the view that truth is transcultural and transhistorical goes right out the window. Interestingly enough, this postmodern approach to knowledge then is inclined increasingly to say it’s not just the materialistic world after all, so you get all kinds of Touched by an Angel-type things today and sÈances, a return of spiritism and astrology, because they’re all legitimate forms of acquiring knowledge.

There are so many stupid programs, from my modernist perspective, on today. You wonder how many people actually believe that’s what the universe is really like. Do they view it as fantasy or do they view this fantasy as somehow reflecting some real reality? I suspect there are a lot in the younger generation who think it’s probably true. I know all kinds of people who claim that they’re Christians who wouldn’t go out the door in the morning without checking their horoscope first. Where do you start with all of this?

I’ve said a variety of fairly positive things, but now let me raise some pretty deep questions. First, in my judgment, the emerging church movement does not understand very well the contemporary discussion on postmodernism. For all that it likes to refer to it constantly, it doesn’t understand it very well, partly because there’s an awful lot of postmodernism today that belongs to this sort of radical camp that thinks there’s no truth out there that’s really knowable, no objective truth.

But there are a lot of.… I don’t know what to call them except chastened postmodernists, more humble postmodernists. On the one hand, you have to say, at one level or another, the postmodernists are right. The postmodernists are arguing that we look at things from a certain perspective. We’re “perspectivalists.” The only non-perspectivalist in the universe is God, because to be a non-perspectivalist you have to see things from every perspective, and only omniscience can do that.

The real question is.… If you are an admitted perspectivalist because you’re finite, does that mean you can’t know the truth? The strong postmodernist will tend in that direction to say that you can’t know the truth. The soft postmodernist will tend to say, “Yeah, you can, but you have to walk humbly. You sort of sidle up to it, and there are a lot of lessons to be careful of.” Well, shouldn’t we Christians admit that?

Nowadays, there’s a lot of literature out there of soft postmodernism that, quite frankly, I applaud. I think it’s pretty good. I mean, I’ve heard some modernists who are awfully sure about a lot of things they really shouldn’t be quite so sure about, haven’t you? But the soft postmodernists who are most careful will also talk about different ways in which you can know things truly, even if you can never know them with the kind of certainty that belongs only to the God who sees everything.

We should never, ever be claiming the knowledge of omniscience. Even in eternity I will not know as God knows, because even in eternity I will not be omniscient, but we can know truly. We can know some things truly even if we cannot know anything exhaustively. Exhaustive knowledge in perfect harmony and in its perfect relationship to absolutely everything in the universe.… That belongs to omniscience.

But the emerging church movement uses as their foils all the time the strong postmodernists, so as a result, they are incredibly reluctant to talk very much about truth. They just don’t like to talk about truth. They’ll talk about experience and confessionalism and who knows what, but they won’t talk about truth.

Some, likewise, in the so-called radical orthodoxy camp have a similar sort of stance. There’s a recent book by James Smith, for example, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? When he finally gets through saying what he thinks.… You know, “We hold to the confession that our fathers held, the confession of Scripture, which confesses that Jesus is Lord, and this confession …”

I found whole paragraphs with six and seven uses of confession in them, but at no point will he actually get off this word confession and say, “And the confession we hold is true.” So you hold it because Luther held it or Calvin or Saint Augustine or you held it because Chrysostom held it or because the New Testament writers held it. We hold to the confession that was confessed.

At what point do you say, “No, that’s not enough, because they could have been mistaken”? At what point do you say, “No, we hold to this confession, which has been held across the sweep of the church, because it is true”? The soft postmodernists will have a place for that. The hard postmodernists just won’t.

There are so many in the emerging church movement who only interact with the hard postmodernists, and thus I claim, with all due respect, that most of them really don’t know the discussion on postmodernism today, which is far more sophisticated than they’re allowing. Moreover, one has to be careful. People in American universities are still reading the French theorists Jacques Derrida, FranÁois Lyotard, and the others.

I spend a fair bit of time lecturing in France and in Geneva. There is no university student in France today who reads Derrida. Derrida is dead as a dodo, but now that he has been translated he’s still a big cheese in North American universities. I want to say, “Give me a break. Get over it. It’s yesterday’s news.”

This does not mean there are no traces left of what we call postmodernism in France. There are, but almost nobody speaks of postmodernism. In fact, they hate the word postmodernism. They speak of la postmodernitÈ, postmodernity, because if it’s an –ism, it’s not postmodern. An –ism presupposes you have a whole structure, and you can’t know the structures anyway, so how can you speak of postmodernism?

Recently, I read a book I picked up a year ago in Geneva written by France’s most well-known philosopher. He’s not only an academic philosopher, but he writes philosophy for undergraduates. This is a wonderful book. Unfortunately, it’s only in French. He works through a whole lot of systems, five of them, in which he wants to know if they teach you how to live. In fact, his book is called Apprendre ‡ vivre, “Learning to Live.”

He says philosophy is not in the business of simply telling you how to doubt and be skeptical about everything. Philosophy, rightly taught, is trying to teach you how to live. So there are Platonic systems and Christian systems and Marxist systems, but a whole philosophical structure is trying to teach you how to live. Apprendre ‡ vivre. So he works through some of these, and he’s very fair in his description of them all, and then he shows what’s the matter with them.

When he comes to la postmodernitÈ, postmodernity, he’s very critical. What’s interesting is when he comes to Christianity. He has a whole chapter.… His middle chapter is on Christianity, and it’s not a bad chapter in terms of its accuracy of depicting what the Bible actually says. He says some things I don’t quite agree with, but most of his descriptions of Christianity are pretty shrewd, pretty accurate.

Do you know what his biggest criticism …? In fact, it’s his only criticism in this long chapter in the middle. Do you know what he says? The only problem with it, he says, is it’s too good to be true. Isn’t that remarkable? The only reason I’m telling you this is not because of what he said about Christianity but because of what he says about postmodernity.

There are rigorous thinkers out of a secular camp who are also picking this thing apart nowadays, and for us to be following church leaders here who are still treating Jacques Derrida and people like that as if they’re the cat’s whiskers and have the final word on where the culture is going and all of that, they’re already out of date. Movements change. That’s my first point.

Second, they do not understand modernism very well either. If you read through their books, they’re constantly saying nice things about postmodernism. There may be a little footnote every once in a while to give them a little slap on the wrist, but basically, postmodernists are good; modernists are bad.

It’s hard to find them saying anything good about modernists. Modernists are responsible for world war. They’re absolutists. They’re intolerant. They’re miserable. They think antithetically. “I have the truth; you don’t have the truth.” That generates war. If we could only be tolerant and not be certain about anything, then we wouldn’t fight about anything, and that would get rid of all the war and the hatred and the genocide.

Modernism is responsible for everything, because every modernist wants certainty about absolutely everything, and because they want certainty about absolutely everything, therefore we generate all the hatred. Whoa! Back off. Take a deep breath. When I first started coming across this stuff a number of years ago, I started just skimming some of my favorite modern authors and pointing out all of the places in them where they talked about all of the things they don’t know and all of the things we couldn’t know and there’s not information for.

Not all people in the modern period thought in absolutist categories. They thought there were different levels of ability to know things depending on how much evidence there was, and so on. I have a long list of writers like that. So many of the emerging church folks are thinking in such antithetical terms … “Modernists bad; postmodernists good, especially the extreme ones” … they’ve set up a dichotomy that just isn’t realistic to history.

At the end of the day, it’s bad history before it’s bad theology. It’s bad understanding of the entire Western tradition. They’ve set up a target. It’s a bit like a Rambo movie. You have to have a lot of bad guys so you can shoot at them. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a Rambo there in the first place? So you have to have a lot of nasty modernists so the postmodernists can come along and teach you the right way.

What I’m saying is that in reality, it’s a messy world out there, and there are just as many modernists in the corpus of literature that I read who walk with a certain kind of humility as there are postmodernists. Some of the most intolerant writers I’ve read are postmodernists who are trying to be very intolerant about getting across their postmodernism. In France they wouldn’t call it an –ism anyway, for that very reason.

Let me push just a little bit farther on this one. One of the people I did not mention in my book, because my book is already four or five years old, was a chap called Bell in Grand Rapids. When I wrote the book, he was a little more conservative than most emerging people, and his church was only about 1,000, which by some of those standards wasn’t all that much. Today he’s speaking every weekend about 10,000. He’s one of the big guru names in all of this.

Are you familiar with him? He has done some interesting things. He has done a whole lot of video clips that he calls NOOMA, which sort of rots my socks, because that’s not a very good translation of pneuma, which means spirit. What he’s trying to get is sort of an Anglicized word. Instead of P-N-E-U-M-A he has N-O-O-M-A. My perfectionist tendencies lost him right there.

But I would fully acknowledge that some of those clips are brilliant. I mean, they really are very clever, very insightful, but I am convinced, nevertheless, having been up to Grand Rapids a few times, that one of the reasons his numbers are what they are is because he’s in Grand Rapids. I’m not quite sure it would work in New York City. In fact, I’m jolly sure it wouldn’t.

What is Grand Rapids made up of besides book publishers? It’s made up of vast numbers of Dutch Reformed believers. CRC, RCA, some Presbyterians. Reformed churches on every corner and half a dozen in between, some of them very substantial. Whether you’re from the Reformed tradition yourself or not, a lot of these churches do a pretty good job at catechizing people.

So they not only have something like the Heidelberg Confession or the Westminster Confession, depending on the particular tradition, but they have catechisms. They bring up their children in it, and the children’s variety of them, so children are brought up with a basic knowledge of the Bible. Their Sunday schools are more content-full than most Sunday schools of other traditions, and so on.

So they have all been brought up on this, but in recent years they’ve tended to assume an awful lot. When you have that many CRC Reformed churches in one neighborhood, after a while certain things get assumed, and some things may get out just a wee bit. What happens is along comes a chap like Bell, and he seems to be infusing everything with insight and lovely skits and contemporary videos and life, so people start going there. This sounds really realistic. It sounds really wonderful.

As time has progressed, he has moved himself more and more away from a Reformed heritage to more and more openness theology and all kinds of things that weren’t there when he began, but I’m persuaded that a lot of people have moved over and read him in the best possible light because they’re bringing their Christian culture with them.

In other words, he shows a little clip on one of his NOOMA videos on forgiveness, let’s say, that would be completely gospel-free to anybody who’s biblically illiterate, but if you bring in your Christian assumptions of what forgiveness looks like because you know what Christ was doing on the cross and you’re making the right confessions already, you read your Christian assumptions into that video, and you don’t see just how empty it is of real substance because you’ve brought all your Christian catechism with you.

If you dump that same ministry with its same emphases in exactly the same format in the middle of New York City, where it’s pretty hard to find too many crypto-Presbyterians (except in Redeemer Presbyterian), then suddenly they wouldn’t have the same sort of categories as they’re reading all of this material. I am claiming, then, that there is a serious ignorance of modernism here that is pretty distorting, however unwittingly.

Third, there has been so far very little effort to sort out where postmodernism should be praised and where it should be confronted and confuted, not catered to. The last thing you and I must do in facing the pressures of postmodernism is retreat to modernism as if modernism were given by God. At the end of the day it’s not. Modernism is still an –ism. It’s a structure of epistemology that can be read more or less in a Christian frame of reference and can be read in a pretty non-Christian materialistic frame of reference too.

There’s nothing particularly sanctified about modernism, so if we don’t like something in postmodernism, we shouldn’t be retreating to modernism. Any –ism, unless it comes right from the throne room of God, is going to be some mixture of truth and error … of truth, because God gives grace commonly to all kinds of people so they see some things truly despite themselves … with some error all mixed in.

Unless everything is brought finally to the test of Scripture and the mind of Christ, of course there’s going to be error, but what the emerging church hasn’t done, by and large, is come to postmodernism and asked a whole lot of critical questions. Where are the drifts in postmodernism helpful, clarifying, reasonably faithful to Scripture, and where are they dangerous, silly, and even idolatrous? It just does not ask that sort of critical question.

Perhaps in no domain is this truer than in thinking about tolerance, so let me say just a word about that. Tolerance, as I’ve said, has meant different things in different times in history, but most of us, until about 25 years ago, operated with an understanding of tolerance that essentially came from another Frenchman called Voltaire. Voltaire at the time of the French Revolution said, “I may detest what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That was tolerance.

So you have to disagree with somebody before you allow them still to speak. That’s tolerance. The new definition of tolerance that increasingly prevails is you can’t speak badly about anybody. You cannot say that somebody else is wrong, at least in certain domains. Nowadays, the UN Charter has a line in there, and the Canadian government recently got a statement of this effect too …

It says something like, “We tolerate everything except intolerance.” My brain hurts when I try to figure that one out, because if what they mean by intolerance is saying anything bad about anybody, then you start persecuting those who say anything bad about anybody. At that point, you yourself are being intolerant, but you never condemn yourself for that, because they’re the ones who are intolerant. That’s why you’re persecuting them.

The new brand of tolerance is intellectually bankrupt and morally perverse. You need to see why in both cases. It’s intellectually bankrupt because it’s not coherent. You cannot speak meaningfully of tolerance until you have disagreement. How does a Marxist come to a capitalist and say, “I tolerate you; I don’t disagree with anything you say”? It doesn’t make sense.

You can only speak of a Marxist tolerating a capitalist or vice versa, or a Christian tolerating a Muslim or vice versa, when you start saying, “Quite frankly, I disagree with you, but I fully defend your right and privilege to speak.” You have to disagree with them before you can tolerate them. Otherwise, I don’t know what tolerance means. It’s not tolerance at all. You have to disagree with them first. So it’s intellectually bankrupt, and it’s morally perverse, precisely because it then begins to be intolerant of anybody who doesn’t buy into their view of tolerance.

In my view, sociologically, this is one of the most dangerous things we’re now facing in Western culture, because in the name of tolerance, there are increasing pressures on people not to say that somebody else is wrong. If you do, you can be slapped with fines and lawsuits and on and on. I would want to argue that if we’re going to claim any freedoms.… And who knows what the Lord will do in his sovereignty? I’m not trying to cause a panic or anything like that. God is still sovereign. He rules as he wills in the heavens.

Nevertheless, insofar as we can actually help things along in the political arena, we need to fight for a kind of tolerance that allows people to disagree strongly but civilly, to say that somebody else is wrong and still affirm them as people made in the image of God, to say that a position we find, quite frankly, is detestable but insist they have the right to defend it, and so on. If we lose that, we will lose most of the freedoms we’ve come to associate with the Western heritage.

Now those freedoms are not the final cat’s whiskers in any case. I mean, Christians have been persecuted for a long time, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get a bit of our share. In fact, a friend of mine in Britain recently visited a church in Malawi, and one of the senior brothers there said to him, “The difference between you in Britain and us is this: in both countries Christians are a despised minority. The trouble is you don’t realize it yet.”

There’s some truth to that. There really is some truth to that. That shouldn’t make us go fearful or introspective or negative or defensive. It simply means that we align ourselves with the saints in every generation, try to be faithful, and speak boldly but civilly, courteously, out of Christian love always.

Fourth, many of postmodernism’s emerging church leading people are terribly sloppy about history, coherence, and a number of other things. My favorite example is McLaren’s book 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.

He has a chapter for each one on why he’s this and why he’s that. He believes in a generous orthodoxy. He belongs to all of them. Isn’t that wonderful? It’s so appealing to the postmodern mind. “I’m above the whole game.” Read the book. If you have any sort of theological discernment at all, it’s not going to do you any damage. You’ll get some really good laughs here and there, in fact, because it really is bad history.

“Why I am Reformed,” which is one of his categories. Because the Reformers believed in semper reformanda (always reforming). Well, it’s true, they did, but that didn’t define the Reformers. There’s no mention of sola gratia, sola fide, the great solas of the faith: grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, to God alone be glory, and Scripture alone. None of that. Just “always reforming.” That’s why he’s Reformed. I don’t know any serious Reformed theologian who would think that the “always reforming” slogan would define Reformed thought.

“Why I’m an Evangelical.” Does he mention any of the evangelical history or the evangelical awakening or any of the great figures, Whitefield or Wesley? No, he loves the evangelicals because of their passion. You get that in Obama or the football club. It’s pretty easy to get a lot of passion. You get it in a Nazi rally. Does that make him a Nazi? It is such a manipulation of the evidence.

Chapter after chapter, I’m afraid, is like that. He’s not espousing a generous orthodoxy. He is, in fact, espousing a raw eclecticism that refuses to live in any tradition so that he can create his own, and that’s the worst form of solipsism and self-idolatry.

Fifth (this is the most serious criticism of all), the movement, by and large, needs to learn to listen more attentively to what Scripture actually says and teach it unapologetically. Consider McLaren’s book, two or three back now, The Secret Message of Jesus. As soon as people start speaking about the “secret message of Jesus,” I confess I have red flags up there in any case.

We’ve had 2,000 years of church history with serious Christians working through the texts of the Bible very carefully and studiously. What does he mean by that? Well, what he does is say, “I’m not going to talk about the cross. I’m not going to talk about the resurrection. I’m just going to focus on the teaching of Jesus. I’m not saying that these other things aren’t important. I’m just saying that’s not what I’m going to do. I’m going to focus on the teaching of Jesus.”

He works through selections of text, basically, to come out with a Jesus who is indistinguishable from about 1920s liberalism, concern for social movements and justice and so on, all of which things, by and large, I am happy with if they were integrated with much broader concerns. What I would claim is that if you start reading the canonical gospels.… Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John … to study the teaching of Jesus abstracted from the cross, you’ve distorted the teaching of Jesus.

You have to read the Gospels as whole books. Where are they going? Each of them has huge chunks devoted to the passion narrative, from somewhere between a third of the way back and a quarter of the way back, and even the bits before that are all heading in that direction, which is why some people have said the Gospels are basically passion narratives with lengthy introductions, because Jesus came, at the end of the day, to die.

So it’s not for nothing that at the words of institution, the Lord’s Supper.… “This is my body, which is broken for you. This is the blood of the new covenant shed for many for the remission of sins. Do this as often as you do it in remembrance of me.” Then back to Mark 10:45 and Matthew 20:28. “He did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” There are many smaller hints all the way through.

Even this business of Jesus being the bread of life. Unless you eat of it, unless the bread dies, you can’t have life yourself. For us, that seems strange. In the first century, that was not so strange. Go home tonight and stop at McDonald’s. As you’re eating a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder or just a cheeseburger, ask yourself what you are eating. You’re eating dead cow, dead lettuce, dead tomatoes, dead onions, and dead barley.

There’s absolutely nothing in there that you’re eating that isn’t dead except a few minerals like salt, of which there’s too much. But you know what? If you lived on McDonald’s hamburgers, every one of those cows and pieces of lettuce is giving its life up for you. Either they die or you do. That’s the whole point of the bread of life discourse. Either Jesus dies or we do.

There’s substitution built right into the very notion of the whole of John, chapter 6. It’s absolutely everywhere. To abstract the teaching of Jesus from such great movements as that is tragic. It finally affects our understanding of the wrath of God and the nature of sin and what the cross achieved and so on, but I will come back to that one at much greater length tomorrow.

Last, the movement is becoming sectarian and losing the center. Now I’ve been teaching for a long time, and one of the things I’ve learned in my teaching and preaching (I know you’ll find this hard to believe) is people don’t learn everything I teach and preach. They just don’t. Do you know what they learn? They learn what I’m excited about. They learn what I’m emphasizing.

If you start assuming the gospel but you focus on something else, like cultural analysis and understanding postmodernism and all of that.… That’s what you’re really excited about. “Let’s go do another emergent conference and figure out how we can add some more candles,” or whatever it is. If you do that, and then I come up to you and say, “Yes, but what place do you have for the cross …?”

“I believe all of that too. I believe Jesus died for our sins. Why should you question me about that? That’s not fair.” In a sense, it’s not fair, but the question is.… What are you excited about? As soon as you start merely assuming the gospel and you’re not excited about it, you’re teaching the next generation to be excited out there about cultural analysis. You can never, ever, ever afford to have the gospel merely assumed, because the next generation won’t learn it as the very core of everything.

It’s easy to sound prophetic on the margins. People are doing it all the time. That’s what happens with these various movements that come along. “I’m excited about this. I’m excited about this. I’m excited about that.” The latest how-to manual, the latest gizmo, the latest program, or whatever. It’s not that I’m against cultural analysis. It’s not that I’m against trying to understand postmodernism. I wrote a 600-page book trying to understand postmodernism.

In fact, I have a book coming out in three months called Christ and Culture Revisited, where I have another go at it 15 years later, because these things do need to be understood. But people had better believe that what I’m excited about is the cross. The cross must not be something we assume. All our theologizing must come out of a center. It’s easy to sound prophetic from the margins, but it’s important to be prophetic from the center. If you lose that, you’re only one generation from ecclesiastical death. Let me pray.

Help us, Lord God, to understand our times. More importantly, give us renewed commitment to understanding your most Holy Word, to teach it humbly, convincingly, authoritatively, wisely, faithfully, in the generation where you have placed us. In Jesus’ name, amen.