Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on The Emergent Church in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
My suspicion is that even in a relatively small crowd such as this, people have come not only with different perspectives on this subject, but different degrees of reading, different degrees of familiarity. Some of you may scarcely be aware of what the emerging church is, and some of you have probably read 15 or 20 books on the whole subject and have read deeply into postmodernism epistemology, and how on earth do I keep all of you interested at the same time?
So what I will do is bore you ad seriatim; that is, I’ll first bore one group, and then I’ll bore another group. The first group I’m going to bore is the experts. I’m going to begin with some fairly familiar survey stuff for those of you who don’t have too much background in the whole area, but the last 20 minutes or so is a fairly technical discussion. It won’t be much longer than that, but a fairly technical discussion of certain areas of epistemology that I just don’t see how to duck.
I could unpack them in an hour at a very popular level, but granted our constraints of time, it will be a little more academic and a little tighter in argumentation, and then I’ll bore those of you who don’t like that sort of argument. If at that point you want to go home before the Q&A session, I won’t be in the slightest offended. I have long since learned that every time I speak, there are millions who stay away, and so I’m never offended if a few more do. I’ve learned that.
We come to the category emerging church, and I have to say right off the bat that it’s not self-evident. A friend of mine, Art Patzia, wrote a book six or seven years ago called, The Emergence of the Church, but he’s no sociologist, he’s no evangelist, he’s no systematician, he’s a New Testament expert who’s pretty narrow in his field at another seminary.
His understanding of the emerging church was the churches that emerged in the first century. It was really a kind of first-century survey of the churches that emerged in C1, century 1. And then I have a number of missiologist friends for whom the emerging church refers to the church as it’s emerging in the so-called Two-Thirds World: the church as it’s emerging in China, the church as it’s emerging in Latin America, the church as it’s emerging in at least two or three countries in Central Europe.
I’m not referring to either of those things. Those are important studies, they are very interesting, and in some ways they are more interesting than this one, but on the other hand, the one that we’ve got to deal with this afternoon is a little different again.
The category emerging church, or emergent church, really developed barely a decade ago, but it crystalized a whole lot of perceptions that were much broader than the handful of perceptions of the two or three guys that were involved at the beginning. Nowadays it has grown to a movement, although a lot of the people in it don’t want to call it a movement; they want to call it a conversation.
It’s grown to a movement of very, very broad dimensions, and it’s hard to analyze, partly because there are a lot of people in it across a very broad theological spectrum. That makes generalizations extraordinarily difficult. If I say emerging people don’t believe such and such or do believe such and such or act in a certain kind of way, well, if I was putting in all in footnotes I would say approximately 35 percent do or don’t, or as far as I can see about two-thirds, or whatever.
It’s such a diverse movement that it’s really, really difficult, but at the risk of overgeneralization, the emerging church movement sees itself as the shape of the church to come because a new culture is emerging. That’s the heart of the issue. In other words, there is a perception that as the culture changes with a new culture emerging, often, but not always, connected with the term postmodernism, which is yet to be defined, then the church must change as well. So as there is a new emerging culture, so there is a new emerging church.
The whole debate becomes the extent to which the analysis of this changing culture and the response to it is good, bad, or indifferent. Again, at the risk of oversimplification, most people in the movement see it as reacting to at least two forms of churchmanship from which they differentiate themselves.
The first is what they call the traditional church. By that they mean churches that are largely in the Protestant tradition, out of the Reformation, and concerned pretty strongly with issues of creed and truth, often generating the impression that you have to believe before you can belong, perhaps less strong on relationships but pretty strong on knowing, teaching, propositions, confessional stances, and the like. (This is their definition of the traditional church.)
Secondly, they see themselves over against seeker-sensitive churches. Their definition of that sort of heritage would be that it is professional, slightly entertainment orientated, everything is happening at the front, designed for Baby Boomers, scarcely for Baby Busters, but they’re really out of touch with the new generation of postmoderns coming along, smooth in terms of its presentation, sophisticated in that sense, but not relationally very good, sort of from the front to the crowd sort of thing rather than participation and relational integrity and the like.
Over against both of them, they say, that the impact of postmodernism (again, we’ll come to that) and a new generation who are under 30, or in some cases under 25, means that the perceptions and the associations with these other categories are all different. So now instead of a lot of emphasis on linear thinking and truth and confessionalism there’s much more emphasis on experience and the various modes that go into learning, including friendship and the complexities of emotion and aesthetics.
Feelings and affections have much more place than in traditionalism. There is much more emphasis on experience and much more emphasis on inclusion over against exclusion. Most people in this camp would say that instead of believing in order to belong you belong in order to believe. You get to know people. You welcome them into your midst. You don’t make sharp distinctions about who’s in and who’s out.
As people get to know you, almost by kind of osmosis, there is a kind of picking up on what it means to be a Christian, which in some of their camps has a lot of confessionalism to it, and in other camps somewhat less, but a heavy emphasis on integrity of relationships and friendship and care for one another, and in that framework, people become Christians almost by osmosis.
In some cases, but not in all, this includes, for example, saying you would never want to exclude somebody from the Lord’s Table, because after all, they might meet Christ there. Why exclude them, do you see? In one particular remarkable book on this subject, if you say, “Yes, but what about the warnings in 1 Corinthians 11 that if somebody approaches this Table in an unworthy fashion then they’re risking illness, perhaps death?”
They would reply, “Well, if they’re unbelievers, they’re already damned and not risking very much, are they? They’re already damned, and who knows if they might meet Christ there?” So this becomes a reason for inclusion rather than for exclusion. There is a lot of emphasis in the teaching and other Word ministry in this group on narrative over against proposition. It is often anti-individualist and pro-communitarian, often remarkably anti-consumerist in addressing a variety of issues in the public place.
For a long while, there was a website whose name was quintessentially emergent; it was called TheOoze.com. Everybody could blog together and sort of flow back and forth, like oozing muck, to give their opinions. “Nobody is right, nobody is wrong, everybody says this. It’s a safe place to dialogue and chat and give different opinions.” Instead of saying, “Yes, but we Christians believe …” Bang! Do you see? Then it immediately becomes exclusive. I haven’t seen it around for a few years, but it was a quintessentially important movement at the time.
Although, as I said, they don’t like to think of themselves as a movement, they prefer to think of themselves as a conversation, yet, I don’t see how you can deny the word movement anymore because they have their own conferences, their own journals, their own websites, their own speakers. You watch who is blurbing whose books, and the same people blurb their books who are in their camp. It has become an in-house movement in many respects and a pretty substantial one.
Moreover, this is a more complex matter that I’ll only barely touch on here. If you want to pursue it in Q&A later, you can. It’s now beginning to link up in certain respects with other movements in the Western church. There is a certain percentage of folks in this heritage now who are into the new perspective on Paul or who are into openness theology or one of the other things that are running around.
Not all of them are, not by a long shot, but some of these other movements are sort of coalescing together. In one of the most recent books surveying the whole movement, published by a couple of guys at Fuller, their whole definition of the emerging church is not really to do with the emerging church self-designated but what they see as emerging patterns that put all of these different things together.
They would say that my book on the emerging church is much too narrow; it doesn’t consider all the churches that are affected by the new perspective on Paul and what they’re doing in justification and doesn’t touch all the churches that are dealing with openness theology and so on. Well, in fact, on both of those issues I have written; I just haven’t written under the rubric of this being the emerging church because of the very category itself is a bit slippery about what you include in the label.
It is certainly an open-bounded sort of set and astonishingly diverse. There are some churches in this heritage that are basically more or less traditional evangelical churches, indistinguishable in belief and thought and even morals and priority from broad-stream evangelicalism, which tweak a few things in their corporate worship and talk a lot about emerging, but apart from that there’s not a lot of difference, all the way to some churches whose profiles are really very different and whose belief structures are astonishingly different.
It is a very, very diverse movement. I’ll give some documentation on this in due course, but it is part of the reason why generalizations about this thing are really quite difficult. So let me ask the fundamental question.… Is this so-called emerging movement a gift from God that stamps where we really ought to go, or even one of the alternatives in where we ought to go, or is this emerging church rather submerging in the culture and taking on so much stuff that it is beginning to get swamped rather than to be a faithful witness?
That’s the heart of the debate. Once again, it is very difficult to be able to say simply, “Yes” or “No” for the whole sweep, precisely because the sweep is so diverse. Which is why with a little effort, I manage to get damned by both sides, but we’ll let that one pass. Let me list, then, some praiseworthy features in the emerging church conversation, movement, or whatever you want to call it.
1. Characteristically they are trying to read their times.
They are trying to read culture. Now whether you agree with this reading or not is incidental, we’ll worry about that in a few moments, but they are trying to read their times.
For many decades now the best seminaries in the country have always, when they’ve trained missionaries, prepared people for cross-cultural communication. If you are going to send somebody to India, then people have got to know not only something about Hinduism but the nature of syncretism and the like.
If you’re going to send people to East Asia, then they need to know not only particular religions, Shintoism or Buddhism or whatever, but also the impact of Confucianism and the polarities that it introduces to culture: who’s up and who’s down. The teacher is up; the student is down. The pastor is up; the parishioner is down. There are polarities which all of culture is in some ways regulated that seem very strange to some of us.
So we are used to preparing people for different cultures, and missionaries traditionally have had that sort of culture-analyzing training built right in to their coursework. But we haven’t done that for pastors, because at least in theory we have said, “Yeah, but these pastors are staying home. They are going to their own culture. They’re from one culture going to the same culture.” So they learn some gospel, but they already know the culture.
The difficulty is, of course, that for a variety of reasons, the culture is changing. It’s changing partly because of rapidly changing demographics. A lot of immigration patterns that are very interesting, and partly because the culture is in fact changing so fast in any case that it’s now an intergenerational conflict in some respects. That means in some ways our pastors need some sort of analysis of changing culture, too, don’t they? It’s not just missionaries; pastors do too. In one sense, these people are riding the curve on cultural analysis, and that’s not all bad.
It is important to ask those sort of questions, isn’t it? In that sense, in some ways, they’re a bit like the seeker-sensitive mob 30 years ago. They were asking a whole lot of questions about the Baby Boomers. Now this new lot is asking a whole lot of questions about the Baby Boomers’ children. In one sense, they’re doing a similar sort of thing. Now if you didn’t like the first lot, you probably won’t like the second lot, but on the other hand, they have this in common, at least.
They are trying to understand what is coming along the road. In one sense, that surely has got to be commendable. In fact, a lot of people in the emerging church movement insist that they are driven primarily by missional concerns, and that’s not entirely wrong; that is, their claim is not entirely wrong. Mission is never wrong, but the claim that they’re driven by missional concerns is not entirely wrong.
2. Communication is key, and the question is.… How do you communicate with the new generation coming along and how do you communicate the gospel in urban centers where everything changes so fast?
I was born in Montreal, reared in French Canada, but I lived for a number of years in Toronto. Toronto, until even 25 or 30 years ago, was white bourgeois middle-class. Oh, there are a few others there, but it was an astonishingly WASP city in many, many respects. There was a small Italian district, and so on, but that’s really what it was. Now, according to the UN, it’s the most multicultural city per capita in all of North America.
It’s a remarkable city, and if you like that sort of thing, and I do, then it’s a fun place to be. If you want monochrome, then you don’t like Toronto. What can I say? But this means there are many suburbs of Toronto, many divisions of Toronto, many boroughs of Toronto, in effect, where there are still some churches from 20 years ago who haven’t adapted, where the average age of the congregation is about 75. There are about 40 people there on a Sunday morning, and all around is this glorious mass of humanity they haven’t figured out how to communicate with.
But of the churches that excite me there.… There’s one, for example.… They’ve just changed the name. They were Churchill Heights Baptist Church. They’ve got a new name, but I’ve forgotten what it is. They are running, maybe, 1500 now, but they have probably 16 or 18 elders. I don’t think they’ve got any more than two from one country. It’s a very colorful.… It’s now my favorite church to go to in Toronto.
In one sense, I keep telling my students at Trinity that in some ways, LA is a lot more like heaven than Lincoln, Nebraska. I mean, in heaven, there are going to be people from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. Now there might be respects in which Lincoln is a little more like heaven than LA. I don’t want to go there; nevertheless, in some respects, LA has surely got the edge up. Do you see? So why do we have to think in monochrome terms?
Thus, if people are asking missional questions about how you communicate with new generations and multicultural situations and the impact of postmodernism, those are certainly good questions to ask, aren’t they? That doesn’t mean you have to agree with all of the solutions they put forward, but they’re good questions to get on the table.
And it’s not just cross-racial or cross-generational. There are also pockets in this country of societal structure that are largely untouched, including university faculties with a far lower percentage of Christian converts than in many other segments of society, including the arts and including the media.
I haven’t done a count here, so you might be able to prove the lie here, for all I know, but when I have checked out churches adjacent to major universities, and checked out the number of Christian undergraduates and the number of Christian faculty in the church, and then assessed them along one divide, I always come out with somewhat similar results.
On the one hand you put all those who are from the hard sciences, engineering, computing, physics, business, all that kind of thing, and over on this side the soft sciences, sociology psychology, arts, literature, and all that sort of thing. Then, watching your proportionality numbers so you’re not just dealing in absolute numbers, but proportionalities, asking, “What percentage of the students and what percentage of the faculty who are Christians in that church come from this side or that side?”
In my experience, at least.… Again, you might be the wonderful exception, but in my experience churches run from about 6:1 in favor of the engineers to 18:1. It’s quite remarkable. And I suspect in part (I’m sure the reasons are many) it’s because most nuclear physicists still have a category for truth. Experts in English and psychology, maybe not.
There are questions here for how you go about evangelizing this lot, aren’t there? Insofar as people are asking that question, it’s not all bad. So in this case, you’ve got both the arts commitment and the university tertiary education commitment coming together in one population group, and the question is, “Who is evangelizing them and how are they going about it?”
Then you throw in the media on top of that. I’m no media expert, but I’ve done enough stuff on TV and other media to have enough friends in this area to realize that how completely and utterly and totally biblically illiterate this segment of society really is, with only the rarest of exceptions. So if people are beginning to ask some questions about how to permeate this lot, I can’t be too disappointed. This combination then of trying to read the times and then trying to reach certain groups, both of those points, I think, are probably pretty important.
3. There is in this group a push for what they would call authenticity over against inauthenticity.
That’s a slippery category. I’ll come to the slipperiness in due course; nevertheless, if we’re going to listen sympathetically before we raise any warning flags, most of us have come out of church on some Sundays, have we not, wondering where God was?
I mean, you’ve sort of gone through the hymns again, maybe you recited the creed, spoken to a few of your friends, the sermon was more boring than usual, but in terms of feeling that you’ve met with the living God, haven’t there been Sundays when you’ve walked out of here and said, “I know I’m supposed to do it and ‘forsake not the assembling of yourselves together’ as a manner on Sundays and all that, but at the end of the day, this just doesn’t quite feel like a foretaste of heaven.”
Now maybe your church is so wonderful you never feel that. If that’s the case, let me tell you there are a lot of churches in the country where people do feel that, they just won’t admit it. If you aren’t in one of those churches, then thank God for it, and you can forget the next two or three minutes of what I want to say.
But grant there are enough of those churches around, you can understand why people start asking for something a little more authentic, can’t you? Now nevertheless, this push for authenticity is a tricky thing. Unless the push for authenticity is merely a question of subjective preferences that has been blessed with the adjective authentic, then you have to start saying that measuring authenticity is a notoriously tricky business.
Ultimately, I would want to argue that really and truly to measure authenticity, you have to have some sort of objective standard or else ultimately it becomes a purely psychological category, doesn’t it? A purely subjective thing. So ultimately, I would still want to argue you’ve got to ask fundamental questions about what the Bible itself mandates for with respect to corporate worship and a whole lot of other things, but even if you put in all those sorts of caveats, people who are talking about authenticity, at least, are not all bad.
Now, how they seek it, in some cases, (some cases, for example, have separate little centers for journaling over in this corner, and candles, and other things in this corner) without any notion at all of how these things have or have not been used or the strengths or weaknesses in church history or whether or not they are really mandated by Scripture or not, it turns out to be pretty subjective. Nevertheless, the concern for authenticity, by itself, I cannot completely be sad about it.
4. There is at least some recognition in this crowd over the peculiar epistemological changes that have been brought about by postmodernism.
Now I spent a bit of time this morning trying to distinguish modernism and postmodernism, and I’ll come back to that in a few more minutes, but this, too, is a subset of the larger issue of trying, if at all possible, to read the times well and to understand the shifting structures of epistemology. For all of those reasons, I can’t be too upset.
5. There is a willingness in this movement to question tradition.
Now I know there’s a kind of questioning of tradition that is dangerous; it just wants to keep reinventing the wheel to overthrow everything. On the other hand, the Christian creed is more than, “As it was in the beginning is now and evermore shall be world without end, amen,” so that everything is, “But we’ve always done it this way before.” In one sense, to be able to throw out those sorts of issues, to at least raise them, is not bad.
In fact, that was one of the questions a generation ago that Bill Hybels was asking in another framework. Again, I didn’t like all his answers, but I sure liked the question. The question was, “What is it that the church is doing, not mandated by Holy Scripture, that gets in the way of communicating the gospel?” That’s not a bad question to ask. Now whether you always agree with the answers is a slightly different issue, but to ask that question is not an intrinsically bad thing to do.
Then this group, this emerging church group by and large, then, tends to become a bit eclectic on what then it picks up or does not pick up from the tradition, and thus, claims in some ways to be more deeply embedded in the tradition by its eclectic picking and choosing than some who then actually live within a particular tradition. I’ll come back to that one again in a few moments. There are huge problems with that way of looking at things; nevertheless, at least they’re beginning to ask some questions.
This last point, in fact, also leaves me free to make another remark. When I first started studying the movement, I discovered that a pretty high percentage, 75 or 80 percent of the leaders in the conversation/movement, came out of culturally very conservative churches; that is, not only confessionally conservative churches but culturally conservative churches.
I wish I had thought of this phrase first, but Brian McLaren said he was perched on the most conservative twig of the most conservative branch of the evangelical tree. He came out of a certain conservative branch of Plymouth Brethren. Then when he found that whole side of things was so dislocated, so distanced from where the whole culture was going, basically what he has done is jumped on a vine and swung to another part of the tree.
Some of us might have preferred that he sort of move to the trunk a wee bit more rather than be swinging on a vine; nevertheless, it is surprising how many of the people in the emerging church movement actually come out of very conservative churches and they were just not comfortable there anymore, for reasons good, bad, and indifferent.
In fact (this is another huge generalization), although there are some churches that call themselves emerging that are proving quite effective in evangelism, there is a huge percentage of them that is not really evangelizing, but attracting disgruntled, frustrated, young conservatives who are trying to find a place in the sun, as it were, outside of traditional conservatism, and in the name of reaching out to a whole lot of others what they’re really doing is tending to reach a whole lot of fellow conservatives who are disgruntled, frustrated, and feeling outside the camp.
The movement is really extraordinarily diverse, but I have to say that these sorts of strengths in the movement should not be despised. Nevertheless, I would want to take one more step before we press on to more substantive things. I must say as strongly as I possibly can that you must not think, even for a moment, that the strengths that I’ve just outlined are found only in the emerging church movement and nowhere else.
If you think that, then you may say, “If these strengths are so important, then I really have to join the emerging church, whatever its weaknesses, because I want those strengths.” But in fact, you can find those strengths in a whole lot of churches that wouldn’t want to associate with the so-called emerging church movement, but the same strengths are there. Mark Dever at Capitol Hill Baptist, Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City, and a whole lot of other churches I can mention around the country. There are literally dozens of them, some of them very strong.
Some have broken away from the emerging church movement. Mark Driscoll in the Seattle area of the Pacific Northwest, who was one of the leaders of the emerging church movement and really feels the emerging church movement has sort of got shanghaied by the left and won’t have much to do with it anymore.
A lot of his styles of corporate worship and so on are not mine at all; nevertheless, doctrinally, he’s a very, very significant Reformed Baptist figure in the Pacific Northwest, and he’s planting churches at a faster clip than all the rest of the evangelical churches put together. It’s an astonishing movement, and it’s barely 10 years old.
Yet he’s asking the same sorts of questions; it’s just that his answers are very different, and he is no longer aligned with that sort of movement at all. You must not think, therefore, that to have these strengths you must be in this movement. That just isn’t fair; it’s to miss the diversity of the movement of the people of God. Now then, let me now articulate some of the dangers, weaknesses, and inconsistencies of the whole movement. I’ll mention six things.
1. The emerging church movement does not understand very well contemporary discussion of postmodernism.
Now I spent a bit of time this morning on postmodernism. It’s a subject on which I could happily spend the next hour and still not do much more than scratch the surface.
McLaren, himself, tells us repeatedly in his writings that he’s been influenced by his own master’s level work in English literature. He’s never studied theology itself, which he points out, but he’s studied English literature, and at the time that he was going through, the kinds of people who he was studying were Michel Foucault, Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and people like that, a lot of French folk.
Still, I was brought up in French, and last year I lectured in both France and French Switzerland. In 2001 there was a book published by the Presses Universitaires de France, some studies done at the Sorbonne, leading French intellectuals analyzing where French culture and intellectual history is going in the next little while.
Together they wrote a 500-page book that managed not to use the word postmodernism even once. Now it’s not quite fair for me to mention that because what Europe by and large means by postmodernism isn’t quite the same as what America means. That’s a long convoluted discussion. We can pick that up in Q&A if you like.
But nevertheless, there is at least a little part of me that gets a bit nervous about jumping on a Michele Foucault bandwagon when the country where he originate has now passed him by. In fact, France is still pretty postmodern, though it wouldn’t ever call itself that, in the American sense of postmodernism. Nevertheless, there have been quite a lot of instances where movement has come along, and evangelicals have jumped on it just as the movement was beginning to die.
I suspect there’s at least some of that going on here, too. The analysis of postmodernism in this literature is so unbearably unsophisticated that it is pretty embarrassing. As a result, I find it necessary when I’m talking about it nowadays to distinguish just for heuristic reasons hard postmodernism and soft postmodernism.
What the emerging people are doing all the time is talking about hard postmodernism, and that is, the kind of postmodernism that is in the most extreme form where you’re suspicious of any notion of truth whatsoever except that which is confessed without having an objective reality, and they’re deeply suspicious of anything to do with metanarrative of any sort, and on and on and on.
Whereas there’s a soft postmodernism today that is much more user-friendly and is afraid of certain things in modernism, but it’s not so exclusivistic in its orientations. Now we can come back to that one in discussion too if there are some who have gotten heavily into that literature. What I note, however, about the writers in this field, not only the emerging church writers, but the theologians on whom they depend, John Franke at Biblical Seminary, Stan Grenz, who died just a year or so ago …
Without exception, they are wrestling with the hard postmodernists. They have not interacted at all with the soft postmodernists, who are the younger ones and the more sophisticated ones. I’m nervous about this dependence upon postmodernism that already strikes me as being more than a little out of date and a little painful.
Then related to this, I would want to argue the emerging church movement does not understand modernism very well. Clearly, something like postmodernism by its very name depends on modernism. It’s not that you have product X and then product Y; you’ve got product X and then product post-X. In one sense, they sort of stand or fall together. Postmodernism on any understanding of postmodernism understands itself over against modernism, so that unless you get the one right, you’re not going to get the other right. Do you see?
Now in hard postmodernism, there is a tendency to keep saying, “In modernism, you begin with the I (the human autonomous knower or the we human autonomous knowers in culture), and here there is a pursuit all the time not only for objective assertions, objective propositional truth, but there is a deep commitment to certainty. Always, always, always you’re after certainty, certainty, certainty.
It is argued that in modernism all the time this pursuit for knowledge and propositional confessionalism is always pursuing what is certain … always what is certain. Whereas postmodernism comes along and says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to begin with the I, you have to begin with us, but we’re so culturally located, we’re so finite, we’re so small that certainty is not possible; in fact, knowledge becomes very substantially relativized.”
Let me back off here and give a couple of illustrations. For about 10 years I worked part-time with World Evangelical Fellowship, and part of my job was to bring together people from different countries and continents (we had them from every continent except Antarctica), deeply committed to confessional stances on Scripture, coming together to write essays to produce a book on some area. Because we had them from different races and denominations and so on, but all with this deep confessionalism, it was interesting to watch the papers. They were really quite different.
They would send them into me, and then I would circulate them to everybody, and then we would meet together in some city, usually in Europe, and then we’d go through each other’s papers paragraph by paragraph by paragraph, criticize them all. We’d take detailed notes and all of that, everybody criticizing everybody from everybody’s perspective.
Then they’d go home and rewrite them, and then they’d come back to me. I’d edit them and out would pop another book. We did one book every two years that way. It was interesting just because there were so many different perspectives that were brought to bear. Just watching this lot come into a room was an education.
You know, there are so many cultural differences even there? I was brought up in French Canada, but my parents were both born in the UK, and there you expect a decent personal separation distance of 30 to 36 inches. Even the fact that they’re in inches and not centimeters says something, doesn’t it?
Then you go to Latin America, and the personal space is not more than 18 inches. So there people are coming closer and closer and closer to you, and you’re standing farther and farther away; you look standoffish. So you stick out your foot, and they step on it. From your point of view, they’re being pushy; from their point of view, you’re being cold. It’s culture.
You watch the Germans come into the room, and they shake everybody’s hand. If they have to go to the car and get something they’re likely to shake everybody’s hand on their way out and then come back in and might even be in danger of shaking everybody’s hand again. Then you watch some of the Latinos come in, you know, from Spain or Italy. “Brother!” Kiss. Kiss. Well, I can manage that; I was brought up in French Canada.
When the Arab Christians come in, it’s usually three kisses, and I can never remember which cheek you start on, so it sort of produces tension. Then they come in from India, and there’s this bowing. Then they come in from Japan. The hands are down, and you bow, but how far down you bow depends on how much money you’ve got and how old you are and how much education you’ve got and how big your church is and all. I never remember all those rules, so I just bow low and be done with it.
I mean, it’s very complicated. It’s all the social rules. I can remember when Pablo Perez from Mexico came into this particular meeting, all 300 pounds of him, bounding toward an Englishman standing in a corner, who was always a bit intimidated, and he was wearing a Harris Tweed. He was almost quintessentially English and bemused by all this hubbub.
He was standing there, looking pious. Pablo came in, and he said, “Brother!” and was about to embrace him, and the Englishman said, “Have we been introduced?” Then in comes the American, “Hi, everybody! Sorry I’m late.” I mean how many rules of social contact did he actually break? And that’s even before you started your papers and the modes of discussion.
I remember once, I was always the chair, and so I was trying to make sure everybody had his or her two cents worth. I turned to Masao Uenuma from Japan on one occasion, a gifted young theologian, and I said to him, “Brother, I haven’t heard from you yet. What do you think about this particular issue?”
He said, “Is it possible that the blessed apostle Paul might conceivably here had been venturing the judgment, perhaps, that …?” Because, you see, in that culture everybody is worried about loss of face, not only their own but the other person’s. You don’t confront. He was trying to make a suggestion that was out of line with others had been saying, and you don’t want to embarrass anybody, do you see? It was as understated as you can get.
One brother from a North European country that shall remain nameless, “Oh, come on! That doesn’t mean that! What it really means.… I mean, anybody can see …” Brother Uenuma wondered what sort of band of barbarians he had fallen into. It’s culture, isn’t it? So that’s long before you hit questions of epistemology and the like. These questions about culture and how you communicate the gospel are relevant even at the most superficial of levels. Your sense of humor is different from culture to culture. It’s hugely different.
In eastern Australia, Sydney and places like that, you cut down the tall poppy. You watch these guys that are sitting around poking holes on each other and swapping insults and falling off their chairs laughing. Well, you don’t do that in England, you know? It’s a different cultural set. In fact, you don’t even do that in western Australia, in Perth; that’s considered rude. In Sydney, that’s how you have fun.
So you realize again that how you communicate the gospel has got to get shifted in some way, but if you think in cultural categories that are hardened too quickly, you can actually blind yourself to some really important things. A lot of the postmoderns in the emerging camp, as far as I can see, have got a hardened view of modernism.
That hardened view can hardly say anything good about modernism. Modernism is bad. Modernism thinks in absolutes. Modernism thinks in certainties. Modernism gave us two world wars. Modernism gives us hate. Modernism gives us racism. Modernism gives us.… On and on and on. It only thinks in terms of certainties, and it’s all bad.
Postmodernism, “Oh yeah, it’s got some dangers of heading towards relativism, and we don’t want to go there, but on the other hand, it is softening things, it’s making us more tolerant, it’s more flexible, more inclusion rather than exclusion. Postmodernism is basically good.” Now apart from the fact that I’m not sure the analysis of postmodernism is quite right … they’ve got parts of it right.… I’m not sure either that the analysis of modernism is quite right.
I’ve been starting to tick off, make a little list, of passages that I’ve read amongst modernist authors, for example, where they argue for some big point or other, and then say, “Of course, I’m not sure that I’m right. My knowledge of this is pretty limited, and nobody knows enough to be quite certain in this area.” In other words, not all modernist thinkers are claiming absolute certainty, not by a long shot.
To claim that modernists’ interest in truth is all driven by a passion for dead certainty is just plain ridiculous. In fact, if you take a chastened modernism and a soft postmodernism you can show an awful lot of similarities between the two. You really can. And the absolute polarities I’m not sure are helping us a great deal.
Then to be told by the most vociferous voices in this movement that unless you go in with them, you’ll completely missing the boat and don’t know how to evangelize, is so blatantly untrue when some of the fastest growing churches amongst 20-somethings in the country are, in fact, pastored by young pastors who are in-your-face dogmatists about what the gospel is. It’s a strange world that’s out there at the moment.
What I will say, I think, is this: Most segments of broad-stream confessional evangelicalism are in danger of being snookered by certain kinds of errors, but not others. For example, if you come out of an Arminian camp, then you’re much more likely to get snookered by openness theology than if you come out of a Reformed camp, but if you come out of a Reformed camp, you’re much more in danger of being snookered by theonomy or one or two other things. Nobody in the Arminian camp is going to get snookered by theonomy.
Now what I’m saying is that having set up the problems and the discussions in certain ways about what modernism and postmodernism are, the blind spots come with the whole territory, and there aren’t many leaders in this lot that are breaking these things down. It’s really quite troubling because things are being set up in a certain kind of way, which brings me to the third point. It’s one of two of the six that are probably most important.
2. By in large, those in the emerging church movement have not thought through very deeply about what needs to be challenged in postmodernism.
In other words, they’ve thought about what needs to be challenged in modernism but not what needs to be challenged in postmodernism. I would want to say that a really thoughtful Christian should be entirely indebted to neither modernism nor postmodernism.
There are some insights in both and some things to be reprobated in both. Why should that surprise us? The gifts of God’s common grace enable all kinds of people to put forward some good ideas, but on the other hand, unless we’re deeply, deeply committed to the sheer centrality of God and his revelation, it’s not too surprising if our whole structures are skewed somewhere.
So what I do not hear from most of the people in the postmodern camp is a penetrating critique of the dangers in the hard forms of postmodernism that they are themselves unwittingly espousing, which brings me to the fourth point, and it is by far the most important of the lot. Let me come at it through the side door before I tell you what the point is.
Some in this movement think of themselves as spearheading a new reformation, but in the old Reformation the leaders saw what was going on in the church and perceived the distance between what was going on in the church and the Scripture and were trying to call people back to Scripture; hence, one of the Reformation slogans, sola scriptura.
By and large, this movement sees the changes that are going on in the culture and are trying to get the church to adapt to the culture. Now after the fact, they start quoting some Scripture verses to authorize what they’re doing, but what’s driving it, nevertheless, is the perception for the change in the culture and the insistence that the church must change because of the changes in the culture.
Now that’s not necessarily all intrinsically bad, but it’s not reformation in any Reformational sense. It’s not saying, “Let’s make sure that we’re really fundamentally tied as closely as we can be to the reforming power of the Word of God.” It’s, “Yeah, we’ll assume the truth of the Word of God alright. Nevertheless, what’s driving it is how to read the culture and then adapt appropriately to these cultural changes.” Which brings me, now, to the crucial fourth point.
3. The postmodern movement needs to learn to listen much more attentively to what Scripture actually says on scores of issues.
They just need to learn much more carefully to listen to what Scripture says. Now they’re often pretty good at pointing out blind spots in scriptural understanding amongst Christians in the past.
God knows we’ve had them. God knows they’ll be with us in one fashion or another to the very end. God knows we must work to overcome them. But those Christians who are most aware are going to be asking themselves, “Where are my blind spots? How can I become a little more reformed by the Word of God?” Isn’t that what we ought to be doing? Always?
So while we talk a great deal about the importance of inclusion and the importance of narrative and the like, let me hoist a couple of dangers. There is an Old Testament scholar, very prolific today, by the name of Walter Brueggemann. He’s a very interesting writer. He finds it impossible to be boring.
One of his shticks as he treats biblical narrative is to interpret a particular story just in terms of that story without reference to context. So if he’s interpreting Genesis 3 (this is his example, not mine) which is the account of the fall, he doesn’t want to do it in the framework of Genesis 1 and 2 and 4–50, still less in terms of the Pentateuch or the Canon, he wants to interpret Genesis 3 all by itself.
Of course, as soon as he does that there are additional interpretive grids that are possible. It’s one of the reasons why he’s not a boring writer. He’s got so many new interesting things to say. “Oh, is that right? How can that make sense? Oh, is that true?” You see, one of the reasons why he’s interesting is because he’s saying a lot of innovative things all the time.
The trouble is that an awful lot of the innovative things that he says really wouldn’t make sense once you stick those stories back in the bigger story. For example, on the fall in Genesis 3, let’s just take it away from chapter 1 and 2 now. Take it away from the rest of the chapters. Just Genesis 3, all by itself.
“It’s a story about a slightly cranky God who is a bit restrictive, but who is forced to admit at the end of the day that Eve basically did the right and courageous thing because she knew full well that if she did eat that fruit that had been forbidden, she would become like God, knowing good and evil.
After all, in the other chapter, God himself says, ‘The man and wife would become like us knowing good and evil.’ The Devil is telling the truth. Tough call, but Eve made the right decision. It was a matter of growing up into a fuller moral self-consciousness and self-identification …” and so on.
A very interesting interpretation, isn’t it? Mind you, it’s much harder to read it that way when you read Genesis 1 and 2 first, and then you’re told that God made everything good, when he saw the whole thing, he decreed, himself, because he’s God, what is good. He saw it was all very good.
He made human beings in his own image, which means that all of their accountability and responsibilities is grounded in the fact that they’re creatures, and he forbade one thing so that to defy him is to de-God God. It’s to deny their own creaturely status. It’s rebellion. The following chapter is the first fratricide; it’s the first murder.
The chapter after that, chapter 5, is a genealogy with the repeated refrain, “So and so lived so many years, he begat so and so, lived so many more years, and he died. So and so lived so many years, he begat so and so, lived so many more years, and he died. And he died … and he died … and he died.” You have to be really blind not to see that chapter 3 is connected to chapter 5.
Then comes the flood and judgment, and then comes Babel, still more wickedness. Do you see? Eventually you’re going to tie that canonically to Romans 1:18–3:20, aren’t you? “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all manner of unrighteousness which unrighteous people have unrighteously pursued, suppressing the truth in their wickedness.”
Now Walter Brueggemann takes this approach to the Old Testament partly because he won’t allow in any place for the biblical metanarrative. Metanarrative is to narrative what metaphysics is to physics; that is, metaphysics is the frame of reference in which you do your physics. Metanarrative is the big story in which you do your little stories. Metanarrative is the big story; it’s the arching story. It’s the big story that explains all the little stories.
Now despite the fact that there are some exceptions, there are an awful lot of leaders in the emerging church movement who are profoundly suspicious of metanarrative. They’ve listened so much to Michele Foucault or Francois Lyotard. As a result, they have this (what Lyotard calls) incredulity toward metanarrative.
They find metanarratives too controlling. They’re too diminishing. There’s no place in which to stand in which these things have the right to control you. Now Lyotard is not himself interested in overthrowing the Bible. He is sufficiently unaware of Christianity. He couldn’t give a rip. He’s trying to overturn modernism; he’s trying to overturn Kantianism, and so on. But any big story that explains the whole he thinks is awful.
McLaren and others have picked up exactly that stance and said, “You know, you can’t speak about the Bible storyline as being a metanarrative. You mustn’t do that.” Suddenly you have the range of possible interpretation of story after story after story in highly creative personal ways, but does it fit into the metanarrative?
I want to say as dogmatically as I can, “You cannot faithfully understand the biblical stories unless you fit them into the super-story, into the metanarrative. There is a whole narrative that goes from God, creation, fall, judgment, rise of Israel, establishment of nation, kings, prophecy fulfillment, the coming of Christ, dawning of the church as the international community of the people of God, born of the Spirit, all the way to consummation at the end.
There’s a whole story that puts the whole thing together, and it becomes the grid, the frame of reference in which we understand the whole, of which we understand all the parts. Do you see? You lose that and you’re opening up yourself to huge, huge challenges. I don’t think, then, that they listen very carefully to what the Bible is actually saying in the area of the metanarrative, not in the area of sin and judgment.
Two or three of their most popular writers have spoken of penal substitution as a form of cosmic child abuse. Several of their writers have spoken of different models of the atonement, the exemplary model; that is, by Christ’s death he shows us how to die to ourselves and to live righteously.
The Christus victor model; Christ is victor over sin and death and the Devil. He conquers. The penal substitutionary model; that is, he takes our punishment and substitutes himself in our place. He works through six models, for example, one particular author, and then he says, “Of course, these models have been taught by various wings of the Christian church. Pick one, for goodness’ sake. They are all Christian!”
I would want to say, “Yeah, but if you’re really trying to reform yourself by the Word of God, methodologically, that’s all backwards.” What you do, instead, is say, “Now if Christians around the world have developed these six models, which ones, so far as I can understand them, are really mandated by Scripture and which ones aren’t, and of those that are, how do they related to each other in Scripture?
Are they just sort of competing models in Scripture or are they integrally related in some sense? Shouldn’t that be the binding factor, rather than merely, “Pick one” because it seems most attractive to certain kinds of Christians today or to certain kinds of unbelievers today? Penal substitution is not really hot today, so pick exemplary instead or Christus victor?”
But isn’t it better to say, “What does Scripture teach?” And if Scripture teaches it, then integrate it. Teach the whole counsel of God to the whole people of God, understanding full well that different people will come to the Word of God with different biases and different blind spots and all of that, but that’s what you have to do finally, isn’t it, to reform your life and conduct and ethics by the whole counsel of God, rather than just pick that little part of it that seems least offensive to your subset of society?
I mean is there any part of our society that is going to be real keen on observing “turning the other cheek”? At the end of the day, it’s the whole counsel of God for the whole people of God, and how you put it together is part of the responsibility of Christians everywhere, not least pastors and theologians, how it’s put together in faithfulness to the Word of God.
So far as you can possibly manage it, understanding full well that you’ll make mistakes and that your ability as a teacher must not be equated with what Scripture actually says so that teachers themselves will often have to say, “I was wrong. I’m going to revise what I’ve said in the past because my understanding has deepened as to the Word of God, and now I’ve come to think that it means this.”
In other words, this business of epistemology is a tricky one. Nowadays, to the soft postmoderns, that is, who recognize we do look at things from a certain perspective, we are all perspectivalists. We cannot escape that. There are only two kinds of perspectivalists: those who admit it and those who don’t.
Whereas the strong postmoderns begin with the fact that we’re all perspectivalists; we all look at things from a certain perspective. We can’t avoid that; we’re not neutral. None of us is neutral. They leap from the fact that we’re all perspectivalists, whether we like it or not, to the conclusion that we really can’t know objective truth.
But I would say instead, “Everything depends on what you mean by objective.” That is to say, you can now the truth that is actually there. It’s a realist vision of truth. It is objectively outside the text. But you cannot know it objectively; that is, as if you yourself had some neutral space on which to stand. You can’t do that because you’re a perspectivalist.
In fact, in some ways, I’m more postmodern than my postmodern friends. Not only do I admit my limitations, my finitude, I admit that I’m fallen. Not only do I not understand the whole, I pervert what I do know. That’s partly a creedal confession. Do you see? I’m lost. Yet within this framework, does that mean I cannot know the truth? I cannot know objective truth?
Well, I cannot ever know the whole truth perfectly. You know why? Because I’m not God. The only being who is a non-perspectivalist is an omniscient being. An omniscient being sees the whole and the whole’s relationship to everything else and looks at things from every conceivable perspective. Only an omniscient being knows the whole.
So if the criterion for true knowing is being omniscient, then obviously we can’t know. Only God can know. The trouble is the Bible speaks again and again and again of people really knowing, of knowing certain things, of knowing certain people. Never is the claim made that they know things universally or absolutely or as God knows or from the perspective of omniscience, that’s not made, but we do know. And in fact, intuitively, we have some models that help us to understand that, don’t we?
Let me ask you, “How many of you have done at least a semester of Greek?” Look around. There are quite a few of you. Okay, do you remember? L˙ō, l˙eis, l˙ei, l˙omen, l˙ete, l˙ousin. “Boy, that’s hard!” L˙ō, l˙eis, l˙ei … Verbal structures. Then you start working on the declensions, then the adjectives, and eventually the participles, and.… Boy, this is really tough, isn’t it? Except 10 weeks into it, the present tense seems blissfully simple. And if you get to the second semester, and you’re doing pretty well, participial forms are pretty easy. What is really hard then are the me verbs.
The same is true for first course in calculus. All this stuff about approaching infinity, asymptotic approaches to things, good grief! Then you learn those formulas for how you do differential calculus, and you just about think that you’ve got that under your belt when they throw in the trigonometric dimension, and then they start throwing in integral calculus, and that means reversing everything.
Sooner or later, you’ve got that under your belt, and you’re really, really happy, and now you’re doing double integrals. Good grief! Then you go back and look at those first differentials, and they are a bit of a snap, aren’t they? In other words, we do approach knowledge of stuff asymptotically.
You get closer and closer and closer to knowing it, but you’ll never know anything, whether calculus or Greek or anything else, exhaustively, omnisciently, not even in eternity, not even 50 billion years from now will you ever know anything as God knows, because omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God; that is, it’s an attribute of God that belongs only to God.
It’s not one that he can share with finite human beings. So if you make as the criterion for knowing, knowing exhaustively and perfectly, then obviously you can’t know. That’s raising the bar too high. It’s raising so that all you can say is you can’t know. It’s raising the bar too high. You can know, as human beings know.
Your knowledge and principal will have to be self-corrected, and it will always only be approaching the truth exhaustively, but it can be true knowledge of the truth even though it can never be exhaustive knowledge of the truth. It can be knowledge of the absolute truth; it cannot be absolute knowledge of the truth. You can know what is objectively out there. You cannot know it objectively. Do you see?
I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to say that, and yet, at the same time, those categories just aren’t cutting the mustard amongst my strongest postmodern emergent church friends. So as a result, they become more and more embarrassed to talk about truth and so on.
I mention in the book that I was speaking at a Christian college a couple of years ago before the book came out and met a young man in fourth year. This was a conservative Christian college. The young man said, “Look, I hear your arguments. I understand what you’re saying. They make sense to me, but I’ve got to say after all I’ve read, every time I cross another truth passage in the Bible, I’m embarrassed by it and I don’t know what to do.” Scary, isn’t it?
So I gave him some homework. I said, “If you want to beat this one, I’ll tell you how to beat it. You go home and you take a concordance, I don’t care whether it’s digital or hard, get a concordance. You write out all the verses in the Bible (take your time) that mention true or truth and all the verses in the Bible that talk about certainty, all the verses in the Bible that mention knowing that; that is, not knowing someone simply (we all agree on those).
Sometimes knowing someone is sexual in the Bible even, but all the ones that say, knowing that where you’ve got a proposition that follows. Mark them all. Then tick of all the ones that have anything to do with propositional truth or assertion or anything like that, and delete the rest. Then read through the whole lot. You’ll find hundreds of them.
Then ask yourself, “Why do these make me nervous?” Then you decide: are you buying into this extra-biblical postmodern grid or are you going to reform the grid by the Word of God, because you can’t have both, and as long as you’re so uncomfortable by what Scripture says in these domains, unless you develop a way of handling these things, you will go belly up. It’s only a matter of time.
Now there are a lot of dimensions, it seems to me, where biblical material is simply being slighted by this camp, and it is deeply, deeply disturbing, including notions of the wrath of God, what sin is, what the cross really achieved, what propitiation is. These things are right at the heart of the Christian gospel. You don’t play around with them.
4. Many of the people in this movement … not all, but many … are incredibly sloppy about their uses of categories.
My favorite illustration (I used it in the book, so if you’ve read the book, forgive me for mentioning it again) is the book A Generous Orthodoxy. The subtitle of the book I rarely get right because it’s too long for me to remember.
It’s: 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. Well, that sort of covers it, doesn’t it? And this is called, A Generous Orthodoxy.
Obviously that’s going to appeal to a postmodern mood in which you’re embracing, you’re inclusive, you’re not excluding people. You know, you’re embracing the whole heritage. There has got to be something attractive about that. Don’t we get up and say with the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the holy catholic church,” this universal church? I mean, isn’t that all that it’s saying? It’s pretty good, isn’t it?
Read the chapters: “Why I’m an Evangelical.” He’s an evangelical because evangelicals are passionate, so that is why he’s an evangelical. Nothing about the history of evangelicalism or evangelical confessionalism or relation to the Reformation or the five solas or the evangelical movement or evangelical awakening, nothing. Nothing about sola scriptura, nothing about what the gospel is. We’re passionate. Well, so was Hitler. So was Pol Pot. So are some supporters of a football game, to mention something possibly relevant today. And that makes it evangelical?
“Why I am Reformed.” Yes, well, this crowd would probably like to know exactly why this chap is reformed. He is reformed, he says, because he really does believe in the Reformation slogan, semper reformanda, always being reformed, always reforming, depending whether you put it in the passive voice or an active voice in translation.
Of course postmoderns are really going to love that, aren’t they? I mean, they’re not stuck in the mud. No, they are always reforming. Do you see? Nothing about the five solas: sola gratia, grace alone; sola fide, faith alone; sola Christus, Christ alone; sola scriptura, Scripture alone; soli Deo gloria, to God alone be glory. Nothing about the place of justification, nothing about the debates at the time between Catholicism and the various Reformed movements about the locus of revelation. Nothing. Just always reforming.
And so it is. You go through category after category after category. In the majority of the chapters in the book, I have to say, that almost nobody who actually wears one of those labels with pride would recognize the author’s definition of that label which he is now claiming for himself. I want to say, that’s either awfully bad argumentation or its rhetorically manipulative. What else can I say? But this is not, in fact, a broader catholicity. It is a pick-and-choose subjectivity. Which brings me to my last point.
5. This is a terribly sectarian movement.
Instead of being happy to live in any tradition, it wants to pick and choose from across the world and pick up this little bit and reject that little bit. By what grid? By what standard? By Scripture? Not really. By the historical accident of living in a particular tradition? No, not really that either. But because that is where they feel comfortable in their place in history, and that is what they want to do. So it becomes the creation of a new sort of tradition that is guided, as far as I can see, by an awful lot of personal aesthetics.
I was struck by something that a blogger wrote not long ago. He reviewed my book and obviously didn’t like it, which seems to be a pretty common perception among some folks. At the end of the day after he had finished reviewing the book, he said, ‘On the whole, I would rather be wrong with McLaren than right with Carson.”
Well, I confess I’m sufficiently hardnosed that I wasn’t even wounded. I was too busy trying to figure out what he meant. Is the whole movement, then, so based on aesthetics that truth isn’t important? There are some people who are so miserable in the way they confess the truth that I’d want to be true with them, but I don’t really like the way they say it. Is that what he meant?
No, no, he’d rather be wrong with McLaren than right with Carson. Is the whole thing, then, not a matter of right or wrong at all? The real control is personal aesthetics? I don’t know what else to call that, but in the kindest way, calling it a new sectarianism, where the controlling grid is a kind of personal aesthetics, it seems to me.
Now I hasten to say that there are many, many, many people in the so-called emerging camp who are nowhere near that position. Nowhere near. But even where this is not the voice of many people in the emerging camp, there is a second level of it that is far trickier. If you’re a teacher at all, you know that your students fasten on what you judge to be most important, on what you enthuse about.
If I speak to some of my friends in this camp and say, “You know, you do rabbit on and on and on about how you’re reading culture and the latest trends, and I read those same books, too, but in your excitement I hear you talk about your next stage in cultural analysis. I don’t really hear you being really excited about Christ’s resurrection from the dead and what it means for how we live today.
“Well, I believe all of that stuff, too!” He’s full of indignation. “I believe exactly what you do. I’m doctrinally just where you are.” In many cases, that is correct. It’s also almost irrelevant, because once the gospel becomes that which is merely assumed, while what you’re excited about is your cultural analysis, then what you are teaching your students is that it’s the cultural analysis that is really important, and don’t worry about the doctrine; it will take care of itself. Then you’re only half a generation away from 1920s liberalism.
In other words, the church of the living God must always be excited about Christ, must be excited about incarnation, must be excited about Jesus’ works and words about the dawning of the kingdom, must be excited about Christian ethics, must be excited about the cross, must be excited about the resurrection, about the bestowal of the Holy Spirit, about the Lord’s soon return, about the anticipation of the new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, about righteousness existence in a resurrection body.
It must be excited about those things or it is lost. It just hasn’t figured it out yet, but it’s lost. Never, ever, ever let the gospel become that which you merely assume while the exciting things are something else. Never. Let me hasten to add, that we shouldn’t be thinking about culture and analysis and how to reach people. Of course we should. Of course, of course, I insist on it as strongly as the next person. Yet, at the same time, what must vibrate from us everywhere must be the gospel itself.
