The Movement Evaluated More Critically

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the emerging church in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

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Yesterday I tried to show you what the emerging church movement looks like, and I left you with an array of its important strengths, because it certainly has some. Today I want to draw attention to some of its weaknesses. This is far from being an exhaustive list, as the list of its strengths was not an exhaustive list, but I hope that this will at least prompt some reflection and perhaps increasing discernment.

1. The emerging church movement does not understand very well contemporary discussion of postmodernism.

In other words, it builds an awful lot on postmodernism, and I’m not sure it always understands exactly what it’s talking about. There is an enormous literature in this area, and most of what they cite is in the pop arena that deals with yesterday versus today, good versus bad, what I don’t like versus what I now do like, and that sort of thing.

It’s actually a far more complex matter than that. It’s complex in and of itself. That is to say, amongst people who do intellectual history, there are huge disputes about what postmodernism really is or even if there is such a thing. For example, on my own faculty, there is a chap called Harold Netland who was a missionary for many years in Japan and then did his own PhD under John Hick, who is at the very front end of relativism.

He has published several books in this area. He is a very widely respected, very thoughtful, godly man, and he thinks the whole term postmodernism isn’t very useful. He thinks that postmodernism, whatever that is, is nothing more than late modernism. In other words, it’s the trends that were put in place by the Enlightenment and other kinds of things, a certain kind of self-autonomy in the area of knowing that is worked out in all kinds of fields, and this is the late form of it. It’s gone through several osmoses. It’s gone through a variety of changes.

After all, under this whole rubric of modernism have been a variety of sub-movements as well, some of which I’ll mention in a moment, and postmodernism is just one more of them. Although in some ways that’s a semantic debate, it’s a debate over meaning, it’s a debate over terms, eventually these things become important if your entire analysis of the way they go forward depends on your analysis of the culture. So you’ve got to start trying very hard to get the culture analysis right, but it’s more than that.

A) Some of it is mere sloganeering.

This is from McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian. Postmodernism has Neo constructing a summary of postmodernism by adding “post” to the features of modernism, such as “postconquest, postmechanistic, postanalytical, postsecular, postobjective, postcritical, postorganizational, postindividualistic, post-Protestant, and postconsumerist.” Well, let’s just pick up two or three of those things and think about them for a minute.

Postmechanistic? This is the digital age. We’re producing more and more robots. We’re talking about more and more biotech syntheses. Postanalytical? What do you think this debate is about? It’s about analysis of things. Postsecular? I know what is meant by that; there’s a kind of renewed interest in something vague called spirituality. “You’re really helped by Jesus, and I’m a very spiritual person too. I’m helped by the vibrations of crystals, and we’re all very spiritual.” In that sense, I suppose, it’s less secular in some sense.

What’s secular? Most people who treat secularization view it as the process, not which abolishes religion, but as the process that squeezes religion to the periphery of life. So you still have pretty close to the same percentage of people going to church today as you had 50 years ago, but all sides agree that there’s more secularization because the church doesn’t have nearly the controlling power that it had 50 years ago.

So you can be ever so religious; it just doesn’t matter. It’s squeezed to the periphery of life. If you have more spirituality, whatever that it, this doesn’t mean you’ve come to the end of secularization. It may merely be the multiplying of secularization.

Postorganizational? Have you seen all the books on the shelves about how to organize yourself, your companies, your time, and everything else? Postindividualistic? A case could be made that part of the emergent movement is precisely a breach from previous constructs to constitute a new “This is the way I will do it.” Post-Protestant? You mean the Reformation doesn’t count?

Postconsumerist? Has anybody been watching the stock market recently? Volumes of sales? How we lift the economy? In fact, some of these trends that people identify in the young, I lived through in the dirty 60s. As the great philosopher Yogi Berra said, “DÈj‡ vu, all over again.”

So one wants to be careful with this mere sloganeering. An analysis of culture that is not just slogans demands more thought, more perception, more accuracy. If you start building up your entire philosophy of ministry out of just slogans, you can be falling into traps that you may not even see are there. But it’s more than that.

B) It’s the antitheses that are constructed.

Here’s a wonderful list, this one from Webber. These are the titles of most of his chapters in his most recent book The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World. He sets up the debate. His chapters from three to the end run like this: In the field of communication, “Communication: From Print to Cultural Transmission.” Do you mean when there was print there was no cultural transmission?

“History: From Ahistorical to Tradition.” Wait a minute. Ahistorical? There have been entire movements of philosophy of history in Western university history departments in the last 300 years. Entire philosophies of what history is, most of which we’ve lost. You could make a case for the view that postmodernism is more ahistorical since it is far less interested in what took place in the past than in our recreations of what took place in the past.

“Theology: From Propositionalism to Narrative.” Again, there’s a smidgen of truth in that. That is to say, an earlier generation of preachers was far more likely to preach from texts that focused on discourse and propositions. They were far more comfortable with such texts, so you had young preachers far more able to handle Galatians and Colossians than they were to handle John or 2 Samuel.

Yes, there’s some truth to that, but do you know any thoughtful Christian in any age that thinks that truth is just propositional? If you have only narrative, or even a supreme emphasis on narrative, then.… Narratives themselves are intrinsically more open-ended. Unless you locate narratives within a certain kind of context of understanding and assumptions, you get multiplying vagueness.

“Ecclesiology: From Invisible to Visible.” What they’re saying is, “You know, there was a stress on the great invisible church, where we want to be visible and work it out in life.” Well, talk to Baptists about that. They don’t understand much about Baptist ecclesiology to give that kind of analysis.

“Being Church: From Market to Mission.” I’ll say more about that. Don’t forget; we’ve just come through one of the greatest mission expansion movements in the entire history of the church. Was it all market driven?

“Pastors: From Power to Servanthood.” I know there are some horrible, power-hungry pastors. My dad was a pastor. I don’t remember a single day of his life when he didn’t spend 45 minutes to an hour on his knees. Not a single day. I’ve seen him hurt, maligned, and crushed. I saw him in the early years of French Canada. Don’t talk to me about power.

I can multiply their number by hundreds and hundreds of pastors I’ve met throughout the Western world. This is very close to maligning the servants of God. I know that there are some bad apples. There are some bad apples in every lot. “Youth Ministers: From Parties to Prayer.” “Educators: From Information to Formation.” Do you see the antitheses everywhere? There’s always some smidgen of truth to them, but they are, at the end of the day, manipulative. There is a worse element yet, it seems to me.

C) There is also a kind of throwing around of semi-technical jargon that muddies the waters.

I have yet to read anybody writing in the emerging church tradition using the word deconstruction who has a clue what it means, and as for the movement of deconstruction itself, which was invented in France.… In France, in fact, it’s now a dead issue. It’s gone.

That doesn’t mean that postmodernism is gone, but the input into postmodernism from the philosophical movement called la dÈconstruction is, in fact, dead. It’s only still alive here in America. It’s dying in Britain. It’s dead in France, and it’s still on the uprise over here. In fact, the way they use the term.… They use deconstruction to mean something like unpack or unwrap, and thus explain. Nobody in the field uses the term that way, and that’s merely an example.

You say, “Well, it wouldn’t matter. This would all be picky stuff. You can’t be right all the time. They’re not all scholars. Okay, don’t be so picky, Carson.” Except that their analysis of where we need to go turns very strongly on their analysis of what postmodernism is about, so if there are huge questions about their analysis of postmodernism, if the foundation is that weak, then how do we do our assessment of the next stage?

2. The emerging church movement does not assess modernism very well.

Partly it’s a question of the rigid antitheses I’ve just mentioned; partly it’s a failure to grasp how varied the modern period has been. The modern period has embraced, for example, the sub-period called Romanticism. “A crowd, a host of dancing daffodils,” Wordsworth, and so on. Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it embraced existentialism. What’s the difference between existentialism and postmodernism? In Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, you define yourself by what you do. The world is open, and you define yourself by what you do. That’s very close to postmodernism, and it belongs to the modern period.

There were some slogans in the Paris underground about 35 years ago sort of summarizing various well-known philosophers at the time. Camus: “To be is to do.” Sartre: “To do is to be.” Sinatra: “Do be do be do.” All I’m saying is that both the beginning with being, with Camus, and the beginning with doing, to define your own self, that was part of the 60s as well, do you see? It’s not as if we thought of these things for the first time.

Above all, perhaps this is the most important part of this sub-point, I think it fails to recognize that it’s understanding of modernism seems to derive from the perceptions of its leaders who have almost, without exception, come from a very narrow subculture, a conservative, sometimes fundamentalist subculture, of evangelicalism. Let me explain this point a little more since it’s very important.

Evangelicalism, broadly defined, has different segments, and the different segments are vulnerable to different kinds of innovation. So in the Reformed heritage, for example, they have proven very susceptible to influence from a movement called theonomy. If you don’t know what theonomy is, it means you’re not from the Reformed tradition. If you’re from the Reformed tradition and you’ve been awake, then you know about theonomy.

Theonomy has not been at all a danger to Arminians. It’s not been a danger to charismatics. It’s not been a danger to all kinds of evangelicals, but it has been a danger to people in the Reformation tradition. Also a danger to the Reformation tradition, although not only to them but primarily to them, is what’s now called the new perspective on Paul. That’s a whole array of positions as well, but it ends up with the most dominant voices giving a new definition of justification.

Justification is not God’s declarative act by which he declares you to be just on the ground of Christ’s righteousness and his death on our behalf. No, now it is God’s declaration that you belong to the covenant. There are very huge implications for how you preach the gospel in that view, and in Reform circles, it’s dividing churches left and right.

In more Arminian circles, whether they admit that they’re Arminian or not, in fact, they’re far more open to openness of God theology. The Reformed tradition is not going to be affected by the openness of God theology. Not a chance. There’s just no danger there. On the other hand, the Arminian tradition is very “influenceable,” if I may coin a phrase, by this sort of tradition.

Let me give a couple of more examples. If you come from a church that has been entirely freewheeling in the nature of its corporate meetings.… Very little planning, very little structure, very little reverence. Somebody comes up to the front and says, “Good morning, everybody,” and there’s a subdued, “Good morning.” “I didn’t hear you. A little louder.” You’re gathering to meet God, and you have a cheerleading session.

Then when it comes to the next hymn or the next reading, there’s a smart-mouth remark, and so on. I can understand if a person comes from that tradition why reverting to the prayer book of Anglicanism suddenly looks jolly good. You see, you are open to liturgical reformation when you come from something that sloppy in the first place.

Now the question is.… If you come from a very, very conservative, even fundamentalist background, what are you going to be most open to? I’m not saying that any of these traditions are all demonic or all good. It means, again, we’ve got to reform ourselves by the Word of God again and again, doesn’t it?

What I am saying is if you come from a church tradition, for example, that stresses inerrancy, as all of these groups at their best do, but stresses inerrancy and works that out in terms of, “You need to have the right version. So you believe in inerrancy, you jolly well better get your doctrine of hell together so that you can articulate it in very bold terms. Get your details of eschatology, or we don’t want you in this church,” and on and on, so that inerrancy turns out to be a narrow set of structures. It’s hard-nosed and hard-boiled.

Then I can understand that a McLaren comes along, and he’s wonderfully attractive. I can understand, but the mistake from the methodological point of view is, then, reading his take on what is legitimately wrong and needs to be corrected in one narrow stream of evangelicalism onto all of evangelicalism and branding the whole thing as modernism so that you are reacting in theory against your own background, growing up a wee bit, and in danger of a pendulum swing, but you’re casting it as if what you’re really doing is speaking prophetically to all of modernism. That’s not true. It’s not accurate. It’s not right.

If instead you come from a church that is no less inerrant, but where it’s been steeped in really excellent Bible teaching, really excellent corporate worship, really excellent outreach into the university, and men and women are being converted (I can introduce you to churches like that), then you look at this sort of material, and you’re not impressed, to be quite frank. Just as an Arminian is not too impressed by theonomy or a Reform type is not too impressed by open theology.

In other words, the more you get your theology really mature and balanced and your churchmanship really mature and balanced, the more that you’re exposed to really, really good models, the less attractive a kind of pendulum swing correction to a bad model within the big movement is going to be to you.

So one of the things that has grabbed my attention (it’s almost unavoidable) is how many in the emerging church leadership have come out of very culturally-conservative backgrounds. Simply read their own stories. Read Spencer Burke. Read McLaren. So McLaren comes along, and part of his appeal.… In the second volume after A New Kind of Christian is a section on how Christians will respond to R-rated movies.

Now he’s come out of a certain kind of conservative background. “Well, they’re just dirty movies. You don’t go to them. You keep yourself completely uncontaminated from the world, and thus you can’t talk to anybody. You’ve got to retreat into a holy huddle,” and so on, over against a much more diffuse, elaborate, and Christian way of thinking, so that you understand what’s going on, can see its good points and its bad points, and talk to people about it.

You see, if he came out of just a “no, no, no” background, I can understand how he gets there. On the other hand, when my daughter was growing up.… She’s now in fifth year university, so she’s closer to the grownup stage, but when she was in her early teens and she wanted to go to a movie that was one more beyond the level that I thought was appropriate, we had a rule in our house. I never said, “No.” What I said was, “Yeah, okay. Fine. You can go with your friends after you’ve seen it with me first.”

So we’d go off to the movie and then go off to some restaurant afterwards and have a long chat. “What was the movie about? What do the camera angles do to right and wrong? How does the storyline project good and evil? Who’s made a hero? What is considered right and wrong? Are there any rights and wrongs? How do you know?”

Now I think that she wouldn’t be too impressed with McLaren’s argument here, precisely because she hasn’t come out of a right-wing church, but at the same time, I also did want to protect her. I want to protect my son. I start watching the cookies on the computer to find out what websites they’ve been visiting because, at the end of the day, garbage in, garbage out. That applies to your mind too.

I don’t want them hooked on porn. I don’t want them hooked on endless violence. Somewhere along the line, something’s got to be said about that too, besides engagement. Where does the balance of all of that come in? “You are not to be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Somewhere along the line if, when you see this stuff, you start fantasizing about it, you’ve got red flags going off. Your engagement better include a fairly decent bit of strategic withdrawal, and I don’t hear that in McLaren. I understand why. I understand why because he comes out of a certain kind of background.

Another example is Tomlinson’s book on non-evangelical theology. One of the things he means by post-evangelical, he tells us, is that he wants to be able to explore positively and “interact positively” (that’s his expression) with non-evangelical theology. Well, I think that’s a good thing. I want my students to read not only a conservative introduction to the New Testament, like Guthrie or Carson, Moo, and Morris, I also want them to read Kummel or Raymond Brown, and so on.

In theology, I not only want them to read Calvin, I want them to read Barth, I want them to read Schleiermacher, and I want them to read some of the post-liberals. I want them to read Brueggemann on the Old Testament, and so on. Of course, of course. Do you know what I’ve observed, in fact? I’ve watched students go on for PhDs now for a long time.

Those students who come out of the most culturally-conservative seminaries, when they go to a secular school and do a PhD, have a very high failure rate in terms of fidelity to the gospel, because all the way along the line, they’ve been taught that all liberals have horns. They’ve never found anything good in Barth. Barth is necessarily bad. They’ve never read Barth. All they’ve read is stuff about Barth that condemns Barth.

Then they go off to university and discover vast strands of Barth that are terrific, that you’d want to say your “amen” to. As a result, they’ve got no categories for it, so they’ve got to reject all of the authoritative propositional teaching they’ve had in the first place. Do you see? The highest rate of moving away from any faithful confessional evangelicalism amongst students who go on for PhDs is amongst those who come from the most conservative backgrounds in their churches and education. That’s the truth.

Whereas I want to be part of a church and a seminary that is genuinely confessional but teaching people to evaluate, think, think critically, and so on. Our failure rate for our students who do PhDs elsewhere instead of doing them at Trinity is pretty small. We have a few who go off the deep end but not many.

So once again, it seems to me that part of what has gone on is the leaders of the emerging church movement are responding as much to their own limited backgrounds as they are to anything else, then projecting those backgrounds on the entire evangelical confessional movement, and then projecting that onto all of modernism, creating a fair bit of false antithesis.

3. The emergent church movement needs to begin talking about where postmodernism, however defined, should be confronted, not catered to.

You see, this side of the new heaven and the new earth, no culture is going to be entirely biblically faithful. No culture. None. No culture, this side of the new heaven and the new earth, is going to be all good or all bad. That’s part of the doctrine of common grace. It’s part of the fact that there remains a law written on the heart.

So when you speak of antithetical categories, and postmodernism has all of these weakness and has produced all of these evil things in the church, don’t you at least want to ask the question, “All right, now we are responding to an emerging change in the culture (let’s call it postmodernism and not be too explicit on what it involves), what are the things in it that we should not cater to?” Don’t you have that responsibility, as you would have for any culture?

If you’re going to become a missionary in Thailand, you’ve got to understand something of Thai culture. You have to understand something of Buddhism. You don’t want to walk into minefields. You have to understand how the thing is put together, but there are going to be some things, sooner or later, you’re going to have to confront, aren’t you? You have to do that for any culture. What I can’t hear very much of in this literature is what things need to confronted in postmodern culture.

In fact, a colleague of mine at Trinity who is extremely alert, both thinking culturally and thinking biblically, was trying to point out that the strongest forms of epistemological postmodernism, that is the forms that say that you cannot know anything, if you take that in the strongest possible form, it sounds very, very different from all of the biblical statements about, “We know this.… We are certain that.… We write this to you, Theophilus, that you may be certain of the things that we have taught you …” and so on.

It sounds very different from all of that, doesn’t it? At what point do you start saying that the strongest form of postmodernism has some elements in it that are incompatible with biblically faithful Christianity, and things need to be looked at again? So he was saying this in class, very low key, and one of the students emailed him and said, “You know, I think you’re a bit harsh. We respond to this sort of thing in our church by having more liturgy and the Lord’s prayer. We recite the Apostles’ Creed. That’s how we respond to it.”

You see, what the student meant was that you respond to it by recognizing that you yourself are steeped in a tradition. You speak out of a frame of reference, which is what postmodernism says. So we’ve responded to it. We do something that’s right and good and helpful. Do you see what’s wrong with that response?

It fails to answer the question, “Is this tradition, which is comfortable with some liturgy, some creed, and some confessionalism as part of a tradition, true, or is it just my tradition? What does the Bible say about that sort of thing?” We’ll come to that question more explicitly in a moment.

Or take the whole category of tolerance. There are a number of universities now that have public funds to invite people in to give what are simply called public university lectures. They pay the transport, and they pay an honorarium, and so forth. Any legitimate group in the university can nominate someone to come in and give a public university lecture. Sometimes they’ll bring in Steven Gubser at Princeton to come in and talk about string theory for the Physics Club or something.

Sometimes it’s something really esoteric, or it’s a gay liberal agenda and so on. Sometimes you get five people showing up at these university lectures and sometimes more. In several universities there have been recognized Christian groups on campus who’ve tapped into these funds and had people like me or a few others that are invited to give these public university lectures.

They can’t be straightforward evangelistic talks, but in these frames of reference, I’ve sometimes lectured for an hour or two under the title, “The Intolerance of Tolerance.” That invariably pulls in a crowd. Invariably, even from the most liberal universities, maybe especially from the most liberal universities because, you see, tolerance has changed definition under postmodernism.

It used to be that tolerance was understood to be that attitude which meant that even if you disagreed with someone, you tolerated them. That is, you defended their right to exist, to speak, and to defend their turf. It was bound up, thus, with a view that said, “I may dislike what you’re saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That was considered the best of tolerance.

But the new definition of tolerance doesn’t work that way. The new definition of tolerance says that every position is equally good or equally bad. Every position is on the same moral par with every other position, and if you don’t believe that, then you’re intolerant. Now I scratch my head, and I ask myself, “If I don’t disagree with a position and think it’s wrong first, how can I possibly speak of tolerating it?”

In the past, you had to disagree with something before you could speak of tolerance. You disagree with it, and then grant it permission to go ahead anyway. Do you see? It’s part of a liberal, democratic society. It’s part of a tolerant society, as opposed to an oppressive, oligarchical, or dictatorial society, but if you say that each position is equally right, how can you speak of tolerating?

“Oh, I think you’re as right as I am. I tolerate you.” I don’t know what that means. It’s incoherent. Then at the one place where they actually do think that somebody is wrong, namely in their definition of tolerance, then the so-called tolerant people are the most intolerant of the lot. The new definition of tolerance is rabidly illogical, incoherent, and intolerant.

A very helpful book along these lines, in terms of trying to help people see this, is a new book written by Randy Newman called Questioning Evangelism. Now he is as sensitive as anyone in the emerging church camp to how to address biblical illiterates, postmoderns, and people who are appealing to this sort of tolerance. He’s a Trinity graduate from 20 years back. He’s been doing university evangelism … now he’s doing faculty evangelism … in the Washington, DC area for a long time.

For those who know about these matters, the DC area universities have been just closed to the gospel for decades. Campus Crusade was wiped out there. InterVarsity was wiped out there. He went back, in fact, with Crusade, and he spent the last 20 years in George Mason, George Washington, Howard, Georgetown. He’s got groups going in all of them, and they’re working fine.

Now out of this framework, you see, he is deeply committed to the truth of Scripture, but he recognizes that very often you have to use the kinds of devices that the Lord Jesus himself used. When somebody asks you a leading question, learn to ask a certain kind of question back. Somebody sticks a mic under your face or some student confronts you in a university, “Are you intolerant?” I don’t know how many questions.… “If you think that Jesus is the only way, doesn’t that make you a bigot?”

So you smile sweetly, and you ask, “Do you think all positions should be accorded equal stance? Let’s say Hitler. Do you think that he should be allowed free speech on this university? How about someone who is advocating child molesting or a Catholic priest who has succumbed to pedophilia? Do you think that he should be allowed to advocate that stance on this university campus?”

“Well, no. Some things are …”

“On what grounds, then, would you make a distinction?”

You see, he is teaching us to try to win people over to a more sober assessment of all kinds of issues by questioning and questioning. Start reading the New Testament to find out how often Jesus answers questions back with questions, not because he wants to leave things open-ended, but because he wants to expose what’s wrong with the presuppositions that are bringing the question in the first place.

That means that we cannot simply cater to postmodern love of tolerance. You have to be aware of it. You have to be aware that sometimes, in stating the truth, you may be coming across in a very negative way. You may be projecting all kinds of narrow-minded bigotry that you don’t mean to project. At the same time, sooner or later, you have to question this new definition of tolerance at a most fundamental level or, at the end of the day, God cannot be God. The issues are that bald. I would love to say much more about that one, but I’ll let that one pass.

4. Postmoderns need to recapture the sweep of biblical texts and without fudging.

Let me just give you a few examples.

A) Burke, in his “suspicion of all hierarchy” (that’s his term) in Christian leadership then instead promotes a kind of uniformity of voice in a website chatroom like The Ooze.

What do you do with a biblical passage that says, “Obey those who have the rule over you … for they watch over your souls.”? It sounds like a hierarchy to me. I might not like the term, but …

Now that’s not the only thing that is said. The church is also made responsible to discipline leaders, but it is one thing that is said. To get a notion of the balance and proportion of these sorts of things in Scripture is part of any Bible teacher’s job, so that you avoid mere hierarchicalism (a top-down model) and avoid a kind of open-ended “We all have the same voice and authority” model, which is, again, clearly not true. It’s not biblically faithful.

B) Then there is the question, “What about all the other guys?”

One of the chapters in McLaren’s book has it, and at the end of the day, you do not have a decisive answer. You have an answer that does say, “Yes, all those who will be saved ultimately will be saved by Christ,” but he doesn’t answer the question whether or not it will be by self-conscious faith in Christ or not. That one is ducked.

C) Meanwhile, every time you start pushing for a little more biblical clarity, the question is transmuted to another key.

“Well, don’t forget that Christians have changed their minds on quite a few things. Christians have been wrong about slavery. Christians have been wrong about the Crusades. Christians have been wrong about this or that; therefore, we shouldn’t go into the business of saying what’s right or wrong or who’s in or out.”

Well, if we shouldn’t go into the business of what’s right or wrong, then, of course, we can’t say that slavery is wrong today either. That stance has a nasty stinger in the tale, brothers and sisters … a really nasty one. You see, to say that something is right or wrong in Scripture does not mean that the church has always got it right.

Meanwhile, it helps to get a certain amount of historical perspective. One of the efforts of this literature is to show that the Christian heritage, the Christian tradition, Christendom in general, has made just as big a muck up of things as any other world religion, so we’re all in the same place and we’re all in the same journeying together. So let’s just sort of compare our lives. If we live a godly life, then people will see that we have something to offer and come along with us. We’re on the same pilgrimage; we’re on the same journey.

Well, God knows we need humility, but let’s get some accuracy here too. What does Philemon say about slavery? How was slavery finally undone? One of the persons who has helped me most think through questions of slavery has been an African-American scholar by the name of Thomas Sowell, who has written three large books on the subject. They are superb at the level of their research.

The point is that virtually every world civilization embraced slavery until the eighteen century. The Hittites did it. The Jews did it. The Chinese did it. The Indians did it. The Africans did it. In fact, when we were taking slaves from Africa, one African tribe would enslave another African tribe. A large percentage of the Africans that whites took across the Atlantic were, in fact, first captured and enslaved by Africans and then sold to the whites. It’s complicated.

At the very same time that 11 million Africans were shipped, sinfully, across the Atlantic … many of them dying on the boats … 13 million were shipped up the Arabian Gulf. There has arisen a huge guilt literature in the Christian West over this. There has not arisen any guilt literature in the Muslim world. Not a scrap. I haven’t been able to find any. Why?

What stopped the slave trade? It was stopped by Christians converted under Whitefield, Wesley, and Howell Harris, who began to see the implications of the gospel itself: of men and women made from one pair according to Acts 17; that the Old Testament may modulate, limit, and delimit slavery, but it never finally justifies it; that the whole teaching of Philemon is radically against it; and they rammed through Parliament the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

Do you know what stopped the slave trade across the Atlantic? British gunboats when the America navy was still too small. Do you know what stopped the slave trade up the Arabian Gulf? British gunboats. Now I’m not suggesting that the colonialism was itself all good either; don’t misunderstand me, but the fact of the matter is that all of the great movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries toward the abolition of slavery was, in fact, motivated by the effluent from the Evangelical Awakening.

I don’t hear any of that in this kind of discourse of what’s right or wrong. Yes, Christians have got things wrong, and we need to walk with a great deal of humility because we do. On the other hand, does the Bible speak to this issue or does it not? What is the actual history in this area? You cannot keep taking examples in which the worst of what we do is emphasized and the best of what others do is emphasized in order to make an equivalence of world religions. You cannot do it.

D) How do you get across the notion of sin?

Brother and sisters in Christ, this is extraordinarily important. You cannot get agreement on the solution to a problem unless you get agreement on the nature of the problem. Unless you have a biblical definition of what the problem is, you cannot get a biblical definition of what the cross is about. You cannot do it.

Unless you see, somewhere along the line, that sin.… Whether you call it sin, transgression, idolatry, or anything else; there are many different ways of talking about sin. Sooner or later, unless you see that the fundamental issue is anarchy against God, the de-Godding of God, rebellion against God.… Not just breaking some rules, but dethroning God so that I’m at the center of the universe.

Unless you see that is the most fundamental issue, and because of that, God is righteously angry against us.… The only way we are going to get saved is if somehow we are reconciled to him, so that his wrath is removed, so that at the heart of the Christian gospel is God’s own loving plan to remove our guilt and shame, and thus set aside his wrath justly while preserving his own integrity. Unless you see that’s what the problem is, you cannot possibly be faithful to the gospel.

Now you can have all kinds of other sub-themes related to this. Christus Victor. That is, Christ victorious over Satan and his enemies. You can get reconciliation themes, all kinds of things, but at the heart of it, right at the Bible’s storyline.… I could take three or four hours to demonstrate this to you, it seems to me, beyond possibility of cavil. Right at the heart of the Bible storyline is our problem is that we are anarchists and the wrath of God stands over against us.

Unless you see that is what sin, rebellion, anarchy, and transgression are, and recapture the sheer odium of it, you cannot finally present the gospel as the answer. You cannot do it. Unless you get agreement on what the problem is, you cannot get agreement on what the solution is. You cannot do it.

I’m not saying that’s easy. I’m not saying that you can go in there with sort of hellfire, brimstone, sort of Elmer Gantry stereotypical stuff. I’m not saying that. There are ways of being winsome, careful, and making a reasonable, responsible, convincing, compelling, convicting case in all of these areas, but you have to get there.

You see, part of learning your biblical theology well is understanding that in addressing people of another culture, whether it’s postmodern or Buddhists in Thailand, you not only need to know how to engage, you need to know where they’re coming from, but once you are starting to engage you need to know where you’re going.

To focus on the engagement and all the sensitivities on one side or the other side without having a good idea of what the biblical theology is in the first place means you don’t really know where you’re going. Then sooner or later, the danger is that you become so eccentric, so off-center, so focusing on relative peripheries, that you’re in danger of sliding off into the cultic or the irrelevant.

5. Very often, postmoderns give us an antithesis that I think is dangerous.

The antithesis is this: either you can know something certainly, with the certainty of omniscience, or if you can’t, then you’re necessarily left in an open stream of uncertainty and a certain kind of relativism. That’s the antithesis, and because you can always show that human beings don’t know anything absolutely, with a certainty of omniscience, then you are left with this denial of certainty anywhere.

But everything depends on what you mean by certainty. If you mean by certainty the kind of certainty that only omniscience has, a kind of being who does know absolutely everything about everything, then obviously we can never have any certainty. Postmodernism is right. Obviously. On the other hand, I would also say that it is idolatrous to think that we ever could have the knowledge of omniscience.

The question is.… Are there legitimate, careful, right, responsible ways of talking about certainty for finite human beings that do not pretend to claim omniscient certainty? I would say that there are, and that the Bible is full of them with propositional truth: “We know that.… We are certain that.… We are sure that.… We present this.… Unless you believe that …”

You see, truth in Scripture is sometimes very personal: “Christ is the way, the truth, and the life,” but there are scores and scores of propositional sentences. “Unless you believe that … you cannot be saved.” “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.” The gospel is a message, and you can be certain of these things, not with the certainty of omniscience. That is forever closed to us. We’re not God, and to think anything else is idolatrous.

On the other hand, as human beings, we can be certain within the limitations of what it means to be human, and you know this to some measure, in any case, in your own experience, in that we gain an asymptotic approach.… I know there are math students here who know instantly what I’m talking about, but there are some English majors here who are sort of asymptotically challenged, so let me explain.

An asymptote is a curving line that comes down to an axis and gets closer and closer but never touches. An asymptotic approach is an approach that gets closer and closer and never touches. So also in knowledge. You start learning Greek, “L˙ō, l˙eis, l˙ei. Oh, this is tough. L˙omen. How am I …? We have a test tomorrow. L˙ete …” It just seems so obscure, strange, difficult, and alien.

Halfway through the course, you’re really challenged by participles, but the basic paradigm of the present verb is no difficulty. Five years later, you’re a major in Classics somewhere, you’re doing postdoctoral work at Trinity on “Aspect Theory and the Greek Verb,” and l˙ō doesn’t seem too difficult anymore, does it? What’s happened? You’ve approached a certain field of knowledge asymptotically. You have learned more and more things.

You are not an expert in Greek. You don’t know all there is to know about Greek. You never will know all there is to know about Greek, but you’ve approached asymptotically to a higher level. You will never have the knowledge of omniscience, but you will know some true things about Greek.

We may know many, many true things, even if we may know none of them omnisciently. We may know certainly but never with the certainty of omniscience. I wish I could spend two or three hours working out the epistemology for what that would look like, but I would want to argue that on the very surface of things, the Bible is full of those sorts of claims. You cannot duck them without losing the flavor and the content of the Bible. Let me end with this note as well.

6. It seems to me that this emerging church group needs to be more careful to avoid sectarianism.

In the book on five perspectives that has McLaren, and so on, interacting with Horton, Frederica Mathewes, and others, McLaren is a model of courtesy, humility, godliness, listening, and so on. Hats off to him. It’s great stuff.

On the other hand, when he’s writing his own books, and this is true of most in the field, it seems to me, everything is cast so much in a them and us perspective that, in fact, they are becoming sectarian. They have their own websites, their own chatrooms, their own approved speakers, and their own blurbers. They are off here, and everybody else is off somewhere else. That’s the heart of sectarianism. When I offer these criticisms, brothers and sisters, it’s not because I want to have new divisions in the church. It’s just the opposite.

What I want to see is the positive influence these leaders could have to help some of the most conservative segments of the church grow up a little bit and recognize that, in truth, the times, they are a-changin’. They will not themselves swing in a pendulum drift to errors on the other side such that at the end of the day the gospel is compromised, the truth of Scripture is lost, and somehow they introduce new divisions in the church that are just as ungodly as divisions that we have sometimes had in the past.