My Emergent Letters to Friends: Learning to Discern

My Emergent Letters to Friends: Discernment

by skinhead
March 15, 2011

Dear Ed.  I found Kevin DeYoung’s and Justin Taylor’s statements last week inflammatory about Rob Bell’s position on hell, sin, atonement, justice, and etc. Kevin and Justin made up stuff about Rob that is not true and the response has been typical of what you’re getting on Facebook (from friends and colleagues alike). I really don’t wish to respond to each of their statements publically other than to say what I already have said. Rob fully believes in the evangelical hell, heaven, Jesus, etc. and made it clear again Sunday night at a Q&A held at church when he was questioned.

But Rob uses imprecise language (as I also have stated) which leaves him open to being accused of things that aren’t there. These accusations then amount to false judgments about him in the name of Christ by Christians feeling threatened by his missing imprecisions. Personally, I don’t really wish to defend Rob so much as to point out to my fellow Christians that they are making the very point Rob is making in his book… that we judge each other really fast and aren’t comprehending how deeply grievous spiritual truths like hell, heaven, love, Jesus, really are beyond making our safe creedal statements about them.

With Rob I’ve learned a long time ago to listen to the intent of his speech rather than to the precision of his statements. Too, he loves to talk about theological paradoxes within biblical narratives which cannot be resolved and must be left open-ended. For traditional Christians who are use to hearing “definitive” summary statements within carefully crafted theological formulae, the emergent method can be found to be irritating, frustrating, inspecific, unnerving and angering. Personally, I believe Christians have been spoon-fed for so long that their minds have turned to mush and water and that they don’t know how to think for themselves anymore. How to study, how to investigate, and most importantly, how to listen and think other than to spout off their feelings and emotions as "gospel" to those enablers willing to listen around them.

When I try to parse what Rob is saying against my traditional Christianity upbringing it leaves me blinded from hearing God’s word that is shouting in my ears while I debate God and refuse him his grip on my heart. Said differently, I’ve been too fast to judge Rob on what he should be saying in my mind (wishing to feel safe and content) than to listen to him on what he is really saying. Once I re-orient myself away from those traditional arguments in my head I then can hear him better as to what he is saying…. And, when I do, its spiritually overwhelming - like scales coming off my eyes that I may fearfully come and tread into the holy-of-holies before the presence of our Almighty God.

For you see, Rob still is claiming traditional evangelical doctrinal tenets no less than what DeYoung or Taylor ascribe to, but he is re-framing or re-defining these tenets into a postmodernistic framework of emerging Christianity as he uses the emergent language to help us better hear God's Word. And if anything, emergent language is all about ambiguity and mystery, the high holiness of God and the complete gulf that we have put up to God's eternal redemptive purposes. It is this latter part of postmodernism - its emergent language and mindset - that so engage traditional Christians towards anger for the "truth". They don’t get postmodernism and it unnerves them. Rob will say it more simply -

“If we think we know God, than that "God" we think we know isn’t God. For God is infinitely above what we know and think, and the God we have is the one we’ve put in our religious faith-box, whom we’ve idolized and have told what he should and shouldn’t be doing.”

At least that ‘s my current understanding of all this after 12 years of struggling to listen more completely while trying to figure this postmodern emergent stuff out as an older-generation adult 3 generations removed from generations X,Y and Z. Historically, evangelicalism itself is a new movement birthed from the fundamentalist movements back in the 1880’s-1940’s (the Industrial Age) and has, itself, become the “new fundamentalism” of modernity. Thus, today’s evangelicals control the presses and the schools, the media and the pulpits and are crying foul to its newest challenger and usurper, emergent Christianity. But emergent postmodernism has arisen as an updated version of evangelicalism these past 10-20 years (c. 1990-2010, the "Social Networking" Age) and intends to displace, disrupt, destroy, burn everything that we as evangelical Christians espouse that we think know about God and doctrine and faith and Jesus... or more correctly, impiously think we know. And I don't think for a minute that emergent Christians will be re-writing the bible with false doctrines and lies. More correctly, I do think that emergent Christians will be authenticating their historic faith and as they do we'll discover how close it will be to past creedal statements written in blood, sweat and tears of our past forefathers in the faith.

Emergent Christianity isn’t clearly defined b/c it is so new and no one really knows what it is and where it’s going. The conservative form of "emergent-ism" is an “emerging Christianity” that holds to its orthodox-evangelical roots while trying to not to be too quick to jump into the “emergent ship”. Thus, Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Matt Chandler are kinda caught out as “tweeners” between wanna-be neo-evangelicals and emergent Christians while DeYoung and Taylor are still in the evangelical camp of strict Calvinistic reformed doctrine (at least that's how I understand it). But for the emergent, the argument isn’t to abandon evangelic doctrine but to better speak it to a postmodern era (or rather, let evangelicalism go as irrelevant and unnecessary parts of the continuing conversation of authentic Christianity in its haughtiness and judgmentalisms). And so, it is the emergent's newer-language which “feels” like a "must-hear" better re-interpretation of church dogma as it thrashes around trying to “speak God better”.

Now I have my differences with Rob but its more along the lines of the various emergent strains of Christianity as each emergent position works to define their foundations of where they should be vs. what they are teaching. The spectrum goes from conservative to neo-evangelic to a more liberal abandonment of everything that is church doctrine over the past 2000 years (called “pyro-theology” or “deconstructionism”). And to some degree this latter endeavor may have to be done b/c we have simply “boxed” in God with too much argument and thesis and have missed his heart and soul and consequently, the heart and soul of our faith.

I think of Jesus in the gospels who so greatly upset the Sadducee's and Pharisees as he re-aligned and re-established the OT Abrahamic faith that had gotten lost in the religious rhetoric of his day. Jesus kept to the past, but he re-explained it through himself, and then continued to re-define it in the lives of each soul he met, individualizing it and expanding it, just like the paradigm he was so fond of using, that of "new wine skins for new wine". Without new wine skins the new wine would burst the old wine skins as it fermented. Jesus words were doing the same to the religious institutes of his day. He was re-adjusting and re-framing God, faith, sin, life, living, love, justice, etc. to the faithful (and unfaithful) traditionalists of his day. And so I think that this is what emergent Christians are doing today... searching to speak God better to a sinful, needy, lost world.

And at this point I believe Rob to be an emerging Christian like myself who is making adjustments as he goes along – trying on new suits of clothes for size and fit, freewheeling off of new wake boards as he tests new equipment and theories, in an attempts to determine the necessary fundamental emergent directions he thinks postmodern Christianity should be taking.

And unlike me, he is more committed to destroying the past more completely (which takes a lot of courage b/c of all of the vilification that he gets). But I think he’s more gifted to do this like the old-time preachers of the past - the Billy Sundays and George Whitefields, the Jonathan Edwards and Charles Spurgeons, the John Wesleys and D.L. Moodys, and the David Otis Fullers of their day. They didn’t take any crap and they loved dishing it out in extremely convicting hellfire-and-brimstone sermons. They wielded the pulpit like a bully club and they struck down anything and anyone that didn’t worship Jesus first and foremost. Rob is not very different from these old-timey preachers but I think that he is hated even more. And so, we would do well to shut our mouths and listen first, before hastening to judgment and vaunting ourselves and our bruised egos up in inflammatory rhetorical displays. God is not pleased by our harsh judgments, words and labels. We are to speak truth in love, and in love speak truth, and use God's wisdom in both directions. Amen! and Amen!

Consequently only time can tell what will be, and it’ll be at least another 10-20 years before everyone really knows what emergent Christianity will was about. But outlandish statements made by both sides as they create point-and-counterpoint arguments against each other can be as much constructive as they are destructive to the fellowship of God's church over time. Bell, like myself, will continue to modify his position in light of newer developments and spiritual insights based upon Inauguration Eschatology (cf. my writings and NT Wright's among others). It must be done and is being done by Mars Hill Church and others.

Thus, emergent Christianity is in its own “discovery-and-analysis” phase of what postmodernal Christianity may look like. But we don’t know. It’s too soon to tell. And when we get there our traditional brethren can thank us then for plowing the hard ground that is ahead and has been behind. Because they have not helped with their harsh judgements and inciteful words, working against any form of plowing being done by humble, faith-driven, obedient servants of God. But I would that my brethren team with their newest cousins and work with us together towards figuring-out this thing we call the Christian missional message of Jesus.

- skinhead