My Emergent Letters to Friends: What is Emergent Christianity?

My Emergent Letters to Friends

by skinhead
March 14, 2011

Hi. Attached is a Christianity Today review of Rob Bell’s book. My comments are in green to help elucidate the mis-statements I’ve been noticing in popular discussion websites. I think that if we wish to critique emergent Christianity that we should look past Rob to the thing itself. To do that I’m reading through “Church in the Present Tense” by Kevin Corcoran (a Calvin prof) and Scot McKnight (formerly of Cornerstone). The first chapter made all the difference for me in discussion of philosophical realism versus antirealism and its social apophaticisms. Too, McKnight’s candid comments on emergent Christianity should be helpful like his blog, “The Jesus Creed”.

http://www.amazon.com/Church-Present-Tense-resources-communities/dp/1587432994

http://www.patheos.com/community/members/scotmcknight/

Overall I believe Rob's critics to continue to mistake him as a non-evangelical rather than as a neo-evangelical or more popularly knoewn as an emergent Christian. In fact, Rob’s portrayal of Christ makes the relevance of Christianity even more awesome, hopeful, useful as people have become redeemed, reconciled, Spirit-filled, disciples of the Gospel.

Fearing postmodernism, orthodox/evangelical/modernistic congregations have responded by fleeing backwards into time-bound, traditional church institutions and contemporary evangelical mega-churches that seem to become less and less relevant for this new age of the 21st Century, as they seek to update their liturgies without updating their foundations and the introspections to their faith. You can't dress up something that is already dead or dying. It needs to be buried and left in the ground. Evangelicalism is dead. Let's give it a proper, thankful burial and move on.

Emerging Christianity is doing just that in the continuum of 2000 years of church history as it rescinds from the industrial/scientific age of language specificity to a postmodernistic form of communication known for its looser language rules (thus, the squawk re Rob’s imprecise language).

Lastly, it’s not so simple to say that Love Wins or that Jesus Wins or that Justice Wins through our competing Christian labels and syllogisms. Rather, we had better find out what Jesus wants of us and to do it better, together and not separately apart... for that is where our real strength lies as well as the devil's divisions and inner man's pride.

- skinhead

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syl•lo•gism [ síllə jìzzəm ] (plural syl•lo•gisms)

noun

Definition

1. a logical argument involving three propositions: a formal deductive argument made up of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. An example is, "All birds have feathers, penguins are birds, therefore penguins have feathers."

2. deductive reasoning: reasoning from the general to the specific

3. example of deduction: an example of deductive reasoning

4. specious argument: a subtle piece of reasoning, or one that seems true but is actually false or deceptive