In this article the issue at the heart of postmodernal evangelicalism, aka, emergent evangelicalism boils down to the kind of cosmological metaphysic one builds a foundation upon. Herein, I discovered that I didn't need a new hermeneutic of the bible or a different "economic era" ala modernity or postmodernity (passed a few years ago) or even metamodernity (today) but a non-Platonic philosophical foundation upon which to build a more complete and comprehensive Christian theology. As I discovered seven years into my investigation it was that of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy he termed the the metaphysic of organism. John Cobb built upon Whitehead and directed it towards a process-based, non-Platonic, theology to wit I and others have been working on together. Thus, the new basis for the Christian faith... as well as all religious faiths... is that of process. When down we will have a commonality of agreement around simple things such as love, global cooperation, relational being which is becoming and so forth. More can be found on this subject in the Index files on the right.
R.E. Slater
February 10, 2024
Related Articles Compiled Together as One
Responses to Evangelical Criticism
* * * * * * *
Emerging Church leaders believe that Evangelicals should let go of the Bible and reason as their anchors
Fernando Canale
During the last part of the 20th century, American Evangelicalism experienced rapid changes in worship and ministerial styles in a desperate effort to reach an increasingly secularized culture. On the surface, the Emerging Church movement appears to be a new passing fad in youth ministry. Parallel to these seemingly superficial changes in ministerial style, however, the old liberal/conservative controversy was simmering across denominational lines, creating conflicts at ministerial and grassroots levels. The inerrancy of Scripture and the apologetic efforts of previous Evangelical generations were not enough to produce an Evangelical unity within denominations.
With the passing of time, an increasing number of Evangelical leaders began to realize “that this conflict was not your average, everyday schism, but a paradigm shift of seismic proportions.”1 This conviction led Emergent leaders to re-examine critically their denominations’ “assumptions of what it means to be church. Some suggest that this ‘Great Emergence’ is part of a cyclical pattern of upheavals in the church, on a par with the ‘Great Schism’ or the ‘Great Reformation.’”2
For many observers, something epochal is underway. Phyllis Tickle has suggested that Brian McLaren is the new Luther and his book A Generous Orthodoxy is the equivalent to Luther’s 95 theses.3 According to Tickle’s socio-historical interpretation, a new form of Christianity is being born and will be added to the old forms.
This seems to suggest that the Emerging Church movement may be unleashing deep paradigmatic changes not only in American Evangelicalism but also in Protestantism and Christianity as a whole. Something inside and outside Christianity must be at work, making such a change desirable and even necessary.
Dissatisfaction
Growing discontent seems to have been brewing within the broad Evangelical coalition for a long time. Causes of dissatisfaction are many and as varied as Evangelicalism. Some are dissatisfied with the way ministers and the churches conduct their everyday business. Others feel frustrated when they see churches playing an institutional game voided of spiritual meaning. Many, probably overstating their case, believe “modern” Evangelical churches are dead.
But dissatisfaction runs even deeper. Numerous believers experience a growing confusion about Christian doctrines as presented by the fragmented views of the Evangelical community. “On the front end of analysis one could argue that the ECM [Emerging Church Movement] is merely reacting to a perception of dead religiosity, hoping to breathe life into the body of Christ. But a closer analysis shows that its reaction to established ministry and typical church life (what some of them call the ‘modern church’) involve deep theological issues and metaphysical challenges. Its response entails systemic issues much more than mere aesthetic preferences.”4
According to Emerging Church leaders, this crisis can be traced to Evangelical responses to modern philosophy. Not without reason they blame the rise of the liberal/conservative controversy that divides Evangelicals on the Fundamentalist response to modernity. Liberals responded to modernity by constructing their theological project “upon the foundation of an unassailable religious experience while conservatives look to an error-free Bible as the incontrovertible foundation.”5
This suggests that both Evangelical and Emerging Church leaders fail to realize that at a deeper level, the crisis they confront stems from the underdevelopment and limitations of Protestant thought and the failure to produce an alternate synthesis of Christian theology and practice based on Scripture alone. The very existence of the “Evangelical coalition” flows from and witnesses to this fact. “American religion,” says Phyllis Tickle, “had never had a center before, primarily because it was basically Protestant in its Christianity; and Protestantism, with its hallmark characteristic of divisiveness, has never had a center.”6
What Protestant leadership was unable to produce, laity sought to find on their own around the so-called water-cooler conversations during the 1980s. Tickle argues that out of these informal conversations taking place in the context of cultural epochal change, a center was emerging. “But what was emerging was no longer Protestant. It was no longer any ‘thing,’ actually. It was simply itself, a mélange of ‘things’ cherry-picked from each quadrant and put together—some would say cobbled together—without any original intention and certainly with no design beyond that of conversation.”7 In the process, dissatisfaction with the inherited church grew strong. For many, the “inherited church was that from which they had come and to which they, literally, now had no means of returning, let alone any desire at all to do so.”8
Not surprisingly, by the end of the 20th century, the Evangelical coalition was no longer able to contain the deep theological, ecumenical, and cultural divisions present in both the leadership and laity of American Protestantism. “Evangelical leaders became highly concerned about the future of the evangelical movement. Evangelicals began to look for clarity and unity of focus in the midst of what appeared to be an unwieldy diversity. Questions such as ‘What is evangelicalism?’ ‘Where is its center?’ and ‘Where are we going?’ began to emerge.”9
The inner spiritual, theological, and hermeneutical crisis brewing in Evangelicalism during the past two centuries can explain the need and even possibility for epochal change yet, by itself, it cannot explain its generation. Something more was needed to generate an epochal mutation in Evangelical Christianity. Arguably the advent of postmodernity provided the trigger to the rise of the Emerging Church.
Postmodernity
Prior to the growing spiritual and theological dissatisfaction in the Evangelical movement in the last two decades [80s and 90s] of the 20th century, Postmodernism was effecting epochal changes at the very core and foundations of Western civilization. Like the “Emerging Church” label, the “postmodern” label is also an umbrella designation, involving various issues and levels. For this reason, Emerging Church leaders share a growing sense that the world as we knew it is changing, and they also understand postmodernity in various ways.
Evaluation of the Emerging Church movement raises the need to “identify and understand the underlying ideas and assumptions of what has come to be called the ‘modern’ worldview, which has dominated Western culture for the past few hundred years.”10 It is also important to become familiar with “the postmodern ideas, which have become dominant in the early twenty-first century.”11 And two main levels are involved in the epochal changes that Emerging Church leaders identify as postmodernity: cultural and philosophical.
Sociologically, postmodernity names the cultural mores of Western civilization at the turn of the 21st century. For instance, the term postmodern, according to Leonard Sweet, denotes “a 40-year transition from an Information Age to a Bionomic Age that will begin no later than 2020.”12 Although he likens the force these cultural events unleash to a tsunami, like a tsunami, they are of short duration and will be replaced by others in the future.
Stanley Grenz identifies informatics (Computer Age), centerlessness, pluralism, multivalence, impurity, juxtaposition, eclecticism, the refusal to place “high” art above “pop” art, and, belief in the supernatural and extra-terrestials as some of the characteristic traits of postmodern culture.13 These values are embraced, embodied, and disseminated through television, the Internet, and rock music. At the sociological level, then, Postmodernism describes Western society at the turn of the 21st century.
Philosophically, Postmodernism names changes in the area of epistemology. Epistemology is the philosophical discipline that studies the way human beings know what they know, especially in the field of scientific research. These changes that were a long time in the making involve the demise of Foundationalism and the impossibility that human beings could experience “objective” and “universal” knowledge. Thus, postmodernists think that “the world is not simply an objective given that is ‘out there,’ waiting to be discovered and known; reality is relative, indeterminate, and participatory.”14 Consequently, postmodernists “contend that the work of scientists, like that of any other human beings, is historically and culturally conditioned and that our knowledge is always incomplete.”15
Clearly, this conviction leaves Postmodernism without a foundation for universal knowledge, that is, a knowledge that is valid and true for all human beings. To avoid the total fragmentation of society, postmodernists resort to the “community” or “society” as the basis (foundation) for rational agreement and the definition of values. Of course, by definition, society changes, and so will reason and values. Consequently, to achieve some stability, communities need to stand on their own respective traditions. In this way, “regional” truth replaces “universal” truth. Philosophically, then, Postmodernism names the switch from objective and universal reason to a communitarian and traditional reason.
But postmodernity involves an even more radical change at the metaphysical level few Emerging Church leaders have considered. Metaphysics is the philosophical discipline that interprets the nature of reality as a whole. As such it includes general and regional interpretations on the nature of existence, the former dealing with the general characteristics of any and all things real, and the latter with the general characteristics of specific entities, notably, God, humans, and the world. Finally, metaphysics also includes the interpretation of the interrelation among all things real (the system of reality as a whole).
Metaphysics provides the necessary context for understanding anything and everything. As a matter of fact, philosophical, theological, and natural sciences always assume a general interpretation of the nature of the reality or realities they interpret. More specifically, metaphysics provides the ground for theological and biblical hermeneutics. A minor change in metaphysical concepts may generate broad hermeneutical changes that will reverberate across the sciences and the culture they generate.
The rethinking of metaphysics came to full expression and articulation in the work of Martin Heidegger, one of the leading postmodern philosophers. Heidegger confirmed and further articulated Nietzsche’s “overturning of Platonism,” which has been the ruling metaphysical view since the beginnings of Western civilization. Heidegger calls this the “destruction” and “overcoming” of metaphysics.16 The “destruction” of metaphysics means the criticism and abandonment of the traditional approach to philosophy and theology, and the “overcoming” means a new interpretation of metaphysics that Heidegger advanced throughout his many works.
To put it briefly, the new metaphysics of postmodernity abandons the notion that real or ultimate reality is timeless and replaces it with the view that real or ultimate reality is temporal and historical. [Actually, the word "relational" is a better term to use than temporal and historical, ala Whitehead's process philosophy. Relationality is supra-temporal, supra-experiential, and supra-panpsychic. - re slater]. Heidegger understood the magnitude of the changes involved in his metaphysical investigation into the history and nature of metaphysics and expressed it in a series of poignant rhetorical questions. “Do we stand in the very twilight of the most monstrous transformation our planet has ever undergone, the twilight of that epoch in which earth itself hangs suspended? Do we confront the evening of a night which heralds another day? Are we ‘precursors of the day of an altogether different age’?”17
Even though postmodernity brought about epochal changes in the areas of culture, epistemology, and metaphysics, Emerging Church leaders and their Evangelical critics have been able so far to relate only to the cultural and epistemological levels, seemingly impervious to the deep metaphysical change postmodernity has brought about. [ahem, both groups never consider the metaphysical. - re slater]
Embracing Postmodernity?
Christians have always experienced the gospel within their diverse and always changing cultural, philosophical, and scientific settings. Why, then, have Evangelicals changed their relation to culture from rejection to embrace? Why are Emerging Church leaders more positive about cultural trends, philosophical doctrines, and scientific views than their predecessors? Why do Emerging Church leaders embrace postmodern culture as part of their Christian experience?
At the practical level, Emerging Church leaders embrace postmodern culture to shape the forms of liturgy and attract believers to the worship services. An obvious internal motivation for the “turn to culture” is the low attendance at church services. According to Philip Clayton, “Mainline churches are simply not attracting significant proportions of the younger population in America and there are no signs that this pattern is about to change. If for some reason all the persons in mainline churches today who are over the age of sixty-five were to disappear, two thirds of current church attendees would be gone.”18 This indicates that the secularization of Western culture that emptied churches in Europe during the 20th century has finally arrived in America. The pragmatic motivation to fill the churches, however, may be the trigger but not the ground for the Emerging Church’s turn to culture.
The primary reason for the Emerging Church’s embrace of postmodern culture is the emergence of charismatic belief and practice in Protestantism during the second half of the 20th century. A term has been coined for this process: “Charismatization.” It is used to speak of the “Pentecostalization” of Christian worship during the second part of the 20th century. Pentecostalism adapted to culture with ease. Attracting large numbers to worship services, it became a model for Evangelicals and Catholics alike who eventually adopted and followed the Pentecostal liturgical model, producing a Charismatic renewal. Not surprisingly, Charismatism has led mainline churches to adopt “new and informal worship styles, an explosion in ‘worship songs,’ a new concern for the dynamics of worship, and an increasing dislike of the traditionalism of formal liturgical worship.”19
The central claim of Pentecostalism is that “it is possible to encounter God directly and personally through the power of the Holy Spirit. God is to be known immediately and directly, not indirectly through study of a text.”20 The direct communication of the transcendent God facilitates cultural accommodation because at best it neglects and at worst rejects the principle of divine incarnation in the cultural forms of the words and the human body of Jesus Christ. When the cultural forms of divine revelation presented in Scripture are neglected or rejected, cultural accommodation not only ceases to be a problem and becomes an essential part of Christian experience.
Charismatism stands on the conviction that God relates to humans outside the realm of history and culture. Consequently, culture does not belong to the worship encounter with God but to the doxological and liturgical expressions it generates. This explains why the Emerging Church movement welcomes all cultural forms of liturgical expression as acceptable forms of Christian worship. Its openness to postmodern culture does not flow from the specific characteristics of postmodern culture but from the Charismatic openness to human culture.
Readers familiar with modern theology cannot miss the basic coincidence between the Pentecostal conception of worship as encounter and Schleiermacher’s theological interpretation of Christian experience. This coincidence is the reason that Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Emerging Christians share the same pluralistic/eclectic approach to biblical interpretation, liturgy, and spirituality; hence, the great resonance that the Emerging Church movement has achieved in a very short time.
A possible reason that Emerging Church leaders embrace postmodern relativism may be that this help to justify their rejection of modernity and dismissal of biblical inerrancy and doctrinal authority. Simultaneously, postmodern relativism helps Emergents to justify the existence of theological disagreements and doctrinal pluralism. In a way, the relativistic version of postmodernity helps to account for the fragmentation of Protestantism through the centuries. It also shows that Evangelical pluralism and eclecticism were unavoidable. Seen in this light, the Emerging Church may be the best expression of the Evangelical experience.
Yet Emerging Church leaders may be inclined to reject the postmodern view of the nature of existence because it challenges tradition. To accept this view implies not only that the metaphysical assumptions of Christian tradition are wrong but also that we should replace them with new ones. To do so unavoidably questions the reliability of tradition and the nature of the Charismatic experience of God as trustworthy foundations for Christian theology and worship.
Additionally, the limited capabilities of postmodern reason seem to indicate that a universal metaphysics might be unreachable. As Emerging Church leaders, together with their Roman Catholic and Evangelical colleagues, build on the “Grand Tradition,” they implicitly assume the classical metaphysical framework embraced by the church fathers. This fact may help to understand their failure to accept the postmodern idea of the nature of existence.
Methodological Change
Changes in method produce modifications in the way we do things. Changes in the nature of knowledge alter the way in which we understand the origin and nature of the sources on which we base our beliefs. Changes in the nature of existence affect our understanding of the basic ideas we assume to understand the sources of our beliefs. Consequently, in Christian theology, changes in method affect ministry, mission, and liturgy. Changes in the nature of knowledge impact mainly the area of doctrines. Changes in the nature of existence touch mainly the area of understanding and meaning.
For Emerging Church leaders, change in ministerial and liturgical methodology centers on “recovering the gospel from the clutches of a consumer culture” by using postmodern deconstructionist methodologies.21 At this level, changes in the church take place in the areas of ministry, liturgy, and mission. In these activities, Emerging Church leaders want to distance themselves and overcome the practices of the traditional and pragmatic evangelicals of the 20th century. This level closely relates to the cultural level of postmodern change described above.
The equivalent rubrics “Vintage Christianity” and “Ancient-Future” capture the essence of the methodological level of change in the Emerging Church movement. These terms name the method by which Emerging leaders face the future with the resources of ancient church traditions. In this sense the Emerging Church movement is conservative even while embracing methodological change. Its application brings the past into the future by “drawing on the wisdom of the ages for the current work of the kingdom.”22 Emerging church leaders and even some Evangelical leaders believe postmodern times require them to make deep changes in the method of ministry especially in relation to spirituality and discipleship.
Although one may assume that changes at the methodological level are disconnected with theology and doctrine, Robert Webber’s summary of the main components involved in the Emerging Church movement reminds us that such disconnection is impossible. According to him, the main components of Emerging Church change at the methodological level are: (1) a missiological understanding of the church, (2) spiritual formation, (3) cultural awareness, and, (4) theological reflection. By explaining that these components are interdependent and mutually condition one another, Webber makes clear that any attempt to isolate the methodological level from theological reflection naively ignores reality. He correctly links methodological change with theological change. On the one hand, then, the actual content that new methodological views on ministry and liturgy may bring into the church is directly conditioned by the theological ideas that pastors assume. On the other hand, to make methodological changes at the ministerial and liturgical levels without simultaneously making changes at the doctrinal-theological level is impossible.
Emerging Church writers assume theology to be “a communal reflection on God’s mission that arises out of God’s people as they seek to discern God’s work in history and his present actions in the life of the community.”23 According to them, it is not the Bible but the deep past of Christian tradition that should open the future of Evangelical Christianity.
Additionally, because “the practice of ministry is already theology—theology in action,”24 Emerging leaders are able to articulate the inner link between classical and modern theological traditions, on one side, and the experiential nature of Charismatic Christianity on the other. They see this combination to be pregnant with possibilities and ecumenical promise.
Theological Change
The theological and doctrinal level of change in the Emerging Church centers on the role of Scripture in the understanding of Christian belief and practice. At this level changes take place mainly as reinterpretation of the role of Scripture and the teachings of the church. In this area, Emerging Church leaders want to distance themselves from the theological approach of American Evangelicalism during the past two centuries based on the inerrancy of Scripture advanced by the Old Princetonian theologians. This level is deeper than the methodological one and consequently produces a more significant mutation in the Evangelical community.
A notable characteristic of the Emerging Church often missed by both their Evangelical detractors and emulators is the focus on theological reflection at the grassroots level. An increasingly educated and sophisticated society wants to know what they believe. They want to know the basis on which pastors teach them what is truth.
Emergent leaders are getting the message and responding to the challenge. Most of them, however, are working at great disadvantage because their Evangelical denominations have not prepared them for such a task, neither spiritually nor theologically. Besides, many have experienced Christianity as part of their own denominational culture rather than from serious theological and philosophical reflection on biblical teachings. Doctrines are part of their cultural and religious “inheritance” but not of their thinking and spiritual patterns.
As Emerging Church leaders attempt to explain their beliefs to others, they discover the obvious inconsistencies of their own biblical and doctrinal understandings, as well as the theological divisions existing within the Evangelical community. Moreover, they realize the need to link doctrines, biblical understanding, and experience into a unified net or system of meaning and experience. In their personal and ministerial search for theological meaning they are not prepared to accept without question or explanation dogmatic answers from their mentors or denominations. Instead, they are learning for the first time the exhilarating feeling theological discoveries bring to themselves and the community.
Not surprisingly, at times their theological writings resemble a diary of their theological pilgrimage. Brian McLaren’s writings give testimony to this “testimonial” or “conversational” method of doing theology. Such a procedure is more than a way to communicate truth. It is a path leading to the discovery of truths other Christians before them had embraced. Through this conversational methodology, Emerging Church leaders are reaching conclusions on doctrinal issues like the atonement, justification by faith, the kingdom of God, and hell that their Evangelical peers regard as heretical and therefore unacceptable.
Doctrinal change in the Emerging Church movement, however, goes deeper than mere doctrinal divergence. It involves a paradigmatic shift in the role Scripture plays in the construction of Christian teachings. Phyllis Tickle correctly estimates that at the center of all paradigmatic shifts lies the perennial question of authority. In the Protestant Reformation, authority shifted from the Pope to the sola Scriptura principle. But Scripture required interpretation that led to denominational and theological fragmentation. And theological fragmentation eventually generated theological and spiritual dissatisfaction.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, a number of interrelated factors contributed to a progressive questioning of the viability of the sola Scriptura principle among Evangelicals. They caused many of the most diehard Protestants to grow suspicious of the Scripture-and-Scripture-only principle. Besides, in an ecumenical age, Evangelicals are weary of the perennial theological fragmentation of Protestantism and are becoming convinced that Christianity cannot stand on Scripture alone.
An important factor accelerating the shift from the Protestant sola Scriptura as principle of authority to the Roman Catholic spiritual experience guided by tradition principle advanced by the Emerging Church movement is the rise of Pentecostalism. Remarkably, Evangelical responses to the Emerging Church ignore this factor. However, Phyllis Tickle explains that Pentecostalism directly contradicts the sola Scriptura principle of the Reformation, thereby providing Emerging Church leaders with a strong religious base to question and dismiss the sola Scriptura principle.
This experiential base fits well with the sheer frustration growing out of centuries of theological fragmentation in Protestant theology and practice. To Emerging Church leaders, this fact unavoidably indicates that a genuine theology from Scripture alone is impossible.
Consequently, to overcome theological and ministerial fragmentation, a new comprehensive way to do theology had to be found. To this end, Pentecostalism became instrumental because by fitting well with the Evangelical experience, modern and postmodern epistemologies, and Roman Catholic theological tradition, it naturally emerged as the efficient cause, bringing them together in a new synthesis for a new age.
In this context, postmodernity’s criticism of reason and the non-foundationalist epistemology became scholarly tools for Emerging Church leaders to reject the Evangelical belief in an inerrant Scripture as authority. The same tools point them to the community and its tradition as the new locus of authority for the church.
By accepting tradition and community as the principle of authority, the Emerging Church is embracing the same as that on which the Roman Catholic Church stands. This seems to indicate that, at the theological level, the Emerging Church movement heralds the end of the Protestant Reformation.
Initial Evangelical reactions to the Emerging Church movement indicate its strongest opposition focuses precisely on the role of Scripture in theological construction. However, Tickle thinks history is on the side of the Emerging Church movement away from the sola Scriptura principle and predicts its eventual demise and the emergence of a new principle of authority. Yet, when we realize that the alternative to the sola Scripturaprinciple is tradition and community, it is difficult to envision them as “new.” Instead, it seems that the “old” Roman Catholic principle from which the Reformation emerged is carrying the day after five centuries of controversy. But, even if the Emerging Church may come to define the new Evangelical center from tradition instead of from Scripture, thereby bringing the Protestant Reformation to an end, would a remnant of biblical Protestantism survive?
Hermeneutical Change
The hermeneutical level of change in the Emerging Church centers on the role that philosophy plays in the interpretation of Scripture and the understanding of Christian beliefs and practices. At this level, changes take place mainly as reinterpretation that exegetes, theologians, and ministers assume when they engage in their respective trades. In this area, Emerging Church leaders seek for the interpretive perspective they need to construct their theological and ministerial views.
Robert Webber testifies to the existence of an anti-philosophical bias in American Fundamentalism, the “all you need is the Bible” appropriation of the sola Scriptura principle in Evangelical seminaries. Neo-Evangelical pragmatism did not do much to reverse this state of affairs. Emerging Church leaders, then, react against the Evangelical neglect of the philosophical foundations of their faith. By so doing they grant a positive role to philosophy that contradicts the sola Scriptura principle on which Evangelicalism stands.
In the hermeneutical analysis, a fateful inconsistency in Evangelicalism comes to view. On one side, a large number of Evangelicals appear to believe that their doctrines and hermeneutical principles stand on the basis of Scripture alone. Wayne Grudem, an often-quoted representative of this approach, maintains that “systematic theology involves collecting and understanding all the relevant passages in the Bible on various topics and then summarizing their teachings clearly so that we know what to believe about each topic.”25 Within his methodological matrix, the role of philosophy in systematic theology is minimal. “Philosophical study helps us understand right and wrong thought forms common in our culture and others.”26 On the other side, a large sector of leading Evangelical theologians believes that their understanding of Christian doctrines stand on a multiplicity of theological sources among which philosophy and science play important hermeneutical roles.
Interestingly, both Emerging Church and neo-Evangelicals leaders agree in their disapproval of Grudem’s approach. According to Bolt, “Evangelical theological method should not be restricted to summarizing biblical doctrine. Such an understanding of the theological task today fails as claim to truth about God, a universal claim desperately needed today.”27
These confronted positions beg the question about whether neo-evangelicals embrace the sola Scriptura principle as the principle of authority in doctrinal and practical matters. If they do, then, we are facing the existence of different views of understanding the same principle. We cannot dismiss either position by using slogans and labels. They require careful reflection, especially for Evangelicals facing epochal change in this generation.
The agreement between neo-Evangelicals and Emerging Church leaders about the multiplicity of theological sources is momentous and has a long history. Arguably, the Evangelical theological synthesis articulated by Luther and Calvin never stood on the sola Scriptura principle but rather implicitly on the multiplicity-of-sources matrix. As they drew heavily on Augustine, their theological synthesis unintentionally assumed principles of Neo-Platonism, a reality neo-Evangelicals tend to deny strongly.
Perhaps the so-called Radical Reformation came closer to building on the sola Scriptura principle, yet, it never generated a philosophical and theological synthesis. However, the continuity of Protestant theology with medieval Roman Catholic Theology transpired soon after the reformation during the period of Protestant Orthodoxy (1560-1620).These simple historical facts cast suspicion over the neo-Evangelical claim that its doctrines spring from the sola Scriptura principle. Perhaps neo-Evangelicalism owes more to the Radical Reformation than to the Magisterial Reformers such as Luther and Calvin. Yet they are also dependent on the latter for their main doctrinal trusts.
Conclusion
The changes that American Evangelicalism is experiencing at the beginning of the 21st century are not superficial but deep and paradigmatic, touching its nature and destiny. These changes stem from deep grass-roots dissatisfaction with the spiritual, doctrinal, and ministerial status of Evangelical denominations. Because Evangelical theology and ministry are not reaching young generations of churchgoers, growing dissatisfaction goes far beyond aesthetic issues to include theological, metaphysical, and systemic topics. This situation uncovers a long crisis of theological and ministerial leadership that can be traced back at least to the failure to produce a theological synthesis of biblical philosophy and theology that could answer the questions and challenges presented by classical philosophies and modern science.
While the Evangelical experience is slowly but surely cracking under the pressure of inner spiritual, theological, and hermeneutical crises, the world around it is crumbling under the pressure of philosophical, scientific, and technological changes. Without inner or external anchors to guide its destiny and mission, rapid changes threaten to further fragment the never cohesive existence of the Evangelical movement.
To save Protestantism and advance its mission, Emerging Church leaders believe, unlike their predecessors, that Evangelicals should let go of the Bible and reason as their anchors and embrace postmodern social, epistemological changes. In their minds this amounts to the postmodern reformation of the church, even the next reformation. In this process, the Protestant Reformation based on Scripture appears to be vanishing before our eyes.
Fernando Canale, Ph.D., is Professor of Theology and Philosophy at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Berrien Springs, Michigan.
Notes and References
1. Ken Howard, “A New Middle Way? Surviving and Thriving in the Coming Religious Realignment,” Anglican Theological Review 92:1 (Summer 2010):104.
2. Ibid.
3. Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2012).
4 Mark Liederbach and Alvin L. Reid, The Convergent Church: Missional Worshipers in and Emerging Culture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 2009), p. 21.
5. John R. Franke, “Generous Orthodoxy and a Changing World: Foreword to A Generous Orthodoxy,” in Brian McClaren, ed., A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2004), p. 11.
6. Tickle, The Great Emergence, op. cit., p. 134.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 136.
9. Ibid. pp. 40, 41.
10. Ibid., p. 34.
11. Ibid.
12. Leonard Sweet, Soul Tsunami: Sink or Swim in the New Millennium Culture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1999), p. 17.
13. Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996), pp. 8, 9, 19-33.
14. Ibid., p. 7.
15. Ibid., p. 8.
16. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 41-49.
17. __________, Early Greek Thinking, Daved Farell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi, trans. (San Francisco: Harper, 1975), p. 17.
18. Philip Clayton, Transforming Christian Theology for Church and Society (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), p. 46.
19. Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution—A History From the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 420.
20. Ibid., p. 431.
21. Ed Stetzer, “The Emergent/Emerging Church: A Missiological Perspective,” The Journal of Baptist Theology and Ministry 5:2 (2007):56.
22. Robert E. Webber, The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2002), p. 240.
23. Ibid., p. 241.
24. Ibid.
25. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Leicester, U.K.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1995), p. 21.
26. Ibid.
27. John Bolt, “Sola Scriptura as an Evangelical Theological Method?” in Gary L. W. Johnson and Ronald L. Gleason, eds., Reforming or Conforming: Post-Conservative Evangelicals and the Emerging Church (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2008), p. 89.
No comments:
Post a Comment