The Great Emergence of Christianity

There has been a lot of discussion lately as to whether we are in a time that is a game changer described as the very early stages of postmodernism and its seeming correspondent form of Christianity known as Emergent Christianity. As said earlier, I'm not sure whether Emergent Christianity is real or not, whether it is a movement or not, or whether its is a separate branch of Christianity or not (hopefully not!).

But if I were to choose I would think of it as an ecumenical postmodernistic Christian movement composed of a wide variety of believers from many different walks of life and doctrine, theology and practice, who are investigating postmodernistic expressions (as well as responses) to their Christian faith, whether orthodox or not. The idea of a Great Emergence is an attempt by its author Phyllis Tickle to explain her understanding of the historical import of this introductory era that we seemed to have entered into - its creative expressions and recapture of the Christian faith, as well as the  frustrations of non-emergent believers resistant to change and movement within their traditional faith expressions, structures, beliefs and practices.

For myself, I come from the conservative side of orthodox Christianity that is looking for faith's life and breath again against all the quantified statements that have formed themselves into rigid theological structures within our modernistic era. Not that they aren't good, solid, acceptable expressions of God, his Word and our faith communities, but that they seemed to have lost the life of God, his Word and the essence of communal living. Some of this I attribute to the constant reparsing and redefining of the Christian tradition until it has become trapped in a dark tunnel unable to see the life and hope and beauty that God has intended for us. At other times because we fear change as unhealthy or unproductive and wish to prove and discern new movements before accepting their questionable foundations and philosophies.

Which is all well and good but my charge to my conservative friends is twofold - don't so over criticize what could be a legitimate God-sent movement so as to kill the thing itself and in the killing kill your own faith's hope for salvation and life. And secondly, if there is some remnant of fact or heartfelt experience that is attractive within this Emergent movement than get on board and allow faith to grow again. Do not try to capture it and re-work it backwards into a dying expression of faith. But through listening and discerning Emergent Christianity's heartbeat let it wash back over all the past into something cleansing, renewing, revitalizing and refreshings.

For without active orthodox acceptance and support this movement can become stillborn and left to less traditional proponents of Christianity which may then take generations to recapture and express again. But don't come to emergent Christianity seeking to only put on its new dress, new clothes and new shoes! For this movement requires a radical change of thinking, of re-orientation. It requires a change of heart and a change of spirit that is found underneath the new clothes and shoes.  And once that is done postmodernistic Christianity will be a thing of beauty unlike its older, modernistic self dressed in its dark grays and death-filled colours.

Overall, I am thankful to my past which contained enough kernels of faith and truth that it could be rebirthed into the freedom of investigating a larger, less restrictive paradigm to the Christian faith. But it took awhile to hear again God's word and Spirit partly because I was to blame and partly because what I was listening to was inconsistent and ill-defined - rough as it were in its early stages of expression. It took a long while to hear this new paradigm's heartbeat and for its message to be sorted out and better understood and streamlined by its proponents. But its message is one that the Belfast Irishman, Peter Rollins, (cf. the last four videos below) has summed up quite neatly and shows in postmodernistic fashion what real faith can mean again by allowing Christianity's traditional creedal and religious statements to live and breath and find expression like they once had had.

And with that said, let me say that this is the very reason why this web blog has been developed - to help elucidate the best of what Emergent Christianity could be, as it interacts with both the older and newer traditional beliefs and practices of Christianity. So then, let me place a charge of responsibility to every believer that each of us be involved with enhancing this conversation of our Lord and Savior to the best version of itself that we can express this side of humanity. This is my prayer, my hope, my desire for today's postmodern church in its communal witness, ministry, worship and spirit-filled life.

- skinhead

The Great Emergence, October 2008

In 2008, Phyllis Tickle and Peter Rollins discuss

the spirit and theology of the emerging church

movement and what is happening abroad.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

My Emergent Letters to Friends: Learning to Trust God

My Emergent Letters to Friends: Learning to Trust God

“can anything be less plain than the intent of our speech

as versus the composition of the correctness of our speech?”

– skinhead

Hey skinhead,

I have to disagree with what you’re saying about Rob's views on heaven, hell, love, etc. after watching his livestream from NYC. I think he would even say that he doesn't agree on the traditional views of these things. And not even going off what Kevin Deyoung said but in just reading quotes from the book itself, mocking a God who would send someone to literal, eternal hell if they got hit by a car w/o believing in Jesus.

And so, though I appreciate your response to my emails I have to disagree & point out that Rob neglects major chunks of scripture in order to try and make points in the book. It's grievous to me to read and hear the things he's saying and I lovingly want to caution you to see that what he's saying in many places in the book are unbiblical and even mock the God of the Scriptures:

"Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way according to the person telling them the gospel, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would insure that they would have no escape from an endless future of agony." – from Love Wins by Rob Bell

Thanks again for your emails.

- your brother in Christ

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Dear brother, Hi! -

I have yet to read Rob's book but am very familiar with his convictions having been engaged with his ministry the past dozen or so years. After a third reading of the Rob quote above I would give him a pass by saying the following: he’s not questioning the eternal torments of hell and its reality as it would seem on the surface. But that he’s saying that when that time of finality comes in a person’s life it will be finally and solemnly at that free-willed being’s rejection of all things Christ. Here’s my summary of “Love Wins” for which I’ll give to Rob partial inspiration and to the Lord the greater portion of inspiration:

“We are to over-expound and over-preach the hope and the grace that is in God as we preach the solemnity of the horrors of hell found in this life as it is in the next without Christ.

Furthermore, this message isn’t simply for others, but it is for us to know too - of the hope and grace that is in God and is ours both now, as heaven touches earth through Jesus, even as it will be ours later, in heaven.

That we as Christians do not live with a gospel that has become an evangelical-evacuation policy from earth, but with a gospel that is every-much as good news to us, as to those around us, in this present day of the here-and-now because of the presence of the Kingdom of God enacted at the Cross and through the Holy Spirit in response to Christ's atonement on the Cross.

As is the solemn reality and responsibility of the hell we deliver to people around us by living unChrist-like; or the hell that non-Christians live in each day in their brokenness apart from Christ; or the hell that humanity is experiencing at its own hands, when the love of God through Jesus is not being lived, shared, breathed and experienced.

Ultimately, the last book of the bible, Revelation, shows us in exquisite grief the finality of mankind rejecting the love of God when love doesn’t win; as well as the finality of God’s resurrection (and resurrected kingdom) because love did win.”

- skinhead

But asked another way, I think the broader reading of Rob is more to the point that my fellow classmate Scot McKnight has earlier observed these past several weeks in the links that I have sent to you:

Link 1 - My horror, then, was three-fold [to the evangelical response to Rob Bell's book, LOVE WINS]: first, the image of God that is depicted when hell becomes the final, or emphatic word to the world [as evangelicals missionize the Gospel]; second, the absence of any context for how to talk about judgment in the Bible [in the evangelical kit of 'Becoming Saved']; and, third, the kinds of emotion [we are seeing] expressed [to Rob's book, which isn't pretty]. We saw too much gloating, pride and triumphalism on both sides of the LOVE WINS issue. I felt like those watching the sinking of the Titanic but who didn’t cringe at the thought of thousands sinking into the Atlantic to a suffocating death. We were instead singing and dancing to a jig that we were right or had been predicting the sinking all along.

Link 2 - To talk about wrath apart from this depiction of the grace-consuming God is to put forward a view of God that is not only unbiblical but potentially monstrous. And, to put forward a view of God that is absent of final judgment, yes of wrath, yes of eternal judgment, is to offer a caricature of the Bible’s God.

No one should begin to talk about hell without spending fifteen minutes in pausing prayer to consider the horror of it all.

Further, I find some people can get intoxicated on wrath and it can lead them in a triumphalist dance of anger. And I find some who get intoxicated with a flabby sense of grace. Isn’t it better to get lost in the dance of God’s good and triumphant grace and of making things right? If we are to be intoxicated, let it be from imbibing the hope and grace of God’s love which will both win and be right in the End.

- Scot McKnight

By way of summary, and as I’ve repeatedly have said in the past, the enigma that is Rob Bell can be a slippery-sloop to those who chose to listen selectively (and this is truth of both sides - both of his detractors and well as of his supporters). He too easily can mean whatever we wish him to mean. And maybe I think of Jesus when I write this too. For his listeners also had all types of responses to his messages as well.

And so I think I get Rob more than I had in the past, in his cynicisms, his irreverent apologies and statements, in his quirkiness that comes with an impassioned heart and soul, and a mind overwhelmed with speaking God better to the misunderstanding lost masses. He's willing to bend on exact statements to allow his congregants and audience to become further engaged with the ministries and the minitrations of Jesus and Jesus' flesh-and-blood fellowship on this side of heaven. He's willing to entertain extra-biblical suppositions and questions to raise the awareness of both personal and corporate introspection, trusting in the Spirit's overall leading to teach and to guide in questions of mis-understanding and mis-statement.

But it is still my and your responsibility to cut through his words to get to the sense of the argument (as versus just dumping on him as a brother in Christ). The quote you gave is hard to defend in-and-of itself but then again, I don’t wish to. Nor do I wish to defend Rob. I stand with him, I pray for him, and I treat him in love as my brother in Christ as we and many other emergent Christians re-learn God’s heart for the lost and for our fellowship of brothers and sisters.

Too, when I get a chance to read LOVE WINS I’m sure I’ll see a lot of similar statements just like there were in his past books. Still, I know that Rob believes in the evangelical doctrines of Hell, Heaven, Sin, Judgment, Jesus. So the fight isn’t there. The fight is over evangelicalism's words and formulaic statements of correctness that have lost the heart of God in their zeal for the truth of God, and for which postmodernistic books and writings wish not to similarly evidence. You have an austere evangelical readership wanting correct, specific statements as versus a "mellow" emergent body of believers wishing to lovingly retell the gospel to a non-Christian world through relational and service ministries about Jesus; a world that is totally unfamiliar with the centuries-old church dogmas and doctrines that have overtaken the evangelical church, and have removed the life and heart of God in the process.

Doctrines? Yes, if they are biblically received. But no, if they are more important than the people that those doctrines minister to. I'm all for correct doctrines but I'm also for allowing people to express their fears and misunderstandings and to allow for further personal expressions of God. We can correct their (and ours) misunderstandings later through biblical study, but it is more important first to find the heartbeat of God and to resurrect it into the pulse of dying mankind. Let us do the hard work of ER first and then later get the whole man healthier over a process of time and involvement, benevolent engagement and practice, faithful living and endeavor, merciful love and living.

So then, in order for us as evangelicals to be able to read postmodern/emergent writings it will require that we put away our theological formulas, our compendiums of exact scientific speech, and re-double our encryption efforts to hear and read Rob’s (and others) words for the intent that is being conveyed. It’s not easy to do and after 12 years of listening, investigating, questioning I think have adapted enough now to do it. And by “adaptation” I don’t mean that I’ve left my doctrinal heritage or legacies but that I’m re-learning how to better speak my heritage in more relevant forms and fashions using postmodernistic methods that are highly creative and deeply personal and loving to the non-Christian, non-churched audience.

Peace,

skinhead

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

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