Pulpit Magazine

(By Phil Johnson)

This is a continuation of Phil’s seminar-transcript from the 2006 Shepherds’ Conference.

The “movement” is not monolithic

Before we move on, I want to reemphasize something important and elaborate on it just a bit: What I just gave you was a quick, broad-brush description of the “emerging church movement.” There are lots of nuances and differences within the movement.

Not everyone in the movement is saying exactly the same thing.

I already indicated, for example, that attitudes toward postmodernism vary within in the movement. Practically everyone in the movement will insist that they do not uncritically embrace every aspect of postmodernism, and that they are only trying to adapt their language and worship style in order to reach postmodern people.

Listen to what emergent leaders say about postmodernism, for example, and you will see that they don’t all agree among themselves completely about what’s good and what’s dangerous about postmodernism. Even Brian McLaren, who used to speak of postmodernism in glowing terms, lately seems to be trying to avoid references to the subject and now occasionally even denies that he himself is a full-on postmodernist.

So there are vast differences in style and opinion within the “emerging church movement”; the movement itsef is in flux and I want to acknowledge that.

For example, the British flavor of evangelical postmodernism tends to be somewhat less superficial than its American cousin. British emergents are normally more concerned about substance as opposed to style. They would tend to stress the missional aspects of the movement and see their philosophical and doctrinal differences with mainstream evangelicalism as secondary. One of the outstanding British figures in the “emerging church movement,” Andrew Jones, recently wrote an appeal to American emergents, urging them to get their act together.

I’m not suggesting that the “emerging church movement” in Britain is ultimately any more doctrinally sound or any less postmodern than the American version. It’s not. But it is, perhaps, a little more serious.

Then you have Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill in Seattle, who this time last year [Spring, 2005] might have been singled out as the quintessential “emerging church” leader. But last spring he wrote a letter to other pastors in his branch of the movement in which he said, “Let me agree that much of the church today is incredibly frustrating. Personally, when I hear so many young guys denying substitutionary atonement and the like after drinking from the emerging church toilet I turn green and my clothes don’t fit.”

Since then, Driscoll has spoken out several more times against the doctrinal ambiguity of the “emerging church movement,” and it is clear that he rejects the movement’s hostile attitude toward doctrine and propositional truth. Driscoll even appears to have stopped referring to himself as “emergent,” and he and the movement currently seem to have something of a love/hate relationship going.

Assuming Mark Driscoll is still (more or less) part of the movement, he would definitely represent the “conservative” wing. ([When this seminar was given] he had recently published tributes at his blog to Robert Schuller and Bono, the rock musician, so the word conservative would apply to him only in a relative sense.)

Oh, yeah…

That reminds me of a couple of other things I wanted to mention but can’t really take time to elaborate on. This may help you more than anything I have said so far to understand the flavor of the “emerging church movement”: Bono—the Irish rocker and politico of U2 fame—seems to be the unofficial icon of the movement. If you’ve been tuned into pop-culture at any time over the past two decades and know anything about Bono, that might help you to grasp something about the look and feel of the movement. (My favorite fact about Bono is that he named one of his sons “Elijah Bob Patricus Guggi-Q.”)

Anyway, Emergent types seem to quote Bono all the time. I would say that he sometimes seems to be the chief theologian of the “emerging church movement,” but in all fairness, that honor belongs more to John R. Franke and Stan Grenz. Grenz, sadly, died at a fairly young age about a year ago when an aneurism burst in his brain. But he and Franke are the two academic theologians who have done more than anyone else to blend postmodernism and theology into a kind of quasi-evangelical doctrine.

Again, I can’t elaborate on this at length in our short time frame, and I don’t want to take anything away from the scholarship and writing style of either John Franke or Stan Grenz, because intellectually, both of them were blessed with more brilliant minds than mine. But I am disturbed by the accommodations both men made to postmodernism, and I think the fruit of their work is manifestly disastrous.

However, if you want to begin to understand how anyone might try to write a theological justification for the irrational agglomeration of unorthodox ideas that is circulating in the “emerging church movement”, read the book these two men jointly authored, titled Beyond Foundationalism, subtitled “Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context,” published by Westminster John Knox Press just five years ago.

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