I find the authors gracious treatment of Kristen Bells testimony descriptive of his writing at large. Kristen said:

“I grew up thinking that we’ve figured out the Bible, that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I feel like life is big again - like life used to be black and white, and now it’s in color.”

What is she saying?

I think she is saying this: I used to live with an over simplistic vision of the Bible - it was just a source book for right answers, right and wrong.
Now, it is suddenly full of life! Real people struggling like me in real life, not always being sure of what will happpe next, but through it all there is God! Not everything is simple any more, not everything is black and white, but a two dimensional black and white rule book has become so much more, it has become three dimensional, and it is in color! It isnt hust right or wrong, there is love, fear, hunger, doubt, faith, courage, sadness, life, death. Instead of five bulletpoints on salvation, there is flesh and blood, desoair and triumph. It´s alive!

What does the author hear?

“Ultimately, the emerging church message begins to sound like an echo of the voice of Satan in the garden: “Hath God said?””

3. At the center of missional thinking is the thought of the kingdom of God, a theme that evangelical christianity has not been able to do justice, in that its definition of salvation has been too narrow. When salvation means “getting your soul to heaven when you die”, there is:
- no need for discipleship apart from personal morality.
- no need to focus our time, resources and energy on our present time and place, since we will soon be beamed up, and the earth will burn anyway. This in turn leads to apathetic christians with a faith disconnected from reality.
- Since the church has no function apart from being a bus stop or container holding the faithful (apart from the world), it is not expected to transform the world, but only cater to its members needs while they wait for take off.
- over emphesis of justification on the expense of justice. Shalom - peace on the earth, lions and lambs grazig together - becomes a peace of heart.

I believe the evangelical church has delivered some of the grossest disfigurements to the body of christ ever seen. Blind faith in authoritarian leaders, a simplific reading of scripture and a airlift us out of here mentality. That is not the church I want, but like Kristen Bell, I was once a member.

Then I met Jesus.

I use to believe that the message the Church delivered should never be changed, but that the delivery method needed to change for the new age.

However, that doesn’t work either. God for all intensive purposes hasn’t changed, is not changing, and won’t ever change. The methodology of Christ Crucified for our sins, substituting his righteosness for my sins, and satisfying God like our old blood sacrifices did, should never, ever, change. By changing our worship styles we have dummy downed the Bible and Christs work to the point of it being some spiritual voodoo that the crowds enjoy.

The emergent Church is for the Sinners and not for the Saints. The messages in the EC should be preached on the street corners for all sinners to hear, not from the pulpit for the Worship of GOD.

It is a shame that what people want to hear, is not what God tells us to speak. People will listen to anything and anyone, but that my friend will lead to a pew in hell.

If this manner of essay writing is the example of authority we’re all supposed to be following, it’s no wonder alternative dynamics like the ECM are growing in popularity. The writer presents all the religious answers tidy in a box, wrapped, sealed, and ready for UPS pick-up. But I can program my computer to spit out all the right religious answers.

I read in all this a tired, rabidly dualistic, frankly dying methodology that does little to honor Jesus. Immaturity notwithstanding, I see in the ECM a spark of youthful honesty that is difficult to find in an age where the “religion of bold leadership” has splintered the worldwide church into thousands (upon thousands) of sects and denominations. It’s time to honor Christ by mending his body, not by picking at scabs.

Being a follower of Jesus is about focusing on Him, centering on Him. I have been a follower since 1971 and the emergent conversation we’re involved in is a healthy questioning of the evangelical / political baggage and litmus tests for that subculture’s form of “orthodoxy” that has compromised the beauty and simplicity of following Jesus, worshipping and adoring Him and showing the world that we are His by serving and loving each other and our neighbors.

For every instance of “marginal” theology critics bring up there are also instances of very sound theology and there is a dialog between those who have a lot of quesitons and those who are comfortable with their conclusions, sharing in humility.

A huge difference is attitude. There are those in christianity who feel that they are tour guides. In contrast, most who are carrying on an emergent conversation view themselves as peers sharing insights. I find that a refreshing break from the cold scholastic dogmatism.

Narrow-mindedness and Intolerance can be rebellion against God as well. Your conclusions are arrogant to say the least.

Thank you and Dr. Macarthur for this series on Emergent/Emerging. It has been very helpful. I guess it is clear to these guys that the Bible isn’t clear. I couldn’t resist…

You said:

“The entire postmodern epistemology … deliberately glorifies uncertainty.”

In post-modernism uncertainty is an axiom. The only thing that is certain is uncertainty.

“The obvious implication here is that Scripture just isn’t clear enough for us to say what it means with any kind of confidence.”

This core issue here is a theory about language and culture. I am still reading McLaren but he seems to be a classic post-modern. He was a sum cum laude BA and magna cum laude MA in English (lit?) in the late 70s. This places him in school when Derrida and Foucault were the high priests of literary theory. McLaren’s ideas put into the mouth of Neil aka NEO fit very nicely into this framework. In the mid 80s I had a young colleague who we will call Kathryn who was a Ph.D. (abd) in English lit. and we spent countless hours over several years discussing this stuff. Kathryn gave me an education in how the post-modern framework sounds when you meet it in person.

It should be emphasized that this theory about the inherent limitations of human language is something that flowered within the domain of literary criticism. The linguists I know don’t take J.Derrida and his friends very seriously. The problems posed by language and culture are not sufficient warrant for epistemological nihilism. Working linguists (e.g., bible translation consultants) don’t run around consumed by despair over the limitations of human language.