Sort-of book review.I've been reading D.A. Carson's book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications and have been fairly impressed so far.
My assumption is that those reading this blog will at least be somewhat familiar with the emerging church, those who aren't can get a pretty good idea here, here and here.
Carson notes some of the many strengths of the emergent movement - first and foremost, their ability to speak the language of younger generations whose ideas about God and faith are permeated by postmodern thought. It seems that Carson sees the movement as a good thing, but he has problems with the theology espoused by some of its leaders. I think Biblically faithful Christians ought to share his concerns.
Unfortunately, Carson's book encounters the same problems that must be dealt with by anyone who tries to analyze the emergent movement - namely, that those who are a part of it are stubbornly resistant to being labled a movement and to having the writings of emergent thinkers generalized to the entire movement (which they say isn't a movement). Carson does a good job of engaging Brian McLaren who is the most prominent emergent writer, but thus far (I haven't finished the book yet) he does so to the neglect of engaging others, such as Doug Padgitt or Chris Seay. Interestingly, McLaren and others have subsequently claimed that Carson misrepresents what they've said. This may be so, but my view is that the Emergers (or whatever we're calling them these days) have left themselves wide open on that front by being so vague, elusive and contradictory on issues that should be automatic for Biblically faithful Christians.
I hope to expand upon my own view of the emerging church and ministering to a postmodern culture, but for now I'll just say that I think churches ought to pursue methods of offering postmoderns something different rather than diving headlong into the ocean of relativistic uncertainty, as McLaren and others seem to suggest. The most succinct definition of postmodernism I've heard is that it's an experiential epistemology. Truth is apprehended via experience. What the church must do, then, is provide a way for people to experience the Truth.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, August 11, 2005 at 11:08 AM.
