The Emerging Church and The Line of Despair

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The Emerging Church and The Line of Despair
Presented by Bob DeWaay September 9th, 2005

• Escaping From Reason

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Defining The Undefined

• The Emerging Church does not like to be defined,
  because definitions create boundaries and they do
  not like boundaries.

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What the Emerging Church Means by Missional

• One of the key features of the generous
  orthodoxy promoted in McLarens book, is that
  practice must precede theology. This means,
  rather than going to a people group with a fixed
  set of theological beliefs about God, man, the
  world, Christ, salvation, justification, the Holy
  Spirit, and other important Biblical matters, one
  goes to the people first and finds a practice
  that fits their needs and priorities.

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In Emergent Thinking, Ones Mission Determines
Ones Theology

• I am a Christian because I believe that, in all
  these ways, Jesus is saving the world. By world
  I mean planet Earth and all life on it, because
  left to ourselves, un-judged, un-forgiven, and
  un-taught, we will certainly destroy this planet
  and its residents. And by the world I
  specifically mean human history, because again,
  it was and is in danger, grave danger, ultimate
  danger, self-imposed danger, and I dont believe
  anyone else can rescue it. (McLaren 97)

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In Emergent Thinking, Ones Mission Determines
Ones Theology

• Theology is the church on a mission reflecting
  on its message, its identity, its meaning.
  (McLaren 105)
• But How do we know what the Mission is?

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Mission is Defined along the Lines of Liberation
Theology

• Oppressed people would be free. Poor people would
  be liberated from poverty. Minorities would be
  treated with respect. Sinners would be loved, not
  resented. Industrialists would realize that God
  cares for sparrows and wildflowersso their
  industries should respect, not rape, the
  environment. . . . The kingdom of God would
  comenot everywhere at once, not suddenly, but
  gradually, like a seed growing in a field, like
  yeast spreading in a lump of bread dough, like
  light spreading across the sky at dawn (McLaren
  111)

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There is no Bad News

• The idea that the Christian message is
  universally good news for Christians and
  non-Christians alike is, to some, unheard of,
  strange, and perhaps heretical. To me, it has
  become natural and obvious.
• (McLaren, 110)

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Rejection of Systematic theology

• At the heart of the theological project in the
  late modern world was the assumption that one
  could and should reduce all revealed truth into
  propositions and organize those propositions into
  an outline . . . (McLaren, 152)

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Rejection of Systematic theology

• Barth anticipated the day when the common sort
  of systematic theology would become a historical
  artifact. Prose abstractions just dont contain
  or convey Gods truth as well as we thought they
  did. (McLaren 152)

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Deconstruction

• The implications of deconstruction are
  staggering for Christians doing ministry in the
  emerging culture. . . By driving for the one
  true interpretation, for example, they
  disenfranchise postmodern reader for whom
  deconstruction is as much the mother tongue as
  traditional interpretation is for modern people.
  (Language, Sweet, McLaren, Haselmayer, 89)

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Re-imagining

• This full, radiant, glorious experience of God
  in Jesus Christ eventually revolutionized the
  whole concept of God, so that the word God itself
  was reimagined through the experience of
  encountering Jesus, seeing him act, hearing him
  speak, watching him relate, and reflecting on his
  whole career. (McLaren, 73)

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A Theology of Personal Preference

• Think of the kind of universe you would expect if
  God A created it a universe of dominance,
  control, limitation, submission, uniformity,
  coercion. Think of the kind of universe you would
  expect if God B created it a universe of
  interdependence, relationship, possibility,
  responsibility, becoming, novelty, mutualilty,
  freedom. . . . I find myself in universe B
  getting to know God B (McLaren 76)

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Perpetual Doubt Rejecting the Reformation View
of Scripture

• How do I know the Bible is always right? And
  if I am sophisticated enough to realize that I
  know nothing of the Bible without my own
  involvement via interpretation, Ill also ask how
  I know which school, method, or technique of
  biblical interpretation is right. . . .

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Perpetual Doubt Rejecting the Reformation View
of Scripture

• What makes a good interpretation good? And if
  an appeal is made to a written standard (book,
  doctrinal statement, etc.) or to common sense or
  to scholarly principles of interpretation, the
  same pesky I who liberated us from the
  authority of the church will ask, Who sets the
  standard? . . .

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Perpetual Doubt Rejecting the Reformation View
of Scripture

• Whose common sense? Which scholars and why?
  Dont all these appeals to authorities and
  principles outside the Bible actually undermine
  the claim of ultimate biblical authority? Arent
  they just the new pope? (McLaren 133)

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Schaeffers View of the Scriptures

• The Scriptures give the key to two kinds of
  knowledgethe knowledge of God, and the knowledge
  of men and nature. The great Reformation
  confessions emphasize that God revealed His
  attributes to man in the Scriptures and that this
  revelation was meaningful to God as well as to
  man . . .

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Schaeffers View of the Scriptures

• There could have been no Reformation and no
  Reformation culture in Northern Europe without
  the realization that God had spoken to man in the
  Scriptures and that, therefore, we know something
  truly about God, because God has revealed it to
  man. (Escape From Reason, 21)

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Schaeffer Warned of the New Theology

• To the new theology, the usefulness of a symbol
  is in direct proportion to its obscurity. There
  is connotation, as in the word god, but there is
  no definition.
• (The God Who is There, 58)

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Emergent Theology is a Contemporary Version of
Neo-Orthodoxy

• The secret of the strength of neo-orthodoxy is
  that these religious symbols with a connotation
  of personality give an illusion of meaning, and
  as a consequence it appears to be more optimistic
  than secular existentialism. (God Who is There,
  58)

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Schaeffer Rebukes Emergent Thinking before the
Fact

• All the new theology and mysticism is nothing
  more than a faith contrary to rationality,
  deprived of content and incapable of
  communication. . . Rationality and faith are
  totally out of contact with each other. (God Who
  is There, 61)

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Rationalism and Rational

• Rationalistic By this meant that man begins
  absolutely and totally from himself, gathers
  information concerning the particulars, and
  formulates the universals
• Rational The sobering fact is that the only way
  one can reject thinking in terms of an antithesis
  and the rational is on the basis of the rational
  and the antithesis. . . .
• The basis of classical logic is that A is not
  non-A (Schaeffer, Escape, 35)

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Emergent ThinkingLoathes the Propositional

• The purpose of Scripture is to equip Gods
  People for good works. Shouldnt a simple
  statement like this be far more important than
  statements with words foreign to the Bibles
  vocabulary about itself (inerrant, authoritative,
  literal, revelatory, objective, absolute,
  propositional, etc)? (McLaren 165)

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Schaeffers Warnings and Predictions

• The evangelical Christian needs to be careful
  because some evangelicals have recently been
  asserting that what matters is not setting out to
  prove or disprove propositions what matters is
  an encounter with Jesus. . .

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Schaeffers Warnings and Predictions

• When a Christian has made such a statement he
  has, in an analyzed or unanalyzed form, moved
  upstairs. If we think that we are escaping some
  of the pressure of the modern debate by playing
  down propositional Scripture and simply putting
  the word Jesus or experience upstairs. . .

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Schaeffers Warnings and Predictions

• We must face this question What difference is
  there between doing this and doing what the
  secular world has done in its semantic mysticism,
  or what the New Theology has done? . . .

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Schaeffers Warnings and Predictions

• Certainly men in the next generation will tend
  to make it the same thing mysticism. If what is
  placed upstairs is separated from rationality, if
  the Scriptures are not discussed as open to
  verification where they touch the cosmos and
  history, . . .

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Schaeffers Warnings and Predictions

• Why should one then accept the evangelical
  upstairs any more than the upstairs of the modern
  radical theology? . . Why should it not just as
  well be an encounter under the name Vishnu?
  (Escape from Reason, 76, 77).

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Religious Symbols, Stories, Mystical Experiences,
Icons, etc. Replace Proclamation of Truth

• To go abductive, get rid of your
  inductive/deductive outlines and points and make
  your sermons pointless! . . . Instead of asking
  yourself before creating a sermon. . . What is
  my point? ask yourself, Whats my image?
  (Language, Sweet, 31, 32)

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The Ten Commandments Propositional Truth or
Religious Symbol?

• Then God spoke all these words, saying, I am the
  Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of
  Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall
  have no other gods before Me. (Exodus 201-3)

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Heeding Schaeffers Warning

• Increasingly over the last few years the word
  Jesus, separated from the content of
  Scriptures, has become the enemy of the Jesus of
  history, the Jesus who died and rose and who is
  coming again and who is the eternal Son of God. .
  .

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Heeding Schaeffers Warning

• . . . So let us take care. If evangelical
  Christians begin to slip into the dichotomy, to
  separate an encounter with Jesus from the content
  of the Scriptures (including the discussable and
  the verifiable), we shall, without intending to,
  . . .

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Heeding Schaeffers Warning

• . . . Be throwing ourselves and the next
  generation into the millstream of the modern
  system. This system surrounds us as an almost
  monolithic consensus.
• (Escape from Reason, 79)
• This system is now called postmodern

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Brian McLaren Writes of Seven Jesuses I have
Known

• Up until recent decades, each tribe felt it had
  to uphold one image of Jesus and undermine some
  or all of the others. What it, instead, we saw
  these various emphases as partial projections
  that together can create a hologram a richer,
  multidimensional vision of Jesus? (McLaren, 66)

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How Much Heresy Will This Lead to?

• The end of entropy
• In the postmodern matrix there is a good chance
  that the world will reverse its chronological
  polarity for us. Instead of being bound to the
  past by chains of cause and effect, we will feel
  ourselves being pulled into the future by the
  magnet of Gods will, Gods dream, Gods desire.
  (Language, Sweet, 113).

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How Much Heresy Will This Lead to?

• This new vision sees the universe as only
  partially created, an unfinished symphony, a
  masterpiece in progress. In this eschatology we
  are invited to be part of Gods creative team
  working to see Gods dream for the universe come
  true . . .

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How Much Heresy Will This Lead to?

• . . . In this way our relationship with God is
  more than interactive it is collaborative. It is
  more than just a matter of God interacting with
  us it is a matter of God inviting us to be
  creative partners in the construction of a world
  as it could be from the world as it is to be.
  (Language, Sweet, 113, 114)

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What Does the Bible Say About this?

• But the day of the Lord will come like a thief,
  in which the heavens will pass away with a roar
  and the elements will be destroyed with intense
  heat, and the earth and its works will be burned
  up. Since all these things are to be destroyed in
  this way, what sort of people ought you to be in
  holy conduct and godliness, (2Peter 310, 11)

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What Does the Bible Say About this?

• looking for and hastening the coming of the day
  of God, on account of which the heavens will be
  destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt
  with intense heat! (2Peter 312)

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The Traditional, Christian View is that History
is LinearHistory Begins with Gods Act of
Creation and Ends With Gods Act of Judgment

• Postmoderns reject this view and claim a new view
  that is a combination of linear and circular
  time a helix A spiraling faith is one of
  timelessness within time, one in which the past
  is embedded in the future. (Language, Sweet, 143)

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We Were Warned about This

• But realize this, that in the last days difficult
  times will come. . . . holding to a form of
  godliness, although they have denied its power
  and avoid such men as these. . . . always
  learning and never able to come to the knowledge
  of the truth. (2Timothy 31, 5, 7)

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How Does the Emergent Church Cross the Line of
Despair But Apparently Feel no Despair?

• They are clinging to the false hope that God is
  still creating and that with our help the world
  is going to solve its problems
• This is like going to the dentist with an
  abscessed tooth, getting a shot of Novocain, and
  going home happy because the pain is gone.

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Brian McLaren Mentions post-foundationalism
What is That?

• Foundationalism is the classical epistemology
  that builds a theory of knowledge from
  foundational givens.
• These givens are typically the basic reliability
  of sense perception, the law of
  non-contradiction, and causality.
• Emergent thinkers reject foundationalism.

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What is the Alternative to Foundationalism?

• Coherentism judges a system of knowledge by
  internal coherence without requiring it to be
  attached to the real world.

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What is Wrong with Coherentism?

• Coherence requires foundational presuppositions
  such as non contradiction in order to test for
  coherence.
• That a coherent system is better than a non
  coherent system merely assumed, therefore is
  itself a foundation.
• It would be possible to create a fully coherent
  view of reality that had no attachment to the
  real world.

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What is Wrong with Coherentism?

• Coherentism is an epistemological attempt to put
  knowledge into an upper storey.
• This creates a disjunction in which in the realm
  of nature, people go about their business in
  areas such as science and engineering as if
  foundationalism were valid in a lower storey, but
  put everything else into a mystical upper storey.

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An Illustration of Why post-foundational
Epistemology Leads to a Disjunction Between Upper
and Lower Storeys

• A Trip to a post-modern doctor.

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A Trip to a Post-modern Doctor.

• A person goes to the doctor with vision problems
  and severe headaches.
• A brain scan is ordered and it shows a brain
  tumor.
• The post-modern doctor has rejected
  foundationalist premises basic reliability of
  sense perception, the law of causality, and the
  law of non-contradiction.

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A Trip to a Post-modern Doctor.

• Patient Am I going to need Brain surgery?
• Doctor There is no reason to believe that.
• Patient But the person who read the brain scan
  sees a tumor. I did not use to have these
  symptoms, now I do, the tumor must have caused
  them.
• Doctor Causality is a relic of Enlightenment
  Rationalism, I dont believe in it.

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A Trip to a Post-modern Doctor.

• Patient But the technician who read the scan
  showed me the tumor, I saw it.
• Doctor The reliability of sense perception is a
  relic of foundationalism, now we know that we
  cannot believe what we see.
• Patient But a brain with a tumor is not the same
  as a normal brain, I need help.
• Doctor I do not believe in non-contradiction.

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A Trip to a Post-modern Doctor.

• Patient So what do you believe in?
• Doctor, I believe reality is filtered through a
  culturally determined grid that distorts what you
  see. Perhaps you should stretch your mind to see
  things differently. I suggest meditation.
• Patient I think I want a second opinion do you
  know any Enlightenment Rationalist doctors?

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This Cannot be Lived out in the Real World

• Schaeffer The basic issue is a shift in
  epistemology. . . . As far as the theologians are
  concerned, they have separated religious truth
  from contact with science on one hand and history
  on the other. There new system is not open to
  verification, it must simply be believed.
• (God Who is There 54)

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Schaeffer Warns about Hegelian Synthesis

• Schaeffer wrote, If our own young people within
  the churches and those of the world outside see
  us playing with the methodology of synthesis, in
  our teaching and evangelism, in our policies and
  institutions, we can never expect to take
  advantage of this unique moment of opportunity
  presented by the death of romanticism. (God Who
  is There, 47)

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The Emerging Church Uses What Schaeffer Warned
Against

• For those familiar with Hegelian synthesis, it
  may be tempting to see modernity as the thesis
  and postmodernity as the antithesis. We believe a
  better approach would be to see pre-modernity as
  the thesis, modernity as the antithesis, and
  post-modernity as an attempt at synthesisan
  attempt that is still in its earliest stages.
  (Language, Sweet, 242)

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Conclusion Distinguishing Description from
Prescription

• The whole Emerging Church Movement is predicated
  on the idea that relativistic, postmodern young
  people cannot be expected to embrace the gospel
  in terms of it being an absolute truth claim.
  Therefore it, they say, it cannot be presented
  that way.

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Conclusion Distinguishing Description from
Prescription

• That many people in our culture are relativistic
  is descriptively true.
• It does not follow, however, that the gospel or
  Christianity must be changed to make it
  attractive to such people.

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The Gospel Is Gods Power to Change Anyone who
Believes Regardless of Their Cultural Prejudices

• Romans 116
• For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is
  the power of God for salvation to everyone who
  believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

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