Imagine that you are back with your Christian friend, talking in the hall after the theology class you’re taking. You inquire again about the “Emergent” version of Christianity he has embraced, and about the asterisks he had placed on his copy of the Apostle’s Creed to represent his new take on the faith.

“Yeah,” he begins sheepishly, “maybe doing the asterisk thing was a bit over the top, a bit too in-your-face, and I don’t mean to be like that. I also didn’t mean to make the professor spit out his drink when he saw it.”

You ask your friend what happened to his faith since you had seen him last. After a moment’s reflection, he replies: “I stopped worshiping the idol of epistemic certainty.”

Recognizing that your conversation is about to get quite philosophical, you invite your friend to sit down with you at the Mars Hill of postmodern America: the local coffee shop.

As you sit down at your table, your wallet significantly lighter, the air filled with music peddled by this non-establishment shop, you can tell your friend is working something over in his mind. His face contorts as his thoughts surface. Finally, he lets loose in a bluster: “Do you ever think that you’ve made an idol out of the Bible? Made it something it was never intended to be? I mean, think of the guys who wrote the Bible. They were part of a culture where questions were argued but not settled. There was always ongoing dialogue about truth and a struggle to apply it to new situations. But in the modern world, the church wants us to shut down the conversation. We need to have everything spelled out, laid to rest for all time. We don’t want to explore ways that God may still be speaking to us, because we think the infinite Lord of heaven and earth has already said everything He needs to…in a book!”

“Sorry,” your friend says as he watches you choke on your coffee. “Please don’t get me wrong. The Bible is sacred, but I don’t think God wanted us to worship it, or that He meant it as His last will and testament to us. He gave us a dynamic, living Word; but instead of letting the Bible breathe, we suffocate it through our systematizing. We want all the loose ends tied up. We use Aristotle and his logic to interpret texts that came way before and way after him; we look for 17th Century rationalistic certainty in a text written over a thousand years before that and from a completely different world view. We take all the passages we can and try to build these unified conceptual cathedrals,¹ forcing an awkward fit between texts meant to live in dynamic tension. We nail them together but they strain against each other, longing to resume their natural shape.

“And we do this all based on a blueprint the Bible itself never gives us! We make the Bible an owner’s manual to fix spiritual problems,² a science book, an archaeological field guide, a theological encyclopedia, the be-all and end-all of Christian knowledge! We turn a blind eye to truth discovered in other areas of life; we anathematize people who want us to reckon with what they found through extrabiblical historical study and how it might shed new light on crucial passages. I mean, what do we expect to get after we crank the Bible through our philosophical factory but an idol!”³

Glad that your friend ordered decaf but wishing you hadn’t, you settle in for a long conversation. You invite him to keep unloading his obviously troubled heart. You listen with deepening concern as he articulates for you the reasons he has abandoned the faith you once shared together in exchange for beliefs espoused by the Emergent Church.

Our fictional friend represents what has been called the liberal wing of the Emerging Church Movement (ECM). His questions and critiques are typical of Emergent theology, and as we’ll see for the remainder of this article, they are aimed squarely at denominations like the RPCNA. Emergents have much to say in praise and criticism of various denominations, but they vent their most heated comments against theological traditions they believe to be steeped in the philosophy of modernism.

For centuries, what came to be called modernism ruled the philosophical world in the West, its roots taking form in the Scholasticism⁴of late Medieval Europe and growing into full flower in post-Reformation Rationalism.⁵ Recognizing Rationalism’s suffocating effect on the church,⁶ the ECM roundly rebukes the modern era’s extolling of autonomous human reason as the means of knowing God and perfecting humanity. Specifically, modern philosophy’s quest for a philosophically indubitable basis upon which to build all knowledge⁷ is deemed by the ECM a fool’s errand, a chasing after the wind that took Christ’s church far off the path He cleared for her. In decrying philosophical certainty as an idol, the ECM decries as idol worshipers the theological tradition it believes to be beholden to modern philosophy: namely, Reformed theology.

Brian McLaren writes, “In terms of intellectual rigor, I believe that Reformed Christianity is the highest expression of modern Christianity, which is a sincere compliment—and a gentle warning, too. If we are moving beyond modernity in general, then the forms of Christianity that have most successfully adapted themselves to the assumptions and thought patterns of modernity are in the most trouble. For this reason, I suspect that Reformed Christianity is in for a major identity crisis in the next few decades, with some of its number entrenched in modernity and with others—resourced by the robust faith and thought of their forebears—helping lead the way for life, thought, and ministry in the emerging culture.”⁸

According to McLaren, the church in our day could benefit from the raw intellectual rigor employed in the Reformation, but it would be wise to abandon much of the fruit of that cognitive labor. Particularly odious to Emergents and obstructive to the theological and practical progress they want the church to make is a doctrine cherished by the heirs of the Reformation, sola scriptura, which holds the Bible is the “only rule of faith and obedience.”⁹

Writing for a popular Emergent blog, Nic Paton aptly expresses the Emergent view of sola scriptura: “A closed canon, a rejection (or fear) of contradiction…and the static and deterministic worldview of modernism has caused us to close down and defend the bible. When Jesus said, ‘You have heard that it was said…but I say to you…” (Matt. 5:39) he might have been addressing us. We still fail to see revelation as evolving, despite the fact that Jesus and his ministry was founded upon a progressive revelation of God.”¹⁰

Emergents regard sola scriptura as a well intentioned overreaction to Rome’s abuse of ecclesiastical authority during the Reformation era. The Reformers emphasized the perspicuity¹¹ of Scripture, proclaiming the common Christian’s right and ability to know and understand God’s Word. However, according to Emergents, the Reformed Church’s valiant effort to popularize Scripture was mingled with the Rationalistic effort to reduce the transcendent truth of God to facts to be cataloged under arbitrary heads of academic study.

Through vitriolic debates over the minutiae of the faith and the production of ultra-detailed confessions, the Bible was increasingly regarded as a theological textbook rather than the living, breathing Word of God.

Further, as Emergents see it, the Protestant insistence that Scripture alone was God’s Word to mankind not only drowned out God’s speaking through other aspects of creation, but it placed the Bible in an unnecessarily defensive posture against Enlightenment-era discoveries in science, history, and textual criticism, discoveries that raised disquieting questions regarding the content and composition of Scripture.

Unable to stifle swelling doubt about her view of Scripture, the church attempted to shut down discussions by rallying around Scripture as the infallible and inerrant, clearly expressed, internally consistent,¹² closed canon of Divine truth. According to Emergent thought, sola scriptura both resulted from and became a reaction to the Rationalistic principles of the modern era. Thus, Emergents reject sola scriptura, finding it obstructive to the church’s progress in society and, ironically, ultimately unbiblical.¹³ Paton summarizes, “What was a pillar of truth half a millennium ago has become an untenable deadweight (one is tempted to say, an idol) in the life of the church.”¹⁴

Emergents find it ironic that churches who claim to be “always reforming” want to stay cemented in the theological/philosophical past. They warn us that if we do not abandon our philosophical idols and emerge past modern Christianity, we will become increasingly useless to the faith we claim, watching from the back, our protesting voices fading as Jesus’ work in the world moves forward.

However, to those who embrace Emergent agnosticism over against “Calvinistic confidence”¹⁵ the ECM promises the benefits of a vital relationship to Christ without the baggage of destructive in-house debates and perennial paralysis in the midst of social evolution. You can focus on the doing of the faith rather than the debating of it, while not dismissing the debates as irrelevant.¹⁶ You don’t have to worry that you might learn something in science or history class that seems to contradict the Bible. If we read the Bible as narrative (which allows for internal contradiction and correction by external sources)¹⁷ rather than reducing it to academic discourse, and if we hold loosely to our understanding of what it teaches, then we can carry it confidently into the world and apply its world changing teaching to our ever changing times.

Such argumentation by Emergents has proven persuasive (or, as we’ll see in the next article, an excuse) for people like our fictional friend who believe the ECM represents the way forward for the faith—a way both uncharted and ancient as it paints a fresh picture of what Jesus had in mind all along for His church.¹⁸

In the next article we will critique these claims by examining pertinent history and Scripture, revealing Emergent claims as dubious in regard to both. Further, we’ll discover how the ECM’s fresh painting of the faith merely colors over old philosophical and theological challenges to Christ’s church, strongholds to be demolished anew by her God-breathed guide for faith and life.

Author Rut Etheridge is pastor of Providence (Pittsburgh, Pa.) RPC and is adjunct professor of systematic theology for the RP Seminary. He was the speaker for a Reformation Society conference on the Emerging Church entitled, “The Church’s Identity Crisis.”

End Notes