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The Emerging Church (Part 3 of 4)

Human reason over Scripture.

  — | Features, Series | July 01, 2009



As your long, coffee-infused conversation about the Emergent Church Movement (ECM), and your friend’s affinity for it draws to a close, the agitated catharsis with which your friend began suddenly shifts into an almost condescending expression of pity.1

“I just think,” he begins as if struggling to explain a horizon-expanding trip overseas to someone who’s never left his hometown, “you’re limiting yourself in your view of God. He’s so much bigger, so much kinder, than your faith allows Him to be. I mean, think of it. He’s God! Can He really be confined to our creeds and confessions?

“Don’t get me wrong. I love the creeds, especially the early ones. They’re helpful historical expressions of how people at one time struggled to describe a being who defies description. But that’s just it—how can language, even biblical language, really do justice to God? You’re a Calvinist, right?”

Knowing that this question is often more of an accusation, you nervously nod.

“Right,” your friend continues, “you believe we’re limited in our understanding, ‘totally depraved’ as you say. And yet you have one of the most detailed and dogmatic descriptions of God in all of church history! Calvinists are all about the glory of God, but really, when you think about it, if God is that glorious, that far above and beyond us—and I agree that God is those things—then how can we truly know Him based primarily on admittedly fallible language, imperfect expressions of fallible, finite minds? What I’ve realized is that we can never really talk of God Himself, or Herself, or Itself. See, I’m doing it, too! Trying to reduce God to my own categories of thought! I’ve realized that we can’t really describe God as God really is.2

“When we talk of God, we’re really talking about our perceptions of Him. We need to get beyond talk to the experiencing of Him. We learn through those experiences that He is much greater than we can imagine or describe. And I tell you, my friend,” he pauses, letting out a contented sigh. “I only wish you could experience God the way I have the last couple of years. And I think you could! If you would just move beyond Modernity, if you would just rebel against the Rationalistic view of God that you’ve unknowingly embraced.”

Your brain spinning and your heart feeling sick, you ask your friend if you can continue the conversation tomorrow. “No problem” he says. “I know this is a lot to take in. But really, thanks for listening.”

After parting ways, you decide to pay a visit to the teacher of the theology class that you and your friend are taking. You relate your concern for your friend and some of the content of his Emergent faith, explaining the asterisks he placed on his Apostle’s Creed handout.3

“Wow,” the professor begins. “So he wasn’t just doing that for a stunt. He really meant it. But does he realize what he’s rejecting when he embraces that kind of agnosticism?”

You nod sadly and describe your friend’s willingness to depart from even the most basic and defining Christian doctrines. You recount his resounding rejection of the doctrine of sola scriptura as essentially idolatrous, a suffocating, paralyzing byproduct of the Rationalism of the Modern era of history.

“Wait a minute,” the professor interrupts. “Rationalism did have a virtual stranglehold on the church in that era,4 but sola scriptura is what prevented the church’s suffocation, not what caused it. You see, Rationalism was the exaltation of autonomous human reason over Scripture, the desire to make Scripture the servant of man’s attitudes about what facts are rationally acceptable. In that era, doctrines like the resurrection and the virgin birth were increasingly offending people’s ‘enlightened’ sensibilities. Because they did not appeal to Modern man’s philosophical palate, they were either flatly rejected or reinterpreted as mere metaphorical expressions of deeper spiritual truth and experience.5

“It was Rationalism that undermined the church’s extant view that Scripture was indeed the very Word of God and that therefore we must submit ourselves to it. The embracing of God’s inscripturated Word as the only rule of faith and life was not a result of Rationalism, it was the rejection of Rationalism!6 In fact, your friend’s agnosticism regarding the supernatural aspects of Christianity is much more Rationalistic than anything you believe, both in its willingness to deny supernatural events in history and in its criteria for the justification of doing so.”

Craving caffeine more desperately than ever, you ask the professor to elaborate, especially given the fact that the Emergent Church prides itself on being postmodern, which entails the rejection of Modernism and Rationalism.

“That’s the thing about postmodernism. It’s an ultimately hypocritical philosophy. In reality, your friend’s postmodern view of God is every bit as unyielding and insistent as that expressed by the ‘modern’ confessions he rejects.7 The ECM’s dogmatism is just a quiet, veiled dogmatism, and that’s quite typical of postmodernism. It claims to be merely raising questions, exposing our inability to come to philosophical certainty, all the while sneaking its own claims of philosophical certainty in the back door.

“Think about it: He criticizes your theology as too restrictive and confident,8 even unbiblical. But he must be quite sure of his own view of God and his own interpretation of Scripture to so soundly reject yours. His doubts regarding your faith must be based on a certainty he has attained regarding his own. He is at least quite certain about what God and the Bible are not, but that certainty presupposes a standard by which he measures what descriptions are or are not worthy to be attributed to God. He has certainty regarding that unannounced standard. What is that standard, that authority, hich allows his agnosticism on one hand and the certainty from which it springs on the other? And, given his critique of your certainty, what gives him the epistemological right to have his own? He’s either genuinely ignorant of this double standard or ingeniously disingenuous in hiding it.”

You say that your friend fits the former description. He sees himself as on a journey of discovering God, a journey as difficult as it is enticing because of people’s limited ability to know and describe an infinite being. You relate your friend’s comments about the limits of even biblical language in describing God and his frustration at those who try to restrict the infinite God to theological categories devised by finite men.

“Wow,” he responds. “There’s another big straw man9 to add to the Rationalist one. Not even the most creedal Calvinist thinks that we can understand God exhaustively, or that human language, even Spirit-inspired language, can describe Him exhaustively. Calvin taught that scriptural language was the Creator accommodating the needs of His creatures,10 majestic in its content and yet simple in its expression, so that we could know God, not exhaustively, but truly. And, I might add, with certainty and clarity.11

“Postmodernism is not only hypocritical; it’s parasitic. It depends for life on that which it attacks.12 Every time the postmodernist talks about the limits of language, he does so through the very medium whose limitedness he laments! You have to use language to describe language’s limits. Presumably, the postmodernist wants us to understand quite clearly what he says about the limits of language, and presumably, he thinks we can; otherwise, why say it? In the same way, the idea that we cannot truly talk about God, but only our perceptions of Him, is in fact a statement about God. It’s a statement that God either cannot or has not effectively explained Himself to us, such that we can think and speak about Him accurately. It subjects God to people’s rationalized, arbitrary criteria regarding how He relates to His creatures.13

“For the ECM to be so upset about the so-called modern church’s understanding of God, they must have their own understanding of God by which to measure the modern understanding and to find it lacking. And not only do they have an understanding of God, but they’ve taken it upon themselves to publish it profusely! They’ve become quite popular by describing the Infinite Being through the finite language of their books, books declaring for us the way to truly know and experience God.14 They claim for themselves what they deny to you—the right to know and speak about God. And apparently, they seem to think that their descriptions of God possess a clarity and authority that even the Scriptures themselves lack.

“Perhaps your friend is not intentionally duplicitous, but the ECM as a whole is utterly dishonest. The basic premise of the movement, the postmodernizing of the faith in order to recover its authenticity and original design, displays not only hypocrisy, but outright philosophical hubris.

“ECM proponents claim that people like you are attempting to fit the Bible and the faith into the mold of an extrabiblical philosophy: Modernism. But does it occur to them they are doing the same thing, just with a different mold? Certainly Jesus was no Modernist. But are we to believe that He was a postmodernist? It’s not the idea of reading the Bible through the lens of extrabiblical philosophy that really offends ECM advocates, because they do it too. Nor is it the idea of philosophical certainty that truly offends them, because they are quite certain about what God is like and what Christianity should be. What truly offends them are some of the particulars of your faith, particulars that sola scriptura would force them to reckon with. I’d encourage you to talk to your friend again, cut through the straw men, and see if you can get at what’s really troubling him about the faith you two once shared.”

You tell your professor that you’re meeting with your friend tomorrow, and you ask him to pray for you. You leave the meeting more confident in your ability to address your doubting friend, but more concerned about the dogma beneath his doubts.

—Rutledge Etheridge

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

  1. This condescending tone has never been part of my dialogue with my real friend, a deeply kind man whom I referenced in article 1. Its employment by our fictional friend is meant to reflect the cartoonish caricature Brian McLaren often draws of confessional, Calvinistic Christians and Fundamentalists, labeling their approach to the faith as essentially reductionistic. See his chapter on Fundamentalism and Calvinism in A Generous Orthodoxy. While some of his critiques have merit and some of his descriptions should incite some healthy, self-deprecating laughter, other references to such Christians are bitingly harsh. In an interview with Leif Hansen, he describes the angry response to his work from “what seem to be some of the angriest people in general…what I call kind of the Westminster confessionalist … hardcore Calvinists who really feel that they have everything pretty much sewed up and they’ve got the Bible figured out.” Surely, the biblical way to respond to individuals who give the whole group a bad name is not to take up the very kind of rhetoric for which he criticizes them. Fully aware of the irony of such ungenerous language given his stated aim in A Generous Orthodoxy (see p. 39), McLaren nonetheless retains these occasional icy insults in his writing and speaking. ↩︎

  2. For the articulation of the philosophy of language often employed by the ECM, see Peter Rollins, How Not to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church (Brewster: Paraclete, 2006). See also Stanley Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), especially pages 45 and following. ↩︎

  3. See the first article. ↩︎

  4. Another suffocating influence on the church in the Modern era was Rationalism’s mirror opposite, Pietism. In an attempt to recover a sincere, experiential faith in the face of its being reduced by Rationalism to cold, academic abstractions, Pietism ironically damaged the faith in the same way as Rationalism but from the opposite end. Both approaches to the faith beat with the heart of subjectivism. For the Rationalist, the ultimate arbiter in matters of faith and life was the autonomous thinking self, and for the Pietist, the ultimate arbiter was the autonomous feeling self. Neither approach yielded to God’s Word and its emphasis on the union of head and heart (the reception of truth resulting in heartfelt devotion to Christ) in knowing God. The emphasis is everywhere in Scripture, but Psalm 119 (indeed, the whole Psalter!) and the epistle of 1 John give particularly pronounced expression of it. ↩︎

  5. For a fascinating and disturbing read, see Friedrich Schleiermacher’s On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers with the introduction by Rudolf Otto (New York: Harper and Row, 1958). Schleiermacher attempted in his day to defend the virtues and importance of religion against people advanced enough in their Rationalism to utterly reject it. Noble as the attempt may seem, Schleiermacher defended not historic, orthodox Christianity, but his own essentially pantheistic casting of the faith. His work, ostensibly as a churchman, paved the way for what we now know as the liberal church. ↩︎

  6. There was an attempt among some in the church in the modern era to marry Rationalism and Christianity. Rene Descartes believed the most basic, knowable fact is the thinking self’s knowledge of itself as thinking, cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore, I am.” However, in digging to find the most basic belief of which humans are capable, Descartes did not dig deep enough. For what lay behind the existence and self-awareness of the thinking self? See Proverbs 1:7. ↩︎

  7. Emergent literature is replete with dogmatic language right alongside its insistence that our view of Scripture must be humble, i.e. absent the certainty cherished by the modern era. For just one example, consider Rob Bell’s handling of John 14:6. He claims that Jesus’ words here are not about which religion is better than the other, but rather about how to connect to ultimate reality, faith in Jesus being the best way to do it. Bell writes that those who assert the former “miss the point, the depth, and the truth.” *Velvet Elvis *(Grand Rapids: Zondervan), p.12. ↩︎

  8. See pages 216-17 of A Generous Orthodoxy. ↩︎

  9. A straw man is an artificial and easily assailable version of an argument, attacked in order to make the true argument seem weak. In debate, the erection of a straw man indicates either ignorance of what is being argued or dishonesty in the method of argument. ↩︎

  10. See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, chapter 9. ↩︎

  11. As we’ll see in the next and final article, Scripture is voluminous in attesting to its own design in teaching God’s people, with clarity and accuracy, to truly know God. See, among a plethora of other examples, Psalm 119:30. From a resource I’ve been unable to track down, theologian Wayne Grudem writes: “We would do well to remember that not once in the gospels do we ever hear Jesus saying anything like this: ‘I see how your problem arose—the scriptures are not very clear on that subject.” ↩︎

  12. This same principle applies to the postmodern attack on Foundationalist thinking. Postmodernism must have a foundation from which to attack Foundationalism, an inflexible epistemological standard by which it finds foundationalist models lacking in epistemological integrity. ↩︎

  13. God’s recognition of and willingness to deal with our natural finitude and the corrupting influence of sin upon our understanding is expressed in His demands for exacting obedience to His Word. Knowing our ability and propensity to stray into idolatry, God reveals quite clearly how we are and are not to think and speak of Him. See the second and third commandments in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. ↩︎

  14. Again, note the authoritarian title of Rollins’ book, How Not to Speak of God. ↩︎