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The Emerging Church (Part 2 of 4)

Assertions aimed at denominations like ours

  —Rut Etheridge | Features, Series | June 02, 2009



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


  1. The building of “conceptual cathedrals” is how Brian McLaren refers to the discipline of systematic theology as it has been done traditionally. See A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), p. 168. ↩︎

  2. Rob Bell contends that some people view Scripture merely as an owner’s manual, consulted only when there is a spiritual problem to be solved. See Velvet Elvis(Grand Rapids: Zondervan), p. 62. ↩︎

  3. Both the comments in our fictional friend’s tirade and the tone in which he expresses them are reflective of recurrent emphases in the ECM, particularly as seen in A Generous Orthodoxy↩︎

  4. The philosophical giant of this era was Thomas Aquinas, lauded by many Christians for showing the compatibility of received revelation and reason rightly employed, and criticized by others for opening the door of Christian thought to the influence of pagan philosophy. For a work in praise of Aquinas, see Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991). For a critical view of Aquinas’s work, see Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1983). ↩︎

  5. Rationalism is the appeal to autonomous human reason as the ultimate arbiter in matters of faith and life. In Rationalist thought, human reason was not merely the tool through which we process information and make value judgments; it was the substance of the foundation for all knowledge, including knowledge of the Divine. Thus, Rene Descartes’ famous axiom: Cogito ergo sum. I think; therefore I am. ↩︎

  6. See Andrew Drummond, German Protestantism since Luther (London: Epworth Press, 1951) and also John Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, as Contrasted with its Earlier and Later History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881). ↩︎

  7. The approach to epistemology (the study of knowledge) which seeks some basic truth or truths upon which to build other truth claims is called Foundationalism and is soundly rejected by ECM proponents. They gain philosophical ammunition for their attack on foundationalist models of theology from works such as Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001) by Stanley Grenz and John Franke. These authors’ writings are quite popular in Christian higher education. See also Grenz’s A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996). ↩︎

  8. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 210. ↩︎

  9. Westminster Larger Catechism, question and answer 3. ↩︎

  10. Nic Paton, “So Long, Sola?”—www.emergentvillage.com/weblog/so-long-sola ↩︎

  11. Ironically, this word means “clarity.” ↩︎

  12. Peter Rollins, a postmodern philosopher whose work flows within and helps push along Emergent thinking, writes that the idea of the Bible as a text at one with itself is “the ultimate fantasy of the fundamentalist.” See The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief (Brewster: Paraclete, 2008). See also his prior book How Not to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church (Brewster: Paraclete, 2006). ↩︎

  13. Further, even if Emergents were to grant the infallibility of Scripture, they would be quick to remind us of our fallibility in interpreting it: “What good is an inerrant Bible without inerrant interpretations?” McLaren postulates this question being raised by theological liberals against Protestants. See A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 148. ↩︎

  14. “So Long Sola?” ↩︎

  15. A Generous Orthodoxy, pp. 216-17. ↩︎

  16. The ECM does not embrace the anti-intellectualism often found in contemporary Christianity. Like its parent philosophy postmodernism, the ECM is intellectually rigorous, as displayed in Beyond Foundationalism. As we will see in the next article, though, while the ECM cannot be rightly labeled as intellectually lazy, it can be rightly labeled as intellectually dishonest. ↩︎

  17. See Scot McKnight’s book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008). ↩︎

  18. Velvet Elvis ends with these words: “We need you to join us. It’s better that way. It’s what Jesus had in mind.” (p. 177). ↩︎