The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of “modesty” (in one sense of that word); i.e., propriety, or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and in what words according to the customs of a given social circle. Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes. A girl in the Pacific islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might be equally “modest,” proper, or decent, according to the standards of their own societies: and both, for all we could tell by their dress, might be equally chaste (or equally unchaste). Some of the language which chaste women used in Shakespeare’s time would have been used in the nineteenth century only by a woman completely abandoned. When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in themselves or others, then they are offending against chastity. But if they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly in order to shock or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other people uncomfortable. I do not think that a very strict or fussy standard of propriety is any proof of chastity or any help to it, and I therefore regard the great relaxation and simplifying of the rule which has taken place in my own lifetime as a good thing. At its present stage, however, it has this inconvenience, that people of different ages and different types do not all acknowledge the same standard, and we hardly know where we are. While this confusion lasts I think that old, or old-fashioned, people should be very careful not to assume that young or “emancipated” people are corrupt whenever they are (by the old standard) improper; and in return, that young people should not call their elders prudes or puritans because they do not easily adopt the new standard. A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.

I doubt many of us then could have envisioned the extent to which exposure to the doctrines of grace and indeed, recognition that the doctrines of grace are grounded in the teaching of Holy Scripture would advance over the intervening decades. It is a real wonder to me that today such a diversity of voices affirm such a robust understanding of God’s sovereignty over this universe and over our own lives and that the salvation of sinners is by grace alone, indeed by sovereign grace alone!

If the doctrines of grace enjoy a measure of acceptance, understanding, and influence; if proclaimers of the gospel of pure grace enjoy a more prominent platform than existed just a few decades ago, then a special, happy but also solemn responsibility and stewardship also rest on the shoulders of any of us who celebrate this undeserved turn of events. Let us pray for Holy Spirit-enabled power to conduct ourselves in ways that do not undermine the precious gospel of grace we so treasure.

I thank God for the many souls who have contributed to the reclaiming of the doctrines of grace in our time; J.I. Packer, John R.W. Stott; Ernie Reisinger, Tom Ascol; Tom Nettles; Timothy George; Al Mohler; Mark Dever, Don Whitney, John Piper, R.C. Sproul, John MacArthur, Curtis Vaughn, Bruce Ware, and today, we must also include, Mark Driscoll. And of course there are many others, countless and nameless others who have prayed and labored and preached and written so that the sovereignty of God and the gratuity of salvation might be recognized to the Glory of God.

God grant that we might not squander the gains that have been made. Lord grant that we who cling to the doctrines of grace because we cling to your Word and to your Son might, as we hold firmly to the precious truth of the gospel, live in such a way that this glorious gospel might shine from our lives, that our love for you and for one another might reflect your grace and your love.

Of course, how one defines the scope of the movement matters when considering this question. I identify two streams within the movement, a doctrine-friendly stream and a doctrine-wary/averse stream. This means that I call some communities of faith “emerging” who would not embrace that characterization for themselves.

I include all of these folks as part of the emerging church movement whether they like it or not: Brian McLaren, Mark Driscoll, Erwin McManus, Tim Keller, Rob Bell , Matt Chandler, Darrin Patrick, and Tim Keel. My rationale for inclusion of such diverse figures and communities of faith under the umbrella term “emerging” is explored in my chapter for the upcoming volume from Lifeway Evangelicals Engaging Emergent set for publication in May 2009.

But never mind. I am writing a book-length analysis of the movement and I would love to gain a better idea of the size of the this phenomenon.

Seen any numbers?

You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realize that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.

             . . . the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil. What He wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise¾does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.  . . . This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper. So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighboring churches as soon as  possible . . . .

Jacob’s Well in Kansas City where Tim Keel serves as the lead pastor provides a helpful window into my justification for the three designations: 1. doctrine-friendly; 2. doctrine-wary and 3. doctrine-averse. When Jacob’s Well first started, they self-consciously held to no doctrines. Not the Apostles’ Creed, not the Nicene Creed, nothing. Later on they formally (the elders at least, for they had no formal membership) adopted the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

In my taxonomy, this change marked a move from a doctrine-averse or doctrine-devoid status to a merely doctrine-wary status. The leadership (Keel) remained and remains wary of doctrine, alert to the scholasticizing, reductionistic, spiritually stultifying dangers of doctrine for the community of faith. Many of the websites of such communities of faith make very clear that even if they post doctrines, however minimal by historical standards, you must visit them and live among them in order to really know what they are about. Just reading the doctrine doesn’t cut it and might even be misleading. (I speak of communities of faith, not churches, because many of these groups know they are not churches, do not want to be thought of as churches or do not care if they earn the “church” tattoo before the bar of history, tradition or any other measure of such tings).

So the self-conscious wariness and sometimes aversion to doctrine is there. This is how many of these groups describe themselves. But, all of these communities of faith that flourish in any way, all of them that display signs of real vitality and life do actually have doctrines as I have argued in a previous post. What would be helpful for “the conversation” is for leaders of these communities to recognize, state, formally accept and defend those convictions and values that already function as doctrines among them as doctrines. Otherwise we find ourselves talking past one another when one group wants to be viewed as being above the fray as it were where doctrine is concerned.

A similar talking-past-one-another occurred during the late unhappiness within the Southern Baptist Convention during which moderates and liberals dubbed themselves the freedom party and dubbed the conservatives as indoctrinating fundamentalists. In fact, as liberal Baptist Nancy Ammerman “confessed” (an apt word in this context) and demonstrated in her book Baptist Battles, the moderates and liberals were just as identifiable according to a set of non-negotiable convictions (doctrines!) as were the conservatives.

Doctrine-friendly emerging types such as, for example, congregations associated with the ACTS 29 church-planting network, or Mosaic in LA (Rafael McManus) have old-fashioned full blown confessions of faith. The leaders of such churches usually share many of the same concerns about the dangers of doctrine that Emergents fear, but it strikes me that they have a more mature realization that doctrine, despite its susceptibility to misuse and abuse, remains essential to sustainable church life. Why? Because, to a significant degree, the depth of our fellowship with others is proportional to our shared convictions, especially where the things of God are concerned.

Among the fruit of the spirit produced within the Body of Christ we find patience, kindness, and longsuffering. Love, we understand “does not seek its own . . .bears all things, . . . endures all things.” Note also Romans 14:1-15:7 in which the Apostle Paul admonishes the carnivores and herbivores and those who count certain days more holy than others and those who treat all days alike to “pursue the things that make for peace and the building up of one another” (Rom 14:19). In Ephesians Paul implores the church “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

Of course Paul could get his back up and go fundamentalist as well, couldn’t he? Just check out the Epistle to the Galatians! Want to impose circumcision? Well just go ahead and castrate yourself then. Prefer a different (eteroV) gospel from the one Paul preaches? Well then, anathama to you. That is what Paul says. The very heart of the gospel was at stake. But what about matters of disagreement where the gospel is not at stake. Then what?

What might the strong New Testament emphasis upon Christian unity, patience within the Body of Christ, forgiveness, bearing with one another have to say about God’s preference for denominational affiliation versus a non-affiliated way of being church or being a Christian?

What are your thoughts?

During the post-sermon mingle time at a non-denominational church where I preached this past Sunday, one of the members said he would love for me to come back again and preach, then went on, his face beaming, to state, with gusto and pride¾“Notice that we don’t have any kind of denominational stuff on the sign out front. We are just Christians!”

Denominational loyalty is at a very low ebb. There seems to be no reason to expect a trend in the direction of denominational revival anytime soon. Why is this so?

Have you considered bolting your own denomination? Why?

Have you already left a denomination? For another one? Or are you now worshiping and serving within a denominationally unaffiliated congregation? How’s it going?

Does McKnight’s special interest in Emergent, given his prolific writing. speaking, and blogging, secure a disproportionately higher profile for the Emergent stream than it deserves? Don’t know. But I wonder.

I divide the movement into two major segments or streams: (1) the Emergent stream: a variously doctrine-wary or even doctrine-averse stream best epitomized, as McKnight recognizes, by EmergentVillage.com, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Tony Jones. And (2) a doctrine-friendly stream perhaps best represented by the ACTS29 network of church planters but also associated with the names Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller and, among Southern Baptists, Ed Stetzer.

Has anyone seen significant data on the numbers involved in the emerging movement? Any good numbers out there that show how big the movement might be or the relative strength of the two major streams of the movement? How big is ACTS29 for example?– keeping in mind that ACTS29 is not a denomination and, despite strong reformed theological affinities and shared convictions related to church-planting in a post-Christian context, nevertheless accommodates significant diversity within its circle of church planters.

Back to McKnight’s CT piece. Though McKnight has proven himself a great friend and skilled defender of the Emergent stream within emerging, he has also identified blind spots and weakness within Emergent that he fears could jeopardize the movement, sabotage its prospects for growth, and call into question its claim to be a movement that, in the words of Brian McLaren, seeks “to plant and nurture biblical communities of faith.”

McKnight’s more longstanding concern has been the bad conscience Emergent has displayed for proselytizing. McKnight recognizes that good news should be not only lived but also proclaimed and that where squeamishness for evangelism takes hold, it compromises the viability of any would-be Christian movement. A case in point–Protestant Liberalism. Liberals found a welcome resting place within the wider culture which easily accommodated their hyper-sensitivity toward the views of the unconverted and their embarrassment about their own faith, its history, and its tradition. The same characteristic psyche that helped liberals “make friends” also ensured that they would not “influence people,”– at least they would not exert the kind of influence that results in conversion, church-planting, and church growth. The Emergent segment of emerging may be headed for a similar fate.

But in this latest of his critiques, McKnight puts his finger on a theological weakness that undoubtedly underlies Emergent aversion to conversion: its inability articulate a view of the Cross that takes the full biblical revelation seriously. However much McKnight celebrates Emergent recovery of the implications of the Incarnation for a truly Christian understanding of issues related to the poor, the sick, and the oppressed, he also notices neglect of great portions of the biblical witnesses–dimensions of witness that center on the chief purpose of the Incarnation, namely that the Incarnate one might do a unique work on the Cross. McKnight puts it this way:

“The most stable location for the earliest understandings of the Cross, from Jesus all the way through the New Testament writings, is the Last Supper– and not a word is said there about violence and systemic injustice. Other words are given to explain the event: covenant, forgiveness of sins, and blood ‘poured out for many.’ Insight into the Cross must begin here.”

Could it be that Emergent failure to comprehend or make much use of the Cross in its thinking involves a pattern of highhanded theologizing that traces back at least to the turn of the 19th century? I have in mind the grand attempt of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) to rescue Christianity in the face of an Enlightenment assault upon the church’s supreme epistemological touchstone, the revelation of God in Holy Scripture.

Formally, at least, is not the chief distinction between “liberal” and ”conservative” or “evangelical” theologizing the opposing postures they take before the witness of the Bible? A true liberal admits, with Schleiermacher, that the theologian stands above the Bible and sifts wheat from chaff, selecting from the Scriptures those teachings best suited to advance the agenda brought to it by the theologian or the preacher etc. In this sense, liberals are not answerable to the Bible. Rather, the Bible serves as a resource for their use.

Conservatives, on the other hand, express formal answerability to the word of Scripture. That’s a big difference. And the danger lurking where the church would stand over rather than under the Bible as the authority for her faith and practice was recognized clearly by Karl Bath: it is the danger of idolatry. Whenever we stand above the Bible and imagine a competence for the sifting of wheat from chaff among its contents, we do, wittingly or not, make a god!

On what basis do Emergents sift biblical wheat from biblical chaff? Irony of ironies–they sift according to their DOCTRINE!  That’s right. The doctrine-wary and doctrine-averse Emergents are eat-up with doctrine whether they realize it or not. They may not admit it, and some may not recognize it, but in fact, Emergents not only have doctrine but are deeply shaped by it. The cluster of unrecognized doctrines active and embedded within Emergent thinking is indicated by such terms precious among them as: authenticity, missional, community, mystery, and post-christian/post-modern. Take note that this same set of terms are just as indispensable when doctrine-friendly emerging types (such as those one finds associated with ACTS29) describe themselves.

Yes, Emergents have doctrine. What they lack is any kind of identifiable, stable authority to which those doctrines become answerable–not the Bible, not the Christian tradition, not anything apparently, beyond their own emerging sense of what the world needs now. While use is made by Emergents of both the Bible and the tradition, neither is allowed to trump or even penetrate Emergent protectiveness of its own un-recognized doctrines. Both Bible and tradition are ransacked for their usefulness to the predetermined Emergent cause, a heavy slice of which seems to be its sour attitude toward evangelicalism.

For this reason McKnight cannot simply issue a straightforward appeal to the Bible in his warnings to Emergents where the Cross and Evangelism are at issue. He shrewdly appeals also to Emergent construal of “kingdom” (another of Emergent’s embedded “doctrines”).

Are not McKnight’s concerns well founded? Are we in a position today to identify with any clarity the underlying malady plaguing Emergent? Might that malady reside precisely in Emergent failure to anchor itself to anything more substantive than the conflation of its own diagnosis of the pathologies latent within existing models of church with its own idiosyncratic prescription for addressing those pathologies? Answers to such questions will reveal to what extent Emergent belongs to that other, older movement known as Christianity and whether the communities of faith nurtured within its ethos can rightly be called churches.

Are not the doctrine-friendlies within Emerging attempting something more promising for those who covet faithfulness to the Bible and inclusion within the global and historic church of Jesus Christ as well as relevant Christian living and church-planting within a post-Christian context? If the doctrine-friendly emerging types such as ACTS29 retain their commitment to Holy Scripture, their welcoming of historic doctrinal anchors along with their zeal for conversion-seeking evangelism and church-planting, they may well leave a mark on Christianity in the West that will long outlast anything likely to come from the still largely unformed and wandering Emergent stream of the movement. I hope they do.

Now that “networking” designates one of the supposed essential tools of success for today’s aspiring professionals, including for many would-be ministers of the gospel, a peek into Lewis’ view of such things reminds us of the prophetic edge the creator of Narnia so often achieves.

In the following excerpt Lewis reflects upon childhood experiences at boarding school:

“ . . . the essential evil of public-school life, as I see it, did not lie either in the sufferings          of the fags or in the privileged arrogance of the Bloods. These were symptoms of something more all-pervasive, something which, in the long run, did most harm to the boys who succeeded best at school and were happiest there. Spiritually speaking, the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation. It is often, of course, the preoccupation of adult life as well; but I have not yet seen any adult society in which the surrender to this impulse was so total. And from it, as school as in the world, all sorts of meanness flow; the sycophancy that courts those higher in the scale, the cultivation of those whom it is well to know, the speedy abandonment of friendships that will not help on the upward path, the readiness to join the cry against the unpopular, the secret motive in almost every action.”

From Lewis’ Surprised By Joy, paragraph 9 of chapter VII entitled “Light and Shade.”

Over the last two years I have engaged in constant research of the emerging church movement, have published a couple of short pieces on the movement and have warned audiences that Carson’s work should not be viewed as the final, comprehensive, evangelical assessment of emerging church. I stand by that view. No treatment of the movement that makes no mention of the names Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller, Erwin Rafael McManus, Ed Stetzer and John Burke can hope to achieve anything like a comprehensive overview of emerging.

But! Having just re-read Carson’s book, I am much more impressed with it than I once thought possible. In a forthcoming book I will argue that folks like Mark Driscoll and Erwin McManus do merit (whether they like it or not) the emerging tattoo and thus, Carson’s book involves an analysis of only a couple of sub-sections of the movement. But very important sub-sections they are and Carson’s analysis of them is, I believe, right on.

Far from the mean, reductionistic treatment of McLaren some have charged him with, Carson is very thorough, fair, and even seems to look for every opportunity to praise McLaren where he can. For example Carson notes McLaren’s care in avoiding the simplistic notion modernism bad/postmodernism good-trap that so many others fall into. Nevertheless, Carson, through careful and footnoted examination of McLaren’s writings, exposes unbiblical conclusions, questionable analysis of culture, and contradictory assertions that characterize McLaren’s thinking. I read Carson before McLaren and when I got around to McLaren I took a bias against Carson with me. But, now having tried to read McLaren sympathetically with little success, I find Carson, upon second reading, very impressive indeed.

I highly recommend Carson’s Becoming Conversant as an indispensable evangelical assessment of what I call the doctrine/wary and doctrine/averse streams within the emerging church movement.

“. . . the young woman explained, ‘This is the first time my fiancé and I have ever actually attended a Christian service, since we were both raised agnostic.’ So I supposed they were like most unchurched young adults I meet, who wouldn’t want to be part of an anti-homosexual organization any more than they’d want to be part of a racist or terrorist organization.”

McLaren goes on to explain why he cannot give straight and negative answers to questions about homosexuality. Here are some of my concerns:

Notice what is going on here. Racism and terrorism are associated (if not equated) with the loving revelation of God that homosexual behavior is opposed to God’s will, bad for those who practice it, and detrimental to others who might follow their example. From McLaren’s point of view, it seems, Christians are rightly anti-racism and anti-terrorism but not rightly anti-homosexual behavior. Why not? Why, according to McLaren’s reasoning should we not bend over backwards to be sensitive to the views of racists and terrorists? If McLaren would have similar trouble giving straightforward and negative answers regarding a Christian church’s policy on racism or terrorism, then we could congratulate him for being consistent and also note that he is consistently nuts.

McLaren believes racism and terrorism are wrong. Good for him.  The people of Israel and followers of Christ (and by the way, the vast majority of the human race) in virtually every spot on the globe, for virtually the whole of history, believe that homosexual behavior is wrong, aberrant behavior, harmful for those who practice it and for others who might follow their example.

Could it be that McLaren’s blindness to his inconsistency stems from his default awareness that “nowadays, all morally sane folk know intuitively that racism and terrorism are repugnant and evil?” (though some on the anti-semitic and anti-American left today even make bizarre apologies for terroists [e.g., Ward Churchill!]

Could it be that the source of McLaren’s hesitance and ambiguity where homosexuality is concerned is simply that the politically-correct cultural norm now rewards such equivocation regarding and even rejection of traditional and Biblical views on the subject?

And does not McLaren’s hem-hawing on homosexuality highlight the crucial difference between McLaren’s quest for culturally relevant forms of Christianity and Mark Driscoll’s  similar quest? Could it be that, fundamentally, McLaren’s touchstone is culture while Driscoll’s is the Bible?

I am asking.

“Building Bridges” recognizes the sad necessity for the conservative resurgence within the SBC and gratitude for its success. I share that recognition. I confronted that necessity in the mid 80’s first hand as an M.Div. student at Southern Seminary where a culture hostile to Bible-believing Christianity held sway. Old Testament professors questioned the historicity of the plagues visited upon Pharaoh; one church historian questioned the historicity of Jesus’ bodily resurrection; an ethics professor viewed abortion on demand as a constituent prerogative of human rights and homosexual behavior as a function of sexual orientation. Yes, the conservative resurgence was necessary. All who love the gospel of Jesus Christ and recognize the Bible as the very word of God owe Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler and the scores of Baptists who helped make their dream of rescuing the SBC from its leftward slide a deep and abiding sense of gratitude.

The conservative resurgence prevailed. Thanks be to God! What now? Listen to the heartfelt words of Thom Rainer: “I am a firm supporter of the conservative resurgence. I knew we could not continue down the path we were headed. But it seems as if we just can’t stop fighting even though the battle for the Bible is over and won.”

Dockery and George offer incisive overviews of the history of Southern Baptists, its now complicated make-up, the new challenges facing the denomination and a plea for the development of a new consensus that can anchor us as a people in evangelical, orthodox confession but also free us from constant self-destructive fighting over secondary issues (important issues but still secondary). The continuance of such controversies threatens to fracture our fellowship and to divert and drain energies better spent in evangelism and church planting. Failure to build the needed new consensus could ensure that the now undisputed decline of Christianity in North America will drag the SBC down with its terrible tide.

David Dockery’s discernment of fourteen categories of Baptists to replace the old moderate/liberal vs. fundamentalist/conservative divide in the convention marks a truly profound contribution to our comprehension of what Southern Baptists have become. If Dockery’s analysis comes even close to an accurate description of the true character of current SBC constituencies, the fragility of that fellowship becomes obvious and so does the urgency of that new consensus necessary to hold together large portions of the various streams in the new SBC.

Current controversy surrounding private prayer language and now the consumption of alcohol highlight the ease with which SBC energies can be diverted from the great task of global evangelism and church-planting into fractious fights we can ill-afford where the character of the gospel and other core doctrines of orthodox, evangelical and biblical faith are not at stake.

14,000 copies of Building Bridges are now in print. Read it for yourself if you can lay your hands on a copy and if you share the message contained therein, pass the word along. The difference between a future of fighting, fragmentation and decline or one of growth, fellowship, and advance of the gospel may hang in the balance.

Audio of the Dockery and George contributions to this volume are availale from Union University. Perhaps copies of the booklet can be obtained from Union University or the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The more I read Lewis the more I am fascinated. I think the recent publication of the final volume of letters will result in significant clarification of Lewis’ views and illumination of the richness of his spirituality.

Lewis seems to hold together a very strong, very serious commitment to the spiritual disciplines and to spiritual accountability and growth without the worst by-products such seriousness can sometimes produce: fixation on spiritual naval-gazing; the holy huddle syndrome; and loss of the glorious liberty of the children of God that knows our righteousness is not our own. Am I right about this?

Later.

“. . . dare we as biblical conservatives to speak of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and let the world see our love? Do we dare to let the world see that while we have strong convictions, we will be less judgmental so people can see Christ in us?

Are you willing to take the risk of trusting your fellow Southern Baptists and being worthy of their trust? (SBC Life, April, 2007)

[The] common commitment to missions is the primary reason the Baptist Faith and Message focuses only on core beliefs of Southern Baptists. If we insist that every doctrinal nuance debated among Southern Baptists is a core belief, sooner of later, our missionary force will be depleted and the unsaved will be abandoned.

In answer to the question, “What is your perspective on the emergent church?” [it should be “emerging” but never mind] Morris responded:

We need to remember that all emerging churches are not the same. In fact, all younger, emergent, and emerging pastors are not to be considered one and the same.  . . . The Southern Baptist Convention has many fine younger pastors who lead their churches differently than we did in earlier generations and yet they are strongly committed to the inerrancy of God’s Word and have a spirit of love and loyalty to our Lord Jesus Christ and the Southern Baptist Convention.

We should become knowledgeable about the emergent church and reserve judgment for those whose actions and words prove them to be heretical in their faith and practice. We should be careful not to speak falsely against those who are honestly trying to find God-honoring methods more suitable for reaching this generation of unsaved for Christ. And we certainly must be careful about condemning a younger pastor simply because his methods are innovative. My prayer is that God will give the people and their pastors spiritual wisdom in the application of their enormous creativity.

Some younger Southern Baptist pastors are insisting that the consumption of alcoholic beverages is not prohibited in the Bible. While the Bible never says that a drink of wine is a sin, it is filled with principles for living a pure life as a testimony to what Christ did for us on the Cross. . . . Rather than argue the finer points of biblical interpretation, why would we not pray, “Dear Lord Jesus, there are some things I will not do, though there be not biblical injunction per se against them, because they are perceived to be an integral part of the world.” (SBC Life, May 2007)[Link to the entire interview here].”

Wow!! What a different tone and substance we encounter here compared to the sweeping judgments some are prepared to make with regard to the emerging church movement! Notice how carefully Chapman chooses his words. Where the Baptist Faith and Message is concerned, our fellowship as Southern Baptists is at stake. But where alcohol is the subject, respectful, scripture-informed conversation between brothers and sisters—no pontificating; no patronizing; recognition that some matters are core and others are very, very important, but not core. The appeal for patience and caution when dealing with young leaders committed to biblical inerrancy, biblical authority, evangelism, and church planting is most welcome.

My reading is that the tone and conviction present here parallels the tone and conviction at the IMB, NAMB, and Lifeway much more closely than do some of the calls for sweeping denunciation of theologically conservative streams within the emerging church that we encounter in some quarters. I strongly and enthusiastically identify with those, like Chapman, calling for a default posture of openness, trust, patience, and respectful conversation where solidly evangelical Southern Baptist leaders and churches are concerned.

I believe a rush-to-judgment response to the emerging church movement could seriously damage the SBC’s effectiveness in evangelism and church-planting at this critical historical juncture in which the center of gravity of God’s converting activity is moving to the Southern Hemisphere [See Philip Jenkins' extraordinary treatment in The Next Christendom]. One of the very few bright spots in the West and North America is precisely among those conservative, evangelical, doctrine-friendly churches associated with the emerging church and missional Christianity. Lovers of the SBC such as myself should be very careful whom they choose to alienate.

Yesterday this press article appeared on The Pathway website. Since its release, I have been inundated by folks who have read my article and cannot understand how the “points” listed by Chairman Rev. Michael Knight could possibly be “based on” things I have written or said. I share their confusion.

Editor of The Pathway, Don Hinkle, has graciously invited me to write an op-ed piece for the next issue. I am grateful for this opportunity to articulate my views on the subject directly. You can link to a first draft of this op-ed piece here and comment as you wish.  

I find McLaren helpful if I am looking for insights into culture or if I want to know what can go wrong within evangelical churches and how anger and hurt might manifest itself among those who have had bad experiences in evangelical churches.

But I do find McLaren alternately sloppy and disingenuous where the Bible, theology, church history, historical theology or evangelicalism are concerned. He plays himself up as a gentle soul looking for respectful conversation, but that does not include conservative evangelicals. There I find caricature and dismissiveness and evasiveness.

I noted the issues of homosexual behavior and substitutionary atonement; one ethical matter and one theological/doctrinal matter. On both of these, McLaren seems to relish confusion and tends toward the tickling of politically correct ears. “Scholars disagree” is supposed to silence challenges to McLaren’s aw-shucks uncertainty on a range of issues where, surprises surprise, his attractiveness to the politically correct and theologically progressive is deftly maintained.

Is he unable to study the meaning of the word “porneia” in the New Testament? It is not controversial. The finest liberal exegetes (or New Testament scholars of any strpe for that matteer) tell us that, in fact, homosexual behavior is viewed as sinful by the apostle Paul and, almost as certainly, in the words of Jesus in Matthew 15:19 where Jesus’ listeners would have heard that word (porneia) as referencing all unlawful sexual behavior covered by the Levitical holiness code. Liberal scholars admit that this is the meaning of Jesus’ recorded words and go on to reject this New Testament teaching for today’s believers. Such admitted rejection of Biblical teaching I can disagree with but still respect as honest.

But McLaren hem-haws. Why does this kind of thing matter? Because McLaren wants to be viewed as a builder and nurturer of biblical communities of faith. Help me here. How can I take him seriously if he, year after year, evidences no interest in learning what the Bible teaches on just those issues that would render him odious to those who have made him a star? Does not his antipathy toward evangelicals outweigh his stated commitment to the Bible?

Meanwhile, I see in Acts29 effective engagement with young supposedly thoroughly postmodern urbanites while retaining a fully-orbed doctrinal stance and a willingness to bear the brunt of attacks from progressives, liberals, and politically correct bashers of conservative Christians. I suspect a major Baby-out-with-the-bathwater factor borne of the “protest” roots of much that I see in emerging.

Scot McKnight (whose default sympathies are with the McLaren-friendly types and not with the evangelicalism-friendly types like myself) once put it this way: those recovering from fundamentalism are anxious to befriend all those who were “othered” within their former churches. I think McKnight is on to something here. I see an amazing openness to almost anything except conservative Christianity among many within the emerging movement. There is that rush of freedom that comes with liberation from having been denied the good things of Christianity present within other traditions. I understand this from a human and therapeutic point of view, but I also believe that, in time, those who would build and sustain anything recognizably biblical and Christian will eventually have to take stands on the major teachings of Holy Scripture. At this point it appears to me that Acts29 gets this, McLaren seems not to, and significant chunks of the emerging conversation seems indifferent.

One more little tid-bit of my thinking. It strikes me that McLaren and Padgitt speak of postmodernism as a formidable, almost fixed cultural, even philosophical force before which one must genuflect or be found irrelevant. On the other hand Mars Hill/Acts29 try to distinguish within the culture dimensions that are neutral, beneficial, or pernicious vis-à-vis the gospel. This view of the relationship between the confession of the church and culture strikes me as more protective of the gospel and less susceptible to relevance-chasing, heresy-endangered syncretism.

1. It seems that for Bolger, the term “emerging” was encountered among some of the communities he studied because he viewed them as possibly “missional” in their understanding of church. Bolger contrasts “missional” models of church to “attractional,” models. This is fascinating not least because it reveals Bolger’s prior interest in a particular way of being the church as the motive for the research he and Eddie Gibbs have pursued.  

2. How does the issue of authority function in these missional churches. They appeal especially to the Gospels to legitimize their preference for missional models of being church. But does that mean that they would accept Bible-based challenges to their views as appropriate critique or do they rather assume the prerogative to stand above the Bible and pick and choose according to some other commitment, say matters related to their understanding of the culture? Are the answers different for Gibbs/Bolger missional communities compared to Mars Hill based Acts29 churches?

3. To the extent that they intend to submit to the Bible as the authority for their conception of being the church, do they accept what I like to call an historical/grammatical approach to hermeneutics? What I mean is this: does apprehension of a Biblical author’s intention at least limit and, in best case scenarios, determine legitimate readings of passages? This is important because, if so, the task of determining where Jesus, as presented in the gospels, intended to provide models for being church and where he did not, determines the legitimacy of particular appeals to the Jesus of the gospels. If “missional” pastors reject the legitimacy of such critiques then, in what sense can they call their communities of faith biblical? How are they protected from the same kind of “reading into” the text alien norms that they decry where other models are in view? Again, what about the comparison with Acts29?

4. Do we find in these missional churches an effort to recover the gospels for understanding the proper shape of communities of faith, or something akin to the old protestant liberal contrasting of the gospels with the Pauline corpus where the former is preferred to the later? If so, the Barthian critique becomes operative. A self-conscious application of an alien norm (probably along the lines of cultural considerations and felt relevance concerns) is being employed to make selective use of Biblical material rather than an honest effort to submit to the Scriptures as the very word of God. Acts29?

5. A test in regard to the relationship between missional churches and the Bible arises wherever lack of enthusiasm for Bible teaching surfaces. The most blatant examples of this of which I am aware are on the questions of biblical teaching regarding the substitutionary atonement and homosexual behavior. With respect to the latter especially, the hem-hawing of Brian McLaren combined with his star status among many raises real questions regarding the place of the Bible among some of the missional leaders. A real naiveté regarding the ineluctably theological nature of Christianity seems apparent in much of the conversation that I suspect gains much energy from the protest dimension and leads to a Baby-out-with-the-bathwater effect. The contrast with Acts29 is stark here, is it not?

6. My concerns regarding the authority of the Bible matter to me precisely because I believe that some of the missional thinking does involve faithful recovery of neglected Bible truth and that is what followers of Jesus should celebrate. A danger, though, is that missional leaders will imagine that they can pick and choose what suits them from the Bible without lapsing (albeit unwittingly) into Feuerbachian projection and idolatry.

7. Bolger’s missional churches call for the sacralizing of secular space in contrast to the idea of Christendom in which the Church stands in sharp contrast to the world and paganism. This notion that the modern world created the division between sacred and secular is interesting and may be accurate to some extent, but it seems unaware of how compatible the collapse of the distinction between sacred and secular is to the notion of Christendom!! The collapse of the distinction does offer promise of a recovery of the Biblical notion of Christ’s Lordship over the entire world. But, it may not comprehend the Biblical conception of the church as a witnessing, pilgrim (resident alien) people where the distinction between church and world is retained without resulting in the relinquishing of the church’s responsibility to the world or the world’s answerability to Christ. I suspect there is a third way here that I do not hear from Bolger but which may apply somewhat to Acts29.

8. The Mars Hill based Acts29 network of churches may be rightly denied the “emerging” tattoo by Gibbs/Bolger but it does think of itself as missional in just the way Bolger articulated it in the interview, namely that the church must go into the world where the lost live rather than expect them to come to a worship service to which they have been attracted. (as an aside, while I do see evidence of the dangers of attractional models to the gospel message and to a serious practice of community, for example in certain seeker models, I do not see why an attractional model is, in and of itself, necessarily unbiblical or otherwise pernicious.) Is not the superiority of Acts29 the clear, formal acknowledgement that the Bible must be the authority for its faith and practice? Does not the anchoring of Acts29 in what one might call a fully-orbed and historically impressive theological self-understanding provide a check and balance for its development as it seeks to be missional that the Gibbs/Bolger types may lack?

I wonder now, though, if we Southern Baptists have become proud and find ourselves set for divine correction. I wonder and I tremble.  The Psalm of the day is number 12:

Save us, Yahweh! There are no devout men left,
Fidelity has vanished from mankind.
All they do is lie to one another,
Flattering lips, talk from a double heart.

May Yahweh slice off every flattering lip,
Each tongue so glib with boasts,
Those who say, “In our tongue lies our strength,
Our lips have the advantage; who can master us?

“For the plundered poor, for the needy who groan,
now I will act” says Yahweh.
“I will grant them the safety they sigh for.”

The words of Yahweh are without alloy,
Nature’s silver coming from the earth seven times refined.
And you, Yahweh, hold us in your keeping,
Against that breed protect us always.
The wicked prowl on every side,
Baseness stands high among the sons of men.

1. Gibbs/Bolger are concerned about the decline in numbers in the church in the West.
2. They believe the shift from the modern world to the postmodern world is the main factor determining the viability of contemporary ministries (especially in urban contexts).
3. People now in their 20’s and early 30’s are thoroughly postmodern and thus virtually unreachable by ministries shaped by modernism.
4. The ministries they analyze and call “emerging” are culturally indigenous to the postmodern context and thus more suited to reach these thoroughly postmodern 20 and early 30 somethings.
5. Alas, Mars Hill Church (and by implication, Redeemer in NY and The Journey in St.Louis) is a modern Gen X church. And in the case of these three congregations they have the added problem that they love the Reformation and doctrine and preach about election and the substitutionary atonement, all of which are variously eschewed or radically re-interpreted or re-packaged by the Gibbs/Bolger bona fide emerging communites.
6. But the 20 somethings keep pouring into these congregations while those first reached are retained and now older believers are joining them. And this is happening in Seattle, Manhattan Island and urban St.Louis.
7. The 20 and early 30 somethings Gibbs/Bolger are so concerned about are not behaving as Gibbs/Bolger expected. Instead they are finding relevant what Gibbs/Bolger thought they wouldn’t.

So where does this leave us?

1. The Gibbs/Bolger book remains the best single source for comprehending the phenomenon they call “emerging.”
2. Gibbs/Bolger’s help in comprehending contemporary urban culture in the West is greatly compromised. By this I just mean that they are not adept at predicting what urban 20 somethings will find relevant.
3. Given Gibbs/Bolger’s stated concern for the decline of Christianity in the West, one would expect them to train their attention on churches like Mars Hill, Redeemer, and The Journey which obviously “get it.” If they do not become champions of such ministries it raises the question of whether we are really looking at preference and advocacy of certain kinds of ministries, the role of doctrine in them etc., rather than just straightforward concern to see the decline of Christianity in the West reversed. Which is fine, but let’s just be clear about our motives.

 I “had thought” my exposure to Mars Hill marked my introduction to the emerging church only to realize later that Donald Miller’s bestselling book Blue Like Jazz had already brought me into that world. But not so fast. The taxonomy troubles where the emerging church is concerned go deeper. Gibbs/Bolger insist that Mars Hill is not emerging but Gen-X. About such churches Gibbs/Bolger contend:
 

“. . . to generalize, the church services were characterized by loud, passionate worship music directed toward God and the believer (not the seeker); David Letterman-style, irreverent banter; raw, narrative preaching; Friends (the popular TV series) type relationships; and later, candles and the arts. The bulk of church practice remained the same as their conservative Baptist seeker, new paradigm, purpose-driven predecessors; only the surface techniques changed.”

So who is right? What we can say is that Redeemer Church in New York, Mars Hill in Seattle, and The Journey in St. Louis have been spectacularly effective at reaching precisely the demographic the heroes of the Gibbs/Bolger type churches insist will only respond to sufficiently postmodern immersed and shaped ministries. Note the implied warning from Gibbs/Bolger:
“We both [Gibbs and Bolger] believe the current situation is dire. If the church does not embody its message and life within postmodern culture, it will become increasingly marginalized. Consequently the church will continue to dwindle in numbers throughout the Western world. We share a common vision to see culturally engaged churches emerge throughout the West as well as in other parts of the world influenced by the Western culture.”

Gibbs/Bolger contend that young people now in their 20s and early 30s are thoroughly postmodern and will not respond to ministries shaped by “modernity.” Fine. How might we then identify ministries that “get it” and thus can help stem the ebb tide of dwindling numbers in the West? How about 5000 plus urbanites in their twenties and thirties streaming to church demanding Bible preaching on the right and left coasts of America and 1600 in three locations in St. Louis? No, say Gibbs and Bolger. Yes, says Stetzer. Perhaps we should let the Stetzers and the Gibbs and the Bolgers duke it out on the nomenclature front. However the semantics “emerge,” we already see much that can inform evangelical church planting.
A dispute between Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann of yesteryear with a little bit of Paul Tillich thrown in might help us here. Bultmann complained to Barth that he had no notion of changing the gospel message. His only aim was to translate the gospel message into contemporary language. Barth responded that he had no problem with that, as long as the translator remembers his first task—accurate comprehension of the original to be translated, in this case, the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is just at this point that the mischief enters in. Remember that Bultmann considered the question of the bodily resurrection irrelevant to modern men and women. Barth expected that once God got Bultmann out of the ground and to a standing position, the relevance of the bodily resurrection would likely lock in for Rudolf in short order. For his part, Tillich discovered that the word “God” had lost its relevance and so he proposed an alternative—“the ground of our being.” Oops! That didn’t catch on did it?
Once you set yourself up as the relevance police, the put-up-or-shut-up test becomes operative, nicht wahr? When your perceptions and prognostications don’t pan out, you find yourself running around frustrated that folks keep finding relevant what you just told them they couldn’t and shouldn’t. So, are Redeemer, The Journey, and Mars Hill emerging or not? The jury is out, but what we do know is that these communities of faith are concretely being found relevant by exactly the demographic deemed most resistant to church and gospel in the Western world. It is a fact that kids are dropping out of church in droves (especially seeker and purpose-driven churches) when they reach their twenties. But churches like Redeemer, Mars Hill, and the Journey attract them! And they do so not with less Bible and theology compared to seeker and purpose-driven churches already ensconced within the Southern Baptist Convention, but with more!

“There is another way in which [culture] may predispose to conversion. The difficulty of converting an uneducated man nowadays lies in his complacency. Popularized science, the conventions or ‘unconventions,’ of his immediate circle, party programmes, etc., enclose him in a tiny windowless universe which he mistakes for the only possible universe. There are no distant horizons, no mysteries. He thinks everything has been settled. A cultured person, on the other hand, is almost compelled to be aware that reality is very odd and that the ultimate truth, whatever it may be, must have the characteristics of strangeness—must be something that would seem remote and fantastic to the uncultured. Thus some obstacles to faith have been removed already.”

It is not surprising and it is a good thing that so many emergent/emerging believers display, initially at least, something like a congenital predisposition towards the writings of C.S. Lewis. I think it a safe assumption that Lewis himself will exceed virtually all if not all of his readers in knowledge and appreciation for culture and so will be in position to satisfy and instruct but also to warn others similarly enamored of the arts as to their potentialities but also their limits, weaknesses, and dangers.

The “tiny windowless universe” Lewis describes may also characterize the “believing universe” in some quarters, and many emerging believers point to the conservative Christian communions from which they have emerged and against which many now pride themselves in protesting. Well and good. Now liberated from the suffocating narrowness and pat-answer-permeated confines of conservative evangelical churches, some preen and pose proudly in the new superior world of mystery they now inhabit. Elasticity of meaning and belonging before believing now shapes the religious milieu they prize.

Lewis will be in a position to calm them down I expect and demonstrate both proper and improper acknowledgement of mystery. Where God has revealed truth, escape into the vagueness of mystery for the sake of peace or unity or to evade politically incorrect recognition of and submission to divine commands (Brian McLaren and homosexual behavior is a case in point) is not deep or sophisticated, legitimately modest or loving, but a cop-out at best and willful blindness and disobedience at worst. Beware indiscriminate lovers of mystery wading into C.S. Lewis with your guard down. A conservative, dogmatic, evangelicalish Christian lurks within.

Well on that score it appears most of us have got some catching up to do if Lewis’ reprimand is our aim. Reports and concrete evidence of Lewis’ astounding and continuing effectiveness in bringing sinners to faith and making disciples abound. Just ask Lye Dorsett, longtime curator of the Lewis collection at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. Dorsett, during decades of worldwide travel and lecturing on Lewis always asked his audiences to raise their hands if Lewis was instrumental in bringing them to faith and/or nurturing them in the faith. It never fails. Many hands go up.

But still. Is it not a wimpy spineless cop-out to keep one’s mouth shut about the Savior when confronted with a stream of known unbelievers? I know. Lewis sought to avoid the ostracism and possible reprisals with which his Oxford and Cambridge contexts would have greeted any Christian proselytizers among them. Well, if that was Lewis’ aim, he failed miserably. Through his writing, public speaking, and radio broadcasting, the ostracism and reprisals came in by the buckets. I suspect Lewis’ selection of contexts for speaking out and keeping quiet owes nothing to cowardice but much to his highly developed sense of propriety, which is not that dissimilar from a sensitivity to differences in cultures or even sub-cultures (such as that between an Oxford conclave and a soccer stadium). However that may be, late in his life, Lewis admitted that from the time of his conversion in 1931, he understood his whole life as one of evangelism. To know Christ is to want Him known. Clearly, Lewis’ selective silences did not hinder his outstripping of many a Bible thumbing collar-and-back-into-a-corner style evangelist in terms of effectiveness.

Let’s shift gears slightly. Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle verbalizes a strong evangelistic understanding of the mission of the church and the Christian life but also adds “we don’t do anything silly such as knocking on doors or passing out tracts.” Skipping such well worn approaches has not prevented Mars Hill from drawing more than 7000 20 and 30-somethings to downtown Seattle for exposure to quite conservative Bible teaching on a weekly basis.  Prolific author, professor at Chicago’s North Park University, and enthusiastic friend of Emerging/Emergent, Scott McKnight, consistently raises one concern regarding the emerging/emergent movement—squeamishness where evangelism is concerned.  McKnight writes, “Any kind of Christianity and any kind of Christian that is not evangelistic is woefully inadequate. Unless you proclaim the good news, there is no good news at all; and if there is no good news, there is not Christianity.” Again McKnight, “I speak personally. I’m an evangelist—not so much the tract-toting and door-knocking kind, but I am the Jesus-talking and Jesus-teaching kind.”

While some evangelicals would find it very difficult to sanction Lewis’ strong selectivity of venue and audience for his own explicit evangelizing, many of these same folk voice high praise for the “storying” techniques pioneered by New Tribes Mission whose materials and techniques are in use by no less an evangelistically fervent group than the Southern Baptist Convention. “Storying” approaches to evangelism delay the direct presentation of the gospel in settings where comprehension of the gospel is deemed impossible because of deep worldview issues and other meaning-shaping cultural factors. New Tribes starts with Biblical stories beginning with creation and the history of God’s dealings with Israel so as to render the gospel meaningful in a particular cultural/linguistic context. If that takes some time and patience, so be it.

Is not the recognition that Europe and North America are comprised of a mosaic of sub-cultures one of the most intriguing and hopeful insights of the emerging/emergent movement and conversation? Is not actual communication of the gospel message a prerequisite for its acceptance or rejection? Ought not sensitivity to cultural factors result in selectivity of time, place, and mode of gospel presentation, not in flight from bold proclamation but precisely in service to its achievement? What do you think? 

“We are to defend Christianity itself—the faith preached by the apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers. This must be clearly distinguished from the whole of what any on of us may think about God and Man. Each of us has his individual emphasis: each holds, in addition to the Faith, many opinions which seem to him to be consistent with it and true and important. And so perhaps they are. But as apologists it is not our business to defend them. We are defending Christianity; not my religion.”

Lewis’s quest for and protectiveness of Christian Orthodoxy parallels Jaroslav Pelikan’s quest for “what all Christians, everywhere and always believe teach and confess on the basis of the Word of God.” Exact identification of the content of this Orthodox Christianity may finally elude us, but recognizing the urgency and appropriateness of the attempt to seek it and insofar as possible distinguish it from “sectarian” matters seems crucial to the church’s ability to display the unity God expects and from which world evangelization would greatly benefit. In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, tolerance.

I have in mind particularly Lewis’ approach to old texts (or ostensibly any text for that matter). A couple of excerpts from Lewis’ remarkable 1942 Preface to Paradise Lost will help to illustrate what I mean:

“The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about a cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the object before you. . . . The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be.”

From a certain vantage point, the quest to achieve such utter submission to “author intent” defines the fundamental divide between “liberal” and “conservative” treatment and use of the Bible. A liberal approach knows beforehand the message sought in the text and exerts itself in the search and construal mission necessary for the extraction of that message. A conservative approach is devoted to truth and so submits itself to the object of its interest fully prepared to let the chips fall—to be shocked, amazed, corrected or bored. The conservative fears projection of its own biases, blind spots, and predilections because it wants to learn, it wants to know its object, not use it as such.

When conservatives and evangelicals lose this posture of the true learner, and settle for concordance-fixated ransacking of the Bible for the heaping up of ammunition in the defense of predetermined goals, we unwittingly lapse into exactly the kind liberalism we claim to abhor and eschew. Lewis calls us back to that exacting historico-grammatical posture before the text without which Luther could never have defied emperor and pope for the sake of the gospel.

Take of this passage from the extraordinary Preface to Paradise Lost. In this excerpt Lewis is defending Milton’s attempt to evoke “stock responses through his poetry:

“By a Stock Response Dr. I.A. Richards means a deliberate organized attitude which is substituted for ‘the direct free play of experience.’ In my opinion such deliberate organization is on of the first necessities of human life, and one of the main functions of art to assist it. All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or in general, as perseverance—all solid virtue and stable pleasure―depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux (or direct free play) of mere immediate experience. This Dr. Richards would not perhaps deny. But his school puts the emphasis the other way. The talk as if improvement of our responses were always required in the direction of finer discrimination and greater particularity; never as if men needed responses more normal and more traditional that they have now. To me, on the other hand, it seems that most people’s responses are not ‘stock’ enough, and that the play of experience is too free and too direct in most of us for safety or happiness or human dignity.”

I wonder how compatible Lewis’ conception of the purpose of art here expressed coincides with that present within the emerging community. If by the welcoming of mystery we think of the appreciation of the elasticity of truth or a kind of emptying of the mind in the interest of a “free play” of experience and meaning, we certainly part company with Lewis. The longer he was a Christian and the more he learned, the more conservative he became, the more convinced he became of the “concrete” character of the objects of knowledge such as virtue, wisdom and ultimately God himself. The great Christian apologist turns out to be, increasingly I think, a dogmatist to the core.

Take the doctrine of the Trinity for example. For Lewis, the term “mystery” may belong to the confession that human reason cannot exhaust the revelation of the one God in three persons, thus requiring humble submission to what we cannot deny given that concrete revelation. But mystery here implies no invitation to a kind of post-modern meaning-creating “free play” of experience such as one might indulge while listening to Pink Floyd’s Meddle album.

1. Meaning cannot be read-off experience. Experience must be interpreted. Example. Mother of 16 year old twins is tragically killed. Son #1 (Nietzsche) gets and stays alternately mad at and denies God to the grave. Son #2 (Kierkegaard) gets mad too but finally takes the leap of faith and finds God in the wake of the tragic loss.

2. Much of the trouble comes when someone’s interpretation of their or someone else’s experience becomes an article for export. That is, they expect others to accept the meaning they place on the experience―to believe it or maybe even underwrite the cost of their upcoming missionary service, benefits and all. We should not require others to treat meanings we claim from our experiences as binding on them, should we? Example: I have high certainty that God made me leave engineering for the Christine ministry and that He made me leave Kansas City for Bangkok. But I need not chafe at the scrutiny of the ordination committee or the mission sending agency. They have no direct access to my experience and they have a provisional and proximate duty of stewardship in the distribution of denominational monies.

3. Even I should not trust what I think I know form such experiences they way I trust God’s word. Surely God’s word is a more sure anchor than any meaning I may derive by interpretation of personal experience.

4. Let’s say what we really mean when we share experiences we view as God’s leading. I find that upon closer investigation, even many who use language such as “God  told me” or “God led me,” often do not mean what that kind of language suggests. If God speaks as clearly as he did to Moses “Take your shoes off.” Fine. But if he didn’t, let’s find accurate language that conveys the difference.

5. Let’s recognize that daily concrete unambiguous leading by God is not ordinary but “extra-ordinary” and ought not to be normalized in our expectation or treated as a sign that we are especially spiritual. Could we abandon the notion that anytime a “BIG” decision is faced that we are under pressure from God to claim concrete guidance from Him. Could we be taking on a burden of discernment He didn’t put there and giving up a freedom to decide He is happy to allow?

Any thoughts out there?

Have you escaped the nastiness prayer can inject into an otherwise mutually supportive gathering of believers? Count yourself blessed. Consider this effort at edification by a local church Women’s Missionary Union (WMU) president lo not so many years ago: “Thank you God that brother George has stopped living in sin with that woman and thank you that some of the young families have finally started tithing.” Can anything compare with the sweet encouragement of a sister in Christ?!

Once I became alert to the kind of mischief an open prayer service exposes believers to, I started giving periodic instruction regarding the purpose of prayer and pointing out how easily what should involve the exercise of a precious privilege and responsibility of the people of God has power to harm as well as help. I encourage you to do the same. (Open microphone confessionals of the type that were so popular a few years ago can be a similar Pandora’s Box of unhelpful public hurtfulness).

As a pastor I try to stay alert to the need to draw aside for a little private instruction those who, wittingly or not, tend to lapse into the use of prayer time to gossip, correct others, criticized the staff, or to advance any number of agendas that have little to do with petitioning God for his help.

Have you experienced how haywire a hijacked prayer meeting can get? Any pointers on how to protect prayer meetings from such unhealthy usurpation?

In a recent volume, Turning Around the Mainline: How Renewal Movements are Changing the Church, Oden taps decades of archived material to urge orthodox evangelicals tempted to bolt Mainline denominations to hunker down and stay put. Oden believes they have more company within and without their denominations than they realize and that real prospects for the recovery of historic, orthodox, biblically shaped and Holy Spirit empowered renewal are quite good, perhaps inevitable.

Protestants targeted by Oden include: Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and (even though, technically, they are not of the Mainline) American Baptists. Could Oden be right? The slide toward liberalism was halted within the Southern Baptist Convention, but then, the structure of that denomination made the path to reform clear (not easy, just clear). What will it take to achieve something real and lasting in the Mainline? Oden addresses some of the difficulties in his book. 

An American Baptist congregation I pastored in Indiana recently gave up on their decade long efforts (banded together with other likeminded churches) to see the long leftward slide of their denomination halted and reversed. Today they are Southern Baptist. If Oden is right, should I be happy or sad that they jumped ship?

Do any of you or your friends out there have experience with evangelicals “living in exile” within their Mainline denominations? What are your thoughts? 

The circles overlap because some objects of knowledge belonging to the full enjoyment of a Christian believer are investigatable and so potentially knowable or at least rendered plausible through Enlightenment epistemological tools by believers and unbelievers alike. This image recognizes a certain irreducible historical dimension of Christian confession from which we must never hide. We dig together with unbelieving archaeologists and submit to a common epistemological standard, fully recognizing the historical vulnerability of our confession. The image also reflects recognition of epistemological turf in which the believer and the church submits to the expertise of the scientist, the physician or the physicist. When the eye surgeon offers his diagnoses, I have no interest in whipping out a copy of the Proverbs to dispute the advice given. But the scientist is encouraged to admit ignorance and perhaps keep silent where his own epistemological tools prove insufficient, say regarding the Trinity, the two natures of Christ or the substitutionary atonement.

Belief that it is possible to have a personal and loving relationship with God; belief that God took human form as Jesus to redeem the world and bring us to God; commitment to a relationship with God through public and private prayer, worship, and reading of scripture, principally within the faith community and sacramentals of the Catholic church. Cornwell then observes that “unlike the pre-Vatican II list of priorities, these post-Vatican II Catholic convictions are shared with other Christian denominations.”

Certainly more and more members of whatever tradition are sitting more lightly in their pews than ever before. Movement between traditions has never been higher. But straying Catholics have earned a well-deserved reputation for finding their way back to Rome in the end. Cornwell and others expect the former magnetic effect of Roman Catholicism, largely due to the unique hold of the sacraments and cult of Mary upon the faithful, to wane. Are we poised for massive migration of Roman Catholics into the ranks of evangelical traditions? Or will we see perceptible evangelicalizing within Roman Catholicism or both?

Chapter 6 is entitled “Welcoming the Stranger,” one of the nine defining patterns of emerging churches according to GB. Check out the following quote from Manchester (UK) emerging church leader Ben Edson of Sanctus1 from that chapter:

“We had a guy from the Manchester Buddhist center come to Sanctus1 a couple weeks ago and talk about Buddhist approaches to prayer. We didn’t talk about the differences between our faiths. We didn’t try to convert him.” Pip Piper of maji community Birmingham (UK): “Evangelism or mission for me is no longer about persuading people to believe what I believe, no matter how edgy or creative I get. It is more about shared experiences and encounters.” I am sorry but this statement from Piper reminds me so much of the mindset and values that infused the drug culture I once inhabited! Never mind. GB from the same chapter: “Christians cannot truly evangelize unless they are prepared to be evangelized in the process.”

One refrain I am encountering repeatedly in the emerging literature is their critique of seeker-sensitive mega churches. But Sanctus1 sounds fairly seeker-sensitive for Buddhists. I expect that emerging church leaders such as Piper and Edson would embrace, as I do, two conditions of real learning and converse passed on by my Ph.D. supervisor: #1. One cannot critique what one has not understood and #2 One cannot usually understand what one has not first engaged sympathetically. Let’s agree that screaming and shaking fingers in unsuspecting faces might not be the best way to share the love of Jesus whether it is done door-to-door or on the street corner or anywhere else.

But has genuine gospel witness occurred where the message is left unarticulated? And does that message not include the exclusive claims of Christ? And is not this claim bound to offend most? And do not the biblical warnings against having other gods (you remember, the first of the ten commandments!) belong to every kind of evangelism worthy of being called Biblical or Christian?

After Willimon finished and sat down, the president of the seminary addressed the assembly and made if clear that we could not follow Willimon on this matter; “we, he said, agree with the apostle Paul:

“Now if Christ raised from the dead is what has been preached, how can some of you be saying that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is not resurrection of the dead, Christ Himself cannot have been raised, and if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is useless and your believing it is useless; indeed, we are shown up as witnesses who have committed perjury before God, because we swore in evidence before God that he had raised Christ to life. For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished. If our hope in Christ is for this life only, we are the most unfortunate people” (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).

So is this the fruit of Narrative Theology? To snatch the resurrection from us and try to make us like it? Do all narrative thinkers and preachers go so wobbly on matters as essential as the resurrection of Jesus?

In his last year he was not so busy and I think very ill. There were some times in the spring and summer when it seemed he would die. But he survived. In the Netherlands that summer, the radio already announced that Karl Barth had died because he was so ill. But I remember the last weeks. It was the high point of the time I lived with him. After his death, my wife said to me, “He was a little bit like an angel in his last weeks.” I could also say he was like a child. He really returned a bit to his youth and very often he sang simple songs he learned in Sunday School.

The last evening, two days before he died, I was with my wife in his house. And I think in the last times he feared the night. Therefore he didn’t want us to leave his house. At one o’clock we said we’d like to go home because we had a one-hour walk. So Barth said to go when we wanted to but that he would go to his bed and that we should come and sing songs. It was 1:16 A.M. and his windows were open facing onto the street. I said, “We’ll have to close the windows because other people will be awakened by our song.” Barth said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, it will be a good song.” And first he began with his children’s songs, then he said to take a church hymnbook and we would sing an Advent song that spoke of the great comfort that Christ is coming with joy. And that was the last time I saw Karl Barth.

Lewis combined a love of goodness and virtue without the typical concomitant pretense to having achieved much of it himself. Lewis was not politically correct. He believed in depravity all the more as his vision of God grew. Lewis loved truth more than his own honor. By his own account Lewis suffered more from selfishness (the desire to have one’s way) than from self-centeredness (fixation upon and fascination with oneself and how one is viewed by others). This comparative division of weakness freed Lewis to “let God be true and every man a liar,” more clearly and boldly than is usual.

“We have to do with a hero, the like of which is but seldom bestowed upon theology. Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendor this figure radiated and still does―I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it―may honorably pass on to other and possibly better ways, but let him never raise so much as a finger against Schleiermacher. Anyone who has never loved here, and is not in a position to love again and again may not hate here either.”

No more profound, no more thoroughgoing, no more devastating critique of the theology of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher compares to the one Barth would bring. Barth traced most of what he found objectionable in modern theology from around 1825 until his death in 1968 to the influence of Schleiermacher. When it comes to theological persnicketiness and the leveling of withering critiques against rival theological approaches, Barth takes a back seat to no one.

But Barth evidenced acceptance of two convictions held and propagated by my doctoral supervisor: (1) We cannot critique what we have not understood and (2) we usually do not understand what we have not first engaged sympathetically. Barth’s tip of the hat to Schleiermacher was prompted in part by the appearance of a scathing rejection of Schleiermacher published by Emil Brunner in 1924. By not taking seriously the two pre-conditions for understanding and critique, Barth believed Brunner not only “got Schleiermacher wrong,” but fell into the trap Schleiermacher set for theology in the 19th and 20th centuries; namely, the abandonment of theology for anthropology.

Be that as it my, the two convictions certainly help define a “do unto others” context for theological dispute.

The musings of the 36 year old Karl Barth upon acceptance of the Chair in Reformed Theology at Göttingen after his own “bombshell dropped into the playground of the theologians,” his peculiar commentary “The Epistle to the Romans,” made him a star in the theological world.

Do not imagine that acquaintance with Calvin’s disciples or Calvin’s interpreters approaches acquaintance with the man himself. He did not get to be Calvin by spoiling otherwise happy gatherings with fierce debates about predestination and an angry God. Read him for yourself. Start with the Institutes (1559) in the Battles/McNeill edition. You will meet more of yourself there than you expected and you will begin to understand how Barth could become so alternately awestruck and smitten.

Now that I am writing on C.S. Lewis, I find in him something of that distinctive, hard-nosed dogmatism I found in Barth. Note this passage from Mere Christianity: “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive. . . . And half of you already want me to ask me, ‘I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?’ So do I. I wonder very much. . . .I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do―I can do precious little—I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it.”

Those words could as easily have been written by Karl Barth. Dogmatism is justly associated with the darker dimensions of human nature and behavior; the furrowed brow, the protruded neck vein, the angrily pointed finger. But in Lewis and Barth, dogmatism puts on a happy face. Lewis found a way to let Christianity be itself while pursuing Christian unity. He shied away from internecine Christian squabbles. He found it unseemly. Barth loved a good debate, but also enjoyed good faith ecumenical dialogue and insisted that theology, above all else, is a “happy science,” because it deals, first and last, with Good News.

Americans give, per capita (gross as well, by a long shot, but the per capita is the real kicker) more in the month of December than most countries give all year. France turns out to be one of the stingiest, laziest, and least couragous countries on the planet when it comes to giving to charity or lifting a finger to help the poor.

Conservatives in America are not only four times more likely to attend church, they outpace liberals by a long shot on giving to charity, volunteering for charitable causes and offering hands-on help to the poor. Conservatives even out-pace liberals and secularists with money and time contributed to non-church-related social organizations.

But wait! Conservative evangelicals are fixated on making money, stopping abortion, and yelling at homosexuals, right? Well, liberals are carrying home barrels full of money too, and now we know they are choosing to keep much more of it for themselves than conservatives do. Go figure. And apparantly, conservatives have energy left over to actually help the poor even after expending themselves in making money (so they can give more than the liberals I guess), defending the unborn, and speaking biblical truth to power regarding God’s loving warning against homosexual behavior.

And conservatives do all this in the face of patronizing ridicule from everybody from the Mainstream Media to the cultural secularists to Oprah and especially their own liberal and progressive Christian brothers and sisters who scold them for not caring more about the poor!

I just know Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo must be tickled about these numbers. A next book title suggestion for either author: Learning to Love the Poor From Conservative Evangelicals–And Getting our Own House in Order.

Message from conservative evangelicals to liberals looking for ways to help the poor: “Jump on in. The water is fine.”

Thomas Oden views modernity as the dying intellectual and cultural framework beyond which postmodern believers may move for the recovery of ancient, orthodox and yes, evangelical Christianity. He defines modernity according to the following four substantive or ideological commitments: (1) autonomous individualism (Sartre, Nietzsche, Hemingway) or in the East, (2) autonomous collectivism/utopianism (Marx); (3) narcissistic hedonic assertiveness (Rousseau, Shelly, D.H. Lawrence, Madonna), (4) reductive naturalism/historicism (Bultmann/Freud, Skinner); (4) absolute moral relativism (Dewey, Bultmann, Feuerbach) and one methodological principle, modern chauvinism according to which old ideas are viewed as necessarily inferior to new ideas.

Oden has this to say of two interpreters of postmodernism preferred by some emerging church (EC) leaders: “Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty have led us into a cult of subjectivism and sentiment that reduces truth to subjective preferences.” Oden views evangelicalism (as a whole and as a distinguishable historical movement) as a refuge of sanity and faithful Christian memory where ancient, orthodox, Biblical Christianity has been comparatively preserved and where the dying and retrograde convictions of modernity have had to contend with Biblical truth and the Spirit of God.

Could it be that the strong protest-element against evangelicalism driving the thinking of some EC leaders is based largely upon idiosyncratic, historically and geographically misinformed and so distortive comprehension of evangelical Christianity? Could such distortive conceptual lenses pre-dispose some to an unnoticed and undesired drift into what Oden recognizes as ultramodernity?

Prospects for reconciliation within mainline denominations between increasingly dissatisfied and disgruntled evangelicals and increasingly discredited, dysfunctional and de-funded liberals will be reduced, says Oden, to the extent that bureaucratic ecumenism remains emotively fixated on (a) ultrafeminist rhetoric, (b) the romantic idealization of secularity, (c) an accommodation to syncretism in world religions that disavow witness to Jesus Christ, and (d) fantasies of rational redistribution of wealth by political planning elites who always plan their own interest first in any plan, as we have learned the hard way.

Will EC leaders settle increasingly into predictably politically correct convictions on one issue after another? For example, will renewed zeal for social justice coincide with liberal democratic recipes for improvement? Will EC exegesis exhibit increased confidence in extracting storied meanings from Biblical narratives that appear oddly novel against the backdrop of two millennia of orthodox exegesis while experiencing intractable befuddlement and ambiguity regarding say, teaching on homosexual behavior that has enjoyed remarkable consensus across those same millennia? Will interest and protectiveness wane with regard to the exclusive claims of Christ, or the distinction between witness as message that draws persecution and good works and service within and without the believing community, the substituionary dimension of Christ’ atoning work?

However things develop, Thomas Oden’s voice will help to sharpen our understanding of the issues involved.

For example, where some students of the Narrative School sit loose with regard to the historicity of the resurrection and its necessity for orthodox Christian confession, Lewis could not. Partly because, as Lewis himself put it in Surprised by Joy, “ I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths.” Appreciation for the uniqueness, power, and beauty of story as an indispensable vehicle for Christian expression, instruction, and worship need not and ought not to require either the neglect or the despising of doctrine. Retention, acknowledgement, and enjoyment of propositional truth and the recovery of Biblical narrative are not mutually exclusive quests. Just ask C.S. Lewis.

Some leaders of the emerging church movement advocate a “belonging before believing” approach to spiritual seekers and non-believers alike, partly as an acknowledgement that God’s dealings with those he draws to himself involve discernible divine activity often over very long periods of time. Reduction of divinely wrought conversion to the narrow confines of a Damascus Road like event may fail to do justice to the full scope of God’s providential redeeming activity.

But surely openness to more durative conceptions of conversion fails to justify the “belonging before believing” mantra of some. Merely being human and/or curious does not a Christian make. Until Lewis gave a clear, credible confession of his faith in Jesus Christ, he had not yet legitimized his reception into full communion with a body of believers called Christian.

Recognition that God’s converting activity takes place over time, even over many years, need not weaken confessional standards for church membership, but it should free us to speak differently about conversion and ease the pressure applied in some quarters to nail down ones conversion to time and place with great certainty. Indeed, might not one view conversion as punctiliar and divine converting activity as durative without expecting exacting perception and tracking of these things by believers themselves? Our comprehension of God’s hand in our own lives and in the lives of others remains proximate and provisional, and that’s OK. For Charles Spurgeon, the ability to nail down with certainty the timing and nature of what happened to ourselves or others back when was less pressing than the presence of discernible evidence for regeneration today.

Dan Kimball objects to the stereotyping of emerging churches and who can blame him? Effort to understand before critiquing is common courtesy; it is an act of doing unto others as we would have done to ourselves. In particular Kimball counters charges of emerging church doctrinal latitudinarianism: “All the emerging churches I know believe in the inspiration of the Bible, the Trinity, the atonement, the bodily resurrection, and salvation in Jesus alone.” The above quote from Gibbs and Bolger, while not justifying some of the more rash generalizations that one encounters, does help explain why concerns are being raised.

Scott McKnight says that Gibbs-Bolger “show that the center of the movement is about ecclesiology not epistemology.” It may be true that Gibbs-Bolger’s impressive marshalling of primary source material shows this and, more importantly, it may actually be true. But Gibbs-Bolger also tell us that the movement was shaped “at a time when there was growing ferment that not only the methods but also the message needed to change.” Then Todd Hunter is quoted thus, “We got the gospel wrong” (p. 49). Not epistemological? Pages 69 and following argue for epistemologically significant narrative approaches to scripture texts and single out foundationalism for special critique. Even in the introduction, an emerging church leader impatient with the generational focus of some church growth leaders is quoted thus, “I couldn’t really figure out why people were obsessing about a subgroup when an enormous epistemological shift was occurring.”

To my ears at least, Kimball and McKnight strike a very different notes than much that I am reading in Gibbs-Bolger.

But the movie captured a fundamental message of the Biblical narratives: our God delights to bestow special favor on the poor, the aged, the disenfranchised, and the world’s rejects and to take his place beside them. It has been his way from the beginning. The history of God’s dealings with humanity is replete with such upside down divine dealings. He makes Israel; not a people, a people. He chooses younger despised brothers—Jacob, Joseph, and David to represent him.

Are we healthy and wealthy? By global and historic measures, most Americans certainly are wealthy. Are we popular and powerful? If so the word of the Lord shouts, “Watch Out! Do not be deceived.” What do we have that is not a gift? And if a gift, why do we boast? God’s blessings confer favor but also responsibility.

Are we poor, sick, despised, and without influence or status in the estimation of the world? The word of the Lord shouts, “Watch Out! Do not be deceived.” Our God resists the proud and lifts up the humble. When God took own humanity in Jesus, he came in low indeed, and stayed low for a long time. When he was finally lifted up, it was on a cross that we deserved. But the grave could not hold Him.

This is the way of our God. He stoops to us to help us but also to model what he expects from and empowers in us, his children; that we would think soberly, humble ourselves and serve the poor, the sick, the outcast, the aged and the prisoners. By so doing, we show acquaintance with the ways of the only God and knowledge of what it cost him to make us ours. Our imitation of him does not make us his, but it does please him and because he causes us to fall in love with him, his pleasure is ours as well.

See The Nativity at a theatre near you.

“Be ye separate” and “Go ye into all the world” are not new commands, and neither is the church’s struggle to satisfy both. Wendell Berry’s spiritual retreat to Henry County Kentucky after his stint at Stanford has entered its fifth decade. I don’t expect him to give up the blue skies and the manure anytime soon. But must we view Berry’s half-century in the sticks as self-serving retreat from responsibility? Amazon rankings suggest the poet/farmer is providing a valued service to more than a few somebodys.

But surely retreat, especially as a lifestyle, can become a spiritual temptation. Perhaps one indicator of legitimate spiritual retreat is precisely its desire to “go ye” with renewed zeal at its conclusion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer labored mightily for the recovery of a rich regime of spiritual retreat in community and by oneself in prayer, Bible study, meditation and worship. But (good Lutheran that he was) Bonhoeffer recognized two unmistakable duties owed by the Christian and the Church to the world Christ died to save―witness and service. Retreat for the sake of pursuing or nurturing some navel-gazing personal holiness given the alien righteousness of Christ and a world in need of the gospel and love delegitimizes the whole sorry business. “Plunge into the tempest of living!” That was Bonhoeffer’s clarion call.

Can we read Paul’s litany of hardship, weakness, and opposition in 2 Corinthians without blushing at fanciful justifications for retreatest, escapest construals of the holy life? The Franciscans are to be commended for resistance to this kind of thing. From time to time our Savior separated himself from the clamoring crowds needing and demanding his help, and perhaps we must as well. Certainly Jesus needed the strength only time alone with the Father provided―for the cross!

Barth saw in this painting an apt depiction of a fundamental dimension of the Church’s mission on earth―to point away from itself to the Savior and Lord of the world. The emerging movement’s quest for right living, rich relational Body life, and service within and without the church may be a prophetic breath of fresh air. But caution ought to temper enthusiasm for the finger turned in on itself that proclaims, “Look at us, watch how we live, don’t you want to know our savior?” Beware irrational exuberance. If there is a perceptible gap between our Savior and what he deserves to see in our lives, confession and repentance is called for because such an inconsistency undermines our witness to Jesus and his gospel. But alas! Until we see him as he is because we are like him, a gap there shall be. Yet the responsibility to bear witness to him remains. What to do? It behooves us to beg those who need him, when they detect distance between us and him, “Do not blame him!” No, life is not witness. Witness is witness. And witness requires pointing away from ourselves to the only One who can save.

My mouth fell open when I learned of this. Despite being born in 1960, four years prior to end of the post-war Baby Boom, I made similar use of secular music. In the years following my Damascus road-like rescue from intravenous drug use and conversion to evangelical faith in Jesus Christ, I very naturally enjoyed Black Sabbaths’ Master of Reality as a most edifying encouragement to my faith. I recall realizing that my use of the music might not match or might even contradict the intentions of its authors (we are talking Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osborne et. al.!) But this did not matter much to me.

But allow similar elasticity of received meaning from a pharmaceutical prescription for my child or my wife’s wedding vows or from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, and dangers lurk. Do you follow? And I fear that some of the proclivities of a certain slice of the emerging movement in a swoon over the recovery of biblical narrative (which can be a very good thing) sit similarly loose vis-à-vis the meaning of biblical texts and author intent.

Case in point: does not the foisting of a too thoroughgoing and uncritical imitatio Christi meaning upon Jesus in the synoptic gospels open all sorts of possibilities for “entering the story” not only never imagined by but positively contrary to the original intentions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Only author intent to present Jesus as modeling the Christian life and evangelistic method could legitimize such use of those narratives.

Emerging Christians secure something precious to their yearnings by reading the gospels largely as blueprints for Christian living: they collapse witness into morality and community and so avoid what Rick Warren has rightly lamented—the widespread perception of evangelicals as a Big Mouth (without loving, service-giving hands and feet) telling people they are bad and on their way to hell. Where is the welcoming of the stranger, where is the place for social justice and service to the community!? Yes, Yes! We must recover these and throughout church history the need to do so spikes in certain sectors of the Christian family and usually on its heels is the pitting of the ostensibly more ethically interested synoptic gospels against everything else, especially Paul.

In many ways the history of the church reads like a history of overreaction. In fact, the gospels are pregnant with theology and the epistles are laced with ethics and any notion of playing one set of scriptures off against another or supposing that we can stand above the Bible and sift wheat from chaff leads inevitably (whether purposefully or not) to what Barth said it would―Feuerbachian projection which is just idolatry, the making of a God of our choosing. That God is a mirage. He does not exist.

Jesus does teach us much about the values of the Kingdom that has come with his appearance in the synoptic gospels. But he is not mainly modeling the Christian life, he is headed to the cross and resurrection. It was from the standpoint of the resurrection that these gospels were written. And the apostles mainly don’t get it, but they will eventually, and when they do, as Jesus told them, they will shout from the housetops what he whispered to them and told them to keep secret.

Witness and personal testimony and telling our stories and living in community according to kingdom values while serving each other and the world are all good and necessary. But they cannot be collapse into each other, and witness, especially, should not be conflated with doing good or anything else. It is precisely the offensive message of the cross (including especially the exclusive claims of the gospel) that, despite the church’s service to the world, and embodiment of kingdom values, nevertheless brings the suffering of persecution that identifies believers with their crucified Lord. No. Living is not witness. Witness is witness. It means to bear testimony to what one knows, in this case, about the one who lived and died and rose again and will come again to judge. And no amount of narrative hermeneutical back flips can undo this.

I haven’t quite ramped up to a bad conscience about the “postmodern” construction of meaning I foisted upon Black Sabbath. But similar creative reading of the Biblical texts just will not do. Author intent must govern—you know, like with the child’s pharmaceutical prescription and the spouse’s wedding vows and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. It is amazing how resistant folks can be (even postmodern folks) to the attempted imposition of meandering meanings upon their own “texts.” When our God speaks to us in his word, shouldn’t we at least strive to keep our meaning constructers turned off as a “do unto others” matter of courtesy?

“I, like you, am worried by the fact that the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism . . . I think the thrill of the pagan stories and of romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings―the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world―while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. For example, the experience of being married and bringing up a family, cannot have the old bittersweet for first falling in love. But it is futile (and, I think wicked) to go on trying to get the old thrill again: you must go forward and not backward. . . . Delight is a bell that rings as you set your foot on the first step of a new flight of stairs leading upwards. Once you have started climbing you will notice only the hard work: it is when you have reached the landing and catch sight of the new stair that you may expect the bell again.”

A remarkable passage to appear in a letter to a friend, don’t you think? Lewis wrote this fresh from his conversion to Christianity. He was almost 33 years of age. Much that accounts for Lewis’ prolific writing and sustained appeal manifests itself here: careful perception of common human experience and emotion together with power to capture it all with language. Lewis goes further though. He is not content to describe. He presses on to instruction. But, make no mistake, the convincing and penetrating description is crucial to Lewis’ freedom to instruct. Accurate description of our deepest often most elusive experiences weakens our defenses against instruction and leaves us docile. And the next thing you know, we not only allow but thank someone for using the word “wicked,” even if we are the offender.

The first cold water to hit my face was the contention that Mars Hill Church, pastored by Mark Driscoll, does not meet the criteria for authentic emerging communities (Gibbs/Bolger identify 3 core patterns and 6 optional patterns). Gibbs and Bolger identify Mars Hill as a Gen-X church, aimed at a cultural and demographic slice of a given community. Gen-X churches such as Mars Hill, say GB, like their “conservative Baptist, seeker, new-paradigm, purpose-driven predecessors; only the surface techniques changed(p. 30)”– they remain essentially modern. I have been navigating the taxonomy terrain according to Ed Stetzer’s identification of 3 streams within the movement according to which Mars Hill qualifies. But now I am accepting Bolger and Gibb’s criteria so as to comprehend their fine work and see where it leads. Certain questions come to mind:

If Mars Hill in Seattle, Redeemer Presbyterian in NYC, and The Journey in St. Louis are being found relevant by hundreds and thousands of urban twenty-somethings today; that’s Generation Y and younger, nicht wahr? What does this say about the BG-defined emerging assessment of what is and will likely be found relevant by coming generations and what is not and will not be?

Like Rudolf Bultmann and especially Paul Tillich, once you set yourself up as the prophetic perceivers of current and future felt-relevance, then the numbers matter, right? Bultmann said the bodily resurrection was irrelevant to increasing numbers of his contemporaries and Tillich said, among other things, that the word “God” should be displaced by “the Ground of our Being.” Folks mainly responded by finding comfort in the hope of the resurection, finding the word “God” meaningful and watching the denominations that found Bultmann and Tillich particularly meaningful shrink.

So, what is wrong with these Gen-Y’s who, we are told (unlike the Gen-Xers) are thoroughly postmodern? Why can’t they see that Mars Hill, Redeemer, and The Journey are irrelevant to them?! Frustrating. The point here is not to question whether Mars Hill is emerging or not (we are granting GB’s exclusion of them) but whether failing to be emerging according to GB’s criteria tells us anything about how relevant a community might be found by young postmodern urban dwellers. Perhaps at a deeper level, Mars Hill’s exclusion raises doubts about the accuracy of GB’s understanding of what is modern, what is postmodern and thus what is being or will be found meaningful. GB’s description of the phenomenon they call “emerging” may be accurate without telling us much about what will be found most relevant by coming generations.

Jacob’s Well in Kansas City Missouri is pastored by Tim Keel who serves on the board of the Emergent website, which should put his emerging credentials beyond question. But does Jacob’s Well meet the Gibbs/Bolger criteria? Jacob’s Well looks real generational to me. Has Jacob’s Well become, perhaps unwittingly, both a modern generational community by GBs criteria and surprisingly felt-relevant (hundreds attend ) by doing so?

Or isn’t it?

Perhaps no theologian (besides F.D.E. Schleiermacher himself) attempted so impressively to keep Christianity relevant in the face of the Enlightenment as did Paul Tillich (1886-1965) in his 3 volume Systematic Theology. This unapologetic embrace of the utterly apologetic method of correlation insisted that the unbelieving audience of Christian proclamation determine the itches preaching had better scratch if it expects to survive.

Among the many ominous warnings Tillich issued was the pronouncement of the obsolete status of the word “God” itself. Thankfully, Tillich provided the positively brimming-with-relevance replacement for the tired old nomenclature for the divine creator of us all. That’s right. We have none other than Paul Tillich to thank for the now all-too-familiar and oh so precious term of endearment for the heavenly father we have come to take for granted . . . “The Ground of Our Being”. . .oh well . . . I guess making felt-relevance one’s chief aim does not always result in the achievement of it.

When Rudolf Bultmann averred that the question of Jesus’ historical, bodily resurrection or the possibility of resurrection for future disciples mattered little to modern persons like himself and his Swiss buddy, Karl Barth suggested that when God actually stood Rudi up from the ground at some future date, the relevance of a straightforward reading of 1 Corinthians 15 would likely lock-in for him fairly quickly.

Meanwhile two worldwide phenomena present themselves for consideration: Traditionalist, orthodoxy-protective, Bible-loving, evangelicalish Christianity (read e.g., Roman Catholicism, the Southern Baptist Convention and the global charismatic movement et.al.) expands while Left-leaning, doubt glorifying, Christianity re-shaping communities (think especially of mainline Protestants) shrivel up and find it harder and harder to gin up as much doubt as they had hoped for while fewer and fewer dollars present themselves for the propping up of the doubters in their endowed chairs and cushy administrative posts. Go figure.

And then there goes little Jack Lewis all growed up and running home to mummy. The solid traditional Anglican Christianity of his mummy that is. I do declare, the more that boy studied the further his brain and body and heart listed to the right and the less impressed he became with “things new, shiny, and relevant.” Who is this Lewis? Why, its the writer, lover, and interpreter of stories; stories happily laden with nuance and mystery yet without the slightest pinch of that squeamishness regarding the story’s capacity to carry both embedded and in-your-face truth claims even of a propositional sort and meant to be taken as universal and permanent truth claims at that.

But some Narrative shepherds of our souls would free us from the shackles of such horrifying certainty as might be gained [and millions of Christians past and present (poor dullards) thing they do gain] should we actually believe in the truth thus taught. It must be frustrating when such an unreconstructed, old style (not necessarily modern) truth lover sells so many books and keeps being found relevant left and right. Does C.S Lewis not know better than to be caught being found relevant when so many bloggers have proven he can’t be? Do not be fooled. The Bible’s narratives lose nothing in nuance and mystery when their truth claims are allowed to stand.

And the gall of Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller, reaching that thoroughly postmodern twenty-something set on both the Right and Left coasts of our great nation (and Darrin Patrick smack dab in the middle) not only without chucking their doctrines (even election and predestination!!) but just carrying them about in the open! For shame!

Whenever you hear the word “postmodern” just prior to being told what you are allowed to find relevant―Achtung, Baby! Taking on traditional, orthodox, evangelical Christianity might sell a lot of books and play well on the PC circuit but it has yet to prove it can build and sustain over time anything recognizable as “church.” Carl Henry urged Protestant liberals to stop trying to fix Christianity and just admit that they don’t like it, reject it, and move on. Most eventually did! Folks who work too hard attempting to fix Christianity in the quest to keep it relevant (Protestant liberals and perhaps now, the “left,” most provocative wing of the emerging conversation) too often break the Christianity they started with and achieve precious little relevance overtime to boot.

But only a little thank you so far. At least compared to the BIG thank you due to conservative evangelicals including especially, in my case, Southern Baptists. Why? Because of the thousands of hospitals, schools, churches, and relief organizations you have created and sustained. [One of the first phone calls made whenever hurricanes bear down upon the United States (or Banda Aceh, Indonesia for that matter) is to Southern Baptists who have earned a world wide reputation for mobilizing effective and sustained help in the aftermath of natural disasters.] Because of the thousands of missionaries you send and support all over the world. And last but not least, thank you for the undeserved opportunities you have provided for me to serve the Lord and support my family for over thirty years.

Without backing away from a single expression of gratitude to or hopeful interest in the emerging conversation, I think a little historical perspective helps to cast matters in the proper light. The wisest and most knowledgeable friends of the emerging conversation have, perhaps rightly, eschewed even the designation “movement” to describe what lies behind the diverse collection of bloggers, writers, and pastors that can include such odd bedfellows as Mark Driscoll and Brian McLaren. Modesty, they insist, commends the term “conversation.” I agree. Some recognize that the conversation may end up serving merely as a prod to existing denominations, churches, and movements rather than become one itself. One prominent “pastor” of one of the (left wing?) emergent (not emerging!) “churches”/fellowships admitted to me that it might be better if his “fellowship” serves as a mere spiritual way station for spiritual wanderers who may move on to an actual church or not rather than become a real church itself. The reticence to have “church” as part of the name of some of these communities may end up being more prophetic than some realize! So the call for modesty commends itself.

Yet, some of the books and blogs fail the modesty test, especially where conservative evangelicals are in the crosshairs. Sweeping and dismissive caricatures take over. Straw men are set up and knocked down by these mere conversers at the drop of a hat. Smugness sets in and backslapping, self-congratulatory, guffawing rhetoric flows freely.

Why is this so? Especially given the embarrassing disparity in shear numbers, historical legacy, geographical presence and actual accomplishment between the emerging critiquing conversers and the conservative evangelical movement? Certain reasons seem obvious:

When your club is young, small, diverse, difficult to nail down, and hasn’t done much, you lack the history and identifiability to become an easy target. (I expect D.A. Carson is learning this afresh). When accomplishment is meager, little presents itself for critique.

Whereas, when you are old, successful, and established, your warts become all too obvious and inviting to the adolescent impulse to point them out.

I fear that some protest-driven, former conservative evangelical emerging conversers imagine that their insights, since absent from their own limited, idiosyncratic exposure to the enormous global movement that is conservative and evangelical, are thus absent from the whole shebang, and that is not so. Emerging conversers, authors, and pastors bring energetic articulation and attempted implementation of the insights and values that define them, not creation of those insights and values. Every authentically biblical value they highlight already exists and even flourishes among conservative evangelicals, but without the prominence or consciousness that pervades emerging thinking about and practice of the same.

A fair amount of distortive projecting and extrapolating is going on here. Friends of emerging rightly cry foul when the distortive generalizations appear in evangelical construals of the emerging conversation but display comparative high tolerance for the broad brush when critiquing evangelicals. If the emerging/emergent conversation/movement is too diverse to put up with (as Scot McKnight has correctly insisted) such a reductionistic construal as D.A. Carson settled for in his book, then the same applies to conservative evangelicals only exponentially more so.

Is the emerging conversation/movement diverse? Conservative evangelicalism is much more so. Is emerging tough to characterize? Evangelicalism much more so. I tell my students that Roman Catholicism must be treated as a special and complicated entity and phenomenon because of its long history, its global reach, and its historical importance and influence. I warn them that the temptation to caricature and dismiss runs high when Protestants, and especially evangelicals, attempt to understand Roman Catholicism. I tell them that the attempt to comprehend Roman Catholicism is often akin to a man blindfolded in a room with an elephant. What he thinks he encounters depends upon where he grabs hold! All of this could be said of conservative evangelicalism. And some of the emerging/emergent books and blogs don’t get this. This is troubling when some set themselves up as the respectful ones, the appreciators of nuance and mystery, the ecumenical community, the “friends” in conversation—the orthopraxy police!

Why do I care? Because I love conservative evangelicalism, Southern Baptists, AND much of what I see in the more doctrinally orthodox streams within the emerging movement. And, I believe my own denomination stands to benefit much from engagement with this conversation. And I believe that dissemination of the best insights from the emerging conversation within a denomination like Southern Baptists offers profound possibilities for their wider dissemination and longevity. And I do not want the possibilities for this kind of thing short-circuited by historical amnesia and sloppy caricature from any quarter.

So, just a little thank you to the emerging conversation/movement so far, but hoping for and even expecting the opportunity to give a Big thank you in due course.

I do question whether Brian McLaren is as gracious and unassuming as McKnight depicts him. I mean in his writings, not his stage or coffee table persona. We know he has got that disarming “conduct” down. But what we write matters too, as McKnight has rightly noted in his critique of Carson’s book on emerging.

As Mcknight notes in his excellent paper delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary, we do not know for sure how big the emerging movement is or will become. We do know that the Southern Baptist Convention is quite large. There are also many Southern Baptist pastors, mostly youngish ones, who are part of the emerging conversation. I am convinced that the SBC would benefit much from certain insights and emphases prized within the emerging movement conversation.

However, I do think that McKnight gives McLaren a bit of a pass regarding how gracious he is. McLaren is, as McKnight says, a provocateur. For those he sees fit to caricature, critique, and often dismiss, (such as conservative evangelicals, you know, like Southern Baptists such as myself) the provocations sting, not only because we find that they hit their target (though they sometimes do) but because of the caricature element, the straw man knocked down. These reductionistic slams strike many of us as mean spirited. I am not sure the designation provocateur is a sufficient fig leaf for one so pumped up about praxis to hide behind.

A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism. By Gerhard O. Forde. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, 223 pp., $22.00.

As I begin this review, a mere four weeks separates me from Gerhard O. Forde’s passing. After almost four decades of teaching, this revered Professor of systematic Theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul succumbed to pneumonia on August 9, 2006 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, Personal gratitude for the help I have received across the years from Forde’s writings, combined with an instinct to protect and propagate his legacy, tempts me to abandon the review in favor of eulogy. Happily, this particular collection of essays provides an excellent entrée into the Forde’s major contributions to the church. Academics, ministers, or students looking for an introduction to Forde’s thinking will find A More Radical Gospel representative of the themes that dominated his interest, the impressive incisiveness of his theological vision and the special humor that endeared him to so many. Those seeking in-depth engagement with Forde’s thinking should look to his weightier and more comprehensive monographs. While this volume fairly represents Forde’s thinking, the lack of indices and dearth of footnotes do not facilitate the kind of scholarly engagement the impressive content tends to invite.

Lutheran Fundamentalist
At his retirement in 1998 Forde expressed the aim that had sustained him for so long as a minister and a teacher in this way: “I have tried through the years to present the integrity and truth of the tradition, especially as found in Martin Luther, in a way that is interesting, compelling, and exciting.” Forde assumed the role of prophet within his own Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, calling her back to her own roots, to the radical apprehension of the only gospel worthy of the name by Martin Luther.

Certainly radical Lutheranism can boast no more clear and persistent advocate than Forde. The essays included in the atonement section rehearse in bold and penetrating fashion Luther’s own insistence upon a declarative, imputed righteousness enjoyed by faith together with the concomitant relegation of the law to the negative role of accuser. No third use of the law for Forde. Only grace through faith produces works pleasing to the God who died for sinners. Box-checking holiness programs begone!

Starting All Over Again
Several essays revisit a fixation precious to many contemporary Christians that Forde loved to despise—progressive sanctification. Luther once said that sanctification is just beginning again with justification, with the gospel, with the proclamation that one’s sins are forgiven. Forde defined sanctification as “the art of getting used to justification.”
Like Luther, Forde understood that the slightest drop of works righteousness mixed with the pure gospel of grace poisons the whole pot. Next thing you know forgiven sinners turn away from the gospel toward their own navels where they gaze and gesticulate in the quest to achieve and earn what they once received as a gift—forgiveness of sins, membership in the family of God and the hope of eternal life. For Forde, preoccupation with some traceable increase in personal holiness amounts to an abandonment of the gospel Paul identified among the Galatians and undercuts the attractiveness of Paul’s desire to “be found in [Christ] not having a righteousness of [his] own.” Perhaps no one in recent memory has expressed more pointedly and with such humor as Forde the ironic impotency of the law to produce what it demands.

Substitutionary Atonement Gone Wild
Forde was less a creative theological constructionist but more the flamboyant defender of the traditions. If he contributed something new to the theological lexicon it may be his notion of the “continuously existing subject” wrongly imagined by non-Lutheran construers of the Christian life. Forde is referring to the “old man,” the “man of the flesh” who has been crucified with Christ. “I no longer live,” Paul could say. Some falsely imagine that the buried man lives. He died. God has not fixed us so that we can get on with getting better. Instead, Forde reminds us, God kills us, buries us with Christ and raises us up to new life. Walking by the Spirit continues to be a walk apart from the law (Galatians). Our lives continue to be hidden in Christ. Christ’s substitutionary role extends beyond the cross and defines the very character of the Christian life, not just entry into that life.

Persnickety Contrarian
Forde’s utter commitment to the radical Lutheran heritage he believed had been abandoned by its rightful heirs sometimes resulted in his identification as a bit of a contrarian. Just as Lutheran chins began to quiver with that peculiar happiness only ecumenical activity produces, there was Forde to rain on everyone’s parade. The essays included under the ecumenical section provide adequate exposure to Forde’s instinct for confessional faithfulness in the face of the mirage of unity purchased by compromise. Forde shines his search light on how thin is the payoff when ecumenical activity attracts those least committed to the distinctive convictions of the traditions they would ostensibly represent at the negotiating table. Only confessional loyalists are equipped to identify where bases for unity appear and where the ways must part.

Pillar of Fire
Not unlike Luther, Forde’s unique contribution is not a broad and systematizing grasp of many things, but a clear, penetrating vision of a few things, vital things without which the character of the whole faith would be endangered. Forde is the man who saw a narrow pillar of fire descending from heaven to earth. Its name is justification by grace through faith alone. It is enough for this one man to stand guardian of what he can no longer pretend he has not beheld rather than venture out into things less certain and perhaps less essential. A More Radical Gospel offers a platform from which to observe this gospel guardian at work

Emerging? In his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev. Mark Driscoll at least could say “no commanded order of church service is to be found anywhere in Scripture, nor is any detailed example of a worship service from the first-century church,” which my colleague in New testament and expert in first century Greek papyri and inscriptions would concur with. The consequence of critiquing RP might be to open an unbiblical Pandora’s Box where preaching has to fight for its life but this need not be the result. Driscoll, in the same book, recounts his own strenuous effort to hear whatever guidance the Bible had to offer regarding church governance, which he thinks he found in some sort of elder rule.

Is it not clear that we should let the Bible regulate whatever it means to regulate but not more? Check out the scriptural support for Chapter 21 (the RP section) of the Westminster Confession. Virtually none of the passages read in context bear directly on the questions they supposedly answer. I suspect that at least two tendencies are at work here: 1. What Karl Barth calls an alien norm, an external question brought to the text which then the text is bound to deliver on and 2. the treatment of the Bible as a puzzle that the Puritan divines have largely put together for us. We have much to thank the Puritans for and the Westminster Confession is a gift to the church, but in this matter exegesis should trump and correct our theology.

***

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What’s wrong with the regulative principle is its temptation to say too much. Christian leaders of every age face a two-fold burden when faced with the duty of biblical interpretation; the quest not to go beyond what is written, but also not to fall short of what the Bible makes clear.

I suspect that Reformed thinkers are prone to violate the first stricture and indeed, go beyond Scripture with neck veins protruding. Why do they do it? They often approach the Bible like a puzzle to be put together so that now all things become clear. Could it be that some neo-Puritan believers find themselves increasingly more enamored with John Owen than with John the Apostle because, after all, the wise Puritan divnes decipher, divy up, and display everything in order, nicht wahr?”

When this preference for the pantheon of approved Reformed expositors and theologians takes hold, it seems that a certain unwitting, catholicizing quasi two-source theory of revelation operates; only the authoritative “tradition” is thoroughly reformed. I call this “Peter (John) Piper picked a peck of pickled (J.I.) Packers hermeneutics.

Happily, in the case of both Packer and Piper, such restriction to some reformed ghetto of eisegetical theologizing has not taken hold. Packer continues to study and learn from many non-Reformed sources and Piper’s Future Grace involved a clear departure from received Reformed wisdom regarding incentives to moral striving and holy living. And the departure was driven by exegetical labor and honesty. And here lies the antidote to Reformed tendencies toward catholicizing eisegesis; an ongoing rigorous, historico-gramatical, contextual approach to the Bible. Where such scrutiny confirms the hallowed Reformed inheritance—so be it. Where it does not—let the chips fall where they may.

***

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This church winnowing sermon series has given birth to the book The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church.
Attention from Times columnist Laurie Goodstein helped to earn Boyd’s book a ranking of 20 on Amazon. Charlie Rose recently interviewed Boyd at length in order to explore his views and make sense of the contradictory reactions evoked by them.

One phenomenon evident in the Rose interview and the Times piece is the salivating stimulated in the main stream media (MSM) whenever the prospect of an evangelical catfight emerges. Boyd was careful to note how resistant to quick definition the term “evangelical” has become while describing himself as a conservative Bible-believing Christian who believes in the divine inspiration of the Bible and seeks to live under the Lordship of Christ. Left out of the interview and the Times piece was the formal denunciation of Boyd’s denial of God’s complete foreknowledge (including foreknowledge of future decisions by free agents) by an overwhelming majority at the Evangelical Theological Society in 2003.

Boyd comes across very well in the interview; intelligent, non-defensive, sincere—genuine in every way. The main thrusts of Boyd’s argument strike me as very sound. His plea is for a Church that embodies the ethic and purposes of Jesus Christ, who, we would do well to remember, turned the other cheek in the face of his enemies in the most complete manner imaginable—he laid down his life rather than strike back. Jesus also made clear that his Kingdom is not of this world and insisted upon distinguishing the realms of Caesar and God when asked about the Temple tax. Faithfulness to the Savior and His Kingdom will resist the co-opting of his message by any political party or cause. And the lure of political power and its potentially corrupting and compromising pressures in a democracy like ours is real indeed.

But how should such protectiveness of the Church’s message play out in a democracy when the Bible-value-laden believer enters the voting booth. Southern Baptist ethicist Richard Land put it this way: “I don’t think God is a Republican but I do think He is pro-life.” If abortion is an ongoing holocaust (and I believe it is), then how is my opposition to a pro-abortion candidate to be construed as anything more than an act of Christian obedience. Boyd does not want politicians labeled “the Christian candidate” because (and he is right) many issues matter to God and reasonable Christians might disagree on this or that. For Boyd, ethical and political complexity rules out unity and clarity when it comes to directing Christians in the voting booth.

But it was fascinating that the corrupting and compromising fusion of faith with politics only applied to conservative hot button issues. Neither Boyd nor Rose seemed to notice the big elephant sitting in the room at Rose’s mention of the name Martin Luther King Jr. It would be illuminating to learn whether Boyd’s eschewal of the religion/politics fusion extends to certain historic social causes marked by strong Christian leadership and church activism. Say for instance; the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Movement. Yes, we know Ralf Reed is a bad boy, but what about Ralph Abernathy? Dietrich Bonhoeffer felt compelled to plunge into the muck and mire of political intrigue and eventually to join the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler precisely because he was a Christian. Bonhoeffer was appalled when the Church tried to keep its hands clean while secretly hoping that secular operatives would succeed in eliminating Hitler.

Boyd’s protectiveness for the independence of the Church’s prophetic message is right on. But the passive, separationist tendencies of his practical advice may involve a shirking of prophetic responsibility laid upon the Church which must, indeed, separate from the world but only in order that it might re-enter again as Salt and Light.

Meanwhile, Warren has launched a massive effort to alleviate poverty and address the spread of AIDS globally but with special focus in Africa. Such socially conscious activism puts would-be critics of conservative Christianity back on their heels just long enough for Warren to show his evangelical stripes, now clothed with the credibility that only walking the walk brings.

Charlie Rose opened a recent interview with Warren by thanking him for the kind note he received during a recent illness. In the course of the interview, both of the crucial PC litmus test issues surfaced and Warren stood firm in a gentle way on both counts. When Charlie suggested that by identifying Jesus as the only path to salvation, Warren condemns billions of good folk to the flames, Warren deftly and rightly noted that here we have to do with Jesus’ own words, not Warren’s and thus, the question is whether Jesus is a liar or not. Rose quickly changed the subject, apparently not anxious to get crosswise with Jesus.

Pray that Warren will continue to “do good,” to love the sinner actively while hating the sin and that, as a result, many will hear the gospel.

C.S. Lewis fought (and amazingly, also wrote poetry) in one of the most uniquely horrific contexts in the history of warfare—the Trenches of World War I. Unlike so many fields of conflict where soldiers engage only to withdraw once the battle concludes, many battlefields of the Great War became living quarters to the combatants. Thousands of soldiers, including Lewis, lived in ditches dug out of French mud from which they emerged and returned like subterranean rodents between ghastly bloodspillings—a war spectacle unprecedented at the time and never repeated. At the tender age of 19, with five months of trench warfare under his belt, the then atheist future creator of Narnia took enough shrapnel at the famed Battle of Arras to land him safely in a hospital bed, the war now behind him for good.

Less than a quarter century later, Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe would attempt the reduction of London to rubble. On the backend of months of air raids over London, Britain would huddle together in shelters, ears cocked toward the Wireless for words of comfort and guidance from this same C.S. Lewis. And, as usual, Lewis’s thoughts were interesting. Following is a sample of Lewis musings not from the BBC Broadcasts but from a sermon, “Learning in Time of War,” delivered in October 1939:

“The war will fail to absorb our whole attention because it is a finite object and therefore, intrinsically unfitted to do so.”

“The rescue of drowning men is a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for. . . .all political duties (among which I include military duties) are of this kind. A man may have to die for [his] country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country.”

“War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality . . .in ordinary times only wise men realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. . . .If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.”

2. God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul by Gordon Fee

3. The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis

4. C. S. Lewis: A Biography by A.N. Wilson

5. Erasmus of Christendom by Roland Bainton

6. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

That narrative theology and narrative preaching represent something of a recovery of biblical faithfulness seems clear. The eventual exposure of the barrenness of the Bultmannian program of form criticism and demythologizing after such a pretentious beginning cried out for replacement. Child’s canonical approach and Frei’s narrative insights effected something of a recovery of the “whole Bible,” useable by the church, from the shambles in which it had been left by the higher critics. Indeed, a great portion of both Testaments were narratives, and recognition of that fact marks a step out of the malaise into which higher critics had plunged the average preacher whose Bible had been confiscated by the university pre-Madonnas.

Having developed and tasted a measure of success, narrative preachers accused traditional expositors and preachers of the Bible with distorting the text. These three point proposition pushers, so it seemed, had ignored the narrative genre with which they had to do, stripping stories of their natural meaning and impact by forcing them into an alien Enlightenment predilection for tables and charts and lists and outlines with multiple sub-points and most of all, propositions. The narratives have a point here. Some preaching and systematic theologizing does seem a little impatient with the Bible in its native state. All the poetry and story and song seem to rankle a bit when we are trying to help folks with from three to five helpful truths or admonitions that might offer concrete guidance for their lives in the coming week. It’s a wonder God didn’t see this coming! Why didn’t He go ahead and just give us a Bible full of propositions or sermons or something more obviously and quickly useful than the mish mash of material we call the Holy Scriptures! He must think He’s God!

Apparently God meant to give us stories and whoever thinks that reductive construal of them into neat sets of propositions improves on the texts themselves is operating, unwittingly or not, with a strange notion of the inerrancy and sufficiency of the Bible. Evangelical preaching, of whatever style, must bow before the text itself, its literary genre intact, for judgment of its own faithfulness. Approaching Bible passages as though they were some scrambled propositional truth puzzle for the preacher to peruse and put right is wrong and does seem to be happening in not a few pulpits.

But not so fast. Narrative theology and preaching has gotten cocky in some quarters and has settled for “making an impression,” on listeners while drawing back from “making a point” or shall we say, from making a propositional truth point. Here is an example of a propositional truth point some narrative enamored preachers eschew—“the God who inspired the Old and New Testaments, because he is all wise and all loving, condemns homosexual behavior.”

But must serious, sermon-style-shaping adjustment to the various literary genres encountered in the Bible (many of which are NOT narrative by the way) pit appreciation for the community creating, emotion tapping power of story against the acknowledgement and celebration of propositional truth, whether explicitly stated or implicitly embedded within biblical texts? I doubt it. Indeed, the greatest preachers from Chrysostom (c.347-407) to Spurgeon (1834-1892) to Truett (1867-1944) to Criswell (1909-2002) have long combined powerful use of story with unashamed truth telling (propositions and all) not only without imagining that the two were really somehow enemies but recognizing that they are the best of friends.

Three-point proposition pushers who dare to insist that the Scriptures demand a particular sermon style for all ages or any age for that matter are going beyond what the Bible teaches. Narrative proponents who deny or otherwise side-step the propositional truth palpably present throughout the Bible fall short of what the Scriptures make clear.

I look forward to getting back in touch and blogging, commenting, etc., on June 2!

I cannot help it though. I really believe that you missional Baptists types bring something vital and right to the SBC.

I am working hard on both fronts–trying to learn about you and trying to educate SBC institutional people as I have opportunity. Who knows, maybe God will help us and once again the SBC will take a turn for the better. And I do believe that the conservative resurgence did involve a huge turn for the better. I was up to my neck in the SBC BEFORE the resurgence!! One thing is clear. Without the conservative resurgence, I would not be employable by an SBC institution.

Pray for me. I am trying to do my part on the inside.

The danger of doctrine is not lost on emergent believers who relish relationship and emphasize belonging before believing. And they have support from no less authoritative a voice than the Apostle Paul himself. Paul took something of a Rodney King (can’t we all just get along) approach to the nasty “herbivore versus carnivore” and “one day is holier than another” debacle in Romans 14 and 15. On these disputed questions at least, love and unity trump and indeed displace any fierce hankering after some supposedly discoverable and essential “will of God.” Instead, Paul’s command is—don’t go against conscience and don’t look down on your brother whose conscious is contrary to yours!

Can this be the same Paul who gets his back up in Galatians over a little thing like the gospel? He encourages anyone who dares to preach a gospel other than the one he preaches not to stop at circumcision, but to just go ahead and castrate themselves and when they are done with that, well, just go to hell. I am not making this up. Paul says, “let them be anathema.” I am afraid that emergent believers will need to accommodate some of this castration and anathema stuff if they truly mean to plant and nurture “biblical communities of faith.”

Some emergent communities, while adamantly not abstaining from alcohol (thank you very much) are going off doctrine cold turkey. They’re loving each other, telling they’re stories and sipping Ripple—no doctrine allowed. Those who weaken and allow a little doctrine to squeeze in tend to stick with the Apostles’ Creed—which is great but then the Apostles’ Creed lacks any straight gospel/atonement talk, which is just what the Apostle himself got his back up about. [When someone seems permanently settled into ambiguity on the atonement and homosexual behavior but picks fights over their right to imbibe, one wonders about the exegetical priorities at work]

The reason the doctrine of the atonement tends to force itself down the throats of Bible-loving, Jesus-honoring folk is because the Bible itself is fixated on the matter and Christians, across time and geography, recognize that the atonement is the heart of the faith (See Mark Dever’s fine article in Christianity Today.)

The atonement has defined and will continue to define the scandal of Christianity and render biblically faithful ministers of the word odious to the practitioners and purveyors of politically correct, pluralistic, group-hug spirituality.

Doctrine does damage to our fellowship when it displaces the Bible as our authority or displaces exegesis and so determines beforehand what passages might mean. Doctrine does damage when it becomes a fig leaf for deluded brothers who imagine that true believing can coincide with disobedience. But doctrine defends our communities against the deniers of the Savior when it declares the meaning of his death as vicarious, substitutionary atonement. The Apostles’ Creed is a good thing, but it has proven insufficient as a doctrinal basis for enduring communities of faith where believers are encouraged to read, believe and obey the teachings of Holy Scripture.

More about the necessity, dangers, and benefits of doctrine in future posts.

Now let’s switch to Emerging/emergent.

Could it be that I am starting to identify a cluster of interests or values that animate the imaginations and longings of most emerging and emergent Christians? Check these out: authenticity, mystery; relationship, missional communities of faith. Perhaps for some emergent types we should add these: belonging before believing and narrative hermeneutics. But let’s stick with the first list for a moment. These interests or values strike me as either simply good things or at least potentially good things (standing alone, its hard to see how mystery is a value, but lets stay calm now. Far be it from me to discourage myself or others from a little directed yet potentially rapturous, divinely sanctioned losing of ourselves while gazing into a McCoy or Thorn flower).

But the devil is in the details, isn’t he? This first little cluster of emerging/emergent values, not without a heavy dose of qualifying, do not a Christian community make (for example, Thai Buddhists would find little here to recoil at). It’s no one’s fault you understand; these animating interests can serve as welcome correctives for any number of communities of faith but, they lack the “dogmatic” (yes, I said dogmatic) power to build and sustain, for long, what would pass as a church.

The nasty fracturing of the emerging/emergent movement stems in significant measure from the simple fact that correctives to Christian communities cannot achieve what only core doctrines can. But as the dust is alternately blown up and allowed to settle only to be blown back up again, certain distinguishable shapes are alas, becoming visible. Some of the voices prove to be the genetic descendents of Schleiermacher and others of Barth or even Carl Henry (Henry did soften on Barth in his declining years).

Now I want to recount an historical episode in the life of Friedrich Schleiermacher. It would be difficult to overstate the watershed significance of this episode in the history of the church. The 18 year old Schleiermacher believed that he was able to experience the true meaning and achieve the true goal of the Moravian community where he studied without sharing the minimal doctrinal standards of that community of faith. And what were the doctrines Schleiermacher tried but failed to believe? The deity of Jesus Christ and the vicarious substitutionary atonement of his death on the cross. That’s all. Well shucks. Let’s not split hairs! Let’s just share our stories and affirm each other.

Do you see the dynamite? We will not reject the Bible. But we will stand above it and sift wheat from chaff. We can peal away the husk, (or later Bultmann–the mythological elements) you know, the deity and vicarious whatever etc., but keep the kernel, you know–authenticity, mystery, genuine relationship, etc. (Oprah would be so proud)–and we will call this Christianity! What did Ludwig Von Feuerbach call this? The projection of our own highest hopes dreams and fantasies into the metaphysical realm. What did Barth call it? Idolatry. Wittingly or not, once we stand above the Bible and sift wheat from chaff, we have already started making a god.

Perhaps we can make some fairly prescient guesses about where the chips of the nasty fragmentation of the emerging/emergent movement will fall. Those who stand above the Bible, obviously if not admittedly selecting what scratches their itches for the moment and discarding or at least passing over what does not, will land on one side of a line and those who genuinely try to stand under the Bible, believing and obeying its teaching, will fall on the other side of that same line.

Surprised by Joy

Screwtape

It is ironic how Lewis’ power to map so much of the universal, human, experiential terrain coincided with intense aversion for intentional introspection. Lewis discovered the “inside” of himself (and others), not deliberately, but as a by-product of his search for something outside himself–eventually God. Lewis’ distinction between self-centeredness and selfishness proves instructive here. The self-centered person (which Lewis was not) fastens his attention upon himself and how he is viewed by others. The selfish person (which Lewis was) craves time and space for the pursuit and enjoyment of something other than himself. Both fixations endanger the soul but the distinction is significant.

What animated Lewis was not himself, but worthy objects of love outside himself. What saved him was the discovery of the one object of human devotion worthy of complete love, indeed of worship–the only true God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Once Lewis realized that it was yearning for God that produced the experience he called “Joy,” his interest shifted from that experiential by-product (precious gift though it undoubtedly was) to the giver Himself. I suspect Lewis’ insight illuminates a paradox at the heart of Christian discipleship–he who saves his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for Christ’s sake will save it.

And they are missional, which might mean that they are so busy actually sharing the gospel with lost folks and discipling believers and planting churches and being authentic all over the place that the anti-Calvinists and Arminians end up doing most of the brow furrowing and neck-vein protruding, and head scratching.

And they seem to be able to emerge without pretending not to know that the God who inspired the Bible views homosexual behavior as sinful whenever it occurs. Given this, wouldn’t it be unloving to pretend that He hasn’t told us that? I suppose if you just got started reading the Bible and stumbled upon a liberal commentator or two who argued that the passages that two millennia worth of commentators were sure prohibited homosexual behavior really condemned child abuse, well, hesitance to take a stand could be a sign of admirable modesty. But, after six years or so (and that is how long it has been for some emergent gurus who have hem hawed on the subject) the admirable modesty interpretation starts to lose its luster and we have to wonder if somebody needs to learn how to research a topic.

And some of these mainly happy reformed guys do urban! That’s right, they go into cities–real cities with tattoos and piercings and grime and loud bass guitars and those silly patches of hair the guys sport and they actually plant churches. WOW!And they believe things. They have stout old sounding doctrines and lots of old orthodox stuff that they have not yet learned to be ashamed of for some reason and Bibles too. They have Bibles and they read them and they think the Bible is the Word God too, don’t they? Tell me I am not wrong. They are like a dream come true. And even though my generation invented “cool” which means that we will always be more cool than this new upstart Reformissional crowd, still, they do seem to be a different kind of cool that the SBC might need just now. I hope I am right about most of this and if I am–please Lord–do not let these Right Wing Emerging Christians bolt the SBC just yet.

:: NEW! Two Treatises on Penance: An Inquiry into Tertullian’s Exegesis and Montanism

:: Evangelicals and Karl Barth: Friends or Foes?

:: Empowered Dependence: The Trinitarian Status of the Holy Spirit and the Christian Life

:: The Original Promise Keeper: The Doctrine of the Final Perseverance of the Saints

:: Freedom Through Prohibition: Sabbath Observance for Lovers of Liberty

:: Friendship and the Cradle of Liberalism: Revisiting the Moravian Roots of Schleiermacher’s Theology

:: Wisdom of the Pages

“Here is a fresh, accurate and compelling portrayal of Bonhoeffer, his life and thought, written by a bright Southern Baptist theologian who knows his subject well. Mark DeVine makes Bonhoeffer come alive and commends him as a tonic for today’s self-satisfied church that needs to learn again the meaning of obedience, discipleship, community, suffering, and hope.”
–Timothy George
Dean of Beeson Divinity School
Samford University