Terry Mattingly of Get Religion has a post titled, "Define 'emerging,' give three examples," which looks at how the "emerging church" movement continues to avoid definition and vital questions:
Whatever the term means, it is supposed to be linked to a kind of post-evangelical embrace of the nuances of postmodern reality, in an attempt to fuse ancient mysteries with contemporary questions without the certainties of orthodoxy or something like that.
The key figure — in part since his church is so close to the D.C. Beltway — is the Rev. Brian McLaren, an author who has a stunning ability to write thousands and thousands of words without betraying anything specific about where he stands on centuries of Christian faith and doctrine and how they apply to modern issues. That’s where — for a premodern, Orthodox Christian guy like me — the frustrations begin. The last thing journalists need to be doing right now is tossing around another loaded, yet almost totally undefined, term. I mean, imagine trying to write an “emerging church” entry for the Associated Press Stylebook.
Mattingly refers to a recent interview in The Washington Post with McLaren, which contains the following:
Q: On the theology behind the emerging church, you reject the idea that there's an absolute truth. So what boundaries are there on theology that churches are teaching? Can any church just call itself an emerging church?
A: Obviously that's a challenge. The flip side of that question is look at the Catholic Church: For all of its orthodoxy, it could have bishops covering up for molesting priests. And evangelicals, for all their claims of orthodoxy, can be barbaric to gay people and can blindly support a rush to war in Iraq and can be, as we speak, fomenting for war with Iran. ... Obviously, I have a lot of critics and they often say, 'You're wanting to water down the Gospel to accommodate to post-modernity.' I say, 'No, I really don't want to do that. But what I do want to do is acknowledge first the ways we've already watered down the Gospel to accommodate modernity.' ... I think the naivete of some of those critics is that they're starting with a pure pristine understanding of the Gospel. It seems to me we're all in danger of screwing up.
That, then, is a taste of the "stunning ability" referred to by Mattingly. My basic impression of the "emerging church" movement is this: it is a reactionary movement within a reactionary movement (evangelicalism) that was formed within a reactionary movement (20th century conservative Protestantism) that was a subset of a reactionary movement ("classical" Protestantism). It will continue to frustrate many, even while it splinters, resplinters, divides, morphs, shifts, and otherwise emerges, submerges, re-emerges, and partially converges in numerous forms, all of which will lead to, uh, something. Mattingly, meanwhile, would like someone to ask McLaren three basic questions:
(1) Are the biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event really happen?
(2) Is salvation found through Jesus Christ, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6)?
(3) Is sex outside of the Sacrament of Marriage a sin?
Answers to said questions will emerge. Someday. Maybe. In the meantime, here is a sample of what McLaren has to offer:
"I don't think we've got the gospel right yet. What does it mean to be 'saved'?.... I don't think the liberals have it right. But I don't think we have it right either. None of us has arrived at orthodoxy." –– Brian McLaren, quoted in "The Emergent Mystique", Christianity Today, November 2004
"Ask me if Christianity (my version of it, yours, the Pope's, whoever's) is orthodox, meaning true, and here's my honest answer: a little, but not yet. Assuming by Christianity you mean the Christian understanding of the world and God, Christian opinions on soul, text, and culture I'd have to say that we probably have a couple of things right, but a lot of things wrong, and even more spreads before us unseen and unimagined. But at least our eyes are open! To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall." –– Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), p. 293.
Hmmm...well...I think I'll have to go with Chesterton on this one:
This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.
• Chesterton and the "Paradoxy" of Orthodoxy
