hughbiquitous

Do you wonder what the whole Emerging Church controversy is about?

If you do, this summary of Justin Taylor’s talk, “A New Kind of Christianity? A Look at the Emerging Church Movement,” is a must-read. It is very even-handed, fair, and clearly addresses many of the issues involved.

Ten days ago, I posted a piece on a “doctrinal statement” of sorts that came out of the Emergent movement.

I said that the statement amounted to an admission that “We’re morons!” I also called it “insanely stupid.”

Speech like that is unbecoming of a follower of Christ. It fails to reflect his glory; it highlights the lack of love that dwells in my heart; and I erred in valuing the ideas more highly than the souls offering them. For this, I apologize.

I must note that I stand by my objective position on the Emergent-US statement: that the document is characterized by doctrinal and epistemological error; I might even be able to make an objective case that it is nonsensical.

However, with this fresh awareness of the “plank in my own eye,” I hardly think I’m in a position to make that case.

Purgatorio lends its satirical aid to help diagnose symptoms of Emergent tendencies.

In the words of one commenter, “Now, excuse me while I return to David Crowder on my iPod, incense burning and a nice Chianti.”

Earlier today, I posted an aside to the Together for the Gospel statement of faith. Little did I know this was coming later in the day…

WARNING: Insanely Stupid Content Follows: Emergent-US Doctrinal Statement(?)

I believe there are several reasons why Emergent should not have a “statement of faith” to which its members are asked (or required) to subscribe. Such a move would be unnecessary, inappropriate and disastrous.

Why is such a move unnecessary? Jesus did not have a “statement of faith.” He called others into faithful relation to God through life in the Spirit. As with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, he was not concerned primarily with whether individuals gave cognitive assent to abstract propositions but with calling persons into trustworthy community through embodied and concrete acts of faithfulness. The writers of the New Testament were not obsessed with finding a final set of propositions the assent to which marks off true believers. Paul, Luke and John all talked much more about the mission to which we should commit ourselves than they did about the propositions to which we should assent. The very idea of a “statement of faith” is mired in modernist assumptions and driven by modernist anxieties — and this brings us to the next point.

Such a move would be inappropriate. Various communities throughout church history have often developed new creeds and confessions in order to express the Gospel in their cultural context, but the early modern use of linguistic formulations as “statements” that allegedly capture the truth about God with certainty for all cultures and contexts is deeply problematic for at least two reasons. First, such an approach presupposes a (Platonic or Cartesian) representationalist view of language, which has been undermined in late modernity by a variety of disciplines across the social and physical sciences (e.g., sociolinguistics and paleo-biology). Why would Emergent want to force the new wine of the Spirit’s powerful transformation of communities into old modernist wineskins? Second, and more importantly from a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry.

I’m too worked up to comment right now…

HT: David Wayne; see also Andy Jackson.

Update 2006-05-05 16:24:
An Emergent “conversation” (generousorthodoxy.net) features this gem from Tony Jones:

I so appreciate you taking seriously LeRon’s salvo. I really hope this is the beginning of a long and robust dialogue over this issue of doctrinal statements…and their use (as bludgeons).