Postmodernism’s Impact on the Content of EC Preaching
Andrew Perriman, an Emerging church theologian, in his website Open Source Theology posted this blog entitled “Jesus, God and narrative theology.” In this post, Perriman, explains away the deity of Christ with narrative theology. In narrative theology, it is not the context of the Scriptural passage that determines its meaning, as much as the context of the community. Clearly the Biblical context of John 20:28 “My Lord and my God” exclaimed by Thomas to Jesus, is the deity of Christ. However, in the narrative context of Perriman’s community the deity of Christ is deconstructed.[1] Perriman rejects universal truths or static beliefs for dynamic insights that the Spirit of God can communicate to the current community of believers.
The late Stanley Grenz, a theologian and philosopher in the Emerging church, would agree and actually laid a new theological basis for this emergent thinking. Grenz revealed his low view of Scripture found in his Revisioning Evangelical Theology by stating that he believes traditional evangelicalism has made mistakes that need to be revisioned. One of the mistakes, in Grenz’s view, is traditional evangelicalism’s emphasis on the Bible as a divine book rather than a human book. Translated means, importance has been placed on inspiration over illumination. According to Grenz, “We can more readily see the Bible—the instrumentality of the Spirit—as the book of the community.”[2] With this communal subjectivism, truth is found in each community, and inspiration is mixed with believers’ illumination: “The confession of the inspiration of the Bible is closely intertwined with the experience of illumination.”[3] Norman Geisler[4] observes that this view sounds like neo-orthodoxy’s view of inspiration which states that the Bible becomes the Word of God when you have experienced this event.[5] The difference between Neo-othodoxy’s view of Scripture and that of the Emerging Church is found in their emphases: Neo-orthodoxy emphasizes the individual experiencing God’s Word and the Emerging church stresses the community experiencing the Word.
As a result of this new neo-orthodox view, many doctrines are rejected. Here are the doctrines Driscoll says the left wing of the EC, what he calls Emergent Liberals, are questioning and in most cases abandoning. As will be obviously observed, the EC has an aversion for doctrine. I have added to Driscoll’s list some documentation of this aversion.
1. Scripture
2. Jesus Christ
3. Gender
4. Sin
5. Salvation
6. The Cross[6]
7. Hell:[7] Will sinners experience a conscious eternal torment?[8]
The secular and evangelical postmodern focus on community has not only directly impaired the content of preaching by lowering people’s view of Scripture and questioning core doctrines, but the style of preaching. In my next post, I will discuss postmodernism’s impact on the style of EC preaching.
[1] “So, for example, Thomas’ words ‘My Lord and my God’ (John 20:28) are read not as an expression of a universal truth but as a particular confession of personal faith within a particular narrative context. This was how Thomas responded – or how John understood Thomas to have responded – to Jesus’ invitation to believe. So I think I’m arguing for two rather different things – first, to exercise a measure of theological restraint in reading the texts, allowing them to set contextual limits to the language that we use about Jesus; but secondly, to recognize that within the covenant community, within the body of Christ, the Spirit of God prompts (continues to prompt) a wide range of personal and corporate insights into the nature of the overlap of identity and purpose between Jesus and God.” Andrew Perriman. “Jesus, God, and narrative theology.” Open Source Theology (September 20, 2005). http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/728. Accessed December 18, 2008.
http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/728. Accesssed January 1, 2009.
[2] Stanley J. Grenz. Revisioning Evangelical Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1993), 115.
[3] Ibid., 118.
[4] Norman L. Geisler and Thomas A. Howe. A Postmodern View of Scripture. A Christian Apologetics Journal 7/1 (Spring, 2008), 70.
[5] “The Bible is God’s Word so far as God lets it be His Word, so far as God speaks through it .…The statement, ‘The Bible is God’s Word,’ is a confession of faith, a statement made by the faith that hears God Himself speak in the human word of the Bible….this act of God upon man has become an event, therefore not to the fact that man has reached out to the Bible, but to the fact that the Bible has reached out to man. The Bible therefore becomes God’s Word in this event….the Bible must from time to time become His Word to us” Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics. Vol. I (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936), 123-124. Karl Barth is important to the EC. One chapter in An Emergent Manifesto of Hope is given over to promoting Barth: “Digging Up the Past: Karl Barth (The Reformed Giant) as Friend to the Emerging Church.” (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007).
[6] “And did the conservative Protestant emphasis on the death of Jesus necessarily marginalize Jesus’ life—his wise teachings and his kind deeds, which had captured my childhood imagination? Over time I began to feel as though, from my perspective, the gospel became simply an individualistic theory, and abstraction with personal but not global import. It became about the solution to a cosmic legal/business/political problem, real and serious, but a bit dry, a bit removed from real life. In my heart grew a deep, subtle, unspoken sense that something was missing, which gradually opened my heart to search for other ways of seeing Jesus” McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 48-49.
[7] “I should add that this dissatisfaction with the conservative Protestant Jesus intensified just last Christmas when one of my children was home for the holidays from college. I asked him how he was doing spiritually. ‘I’m struggling, Dad,’ he said. ‘Tell me about that,’ I said. He replied, ‘Well, Dad, if Christianity is true, then nearly everyone I love is going to be tortured in the fires of hell forever. And if it’s not true, then life has no meaning.’ He was silent for a moment and then added, ‘I just wish there were a better option.’ My heart was broken, I asked, ‘Is that the understanding of Christianity you got from me?’ He replied, ‘No, but that’s the way most Christians think. They just kind of bottom-line everything to heaven or hell, and that makes life feel kind of cheap.’ My son’s insight doesn’t apply to the best expressions of conservative Protestants, but it does, I fear, apply too often to the most popular ones. He put into blunt and powerful terms exactly what I felt vaguely and inarticulately when I was his age”[7] Brian McLaren. A Generous Orthodoxy, 49.
[8] Driscoll, “A Pastoral Perspective on the Emerging Church.” Criswell Theological Review. 3/2 (Spring 2006) 91.
Tim, some interesting remarks. With regard to your summary of my argument in that post (unfortunately your link doesn’t work, try: http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/728), a couple of things don’t sound quite right.
First, I don’t think I was trying to ‘explain away’ the deity of Christ. My point rather was that traditional ontological categories, derived from a later rationalist worldview, are more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to understanding biblical statements about the status of Jesus. The intention inthis is not to explain away anything but simply to explain – in categories that are more appropriate to the text and its historical character.
Secondly, a narrative theology does not deny that ‘the context of the Scriptural passage… determines its meaning’. On the contrary, it is a cardinal principle of narrative theology that sayings and arguments and events in scripture must be understood according to their whole literary-historical context and not extracted as isolable bits of sacred truth – notice, for example, the comment under point 5 about drawing ‘contextually appropriate conclusions from the text’. My argument, however, is that the biblical context when properly taken into account may highlight the contingent character of some of the things that we find there.
Whether Thomas’ confession is a good example of that is a matter for discussion. The point was made primarily to illustrate how a disjunction can arise between biblical interpretation and theological synthesis. A narrative theology resists the process of rationalisation and systematisation out of a concern for the literary-historical integrity of the text, but that is not the same as claiming that there are no ‘universal truths or static beliefs’.
The issue, in my view, is not whether we can speak of universal truth but how we speak of universal truth. I think that the traditional approach has preserved truth at the expense of understanding the text. A narrative theology aims to redress that imbalance.
Thank you for your comment and the link.
Here is another quote from your article that I did not post for sake of space. After the quote I will respond.
“A narrative theology encourages us to draw meaning from larger structures. We are still prone to taking arbitrary proof texts out of context and building a predetermined case around them. A narrative theology is informed not by a post-biblical belief system but by a community, which has to act and interpret its actions in the light of its theological tradition and of immediate experience. This has all sorts of implications. I would argue that for an emerging theology it is the existence of a covenant people that should have hermeneutical priority. There is a strong realist commitment in this: what we actually have is a historical community telling stories about itself over a period of time. Over time the story changes, the context in which it is told changes, the reasons for which it is told change.
Within a narrative framework it should be easier to maintain a sense of how the relation between Jesus and God must be understood dynamically and functionally, not merely statically and ontologically…I feel that there is still a tendency to assume that a proper Christology must give priority to categories of being rather than categories of doing. I certainly think that if we are going to speak of the historical Jesus as ‘divine’, we need to understand this primarily in terms of his self-consciously acting the part of YHWH. ‘Acting’ is a complex notion: Jesus acts out prophetically, he acts as agent, he acts as God….Would it then be appropriate to think of him not as God become man but as the one who acts out, in the various senses of the term, the eschatological drama of judgment, forgiveness and renewal?”
In this quote you down play proof texts, I assume like John 20:28 which clearly in the context of John’s Gospel sets forth the deity of Christ.
You say that narrative theology is informed by the experiences of the community which is a hermeneutical priority. Theology should rise purely from a historical/grammatical interpretation of the text not by the every changing experiences of a community. Certanly after the interpretation is objectively discovered then we apply those truths to our communities.
You substitute catagories of being for catergories of doing in your Christology and then say that Jesus acted “the part of YHWH.”
In other words, Jesus in His being was not God but in His doing, He acted like God. Is this not explaining away the deity of Christ?
I am actually strongly in favour of ‘historical/grammatical interpretation of the text’. But I would disagree with the ‘purely’ and with the way that it is set against the interpretive function of communities. That’s a false dichotomy in my view. There is no purely objective study of the texts, which is why exegetes trained in the grammatico-historical method from different traditions and from within any tradition can reach such divergent conclusions. It’s why John Piper and NT Wright can disagree strongly over justification. I may think that Wright is the better interpreter by some distance, but that still is as much an expression of my bias as of objective assessment.
The point about being and doing in relation to Jesus’ divinity has more to do with what we can actually learn from scripture. Scripture does not, in my view, give us access to or even insight into the being-of-Christ-as-God. It does give us some very good instances of how Jesus fulfilled the purposes of God or acted out prophetically the presence of God in the midst of his people for judgment and salvation.
You may be right about John 19:28: it may be that John intends this to be heard as an acclamation of Jesus’ divinity. I am inclined to think, however, that it reflects Old Testament texts such as Hosea 2:23; Micah 7:7; and Zechariah 13:9 in which YHWH is acclaimed as Lord and God for having saved his people, which would again shift the emphasis away from ontological identity towards the idea that God is narratively active in Israel’s history.