Archive for the ‘Emerging Church’ Category

An Expose of Emerging Church Preaching, Part 5

Posted: November 23, 2009 in Emerging Church, Homiletics/Preaching
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I listen to Driscoll’s sermons, read his books, watch his Youtubes, and benefit from them. The first Driscoll sermon I heard was his sermon on the Trinity and I thought, “This is the best sermon on the Trinity I have ever heard. Come to think, this is the only sermon on the Trinity I have ever heard.” Nevertheless, there are aspects of his sermons that younger preachers who are mesmerized with Driscoll should not emulate. 

Here is what McArthur says about Driscoll’s language: He is a very effective communicator—a bright, witty, clever, funny, insightful, crude, profane, deliberately shocking, in-your-face kind of guy. His soteriology is exactly right, but that only makes his infatuation with the vulgar aspects of contemporary society more disturbing.

For examples of Driscoll’s crudeness that should not be mentioned in public see Tim Challies’ review of Confessions of a Reformission Rev. Here is part of Challies’ review after a quote from Driscoll: I cannot understand why he feels this type of quote is necessary. While this book is filled with confession, the one thing Driscoll does not seem to regret is his reputation as a loose canon and a man whose mouth is often filthy. In the end analysis, I really did enjoy Confessions of a Reformission Rev.. There is much in this book that is edifying. It helped me understand Mark Driscoll and showed how he grew a megachurch in a largely unchurched city in only eight years. He is clearly a passionate, focused man who is genuinely seeking hard after God. He has much to offer the church. I wonder, though, how long his message will be heard as long as it is wrapped in a sometimes vulgar, always sarcastic, package. It may endear him to some, but it will surely alienate him from far more. See 9Marks’ review of Driscoll’s Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

Even the New York Times writes: Mark Driscoll’s sermons are mostly too racy to post on GodTube, the evangelical Christian “family friendly” video-posting Web site. With titles like “Biblical Oral Sex” and “Pleasuring Your Spouse,” his clips do not stand a chance against the site’s content filters.

This is another example of the culture impacting the church. Driscoll sees three major views of the contextualization of culture. Driscoll rejects the syncretistic contextualization of Doug Pagitt who advocates changing the message as well as the delivery of the gospel to reach the postmoderns. “We must pursue new practices as well as new messages: the two are inseparable. It won’t suffice to put new ideas in the trappings of old practices. When we offer a new message through a practice designed to propagate a different message, we may well lose both” ( Pagitt. Preaching Re-Imagined, 80).

These have two open hands. One hand is open to Scripture and the other is open to culture, as Driscoll likes to illustrate.

Driscoll also rejects sectariansism or fundamentalism. The fundamentalist has two closed hands. The fundamentalist holds tightly to his doctrine and his culture of traditional views of music, drinking, and dress. The fundamentalist is Driscoll’s whipping post throughout his writings. Certainly, too many of our fundamental churches are known for their cutting edge ministries of the 60s and 70s.  With one hand, we must hold tightly, like a vise grip, the doctrines of God’s Word but with the other hand we can loosen our grasp on culture and like Jesus be a friend of sinners in our cities and communities. But Driscoll is over the top when he constantly compares the fundamentalist to hypocritical and unsaved Pharisees of Jesus’ time (Driscoll, The Radical Reformission, 142-143).

Driscoll is subversive as a Reformissionist with one hand holding firmly to doctrine and an open hand to culture. “Reformission churches have to continually examine and adjust their musical styles, websites, aesthetics, acoustics, programming and just about everything but their Bible in an effort to effectively communicate the gospel to as many people as possible in the cultures around them” (Driscoll, 100).

We agree that we must adjust these areas of ministry and some of our churches are in fact becoming more current and engaged. For example, conservative churches are using video and movie clips as sermon illustrations, blogs, websites, face book, and simulcast to communicate the message. Others are helping the poor and needy through servant evangelism, etc. These are changes not true in the 60s and 70s. We would agree with Driscoll, who says some things in culture are wrong such as homosexuality and extra marital sex. But some of us would disagree with all he accepts.

The solution and our response to EC is for believers to “earnestly contend for the faith (the doctrines of Scripture)” (Jude 3), love God with all our heart and our neighbor, and speak the truth in love in our culture where God has placed us. Yet realize that not all of culture is neutral. In 1 John 2:15, the command is to “love not the world.” Certainly our more traditional churches need to be cutting edge in the 21st (not 20th) century ministries and involved in the lives of the unsaved in order to win them. Our churches can be more meshed  with the cities we are seeking to win by helping the poor and hungry in order to win a hearing of the gospel. Thankfully some of our conservative churches are ministering to alcoholics, abused women, and orphans. We must be engaged as friends of sinners but distinct as the people of God. Each local church must determine where it draws the boundaries on these issues without selling out to culture. But there must be boundaries.

Conclusion

In order to effectively obey the Great Commission, we must “preach the Word.” We cannot substitute discussion sessions, stories, or the experiences of the community for the propositional truths of the text. For sure dialogue, illustrations, and interactions can be part of our sermons without sacrificing the text. While important they are all handmaidens to the explanation of the text in preaching. Our preaching must be “public hermeneutics” ( Richard L. Holland. “Progressional Dialogue and Preaching: Are They The Same?” The Master’s Seminary.17/2 (Fall 2006) 207).

“Walter Kaiser, a leading evangelical scholar, issued a simple but striking statement in his commencement address at Dallas Theological Seminary in April 2000….When a man preaches, he should never remove his finger from the Scriptures, Kaiser affirmed. If he is gesturing with his right hand, he should keep his left hand’s finger on the text. If he reverses hands for gesturing, then he should also reverse hands for holding his spot in the text. He should always be pointing to the Scriptures” (Steven J. Lawson, The Pattern of Biblical Preaching: An Expository Study of Ezra 7:10 and Nehemiah 8:1-18, Bibliotheca Sacra 158 October-December 2001: 451).

While Kaiser spoke metaphorically of the importance of keeping the text central, many in EC have their finger on the pulse of their community and are preaching thus says my community. Preach is the Word is the divine imperative.

An Expose of Emerging Church Preaching, Part 4

Posted: November 20, 2009 in Emerging Church, Homiletics/Preaching
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What unifies the doctrinally divergent EC is the passion to impact culture. This passion is driven, in part, by the philosophy of liberal postmillennialism where the church will build the Kingdom of God which is followed by the return of Christ. The premillennial view of Christ’s return is that Christ will return and establish the culture altering Kingdom, not the church.

Tony Jones after poking fun of pretribulational rapturists like Tim LaHaye who say “when things ‘down here’ become bad enough, Jesus will return in glory.’ But those of us represented in this book take the contrary view. God’s promised future is good, and it awaits us, beckoning us forward. We’re caught in the tractor beam of redemption and re-creation, and there’s no sense fighting it, so we might as well cooperate” (Tony Jones. An Emergent Manifesto of Hope. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007, 130).

The mandate of the church is not to impact culture but to “make disciples” in Matthew 28:19-20 by winning people to Christ, baptizing them, and teaching God’s Word. Will fulfilling the Great Commission impact culture? The answer is that culture will to some degree be impacted by fulfilling the Great Commission. Historically this has been the case. One of the most colorful of all preachers was Billy Sunday. Sunday’s most famous sermon was “Booze” and the common result of Sunday’s city wide campaigns was the closing of saloons (Robert A. Allen. Billy Sunday Home Run to Heaven (Milford: Mott Media, 1985), 87).

His preaching impacted culture. But the church’s commission is not to impact the culture.

When impacting the culture drives a church, however, then there is the potential for what has happened in the EC: Culture impacts the church. For example and in contrast to Billy Sunday, EC preacher Mark Driscoll (though to his credit, he has distanced himself from the EC) endorses Protestant Pubs: “I personally long to return to the glory days of Christian pubs, where God’s men gather to drink beer and talk theology” (Mark Driscoll. The Radical Reformission. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004, 147).

Mark Driscoll encourages his men to brew their own beer. According to Driscoll, it is not a sin to drink but it is a sin to drink light beer (Driscoll, 139).

Part of Driscoll’s leadership training of the young men in Seattle includes “how to study the Bible, get a job, invest money, buy a home, court a woman, brew beer, have good sex, and be a pastor-dad to their children” (Driscoll, 184).

It has been claimed that Sigmund Freud enjoyed telling his followers a story of a pastor who visited an atheist insurance agent who was on his death bed. The family had asked the pastor to share the gospel with their dying loved one as they waited in another room. As the conversation continued longer than expected there was hope that the pastor was being successful in his mission. When the pastor finally emerged from the bedroom it was discovered that the agent had not converted to Christ but he had been able to sell the pastor an insurance policy.

Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Seminary, after providing this example applied it to our discussion. “In rejecting the very real defects of fundamentalism during the past few decades, evangelicals have begun to take very seriously their responsibilities to the larger culture – and with some obvious signs of success. The questions we must face honestly are these: Have we sold a new policy to the culture – or has the culture sold us a policy” (Richard J. Mouw, The Smell of Sawdust (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), p. 64, quoted in Gary E. Gilley, “The Kingdom of Emergent Theology-Part 1” http://www.svchapel.org/Resources/articles/read­_articles.asp?ID=139).

The verdict is in: Culture has sold the EC a policy. McLaren has the philosophy of the liberal postmillennialists who sees the goal of the church to impact the globe. McLaren has contextualized the message of the gospel as well as the lifestyle of Christianity. McLaren’s gospel is social.

“African and African American Christians (Black theology) and Latin American Christians (liberation theology, integral missiology) have been hitting these themes with intelligence and passion for decades, but few of us listened to their spokespeople, whether it was Dr. King or Desmond Tutu, Gustavo Gutierrez or Rene Padilla. Eco-feminist theology—articulated by authors like Sallie McFague and Mary Grey….In many ways all of these voices echo what earlier Christian leaders (from Charles Finney to Walter Rauschenbusch…had been saying: the modern Western understanding of the gospel was too often truncated, shallow, thin, bland, anemic, privatized, personalized, polarized, and compromised” ( Brian McLaren. An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, Church Emerging: Or Why I Still Use the Word Postmodern but with Mixed Feeling. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007, 147-148).

While Driscoll exposes the heresy of the McLarens, he states, “we must help cultivate a kingdom counterculture where we live” (Driscoll, 170) and “we seek to build our kingdom culture” (Driscoll,184).

Culture is mostly neutral and not worldly for Driscoll. Many aspects of culture can be used in building the kingdom culture, according to Driscoll. Consequently, culture has impacted his ministry.

In my next post I will state the views of John McArthur and Tim Challies concerning the impact of culture on Driscoll and his ministry.

An Expose of Emerging Church Preaching, Part 3

Posted: November 18, 2009 in Emerging Church, Homiletics/Preaching
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Postmodernism’s Impact on the Style of EC Preaching

Postmodernism’s low view of Scripture is a driving force in Doug Pagitt’s Preaching Re-Imagined: The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith. Speaching is what Pagitt derisively calls historic preaching by the pastor. Pagitt admits candidly: “Preaching doesn’t work—at least not in the ways we hope… preaching, as we know it, is a tragically broken endeavor… great preaching isn’t sufficient.”[1]

The first style change for Pagitt is a shift from one pastor teaching God’s Word with authorial intent to members sharing multiple interpretations. Speaching, according to Pagitt, is modernistic because it is characterized by absolute truth and authorial intent i.e., one interpretation. The effect of deconstruction is heard in Pagitt’s alternative view to preaching which he calls progressional dialogue: “Progressional dialogue (hereafter PD), on the other hand, involves the intentional interplay of multiple viewpoints that leads to unexpected and unforeseen ideas.”[2]

Pagitt’s alternative, PD, is interactive with the community of God. The alternative is a direct result of Pagitt’s inferior view of Scripture. PD is interaction with the community who possesses just as much of the Word as does the Bible we hold in our hand. [3] Pagitt writes that “progressional dialogue creates a relationship in which the Bible becomes a living member of the community…. When this happens, the Bible becomes part of our conversation, not a dead book from which I extract truth.”[4]  So if Pagitt preaches in the traditional way, the Bible is a dead book, but if the community dialogues then the Bible is a living Book. The writer of Hebrews would adamantly disagree (Heb 4:12).

The result of these communal sermons is multiple views of Scripture. The Bible is only one member of the community contributing to the dialogue in Pagitt’s view.  One man proclaiming God’s Word is arrogant and too authoritative.[5] Driscoll, who disagrees with Pagitt, offers this refutation: “This makes about as much sense as shooting your doctor and gathering with the other patients in his lobby to speculate about what is wrong with one another and randomly write out prescriptions for one another in the name of equality.”[6]  This is directly opposed to Paul, who commanded as one of the required 16 qualifications to be a pastor in 1st Timothy 3:1-7 was to be “apt to teach.” See Michael Duduit’s interview with Pagitt.

The second style change for Pagitt is a move from the text being central in the sermon to experiences and stories being central. Not only are multiple views of Scripture proclaimed in a service by multiple members but by Pagitt’s admission another element of these dialogues is not the text as with historic preaching but the experiences of the community. “So our sermons are not lessons that precisely define belief so much as they are stories that welcome our hopes and ideas and participation.”[7] The center piece of preaching, according to the imperative in 2 Tim 4:2, is “the Word” not the experiences of people: “Preach the Word…reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.” Paul follows hard the command with the reason for this burning concentration of preaching on God’s Word: “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears.” That prophesy is being fulfilled today in some groups of the EC.

Why does Pagitt reject the style of historic preaching? In part because of his postmodern deconstruction of the history of preaching. Another anti-preaching argument by Pagitt is that speaching or historic preaching is just another adverse result of the EC’s boogeyman, the Enlightenment. Pagitt, the revisionist, rewrites the history of preaching: “In reality speaching is quite new, a creation of Enlightenment Christianity in which faith formation was understood as something best handled by the ‘expert’ (aka the pastor).”[8] John Calvin is just one glaring refutation to Pagitt’s undocumented arguments. Calvin was committed to verse by verse expository preaching through books of the Bible as documented by Steven J. Lawson in The Expository Genius of John Calvin, Orlando, Reformation Trust, 2007, 16 (See review in Unashamed Workmen).

Because the church and state were not separate, and Calvin had elders who were also city council members, who could overrule the decisions of the church, Calvin faced unique battles as a pastor.

The Libertines, boasted in sinful licentiousness. Sexual immorality was permissible, they claimed, arguing that the ‘communion of the saint’ meant that their bodies should be joined to the wives of others. The Libertines openly practiced adultery and yet desired to come to the Lord’s Table.

But Calvin would have none of it. In an epic encounter, Philibert Berthelier, a prominent Libertine, was excommunicated because of his known sexual promiscuity. Consequently, he was forbidden from partaking of the Lord’s Supper. Through the underhanded influence of the Libertines, the City Council overrode the church’s decision, and Berthelier and his associates came to church to take the Lord’s Supper with swords drawn, ready to fight. With bold audacity, Calvin descended from the pulpit, stood in front of the Communion table, and said, ‘These hands you may crush, these arms you may lop off, my life you may take, my blood is yours, you may shed it; but you shall never force me to give holy things to the profaned and dishonor the table of my God.’ Berthelier and the Libertines withdrew, no match for such unflinching convictions.

Eventually, Calvin was banished from Geneva for three years (1538-1541) because of his refusal to allow the spiritually unqualified to partake of the Lord’s Table. Finally, the struggling city of Geneva invited Calvin to return. On September 13, 1541, Calvin returned after his three year banishment. He entered his old pulpit and began, “I will begin my exposition by reading our text for the morning…” and he announced the verses following the exact place he had left off three years before. Calvin started preaching on the next verse.

Preaching God’s Word is a priority of the church (2 Tim. 4:1-6). Preaching God’s Word is the ministry of God-called men whom God equips to be “apt to teach.” This is not a qualification of every member of the church, not even the deacons. But “apt to teach” which is synonymous with preaching the Word in the context of 1 Tim 3:1-7 is one of the primary responsibilities of the pastor.

[1] Doug Pagitt. Preaching Re-Imagined (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 18-19.

[2] Ibid., 52.

[3] Pagitt once again reminds us of Barth’s view, but this time in regard to preaching. Barth quotes approvingly of Luther’s view that when the preacher preaches, he is speaking God’s Word. In other words, the preacher is not simply preaching God’s infallible Word, with which we would agree, but that what the preacher says is God’s infallible Word: “Therefore, we do well to call the pastor’s and preacher’s word which he preacheth, God’s Word. For the office is not the pastor’s or preacher’s, but God’s; and the Word which he preacheth is likewise not the pastor’s or preacher’s, but God’s” Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics. 107. Again what is true with the individual, this time the preacher, in Neo-orthodoxy, is true with the community in the Emerging church.

[4] Pagitt, 218.

[5] Ibid., 123.

[6] Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformation, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 173.

[7] Doug Pagitt. Church Re- Imagined: The Spiritual Formation of People in Communities of Fatih. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005) 166.

[8] Pagitt, Preaching Re-Imaged. 28,60,113.

An Expose of Emerging Church Preaching, Part 2

Posted: November 17, 2009 in Emerging Church, Homiletics/Preaching
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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.

An Expose of Emerging Church Preaching, Part 1

Posted: November 16, 2009 in Emerging Church, Homiletics/Preaching
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In the following posts, I want to explore the current doctrinal and practical impact of the emerging church on preaching.

With some humor, hyperbole, and much accuracy, the authors of Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be) provide a detection list for Emergents (See Tim Challies’ review). Notice this list begins and ends with references to preaching:

You might be an emergent Christian: if you listen to U2, Moby, and Johnny Cash’s Hurt (sometimes in church), use sermon illustrations from The Sopranos, drink lattes in the afternoon and Guinness in the evenings, and always use a Mac; if your reading list consists primarily of Stanley Hauerwas, N.T.Wright, Stan Grenz…(not to mention McLaren, Pagitt, Bell, etc.) and your sparring partners include D. A. Carson, John Calvin, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Wayne Grudem;…if your political concerns are poverty, AIDS, imperialism, war-mongering, CEO salaries, consumerism, global warming, racism, and oppression and not so much abortion and gay marriage;…if you love the Bible as a beautiful, inspiring collection of works that lead us into the mystery of God but is not inerrant; if you search for truth but aren’t sure it can be found;… if you believe who goes to hell is no one’s business and no one may be there anyway; if you believe salvation has little to do with atoning for guilt and a lot to do with bringing the whole creation back into shalom with its Maker; if you believe following Jesus is not believing right things but living the right way;…if you disdain monological, didactic preaching; if you use the “story” in all your propositions about postmodernism… then you might be an emergent Christian. [1]

The current impact of the Emerging church (hereafter EC) is seen in the preachers of the EC who have large churches, best sellers, and high profiles in American Christianity. Brian McLaren is a prolific writer. He was listed among “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America” Time, 7 Feb 2005.  Another prominent name in the emergent movement is Rob Bell. He is the founding pastor of Mars Hill in Grand Rapids which was started in 1999. 10,000 people attend his church weekly. Bell is also the creator of the widely viewed Nooma movies. Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill in Seattle, Washington and co-founder of Acts 29 Network, also played a part in the initial discussions of the movement. Driscoll, who reveals the theological diversity of the EC, now is exposing many of the doctrinal errors of the left wing of the EC that he refers to as the Revisionists. Over 6000 attend Mars Hill on Sundays and 100,000 download his sermons weekly. While the EC preachers enjoy mega popularity and connect to our postmodern audiences, the Biblical content, style, and effect of their overhauled preaching is adversely altered by postmodernism’s rejection of absolute truth.

Postmodernism’s Impact on the EC beginning

The term “emerging” was first used by Leadership Network (hereafter LN) based in Dallas. LN hired Doug Pagitt to find the next generation of leaders and hosted a gathering in 1997 in Colorado Springs called Gen X 1.0 to discuss why the youth were leaving the church. The popular idea at the time was that the problem was generational. The generational advocates said that Busters think differently from Boomers and decided to attract young people by making church cool. Brad Cecil, an evangelical pastor from Texas, who had been researching postmodernism and listening to men like the French Father of Deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida, attended the meeting and argued the reason the church was losing young people was epistemological and not generational. Brad Cecil diagramed on a white board a mega shift that was occurring in epistemology:

Pre-modernism            Modernism (1550-1945)        Post-modernism

Absolutes are known           Absolutes are known                    There are no   

through God’s written         through reason as in                      absolutes

revelation and reason         Rationalism or Empiricism

The ultimate outcome of that pivotal meeting was the EC. To minister to those caught in the mega shift of postmodernism there must a mega shift in church ministry. The result is the Emerging Church’s new ecclesiology.

In the 1997, a second conference (Gen X 2.0) met at Mount Hermon, CA on how the church can reach “Gen X” or the postmodern generation. Mark Driscoll agreed with Cecil that “Gen X” was different from the Boomer, Seeker, and Traditionalist churches and spoke on how to minister to the church that was in transition from modern to postmodern.[2]

The Three Periods of Epistemology

The Emerging church sees a paradigm shift from modern to postmodern epistemology. Epistemology is the “philosophical inquiry into the nature, sources, limits and methods of gaining knowledge”[3] and has gone through three major phases. We will briefly survey the three major phases of epistemology, pre-modern, modern, and postmodern.

Pre-modern Epistemology

Pre-modern or the Judeo-Christian epistemology existed for two millennia before the Enlightenment with Western theologians’ and philosophers’ belief in absolute, universal truths. The foundation for pre-modern epistemology was God’s written Word and philosophy. There developed an emphasis on reason with Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Aquinas believed the Fall did not so adversely affect the reason of man that he could not through rational arguments (Aquinas’ theistic arguments for God’s existence) know truth apart from God’s written truth. In the modern or the second phase of epistemology, thinkers would take Aquinas’ view to the extreme of totally abandoning the need for God’s written Word to know truth.

Modern Epistemology

Modern epistemology or the Enlightenment prevailed during the 17th century to roughly the mid 20th century. While the foundation for pre-modern epistemology was God’s written revelation and or objective truth, the foundation for modern epistemology was reason (rationalism) or experience (empiricism) that could discover God or at least truth for those who rejected the existence of God. Thinkers like David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche took Aquinas’ rationalization to exclude God’s written revelation.  These men were precursors for the postmodern epistemology rejection of absolute truth in the form of language being the barrier to reality.[4]

Postmodern Epistemology

Postmodernism rejects foundationalism. There is no absolute knowledge in postmodernism. In postmodernism truth is discovered, not individually, but in the language of each community.[5] “There are as many worlds as there are communities and languages. There is at least one Christian world, as well as a Muslim world, a Buddhist one, a Hindu one, a secularist one, a Mormon one, and many, many others.”[6] This secular postmodern community view of truth has morphed into an evangelical postmodern view in the left wing of the EC.

The following posts will discuss postmodernism’s impact on three areas of  Emerginng Church preaching: Content, Style, and Effect.

[1] Kevin Deyoung and Ted Kluck. Why We’re Not Emergent. (Chicago: Moody, 2008), 20-22.

[2] Darrin Patrick, “History of the Emerging Church,” October 22, 2007. http://www. journeyon.net/sermn/session-one-the-histroy-and-streams-of-the-emerging-church. Accessed December 20, 2009.

3 Stanley J. Grenz, David Guretzki & Cherith Fee Nordling. Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1999), 45.

[4] David Hume (1711-1776) was a empiricist, who believed truth was discovered through the five senses, which excluded God since God could not be seen or experienced through the senses. Hume said we could not know the “real” world because we are “trapped” behind our sense experiences of sight, smells, and sounds. Things in our everyday existence “like chairs, tables, and even other people are projections of the mind.” Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) “attempted to answer Hume’s empiricism in order to defend rationalism….Kant’s attempted answer becomes an important precursor to current postmodern ideas. …We cannot know objective reality (what he would call the noumena); we only know how it appears to us (the phenomena).” Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was the first one to introduce the idea that language somehow is involved in the process of how we know the world” Scott Smith, Truth and the New Kind of Christian (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005), 28-30.

[5] Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) make the transition from our senses being the barrier to reality to language being the obstacle that stands between us and objective reality. “No longer was it thought that we are ‘stuck’ behind our experiences and cannot get ‘outside’ to the real world. Instead, they developed the idea that we are on the ‘inside’ of language and cannot know reality.…This shift in emphasis in philosophy from experience to language is what is called the linguistic turn, and it marks a turn toward postmodern thought” Ibid., 30.

 [6] Ibid., 31.

The Emerging Church’s Rejection of the Substitutionary Death of Christ

Posted: April 1, 2009 in Emerging Church
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The Scriptures teach the doctrine of the substitutionary death of Christ (1 Peter 2:21-24). Isaiah 53 also predicts the penal substitutionary death of Christ. Paul in Romans 8:3 teaches the penal atonement: “God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” The Emerging leaders, however, have a very different opinion.

“That just sounds like one more injustice in the cosmic equation. It sounds like divine child abuse. You know” (Brian McLaren, The Story We Find Ourselves In, page 102).

“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, pages 48-49).

Here is another emergent preacher’s scorn cast on the cross work of Christ whose book McLaren endorsed. It was in The Lost Message of Jesus that Steve Chalke wrote, “The cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse—a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that, however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement: God is love. If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus’ own teaching to love our enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil” (Steve Chalke and Alan Mann, The Lost Message of Jesus, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003, 182-183).

Steve needs to read 1 John 4:10 where propitiation is the result of God’s love: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

Spencer Burke, creator of theooze.com and author of A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity rejects major doctrines such as exclusivism, Hell, and the substitutionary death of Christ. “Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?” A better approach is to see Jesus as “the model of sinless living, the ultimate example to which all humanity should aspire” (Spencer Burke and Barry Taylor, A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006, ix, x).

Apparently saints in Heaven have a different prescriptive on the penal atonement when they fall at the feet of Christ and worship Him in Rev. 5:9 as the “who has redeemed us to God by thy blood.”

“In light of the fact that Paul and John (and probably the author of Hebrews as well) expressly represent it as a propitiating work, it is important to recognize that Christ’s cross work had a Godward reference. The Bible plainly teaches the doctrine of the wrath of God. It teaches that God is angry with the sinner, and that this holy outrage against the sinner must be assuaged if the sinner is to escape his due punishment. It is for this reason that a death occurred at Calvary. When we look at Calvary and behold the Savior dying for us, we should see in his death not first our salvation but our damnation being borne and carried away by him” (Robert Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of The Christian Faith, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998, page 639)!

N. T. Wright is probably the most prominent and influential of the New Perspective theologians. Nicholas Thomas Wright is a British New Testament scholar and the Anglican Bishop of Durham, England.

For that reason, John Piper wrote an entire book, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright, exposing the errors of the New Perspective on Paul.

There is a connection between the New Perspective on Paul and the Emerging church. The Emerging church leaders have read the New Perspective on Paul theologians. For example, Emerging church leader in England, Steve Chalke, has read N. T. Wright. N. T. Wright admits that Steve Chalke, in his controversial book, The Lost Message of Jesus, where Chalke denies the propitiation of Christ, “embarrassingly at times—the book follows quite closely several of the lines of thought I have myself advanced, though giving them a good deal more energy through shrewd use of anecdote and illustration” (N. T. Wright in a 2007 Internet post quoted by Piper on page 49 in The Future of Justification). What is ironic is that N. T. Wright has written strongly in favor of the propitiation of Christ. Here is a sample:
“The idea of punishment as part of atonement is itself deeply controversial; horrified rejection of the mere suggestion has led on the part of some to an unwillingness to discern any reference to Isaiah 40-55 in Paul. But it is exactly that idea that Paul states, clearly and unambiguously, in Romans 8:3, when he says that God ‘condemned sin in the flesh’—i.e. the flesh of Jesus. Dealing with wrath or punishment is propitiation; with sin, expiation. You propitiate a person who is angry, you expiate a sin, crime” (N. T. Wright, The Letter to the Romans, 475-476).

John Piper makes this appraisal of further comments that Wright makes on the same page that seems to contradict his other statements about penal substitution. “In view of this assertion that God propitiated the anger of God, it is mystifying that Wright would construct the following sentence in this context: ‘It should go without saying that this in no way implies, what the start of the verse has already ruled out, that God is an angry malevolent tyrant who demands someone’s death, or someone’s blood, and is indifferent as to whose it is’ (The Letter to the Romans, 476).”

Piper responds to Wright’s mystifying statement. “What is subtle and misleading about this sentence is that it starts with the denial of pejorative things about God and then ends up denying, with no distinction, things that Wright himself has affirmed. The sentence is written in such a way as to make Wright’s own true view almost unrecognizable. What is to be denied and what is not? Is God angry: Yes. Is he malevolent: No. Is he a tyrant? No (too many false connotations), but he is certainly totally in charge. Does he demand someone’s death? Yes. Blood? Yes. Is he indifferent as to whose it is? No. This is not a helpful way to explain what one thinks. It seems to me that he undercuts with this sentence the force of what he has spent great effort defending from the text of Romans” (John Piper, The Future of Justification, 52).

Emerging Church and Inclusivism

Posted: January 1, 2009 in Emerging Church
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The truth of salvation which determines a person’s eternal destiny is too serious to get wrong. Yet many in the Emerging church are wrong on the doctrine of salvation.

People in the Emerging church are all over the map when it comes to soteriology (the doctine of salvation), as the following two examples show: Spencer Burke and Brian McLaren.

Spencer Burke in his A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity wrote “Could it be that—beyond religion, reason, and conventional wisdom—grace is something to be opted out of rather than opted in to? Is it not something you get but something you already have? When I say I’m a universalist, what I really mean is that I don’t believe you have to convert to any particular religion to find God. As I see it, God finds us, and it has nothing to do with subscribing to any particular religious view.The God I connect with does not assign humans to hell” (page 52, 184-185, 197, 199).

Scott McKnight properly evaluates the Emerging church’s varying views on salvation.

“Some emerging Christians point to the words of Jesus: ‘Whoever is not against us is for us’ (Mark 9:40). Others, borrowing the words of the old hymn, point to a ‘wideness in God’s mercy.’ Still others take postmodernity’s crushing of meta-narratives and extend that to master theological narratives—like Christianity. They say what really matters is orthopraxy and that it doesn’t matter what religion one belongs to, as long as one loves God and one’s neighbor as one’s self. Some even accept Spencer Burke’s unbiblical contention in A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity (Jossey-Ball, 2006) that all are born ‘in’ and only some ‘opt out.’ McKnight rejects this inclusivism” (Five Streams of Emerging Church, Christianity Today, Dec. 31, 2008).

Brian McLaren holds a similar view of inclusivism.

“I don’t believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many (not all!) circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish contexts … rather than resolving the paradox via pronouncements on the eternal destiny of people more convinced by or loyal to other religions than ours, we simply move on .… To help Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and everyone else experience life to the full in the way of Jesus (while learning it better myself), I would gladly become one of them (whoever they are), to whatever degree I can, to embrace them, to join them, to enter into their world without judgment but with saving love as mine has been entered by the Lord (A Generous Orthodoxy, 260, 262, 264).

Both Burke and McLaren totally repudiate Jesus’ claim to be the exclusive “way, the truth, and the life.”