Everybody, please explain Emergent Church Theology to me because it seems thoroughly postmodern. Thanks.
I'm a premodernist. From what lille I know about postmodernism, I probably disagree with most postmodern beliefs, especially what you'll hear from Derrida, Feyerabend, Lyotard, Foucoult, and Rorty, since those five scholars seem to hold extreme opinions.Oh, there are still modernists out there. Look at the New Atheists.
As far as I can see, it's fairly standard mainline Christianity, reinvented by people from the evangelical Church..... trying to take worship and devotional practices from traditional Christianity, and using both a social Gospel and evangelical commitment to a personal relationship with Christ and Bible-centered piety.
My EC friend cares a lot about friendship, love, and being community member. He belongs to a Catholic congregation when he visits his family and to an EC one where he lives now. That worries me because he seems to think that community membership may be even more important than truth.I think that's insightful, although most Emergents seem less influenced by Liberalism of the 19th century, and more influenced by postmodernism and evangelical pietism.
If everyone in the emergent movement is Protestant, maybe my friend only thinks that he's a member of it.
Then I wonder what Christians of other times thin Our Lord mean when He says that He's the way, the truth, and the life. Salvation depends on what we believe, doesn't it? Community is essential, I believe, but even a hermit can go to Heaven.Emergents are post-Protestant, overall.
A big theme in the Emergent movement is narrative rather than propositional truth. And the Christian narrative is one about community, so it makes sense for emergent to focus on community above theology.
Your perception that truth is more important than community is very much a product of your particular culture and time- Christians in other times wouldn't have seen it that way, they would have seen community as embodying truth.
By embodying truth, I mean that emergent put a great stress on living out what they believe, their practice is their doctrine.
^^ THISThere is no such thing as an "Emergent Church Theology" because the whole concept of the "emergent church" is a decentralized hodge-podge of ideas and opinions of people coming out of the modern Evangelical landscape largely disenfranchised by it and attempting to re-discover a meaningful way to be a Christian. And largely that is done by looking to Christianity's historic past. And thus in a lot of ways what many "emergents" are doing is re-investigating the traditional faith. A lot of what various emergent people come to believe and understand about Christianity is largely what most mainline and traditional churches have always believed. As such it shouldn't be surprising that the "emergent" movement has in many cases acted as a kind of transition between Evangelicalism and Mainline Christianity.
I remember dipping my toes into that pond before taking the Lutheran plunge.
But the whole concept of the "Emergent Church" has no centralized idea, there's not really a "Theology" behind it. It largely a lot of various people who feel something is wrong or missing in Evangelicalism and want to know what that something is.
Some folks who are "emergent" are "out there", others aren't. Many have very valid points worth listening to. So trying to herd them all together into one monolithic group called "the Emergent Church" is faulty.
And so while I won't and can't defend the whole Emergent movement, I do think it's important to point out what it is and what it isn't. What it isn't is an organized movement, a group, an organization, or a body of systematic theology. What it is consists of a lot of different people who may describe themselves as "Post-Evangelical" Evangelicals, and the theological influences on these people are diverse, Augustine, Origen, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, Hans Urs von Balthasar, etc. So at the very least the theologians often being listened to have serious theological street cred.
-CryptoLutheran