Emergent Church Theology

MKJ

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I think it probably has to be understood as something that comes after a church which has been influenced by modernism, perhaps overly influenced. I'm no fan of the emergent church movement, but I think it is worth considering why it looks for different solutions.
 
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hedrick

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As far as I can see, it's fairly standard mainline Christianity, reinvented by people from the evangelical Church. It is typically uses the results of historical Jesus scholarship, tends to deemphasize detailed metaphysical doctrines (i.e. holds to the trinity and incarnation but not necessarily the description using natures and persons), and sees Scripture as having been produced by humans describing their experience with God. It tends to be eclectic, 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.

Everybody today is postmodern. So it's hard to know exactly what (if anything) is meant by calling it postmodern.
 
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Bill McEnaney

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Oh, there are still modernists out there. Look at the New Atheists.
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.

My professor of undergraduate Philosophy of Science, who graded papers for Feyerabend, told our class that Feyerabend was a relativist about truth. Then, after I asked Professor Murphy why he wrote books to argue for philosophical theories, she told us that he wrote them because he liked to earn money.
 
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FireDragon76

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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.

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.
 
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Bill McEnaney

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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.
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.

Since we haven't talked about postmodernism, I don't know whether he believes much of it. Postmodernists make some important points. But from what I can tell, postmodernism is too pessimistic about our ability to get knowledge and too relativistic.
 
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Shane R

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The emergent church movement is not very interested in theology, since theology is the contemplation of what it is to be God. The primary emphasis of the emergent movement is social, living in community and building up the community outside of the church. The typical conversation is about friendship. Another calling-card is church without boundaries, meaning that one may be emergent within the confines of any Protestant denomination or house church arrangement; I say Protestant because the movement is clearly an evolution of contemporary Evangelical thought.

A bargain bin book which discusses all of this repetitively is An Emergent Manifesto of Hope.
 
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FireDragon76

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If everyone in the emergent movement is Protestant, maybe my friend only thinks that he's a member of it.

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.
 
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Bill McEnaney

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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.
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.

I know that narrative is a big theme in the Emergent movement, a theme that assumes that there's propositional truth. Narratives are, after all,composed of propositions, declarative sentences that represent them, or both. Even if there are no propositions, there still are truth bearers. Without them, no one could know anything.

Postmodernists, I'm sure, wouldn't deconstruct what medical books say. But suppose a surgeon did that. I hire him to remove my gangrenous left leg. After the operation, I discover that, although I still have both legs, he amputated my left arm. What should he reply when I complain that I'm going to sue him for malpractice because he operated on the wrong limb? Will he tell me, "I'm sorry, sir. What from your perspective, I've cut off your left arm. From mine, perspective, I've amputated your left leg." If postmodernists are realists about medical truth and antirealists about theological truth, they're applying a double standard, aren't they?

I have almost no sympathy for postmodernism, partly because most of my philosophy professors rejected it. But postmodernists do make some good points, though, for example that there's no assumption-free philosophy. They're right to tell me that everyone interprets things from some perspective or other. Still, I think they're wrong if they believe that our beliefs can't conform to objective reality or that we can't know how things actually are in the world. Denying that our beliefs can conform to actual sets of circumstances is like implying that, although our beliefs can't conform to objective reality, the belief that they can't do that does conform to it.

By the way, I'm not conflating postmodernism and deconstructionism.

This article is excellent and relevant to what we're talking about.

Repost: The City of Man | The Orthosphere
 
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ViaCrucis

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There 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
 
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Bill McEnaney

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The Emergent Church members deserve credit because they study history, and a Lutheran friend of mine knows Patristics better than I ever will. Maybe I need to get to know many more evangelicals to learn much more than I know now. My friend's pastor sounds like a wise, deeply thoughtful man. But the EC movement is too, too eclectic for me.
 
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Bill McEnaney

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What does "embodying truth" mean?

I didn't need to write what I wrote about the deconstructionist surgeon and propositional truth, since FireDragon's post doesn't even hint that EC people reject propositional truth. So maybe my disdain for postmodernism explains why I wrote impulsively. Sorry.
 
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FireDragon76

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Sorry I never responded... By embodying truth, I mean that emergent put a great stress on living out what they believe, their practice is their doctrine.

Personally I believe a lot of Emergents could be much more faithful channeling their energy into mainline churches. I believe the weakness in the movement is the hubris of many young people that think they've discovered some new way to be Christian. They really have not. It's the same sort of stuff that state churches and mainline churches have been doing for centuries, only its less sexy.
 
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dms1972

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By embodying truth, I mean that emergent put a great stress on living out what they believe, their practice is their doctrine.

In some ways they are right, protestant christianity became bog down with doctrinal correctness and precision. If you could profess the doctrine - you passed mustard. Love was talked about but rarely practiced. Some thought the only thing that mattered was taking a stand on important doctrines. Emergents have erred to varying degrees in the opposite direction.

Some people such as Dallas Willard get tagged as "emergent" because there is some overlap in their teaching with emergent christianity.
 
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ToBeLoved

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There 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
^^ THIS

There is no rhyme or reason, it is people trying to mix the culture of today into what they think the church should be today.
 
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