The Emergent theology: Voices of confusion (Part 2 of 2)

The Emergent theology

As indicated in Part 1 of this series (March 2010), many Christians assume the Emergent church is about new forms of worship, and pay little attention to Emergent theology. The reality, however, is different. The Emergents are about changing Christian theology. Brad Cecil argued in 1997 that the Emergent church was not about the generational gap and a new style of worship, but “It’s about theology.”¹ Richard Rohr, the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, moves a step further: in order to understand the big questions and concepts like love, forgiveness, suffering, death, and grace, Christians need new “software,” that is, a new way of thinking.²

The Emergent conversation provides a forum to challenge certain doctrines that do not necessarily withstand biblical scrutiny. For example, I, like the Emergents, also question the doctrine of the eternal suffering in the fires of hell. Yet, I find the Emergent theology disturbing for several reasons. For one, the Emergent theology is becoming less Christ-centered and more Spirit-centered.³ Second, Emergent theology is shaped and formulated more by personal and cultural experience, and less by the revealed Word of God. The gospel is being adapted to cultural context and downplayed into a mere good news of God’s inexhaustible love. Next, the Emergent theology increasingly—as it continues to emerge—incorporates Eastern notions of reality and spirituality.

Emergents who have emerged ahead far more than others, Brian McLaren and Richard Rohr for example, insist on the “both/and” paradigm of thinking that is supposed to teach people to stop being divisive, critical, and judgmental. Rohr does not apologize about telling Christians they need to learn to think contemplatively. He promotes an Eastern monistic mind-set.⁴ On the contrary, I find Christianity to be a rational approach to life and spiritual issues. God invites people to come before Him and reason together with Him (see Isa. 1:18). Paul advises young Timothy to correctly handle the word of truth (see 2 Tim. 2:15). John instructs his readers to test the spirits in order to find out whether the spirit(s) in question is from God or not (see 1 John 4:1).

The Emergent spirituality

Innovations in the Emergent worship-like spiritual exercises are introduced to induce spirituality. “Spiritual” or “spirituality” is probably the most favorite concept among the Emergents, directly contrasted to “religious” or “religiosity.” Common sense expects religiosity and spirituality to go hand in hand. So, why do Emergents contrast the two? Spirituality, rather than religiosity, I surmise, means to attract newcomers, estrange the same from the mother base, and then convert them into the new Emergent Christianity.

What characterizes the Emergent theology is its emphasis on catholicity, orthodoxy, and “embodied theology.” The last point is important. The “embodied theology” says that the Spirit present in the Emergent community shapes and formulates Christian theology. To be spiritual means to have a spiritual experience. If community members would have such experiences, that would indeed indicate the presence of the Spirit in the community. In other words, what manifests in the lives of the community members is the work of the Spirit. Hence, an Emergent would feel free to write, “God speaks to us out of our own culture and the stuff of our own lives, no less so than God speaks to us in the canon of Holy Scripture.”⁵ Hence, Bruce Sanguin, an author and minister, says that when he presides “at the wedding of a gay or lesbian couple,” he can “experience it as the ‘new thing’ God is doing in our day and age.”⁶

The “embodied theology” emerges when each member brings to the meeting their own story, their own theological understanding of a biblical text. Out of these individual insights, the “big story” of God emerges. Therefore, the work of the Spirit, embodied in the community, equals, or in some cases, supersedes the written Word of God.⁷

The Emergents claim that the Bible alone does not provide a sufficient guide for contemporary living, and that there is more to divine authority than what the Bible alone offers.⁸ It is not uncommon to read, “Sola scriptura also tends to downplay the role of God’s Spirit in shaping the direction of the church.”⁹ This shift of the repository of spiritual authority from the biblical text to the Spirit becomes problematic. It encourages the masses to rely on subjective experience rather than on the objective and reliable Written Word.

In the physical absence of Jesus Christ, the Bible remains the most reliable spiritual guide. According to Jesus (John 14), the task of the Holy Spirit is to lead people into a deeper understanding of the Truth, that is, the work of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the Written Word of God. The Holy Spirit speaks for and testifies about Jesus Christ, the incarnate Creator God. The intention of the Holy Spirit is not to draw sinners to self but to lead them to Jesus Christ. “Test the spirits to see whether they are from God,” says the apostle John, “because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1, NIV). The Emergents forget one simple but essential point of the gospel and biblical Christianity—it really is all about Jesus Christ, not about us.

The concept of emerging and the kingdom of God

The often-used metaphor about the Emergent church is the budding growth on a forest floor. According to Jones, the movement emerged in the 1990s, spontaneously, so to speak. “A new church is emerging from the compost of Christendom.”¹⁰ The public also came to believe that this “emerging” started in the 1990s. I have, however, come across works that called for and disseminated the idea of a new emerging church as far back as the 1970s.¹¹ In fact, as early as the 1960s, some Christian leaders recognized that Christianity at all levels, in academia, ecclesia, and the public, was undergoing fundamental changes and new approaches were necessary to recapture the attention of the masses.¹²

The idea of Christianity “emerging” through time is directly linked with their understanding of what the kingdom of God is and when it will be fully realized. The theme of the kingdom of God, as central to the Emerging church, places much emphasis on joining God’s “community,” here and now.¹³ A lot of emphasis is also placed on channeling church and personal resources to the making of the kingdom of God here and now—a good and well-intended idea that sounds Christian. Moreover, the making of the kingdom of God is primarily the work of Jesus Christ Himself. The Holy Spirit leads people back t o Jesus Christ, the Savior of humanity and King of kings. Second, the final realization of God’s kingdom necessitates, first of all, the actual and final destruction of evil and sin from the universe—an event that has yet t o take place. A final destruction of evil and sin, that is, of Satan, his demons, and unrepentant sinners, to take place soon is not a pleasant theme for the Emergents.

To find a discussion of the need to abandon sin and a sinful lifestyle in order to enter into the kingdom of God is rare. For the Emergents, the kingdom of God is in the process of spiritual re-formation (notice the hyphenation), a spiritual evolution, here and now, as we speak. Accordingly, this spiritual re-formation—that is, this spiritual “emerging,” or “spiritual formation”— is the work of the Spirit, and a process that has been transpiring for centuries, and will continue on for centuries to come. McLaren states that humanity, as a whole, is spiritually re-forming toward the day when all humanity will finally become the kingdom of God, the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of the Lord.¹⁴ This teaching becomes troublesome on several levels: it misinforms about the true nature of the kingdom of God. It fails to warn of the importance of seeking repentance and Jesus’ grace, today. It lulls people into a false sense of security and hope that God, an “inexhaustible” love, will never carry out divine justice. It teaches that both sin and death are part of one and the same ongoing redemptive process. This emergent attitude toward human predicament resonates with New Ageism, the Baha’i teachings, Eastern monistic notions, and so forth. It is utopian and not biblical.

The Emergent attitude toward history

The Emergents are fond of going back to “ancient” or “vintage” Christianity. The “ancient-vintage” refers to the writings of the church fathers, not to the writings of the apostles and biblical prophets, as some may assume. The Patristic teachings and monastic way of life are being served as a new model of spirituality. This adulation of Patristic theology and insistence that God’s community has lived in the so-called Age of the Spirit for the last 2,000 years, necessitates an argument that the origins of the church are to be found in the first-century church of Antioch rather than the first-century church of Jerusalem.¹⁵ This may appear as a new revelation to some; however, this does not come as a new truth but a new repackaging of an old supersession doctrine arguing for a radical discontinuity between Judaism and Christianity. I find this development to be disheartening. The old Patristic argument that the church replaced the synagogue was the major component of a two millennia-long ecclesiastical hatred and contempt of Jews and Judaism, a direct precursor to modern anti-Semitism.¹⁶ Contrary to their insistence on tolerance and elimination of all forms of prejudice and bigotry, the Emergents may find themselves on the same path.

Though I find the work of Phyllis Tickle and Diana Butler Bass quite informative, their histories are highly skewed toward proving the “emergence” of Christianity during the last 2,000 years.¹⁷ Their work borders on revisionism of church history. In fact, church history was both progressive and contained false teachings and apostasy, corruption, and abuse of ecclesiastical powers. The pogroms and inquisitions were hallmarks of the church that opposed a search for truth. Also, for the Emergents to bash Protestantism for religious warfare, colonialism, and other evils of modernity of the last 500 years, is not uncommon. On the contrary, the Protestants stood up to the inquisitorial and oppressive medieval church. The Protestants played a major role in the overthrow of ecclesiastical and monarchial absolutism, and they contributed to the development of a constitutional model of governance that influenced England, the American colonists, and other parts of the world.

Another example of misinterpretation of history includes their insistence that changes brought about by the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity demand that everything must change in Christian worship and Christian theology. ¹⁸ Much indeed has changed in the last century or so, but those changes are related to modernization. Nothing, however, has changed when it comes to human nature and the human predicament. What changed is how we handle our affairs, not how we handle our sinful nature.

Humans have for centuries tried to resolve the puzzle of human predicament , and all human approaches—be they monistic, monastic, pantheistic, gnostic, deistic, Catholic, ¹⁹ Protestant , or Emergent, all have failed or are failing. The only reliable way out is the blueprint Jesus Christ left behind. The truth about Jesus’ grace and the moral standard of the kingdom of God has been revealed to us through the revelation of Yahweh and Jesus Christ, and recorded in the Bible. It remains constant and certain.