Today’s Emergent/C newsletter gives a link to Tony Jones’ post at the Christianity Today Blog on May 23, exploring the suggestion/accusation that the Emergent Conversation (based in the USA) is the New Christian Left, aligned with Jim Wallis and Sojourners. Mark Driscoll has recently drawn a line in the sand between ’emerging evangelicals’ and ’emergent liberals’. Ed Stetzer has divided the emerging church into relevants, reconstructionists and revisionists.
Tony points out that there is a wide variety of theological and political viewpoints in the Emergent movement. That, it appears, is the problem. The people most likely to stick around in such a conversation are people who enjoy diversity and thrive when they sit alongside people who see thing differently. The Emergent movement, by its commitment to exploring a range of contextual interpretations of Christian faith, becomes unattractive and repulsive to those who have narrow definitions of what following Christ is all about. It’s this pattern that leads to labels such as ‘ecumenical’ being used in the derogatory sense.
In reading through Ephesians I’m finding a strong emphasis on unity in Christ. It appears as though the early Church had similar problems about lines in the sand between differing interpretations of faith. Paul says to do what we can to maintain the unity that has been established by Christ. That’s partly why I’ve made a commitment to turning up for conversations with people whose opinions I genuinely find puzzling or disturbing.
I find the US pre-occupation with diving people up into either left or right camps deeply disturbing (I blogged on it recently). The desperate need to cut up the emerging church into evangelical and non evangelical camps seems equally misguided and ‘worldy.’ As a side-note I am increasing finding Mark Driscoll’s writings hard to take and deeply at odds with anything that can sensibly be called emerging.
Duncan
It’s great to have the open ended dialogue with courtesy and with discernment.
Part of the struggle here is that the psyche in US evangelical circles is very susceptible to definition by way of opposition. Thus you end up with “we are against this and that” as being a very significant component in the processes of self-definition. There is a certain kind of psychology of religion that is attracted to this way of interpreting “us and them”. There is also a sociological dynamic whereby reality is socially constructed and reified. The very heterogeneity of EC in US (not forgetting the global scene) can be difficult to sit with comfortably when the sub-culture one is immersed in is less interested in carefully nuanced differentiation. That is, it is less complicated to categorise “those who agree with me are in” and those who disagree are out”.
Perhaps there are people with liberal-church backgrounds who identify with a liberal approach to theology and ecclesiology in EC. However I strongly suspect that there are also quite a few “recovering evangelicals” who have entered into EC. They have a 12-step programme of recovery from their childhood church experiences, and as the windows have opened wide to previously unknown theological horizons, there is some intuitive affinity with theologians outside of evangelical circles. The inclination may well be that some shift completely from a prior evangelical identity into one that appears to be neo-orthodox or liberal.
However, it is also the case as D G Hart has argued in Deconstructing Evangelicalism, that the modern-day evangelical project of the US has collapsed. The collapse has occurred as the neo-evangelical vision of Billy Graham, Carl Henry, the founders of Fuller Seminary and Christianity Today, reached its ideological limits and began caving in on itself in the 1970s. The acceleration of the collapse in the 1980s and 1990s has coincided with the experiments in EC, and among those who are the spiritual offspring (sons/daughters and grandsons/graddaughters) of the post WW2 movement.
I believe the roots of the ‘”for us or against us” thinking in the US goes way back to the humanistic thinking of the Founding Fathers. Read their writings (eg: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Madison, et al)and you find that one major source of self understanding and self definition as an emerging nation was who they were against, or who opposed them.
Having established a ‘land of the free’ they were dead keen to protect it, especially a many of them became astonishingly wealthy. Thus you have an ‘in and out’ mentality. Much of their govermental life today is driven, I think, by the desire to protect what they have, and they have developed an approach to Christian faith that reinforces that. “What’s good for us” they say, “is good for everyone. If you like it, you’re a goodie, if you don’t you’re a baddie.”
I don’t think the gospel works like that, and I find it doesn’t fit with my perception of what the Kingdom of God is about.