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June 03, 2006
The Emergent Church
Topics: EmergentTim Challies links to two articles by Tony Jones, one of the more prominent leaders within the Emergent church movement. They appear at the Christianity Today "Out of Ur" blog responding to the charge that the Emergent Church is the new Christian left. Jones writes:
The problem with all of these critiques is that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of Emergent Village. We are a group of friends—about 20 in 1997, and now in the thousands—who are committed to doing God's Kingdom work together, regardless of our theological, ideological, and political differences. Are we friends with Jim Wallis? Yes! And are there Bush-loving neocons among us? Yes! Emergent is a loose collection of folks who feel that true, robust conversation about issues that matter has been chilled out of modern Christian institutions (seminaries, mega-churches, denominations, and para-church groups, to name a few). We're trying to make a place to bring conversation back.Thus, we have friends among us who think that small government, free market economies are the solution to poverty, and others who favor federal programs and higher taxes—honestly, this is an ongoing conversation within the Emergent friendship. But we all agree that something must be done about extreme poverty, especially in Africa.
Within Emergent are Texas Baptists who don't allow women to preach and New England lesbian Episcopal priests. We have Southern California YWAMers and Midwest Lutherans. We have those who hold to biblical inerrancy, and others trying to demythologize the scripture. We have environmental, peacenik lefties, "crunchy cons," and right wing hawks.
Jones states that the basis for unity is a commitment for doing God’s Kingdom work. What is the Kingdom of God and where does the village obtain an understanding of God’s will given the apparent rejection of theology and disagreement on the inerrancy of Scriptured? Whether those who comprise the Emergent Village care to become epistemologically self-conscious or not, there exists a set of propositions, core beliefs, that enable their understanding of God and man to provide a united perception of His will.
It becomes increasingly difficult to know the core beliefs of many within the emergent church because they do not seem to know them either.
For example, in a second follow-up article, Jone's he seems to deny that the gospel can be true apart from human experience. Responding to a critical article by Chuck Colson, he writes:
But if I can try to surmise Colson's meaning from the subtitle of the essay, he means to indicate that we in the emerging church have placed too much weight on "relational" or "experiential" theories of truth. The gospel is true, Colson seems to be saying, regardless of your human experience of that truth.Yet absolute truth is a key teaching of Scripture held by believers. Whether the limited experience of man leads to a better understanding of reality or not, God and truth remain the same.But philosophically, the obvious follow-up question is, Why? What makes the gospel true, especially if those of us in the world have no experience of its truthfulness?
This follows from the independence of God. God is separate from His creation and, unlike man, does not depend on anything outside of Himself. He is independent in His Being, in His virtues and actions, and causes all His creatures to depend on Him.
Christians believe in absolute truth and the reality of the Gospel regardless of man’s experience of it precisely because God, as creator, is independent or self-existent. To argue the contrary necessarily elevates man to a godlike status and causes truth to center upon subjective, variable and finite experiences in man’s life.
Despite their teachings that are at times to the contrary, I don't think that Jones, or others in the emergent church, deny God's self-existence. Yet, such a denial is certainly consistent with some of the statements quoted above. At the very least, Jones appears to deny that there is any identifiable truth which we can know beyond our experience of it.
Challies and his commenters have written a lot more that is worth reading.
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Posted by calvin at June 3, 2006 11:00 AM
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Thank you for interesting blog
Posted by: KalinasB at August 25, 2006 05:52 AM
