Without Author|ity 2: Clearing the Table

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 5:14 pm by Tony Jones

Without Author|ity 2: Clearing the Table 2015-03-13T17:14:16-05:00 Tony Jones

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Now I’ll try to respond to some of the issues raised in the comments following my rant. I’ll deal with these fairly briefly, because I don’t consider them the substantive issue at hand — we’ll deal with that once we’ve cleared the table.

1) To those who say there is no emerging church:

Then why do you keep blogging about it? Your statements of non-existence do not in any way really refute the existence of these communities of faith. That’s a nice way to try and preempt some fruitful conversation about the future of the church, but it simply doesn’t work. Nihilism is so 19th century.

2) To those who say emerging church is just a evangelical-fundamentalist phenomenon:

a) To even use the term “evangelical” is highly problematic. Sociologists as prominent as Robert Wuthnow and Christian Smith, and a polling organization like Gallup dramatically disagree on what constitutes “evangelical.” Smith says evangelicals are 7% of the U.S. population, Gallup says they’re 38%. Who are evangelicals?

b) That’s just the sociological; it’s more problematic when you get theological. Stan Grenz wrote a book in 2000 called Renewing the Center, and just days ago a group of more conservative scholars came out with their response (read: attack), Reclaiming the Center. Each is battling over who gets to use the term “evangelical.” What is evangelicalism? Who gets to define it?

c) To those who conflate evangelicals and fundamentalists by accusing emergent of being “evangelical-fundamentalist” (or using the pithy but ultimately meaningless term “fundagelical”), you’re making an even bigger mistake. Friendships were broken, books were written, and new seminaries and magazines were launched in the middle of the 20th century in an effort to differentiate evangelicalism from fundamentalism (see, for instance, George Marsden’s excellent history of Fuller Seminary, Reforming Fundamentalism; see also Mark Noll’s The Rise of Evangelicalism for an excellent account of the origins of the word “evangelical”). The conflation of the two in popular parlance is the result of journalistic haste and laxity.

d) QED, it is virtually meaningless to accuse someone or some group of being evangelical.

3) To those who accuse us of using the machinery of evangelical publishing to disseminate our work:

Can you believe that Charles Wesley had his hymns published? What a sellout! What was Martin Luther thinking to let people reprint his treatises on a moveable type press? Loser! And how about all those bloggers? Don’t they know that much of the technology of the Internet has been pioneered by pornographers!?!

4) To those who think that I am inconsistent with the inclusive nature of Emergent:

While, at first glance, it may seem that I am standing in contradiction to Brian McLaren’s recent Emergent/C email and to Jason Clark and Emergent-UK’s “Inclusive Church” event, in fact I am not. All of us in Emergent want to 1) stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us (more on this in a coming post), and 2) be open and inclusive to those from many (all?) Christian theological traditions. However, this does not mean that we include or embrace sinful and dysfunctional ecclesiastical/denominational structures. You’d better go back and reread Brian’s A Generous Orthodoxy, for he promotes the broad theological heritage of Christianity, not the many super-structures that have grown like weeds around those theologies.

5) To those who say that it’s just about Jesus and we should quit arguing about theology, philosophy and the church:

The philosophy that “It’s just about loving Jesus — let’s all just go out and serve the poor” is just that, a philosophy. More importantly, it’s a theology, and the problem is, it’s a very reductionistic theology. The idea that one can take two thousand pages of holy scripture and two thousand years of interpretation and Christian action and boil it down to “just” this or “just” that is offensive to the gospel and to those saints who spent their lives trying to better understand and live out the gospel. Let’s all stop pretending that Christianity is simple. God gave us minds capable of incredible things, so ideas matter.

6) To those who promote leaving the church altogether:

By doing so, you have just separated yourself from orthodox, biblical Christianity.

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