Which Came First: Chicken or Egg? Thoughts about Belief and Chrsitian Faith

It’s been a VERY long time since my last post. Since then I finished an academic semester, been to London and Belfast and participated on a panel at the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship’s Worship Symposium with Jason Clark and Pete Rollins on Emerging Christianity. And I’ve also been trying to explain on someone’s blog claims I made at the panel discussion concerning belief and Christianity.

First, a word about the panel. As I said, the panel was made up of myself, Jason Clark and Pete Rollins with Jamie Smith, Lori Wilson and Mike Wittmer acting as respondents. Nathan Bierma deftly played the role of moderator. We attracted somewhere between 120-130 to the four hour panel discussion and roughly another 100 over the course of the next two days at one-hour discussions for those who didn’t make it to the panel. The Worship Symposium as a whole drew some 1400 participants from 38 different countries.

The impetus for the panel is a book that Pete, Jason, myself and Scot McKnight are doing addressing various issues in emerging. We gathered (except for Scot) the day before the symposium to go over drafts of our chapters. It was for me an enormously beneficial experience; both the colloquium at which we went over chapter drafts and the panel discussion.

Okay, now to the meat and potatoes. At the panel discussion, Mike Wittmer, a theologian at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, asked the panel whether there are any beliefs that are necessary to be a Christian. He wanted to know if someone could be a follower of Christ and lack belief in the resurrection, for example. Each of the panel members was reluctant to answer the question. Speaking for myself, I said that I was reluctant only because belief admits of different grammars and that the question(er) suggested there was only one. I said there that belief must be thought of not synchronically (as happening at a specific point in time) but diachronically (as something that happens over time). I elaborated on this later on Mike Wittmer’s blog.

Let me state briefly how I am thinking of belief and you good folks (if there are any of you left out there) can tell me what you think. The preferred grammar of the questioner is the grammar of assent, the view that belief is belief that: belief that Jesus was both God and human; belief that Jesus rose from the dead, etc. Here the idea is that belief is belief that certain propositions are true, and he wanted to know if in order to be a follower of Christ one must assent to certain propositions and if so, which ones.

My response was to tell a story about Pascal, who upon being told by a friend that he wanted to become a Christian, doesn’t tell the guy what to believe; rather, Pascal tells him to “go to Mass and take the Eucharist.”

The idea here is that belief can be the result of engaging in certain practices and rituals. Now most 21st Century, Western, Protestant Christians probably think that engaging in Christian practices or rituals follows on the heels of belief. Pascal suggests that the causal chain runs in the opposite direction, from practices and rituals to belief. Indeed, most of us probably think that belief is what brings about salvation itself and not salvation that brings about belief.

God, I take it, is never satisfied with belief that. God is interested in the total reorientation and rearrangement of our lives, our loves, our desires our entire way of being in the world. The important question is whether being a Christian is fundamentally and primarily about belief that certain propositions are true.

At the most basic level it seems clear to me that God is most interested in the total reorganization and reconfiguration of human life, of reorienting the human will, heart, desires and loves. God is interested in our moral and existential transformation. This of course is in no way incompatible with belief that certain propositions of the relevant sort are true. But the goal is transformed lives, not belief in “Jesus facts.”

And this is why when asked whether followers of Christ must know and put their trust in him, I’m inclined to point out that “being a Christian” (like belief) is progressive, that I am even now, and after all these years still becoming a Christian. Followers of Christ must, of course, put their trust in him. I must put my trust in him: today I must; tomorrow I must, and the next day I must. My frustration with myself is that I often put my trust in Christ one moment and then take it back the next.

As to the resurrection and whether someone could become a follower of Jesus before they come to believe in the resurrection, this is what I said on MW’s blog:

“I think that someone could become a follower of Jesus BEFORE they come to believe in the resurrection. But let me preface this…by saying that I agree that the resurrection of Jesus is indeed an essential piece of the Jesus story.

“Suppose you’re a fledgling writer. And suppose you meet someone at a writer’s workshop in Ann Arbor, another author with whom you share coffee and conversation during the breaks. Suppose this author speaks with you throughout the three day conference about the ins and outs of constructing plot and characters and does so in a way that you’ve never experienced before. You find yourself drawn to this author and to his words, even more so than the author leading the workshop. Suppose he has the effect of revolutionizing your own writing and that after all that time you spent together at the workshop you never bothered to get his last name. You knew him simply as John, the name on his name tag.

“Now suppose you go home utterly changed as a writer. Your writing from that workshop on is of a different caliber and gravitas than what preceded it. And then suppose that a week, a month, a year later you read an article in a writer’s magazine about the weekend John Updike attended a workshop in Ann Arbor and about the many conversations he had with this fledgling writer from Grand Rapids. You’re stunned! You’re shocked! You spent three days conversing with John Updike, whose work you love, and you didn’t even know it was John Updike. Now you do.

“The point of this little story is obvious. It’s certainly possible for you to have an experience of someone, to have your life changed by this someone, without at that very moment knowing who or what that someone is or is about. I imagine the resurrected Jesus could draw people to himself without those people knowing at the time of meeting who he is or what he’s done. Knowledge of that sort, if things go well, will come.

I went on to make a point about the resurrection itself.

“I want to stress again that the resurrection of Jesus gets its meaning and weight from the story it’s embedded in. Apart from that story it’s no more than a historical curiosity. I’m not interested in getting people simply to believe that a guy named Jesus was resurrected from the grave, and I doubt you [MW] are either. The good news is that our sins have been forgiven, that God has reconciled us, that there’s a new way to be human and that everything has changed because of the incarnation, life, death AND resurrection of Jesus. The incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus are themselves embedded in a six thousand year old, unfolding story of a bent and broken world and a God working for its restoration and renewal. In other words, the resurrection as an isolated factoid is not what is of paramount importance. It’s the resurrection as part of God’s program of love and reconciliation that is the issue of supreme importance.”

Well, that was my last and final contribution to the discussion on Mike’s blog. Thoughts?

Tony Jones and The New Christians

We last left Tony in chapter four, The Theology Stupid. Today we pick up in chapter 5, After Objectivity: Beautiful Truth.

Tony notes that emergents place a high priority on interpretation and thus conversation. The more interlocutors, Tony suggests, the more likely we are to come to a better interpretation, and the closer to truth. (That's right--truth.)

Now some who listen in on conversations that take place here, whose identities lay safely hidden behind online handles that provide a safe haven from which to launch vitriol and self-righteousness, which shower down like dirty bombs causing injury to the name of Jesus and contributing to the uglification of the Church, some such as these I say, may think:

“But, c'mon; multiplying stupidity will never add up to intelligence. Hundreds of inept interpreters sitting around on couches, sipping lattes from s-bux and pontificating on blogs and in books about social justice after they just drove their hummer the 1.5 miles to the coffee shop is no more likely to get you closer to the truth or to a better interpretation than two such imbeciles chattering away to each other on facebook.”

It’s like the C student who comes to me and asks if he could write a couple of extra papers to raise his grade. How do you tell him, without crushing his spirit, that more average work will not eventuate in an above average grade?

I get the point of the naysayers (although I don’t think I’ll ever get the ad hominems and inflammatory rhetoric such folk characteristically employ). But here’s the difference between what Tony’s saying and my imaginary student. Emergent Christians speak and listen. And they are forever extending the boundaries of conversation.

It’s not unlike Wikipedia. While I advise my students that consulting Wikipedia when writing a philosophy paper is as useless as consulting a dictionary to discover the meaning of words when writing such a paper, there is a dynamic at work in the writing of Wikipedia that is absent in the case of my student. And the difference is network. Wikipedia is open to all via the world wide web and experts with access generally do not allow misinformation to last very long on Wikipedia before it is revised and corrected. Likewise in the conversations that animate emerging. Hearing the voices and stories of others can have the effect of enlarging your world and sometimes making you think “you know, I’ve never quite thought about it that way before. That does seem a more faithful reading than mine, now that I think about it.”

I’m going to keep this short and invite others to throw in. But let me pick up on just one more aspect of this chapter—beauty.

Tony tells a story of a young boy who after hearing a lecture and discussion on the (im)plausibility of the Virgin birth went up to the lecturer and declared that he himself believes in the Virgin birth. The speaker asks him why and he says “Because it’s too beautiful not to be true” (p.160).

I’ve said this many times on this blog, but it bears repeating. If I were asked why I believe in the Christian story, why I believe in a Creator God who pursues his fallen and perverted creation with the urgent love of a mother or father, I think I’d be tempted to answer as the boy. I really can’t help but believe it. I think when you really, truly sense that you are a “crooked soul trying to stay up straight”, when you sense that you are sick and in need of healing, when you sense that you don’t have it all together and stand in desperate need of love and forgiveness, when you recognize that both you and the world you live in are broken and you feel deep down in your bones that a better world and a better you are possible, then the Christian story overwhelms you with its beauty. There’s a fittingness to it. It fits your experience of yourself and the world. It’s too beautiful not to be true. Messy? Yes. But beautiful in its messiness.

What do you think about that? What do you think about beauty or aesthetic qualities as indicators of truth? Is it the case that in math and science we discard one theory in favor of another sometimes because the replacement theory is more elegant, more aesthetically beautiful than that which it's replacing? Granted, the replacement theory is generally expected to have more explanatory power. But is there nothing to the idea that elegance or beauty is truth indicative?

Well, that's enough for now. I'll blog about the final chapter next time. But let me say here that while there have been places in Tony's book where I’ve paused and thought “I don’t know about that” or “That seems a little self-indulgent to me” the major chords being struck in the book and in emergent are ones that resonate very deeply with me. Very deeply indeed.

The Kingdom of God: Ever Coming Never Arriving?

Tony J got me thinking. He got me thinking about God's kingdom, and the way in which Derrida and Caputo represent it as a perpetual deferral. Tony finds the D&C conception alluring and attractive. I suspect many in the emerging movement do. I myself don't find it appealing. I want to know what others think. And I want to wonder aloud about whether it might not actually be something else that Tony, et. al. find appealing in the D&C model, something that they misidentify as the doctrine of eternal deferral.

I make no pretense at all to being a Derrida scholar. So, I am open to correction in what I'm about to say, and I would invite others more knowledgeable than I to weigh in here and to offer correction where correction is needed. Let me lay out what I understand to be the gist of the D&C model of the impossibility and undeconstructibility of the kingdom, and say why, as a Christian, I think we ought to reject it.

As I understand it, the kingdom of God or Justice or The Wholly Other or Messiah is never fully present on the D&C model but always a reality yet to come, always a reality beyond, a future, a hope, an aspiration. Indeed, God is not even to be thought of as a being, an individual, but rather as an uncontainable, unconditional, undeconstructible Event that is, as some who talk about such things put it, "astir" or "harbored" in the name of "God".

Why is the kingdom eternally deferred? Because words and worldly structures are finite, contingent, particular, limited, deconstructible and thus inhospitable abodes for the Wholly Other and the un-deconstructible. At best what we are ever presented with are "traces" of the Event that is God, and these traces call us beyond and invite us into a transformed way of being in the world.

As I said, I'm certainly open to correction here as I am admittedly outside my own areas of professional expertise. But, to the extent that I've got Derrida/Caputo right, I'm inclined to think that this discarnational model of the kingdom is utterly foreign to the incarnational kingdom of Christian faith. Whereas the D&C "gospel" regards the contingent, particular and deconstructible with suspicion and as inhospitable to the Wholly Other/Messiah/Kingdom or Justice, the God of Christian faith dwells within, inhabits, incarnates himself precisely in the particular, deconstructible and contingent. And far from "traces" of God within the particular, deconstructible and contingent the gospel suggests a fullness of presence.

Moreover, while the idea of a transformative event lies at the very heart of the gospel, the Trinitarian God of Christian theism is not himself an Event, but a God-in-three-persons. Events don't have intentions, aims, loves, etc. I can't enter into a reciprocated relationship of love with an event.

What, then, might Tony and others find so appealing in the D&C idea of eternal deferral? I'd like to think that it's not so much the eternal deferral and impossibility of the kingdom that they find so attractive, as that hardly strikes me as good news. That's about as "good" as the news delivered up in Waiting for Godot. At least in the case of the latter the two main characters believe Godot is coming, though he never arrives. Not so in the D&C story where God's coming is impossible.

Perhaps what TJ and others find appealing is the perpetual deferral of understanding, the realization that no matter what we come to understand of God and of his justice it is inexhaustible; there is always more. I wonder if it's not the idea that we ought never to be satisfied or settled with a particular theology or political arrangement, for example, but always questing, always reaching and searching.

In a way, insofar as the emerging movement can be viewed as a development within evangelical protestantism, it is easier for me to see how some of Derrida's ideas are consonant with emergent sensibilities than it is for me to understand how Caputo, a Catholic, would be attracted to such discarnate, disembodied, otherworldly notions. Catholicism's emphasis on the Eucharist, a place where Christ is really present (one almost wants to say re-incarnated) would seem to more easily prevent one from flights of disembodiment than the thin "commemorative" understanding of the Eucharist in low-church protestant denominations and non-denominations.

In any case, what do you think? Have I misrepresented the D&C model? If not, do you find the notion of an eternal deferral of the kingdom appealing?

Theology Stupid: Humility and Relativism

This is a long, fun chapter (chapter 4) of The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. And there's a lot we could talk about. After hitting a couple of the highlights, I'm going to focus on two charges leveled at emerging Christians and discussed by Tony in this chapter. The one charge is that emerging Christians lack conviction in their Christian beliefs, owing to their embrace of epistemic humility. The second charge is that emerging Christians are relativists. Both charges, Tony responds, are false.

But up first, a couple of bottom-of-the-ninth, two out, two men on, game-saving diving catches and last-second, buzzer-beating three-point shots with a hand in the face.

Theology, Tony tells us, is what Augustine did in City of God, Michelangelo sculpted in his Pieta, John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, Peter Paul Rubens painted in The Allegory of Peace and War, Dostoyevsky wrote in the The Brothers karamazov and Bono sings in "Mysterious Ways" (p.105). Theology, in an important sense, is any human activity that reveals what it is we believe to be the case about God, who we think God is and what we think God is up to in the world.

In short, "human life is theology. Virtually everything we do is inherently theological. Almost every choice we make reflects what we think about God. There's no escaping it" (p.106). To which I say, Amen and amen.

And there's this:

the emergent church movement is a counterreaction, a retrieval of the deep theological tradition of wrestling with the intellectual and spiritual difficulties inherent in the Christian faith (p. 109).

Yes, there are spiritual difficulties inherent in the Christian faith. Take something like the Nicene Creed or the Chalcedonian formulation of the two-natures of Christ, for example. It is tempting to think that these formulations of Christian belief were the last words on matters of Christian belief and doctrine. That would be a mistake, however. What the creeds do is to establish parameters or fences, inside of which is the Christian faith and outside of which is not Christian faith. But within those parameters spiritual difficulties remain. We believe that God is a Trinity. But just how to understand the Trinity is difficult business and open to exploration and a variety of acceptable interpretations. Jesus was both human and divine. But how to understand that is an open issue, and one as deeply mysterious as is the Trinity itself. Christian formulae such as the creeds circumscribe for sure, but they don't eliminate mystery and they most assuredly leave room for a variety of views and understandings of the various truths they seek to express. As one of Tony's friends says "to every answer there is a good question" (p.110). Indeed.

And to those emergent detractors who claim that folks like Tony are infatuated with novelty and disdain tradition, let me quote from the horse's mouth, where he says of theology that it is only:

done in the aftermath of the multifarious theologies that have gone before...in conversation with two thousand years of Christian theology and four thousand years of Jewish theology before that (113).

A couple of bloopers and then the main event: humility and relativism.
At the very beginning of the chapter, Tony suggests that both the methods and the message of Christianity "are bound to be reconceived over time" and he says that "if one changes the methods one will inevitably change the message (p.96).

Well, I dunno. The message of Christianity, as I understand it, is essentially this: that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. I know Tony won't like this, but that seems to me the Christian message in a nutshell. To human beings and a world broken and fragmented by sin, the Christian story comes as good news: God's response to sin and lovelessness is love and redemption. If that message should change, it would simply cease to be the Christian message. Now I agree with Tony that the gospel is always already enculturated. And I agree that to try and freeze any particular articulation of the gospel, actually does an injustice to the gospel. But there is a gospel. It has a particular content. And if the content should change in such a way as to entail that God was not in Christ reconciling the world to himself, or change in such a way as to entail that God did not become incarnate in Christ, and did not suffer, die and rise again to reverse the curse of sin and death, well, then, it is, in my view, no longer the Christian message.

Granted, how best to tell the story or show the story or live the story, all of that may change. But the story, should it change in its essentials, it doesn't become something else. It simply ceases to exist and gets replaced with a different story, a non-Christian story.

Tony also says that God is a being whose activity is, by definition, not contingent. And I'm not sure what he means by that. It is, of course, a long standing belief that God's existence is not contingent, that God exists a se or in himself. You and I and all created things, by conrast, are contingent beings. God, it has long been believed, is not a contingent being but a necessary and utterly independent being.

I bring this up because it seems to me that at least some of God's activity is, indeed, contingent on the activity of humans and Tony says that the bible suggests otherwise. I guess I don't see that. Suppose God does not have knowledge of the future free actions of human beings. It would seem to me that if that's the case, then what God does in the future (if God should act in response) is at least partly dependent on what free actions human beings perform in the future. God's getting angry at human beings before the flood, for example, was contingent or dependent on human beings having displeased him. Had those living on the earth not displeased him, he would not have been displeased and sent the flood in response. So, the biblical witness itself seems to point in the opposite direction than what Tony suggests, i.e., that at least some of the activity of God is contingent on the activity of humans.

Okay, from page 115, Dispatch 11:

Emergents believe that awareness of our relative position--to God, to one another and to history--breeds biblical humility, not relativistic apathy.

Conviction is one thing it seems to me emerging Christians have in spades. They believe, and believe strongly, lots of things. Apathy is not one of their trademarks. Yet I have heard it said that emerging Christians lack conviction. That seems false. And yet their convictions are tempered with humility. The humility comes in when one realizes that one's forebears also believed, and believed strongly, lots of things, things we now believe they were dead wrong about. For example, the moral permissibility of slavery and the moral impermissibility of inter-racial marriage. Emerging Christians, although they hold very strong convictions on lots of things, they realize that they are finite, frail and deeply situated creatures and, as a result, it might actually be them that has blindspots. So, they're more inclined to say, "look, this is how I see it and why. How do you see you see it, and why?"

To go along with that, emerging Christians are also aware that cultural realities such as marriage and family did not drop down out of the sky fully worked out and unalterable. They realize that such institutions even within the church have been thought of differently at different times. Even friendship--same-sex and cross-sex-- has been understood differently at different times in Christian history. In fact, to read Saint Augustine and other of our theological forebears on friendship many today would be certain they were gay, for the language they use in correspondence witht each other and the language they use to describe their same-sex friendships sound borderline romantic to our ears.

It is such talk as this that leads critics to charge emerging Christians with being relativists. And Tony's response is "well, we're all relativists" (p.117). And he goes on to offer examples of how all of us work with biases, and how every English translation of the the ancient Jewish and Christian sacred manuscripts is biased. And we, when we read the scriptures, we each of us employ what one might call a canon within the canon. In other words, some believe women cannot be pastors or teachers and believe that this is what the bible teaches. Others believe the bible teaches that in Christ there is no more slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female. The first allows one set of passages to serve as his or her controlling texts (his or her canon within the canon) while the other allows other passages to serve as his or her controlling texts. Both are working with biases when it comes to their understanding of what the bible teaches about women pastors and teachers.

Now, my own view is that what Tony is talking about is not exactly what most people have in mind when they charge emergents with relativism. Usually relativism is thought to have something to do with truth or morality. The contrast to the relativist is usually thought to be the absolutist or objectivist. So when someone charges the emerging Christians with being relativists, I take them to be saying that emerging Christian believe (say) that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but only relative to the Christian story. The critics want to know, however, is it true that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself? The charge is that the emerging Christian will say something like, "well, for the Christian it is, but not for the Hindu."

So when it comes to relativism, most people do not have in mind the problem of canons within the canon. They have in mind relativism. Are homosexual unions wrong? Full stop. The moral relativist is likely to say, well, they're wrong perhaps from a Christian perspective, but not from all perspectives.

Are emerging Christians relativists? Certainly not all. At least most (if not all) of the ones I know are not relativists. They think it's true that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Period. Now they might go on to say something like, "But of course, I sometimes wonder if I've been duped. I sometimes wonder if this story can really be true after all." But that's perfectly consistent with their believing it's true.

And as for homosexual unions being wrong, an emerging Christian might says something like: "Well, as I understand it homosexual unions are at cross-purposes with God's ultimate intentions for human sexuality and so they're morally wrong. But I also recognize that war is at cross-purposes with God's ultimately good intentions for human relations and so too divorce. Now, why are we willing to say when it comes to war and divorce--which we believe to be at cross-purposes with God's ultimately good intentions for the world--that it is sometimes morally permissible to engage in these activities? And why aren't we willing to say that about homosexual unions?"

Now let me add this: imagine that you find yourself in the following psychological predicament. You believe (say) war or divorce is at cross-purposes with God's ultimately good intentions for the world, but you also believe that you have exhausted every conceivable avenue that might avoid going to war or getting a divorce, and you decide to engage in the war or get the divorce, fully recognizing that it is not the best all things being equal decision, but is, to your lights, the best all things considered decision. And so you decide to embark on a path that is at cross-purposes with God's ultimately good intentions for the world. And you think it is morally permissible to do so. That would be a psychologically hellish place to live.

In any case, many of us believe that war is at cross-purposes with God's ultimately good intentions for human relations and yet we believe that it is sometimes morally permissible to engage in war. Why do we not think the same about homosexual unions? That's the sort of question emerging Christians might ask and worry about. And, so far as I can see, there's nothing relativistic about it.

I'll close this off with another quote from the book, p. 122:

Like myriad Christians through the ages, emergents are attempting to...figure out where God is in the world, what God is up to, and how the biblical narrative jibes with our own 21st century lives.

If I were to have written that sentence, I might have changed that last clause to this: "...and how to fit our 21st century lives into the biblical narrative." But Tony gets it.

The Theology Stupid (chapter 4): But Not Quite Yet

A post on chapter four of Tony's book is on its way. But before we go there, I wanted to make an observation. I discovered this past week that there are people out there in the blogosphere who don't just think emerging Christians are wrong about this, that or the other thing, but think too that they are a bunch of people with various sorts of character flaws. I for example have been identified as a slothful, sophmoric half-wit by some of emergent's critics. Now, there's no doubt that emerging Christians have character flaws. We all do.

To see me taken to the mat (quite unfairly, I think) go here. That link will take you to a blog of someone whose name we do not know and whose identity remains safely hidden behind the blog handle "dissidens". Dissidens' prose is crisp and easy on the eye. He's a good writer. The problem (to my mind anyway; certainly not to his) is that he has no desire to listen, to try to understand or to engage in a discussion. Well, actually, that wouldn't be a problem if that was a place he came to after an earnest attempt or two at engaging and listening.

Here's a difference between what I hope can go on here (on this blog) and what (apparently) goes on over at his. Here I hope there can be disagreement, even spirited disagreement, without impugning the character of someone who disagrees with you. For example, I have voiced pointed disagreement with Pete Rollins and John Caputo and worried over some things Tony J has said. So far as I know I have never engaged in ad hominem attacks against anyone and neither Pete nor Tony has ever said to me with guerilla-like rhetorical flourishes "What? You disagree with me? Well obviously you're an idiot then, because if you were an honest and sincere truth-seeker, you'd agree with me; since you don't agree with me, you're not just mistaken, but there's something wrong with you."

Over at "dissidens" blog, it's pretty clear that since he and I don't see eye to eye about semantic plasticity or biblical interpretation, I'm an idiot or if not an idiot at least a half-wit. Apparently he doesn't like the way I used the English word "sexed" or the Latin word "secare" in a previous post. Forget for the moment that he attributes claims to me that a close reading would reveal I didn't make, still it's obvious that we disagree about what words can mean and about how to interpret the scriptures. (We do actually agree on how to spell half-witted, but on typing my comment at his blog I apparently misspelled it only to discover that that was sufficient for showing that I was, in fact, a half-wit, as if there wasn't enough evidence already.)

Now, you'll recall from my previous post on Stanley Fish that I am not immune to dishing out pointed criticism clothed in equally pointed and colorful rhetoric (minus the ad hominem). And some commenters on this blog rightfully and respectfully pushed back. The tone from all interlocutors in the discussion that ensued struck me as civil and respectful even if the passions of many of us were not always packaged in tame words.

I thought perhaps dissidens might actually be interested in engagement, the kind I'd like to think goes on here when what goes on here is at its best. So, I asked him a couple of questions on his blog, which he published. He answered those questions and in so doing made it quite clear that respectful engagement was not among his interests. So I left him a curt and pointed reply to that effect. He removed that comment, and has continued to add to the scorn. That's fine. It is very much in keeping with his handle dissidens. He apparently enjoys sitting apart and disagreeing from a distance and not from a position of engagement. That's fine, too. But in that case why invite comments?

Maybe it's because I've been in the academic world for a decade now that I've gotten used to spirited disagreement sans the character assassination. (How a half-wit like myself was ever allowed into the academy and into the society of analytic philosophy I can only guess remains an utter mystery to dissidens.)

If given the choice (and I guess all of us are) between a fox-news style of "engagement" (replete with caricatures and sniper-fire) and the style of engagement we aim for here on this blog, I'll stick with this style. It seems to me more productive, more fruitful and, quite frankly, more Christ-like.

Emergent or emergent? Do You Care?

Last week there was a bit of discussion around the blogosphere concerning the labels Emergent and emergent (or, as I like to put it, "E(e)mergent", because I feel so "postmodern" when I throw parentheses in the middle of a word like that). Anywho, one discussion took place on this side of the ocean, over at Tony Jones' place and another on the other side of the ocean over at Jonny Baker's place.

Two weeks ago I spoke to a religion class at Calvin on emergent and people (including the professor whose class I was guest-lecturing in) wanted to know if I consider myself emergent. (But maybe he or they meant Emergent or E(e)mergent.)

So what's the issue? Well, there are several issues. For one, there are people who are a part of a very large movement/conversation that quite literally spans the globe concerning how to do church in a postmodern, globalized context. This movement/conversation is very grass-rootsy, too. Not everyone who is a part of this movement/conversation is a part of the Organizaton/Institution in the U.S. known as Emergent (i.e., Emergent Village with spokespeople Tony Jones and Brian McLaren). Some who are a part of the larger movement, in fact, want to distance themselves from some of what the likes of Brian and Tony are up to. Anyway, these folks might like to say that they are part of emergent, but not Emergent. Problem is, outside of contexts like this one (i.e., this blog, where those reading are likely to have an inkling of the difference) there's just one word--emergent--and the average person who hears it is likely to hear it as Emergent, i.e., as everything-Brian-McLaren-says or everything-Tony-Jones-says and so dismiss the whole movement/conversation as a result. In so doing, however, they may be throwing the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bath water, insofar as the baby (emergent in this case) might just contain some things the thrower-outers highly value.

I myself don't like the question "Do you see yourself as part of emergent?". But unlike many, I'm not allergic to categories and labels, as such. So that's not the issue for me. Yet when it comes to the label "emergent" I bristle. And this is so for two reasons. First, I am a Christian. That's a label. It is, in fact, a label I am happy to apply (with fear and trembling) to myself. The issue for me--and one we can add to the above--is that I am aware that the first Christians were called Christians. In other words, they didn't call themselves Christians. Others applied that label to them. My view is this: I will simply say what I say, do what I do and participate in the conversations I participate in and allow others to label and categorize me as they see fit. I feel there's too much work to be done to take time trying to figure out whether I'm emergent or Emergent or whatever. I have enough trouble trying to be and become a Christian. And that's what I really care about; not whether I'm emergent or Emergent.

The second reason I bristle constitutes the third issue in the Emergent vs. emergent discussion. There are a good many people (including Jonny Baker) who feel that Emergent has become a brand. And to them this smacks of the very stuff of consumerism and (dare I say it?) the worst of American pop culture. In other words, the Organization employs paid merchants of Christian cool and hip who are in the business of commodifying elements of the larger movement/conversation (plus some other stuff that has nothing to do with the larger conversation like where you buy your latte, where you wear your facial hair, if you're a guy, and other such stuff), packaging them, selling them in books, seminars and bus tours and calling the product "Emergent". And, well, not everyone is down with that, as commodification and merchandising tends to kill whatever it infects.

So to recap: emergent is the larger movement of which Emergent is a part. Just as all Volkswagens are cars, but all cars are not Volkwagens, so all Emergents are emergent even if all emergents are not Emergent. Got it?

You know, whatever else you may think of Rob Bell, he assiduously and wisely avoids this whole business of labeling by refusing to be commodified by the Emerchants of cool. So too Shane Claiborne. Everyone who takes him or herself to be a part of emergent or Emergent reads whatever either one of these guys say, and would I think, point to both of them as people who are living out the animating impulses of emergent. Yet neither of them self-identifies as emergent or Emergent. And I say, good for them.

How about you? Are you Emergent, emergent, neither? Do you care?

A Festival of Friends (and Sex)

Smiles and laughter and pleasant times
There's love in the world but it's hard to find
I'm so glad I found you -- I'd just like to extend
An invitation to the festival of friends

--Bruce Cockburn
Festival of Friends
from the album In the Falling Dark

The glue of emergent is relationship, says Tony (p.56). It's not a shared set of doctrine or a community built around membership. Emergent is a festival of friends. The conversations that are the stuff of emergent take place within what Tony calls an envelope of friendship.

Emergent types seem pretty self-conscious of living in a world in which they are both at home and not at home. They are not at home in the sense that they feel the world pressing in on them and inviting them to find themselves in its story of consumption, greed, fear, exclusion and self-reliance. They are at home in the world in the sense that they feel made for this time, this place, this earthly realm.

In a world characterized by consumption, greed, fear, exclusion, self-reliance and easy-to-prepare, prepackaged answers to life's difficult questions, emergents are finding each other, they're investing in each other, and they are orienting their lives around each other--from where they live and work to how they get there and whether or not they take the big promotion and move away. And if emergents don't feel wholly at home in the world, they don't feel anymore at home in traditional evangelical churches, and for some of the very same reasons they don't feel at home in the world. So, says Tony, emergents are "largely people who feel great disappointment with modern American Christianity" (p.70).

Where earlier generations of Christian dreamers dropped-out of society and dropped-in to communes, emergents are a new generation of dreamers, but they're not dropping out of society, they're staying put, gathering together in urban and suburban locales, in virtual digs like blogs, myspaces, facebooks, etc. and, as I've so often heard it said, they're doing life together. What are they doing together? They're thinking, dreaming, questioning, longing, worshipping, and seeking to be agents of reconciliation and God's shalom at this particular time in history and in the particular places and spaces they live, work and play.

Emergents have also abandoned a one-dimensional view of human beings they believe the Enlightenment bequeathed them, a view which sees us as primarily cognitive, rational, computing-machines, and they're embracing instead a more holistic view of human beings, a view which validates "emotions, experience, relationships, creativity, nature and the many other aspects of being human" (p.79). And all of this in a thick soup of friendship.

My friend Dan Brennan has a blog dedicated entirely to friendship. Like a lot of emergents, he's an adventurer and one of the frontiers he explores on his blog would scandalize garden variety evangelicals, i.e., cross-gender friendships --friendships between men and women who are not married to each other, but may (or may not) be married to someone else. These are deep, emotional, affectionate and intimate bonds, too; but they are bonds that don't have genital union as their natural end. You'll notice by the way that I didn't say sexual union. That's because the sort of intimacy Dan thinks can and should exist between cross-gender friends is sexual. How can it not be when the friends are themselves sexual beings?

And this leads to another feature of emergents, what Tony refers to as "a hope-filled orientation" (p.72). Emergents live eschatologically, i.e., in light of God's future, a glorious future that has come and is coming still. They're convinced that Jesus came with good news and that God has a program of all-inclusive love, wholeness and restoration for the world and they're eager to get on board with God's agenda. Their view of heaven, therefore, like my own, is not that of a disembodied place in the great by-and-by, but an embodied future where things--earthly things like relationships, drinking water, economic systems, eco-systems, all things--are the way God ultimately intends them to be. That future, they believe, is something to get excited about and to start actively anticipating.

Did you notice that when I ended the brief paragraph on friendship and sex I began the very next paragraph with [A]nd this leads to another feature of emergents, and then I went on to talk about eschatology? If so you may have wondered what those two things have to do with each other, sexuality and eschatology. Permit me to stray from Tony's book for just a minute in order to say, very briefly, how I see the two being connected.

The English word sex comes from the Latin secare which literally means to cut-off or to sever. To be "sexed" is, in a very meaningful sense, to be cut-off, disconnected from a whole or severed from it. And that, I think, is part of the human condition, to find yourself self-aware, aware of a kind of loneliness, incompleteness or un-wholeness. Sexuality is nothing more and nothing less than that drive or energy in all of us for communion, relationship, connection, affection and wholeness. "It is not good for man to be alone." That is sexuality. And what is the eschaton if not community, connection and wholeness? Communion with God and each other. If sexuality is the question, the eschaton is its answer. So, sexuality and eschatology are actually deeply connected. In fact the one (sexuality) is aimed at the other (the eschaton).

Genitality, by the way, or "sexual intercourse", is but one aspect of this larger phenomenon of sexuality. It's a really important aspect, but it oughtn't to be confused (the way it so often is) with the larger creational reality (i.e., sexuality) of which it is but a part.

Anyway, back to Tony's book. Is emergent perfect? Does it always live up to its own ideals? I think what Fredericka Mathewews-Green says about culture applies to emergent itself, it's a "fleeting human creation, a spontaneous uncontrolled collaboration, and we shouldn't expect it ever to be perfect or even to be very good" (p.74). Like a flash-mob that converges for a brief time and then disperses, emergent is a sort of spontaneous uncontrolled collaboration of Christian dreamers. They're converging in real and virtual spaces and doing some wild and crazy things. Who knows how long the collaborative experiment will last. But when its time is up and the crowd disperses, you can bet its DNA will be passed on and turn up in some future gene pools. Right now, though, it's here.

What is Postmodernism? More Tony Jones

I’ve decided to focus this installment of our series on Tony Jones' new book, The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, on a single issue. I have done so because the issue is rather large and unusually squishy. What I want to talk about is postmodernism.

To begin, there’s this from chapter two, p.37:

At its essence, emergent Christianity is an effort by a particular people in a particular time and place to respond to the gospel as it (once again) breaks through the age-old crusts. And it’s the shifting tectonics of postmodernism that caused the initial fissure.

Postmodernism (pomo for short) figures pretty heavily in this chapter and pretty heavily in emergent. Emergent authors and practitioners talk a lot about pomo. But what is it they're talking about? What is this 'thing' that caused the initial fissure within which emergent Christianity has taken root and is beginning to flower?

We get several characterizations in chapter two. According to one characterization, it’s a “cultural watershed” (p.38). According to another it marks an “age of enlightened mystcism” (p.43—Tony quoting Brad Cecil, an important voice at the beginning of emergent back in the late 90’s; italics Tony’s).

Well, I dunno what Tony or Brad might mean by enlightened mystcism, and that's because I don't know what they mean by mysticism. And I must confess to being a wee bit skeptical of the "watershed" view of postmodernism. The idea, as Tony presents Brad presenting it in chapter two, and as the annoying know-it-all "Neo" presents it in Brian Mclaren's A Generous Orthodoxy, is that some sort of cataclysmic, epochal shift occurred in the fairly recent past, when we moved from 'modernism', or a modernist way of viewing the world, to 'postmodernism', or a postmodernist way of viewing the world.

I'm not sure what to make of that claim either. It's the putatively "epic" nature of the shift that I have problems with. I have no doubt about there being differences, and significant differences at that, between this generation and previous generations. But I'm inclined to think that those differences are largely cultural and have little to do with the philosophical ruminations of the patron saints of so-called deconstructive philosophy, with whom postmodernism is often associated, such as Derrida and Lyotard.

So what do people mean by 'postmodernism'? Here's how John Caputo puts it in a quote that Tony uses as an epigraph at the beginning of the book, and refers to in this chapter:

Postmodernism...is not relativism or skepticism, as its uncomprehending critics almost daily charge, but minutely close attention to detail, a sense for the complexity and multiplicity of things, for close readings, for detailed histories, for sensitivity to differences. The postmodernists think the devil is in the details, but they also have reason to hope that none of this will antagonize God.

Tony doesn't tell us where that comes from, but there it is. I like the John Caputo behind that quote. (It's the other John Caputo, the one who is in fact a pretty thoroughgoing epistemological, and so religious, skeptic that I don't like nearly as much! But that's a topic for another day.) For one thing, I understand what the Caputo behind this quote says here. (That's not always the case with the other Caputo.) And for another, I'm rather favorably disposed to postmodernism if this is what it is.

Let me offer my own definition of postmodernism. I begin by first distinguishing between cultural pomo and philosophical pomo. Some of the features of the former include new technologies, new forms of connectivity (cell phones, the internet w/its ubiquitous social networks, like Facebook and Myspace, etc), decentralization and globalization. These features of pomo are, I think, very significant. Epic? Maybe. I dunno, though.

Philosophical postmodernism, on the other hand, involves calling into question “meta-narratives” or grand stories of the world and our place in it, like Marxism, atheistic naturalism, consumerism and Christianity itself. What gets called into question by philosophical postmodernism is our ability to float free of the grand narratives we find ourselves in and to view things from a “God’s eye view.”

Those sensitive to this sort of postmodernism recognize that our grasp of reality is always partial, incomplete, and fragmentary. And this recognition can engender humility, tolerance, and an opening for dialogue with others. Those who really appreciate our human finitude and situatedness are more inclined to say, “Here’s how I see things and here’s why. But, I recognize that I am a finite and frail human being; so I could certainly be the one with blind spots. How do you see things?’ as opposed to saying “I’m right. You’re wrong, and going to hell. End of story.”

This flavor of pomo resonates very deeply with me and, if I read Tony and other of the "new" Christians right, it resonates very deeply with them, too.

And yet. And yet there is another element some people (including some emergents) often add to this plausible rendering of postmodernism. And that is what I will call, following Alvin Plantinga, creative anti-realism or social constructivism. I think this is what people often have in mind when they say such things as that there is no objective truth and the like. Those who add this element to pomo do so, it seems to me, because they believe (mistakenly in my view) that either the epistemic humility characteristic of the plausible strain of pomo requires it or they believe (also mistakenly I would say) that the plausible form of pomo leads to it. In any case, it's this element that seems to me utterly implausible. Let me explain.

I am inclined to think that there is (say) God and our various understandings of God (e.g., that God is loving and merciful and gracious, etc.). I'm also inclined to think that there are the objects that populate the world (like stars and mountains and mollusks) and our concepts of those objects. Well, so far as I can tell, the less than plausible brand of pomo (i.e. social constructivism) rejects this commonsense view of things. According to it it is our concepts and language that actually create God and the objects that populate the world. We don't discover objects in the world or their properties and then use language and concepts to refer to them and describe them, we create them with our words and concepts. It sounds crazy, I know, but the view really is that we create what we find, be it God, stars, mountains or mollusks. And, as I say, this sounds utterly implausible to me. (Though I should also add that very smart people who are not French philosophers have said these very same things. For example, the American philosopher Nelson Goodman embraced this very view.)

Here's a slightly tamer variation of the social-constructive sort of pomo. It's the view that while there may be a world independent of our concepts and language we are incapable of ever coming to know it as it is independent of us. As this relates to God the idea seems to be something like this. God is so big, so wholly other, and we are so small (or finite), that to name God as loving or merciful or gracious (or whatever) is really to create an idol, it's really an attempt to domesticate or tame the un-tameable, to name the un-nameable. Those attracted to this view are thus very attracted to what is called apaphatic or negative theology, the view that no words can legitimately be used to describe God, that none of the properties we ascribe to God actually apply, and so the proper but difficult task of theology is to rid our minds of its idols (i.e., our names for and descriptions of God). For this will make way for the event of God.

It's these latter two elements, often layered over the plausible form of pomo, that lead some emergents to call for a Christianity beyond belief. The idea is that committing oneself to concrete Christian beliefs is to place oneself in the primordial waters of modernism. The postmodern turn for Christians is a turn away from Christianity as believing certain things and a turn toward Chrisitanity as being fundamentally about opening oneself to a transformative event. As I read them, Spencer Burke and Pete Rollins advocate this view.

Maybe an example will help. My friend Pete (Rollins) seems to think that realist claims don't apply to the religious realm. Did Jesus literally and really rise from the dead? I want to say "Look, if he didn't, then those who claim to have been transformed by an encounter with the risen Christ are mistaken." People who say they've had such an experience may in fact have experienced a transformative event, but if Christ is not risen, then their transformation does not owe to an event involving the resurrected Christ. Pete, on the other hand, seems to think that Christianity is a subjective, transformative event that is detachable from historical realist claims. He seems to think that it’s possible to undergo a transformative event of the resurrected Christ even if Christ hasn't really risen. And that doesn't make sense to me. Mind you, I'm all for Christianity as subjecive, transfomative event. I’m even open to the possibility of people participating in such an event without realizing that it is an encounter with the risen Christ. But if the event has anything to do with a risen Christ, then Christ must be risen. (You can view an exchange Pete and I had about this issue on his blog by going here.)

Let me bring all this back down to earth with a bit of autobiography. When I think of a biblical story that parallels my own life experience, I think of the story of Peter out in the boat and Jesus calling him to himself, calling him to get out of the boat and come toward him. Peter must have been scared feces-less. I feel like Peter a lot of the time, in the sense that I feel like I’ve received a call (from Jesus) but between me and him is a raging storm, or to switch metaphors, between me and him is a thick woods. I can’t see clearly most of the time. So I’m doing my best (and sometimes less than my best) to make my way toward that voice, toward the one issuing the call.

So, as I understand it, mine is not a faith that is a groping toward an I-know-no-what. Mine is a faith that is a groping, but a groping toward God, a God of all-inclusive love, compassion and mercy who was, I believe, in Christ reconciling the world to himself and bringing about a new reality, a new society. A robust recognition that I am a finite creature, frail and given to self-deception, and that my knowledge of God and the world is thus always partial, fragmentary and incomplete, does not lead me to religious skepticism (which I think it does lead to in Caputo and Rollins). What it leads to in me, I’d like to think, is epistemic humility. But epistemic humility is perfectly compatible with concrete Christian beliefs and commitments.

All of this having been said, let me add that I still like to read Pete and Caputo. Why? Mainly because I learn from them. I believe that deconstructive philosophy can function as a kind of therapy and can be profoundly helpful. There is a very real sense in which it is true to say that the past three years of my life have been one long deconstructive event. And in the midst of my own disorientation and confusion a space was broken wide open and in that space God appeared and I was re-oriented and re-constructed.

Okay, 'nuff said. I do think it’s important that we get as clear as we can about what it is we’re talking about when we talk about pomo. If the pomo of emergent is the more plausible version of philosophical pomo I described above, then I’m on board. If it’s the less plausible or implausible pomo of creative anti-realism, I’m not. And what of of apaphaticism? Well, I guess I think our language can apply quite literally to God. Which is not to say that I think human language can ever exhaustively describe God. I believe God really is loving and compassionate and just. And I'm sure I cannot plumb the depths of God's love and compassion and justice with words or concepts. But I also don't think that when we get to heaven (or heaven in all its fullness gets to us) we will discover that God was so wholly other, and our language so impotent, that it turns out God is really a self-absorbed, hateful, wicked, unjust and apathetic sonofabitch.

Next time, friendship and eschatology.

Tony Jones: You’ve Got to Leave it Behind (?)

A busy week for this sack of skin and bone, so my apologies for not getting this up sooner. I’m going to begin at the very beginning of Tony’s book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, since I’m told that’s a very good place to start. This whole series of posts will not consist in detailed reviews; instead, we’ll go for the highlights, a sort of ESPN-like “week in review” that seeks to capture the diving catches, impressive dunks and soon forgotten bloopers that make for good audio-visual consumption. We may not go chapter by chapter either. To get us started though we’ll begin with chapter one, Leaving the Old Country. I’ll make a few observations and then leave you with a question or two (or four).

The story with which this chapter opens is beautiful. It’s beauty lies in its likeness to God’s kingdom—surprising, unexpected, shocking. Tony recounts a recent airplane experience he’s had. He gets bumped up to first-class and sits next to a pregnant woman he is quite sure did not get bumped but instead seems to him the sort that would fly first-class regularly. He judges this woman to be a paragon of New York chic, based on what she’s wearing, and where she’s sitting. She strikes him as hip, urban and probably something like a NYC magazine Editor. She sets about working on her stylish MacBook Pro while poor Tony pulls out his less than flashy Dell. The kingdom comes when midway through the flight the woman closes her sleek, silver MBP, takes out a very traditional rosary, drapes it upon her pregnant belly, closes her eyes and begins silently to pray a prayer that’s been prayed by such paragons of un-chic and un-hip as Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

I love that! Tony thought he had her pegged, figured out and then—BAM—his preconceptions are turned on their head. Tony doesn’t use the story to make this kingdom point (but it makes it very nicely, I think), he uses it to underwrite his contention that contrary to what many expected at the beginning of the century—that the more educated and secular we become the less religious we become—we are actually only becoming differently religious not less religious. And while there are many Americans—some 225 million by his count—who lay claim to church membership the level of their commitment to denominations and particular doctrines is growing weaker. Increasing numbers of self-confessed Christians do not care very much about denominations nor for the specific doctrines that define them. And even though the vast majority of self-confessing Christians (some 90%) can tell you what church they belong to there are, out on the fringes, out on the frontier Tony would say, another 10% who are leaving the homeland—the churches of their parents—and heading into the far country.

God may not be dead, but church as usual Tony thinks is. The old style churches still exist—like pay phones still exist—but they’ve outlived their usefulness. As evidence that something is rotten in the Denmark of the Church, Tony points to recent riffs within Anglicanism, the Southern Baptist Convention and other sadnesses within the more left leaning churches as evidence. But probably the most telling piece of evidence are the stats of Barna and boys, who report that some twenty million evangelical Christians have forsaken their church pews for home groups, house churches or no church at all.

Yes, the times they are a changin’ and while emergents are not so much interested in rejecting the past they are even less interested in preserving it. What they’re not interested in preserving is institutional bureaucracy and the supplemental trappings that keep the institutions alive while simultaneously sucking the life out of the very people they’re intended to serve. That’s the story on the left. On the right, the evangelical church, in its desire for cultural influence, has gotten into bed with politicians hoping that by so doing the church might act as some sort of moral yeast or leaven in what is perceived to be a thoroughly immoral society. But if there’s anything to be learned from Elliot Spitzer it’s that when it comes to prostitution and politics, neither politics nor the whore that services him, usually wakes up in the morning feeling very good about themselves. And Tony’s point is that, here we are, we’ve awakened 10, 20, 30 years after Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson’s forays into politics and the moral landscape of contemporary American life is virtually unchanged.

And there’s more bad news. Old school evangelicalism of the sort espoused by Falwell, Robertson and Dobson believes that saving individual souls will translate into moral, communal and societal change, usually thought of in terms of a single issue—abortion. This was/is the single moral issue whose solution—making abortion illegal—was believed to be the key to our nation's favor with God. Thankfully, evangelicalism now sees that there are other issues that are moral issues. Well okay maybe one more anyway—homosexuality. Ridding our nation of homosexuals and abortion is bound to find favor with God.

But it’s this sort of thinking that “the new Christians” are leaving behind. As Tony sees it (and as I see it too) there’s a seriously mutilated, one-dimensional, monochrome-colored gospel at work here. It’s not the gospel of Jesus. The gospel of Jesus, the gospel that is Jesus, is a gospel that sees salvation as much, much larger, grander and all-encompassing than the gospel of individualism. Poverty, the environment, factory farming, education, racism, sexism—the gospel concerns them all. Salvation, reconciliation, redemption, the New Jerusalem is about all these worldly (horizontal) matters as much as about getting one’s soul right with God (what is usually thought of as a vertical matter).

A few more items, then a couple of questions. First, the new Christians have little patience for the classic polarities that have defined life inside and outside church—like the perpetual conservative vs. liberal boxing matches played out on cable television, talk radio and denominational witch trials. Here’a great image from the book:

Meanwhile, a [new] generation of Christians aren’t even boxing anymore. They’re out flying kites.

I love that image because it gets at a sort of playfulness that is characteristic of emergents and perhaps best exemplified in the whimsical, jesting antics of social activist Shane Claiborne of The Simple Way.

To my mind, these are the diving catches and powerful dunks delivered in the first chapter. And I’ll want to say more later about the emphasis within emergent on relationships and deep friendships. For now, though, let’s look at a blooper. And I’ll just mention this point without belaboring it because I’ll take it up in a later post. As a philosopher, and an analytic philosopher at that, I get a little jittery when Tony or Brian Mclaren or anyone else writing on or from within emergent starts talking about philosophy. In this chapter, Tony brings up what he says philosophers call “foundationalism” and the inherent infinite regression supposedly inherent in all foundationalist systems. What I get jittery about is that when Tony talks about philosophy it is usually so-called postmodern philosophy he has in mind. And there are several mistakes I think emergents often make in their discussions of philosophy. But, as I say, I’m not going to press the point here. I’ll take it up later (maybe even next time, since philosophy and postmodernism does put in an appearance in chapter two).

Okay, a few questions for you to chew on.
1. From your own experience or observations, is Tony right that lots of people with emergent sensibilities are leaving behind institutional churches? I ask this because my experience in the UK at least suggests that emergent functions just as much, if not more, as a supplement to traditional church (i.e., Anglicanism in England) and not as a replacement of it
2. From your own experience or observations, do doctrines and beliefs seem less important to you and your generation than they seemed to your parents generation?
3. Do you agree with Tony that traditional, institutional churches are becoming relics, like payphones and phonebooths?
4. Where do churches like Mars Hill, which seem to me to embody many characteristic features of emergent, fit within Tony's taxonomy of contemporary church? I'm sure he'd say it's a megachurch (since it is), but is it emergent?

Lookin' Ahead to Tony Jones

Tony Jones--emergent guru and all around hipster--(whoever says Rob Bell put the hip in discipleship hasn't met Tony, a self-confessed mini-van driving, little-league coaching, boyscout-leading, 40 year old hunka-hunka burnin' love; Christianity's answer to Unknown Hinson) recently and very kindly sent me a copy of his new book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. Starting next week I'll be blogging about it. I'm about halfway in, and I'm lovin' it. It's one of those rare books whose title actually has something to do with its content. So far, anyway, it's largely a descriptive account of emergent, what the movement is growing out of, what it hopes to be growing into and how it all got started. He gives us the inside story as one of its midwives, someone at the bedside of emergent's birth and there for its first, shaky steps into the wild and sometimes less-than-hospitable spaces of 21st Century life. So, stay tuned for that. In the mean time, grab a copy of Tony's latest book and check back here soon. (Alright, admit it, you want more Unknown Hinson. Okay, here you go.)

[12:10 p.m. Saturday 3/29/08
Correction: I believe I mistakenly attributed a kindness to Tony which actually belongs to Keith DeRose. Since I had corresponded w/Tony about the interim I taught and a book project I'm putting together on emergent, I assumed the copy of his book I received in the mail had come from him. Actually, I'm given now to believe it came from Keith. Thanks very much, Keith! Sorry, Tony. You're still kind; just not responsible for this particular kindness.]

Holy Laughter and Emergent/Emerging

I have often thought that the present phenomenon of “emergent” or “emerging” does not, at bottom, have a particular demographic, that it’s not really a twenty or thirty-something thing, for example. I have thought that there is what my friend Kurt has referred to as a psychographic and that emerging appeals to folks with a certain socio-cultural, emotional sensibility. The following comes from an 80 year old man. Perhaps you’ll be able to identify the author:

Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one cometh to the Father but by me," which, in one sense, seems to be exclusive: unless you're a Christian, you're not on the inside. You're on the outside. But Jesus doesn't say, "The religion founded in my name is the way, the truth, and the life, [and] what people say about me is the way." "Our way of worship, the Christian structure, is not the way," [he would say,] "I am. I am. If you want to know what life is all about, what it's supposed to be, where it's supposed to go, where it's supposed to derive its strength from, don't look at anything people say about me. Don't look at the faith that's been created. Look at my life, which is a life ultimately of sacrificial love."

Those are the words of Frederick Buechner, and I dare say I bet they resonate with emerging types. When speaking of his own learning to “speak the language of faith,” Buechner, recounting a story of a mentor of his, says that Jesus is crowned king in the hearts of his beloved amid confession, tears and great laughter. Why laughter? Here’s Buechner:

I think part of the laughter is the laughter of incredulity. Can it be true? Can it be true? Can it be true what they say? That there really is a God and that he was in Jesus and he loves us and forgives us and will make all things right again? That he really made the world, he loves the world, he will save the world in the long run? Can that be true? I can only laugh. Or maybe the laughter is divine relief: "Oh my God. After everything, it's true. I can only laugh. I can weep at the absurdity and beauty of its truth."

Reminds of these words from Switchfoot:

All will be made well, will be made well, will be made well, will be made well. Is this fiction? Is this fiction? Hope has given himself to the worst. Is this fiction or Divine comedy? Where the last of the last shall be first. Living is simple.

Whether it is fiction or Divine comedy I do not know. What I do know is that at the deepest of part of my being, the story—that grand story of universal redemption, reconciliation and healing, that all will be made well—I am deeply moved, swept up and carried away. I believe. And it's not a choice I make, to believe. Rather, I find between the deepest part of myself and that story a powerful resonance, and it calls forth from me, quite independent of choice, belief. It is as though something inside of me shouts: Yes! This is how it is. At the bottom of everything is life and love and wholeness. Is this fiction or Divine comedy? I can only laugh.

[If you want to read the full interview from which the Buechner quotes are taken, go here. For the full lyrics of Living is Simple, by Switchfoot, go here. My thanks to Christi Sprague for introducing me to that song at a time I really needed it, and to Tasha Golden for sending me the Buechner interview. C.S. Lewis once said, “Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.” To which I add only this: nothing.]