Why We're Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be)
The Emergent or Emerging Church has been the buzz of Christianity over the last several months. But is it the glorious answer to taking the Bride of Christ into the 21st century that it claims to be?The Emergent Church has stepped up to the plate, claiming that it is the new Christianity, for a post-modern world. But, according to DeYoung and Kluck, the Emergent Church has struck out.
According to these two guys, the Emergent Church is little more than liberalism (not just liberal Christianity) redressed. And while social activism and conversations about our faith are good and needed, they do not replace our need to know the specific details concerning our faith: the doctrine presented faithfully for over two thousand years, from generation to generation.
Looking at the Emergent Church, I fear that they face making a dangerous error: “they love what Jesus loves but do not hate what Jesus hates.”
At the risk of quoting too long of a passage from Kevin DeYoung’s epilogue, here is a succinct summary:
Emergent Christians, to use the language of Revelation, have many good deeds. They want to be relevant. They want to reach out. They want to be authentic. They want to include the marginalized. They want to make kingdom disciples. They want community and life transformation. Jesus likes all this about them. But He would, I believe, also have some things against them, some criticisms to speak through other brothers and sisters. Criticisms that shouldn’t be sidestepped because their movement is only a “conversation,” or because they only speak for themselves, or because they admit, “We don’t have it all figured out.” Emergent Christians need to catch Jesus’ broader vision for the church – His vision for a church that is intolerant of error, maintains moral boundaries, promotes doctrinal integrity, stands strong in times of trial, remains vibrant in times of prosperity, believes in certain judgment and certain reward, even as it engages the culture, reaches out, loves, and serves. We need a church that reflects the Master’s vision – one that is deeply theological, deeply ethical, deeply compassionate, and deeply doxological.
Emergent Christianity is simply a fad. They claim to be doing something radical, but it’s just a fad. And it frightens me to see a fad pulling people from the church and not really leading them anywhere. “The loss of that fence between truth and falsehood is worrisome.”
Emergent Christian are sick and tired of boundaries. They have a hard time with truth claims. But I’m not sure endless uncertainties and doctrinal redressings are the answer either. We need to be taught (and to teach) with a firmness, rooted in authority. We are longing for the real Jesus, the Jesus we see in the Bible, the Jesus who started the church, the Jesus who is the cornerstone of our faith. Not a Jesus who is shapeless and formless, or simply a teacher of ethics.
If the Emergent Church is really nothing more than liberalism, then the future of the Emergent Church is in serious jeopardy. The further left you lean, the further away you move from absolute truth. And without absolute truth, there will be no church; only socially active groups of people, who really have no hope any longer.
Emergent Christians are throwing out the traditional beliefs about absolute truth in their quest to take this “journey.” Biblical ideas like authority, infallibility, inerrancy, revelation, absolute, literal, have been relegated to the sidelines as decidedly unbiblical. And the result is that the Word of God has lost its centrality within the minds of Emergent Christians. The Bible is no longer a direct communication from God in Heaven to us, his loved ones. Now it is simply the product of human invention, telling the stories of other people who have journeyed and questioned and sought after God in the past. The Bible has lost its authority.
But unless people are convinced that the Bible is authoritative, true, inspired, and the very words of God, over time they will read it less frequently, know it less fully, and trust it less surely.
I believe that DeYoung and Kluck have sounded the clarion. The Emergent Church may be the toughest test that true Christianity faces in this generation. The question is, do we know the Word enough to fight against it? Or will we be “tolerant” of this post-modern false-teaching, and be drawn further away from knowing God’s unequivocal truth? It’s up to us.
Why We’re Not Emergent is a must read for anyone dealing with culture. As a youth minister dealing with teens who grow up thinking post-modernly, this book was a wake-up call. It will be a book I keep handy on the shelf, and read again in a few months. Its message encourages me to stand fast, “to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3).
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