Scot McKnight on the Emerging Church - Part 2

I've had more than a week to think through Scot McKnight's CT article on the Emerging Church. I don't wish to overreact, so some time is good. Nevertheless, I can't help but feel he is fairly comfortable with key elements of EC I find fairly troubling.

Scot McKnight calls the EC movement “one of the most controversial and misunderstood movements today.” This is a common complaint from Emerging Church (EC) folk – that they are misrepresented and misunderstood.

I have a problem with that. Because EC leaders are so reluctant to say what they unequivocally believe in, it is inevitable that EC will be misunderstood. As Scot McKnight said in the article, “the emerging movement loves ideas and theology. It just doesn't have an airtight system or statement of faith”.

Not having an airtight system is one thing. No one does. Not having a statement of faith is another. It sends a signal that nothing is settled, it arouses fears that all doctrines, even essential ones, are open for “discussion” and possibly redefinition. There is not a chance such a position will avoid criticism. Particularly when key leaders of the movement make highly controversial statements.


Of course McKnight (and others) are critical of DA Carson’s attempt to critique EC because he feels it uses a few representatives of EC to represent the whole. “But as a description of the movement, Carson's book lacks firsthand awareness and suffers from an overly narrow focus—on Brian McLaren and postmodern epistemology.”

I have to ask then, how are we to evaluate EC if not to quote its most recognizable leaders? Brian McLaren is a focal point because he has made himself a focal point. He and Stanley Grenz get a lot of the criticism primarily because they are quoted so often in EC books, on EC blogs and web sites and because their books have received so much praise from the movement. McLaren is still a keynote speaker at many EC events. If he is not a good representative, why is this so?

But more to the point, if McLaren’s views do not represent the movement as a whole, where does the movement differ from him? Why? What are the distinctions? Again, the concern is clarity.

Stan Grenz, for example, repudiates a correspondence theory of truth and says essentially that all truth is ultimately determined by the local community. Do the bulk of EC types accept that or not? Brian McLaren provocatively says he is not sure where he stands on homosexuality and that more discussion, including listening to secular sources from psychology and other disciplines, is needed to arrive at a tentative conclusion. Does the EC movement lean with McLaren or against?

But I fear that is the point. The EC does not like to take stands, which they feel would smack of the arrogance of modern rationalism and prefer a more humble stance. It prefers to “converse” without drawing hard and fast lines. So my question remains, how can a movement claim to be misunderstood when no one can say definitively what the movement means?

It seems to me this common EC assertion has the practical effect, intended or not, of granting EC a tacit immunity from criticism, a set of beliefs so broad, anyone in the movement can simply deny that any viewpoint that is criticised is an "official" position. And considering that EC is highly critical of more traditional “modernist” views, immunity from criticism hardly seems fair.

McKnight says in the CT article, “One of the streams flowing into the emerging lake is prophetic rhetoric. The emerging movement is consciously and deliberately provocative. Emerging Christians believe the church needs to change, and they are beginning to live as if that change had already occurred.”

I had to wonder about this. The church should change? Change how? Change what? On what basis? For what reason? And more importantly, to what? Why should we accept the EC view of what church should become if there is no "airtight" doctrinal statement defining where that change will lead?

And if the point is to be provocative, to tweak the establishment, then why protest against those who are directly provoked when they respond to the provocation?

So, I am not completely sympathetic to complaints about unfair criticism. There have been plenty of opportunities to clarify misunderstandings. But clarity is not a hallmark of EC. Openness is. Fuzziness is. There is not a chance such a position will avoid misunderstanding and criticism.

Which leads me to a more specific conclusion – that the central conflict with EC is over epistemology.

On the one hand, EC folk, including Brian McLaren, protest that too much is made of the EC tie to the POSTMODERN, yet Scot McKnight writes, “A (second) stream of emerging water is postmodernism.”

McKnight articulates that there are differences in how EC practitioners respond to PM, some “will minister to postmoderns, others with postmoderns, and still others as postmoderns.”
I like that breakdown, but I have to ask: Is there a value distinction to be made between the three approaches? Is one preferable to another? Do those who minister to postmoderns find themselves ministering to those who minister as postmoderns? Do conflicts arise between the “as” group and the “to” group because of different philosophies? Does the with group find itself mediating between the as group and the to group?

As to the whole PM thing, Scot McKnight seems fairly comfortable with the notion that propositional truth is a modernist era misunderstanding. He quotes LeRon Shults:

From a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry.
This, at bottom, I believe, is the key basis of the criticism of EC. On the one hand, it is certainly true that language can never exhaust our knowledge of God and I don’t believe anybody really claims that it could. That is not what the epistemological debate is about. Rather, at issue is whether language can communicate truly, even if only partially, about God.

At issue is simply whether “thou shalt not commit murder” is a proposition that most reasonable people can understand and accept as an absolute. “I and the Father are One” communicates a lot, and though we can’t exhaust its meaning, we understand enough to draw distinctions between orthodox thought about the nature of Christ and heresy.

And as to unfair criticism, the Shultz charge of, “Linguistic idolatry” is a pretty scathing accusation. It is not exactly an irenic statement to encourage polite discussion. It does suggest some folks are more welcome to the emerging conversation than others.

So a key question in the EC debate is whether God created a world in which human beings can truly communicate, whether God communicated in human language – and whether some truths transcend cultures and eras. In tipping to the side of those who see language as a cultural construction, certain leaders of the EC have adopted an epistemology they see as a necessary correction to a grave error that started with the enlightenment. But this epistemological move seems to undercut the possibility of any consensus on the meaning of Christianity itself. Say's McKnight:

"God didn't reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative, and no language is capable of capturing the Absolute Truth who alone is God. Frankly, the emerging movement loves ideas and theology. It just doesn't have an airtight system or statement of faith….No systematic theology can be final."
Hence, EC is subject to criticism for not being able to be clear about what they believe. But let’s be clear about what is being criticized.

Conservative and traditional evangelicals do not ask for definitive statements about every theological issue. If EC wants to leave infant baptism as an open question so that Lutherans and Baptists can worship together – no problem. If they want to allow folks to have a beer on occasion without being excommunicated or considered backslidden slackers, fine. If they want to reopen theological questions about Mary as theotokos and lessen some Catholic/Protestant tension, I am with them.

But when the issues are more basic, the definition of God, (can God be called "mother" for example) indeed, the definition of truth itself, they open themselves up to criticism and they need to be open to being corrected, not by narrow sectarian viewpoints but by the long consensus of what has been essential for centuries. Folks have been assuming that language about the real world communicates something intelligible to others about that world long before the Enlightenment. And the fact that Christians can’t always agree about what certain tough passages of scripture mean, doesn’t lead to a conclusion that nothing about scripture is clear or that the words only mean what a particular culture understands them to mean.

Finally, McKnight probably did not endear himself to many with statements that sound like a slide toward universalism. Sure, it is a frustration when Baptists and Catholics hurl anathemas at each other, and probably an unproductive exercise. But let’s not carry that too far:

"Even if one is an exclusivist (believing that there is a dividing line between Christians and non-Christians), the issue of who is in and who is out pains the emerging generation…. They say what really matters is orthopraxy and that it doesn't matter which religion one belongs to, as long as one loves God and one's neighbor as one's self."
Is this not a problem? Let’s be clear here. I don’t get to decide who is in or out, neither does Jerry Falwell or V. Gene Robinson. But doesn’t scripture make it pretty clear that Christ does? Doesn’t scripture pretty clearly say that the work God has for us is to “believe on Him who has been sent” and that “no one comes to the father but by me?” or that “there is salvation in no other?” What Scot has said here stretches the limits way too far. I can’t imagine he was merely careless with his words here.

So at bottom, the criticism of EC is over clarity of belief and an epistemology that opens theology up to far too many questions and leaves too many issues unresolved. The criticism of EC is warranted, and the best way to respond to the criticism is to clarify which beliefs of the historic faith EC considers to be essential.