Johnson on the Emerging Church (Pt 3)

PHIL JOHNSON's Shepherd's conference lecture continued

"Definition

So with that as background, let me attempt to give you something that approximates a definition of this movement--this thing--that we all agree resists any kind of precise definition.

Some important disclaimers. I hope you won't be surprised or dismayed when people who are devoted to the emergent subculture point out that my description of their movement is an oversimplification. They are also going to complain that some of the things I criticize don't apply in every exhaustive detail to every person or every congregation in their movement.

Remember: I know that, and I have already acknowledged it. But I still think there's great value in giving you a description of the broad contours of the movement, and that is what I am going to try to do.

Some in the movement will complain that I haven't read enough of their literature; I haven't interacted enough with the right emergent bloggers; or I haven't visited enough of their gatherings to be a competent critic of their ideas.

All I can say in response is that I have read as much literature from the movement's key writers as I can get my hands on; I have interacted directly with people in the emerging movement as much as my time and schedule will permit; I have already put many of my criticisms of the movement in the public arena repeatedly, and I have invited (and received) lots of feedback from people who are devoted to the movement. I have done my best to be fair and complete. And I assure you that I will continue to study the movement.

But I don't agree with the notion that in order to be a reasonable and credible analyst of a movement like this, you have to remain neutral indefinitely and never become a critic. There is simply too much in the movement that warrants criticism.

As I said, I just want to be candid and clear for you. I wish time allowed me to be as nuanced as I would normally like to be. On the other hand, I think a tendency to over-nuance and over-qualify everything has already spoiled some otherwise potentially helpful critiques of this movement.

A definition (of sorts) in four parts. So allow me to give you a broad-brushed description of the "emerging church movement," mainly for the benefit of those who are still having a hard time getting their minds around the concept of what this thing is. This won't be the kind of pithy definition you can take down in a single sentence, so don't even bother trying. But I will try to keep it brief enough to be manageable.

So here's my definition:

1. The "emerging church" is a convenient name for a broad-based and growing assortment of similar or related movements that have flourished in the past half-decade--mostly on the fringe of the evangelical movement. "Emerging" congregations in one way or another tend to be keenly attuned to the postmodern shift in art, literature, and public discourse.

(Incidentally, Postmodernism itself is not easy to define, but in general it refers to a tendency to discount values like dogmatism, authority, absolutism, assurance, certainty, and large, commanding, exclusive worldviews--which postmodernists like to label metanarratives. Postmodern values would include things like diversity, inclusiveness, relativism, subjectivity, tolerance, ambiguity, pragmatism, and above all, a view of "humility" that is characterized by lots of qualms and reservations and uncertainties and disclaimers about whether anything we hold in our belief system is really true or not. Those are the very same values that are usually held in high esteem in the "emerging church movement.")

By the way, I think its a mistake to see the emerging subculture as nothing more than the next generation's version of the "seeker sensitive" church. It is that, but only in a certain sense. In some ways, the "emerging church" is a reaction against and a departure from the shallow, mass-movement professional showmanship of the slick megachurches like Willow Creek and Saddleback. Emergent types tend to value authenticity over professionalism. Many of their churches--perhaps a majority of their churches--are home churches or otherwise small-group gatherings that are informal and unorganized almost to an extreme.

Understand: this is a very diverse movement. Some in the movement might even say they are wary of postmodern influences, while others are advocating that Christians ought to embrace postmodernism enthusiastically. But, either way, they would all pretty much be keenly aware that postmodernism has molded the way contemporary people think, the way public discourse is carried on, the way public opinion is shaped, and the way judgments are usually made about truth-claims. Therefore, they argue, the church must adjust its message accordingly. And normally, in practice, this means some level of accommodation to postmodern preferences.

2. Now, here is another vital aspect of what distinguishes "emerging church movement": Most congregations in the movement would describe themselves as missional, by which they mean they stress the importance of evangelistic outreach by involving themselves in the lives of unbelievers in the community outside the narrow circle of the church. They point out that the way believers live is one of the most potent and persuasive aspects of our testimony to unbelievers--if not the single most important thing of all.

There's nothing essentially wrong with that idea, of course, as long as we also communicate the truth of the gospel clearly and distinctly with words. The problem arises when you factor in the postmodern tendency to distrust or despise every kind of clarity, certainty, or authoritative truth-claim. It has often meant, in practice, that the emphasis on "missional living" results in an evangelistic strategy where gospel preaching is downplayed or deliberately omitted. (And I'll probably have more to say about that if time permits.)

3. Here's another (similar) feature of the "emerging church movement": Emergent-style churches show a preference for "narrative theology" as opposed to systematic doctrine. The story of the gospel is ultimately more important than the theology of it. The simple narrative of salvation history must not get lost in the careful parsing of theological words and ideas.

Obviously, There's an important germ of truth in that idea, too. The four gospels do tell us about the life of Christ in narrative format. They are collections of anecdotes and incidents from His life, not systematic doctrinal treatises about soteriology, or hamartiology, or any of the other-ologies by which we tend to categorize our theology.

People in the "emerging church movement" place a lot of stress on that fact, and in my assessment they tend to go quickly overboard. The fact that so much of Scripture is narrative doesn't alter the fact that much of it is also didactic--and vice versa. Here, I think their obsession with postmodernism has got the better of some of our emergent friends, and they have simply reacted against rationalism by running to the opposite imbalance.

4. In this same vein, people in the emerging church movement often don't hold the idea of propositional truth in very high regard. And this one of the key points many of them want to make: A proposition, by definition, is a premise that is either true or false. There is no third choice. (That is one of the most basic laws of logic, known as the law of the excluded middle.)

Postmodernists simply don't like handling ideas with that kind of clarity. So there's a tendency among emergent types to denigrate or devalue the very idea of propositional truth, logic, and rationality.

I contend that you cannot teach truth at all apart from propositions of some sort. Boil any truth-claim down to its pure essence, and what you have is a proposition. You cannot even tell stories without propositions, so if you were serious about dispensing with propositions altogether, you would have to forfeit narrative theology, too.

Now again, I think there is a germ of truth underlying this aspect of postmodernist thinking. Truth is more than merely a collection of propositional statements. Most of understand that there is a vast and important difference between knowing Christ and knowing facts about Christ.

On the other hand, knowing Christ in a true and saving way must necessarily involve knowing true facts about Him. You don't really know Him at all in any biblical sense if you don't know the basic facts about His deity, His death, His resurrection, and essential parts of the story like those. So there is a sense in which the propositional aspect of the truth about Christ is vital. Al Mohler says it this way: "while truth is always more than propositional, it is never less."

By the way, the suggestion that we try to deal with truth in non-propositional form is not anything new with the "emerging church movement." It's an idea that was floated as one of the key tenets of neo-orthodoxy at least 65 years ago or more.

I would argue that the assault on propositional truth ultimately entails the abandonment of logic completely. It is an irrational idea. Francis Schaeffer said the same thing. He regarded neo-orthodoxy's attack on propositional truth as the theological equivalent of suicide. He said when we abandon rationality in that way, we have crossed "the line of despair." We might as well abandon the quest for truth itself. And in effect, that is the result of the postmodernist perspective.

5. Here's a final element in my abbreviated description of the emerging Christian subculture: Most insiders like to portray their movement as an answer to the influence of philosophical modernism; a departure from modernism; something wholly distinct from modernism. As you know, modernism has assaulted the church for some 150 years, at least. It has always, consistently been hostile to evangelical truth.

Some actually believe the "emerging church movement" is so much the polar opposite of modernism that when you criticize their movement, they will accuse you of blithely and unthinkingly buying into the errors of "modern" thinking. They will often label you a "modernist." And among other things, they will accuse you of parroting a brand of philosophical foundationalism that owes more to Rene Descartes and Cartesian foundationalism than it owes to the Scriptures. Lots of naive people have been drawn into the movement by sophisticated-sounding philosophical arguments like those.

That claim is based on the assumption that postmodernism itself represents a correction of the philosophical errors of modernism, rather than just a further step in a wrong direction.

How any Christian can uncritically adopt that view of carnal, worldly, humanistic philosophy is an utter mystery to me. It ought to be obvious to people in the church that postmodernism poses at least as much a threat to the truth and the clarity of the gospel as every other humanistic philosophy that has preceded it in the long parade of human foolishness that has brought us to the postmodern moment in which we are living.

Postmodernism is just the latest, and possibly the worst, in a relentless procession of bad ideas that ought to have conditioned the church to despise and distrust the folly of human wisdom (which, by the way, is what Scripture commands us to do).

Modernism at its very core and inception was an overt attempt to subvert and defeat the truth of Scripture with humanistic rationalism. Modernism failed, and failed miserably.

Postmodernism is not really a significant departure from modernism; it is just a similar attempt to subvert and defeat the truth of Scripture by glorifying irrationality, and by portraying all truth as hopelessly paradoxical, ambiguous, unclear, uncertain, unimportant, or otherwise unworthy of all the concern and attention philosophers have given to the idea. Postmodernism abandons the hope of finding any absolute or incontrovertible truth, and instead, the postmodernist looks for amusement by playing with words and language, and by questioning every assumption and challenging every truth-claim.

That's no answer to modernism; it is a further step in the same wrong direction.

So my assessment of the "emerging church movement" is that far from being the antithesis of modernism, this sort of "evangelical postmodernism" is really ultimately nothing more than Modernism 2.0.

I have been trying to highlight that point for the past six months or more on my blog by posting excerpt after excerpt from Charles Spurgeon's criticisms of 19th-century modernism. (All that material is still online if you want to review it. Just do a Google search for three words: Spurgeon, modern, and postmodern. That will be enough to get you started.) It is very eye-opening to see that every one of the arguments and biblical points Spurgeon made against the so-called "evangelical modernists" of his day can (without any modification whatsoever) be applied against the "evangelical postmodernists" of our day.

Far from being antithetical, the two movements are ultimately just one and the same. The "emerging church movement" is this generation's version of what our grandparents knew as modernism--updated in some ways, but ultimately, it's essentially the same. Postmodernists today are using the same arguments and the same strategies that the modernists of the Victorian era employed. The results will be exactly the same, too.

You can begin to understand, I hope, why I insist that this topic demands to be dealt with with the utmost candor and clarity, rather than with evasions and equivocations. And I make no apology for that.

The "movement" is not monolithic

Before we move on, I want to reemphasize something important and elaborate on it just a bit: What I just gave you was a quick, broad-brush description of the "emerging church movement." There are lots of nuances and differences within the movement. Not everyone in the movement is saying exactly the same thing.

I already indicated, for example, that attitudes toward postmodernism vary within in the movement. Practically everyone in the movement will insist that they do not uncritically embrace every aspect of postmodernism, and that they are only trying to adapt their language and worship style in order to reach postmodern people. Listen to what emergent leaders say about postmodernism, for example, and you will see that they don't all agree among themselves completely about what's good and what's dangerous about postmodernism. Even Brian McLaren, who used to speak of postmodernism in glowing terms, lately seems to be trying to avoid references to the subject and now occasionally even denies that he himself is a full-on postmodernist.

So there are vast differences in style and opinion within the "emerging church movement"; the movement itsef is in flux and I want to acknowledge that.

For example, the British flavor of evangelical postmodernism tends to be somewhat less superficial than its American cousin. British emergents are normally more concerned about substance as opposed to style. They would tend to stress the missional aspects of the movement and see their philosophical and doctrinal differences with mainstream evangelicalism as secondary. One of the outstanding British figures in the "emerging church movement," Andrew Jones, recently wrote an appeal to American emergents, urging them to get their act together.

I'm not suggesting that the "emerging church movement" in Britain is ultimately any more doctrinally sound or any less postmodern than the American version. It's not. But it is, perhaps, a little more serious.

Then you have Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill in Seattle, who this time last year might have been singled out as the quintessential "emerging church" leader. But last spring he wrote a letter to other pastors in his branch of the movement in which he said, "Let me agree that much of the church today is incredibly frustrating. Personally, when I hear so many young guys denying substitutionary atonement and the like after drinking from the emerging church toilet I turn green and my clothes don't fit."

Since then, Driscoll has spoken out several more times against the doctrinal ambiguity of the "emerging church movement," and it is clear that he rejects the movement's hostile attitude toward doctrine and propositional truth. Driscoll even appears to have stopped referring to himself as "emergent," and he and the movement currently seem to have something of a love/hate relationship going.

Assuming Mark Driscoll is still (more or less) part of the movement, he would definitely represent the "conservative" wing. (He has recently published tributes at his blog to Robert Schuller and Bono, the rock musician, so the word conservative would apply to him only in a relative sense.)

That reminds me of a couple of other things I wanted to mention but can't really take time to elaborate on. This may help you more than anything I have said so far to understand the flavor of the "emerging church movement": Bono--the Irish rocker and politico of U2 fame--seems to be the unofficial icon of the movement. If you've been tuned into pop-culture at any time over the past two decades and know anything about Bono, that might help you to grasp something about the look and feel of the movement. (My favorite fact about Bono is that he named one of his sons "Elijah Bob Patricus Guggi-Q.")

Anyway, Emergent types seem to quote Bono all the time. I would say that he sometimes seems to be the chief theologian of the "emerging church movement," but in all fairness, that honor belongs more to John R. Franke and Stan Grenz. Grenz, sadly, died at a fairly young age about a year ago when an aneurism burst in his brain. But he and Franke are the two academic theologians who have done more than anyone else to blend postmodernism and theology into a kind of quasi-evangelical doctrine.

Again, I can't elaborate on this at length in our short time frame, and I don't want to take anything away from the scholarship and writing style of either John Franke or Stan Grenz, because intellectually, both of them were blessed with more brilliant minds than mine. But I am disturbed by the accommodations both men made to postmodernism, and I think the fruit of their work is manifestly disastrous.

However, if you want to begin to understand how anyone might try to write a theological justification for the irrational agglomeration of unorthodox ideas that is circulating in the "emerging church movement", read the book these two men jointly authored, titled Beyond Foundationalism, subtitled "Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context," published by Westminster John Knox Press just five years ago.

Becoming cognizant of emergent

Now, if you men represent a typical cross-section of conservative evangelical pastors, in all likelihood, most of you had probably never even heard of the "emerging church movement" eighteen months ago. The issue more or less began to come to the forefront of discussion and debate in the evangelical movement after a cover article on the emerging church phenomenon in Christianity Today in November of 2004.

Since then, critics of the movement have multiplied, and the movement has become the focus of intense debate and controversy. Most of the critics are deeply and legitimately concerned about the overall direction of the movement and its long-term influence on the rest of the church. Over the past six months, this has probably become the dominant issue in the agenda for evangelical discussion and debate--in an era when the evangelical movement was already troubled by (and not quite sure what to do with) issues like "Open Theism," "The New Perspective on Paul," and various other relatively recent controversies.

It would be easy, actually, to critique the emerging church movement by reviewing some of Brian McLaren's books, starting with A Generous Orthodoxy. The problem with that approach is that McLaren clearly does not speak for everyone in the "emerging church movement." Whenever critics try to analyze the movement by examining what McLaren has written, people within the movement simply dismiss the criticisms by suggesting that whatever McLaren says is his own opinion, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the movement itself.

That's partly true and partly a deliberate evasion. The emerging subculture clearly fosters an environment where theological mavericks like McLaren are pretty much encouraged to throw whatever bizarre and even heretical notions they like on the table for discussion. So I do think Brian McLaren is fair game, and because he is such a large figure in the movement, I can't really ignore him.

On the other hand, it's also true that although McLaren has had a profound influence in the shaping of the emerging church, he doesn't necessarily speak for everyone identified with the movement. To critique Brian McLaren is to critique Brian McLaren. It doesn't necessarily go to the heart of the movement itself. So I'm going to say a few words about Brian McLaren and then move on to other issues.

About McLaren . . .

I gave a fairly lengthy review of one of Brian McLaren's books (A New Kind of Christian) in the seminar on I did on postmodernism last year, so you can read that transcript or listen to the recording if you want to understand more of my objections to McLaren.

I will also say that McLaren's book A Generous Orthodoxy is one of the absolute worst books I have ever read from Zondervan (and that's saying quite a lot). Frankly, I think it raises grave doubts about whether Brian McLaren is really "orthodox" in any sense of the word. He borrows a lot from neo-orthodoxy--and that, I think, is probably the only sense in which he is entitled to apply the term "orthodox" to himself. He does claim to accept both the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene creed, but he also makes it clear that he doesn't ultimately put much stock in the actual propositions that are affirmed in those or any other creeds, and he spends most of the book arguing against the idea that our defense of the Christian faith requires us to defend any of our actual doctrines.

Most of all, Brian Mclaren is hostile to the idea that we can claim any degree of certainty about any point of truth. This is, by the way, not an obscure idea in Brian McLaren's works. This is one of the key points he labors to make almost any time he gets a platform to speak. He makes it clear over and over in all his books and lectures that he despises every hint of certainty or assurance. He thinks it is inherently arrogant and unspiritual to speak dogmatically about any point of spiritual truth.

And nothing epitomizes cocksure arrogance more in Brian McLaren's mind than radio preachers. He says it makes him angry to listen to Christian radio and hear preachers who seem so sure that the doctrines they believe and teach are really true. Authentic "humility," in Brian McLaren's opinion, must start with a refusal to insist on the absolute truth of any given proposition. And (other than his absolute contempt for overconfidence) he's not really even absolutely sure about the things he himself writes about.

McLaren portrays faith and certainty as opposing concepts. He says prefers the idea of confidence rather than "certainty," but he carefully qualifies himself to make clear that he will only tolerate a relative kind of confidence. He himself is not "absolutely certain" about anything.
I should add that McLaren wants it made clear that he is not saying no absolutes exist. He's only saying that if they exist, we can't know them with any kind of absolute certainty. And therefore, he says, we should never proclaim anything unequivocally. And he himself generally follows that rule (except when he is railing on the certainty with which radio preachers tend to speak.)

Brian McLaren says, "Certainty is overrated . . . History teaches us that a lot of people thought they were certain and we found out they weren't." In a different interview, he said, "When we talk about the word 'faith' and the word 'certainty,' we've got a whole lot of problems there. What do we mean by 'certainty'? . . . Certainty can be dangerous. What we need is a proper confidence that's always seeking the truth and that's seeking to live in the way God wants us to live, but that also has the proper degree of self-critical and self-questioning passion."

McLaren himself is not sure about whether it's proper to speak of homosexuality as "sin." He recently published an article where he recounted how someone asked him where his church stood on the issue of homosexuality, and his answer was a lengthy apologetic for his own ambivalence on the issue. Here are his exact words:

Frankly, many of us don't know what we should think about homosexuality. We've heard all sides but no position has yet won our confidence so that we can say "it seems good to the Holy Spirit and us." That alienates us from both the liberals and conservatives who seem to know exactly what we should think.

Then he added this:

Perhaps we need a five-year moratorium on making pronouncements. In the meantime, we'll practice prayerful Christian dialogue, listening respectfully, disagreeing agreeably. When decisions need to be made, they'll be admittedly provisional. We'll keep our ears attuned to scholars in biblical studies, theology, ethics, psychology, genetics, sociology, and related fields. Then in five years, if we have clarity, we'll speak; if not, we'll set another five years for ongoing reflection.

That, frankly, is Brian McLaren's approach to everything. He has been pressed on several occasions to name any doctrines or truths that he feels are sufficiently clear to be proclaimed dogmatically or preached with conviction, and he has made it absolutely clear that conviction and the full assurance of faith are things he holds in high contempt.

He even has the audacity to ask for a universal moratorium on preaching about the sin of sodomy. Apparently, he thinks the rest of us should be silent about the matter until he makes up his own mind about it. (And he clearly even hints that he might never actually form a settled opinion on the matter. In fact, I can already tell you that if he follows his own epistemological convictions, he won't. He can't.)

So when Brian McLaren claims adherence to the ancient ecumenical creeds, that claim, by Brian McLaren's own admission, is dubious. He's not really sure about anything he believes.

By any historic evangelical standard, McLaren's religion is not authentic Christianity at all. And it does frankly raise major questions about the whole "emerging church movement" when he is given so much credence by people in that movement.

He is in almost every way an exact replica of Harry Emerson Fosdick, adapted to suit the 21st-century zeitgeist. Most of you will understand exactly what I mean by that.

Enough about McLaren.

My three main concerns

What else could possibly be wrong with the "emerging church movement"? (I'm not going to try for an exhaustive list. I wish you could see the stack of books I had to read over the past year as I prepared for this seminar. It's literally a two-and-a-half-foot-high stack, and fully half of them are recent products of the Zondervan imprint called Emergent-YS, indicating the involvement of Emergent (Brian McLaren's organization) and Youth Specialties, an organization that for years published the infamous evangelical satire magazine Wittenburg Door. Youth Specialties is also well known for publishing books of activities--outrageous games and grotesque or messy contests--for youth groups. Their literature has been a major influence in evangelical youth work for almost three decades now, and if you have ever been in youth ministry, you are probably familiar with them. These days, they are one of the main cheerleaders for the Emergent idea.)

I have friends who have suggested that the emerging church idea is the predictable fruit of churches that tailor their youth ministries to whatever style is currently fashionable, hold alternative church services for the youth in a separate building ("the youth building") and never incorporate them into the actual life of the church itself. They've grown into adulthood while their styles and preferences were catered to in a special "church" service all their own. The actual church service was something they weren't expected to like. Many of them were never really exposed to worship in the context of the actual church, with real adults. They were deliberately entertained instead, and thus they were conditioned to think that way. They grew old, but they never grew up, and now even as adults, they want to continue to play at church, but outside the mainstream of the historic church. (My friend characterized the emerging church worship style as "Church services for the ADHD generation." Read the Christianity Today account of Emergent's national convention and you will understand why he said that.)

And while that is not the background of everyone in the emerging subculture, I'm sure there area lot of people who fit that profile, including some of the key leaders in the movement. You'll see what I mean if you read the Christianity Today article on the emerging church in the November 2004 issue.

Anyway, I could probably come up with a very long list of issues that concern me about the "emerging church movement," but since we have so little time to pursue this, I have decided to boil it down and give you a short list of my top three current concerns about the "emerging church movement." We can cover these very quickly, because I think you'll understand my rationale for these concerns just based on what I have already said.

So here are the three things that disturb me most about the general drift of the movement:

1. It fosters contempt for authority. The New Testament idea of church government is not anarchy. It's not even democracy or mobocracy. The church is certainly not supposed to be the sort of populist organization where everyone has an equal voice in everything that happens.

The contempt for structure in the "emerging church movement" is a thinly-veiled aversion to authority. You will see that if you simply examine the angry comments that were posted at the Emergent-US blog when it was announced that the new organization would have a "director." Blogs and discussion forums associated with the movement were assaulted with complaints and angry criticisms. One member of the movement said, "A director?!! Nobody's going to direct me! That's why I left the traditional church." Another guy wrote: "I think we are going in a horribly dangerous direction. We aren't becoming a 'conversation,' we're becoming an institution. A 'National Director?' for a conversation? Give me a break . . .. I have a feeling we're going down the Anakin Skywalker path here, folks."

The whole movement's approach to Scripture is another major reflection of the widespread tendency within the movement, to show contempt for every kind of authority in the church. Brian McLaren insists that Scripture does not actually claim authority for itself. It claims to be profitable, he says, but not "authoritative."

As a matter of fact, the whole movement seems devoted to dialectical approach to truth. This, I think, explains the movement's aversion to the idea of preaching and its preference for the idea of "conversation." There's an underlying assumption that this is the best way to arrive at the truth: You have a thesis, and then an antithesis, and the truth is supposed to lie in a synthesis of those two contradictory ideas. That synthesis becomes the new thesis. It's answered by a new antithesis, and the synthesis of those ideas becomes the new thought. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It's a never-ending cycle.

That's the perspective of truth and epistemology proposed by the German philosopher Hegel: the dialectical method. All truth is ultimately determined that way. So it's fluid; never absolute. Truth changes all the time.

The dialectical method may indeed be a fairly accurate description of how public opinion develops. But we ought to know as Christians: That's no way to discover truth. Right?

Scot Mcknight (who is an apologist for a number of the movements that are currently trying to expand the whole concept of evangelical Christianity) has written a sympathetic analysis of the "emerging church movement" that is worth reading if you want a decent description of the movement from a sympathetic perspective.

Scot McKnight says this: "[People in the "emerging church movement"] want to open up questions. They're asking questions about how we should understand our relationship to scripture: Is it inerrant? Is it true? And many of the emergent people are saying that [Scripture may not be absolute and authoritative and inerrant, but] it is the "senior partner" in the conversation." McKnight calls that "a healthy category." I don't think it is. I think it's just more evidence of how the "emerging church movement" fosters a contempt for authority.

Here's a second major concern I have:

2. It breeds doubt about the perspicuity of Scripture. You understand the principle of perspicuity? It speaks of the clarity--the "understandability"--of the Bible. The Westminster Confession of Faith says it like this: "All things in scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, [so] that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them." Perspicuity. The Bible is not too hard for us to understand.

The entire postmodern epistemology (their view of how we acquire knowledge of the truth) deliberately glorifies uncertainty. I already gave you some quotations about this from Brian McLaren, but you can read almost any writer in the movement and you will find this theme is relentlessly pressed.

The article in Christianity Today last year about the emerging church, for example, is a classic example of this. One of the central themes running through that article is the message that people in the "emerging church movement" have abandoned certainty, assurance, and strong convictions. They aren't dogmatic about what they believe, because they aren't really sure of what they believe.

The obvious implication here is that Scripture just isn't clear enough for us to say what it means with any kind of confidence.

In fact, that's more than an implication of the article. It's pretty much what these folks are expressly saying. Listen to this paragraph about the husband-and-wife pastoral team of one of the leading emergent-style churches in the country. This is about Rob and Karen Bell, who founded Mars Hill in Grand Rapids:

They found themselves increasingly uncomfortable with church. "Life in the church had become so small," Kristen says. "It had worked for me for a long time. Then it stopped working." The Bells started questioning their assumptions about the Bible itself-"discovering the Bible as a human product," as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat. "The Bible is still in the center for us," Rob says, "but it's a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it."

"I grew up thinking that we've figured out the Bible," Kristen says, "that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I feel like life is big again-like life used to be black and white, and now it's in color."

Ultimately, the emerging church message begins to sound like an echo of the voice of Satan in the garden: "Hath God said?"

This is a huge issue--in some ways the pivotal issue. The overwhelming message coming from the "emerging church movement" often sounds like a flat denial of the clarity and perspicuity of Scripture. That is a denial of one of the basic tenets of biblical Christianity, Protestant history, and evangelical conviction.

Yes, parts of Scripture are "hard to be understood." The apostle Peter acknowledges that in 2 Peter 3:16. But the essential message is simple and clear. The wayfaring man, though he be a fool, doesn't have to be confused by it, according to Isaiah 35:8. God has made Himself plain enough that there is much more than merely mystery to the Christian faith.

Quickly, here's a third thing that disturbs me about the "emerging church movement":

3. It sows confusion about the mission of the church. I'll just sum up my final point with this one observation: The "missional" emphasis in the "emerging church movement" seems to be entirely focused on an effort to adapt the church to the culture, with very little stress on the church's duty to proclaim a message of repentance and faith in Christ that calls men and women to forsake the world.

In other words, the "emerging church movement" seems to be all about the conversion of the church, rather than the conversion of the sinner.

In fact, I found little or no emphasis on conversion in any of more than a dozen books I read about the "emerging church movement". (Sometimes, emerging church writers adopt the language of postmodern narcissism and talk about "recovery," but that's as close as they usually get to discussing conversion.) It is simply not a major theme of discussion in the emerging conversation.

This is a glaring flaw in a movement that calls itself "missional."

The true mission of the church is embodied in the gospel message and the Great Commission. It is truth that demands to be proclaimed with clarity, and authority and conviction, and if you refuse to do that, even if you insist you are being "missional," you are not fulfilling the mission of the church at all.

Those are some of my main concerns about the "emerging church movement." Can I make one of those absolute statements that make postmodernists grind their teeth? There is absolutely no sense in which I would commend this movement to you, encourage you to join the so-called "conversation," or wade through the mounds of trendy literature in search of valuable helps and insights that might help your church.

Spiritually speaking, that literature points down a dead-end street into a blind alley on the bad side of town. I am convinced that this movement is going to be a serious detriment to the testimony of the church as a whole, a source of great confusion for many Christians, and another in a long series of movements that will surely undermine the work of the gospel rather than advance it. And I have no doubt whatsoever that those predictions will be proven correct within the next 10-20 years, if not sooner.

What about those "valid points"?

At the beginning I said I think some valid points have been made by people in the "emerging church movement," and some of you might be thinking everything I've said since then makes that compliment ring rather hollow. That's good, because I didn't want you to get the idea that if I commended something that has been said by someone in the "emerging church movement," I'm endorsing the movement.

But in closing, I will say that I do think some of the points that have been made by people in the "emerging church movement" are good and valuable, and worthy of heeding.

For one thing, they are right to reject the professionalism and big-business approach to ministry that has been popularized by most of the influential megachurches.

They are right to point out that millions of American evangelicals live lives of gross hypocrisy and narcissism, ignoring the needs of the poor while indulging themselves with entertainments and luxuries while the church struggles, and many pastors live barely above the poverty level (if that), and our Christian brothers and sisters struggle in many parts of the world because they don't even have clean water or basic medical care. We have the resources, and yet we are too prone to spend them on ourselves. I often think American evangelicals will have a lot to answer for when we are called to give account for our stewardship.

They are right when they complain about the way the evangelical movement has sold its birthright for a mess of Republican Party porridge. I obviously don't agree with those who think a commitment to left-wing politics would be the right remedy. But I do think the evangelical movement should cut its ties with all political parties, get out of party politics completely,and get back to the business of preaching the gospel.

And they are right when they suggest we have not done enough to reach the outcasts and counter-cultural people in our society. I think their approach to reaching those segments of society is all wrong and largely counterproductive, but to adapt a phrase from D. L. Moody: I like the way some of them are trying to reach those people a lot better than I like the way many evangelicals simply ignore the task of evangelism.

Let me say that we can and should heed all those things without buying into the agenda of the "emerging church movement"--and certainly without abandoning the task of preaching the gospel with clarity and conviction. I hope we can take that challenge to heart, and minister accordingly, and look to Christ as the only true and trustworthy pattern for church ministry.

It's not really that complex an issue, when you see it in that light."