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Becoming conversant with the emerging churchNext step?BECOMING CONVERSANT WITH THE EMERGING CHURCH The debate over the book The Lost Message of Jesus by Steve Chalke with Alan Mann has occupied many inches of column space and many hours of consultation for the past year or so. What may not be so widely realised is that its roots are in a much bigger movement, already well established in the USA and now impacting evangelical culture on this side of the Atlantic, far more than has been generally recognised. Professor Don Carson’s new title Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church once again puts conservative evangelicals deeply in his debt. He has developed a penetrating biblical critique of this widely diversified development out of orthodox evangelicalism. But he does it with sensitivity, generosity, in an irenical spirit and with a genuine desire to understand the movement and its implications. The emerging church thesis is that the radical changes from the modern to the postmodern, in Western culture, signal that a new church needs to emerge and is indeed emerging. Its values and methodologies need to be embraced and followed if the current evangelical church is not to become washed up on the beach of irrelevance, like a fossilised relic. This thinking is clearly addressing critically important issues for gospel people, as it affects all that is dearest to our hearts in proclaiming the Lord Jesus Christ to a lost world. So, do we need to listen and do we need to act? ProfileThe book’s opening chapters profile the movement and evaluate its analysis of contemporary culture. While commending its positive emphases on authenticity in church life and evangelistic effectiveness, Carson finds its analysis of our culture ‘reductionist and wooden’. Modernism is too easily equated with a confessional Christianity which is a one-dimensional caricature of the Reformation faith. He finds this argumentation ‘theologically shallow and intellectually incoherent’. The author’s own detailed analysis of postmodernism follows, exposing it as relativistic, manipulative and ultimately foolish in its denial of the reality of any objective knowledge if it is not total. The thrust of Carson’s charge is that the emerging church literature shows no signs of engagement with the chief areas of postmodernism’s assault — ‘truth, certainty, historical witness and even the nature of the gospel itself’. Rather than facing these crucial challenges, the movement has uncritically capitulated to postmodernism’s presuppositions. In a sustained and well-documented argument, Carson cites five areas of failure in the emerging churches’ reactions. The first is a failure to come to terms with the importance of non-omniscient truth claims, a category which is vital to historical biblical Christianity, but which is sacrificed by the emerging church on the altar of its devotion to postmodernism. The attitude ‘adapt or be irrelevant’ is shown to be inadequate, since it fails to tackle the absolutism of postmodernism’s claim that, if we cannot know God totally, we cannot know him at all. Failure to face the tough questions, especially if they are truth-related, is the second charge. For example, in the area of other religions, emerging churches want to argue for ‘emerging obligations of a generous orthodoxy’, which means fighting against evil along with other religions. The question is then ‘which religion provides the basis for the best community?’ But there is no attempt to adjudicate by any truth claim and no recognition of Scripture’s view of such religions as idolatrous. In place of Scripture as the norm, an elastic appeal to ‘tradition’ takes over, so that the third failure lies in what Carson calls a sloppy, pick-and-choose approach, which in fact accepts liberal denials of biblical truth. History, God’s character and actions, ourselves and our need are all casualties of this approach. This leads to the fourth failure, which is the blurring of the ‘becoming’ and ‘belonging’ categories in church life, obscuring the New Testament view of the church as a new and distinctive community and opening its membership to any who want to ‘belong’, which, as Carson indicates, is simply creating a different ghetto. His final charge is the failure to handle facts, both exegetical and historical, in a responsible way. Instead, he finds a ‘painfully persistent’ pattern of distortion. Two key textsEvidence for all this is provided by a detailed critique of two key texts emanating from the movement. These are A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren, one of the leading American exponents, and The Lost Message of Jesus by Steve Chalke. The book will be worth its price for these two reviews alone, as the author exposes the presuppositions which lie at the root of what is in effect an abandonment of the biblical gospel. The manipulative methodology of such argumentation is exposed alongside the theological distortion of their thesis. This critique is as persuasive as it is relentless, since it is Scripture itself which is used to expose the wrong thinking. For example, writing about McLaren’s book, Carson says: ‘Every chapter has some useful insights and every chapter overstates arguments, distorts history, attaches excessively negative terms to all the things with which McLaren disagrees….and almost never engages the Scriptures except occasionally in proof-texting ways.’ His conclusions concerning the Evangelical Alliance’s distancing of itself from Chalke’s position, as outlined in his book, is that this was ‘sad, necessary and commendable’. The book ends with lists of relevant biblical texts on truth, knowledge and pluralism, brief comments on ten biblical passages, the contents of which are being overlooked or ignored by the emerging church movement, and a detailed exposition of 2 Peter 1, entitled ‘A Biblical Meditation on Truth and Experience’. Old-fashioned liberalism?Although only 250 pages in total, this is an important and significant book which every church leader should read. The issues it raises are already with us here in the UK and are likely to be increasingly confrontational. What I particularly appreciated about Don Carson’s treatment was his combination of razor-sharp analysis, with warm-hearted enquiry and unyielding biblical faithfulness. It is a model of how to conduct a controversy of these dimensions and importance. When all is said and done, in becoming conversant with the emerging church we discover that old-fashioned liberalism with its suspicion of biblical absolutes and downgrading of truth categories appears to have assumed a new and trendy dress, for a different climate. But as always, to the undiscerning reader, it all sounds very plausible. This is particularly so in the cultural moment in which we find ourselves. Of course, if we are going to communicate the gospel with any effectiveness to the millions of completely unchurched people in our society today, we have to listen to their concerns, understand their presuppositions and their prejudices, and present the unchanging message of the Bible with sensitivity and love, as well as relevance and penetration. To many young people today the church entirely lacks authenticity. To them it does seem like a stranded relic from the mists of pre-history. There does often seem to be a yawning gulf between what we Christians say we believe and how we live together in our churches and within the wider community. All of this is extremely important and, in articulating this, the emerging churches are refusing to bury their heads in the sand or retreat into their pietistic ghettos. For this they are to be commended. But when the only answers forthcoming seem to be at the expense of gospel essentials, and particularly the substitution of personal experience for Scripture as the point of ultimate authority, we know that the right questions have generated the wrong answers. Led by the cultureWhenever the church is led by the culture, rather than the Word, it is signing its own death warrant, because it will be swallowed up wholesale. It has always been so. The liberal refusal to accept the supernatural in the early 20th century was a misguided attempt to make a de-mythologised Christianity more acceptable to the modern rationalists of the time. It emptied the churches of Western Europe in the next 100 years. That is the situation still. A friend of mine was engaged in conversation with a liberal national denominational leader recently and enquired whether he was not concerned about the small number of men from his camp coming forward for the ministry today. ‘Oh, not at all!’ was the reply. ‘We have always recruited from the ranks of the evangelicals and we shall continue to do so.’ That is why this book is so important. Each church leadership team should read it and discuss it together. If the emerging church is coming up with the wrong answers, what are the right ones? How are we going to combine 100% biblical faithfulness with cutting-edge penetration into our 21st-century culture? These questions are certainly not going to go away. Perhaps this book will help us to begin, or to continue, the hard work of finding and implementing the right answers. David Jackman,
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