New Christians wrap up and...

Okay- I know I've been pokey about getting to the New Christians and A Christianity Worth Believing.
Sorry.
Just been pokey in general...

I want to wrap up one and bridge to the other... first, some general comments.

I liked The New Christians. The book has roughly three movements, not so much segregated or delineated, but... The first third is some interesting history of Emergent, with much of the behind-the-scenes thinking and feeling filled in. I was especially glad to read a balancing perspective on what's now risen to the status of "lore" in modern-day evangelicalism: Mark Driscoll and his exit from the original group the would become Emergent.

The last part of the book is a helpful look at various emerging church communities and how they live out their community lives.

The real meat of the book, I think, is in between.

The middle part of the book tackles various themes of theology, truth and objectivity and how "emergents" tend to come at the issues differently. If anyone is going to have problems with the book, it will be here. Jones tries to take a "middle way" approach (something I very much appreciate).
The inherent problem with a middle way approach , however, is that it's highly dependent on what you plot as being the end points of your spectrum. Put John Piper on one end of your spectrum and Rick Warren on the other and you'll get a very different "middle" than if you put Rick Warren on one end and Marcus Borg on the other.
On the spectrum of liberal to conservative in Christianity, we not only tend to lean towards one end or the other, I think we tend to "write off" those at the farthest end from the side we lean towards. So, folks on the more conservative side of the spectrum, even in the emerging conversation tend to view guys like Borg and actively lesbian Unitarian pastors with the same suspicion and through the same lens that those on the more liberal end of things tend to view fundamentalists with big black King James Bibles, wives who don't wear pants and more Old Testament sensibilities when it comes to various social issues... as "sub-Christian."

Now, I don't think the answer is simply to not make any judgment calls at all- no reasonable reading of the New Testament can get us to the point where we just have to smile and nod along with anyone who claims some affiliation with Jesus.

But what we can do is this- as we consider what a truly middle way is, we can make sure our spectrum extends sufficiently far enough out to encompass those  who tend to get written off on both sides, thus ensuring that our middle way really is that- a  middle way, a bringing together of both left and right, a healing of the polarity-ridden thinking that is damaging so much of the world around us.
I say all this to say- even as a fan of middle way thinking, I still found myself uncomfortable with some of what Tony lays out- when the ends of your spectrum are mainstream evangelicals on one end and the far end of liberal thinking on the other, your "middle way" tends to have a distinct lean.
In discussing the tendency to expurgate certain lines from the Psalms in lectionary readings, Tony writes this great couple of paragraphs:

"This happens over and over in the lectionary: Sunday morning Bible readings are purged of their unsavory- some might say 'politically incorrect'- content. This dubious practice raises the obvious question: How does it serve the faithful who sit in congregations across America? The answer: It doesn't. Instead, this practice is an injustice both to the Bible and to those who place their trust in the Bible's words. It assumes that average Christians can't handle all that the Bible has to offer, or worse, that preachers can't manage the prickly parts of the text.
This is the left's sin against the Bible. About a year ago, I subscribed to a verse-a-day e-mail from a well-known Christian justice ministry. But the verses that arrive in my inbox daily are not representative of the breadth of scripture. I'm reminded that Jesus said, 'Turn the other cheek' in the Sermon on the Mount but not that when the disciples ended the Last Supper, they pointed to two swords, and Jesus said, 'That is enough.' On both the left and right of modern American Christianity, the cut-and-paste approach to the Bible is a disservice to the people of God. Emergents, for their part, are trying to embrace the whole text."

I love the sentiment... but tend to be a bit more skeptical of its outworking. I've been in enough "non-creedal" baptistic churches who "just follow the Bible" and yet have veritable mountains of biblically-sourced and yet Scripturally dubious codes, mores, and practices to view any claim to embracing the whole text with some suspicion. We all tend to lean into the texts that fit our theologies and away from those that don't.

I too hope that the emerging church can pull in the ends of the spectrum, get back to a place where we wrestle with God's Word in its entirety... but my suspicion is that if the sin of our  evangelical fathers/mothers was ignoring Scripture 's claims on us in terms of, say, our duty to the poor, our (the emerging church) besetting sin is simply picking different issues to lean away from and minimize.

A good example of this is found right in the book, as Tony describes a meeting he had with John Piper (who isn't named here, but Tony has talked about it in other places, so connecting the dots isn't too hard) and Doug Pagitt.

"The pastor began by admitting that he'd never heard of me before, and that he really didn't have anything against emergent Christians per se.  His beef is with Brian McLaren and Steve Chalke, both emergent authors who have questioned the version of the doctrine of the atonement that he holds dear. Early in the lunch, Doug said that he's long respected the ministry of the pastor's church and since we're in the same town, perhaps we could minister in partnership with one another. 'Regardless of our theological differences,' Doug said, 'maybe we can find ways to wor together.' But as the lunch progressed, it became clear that the pastor felt that the beginning oany partnership was necessarily agreement on a particular doctrine, the atonement, a doctrine that he equates with an understanding of the Gospel. To put it conversely, if you don't understand the atonement as he does, you do not understand the Gospel...

I mentioned that it might be arrogant and a bit deceptive to preach that one of them [theories of atonement] is the sole and exclusive means of understanding the single greatest event in the history of the cosmos: the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

...He [Piper] went on to explain that in this confusing, relativized and postmodern world, people need 'fixed points of doctrine' around which they can orient their lives. In other words, a correct understanding of a particular doctrine is the beginning of all Christian  ministry. If you don't have that, he was saying, you don't have anything.

Then I tried another tack in explaining emergent Christians. 'For you,' I said, 'it's the fixed point of doctrine that is the litmus test of all ministry. But for us, it's the Apostle Paul's call to be be ambassadors of reconciliation in the world. Everything we do in the emergent church is surrounded by an envelope of friendship, friendship based on lives of reconciliation...

'In fact,' I continued, 'I'm not sure it's even possible to be an orthodox Christian if you are not living a life of reconciliation.'"

And as I read that, thought "So... if you don't have THAT, you don't have anything?"

In other words, we're trading the all or nothing of orthodoxy for the all or nothing of orthopraxy?
I've been thinking about this story for a couple of months now, literally. Since I got the book and began to read it- it's served as something of a translating metaphor for me in thinking about the emerging church. This puzzling inability to see that any overemphasis, even overemphasizing practice in trying to balance out an overemphasis on doctrine is still just that- OVERemphasis. Is Piper wrong to leave out the ministry of reconciliation and rest "what is a Christian" wholly on doctrine? Absolutely. Would anyone else be equally wrong to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side and rest the question wholly on lifestyle to the exclusion of belief? 

I'll have more to say about this when I dig into Doug's book. But Tony opens the door with this story and his statement that it's "arrogant and a bit deceptive to preach that one of them [theories of atonement] is the sole and exclusive means of understanding" what Jesus did... and then goes on to give us the one means of understanding what Jesus did, namely: "an act of divine solidarity with the suffering and broken world..." To be fair, he doesn't explicitly state that this is the only view (of course, it's the only one he mentions)- but his writing here is strikingly similar to Doug's much more expanded writing in A Christianity Worth Believing in which he out and out rejects the idea that the Atonement has anything to do with a legal transaction or our sin, and chalks up to Greek influence the idea of Jesus as a substitute who saves us from the punishment that was due us... an "innocent one chosen by God to pay the price for the sins of humanity" because "that's what the up-and-out, distant, vengeful God demanded."

Like I said, I'll deal more in depth with this later... but for now I long for us as Christians (emerging and otherwise) to put into practice what Tony is calling us to and that we are ALL, emerging church "leaders" and average emerging joes and janes alike practicing so imperfectly: Embracing the whole text. Whether it be the call of Scripture to watch both our life AND our doctrine closely, or even to sit with some of that tension that Tony brings up in talking about expurgated lectionary readings in how we view the atonement. Am I entirely comfortable with the ideas of, among other places, Romans 5 ("Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him!")?

No. I'd rather not think about God's wrath, but in spite of the fact that Jesus saves me from many, many different things, "God's wrath" still has to be on any list if we are to be truly "embracing the whole text."

And that's the challenge.

Through it all, in The New Christians, Jones is sharp, articulate, and deals with what are basically high-level questions of epistemology at a very accessible level. It's a good book, and a good window into where the emerging church is at both at its best and its most "challenging"... or maybe I should say, those areas where it most needs to be challenged.

Comments

[Julie Clawson]

Maybe I read your post too quickly, but it seems like you aren't fully distinguishing between embracing/watching our doctrine and the need/ability to question certain conceptions of doctrine. Questioning a doctrine is not the same as abandoning doctrine itself. It is permission/grace to do this just that I feel often gets denied us emerging folks.

[Ryan]

Incredible post here Bob, lots of good stuff to think through. I even had to bust out the dictionary and look up the word, "expurgate" now I need to try and use it in a conversation sometime today to make it stick.

I thought the Jones recollection of the meeting with Piper was amusing, given the snippet of the meeting that was transcribed in the newly released book, "Why We Are Not Emergent" by DeYoung and Kluck. Here is the quote.

"An emergent leader named Tony Jones called reformed icon John Piper's comments 'smart-[expletive]' on his blog earlier in the week, in response to Piper's invitation to a recent conference. To his credit though, Jones invited Piper and several other reformed heavyweights to coffee, ostensibly for a sort of evangelical peace summit, complete with caramel lattes and biscotti. Piper went, but first asked Jones, 'Do you always call someone a smart-[expletive] before asking him to coffee?"(p.93)

Would have loved to have been at that coffee gathering as the unintentional comedy had to be off the charts.

[bob]

Julie- good question. My main concern with much of Emergent is an overt downplaying of doctrine altogether- not just an openhanded approach.

This felt to me like Piper was saying "Doctrine!!" and Jones was saying "How you live!" and I'm saying that feels like a false choice to me.
Doug was even more explicit when he was here- for him it's all about living life in the way of Jesus/according to the hopes, dreams and aspirations of God. Someone asked him- "so where does belief come into it" and the answer was "it doesn't." If I understand him correctly, in Doug's mind the idea that my beliefs would in any way affect my soul/eternal destiny/relationship with God is tantamount to Gnosticism. And while you can take it too far and end up in gnostic-like thought, the idea that our beliefs about certain things like the person of Jesus have zero impact on our relationship with God just doesn't do justice to the NT text. The hard left shift of "doctrine doesn't matter at all" is not in any way better (in my mind) than the hard right of "doctrine matters first and foremost" to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.

I have no problem with questioning/ reformulating, etc.

What I'm sensing here goes beyond that, particularly in Doug's new book- and he'd be the first to admit it. He's openly rejecting the idea that the cross had anything to do with my sin. I think you can't say that AND say as Tony has that emergents are trying to take the while scope of Scripture seriously, even the hard parts.

[Julie Clawson]

Thanks for the response. I'm intrigued now to read Doug's book and hear his take on this. At the same time I often feel that any conversation on praxis has to be padded with all sorts of disclaimers about doctrine. I know they do go together, but sometimes I just really want to focus on praxis...

[Sean]

I think my own personal spectrum is stretched between W.V.Grant and Creflo Dollar. And I'm definitely a centrist in that spectrum.