Transcript Resurrection - Critical Issues Commentary

Presented by Bob DeWaay
September 9th, 2005
The Emerging Church
and The Line of
Despair
Escaping From Reason
Defining The Undefined

The Emerging Church does not like to be
defined, because definitions create
boundaries and they do not like
boundaries.
What the Emerging Church
Means by Missional

One of the key features of the “generous
orthodoxy” promoted in McLaren’s book, is
that practice must precede theology. This
means, rather than going to a people
group with a fixed set of theological beliefs
about God, man, the world, Christ,
salvation, justification, the Holy Spirit, and
other important Biblical matters, one goes
to the people first and finds a practice that
fits their needs and priorities.
In Emergent Thinking, One’s Mission
Determines One’s Theology

“I am a Christian because I believe that, in all
these ways, Jesus is saving the world. By ‘world’
I mean planet Earth and all life on it, because left
to ourselves, un-judged, un-forgiven, and untaught, we will certainly destroy this planet and
its residents. And by ‘the world’ I specifically
mean human history, because again, it was and
is in danger, grave danger, ultimate danger, selfimposed danger, and I don’t believe anyone else
can rescue it.” (McLaren; 97)
In Emergent Thinking, One’s Mission
Determines One’s Theology

“Theology is the church on a mission
reflecting on its message, its identity, its
meaning.” (McLaren 105)

But How do we know what the Mission is?
Mission is Defined along the Lines of
Liberation Theology

Oppressed people would be free. Poor people
would be liberated from poverty. Minorities would
be treated with respect. Sinners would be loved,
not resented. Industrialists would realize that
God cares for sparrows and wildflowers—so
their industries should respect, not rape, the
environment. . . . The kingdom of God would
come—not everywhere at once, not suddenly,
but gradually, like a seed growing in a field, like
yeast spreading in a lump of bread dough, like
light spreading across the sky at dawn (McLaren
111)
There is no Bad News

“The idea that the Christian message is
universally good news for Christians and
non-Christians alike is, to some, unheard
of, strange, and perhaps heretical. To me,
it has become natural and obvious.”
(McLaren, 110)
Rejection of Systematic theology

“At the heart of the theological project in
the late modern world was the assumption
that one could and should reduce all
revealed truth into propositions and
organize those propositions into an outline
. . .” (McLaren, 152)
Rejection of Systematic theology

“Barth anticipated the day when the
common sort of systematic theology would
become a historical artifact. Prose
abstractions just don’t contain or convey
God’s truth as well as we thought they
did.” (McLaren 152)
Deconstruction

“The implications of deconstruction are
staggering for Christians doing ministry in
the emerging culture. . . By driving for ‘the
one true interpretation,’ for example, they
disenfranchise postmodern reader for
whom deconstruction is as much the
mother tongue as traditional interpretation
is for modern people.” (Language, Sweet,
McLaren, Haselmayer, 89)
Re-imagining

“This full, radiant, glorious experience of
God in Jesus Christ eventually
revolutionized the whole concept of God,
so that the word God itself was reimagined
through the experience of encountering
Jesus, seeing him act, hearing him speak,
watching him relate, and reflecting on his
whole career.” (McLaren, 73)
A Theology of Personal Preference

Think of the kind of universe you would expect if
God A created it: a universe of dominance,
control, limitation, submission, uniformity,
coercion. Think of the kind of universe you would
expect if God B created it: a universe of
interdependence, relationship, possibility,
responsibility, becoming, novelty, mutualilty,
freedom. . . . I find myself in universe B getting
to know God B (McLaren 76)
Perpetual Doubt – Rejecting the
Reformation View of Scripture

“How do ‘I’ know the Bible is always right?
And if ‘I’ am sophisticated enough to
realize that I know nothing of the Bible
without my own involvement via
interpretation, I’ll also ask how I know
which school, method, or technique of
biblical interpretation is right. . . .
Perpetual Doubt – Rejecting the
Reformation View of Scripture

“What makes a ‘good’ interpretation good?
And if an appeal is made to a written
standard (book, doctrinal statement, etc.)
or to common sense or to ‘scholarly
principles of interpretation,’ the same
pesky ‘I’ who liberated us from the
authority of the church will ask, ‘Who sets
the standard? . . .
Perpetual Doubt – Rejecting the
Reformation View of Scripture

“Whose common sense? Which scholars
and why? Don’t all these appeals to
authorities and principles outside the Bible
actually undermine the claim of ultimate
biblical authority? Aren’t they just the new
pope?” (McLaren 133)
Schaeffer’s View of the Scriptures

“The Scriptures give the key to two kinds
of knowledge—the knowledge of God, and
the knowledge of men and nature. The
great Reformation confessions emphasize
that God revealed His attributes to man in
the Scriptures and that this revelation was
meaningful to God as well as to man . . .
Schaeffer’s View of the Scriptures

“There could have been no Reformation
and no Reformation culture in Northern
Europe without the realization that God
had spoken to man in the Scriptures and
that, therefore, we know something truly
about God, because God has revealed it
to man.” (Escape From Reason, 21)
Schaeffer Warned of the
“New Theology”

“To the new theology, the usefulness of a
symbol is in direct proportion to its
obscurity. There is connotation, as in the
word god, but there is no definition.”
(The God Who is There, 58)
Emergent Theology is a Contemporary
Version of Neo-Orthodoxy

“The secret of the strength of neoorthodoxy is that these religious symbols
with a connotation of personality give an
illusion of meaning, and as a consequence
it appears to be more optimistic than
secular existentialism.” (God Who is There,
58)
Schaeffer Rebukes Emergent
Thinking before the Fact

“All the new theology and mysticism is
nothing more than a faith contrary to
rationality, deprived of content and
incapable of communication. . . Rationality
and faith are totally out of contact with
each other.” (God Who is There, 61)
Rationalism and Rational
Rationalistic: “By this meant that man
begins absolutely and totally from himself,
gathers information concerning the
particulars, and formulates the universals”
 Rational: “The sobering fact is that the
only way one can reject thinking in terms
of an antithesis and the rational is on the
basis of the rational and the antithesis. . . .
The basis of classical logic is that A is not
non-A” (Schaeffer, Escape, 35)

Emergent Thinking
Loathes the Propositional

“The purpose of Scripture is to equip
God’s People for good works. Shouldn’t
a simple statement like this be far more
important than statements with words
foreign to the Bible’s vocabulary about
itself (inerrant, authoritative, literal,
revelatory, objective, absolute,
propositional, etc)?” (McLaren 165)
Schaeffer’s Warnings and
Predictions

“The evangelical Christian needs to be
careful because some evangelicals
have recently been asserting that what
matters is not setting out to prove or
disprove propositions; what matters is
an encounter with Jesus. . .”
Schaeffer’s Warnings and
Predictions

“When a Christian has made such a
statement he has, in an analyzed or
unanalyzed form, moved upstairs. If we
think that we are escaping some of the
pressure of the modern debate by
playing down propositional Scripture
and simply putting the word ‘Jesus’ or
‘experience’ upstairs. . .”
Schaeffer’s Warnings and
Predictions

“We must face this question: What
difference is there between doing this
and doing what the secular world has
done in its semantic mysticism, or what
the New Theology has done? . . .”
Schaeffer’s Warnings and
Predictions

“Certainly men in the next generation
will tend to make it the same thing
[mysticism]. If what is placed upstairs is
separated from rationality, if the
Scriptures are not discussed as open to
verification where they touch the
cosmos and history, . . .”
Schaeffer’s Warnings and
Predictions

“Why should one then accept the
evangelical upstairs any more than the
upstairs of the modern radical theology?
. . Why should it not just as well be an
encounter under the name Vishnu?”
(Escape from Reason, 76, 77).
Religious Symbols, Stories, Mystical
Experiences, Icons, etc. Replace
Proclamation of Truth

“To go abductive, get rid of your
inductive/deductive outlines and points
and make your sermons pointless! . . .
Instead of asking yourself before creating
a sermon. . . ‘What is my point?’ ask
yourself, ‘What’s my image?’” (Language,
Sweet, 31, 32)
The Ten Commandments;
Propositional Truth or Religious
Symbol?

Then God spoke all these words, saying, “I
am the Lord your God, who brought you
out of the land of Egypt, out of the house
of slavery. You shall have no other gods
before Me.” (Exodus 20:1-3)
Heeding Schaeffer’s Warning

“Increasingly over the last few years the
word ‘Jesus’, separated from the
content of Scriptures, has become the
enemy of the Jesus of history, the Jesus
who died and rose and who is coming
again and who is the eternal Son of
God. . .”
Heeding Schaeffer’s Warning

“. . . So let us take care. If evangelical
Christians begin to slip into the
dichotomy, to separate an encounter
with Jesus from the content of the
Scriptures (including the discussable
and the verifiable), we shall, without
intending to, . . .”
Heeding Schaeffer’s Warning

“. . . Be throwing ourselves and the next
generation into the millstream of the
modern system. This system surrounds
us as an almost monolithic consensus.”
(Escape from Reason, 79)

This system is now called “postmodern”
Brian McLaren Writes of “Seven
Jesuses I have Known”

“Up until recent decades, each tribe felt
it had to uphold one image of Jesus and
undermine some or all of the others.
What it, instead, we saw these various
emphases as partial projections that
together can create a hologram: a
richer, multidimensional vision of
Jesus?” (McLaren, 66)
How Much Heresy Will This Lead to?

“The end of entropy”
“In the postmodern matrix there is a
good chance that the world will reverse
its chronological polarity for us. Instead
of being bound to the past by chains of
cause and effect, we will feel ourselves
being pulled into the future by the
magnet of God’s will, God’s dream,
God’s desire.” (Language, Sweet, 113).
How Much Heresy Will This Lead to?

“This new vision sees the universe as
only partially created, an unfinished
symphony, a masterpiece in progress.
In this eschatology we are invited to be
part of God’s creative team working to
see God’s dream for the universe come
true . . .”
How Much Heresy Will This Lead to?

“. . . In this way our relationship with
God is more than interactive; it is
collaborative. It is more than just a
matter of God interacting with us; it is a
matter of God inviting us to be creative
partners in the construction of a world
as it could be from the world as it is to
be.” (Language, Sweet, 113, 114)
What Does the Bible Say About this?

“But the day of the Lord will come like a
thief, in which the heavens will pass away
with a roar and the elements will be
destroyed with intense heat, and the earth
and its works will be burned up. Since all
these things are to be destroyed in this
way, what sort of people ought you to be in
holy conduct and godliness,” (2Peter 3:10,
11)
What Does the Bible Say About this?

“looking for and hastening the coming of
the day of God, on account of which the
heavens will be destroyed by burning, and
the elements will melt with intense heat!”
(2Peter 3:12)
The Traditional, Christian View is that
History is Linear:
History Begins with God’s Act of Creation
and Ends With God’s Act of Judgment

Postmoderns reject this view and claim a
new view that is a combination of linear
and circular time; a helix – “A spiraling
faith is one of timelessness within time,
one in which the past is embedded in the
future.” (Language, Sweet, 143)
We Were Warned about This

But realize this, that in the last days
difficult times will come. . . . holding to a
form of godliness, although they have
denied its power; and avoid such men as
these. . . . always learning and never able
to come to the knowledge of the truth.
(2Timothy 3:1, 5, 7)
How Does the Emergent Church
Cross the Line of Despair But
Apparently Feel no Despair?
They are clinging to the false hope that
God is still creating and that with our help
the world is going to solve its problems
 This is like going to the dentist with an
abscessed tooth, getting a shot of
Novocain, and going home happy because
the pain is gone.

Brian McLaren Mentions “postfoundationalism” What is That?
Foundationalism is the classical
epistemology that builds a theory of
knowledge from foundational “givens.”
 These givens are typically the basic
reliability of sense perception, the law of
non-contradiction, and causality.
 Emergent thinkers reject foundationalism.

What is the Alternative to
Foundationalism?

Coherentism judges a system of
knowledge by internal coherence without
requiring it to be attached to the real world.
What is Wrong with Coherentism?
Coherence requires foundational
presuppositions such as non contradiction
in order to test for coherence.
 That a coherent system is better than a
non coherent system merely assumed,
therefore is itself a “foundation.”
 It would be possible to create a fully
coherent view of reality that had no
attachment to the real world.

What is Wrong with Coherentism?
Coherentism is an epistemological attempt
to put knowledge into an “upper storey.”
 This creates a disjunction in which in the
realm of nature, people go about their
business in areas such as science and
engineering as if foundationalism were
valid in a lower storey, but put everything
else into a mystical upper storey.

An Illustration of Why “postfoundational” Epistemology Leads to
a Disjunction Between Upper and
Lower Storeys

A Trip to a post-modern doctor.
A Trip to a Post-modern Doctor.
A person goes to the doctor with vision
problems and severe headaches.
 A brain scan is ordered and it shows a
brain tumor.
 The post-modern doctor has rejected
foundationalist premises: basic reliability of
sense perception, the law of causality, and
the law of non-contradiction.

A Trip to a Post-modern Doctor.
Patient: Am I going to need Brain surgery?
 Doctor: There is no reason to believe that.
 Patient: But the person who read the brain
scan sees a tumor. I did not use to have
these symptoms, now I do, the tumor must
have caused them.
 Doctor: Causality is a relic of
Enlightenment Rationalism, I don’t believe
in it.

A Trip to a Post-modern Doctor.
Patient: But the technician who read the
scan showed me the tumor, I saw it.
 Doctor: The reliability of sense perception
is a relic of foundationalism, now we know
that we cannot believe what we see.
 Patient: But a brain with a tumor is not the
same as a normal brain, I need help.
 Doctor: I do not believe in noncontradiction.

A Trip to a Post-modern Doctor.
Patient: So what do you believe in?
 Doctor, I believe reality is filtered through a
culturally determined grid that distorts
what you see. Perhaps you should stretch
your mind to see things differently. I
suggest meditation.
 Patient: I think I want a second opinion; do
you know any Enlightenment Rationalist
doctors?

This Cannot be Lived
out in the Real World

Schaeffer: The basic issue is a shift in
epistemology. . . . As far as the
theologians are concerned, they have
separated religious truth from contact with
science on one hand and history on the
other. There new system is not open to
verification, it must simply be believed.”
(God Who is There; 54)
Schaeffer Warns about
Hegelian Synthesis

Schaeffer wrote, “If our own young people
within the churches and those of the world
outside see us playing with the
methodology of synthesis, in our teaching
and evangelism, in our policies and
institutions, we can never expect to take
advantage of this unique moment of
opportunity presented by the death of
romanticism.” (God Who is There, 47)
The Emerging Church Uses What
Schaeffer Warned Against

“For those familiar with Hegelian
synthesis, it may be tempting to see
modernity as the thesis and postmodernity
as the antithesis. We believe a better
approach would be to see pre-modernity
as the thesis, modernity as the antithesis,
and post-modernity as an attempt at
synthesis—an attempt that is still in its
earliest stages.” (Language, Sweet, 242)
Conclusion: Distinguishing
Description from Prescription

The whole Emerging Church Movement is
predicated on the idea that relativistic,
postmodern young people cannot be
expected to embrace the gospel in terms
of it being an absolute truth claim.
Therefore it, they say, it cannot be
presented that way.
Conclusion: Distinguishing
Description from Prescription

That many people in our culture are
relativistic is descriptively true.

It does not follow, however, that the gospel
or Christianity must be changed to make it
attractive to such people.
The Gospel Is God’s Power to Change
Anyone who Believes; Regardless of
Their Cultural Prejudices

Romans 1:16
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it
is the power of God for salvation to
everyone who believes, to the Jew first
and also to the Greek.”