| What is “Emergent” | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intro: “Emergent” | 1: “Emergent” and Culture | 2: Targets of “Emergent” | 3: “Emergent” Epistemology | 4: “Emergent” Superior? | 5: Analyzing “Emergent” |
Scot’s last question:
#5: Has the emergent movement understood culture accurately? Does it appeal to Scripture accurately?
Given the previous posts, the first quesion is simple to answer: yes. “Emergent” has arisen as a means to reach today’s culture. It even draws from the culture.
The second question, though, requires more. Too many movements in history claimed to interpret and appeal to Scripture correctly. We first need to understand what the “Emergent church” sees as good hermeneutics. It appears that most in the movement want the interpretation of Scripture to be fluid. That is, instead of defining a rigid and exhaustive system defined as “orthodoxy,” many in “Emergent” want to define some borders which one cannot cross and remain “orthodox” but allows room for some variations on interpretation. In some ways, this is a move from trying to “be right” to “not being wrong.” Many groups of Christians have equated the two, but “Emergent” appears to dissociate the two and even allow some generosity and humility in the interpretation game.
So, does “Emergent” appeal to Scripture accurately? It depends. If one maintains a very strict interpretation of Scripture, then nobody besides that one is accurate. But, in today’s society, strict interpretation has become a rather quaint peculiarity of true fundamentalists. “Emergent” has been pretty vocal in not becoming such. And so have i. So, for me, “Emergent” has generally appealed to Scripture in acceptable ways. Accuracy still implies a single correct answer; and that is something postmodernism rejects as a human possibility. It may very well be true that there is only one answer, but we humans are incapable of reaching it…and we haven’t been promised it.
It seems to me that emergence and the fundamentalism to which it reacts are a symptom of the subject/object split that has taken place within modernist thought. While fundamentalism goes hard to the objective side to combat an objective scientific framework with an objective biblical framework, the emergent church rejects this notion leaning ever harder towards a more subjective grounding of religious truth in the experience of the believers.
This condition seems to explain the EC’s movement, especially on liturgy.
The question that I have is how does the EC avoid sliding into a kind of subjective Pentacostalism in which the measure for adequacy becomes the spiritual feeling that one experiences in the church or bible reading? I am concerned about this because I worry about the EC’s more broad conception of doctrine as you said earlier as “not wrong” seems to slide into a religious consumerism in which a variety of views on vital issues such as justification etc. may be tolerated to get people to come to church.
As a student of theology I wonder if this undermines a monotheism which prides itself on the search for a single source of reality and experience. Instead of a church working out within its institutional self what is the best answer (and this process never ends) we stop short with a plurality of answers in which one may or may not be as adequate as the next. This to me seems antithetical to the idea of a church as a community in which all rely on eachother for mutual upbuilding.
i do agree with you the the EC has been leaning towards some kind of subjectivity, but i don’t think it’s clear as to what kind of subjectivity. Some strands show more relativist leanings, while others show more of the Kierkegaardian leaning.
i find myself leaning more towards Kierkegaard’s subjectivity and not that of relativism. From there, it is obvious as to how “open” the orthodoxy will be. The reason why i don’t consider myself part of the “Emergent” crowd and yet consider myself “postmodern” is because of these lines that have been drawn. For the most part, though, the EC does seem to be more community-focused when it comes to theology in which, as you said, “all rely on each other for mutual upbuilding.”