Magnificent Hot Air Balloon

If you are really bored, listen to my sermon.

Emerging, Emergent and Protestant Liberalism

Can we predict the trajectory of a given community of faith? No. Not perfectly. But the robust original form of Protestant Liberalism continues as an uncanny harbinger of where many communities eventually settle in. I'm not thinking of the wimpy, sissy liberalism I sometimes encountered as a student at Southern Seminary in the mid 1980's. I am thinking of the truly magnificent, spectacular, manly liberalism of --brace yourselves for aggressive, cocky, stacked-up German consonants--Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. Emil Brunner tried to detonate a fat tome of a firecracker against Schleiermacher that Karl Barth rejected as a dud. He said Brunner remained unwittingly under Schleiermacher’s spell (In a later post I will argue that parts of the church growth movement are also unconscious children of Schleiermacher.) Barth also said of Schleiermacher, "He who has not loved here cannot hate here either!" I agree.

Now let's switch to Emerging/emergent.

Could it be that I am starting to identify a cluster of interests or values that animate the imaginations and longings of most emerging and emergent Christians? Check these out: authenticity, mystery; relationship, missional communities of faith. Perhaps for some emergent types we should add these: belonging before believing and narrative hermeneutics. But let's stick with the first list for a moment. These interests or values strike me as either simply good things or at least potentially good things (standing alone, its hard to see how mystery is a value, but lets stay calm now. Far be it from me to discourage myself or others from a little directed yet potentially rapturous, divinely sanctioned losing of ourselves while gazing into a McCoy or Thorn flower).

But the devil is in the details, isn’t he? This first little cluster of emerging/emergent values, not without a heavy dose of qualifying, do not a Christian community make (for example, Thai Buddhists would find little here to recoil at). It's no one’s fault you understand; these animating interests can serve as welcome correctives for any number of communities of faith but, they lack the "dogmatic" (yes, I said dogmatic) power to build and sustain, for long, what would pass as a church.

The nasty fracturing of the emerging/emergent movement stems in significant measure from the simple fact that correctives to Christian communities cannot achieve what only core doctrines can. But as the dust is alternately blown up and allowed to settle only to be blown back up again, certain distinguishable shapes are alas, becoming visible. Some of the voices prove to be the genetic descendents of Schleiermacher and others of Barth or even Carl Henry (Henry did soften on Barth in his declining years).

Now I want to recount an historical episode in the life of Friedrich Schleiermacher. It would be difficult to overstate the watershed significance of this episode in the history of the church. The 18 year old Schleiermacher believed that he was able to experience the true meaning and achieve the true goal of the Moravian community where he studied without sharing the minimal doctrinal standards of that community of faith. And what were the doctrines Schleiermacher tried but failed to believe? The deity of Jesus Christ and the vicarious substitutionary atonement of his death on the cross. That's all. Well shucks. Let's not split hairs! Let's just share our stories and affirm each other.

Do you see the dynamite? We will not reject the Bible. But we will stand above it and sift wheat from chaff. We can peal away the husk, (or later Bultmann--the mythological elements) you know, the deity and vicarious whatever etc., but keep the kernel, you know--authenticity, mystery, genuine relationship, etc. (Oprah would be so proud)--and we will call this Christianity! What did Ludwig Von Feuerbach call this? The projection of our own highest hopes dreams and fantasies into the metaphysical realm. What did Barth call it? Idolatry. Wittingly or not, once we stand above the Bible and sift wheat from chaff, we have already started making a god.

Perhaps we can make some fairly prescient guesses about where the chips of the nasty fragmentation of the emerging/emergent movement will fall. Those who stand above the Bible, obviously if not admittedly selecting what scratches their itches for the moment and discarding or at least passing over what does not, will land on one side of a line and those who genuinely try to stand under the Bible, believing and obeying its teaching, will fall on the other side of that same line.

Bonhoeffer on Baptist Press

See my column on Baptist Press.