Emerging Church: Whose Meaning is it Anyway?

***Some emerging communities in Britain make as much or more use of secular music as they do sacred—and they construct meanings of their own choosing. Such sacralizing of secular texts represents one example of Gibbs and Bolger’s second core pattern of emerging churches covered in a chapter entitled “Transforming Secular Space.” Would-be secular “texts” (whether in the form of music, motion pictures or literature) are taken captive, sanctified, if you will, for the glory of God and the edification of believers and unbelievers alike.

My mouth fell open when I learned of this. Despite being born in 1960, four years prior to end of the post-war Baby Boom, I made similar use of secular music. In the years following my Damascus road-like rescue from intravenous drug use and conversion to evangelical faith in Jesus Christ, I very naturally enjoyed Black Sabbaths’ Master of Reality as a most edifying encouragement to my faith. I recall realizing that my use of the music might not match or might even contradict the intentions of its authors (we are talking Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osborne et. al.!) But this did not matter much to me.

But allow similar elasticity of received meaning from a pharmaceutical prescription for my child or my wife’s wedding vows or from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, and dangers lurk. Do you follow? And I fear that some of the proclivities of a certain slice of the emerging movement in a swoon over the recovery of biblical narrative (which can be a very good thing) sit similarly loose vis-à-vis the meaning of biblical texts and author intent.

Case in point: does not the foisting of a too thoroughgoing and uncritical imitatio Christi meaning upon Jesus in the synoptic gospels open all sorts of possibilities for “entering the story” not only never imagined by but positively contrary to the original intentions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Only author intent to present Jesus as modeling the Christian life and evangelistic method could legitimize such use of those narratives.

Emerging Christians secure something precious to their yearnings by reading the gospels largely as blueprints for Christian living: they collapse witness into morality and community and so avoid what Rick Warren has rightly lamented—the widespread perception of evangelicals as a Big Mouth (without loving, service-giving hands and feet) telling people they are bad and on their way to hell. Where is the welcoming of the stranger, where is the place for social justice and service to the community!? Yes, Yes! We must recover these and throughout church history the need to do so spikes in certain sectors of the Christian family and usually on its heels is the pitting of the ostensibly more ethically interested synoptic gospels against everything else, especially Paul.

In many ways the history of the church reads like a history of overreaction. In fact, the gospels are pregnant with theology and the epistles are laced with ethics and any notion of playing one set of scriptures off against another or supposing that we can stand above the Bible and sift wheat from chaff leads inevitably (whether purposefully or not) to what Barth said it would―Feuerbachian projection which is just idolatry, the making of a God of our choosing. That God is a mirage. He does not exist.

Jesus does teach us much about the values of the Kingdom that has come with his appearance in the synoptic gospels. But he is not mainly modeling the Christian life, he is headed to the cross and resurrection. It was from the standpoint of the resurrection that these gospels were written. And the apostles mainly don’t get it, but they will eventually, and when they do, as Jesus told them, they will shout from the housetops what he whispered to them and told them to keep secret.

Witness and personal testimony and telling our stories and living in community according to kingdom values while serving each other and the world are all good and necessary. But they cannot be collapse into each other, and witness, especially, should not be conflated with doing good or anything else. It is precisely the offensive message of the cross (including especially the exclusive claims of the gospel) that, despite the church’s service to the world, and embodiment of kingdom values, nevertheless brings the suffering of persecution that identifies believers with their crucified Lord. No. Living is not witness. Witness is witness. It means to bear testimony to what one knows, in this case, about the one who lived and died and rose again and will come again to judge. And no amount of narrative hermeneutical back flips can undo this.

I haven't quite ramped up to a bad conscience about the “postmodern” construction of meaning I foisted upon Black Sabbath. But similar creative reading of the Biblical texts just will not do. Author intent must govern—you know, like with the child’s pharmaceutical prescription and the spouse’s wedding vows and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. It is amazing how resistant folks can be (even postmodern folks) to the attempted imposition of meandering meanings upon their own “texts.” When our God speaks to us in his word, shouldn't we at least strive to keep our meaning constructers turned off as a "do unto others" matter of courtesy?