The Chicken or the Egg?

by Phil Johnson

n a January CT article titled "Five Streams of the Emerging Church," Scot Mcknight suggests that emerging Christians tend to be more praxis-oriented than the rest of us. According to McKnight, to most in the Emerging movement, "how a person lives is more important than what he or she believes."

In other words, Emerging Christians tend to think good works generally trump sound doctrine. If our Emerging friends sometimes seem to sweep aside more conservative Christians' concerns about the soundness of their doctrine, this is the main reason. McKnight writes, "Here is an emerging, provocative way of saying it: 'By their fruits [not their theology] you will know them.'"

But that presents a horribly misleading false dichotomy. Biblically, our theology is an important aspect of our fruit. "Whoever transgresses and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God. He who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son" (2 John 9).

Moreover, the notion that what people do is ultimately more important than what they believe flies in the face of the very same proof-texts that are normally used to support it. McKnight, for example, quotes James 2:20: "Faith without works is dead" But that verse doesn't suggest that what we do is "more important" than what we believe; James's whole point is that the two things seen properly are perfectly symbiotic. Both are essential.

And in terms of causal priority, faith does take first place over works, because any truly good works we do are the fruit of our faith—and James expressly says so at the start of his argument: "I will show you my faith by my works" (James 2:18).

That's the same cause-effect relationship between faith and works that Scripture consistently stresses. Titus 2 describes good works as adornments for sound doctrine; not vice versa. According to 2 Peter 1:5-8, Christian virtues are the necessary accoutrements of authentic Christian faith.

McKnight anticipates that argument: "Many will immediately claim that we need both or that orthopraxy flows from orthodoxy. Most in the emerging movement agree we need both, but they contest the second claim: Experience does not prove that those who believe the right things live the right way."

In the first place, such an argument from "experience" is fallacious. It's precisely like the argument of the Arminian who insists true Christians can indeed fall away from Christ and be eternally lost "Because I knew a guy who I am certain was saved, and he became an atheist." First John 2:19 explains the "falling away" of such people: "They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us." Similarly, 2 Peter 1:9 says someone who lacks the virtues that flow from faith "is blind"—not a true believer at all.

Likewise, James 2 is pointing out that someone whose life is devoid of good works is no true Christian. James is not suggesting that "how a person lives is more important than what he or she believes."

In the second place, whether McKnight is correct or not in claiming that "Most in the emerging movement agree we need both [right practice and sound belief]," that idea is hardly one of the driving convictions of the larger movement. In fact, I can certainly see how some readers of Emerging blogs and literature might get a totally different impression. The Emerging penchant for making orthopraxis primary over orthodoxy has produced all kinds of rhetoric and behavior which at times seem to imply that sound doctrine is almost wholly optional.

But that's not even the worst of it. The whole way of thinking is upside down. Take the notion that behavior always trumps belief to its logical conclusion and you will end up making a person's own works the ground of his or her hope for justification.

That's no trifling mistake. It's an absolute lie—a damnable lie; and it is the main falsehood that undergirds all false religion—to suggest that what you believe doesn't ultimately matter very much as long as you are good enough.

The final word on this one: The comment thread attached to this post melted down into an unintelligible cacophony, so I closed it. But just before I closed it, commenter David Rudd asked a question designed to refocus the discussion. Here's my answer to his question, and I'm going to let this be the final word in this thread. I'm adding it to the bottom of the original post, to preserve the sanity of friends who won't want to wade through 80+ comments to get the point. But if anyone does want to slog through those comments, they are still there in all their glory. Enjoy. To David Rudd: Thanks for the valiant attempt to refocus the comments with your last one. I think you're whistling in the wind if you expect the train wreck this thread has become to jump back on track so easily, but you have asked the right questions. I really did invite Scot McKnight to post a detailed clarification here, and I was waiting to post any more comments until he has had that opportunity, but he hasn't answered my e-mail yet. Perhaps he's away for the 4th. I'm going to close this thread anyway now, and perhaps we'll reprise the theme in a future post, without the baggage of so many nasty and totally off-track comments. Anyway, as I said, you have asked the right question: "Is the statement: 'how a person lives is more important than what he or she believes.' necessarily the same as: 'good works generally trump sound doctrine'"? (Note: The former statement is what McKnight actually wrote. He suggested that one major idea that shapes the Emerging movement is the belief that "how a person lives is MORE IMPORTANT THAN what he or she believes." He did not say, "How a person lives is more important than what he or she professes to believe"--which is in essence what his defenders now say he actually meant and what Scot himself seemed to indicate in his short note to me.) My answer to your question is: Yes, I am expressly contending that if what a person does is really "more important than" what he or she actually believes, then good works must trump sound doctrine. Furthermore, that's precisely what is happening on a wide-scale basis. What Scot actually wrote (as opposed to what we're now told he meant) does in fact appear to be a common feature in Emergent/Emerging rhetoric and practice. It should be perfectly obvious that most Emerging literature puts a lot of stress on lifestyle, behavior, attitudes, and whatnot—while minimizing the importance of sound doctrine. That perspective explains why an ostensibly "conservative" Emerging leader can insist on the one hand that he personally believes in sola fide and sola Scriptura (and even claim that he regards these doctrines as "essential" to authentic Christianity) while at the same time maintaining the pretense of Christian fellowship with people who openly and regularly disavow those "essentials," attack the atonement, deny the authority of Scripture, and wink at whatever new heresy is popular in the post-evangelical community this week. As for the question of whether it's legitimate or not to critique the Emerging "conversation" as a movement, I'll reiterate what I wrote in a comment I addressed (to you, as I recall) once before: I'll tell you what: when there are no more national gatherings with the words Emerging or Emergent in their titles and all the usual suspects stop coming together to lecture one another on adapting the biblical message for postmodern ears, then I for one will stop dealing with the whole jumble as a "movement." I do recognize (and have said so many times) that it's a messy, muddy monstrosity, and its participants aren't always "moving" the same direction. But most participants do acknowledge some commonality with one another. That's why they keep giving endorsements to one another's books, and why Zondervan/YS formed a whole special line to publish and publicize those books, and why we all speak of "Emerging" in the first place. And even though we critics sometimes grope for a better way to describe the muddled commonality that exists; and we occasionally fail to load every criticism with the requisite number of disclaimers; and we recognize that the contours of the movement itself are deliberately ambiguous and constantly in flux—well, if postmoderns and post-evangelicals themselves can keep using "Emerging" as a label to represent something they are convinced is positive, they really shouldn't keep complaining about the label per se every time a critic comes forward to object to this or that thing which some Emerging blogger or author says is the whole key to reaching postmoderns.

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