If the Lyotard Fits, Wear It

by Phil Johnson

wice recently (here and there) I have mentioned Scot McKnight's article on the Emerging Church from last January's Christianity Today. The article sparked several thoughts when I read it earlier this year. At the time, I was busy preparing for Grace Church's Shepherds' Conference. Then I had a book chapter to write. After that, I taught a week of systematic theology in Italy. Next I went to Atlanta for the FIRE conference. And yadda yadda. By mid-May, blogging about a January CT article seemed so—yesterday. So I was going to let it go.



But every week, it seems, I encounter fresh references to McKnight's article. "Here's an article that will surely ease your mind about Emerging Christianity," someone recently told me (with a kindly pat on the shoulder). "It turns out that most of the movement is really, really good! You just need to understand how diverse it is. See: there are these Five Streams of Influence, and most of them are very positive and healthy developments. . ." And all the things I originally wanted to reply to in that article keep coming back to me.

So here's another one:

Scot McKnight grossly understates the influence of postmodern thinking in the Emerging Church movement. Notice (on the one hand) that McKnight himself can't even manage an introductory description of the movement without using the P-word over and over. But (on the other hand) he dismisses D. A. Carson's Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church with the patented Friends-of-Emerging shrug-off: "Carson's book lacks firsthand awareness and suffers from an overly narrow focus—on Brian McLaren and postmodern epistemology."

For whatever reason, McKnight hates it when the question of postmodern epistemology comes up in the emerging Conversation—regardless of whether friends or critics are the ones raising the issue. "Instead of epistemology, the EM is concerned with ecclesiology—how to 'do church,'" he insists.

But most (if not all) of the typical Emerging innovations in ecclesiology and methodology are in fact rooted in the postmodern epistemological shift, and McKnight is simply wrong if he seriously wants to deny that. In fact (and here's something you will rarely hear me say), on this point, McKnight is wrong and McLaren is right. Practically everything that makes the Emerging movement distinctive is closely related to postmodernism's cynical attitude about knowledge and truth—and that includes all five "streams" identified by McKnight.



Of course, there was no way for McKnight to deny that postmodernism is a major influence (if not the definitive ingredient) in the movement as a whole. Still, he tries to mitigate that admission every way he can think of. Instantly after listing postmodernism as "a second stream of emerging water," he reflexively takes a defensive tone: "Postmodernity cannot be reduced to the denial of truth."

Well, OK. That's true, but what serious critic ever said otherwise? Indeed, Postmodernists don't generally "deny" anything outright. Instead, the usual postmodern response to truth-claims is suspicious skepticism. But even so, it still wouldn't be right to "reduce" postmodernism to that. No credible critic would. So McKnight's comment sets up straw man—a caricature that backhandedly misrepresents why critics are wary of postmodern epistemologies. Perhaps he would benefit from another reading of Carson.

I'm certain Carson would gladly agree (as I do) that postmodernity cannot be "reduced" to the denial of all truth. On the other hand, postmodernists can legitimately be charged with a general reluctance to affirm truth unequivocally. That's the issue McKnight needs to come to grips with, because it does have a seriously adverse effect on the way lots of postmodernists—including several of the most vocal leading voices in the Emerging conversation—handle (and mishandle) the revealed truth of Scripture.

Anyway, after that brief, gratuitous remark about what postmodernism isn't, McKnight gives a not-particularly-enlightening explanation of what postmodernism is. He says (in typically postmodern terms): "It is the collapse of inherited metanarratives . . . like those of science or Marxism."

He seems determined to downplay the problems with Postmodernism's know-nothing approach to epistemology. He makes an offhanded reference to Jamie Smith's Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault To Church in order to buttress the preposterous suggestion that despite postmodernism's addiction to uncertainty, "such thinking is compatible, in some ways, with classical Augustinian epistemology."

What does McKnight mean by that, you ask? Just this: "Emerging upholds faith seeking understanding."

Yeah, right. "Doubt seeking justification" would be my own assessment of the dominant Emerging approach to epistemology, but let's not get sidetracked with an argument about that just now.



McKnight next borrows some categories from Doug Pagitt to classify three different categories of attitudes toward postmodernism within the Emerging Church. He says some in the movement want to "minister to postmoderns, others with postmoderns, and still others as postmoderns."

It is true enough that the attitude toward postmodernism within the Emerging movement is not uniform. Driscoll seems to belong to category one of the Pagitt/McKnight taxonomy and McLaren probably exemplifies category three. (Although these days, McLaren himself might very well describe himself as a Class-Two Emergent. In fact, I'd think most in the movement would want to place themselves in the center category, because people who are enthralled with postmodernism love those Hegelian syntheses, and they hate to be labeled. No true postmodernist would therefore ever admit to being one.)

McKnight suggests that critics of Emerging spirituality are usually preoccupied with the Class-Three Emergents because they stand out (and thus presumably make the easiest targets). In McKnight's words, "The third kind of emerging postmodernity attracts all the attention."



I think McKnight has misunderstood the critics' concern. My one complaint with our Emerging friends is that (whether they formally embrace postmodern epistemologies or not) they tend to be far too accommodating when they meet postmodernism face to face. Rather than answering postmodern skepticism and refuting it with biblical truth proclaimed confidently, they typically try to tiptoe around the sensitivities of the postmodern unbeliever.

But it is nevertheless quite true that Class-Three Emergents are by far the most problematic. In McKnight's words, "[They] have chosen to minister as postmoderns. That is, they embrace the idea that we cannot know absolute truth, or, at least, that we cannot know truth absolutely."

Now, judging from what's written in the Emergent/Emerging blogosphere, I think that is a far more popular perspective among the rank and file in the Emerging Church movement than McKnight cares to admit. But without George Barna's help, I don't know that it would be possible to cite actual statistics that would prove whether my pessimism or McKnight's optimism is more justified.

It's true, however, that the most troublesome voices in the Emerging Church movement are those who plainly and simply have embraced postmodern skepticism about truth, knowledge, and certainty. I would include Chris Seay, for example, in that number. (I wouldn't be surprised if Seay himself objects to that characterization and says I'm "labeling" him unjustly, but again, that's a predictably postmodern thing to say anyway. I'm sticking by my assessment for now, and hopefully what I quote below from Seay himself will be sufficient to explain why.)

Seay is a third-generation pastor in the Houston area. I can't resist mentioning in passing that one of his books is The Gospel According to Tony Soprano: An Unauthorized Look Into the Soul of TV's Top Mob Boss and His Family. That has nothing to do with any point I'm making, but it does illustrate that Emerging Christianity is no less tawdry and shallow than the seeker-sensitive approach that most "Emerging" Christians emerged from—and which they claim to be in rebellion against.

Especially Seay. He is legendary for the way he savages his own father's and grandfather's pragmatic styles of ministry.

So on one of Seay's recent podcasts, an interviewer was asking him about his struggle with youthful rebellion against the beliefs of his parents. Here's Seay's answer:

My bigger question was could we find truth, right? So, um, that we could believe it was true. But who's really to determine what is true? And I still am at a place that I question the reality of objectivity, and what "objectivity" really means. So who can say what is objectively true? Unless you could actually be objective, which none of us are capable of because we can't get to a third place beyond where we are.

That's actually a much better summary of the postmodern attitude toward truth than McKnight gave. But it isn't really a Christian position at all. Note: Seay can't answer the question "who's really to determine what is true?"

That's a serious problem, and it's a much more widespread problem throughout all streams of the Emerging Church movement than I think Scot McKnight wants to acknowledge. I do read a lot of Emerging and Friend-of-Emergent blogs. I see what the grassroots participants in the emerging conversation are saying.

Now, let's be clear here: The Friends of Emergent need to be at least half as fair with their critics as they want their critics to be with them. No intelligent, rational, serious-minded student of theology would ever insist that we have a "complete"—i.e., perfect—understanding of any doctrine.

Postmodernism thinks that admission is fatal to all knowledge. If we don't know anything perfectly, we can't ultimately be certain about anything, right?

That's not a question that suddenly occurred to the people of God now that the age of postmodernism has enlightened us about what true humility really is. Thoughtful Christians have contemplated that same question in every generation, and the historic Protestant confessions answer it plainly.

First, God's Word is truth. It is pure truth, revealed by God, and it is the sole and sufficient final arbiter between what's true and what's false.

Second, while we may not understand any doctrine exhaustively, we can nonetheless be confident that what we do know accurately is true. That's the beauty of propositions. They recognize that truth by definition includes facts, and even though no finite set of facts or propositions ever exhausts all truth about God, we can know lots of true facts about God, and we can even know God Himself (albeit through a glass, darkly) because those facts, and God Himself, have been revealed to us by God Himself in Scripture.

So (lo and behold!) I can actually affirm penal substitution without being guilty of "reducing" the gospel to only that one point.

Mark Dever was saying something very similar in a very fine article which McKnight objected to two Easters ago. Look how far we have come since then. The "conversation" is going nowhere fast, it seems.

With this post, we introduce the first of several original motivational posters based on the jargon of Emerging Christianity. Sixteen are already in the pipeline, and we'll be releasing more in the days to come. Soon we'll post a link where you can view the full collection and even download hi-res copies suitable for poster-size printing. Watch this space.

---

Left-leaning politics and the Emerging Church

by Phil Johnson



cot McKnight's Christianity Today article on the major streams of influence within the Emerging movement acknowledged that the political drift of the movement is leftward. Most Emerging Christians are fed up with the evangelical movement's thirty-five year dalliance with Republican-party politics.

OK, let me say first of all that I have great sympathy with the concern they are expressing. For more than twenty-five years, I've been voicing disapproval of the way right-wing political activism often seems to eclipse gospel ministry on the agenda of some churches and evangelical organizations. Some in the religious right seem to think the primary duty of the church in secular society is political lobbying. Evangelical politicians have displayed a frightening willingness to compromise spiritual principles, forge partnerships with unbelievers, and shift the focus of their message away from the gospel in favor of more broadly-appealing moral and political themes. Some seem willing to take whatever pragmatic means are necessary in order to influence the vote—as if the advancement of Christ's kingdom depended on the American electoral process.

Several of the best-known leaders in evangelical politics are former pastors who have left church ministry behind in order to become full-time lobbyists and political commentators. The evangelical movement as a whole has mirrored that trend for the past couple of decades, I fear—abdicating the teaching ministry in favor of more worldly affairs. Judging from the books that typically rise high on the Christian best-seller lists, evangelicals nowadays are a thousand times more concerned with politics and public relations than with studying and proclaiming Scripture. And it's no accident that the elevation of worldly entertainments in evangelical megachurches has gained popularity right alongside evangelicalism's obsessive craving for clout in the political arena. I'm convinced these trends are closely related. Perhaps I'll blog about that one day.

Anyway, Emerging Christians are convinced evangelicalism's close affiliation with conservative party politics in America actually undermines the clarity of the gospel message. I agree with them about that.

We generally don't agree on a solution to the problem, however. Liberal-minded Emergents don't want the church to get out of politics completely; they simply want the pendulum to swing back to the left. Their proposed cure turns out to be worse than the disease. It's like drinking strychnine to cure oneself of a hacking cough.

Of course, not all Emerging Christians are left-wingers. (Scot McKnight doesn't mention that fact in his CT article, but I know that if I don't mention it, we'll have forty-five angry, insulting, or otherwise unnecessary comments in response to this post. So let's just remember that on this issue as well as everything else, there is a lot of diversity in the Emerging Movement.) Nevertheless, according to McKnight, most of the movement tilts leftward. He characterizes them as "a latte-drinking, backpack-lugging, Birkenstock-wearing group of 21st-century, left-wing, hippie wannabes. Put directly, they are Democrats."

McKnight acknowledges that he himself is a political liberal at heart, but he also say he is concerned that if Emerging Christians get too caught up in politics, they will repeat the error of the modernist churches who embraced the social gospel and abandoned the biblical gospel in the process. To his credit, McKnight says he is wary of that tendency. He seems to sense, however, that a large segment of the movement is already barreling that direction. ("Sometimes . . . when I look at emerging politics, I see Walter Rauschenbusch, the architect of the social gospel," he says.)

McKnight himself is clearly conflicted, though: "I don't think the Democratic Party is worth a hoot, but its historic commitment to the poor and to centralizing government for social justice is what I think government should do." He's not completely comfortable with the leftist agenda, because he doesn't support abortion or homosexuality. But still, that hasn't kept McKnight from voting Democrat, and he really doesn't offer any strategy for making sure the Emerging Church movement doesn't fall into the same devastating error that destroyed the mainstream denominations.

That point, in microcosm, illustrates the main reason for my deep and continuing concern about the Emerging Church movement. There are countless parallels between the Emerging Church movement and classic religious modernism. Both movements were sparked by massive paradigm shifts in secular thought and culture. Both are undergirded by a conviction that the church must change in a fundamental way or be rendered irrelevant: she must adapt her perspective of truth and certainty in order to fit better with the way the world is "progressing."

Exactly like early modernism, the Emerging Church movement is being defended vigorously by a group of mostly-sincere people who really do envision themselves as completely evangelical and who insist that they have no agenda to do away with any essential doctrine.

Meanwhile, within the movement are numerous other people who are simultaneously attacking essential evangelical truths, starting with a handful of truths that are especially hard to receive. They want to re-imagine the atonement to do away with the penal aspect, for example, because they think it makes God look harsh. They question the doctrine of eternal punishment. They despise the doctrine of original sin. They diminish the importance of sound doctrine completely. And they blithely pretend that their critics' only possible motive is an utter lack of charity toward them. Their favorite, and practically their only, defense is the claim that they have been misunderstood and misrepresented.

We are seeing history repeat itself.

Addendum An interesting exchange lifted from Dan Paden's blog Dan Paden: "It's nice to see that Professor McKnight acknowledges the screamingly obvious. I said more than a year ago that it seemed to me that Emergents in general were inextricably welded to the political left, and then no less an Emergent luminary than Tony Jones dropped by long enough to offer the 'not all Emergents are like that' defense that is almost universally proferred against any charge, and to mention that he, personally, was pulling for John McCain. "I realized long ago that when they start pulling that 'not every Emergent is like that' stuff, you have almost always found something that is true of most of them." Tony Jones: "You're right, Dan. We're all like that." Dan Paden: "Have you sent a similarly dismissive e-mail to Professor McKnight?"

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.

---