Crunchy Con

Why they're not emergent

Friday May 16, 2008

Categories: Evangelicals

Kristen Scharold is an Evangelical Christian who lives in Brooklyn, is something of a hipster. So...

Shouldn’t I be craving a new kind of Christianity that will undo my traditional evangelical upbringing while satisfying my newfound love for diversity, social justice, and, of course, soul searching?

Not at all. Despite my hipster leanings and stale Christian pedigree, I am not emergent, if emergence is defined by its theology instead of just its ethos. And after reading this book ["Why We're Not Emergent" by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck], I am even more grateful that I never jumped onto the emergent bandwagon. I am not the only young Christian who appreciates many aspects of postmodern culture but who also yearns for the absolute conviction that DeYoung and Kluck present.

“Some of us long for teaching that has authority, ethics rooted in dogma, and something unique in this world of banal diversity,” DeYoung writes. “We long for Jesus—not a shapeless, formless good-hearted ethical teacher Jesus, but the Jesus of the New Testament, the Jesus of the church, the Jesus of faith, the Jesus of two millennia of Christian witness with all of its unchanging and edgy doctrinal propositions.”

This Jesus is the Jesus of traditional doctrine, the Jesus of yesterday and today and forever. He is not a Jesus who will go out of style along with skinny jeans, tight cowboy shirts, and aviator sunglasses.

Throughout the book, the authors make the case that the emergent church is simply a fad. In fact, the emergent church seems to be going down the same accommodationist path as the mainline, bourgeois, modern churches that they are reacting against. And, like the baby boomer’s megachurches, the emergent church is sweating to make the gospel entertaining and comfortable to their generation. “The mainline church bent over backward to accommodate modernism, and its members have budget crunches and shrinking churches to show for it. Will the emerging church go down the same nondoctrinal path as the mainline church relative to postmodernism?” DeYoung asks. In an attempt to “reimagine” the gospel, emergent teachers have merely repackaged the modern, seeker-sensitive approach.

Because they are reacting against the suburban, middle-class churches of their parents, the emergent ideal is an urban breed of Christianity. Yet the largest church in the cosmopolitan center of the United States, New York City, is Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Redeemer—which, coincidently, is primarily attracting twenty- and thirty-year-olds, many of whom are artists—is a church of rigorous expository preaching that is anchored in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Tim Keller, the senior pastor at Redeemer, understands that it is important to contextualize doctrine but that you cannot change doctrine. Even while preaching absolute truth, propositions, sin, and hell, Keller will quote the Apostle Paul in the same breath as a quote from Bono, and all to make a point meaningful to his congregation, not to win cool points. Redeemer is a church that is ministering to a young, urban congregation because of—not despite–the fact that it is dedicated to historical Reformed theology.

Discuss.

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Comments
me
May 17, 2008 10:42 AM

most emerging church types are not trying to be hip, but spend a fair amount of time going back and looking at stuff their predecesors threw out to see what we should have kept. Emerging is sometimes characterized as "smells and bells" for its embrace of more ancient practices. They are also more open to mystery within the gospel while evangelism has been on a long quest for a more perfectly defined theology on which "true believers" ought to agree. What emerging churches are seeking is much closer to something Rod would agree with than the evangelicals he is quoting.

Eric W
May 17, 2008 12:07 PM

Here is the SMU Perkins School of Theology Webpage with info/links re: the Emerging Church:

smu.edu/theology/evangelism/links_emerging.html

Tony D.
May 17, 2008 3:34 PM

You know, I've had another thought - - Traditional, Reformed theology of the Calvin/Knox school is way too dry and scholastic for me, but I've never thought of it as "Evangelical." Nor would I consider a traditional Presbyterian church to fit into that category. Is this a misconception on my part?

I tend to think of evangelicalism as something more rooted in the Baptist end of the Protestant spectrum. Churches self-designating as "non-denominational," for example, almost invariably are recognizably Baptist in their ecclesiology and soteriology.

And I tried to read the Evangelical Manifesto, or at least the "executive summary" thereof, but my eyes glazed over in very short order...sorry!

Matt
May 23, 2008 1:41 AM

Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck just released a great book on the growing Emergent Christian movement and what a load it truly is. Why We're Not Emergent. It is a must read.

Your Name
June 4, 2009 11:15 AM

Tony,
it is not a traditional Presybterian church that he is referring to, not the Prebsyterian USA but rather the PCA--a conservative, traditional reformed theology, that is rooted in orthodoxy of scripture and is truly evangelical. Check out Cresheim Valley church on google, or Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia.
I am a fundamentalist of the Baptist vein that you might be thinking of, but because there are very few of my ilk in urban areas like philly, i attend a PCA congregration. They are evangelical.

I think you may be mixing up USA and PCA, and also fundamentalist--dispensationalism with evangelical--reform theology.

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About Crunchy Con

Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.

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