Scot,
Thanks for posting this. I’ve wondered the same thing a couple times.

Labels are such fuzzy things, aren’t they. I’d probably simply be called a traditional, conservative Reformed person, and yet I wholeheartedly agree almost everything you’ve written. Makes me wonder how useful these labels really are. Thanks for the food for thought.

Scot, Well expressed and helpful. I’m more or less struck by everything and find myself, I think, in basic agreement with what you’re saying here.
We have to be careful not to think that others in more traditional settings, cannot be emerging along with us, in ways that really matter, pertaining to the kingdom of God in Jesus as worked out here and now.
Thanks.

‘anabaptistic’. Now we’re talking…

Brother, Scot:
You are a man after my own heart.
Pax vobiscum,
Kevin

Scot,
I’m not trained in philosophy or epistemology, so my question is: can you be a ‘critical realist’ and hold to relational truth (Jesus said, I am the truth…)? Are you a chastened absolutist?

Scot,
Thanks for posting this. Many profs are unwilling to put themselves out there personally. It is kind of you to do so.

I like the thought that one can be an emerging type embedded in a community that isn’t …
…because I have often wondered how I fit in being embedded in an older, very small congregation. This helps me. I need to keep being emerging but I love the small community I am a part of.

Thank you! Very clear and helpful in reading you.

I think we all put too much stock in labels and charicatures, particularly when we try and evaluate what “kind” of Christian a person is. People who have never set foot in Willow Creek may have all sorts of conceptions of what goes on there. People who have never read any source material out of EC have already created a picture of Emergence in their mind. I’ve learned that I will never cease to be surprised at the way stereotypes fall apart the closer you loook at any person, movement, or group. We’d all do better to take a closer look at things and withold judgement at least for a while. In the last year my own stereotypes about what it means to be Pentecostal, Liberal Mainline, Catholic, or Evangelical have broken down as I spend more time in the company of people who don’t neatly fit preconceived ideas of what certain groups are like.

Hi Scot,
If you have time, can you elaborate on this one a little?
“post Bible study piety”
I think I know what you mean, but I’m having difficulty expressing it in a way the average church member understands.
(Making me think that I don’t fully grasp it myself.)
Thank you,
Craig

John,
Since I think truth is relational at its core/essence, then a true critical realist would also be relational critical realist.
Matt Kennedy, bang on in my view. I just heard the sentiment in having lunch with a Covenant leader today. Same point.
Craig,
Post Bible study is a reaction to a perception/practice of the Christian life that is too connected to Bible knowledge and to being Biblical and not connected enough to knowing God and seeing the Bible as an expression of God’s communication to us.

Scot -
I’m so glad you wrote this. As a Willow pastoral staffer, and as one who engages in the emergent conversation, it has been interesting to experience the responses I get when I tell emergents I am from Willow. “Really!?” … and “oh, that’s ok” lead the way. The same goes for when I tell others YOU attend and faithfully serve at Willow. This helps – none of us like being boxed up and put into a corner!

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Scot,
What do you mean when you say that truth is relational? Take the claim that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’. It seems to me that claim is true if, in fact, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and false otherwise. In what sense is some truth, say the truth that ‘no proposition both is and is not true’ relationally true?
Maybe my being a philosopher (of a certain stripe) is putting me at a disadvantage here.
Kevin

Kevin,
You can whip me here. Let me put it this way:
The deepest truth of all is knowing God as loving God in relationship. (Do you hear Shults here?) That truth is true independent of relationality by persons, but its truth is designed for that relationality.
I don’t dispute that lines on the street are true if there are lines on the street in an empirical sense. But, I think the question came more from a theological gospel angle.
I’m trying to figure out if I wrote something that provoked John Frye’s question.
But, if the final truth is the perichoretic dance of the Trinity, coursing amongst one another, then truth for us is what approximates and participates in that dance.
Where am I brother?

I like the initial point here – “First don’t box me in.” And agree with Matt (#10). We like caricatures and stereotypes – probably to get a handle on things. But the caricatures, like any systematic theology, always contains elements of truth mixed with a great deal of error. We like to create straw men and knock them down, but I am not sure why.
Not being a philosopher – Why would “critical realist” be incompatible with “relational truth”?
On the second second point – I wouldn’t consider orthopraxy more important than orthodoxy. Rather orthopraxy is an inseparable part of orthodoxy. I don’t think it is truly possible to have one without the other. Do you disagree?

Scot,
That was very helpful self-definition. Thank you.
I am a bit unsure how “post-systematic theology” but not “post-theology” works out. You mention the importance of narrative and I concur, but actually I think that is one of the benefits of a system like Covenant theology, it sees Christian truth in terms of a story, the story of God’s covenantal relationships. (Actually, I suppose Dispensational theology has a similar strength, it just tells the story rather differently, with more discontinuity between its parts, perhaps.) I see Deism, Arminianism, Open Theism and Calvinism, for instance, as quite different ways of telling the whole story because of the difference in regard to how much of the critical (or causative?) action is attributed to God and how much to creatures.
When I think of myself as still satisfied with “systematic theology” what I mean particularly is that I value coherence in theology. That is what “system” entails, in my view. This was why I wrote _Providence and Prayer_. I was frustrated with the frequent lack of coherence between the way I heard people pray and what they claimed to believe about divine providence. I thought it would be helpful to the church if we looked at a range of models of divine providence and thought through the impact that each of these has on petitionary prayer and then brought our theory and our practice together. Some people might decide to pray differently others might revise their doctrine of providence but at least the two would cohere.
I don’t see narrative theology as an alternative to systematic theology, because good narratives are coherent too. Biblical truth can’t be reduced to propositions and nor can narratives, but good narratives (like fiction or movies) can generally be capsulized in a series of propositions (meaningful statements) for the benefit of someone who wants to know about it. Before picking a move, for instance, I read the reviews of a few people who are good at giving me a clear sense of what the movie is about. (That is more important to me than whether or not I tend to agree with their assessment.) Good systematic theology is a telling of the story of God and creation that shows how it all comes together and what it all means.
So, pardon my length, but I’m hoping that some of this might trigger a bit of amplification from you about what a “post-systematic” theological orientation or method looks like.
Thanks,
Terry

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Terry,
This is very good — and I’m probably closer to you than my words allow. When I say post systematic theology, I don’t mean post coherency and the like. I fear systematics asking Christians to believe in a theory of how it is all put together that is not found anywhere (quite like that) in the Bible and that is supposedly the “puzzle” that God had in mind when he scattered his bits of truth hither and yon in the Bible. I know this broaches the question of the unity of the Bible and the like, and I want to be careful about that, but I don’t think its unity is to be found in the systematic exposition of what we think God had in mind but in the narrative itself — and I’ll leave it at that for right now.

RJS,
I come back to this: judgment scenes in the Bible are based on works (Matt 16:27 or 25:31-46).
Do I think orthopraxy is possible without orthodoxy? No. One flows from the other — in our mind.
But, there are lots of solid Christians who don’t have a clue about theology. Lots of theology who are not good Christians.

Scot, it took a while, but I am not satisfied with the discipline of systematic theology, either, anymore. I would also consider myself post-evangelical and a relational critical realist. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why I like hanging out here.
Terry, I value “coherence” in theology. Our theological paradigms have some sense of deep coherence within them, but they don’t fit the kind of “coherence” systematic theologians usually call for and strive after. A systematic approach, it seems, from my perspective, assumes a universal application of the law of non-contradiction underneath all other disciplines through a theoretical paradigm. I don’t want to jettison the law of non-contradiction–but I also don’t want it to be the rock bottom dynamic in theology–which it seems to be in many evangelical systematic theologies.
I haven’t encountered yet, systematic theology as a telling of a story” in evangelical circles. Was it Warfield or Hodge, it was Hodge who viewed systematic theology as a “storehouse of facts.”

Scot,
“But, if the final truth is the perichoretic dance of the Trinity, coursing amongst one another, then truth for us is what approximates and participates in that dance.”
I understand ya, Scot! I’d express it a bit differently, but only b/c the term “truth”and its cognates in my disicipline have a technical meaning that they don’t possess outside the discipline. In (analytic) philosophy “truth” is a property that a proposition either has or lacks. So, where you use the term “truth” I would want to use the term “reality”. The final or ultimate REALITY–the end toward which this whole cosmic drama is moving–is joyful participation in that blessed perichoretic dance of reciprocated love that exists among the three persons of the Trinity.
And where you say “truth for us is what approximates and participates in that dance” I would say something like “and we realize or more closely approximate reality, i.e., the end for which we have been created, when we participate in and incarnate among each other that same blessed dance of reciprocated love, affection and intimacy that exists among the blessed Trinity.
When I catch a glimpse of that reality in a novel, movie or song, or taste it among friends, I melt. I melt because something deep down inside of me, way down where the meaning is, screams “Yes! This is your destiny! The destiny of the whole cosmos.” And this is why story or narrative is the relevant economy of the gospel and not the dry, arid prose of a philosopher! Because stories move us, and philosophy bores us.
Kevin

Kevin,
You not nly whipped me, you blessed me big time. Thanks Kevin. I love it.

OK I’ll admit it…Scot I honestly tried t get this one…maybe it’s late, maybe I’m just dense, but here is the one that threw me…from your WTS paper…”Yet another point: defining a movement by what folks are reading is
hazardous. I think most emerging folks do read McLaren – does that mean they find his questions their questions or does it mean they find his resolutions theirs? The difference is enormous. 70 million copies of the Left
Behind series have sold – does that mean pre-tribulation rapture is growing in the USA? In fact, one piece of research shows that 90% of the readers don’t believe its eschatology. I don’t need to fill in all the lines and
implications here – the point is clear.” OK…it’s me…but Scot…they don’t believe the eschatology, meaning…they’re lost as a goose or what? I’m missing the obvious..usually that don’ happen…help??? Dana

Dana,
Which means you can’t say “the world is getting more pre-trib because many read Left Behind” anymore than the emerging Christians all believe Brian’s conclusions because they read his books.

Scot,thank you- with all you have going on you took time to get my mind clear on that…makes perfect sense…question—is my understanding that from the ascension Jesus return has been “imminent” is that, basically a correct sense of the issue? Jesus return is going to take place, we don’t know when, but we do know, if I read Paul right, that we are to comfort one another with this thought, yes?

Scot,
A bit late to get back on this one, but I will anyway. I don’t think orthopraxy is possible without orthodoxy as you said. But the converse is also true. I don’t think that true orthodoxy is possible without orthopraxy. What is inside will come out in practice and what comes out in practice reflects what is really inside. One cannot really read the NT without being struck by this – from the Sermon on the Mount, to the judgment scene passages you cite, to Romans 6 and Corinthians and James and 1 John and …
It is interesting that this point comes up repeatedly in the apologies and other texts of some of the early church fathers as well as in the NT. To quote Origen (Book 1, Preface, Against Celsus)”And yet even now He [Jesus] continues silent before these things and makes no audible answer, but places his defense in the lives of His genuine disciples, which are a pre-eminent testimony and one that rises superior to all false witnesses and refutes and overthrows all unfounded accusations and charges.”
Oh that we would live this testimony in speech and deed.

Scott,
I found this fascinating and again, a question I’ve had myself. I’m not a big theology person sadly, and much of this is way over my head. My question to you would be this: I came to Christ at Willow Creek in 1987 a year out of college when I was 23. I volunteered there for 4 years before going on staff full time in programming (music) for 10 years and also worked for the Willow Creek Association. We left Willow around 2002 after many things job wise there went in different directions and my position was not included in that direction, sad to say. It was good to get “out of the nest” so to speak however. I am still in full time ministry at a church today (not a willow model but willow influenced) and learning to embrace and investigate/learn from all of the new paradigm and movement shifts in church culture today, which is fascinating. However being 42 now, I clearly grew up as a Christian in the “glory days” of the mega/seeker/Willow church movement and I hold that dearly. I can imagine no other way at the time I would have come to Christ or even come to a church, and learned to use my gifts and passions in the church the way I did, than the Willow process and culture in those days. My question to you is really one of a personal and curious nature, being a former “Creeker” and having watched Willow from afar these past few years, seeing all the many changes there in many ways, and still having many friends who attend there and are on staff: Where do you see the state and direction of Willow heading these days? Do you agree with many of the “stereotypes” of Willow/mega churches that I often see (much to my dismay sometimes) in other church and movement circles? Do you see Willow moving in directions that align with newer paradigm/movement models? For me, and perhaps this is a naive statement, but when I read about the supposed newer model of the “missional church” and the supposed definition (as I have read and heard Driscoll and others put it) – I find nothing new there and nothing really earth shattering in concept that Willow wasn’t thinking and doing the last 30 years and still is – even to a greater extent today than ever. Do feel it’s correct to say that or not? Curious as to your thouhts/views on all that from being there. Thanks!

a correction to my personal website address if you can change in my original comment please – sorry!:-)
http://www.johncarlsonmusic.com

Scot,
You say you’re anabaptistic or have those ecclesiological leanings, say like a Yoder or Hauerwas…but how do you square that with Willow? Is Willow doing anything alternative to the domination system (to borrow Wink’s term) of consumerism, individualism, and a product oriented gospel? Is the message not in the medium?
Sincerely a post-mega church, emergent, Jesus follower…

Sam,
What most don’t realize about megachurches is that “what you see is not what it is.” That is, you may see a megachurch and think everyone is wealthy and business-driven, and then you get inside and you realize that they are the most ecumenical form of evangelicalism you can find. Size might lead to attracting diversity in fact.
There are all kinds of anabaptists at Willow.