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Danny E. Olinger is the publisher of the Magazine New Horizons

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The Christianity

and the Emergent Church

In his book of major sale, The Great Emergent [The Big Emergent one], Phyllis Tickle argues that a captivating change happens in the Christianity. In a way similar to the Protestant Reform, the church is cleaning the house, and what is going to stay is the emergent church.

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In accordance with Tickle, the leader (similar to Lutero) of the big emergent church he is Brian McLaren, and his book A Generous Orthodoxy [A Generous Orthodoxy], of 2005, is 95 theses of the movement. McLaren presents a new way for the church that avoids the pitfalls of the called conservative doctrinal theology and of the liberal indifference. The McLaren goal is to undo the Christianity and to reconstruct it in a form that harmonizes with the postmodern culture: a kinder faith, less similar to the sky and more socially transformadora. The church must lower the voice about the absolute truth and the certainty and follow the lead of Jesus in his way of acting with the most urgent problems of the man (famine, climatological changes, infectious diseases, consumerism).

The elect president Obama, with his message after the elections, has showed a way about a new day in the politics; now the church must do the same in the religion. Supporting heartily Obama, McLaren wrote in his "blog" after the elections: “Congratulations, America! Thanks to all those who had the valor of voting for the change on the entrenchment, the hope on the fear, for the diversity on the homogeneity and the conciliation on the division”.

For McLaren, what it applies to the politics applies to the church. To leave behind the entrenchment, the church must leave the dogmatic tone and stop proclaiming the doctrines that are frightening (sky / hell) or excessive (substitute atonement). The church must accept to all without importing what they create (arminianos/calvinistas) or his (homosexual) life styles. The church must get rid of the certainty (the inerrancia of the Bible) and of the auto-imposed borders (confessions), which have caused divisions and disunion. The good news is that now there are many Christians doing this.

It does not import if you agree with the McLaren evaluation on the changes in the American politics, you must ask yourself if the same type of movement in the Christianity is a good piece of news. The good piece of news really centers on the life, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus for the sinners. “Crucified Christ” is the message that must be proclaimed if it is a question of a faithful testimony that brings good piece of news to a fallen and moribund world.

This new movement, the emergent church, combines aspects of two ancient theologies that were opposite to the Christianity: the liberalism of the days of J. Gresham Machen and the neo-orthodoxy of the days of Cornelius Van Til.

Christianity and Liberalism

The liberalism in the times of Machen was preached to adapt the Christianity to modern thoughts. His answer to the apparent tension between the faith and the science was to see to the Christianity essentially fulfilling the moral life, which prospers with learning. The emergent church is more interested in the contemporary sensibility than in the intellectual respectability, but they share with the liberals the goals of establishing a just kingdom in the world across the social transformation. The emergent church and the liberals share a common hermeneutics, namely, that the Christianity talks each other of works, not creeds.

McLaren time and again proclaims that the gospel is Jesus's way. The ethics are first and then the doctrine. McLaren says about the liberal Protestants who emphasize the works and not the creeds: "I applaud his desire to live through the intention of the histories of miracles even if they do not believe that the histories really happened how they are written”. (To Generous Orthodoxy [] Generous Orthodoxy p.61)

J. Gresham Machen, in Christianity and Liberalism [Christianity and Liberalism], supports that the Christianity treats about creeds and works, doctrines as life. Machen said: "It is said, ‘The Christianity is a life, not a doctrine’. This affirmation is done often and has a piety appearance. But it is radically false” (p19). On the other hand, Christianity is a life based on a message: "Christ died for our sins”. Machen told that “Christ died” it is a history and that “Christ died for our sins” it is a doctrine. Without the history and the doctrine you join in an indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.

Machen also saw to the liberalism separating the history of the faith on having supported that the faith can exist in spite of the inaccuracy of the history and the manufacture in the Writing. Tickle indicates that this is the position of the emergent church. She writes: "A person who is a part of the emergent church, on having observed heated debates or conversations excited about the veracity of the virginal birth, for example, can be surprised. For him or she, "there" there is no "problem" in a real or distinguishable sense. For this person, as she or he would say it himself, the virginal birth is so beautiful that it has to be true, it has happened or not” (p. 149).

The Authority of the Writing

McLaren believes that the modernity and the Protestantism are tied, and that the Reformed Theology is the best theological system in the modernity. The end of the modernity, nevertheless, can mean the end of any theological tradition that depends on the authority of the Writing like his foundation.

The confessional Protestants, he argues McLaren, they put his confidence in a free Bible of errors. The doctrine of the inerrancia, nevertheless, is a distraction because the Bible tries to follow Jesus like a way of life, not about claims really. The life of a Christian is a day in which the believer can meet God, but this knowledge cannot be compared with the certainty. McLaren prefers to speak about “unheredity“ since, he says, the Bible only contains the God's Word.

McLaren is very careful in his writings of not saying much any more on the Writing, unless he loves the Bible and that the Christians have always been bless you on having used it with the intention of being good persons that, on having followed the lead of Jesus, good works do in the good God world. It seems that McLaren is applying to himself the advice that once received from the novelist Walker Percy. Percy wrote to McLaren, a school instructor of English, “The religious writer must always conceal his traces.” McLaren affirms that he never knew if this way of doing it was intentional or not, but, “if one is writing for a religious hearing or the not religious one, there is times when not to adopt positions is the best strategy” (Dan Knauss, interview with McLaren in www.newpantagruel.com, vol2, issue3).

The way of not assuming positions is to profess love for the Bible, and to support that no external authority is bigger than the personal experience of one. McLaren believes that the meaning is located, not in the text, but in the reader. The interpretation of the Bible reveals what a person in particular believes, not what the Bible teaches. The authority of the Word, then, is not in the words of the Writing. Historically, this opinion is related to the neo-orthodox doctrine of the Writing.

The position of the neo-orthodoxy of the Writing in the days of Van Til was that the Bible is not the God's Word, but a testimony to the God's Word that is transhistórica. The God's Word, then, does not have to be identified with the words of the Writing. Instead of that, the Writing comes to be the Word of God as God himself makes meet the one that reads it in faith. Revelation cannot be the written word; it is a personal meeting with Christ Jesus.

In the Reformed Theology, nevertheless, the Bible is the God's Word, and the authority of the Writing is based on the person of God himself. His authority does not depend in any man or church. The Writing is auto-authenticated, the judge of any controversy, and its own interpreter.

Christ writes to me a letter. What is the letter? The letter is the Writing, which focuses in Christ's redemption of the sin. The Writing constitutes the culmination of the redeeming work of God across Christ and his Spirit. They go Til, then, puts certainty in God himself, the God of the Writing that testifies himself.

They go Til believes that the neo-orthodox position is merely a liberalism in a new clothing. A key difference that him was distinguishing was that it was not offending straight, how the liberalism. The liberalism spilled milk of a bottle and replaced it with water contaminated, and of that time, the neo-orthodoxy gave him to the contaminated water the color of the milk.

The Criatianismo and The Emergent ones

Tickle and McLaren, openly declared that the emergent church is interpreting a symphony different from that of the historical church. What they do not declare, nevertheless, is his tone. They do not establish the difference between the confessional Protestantism and the liberalism. Rather, they carry strong notes of liberalism and neo-orthodoxy, announcing that the man can solve the problems of the world across moral efforts combined with an attack to the authority of the Writing.

But, knowing that the modern culture is afflicted by the doubt about the certainty of the faith, the emergent one has bathed the tone in the humility language so that it could attract a hearing. But it is a false humility. An ambivalence about the truth of the God's work in the history is not a Biblical humility. A Biblical humility surrenders to a living God and to his Word. The real humility admits that the interpretation of the man is fallible, but that the Bible, the God's interpretation of his activity in completing the redemption, is perfect. Our confidence is in our God and in his revelation in us, and our hope is in the expiatory work of his Son, Christ Jesus, in the history. The majestic God act in Christ, what Machen calls “the triumphant indicative”, is the good piece of news of the Bible that the real church believes and preaches.

Following the Machen direction and Til Goes, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church across his history has stopped road surface against the destructive devotion of the liberalism and the neo-orthodoxy. It seems that the same position is necessary now against the emergent church.

(This article was taken of the magazine New Horizons of January, 2009. It was translated by Mercedes Cordero and Carmen Villanueva of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church “Jesus is True” in San Juan, Puerto Rico).

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