The Emerging Church, Postmodernism, and Conservative Responses
There might be a serious problem with postmodern emphasis on truth-relativity and anti-realism, but conservative responses usually suck.
Before describing what I mean, a brief aside…
I find myself in a really weird place. As I am still in the period of “theological puberty,” a time when I am still growing and changing and developing almost exactly at the moment of exposure to new ideas, I find myself intellectually doubling back. I hear a pretty heavy critique on young people (like myself) that we are gullible because we just uncritically accept anything new. While that critique is probably not entirely misguided, I think there is something to the fact that limited exposure to ideas breeds a limited understanding. By this, I mean that for my personal situation I find new ideas particularly intriguing because they give new perspective as I genuinely understand competing perspectives. As I am now learning to embrace this, I am trying to embody humility more by acknowledging that the Ben Griffith of right now and probably the next 10 years or so is learning. Nothing I currently believe has been challenged and thought through enough to have enough depth that I can say that it is a genuine conviction that will stick.
Hopefully, that description is thick enough that you can understand what I’m trying to say. So, back to the title of this post. My personal story goes like this: First, I was an uncritical nasty conservative; then, I found this position problematic so I pursued my only known alternative—postliberal Christianity, particularly in the form of the Emerging Church (through the writings of Brian Mclaren and Rob Bell); now, I find myself challenging many of the salient ideas behind the postliberal move.
But all of these thoughts were spurned by my scrolling down my iTunes library and finding a Open Forum from Cleburne, TX offering a conservative CoC response to the Emerging Church Movement. I listened to about 15 minutes of the discussion and I found myself agreeing with some of their worries, but holy cow did they totally mishandle the response.
All of this to say…I think there’s an interesting place for critique of postliberal Christianity in a healthy and sane way. I would like to probe some of the presuppositions of postliberalism (including Emerging Christianity) in a healthy and sane way (i.e., not like nasty conservatives).
