Where Emergent Goes Bad (3) - Historical Revisionism

Historical Inaccuracy – Purposeful Revision?

This leads us to another habit which is commonplace in EC. My own opinion is that the majority of EC authors are given to purposeful revision of historical matters to suit their own ends. There needs to be a serious work written to refute some of the patently erroneous statements made that serve as the foundation to much of the EC. One tiny example of this kind of factual error is found in McLaren’s recitation of the collier’s conversion in Kingswood in 1739.

What a great story Methodists have to tell about themselves! In 1739, Anglican priest George Whitefield (1714-1770) invited Anglican priests John and Charles Wesley to join him preaching an evangelical (see Chapter 6) gospel where it’s [sic] most needed (and accepted): not from the pulpits of a church grown complacent and comfortable, but in the streets and fields, wherever the unwashed and unchurched people were. The Wesley brothers joined Whitfield [sic]—George and John supplying the preaching and Charles providing some music. This was music the common folk could relate to—down-to-earth songs, lyrics in simple but beautiful English, with a good melody and a good beat, songs with feeling, more like the songs they sang in the pub at night than the highfalutin’ organ music of the cathedrals. Even after Whitfield [sic] left to travel to America, thousands came to hear John and Charles. People responded powerfully with tears, shrieks, groans, and trembling.

One reporter described the scene outside a coal mine, here the miners stopped on their way home after a day of backbreaking, low-paying, bone-wearying, lung-destroying work. The miners were probably planning to anaesthetize their aching muscles and downtrodden hearts with strong drink, which might lead to wife beating and other sad outcomes. John Wesley’s powerful voice caught their ears. This man has passion and compassion they thought. They stopped and listened to someone who didn’t despise them for their low-life ways. The crowd grew—dirty, men, black-faced from coal dust. Wesley spoke of a God who loved them and wanted to help them even though they got drunk, though they gambled, even though they mistreated their wives and children. The reporter noticed pale, clean tracks forming or coal-blackened cheeks of these tough men, tracks formed by tears of repentance and faith.[1]

Right away we are met with several significant factual errors:

1. Whitefield and the Wesleys were in different parts of the country at this time. First of all, Whitefield was in Kingswood (not America). Secondly, John Wesley was in London.
2. Whitefield was the preacher and this event occurred before he had convinced John Wesley to join him in open-air preaching. As of yet, Wesley continued to preach in the established church.
3. Organs were rarely used in public worship at this time – except perhaps for one or two Anglican cathedrals in London. More importantly, as others have shown, the Wesleys were far more interested in singing good experiential theology than they were in adapting to current musical trends... especially from the pub![2]
4. Whitefield’s message was much more than “God loves you, lets have a conversation, I have a lot of passion and compassion and now let’s sing an old pub favourite with these new Christian words.” The tears of the colliers were in response to conviction for sin and even a cursory reading of Whitefield’s (and the Wesleys’ for that matter!) preaching would prove they dealt very strongly with sin.
5. The account was reported by Whitefield himself (in his published journal) – not by a newspaper reporter as McLaren would lead one to believe.[3]

Some of these discrepancies might be excused as having no bearing on the point of his chapter, but they indicate an incredible lack of research and fact-checking.[4] That alone ought to alarm any reader of McLaren specifically, and of EC authors in general, for it serves as one clear demonstration of a regular blunder: post-modernism run amuck in shameless revisionist history. Here the story is re-told to suit the ends of the teller. In other words, a false-history is created upon which an entire solution paradigm is launched.

I believe this is one of the greatest dangers of EC as it is practiced by McLaren and those of his ilk.[5] It is deceptive. If history is as they present it, then perhaps their solutions ought to be minded. If the reality of what happened in the past (especially the recent past) is quite different from how they present it, then one might assume the solution is flawed.[6] What happens, though, when they have misrepresented history, but offered a solution to current problems that is genuinely good; in other words, when they have built at least one solution off of a faulty foundation? This is perhaps the worst scenario of all, as it muddies the waters and lures the pragmatic Christian of our age into a hodgepodge of good and bad... where the bad more-often-than-not outnumbers the good.

Although McLaren is an intellect, he is a dangerous intellect as he is given to summarizing historical events in a way that promotes his preconceived point. When you combine these conclusions with the “guilt-by-association statements” and new-fangled words and lots of hyphenated, thesaurus-filled adjectives – you end up reading something that sounds very convincing.

Thus, I believe EC is to be handled cautiously by Christians. Evangelicals are notoriously easy prey for “the next best thing” and McLaren writes in an especially compelling manner. This, coupled with his penchant for exposing the worst of evangelicalism, gains him a hearing for his proposed solutions. But these solutions are not a return to Scripture; rather they appear to be the ever-changing musings of a somewhat disgruntled yet very articulate intellect. More will be said about this later, but suffice it for now to say that this assessment alone ought to be enough to make us very wary of EC. Still, there are even more reasons to remain cautious.

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[1] Orthodoxy, 215, 216.

[2] Gene Veith comments on Luther (not Wesley’s) use of “pub music.” “For the record, Luther did not take "bar tunes" and put biblical words to them. That legend comes from a comical misunderstanding. Someone apparently heard a music historian referring to Luther's use of the "bar form," which refers to a stanza structure, not to what drunks sing in a tavern. Luther did borrow and adapt tunes from earlier hymns, medieval chants, and contemporary composers, but a good number of his melodies were his own original compositions.” http://www.worldmag.com/articles/9831 Accessed on April 5, 2006. I could not find my source, but I believe the same is equally true for the Wesleys. In fact, Charles was a great lover of “good music” and the thought of him writing lyrics to bar ditties is hard to comprehend.

[3] “In a description which has become classic, Whitefield reports his ministry among this pitiable and neglected people. We visualize the scene — the green countryside, the piles of coal, the squalid huts and the deep semi-circle of unwashed faces — as we read his words: ‘Having no righteousness of their own to renounce, they were glad to hear of a Jesus who was a friend of publicans, and came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The first discovery of their being affected was to see the white gutters made by their tears which plentifully fell down their black cheeks, as they came out of their coal pits. Hundreds and hundreds of them were soon brought under deep convictions, which, as the event proved, happily ended in a sound and thorough conversion. The change was visible to all, though numbers chose to impute it to anything, rather than the finger of God.’” Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield, Volume I: The life and times of the great evangelist of the 18^th century revival (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1970) 263-264. And this was neither the first time he had preached outdoors nor the first time he had preached to the colliers.

[4] The point being the title of the chapter, “Why I am a Methodist.”

[5] Revisionist Emergents.

[6] I don’t have time to deal with it here, but I think this habit of misrepresenting recent history is most clearly seen in Robert E. Webber, The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 2002 - 4^th Printing October, 2004). This “seminal work” to EC seems to me to be overflowing with revised history. It would be good for a more skilled reviewer to document these errors.

Where Emergent Goes Bad (2) - What Defines a "Christian?"

Naming Christ Makes Someone a True Christian

A related fallacy to this is assuming any action or person that happens to mention “Jesus” is an example of true Christianity. McLaren’s slipshod treatment of the Spanish Roman Catholic explorer Pizarro is an easy example of this. Pizarro betrayed the Incan King and killed him and thousands of his men in the name of Christ.[1] McLaren goes to great pains to repent of this action and express regret for it... as a fellow Christian with Pizarro. Of course, he anticipates that some would distance themselves from Pizarro, but having already suggested that he himself is “catholic” he sees no issue in owning this sin – even going so far as to instruct the reader to put down the book and “breathe a prayer.”[2] But there is much that is questionable in this.

First off, was Pizarro a genuine believer? There is little evidence to suggest so. Just because someone claims to be doing something in Jesus’ name does not mean they really are, nor does it mean they really have a clue who He is! The man who spray paints ethnic slurs across a storefront because, “Jesus told him to do it” is not giving good evidence of having been born again. In events like this, we are to examine the words of a person against their actions. This is obvious, but McLaren lumps us all in with Pizarro without any historical evidence to suggest he was a true Christ-follower.

Secondly, what are we to do with all the atrocities of all the Christians over the ages? Are we to repent for Peter’s denials of Christ? Saul’s murderous threats against Christians? What purpose does this serve?

More to the point, however, notice how misleading this kind of talk can be. There is no question that there was much wrong in the Crusades, in the politicizing of Christianity that began under Constantine and even in the Reformation. Sins were committed; some of them grotesque. But to simply hold up these examples and suggest that they are representative of the true Christian faith over the centuries is preposterous. Each event must be examined in its own light, with careful study into the culture and ethos of the day. Not only that, one must remember that much accomplished “in the name of Christ” had nothing to do with true Christians and the true Jesus. Just accepting all these things and repenting of them is overly simplistic and I propose accomplishes no actual good. Holding them up as proof that we Christians continually get things wrong and need to be always re-inventing, or emerging is plainly misleading.

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[1] Orthodoxy, 271f.

[2] Orthodoxy, 273.

Where Emergent Goes Bad (1) - Over-generalization

The Steady EC Diet – Over-generalization and Guilt-by-Association

Brian McLaren paints with extremely wide brushes. He categorizes people and movements with the accuracy of one of those extra-wide rollers you can buy at Home Depot! This becomes absolutely frustrating in all his written work I have read. The end result is a blurring of categories by rampant overgeneralization and a redundant guilt-by-association. This becomes annoying in the extreme. Frankly, I think it makes his stated goal of “having a conversation” nearly impossible. He may assume speaking in this way provokes his readers and forces them to think through their unconscious pre-suppositions, but after a few pages the reader feels like he is trying to reason with a child.[1]

Note some of these examples:

If fundamentalist means other things—such as requiring belief in a foundationalist epistemology, assenting to something like a dictation theory of biblical inspiration, upholding a sectarian and elitist approach to non-Fundamentalist Christians, and identifying judgmentalism and anger as fruits of the Holy Spirit, then there’s little chance I’d be welcome in their company, which is probably for the best. And if the previous sentence full of technical religious jargon went over your head, thank God and don’t worry about it.[2]

As he so often does, McLaren paints up everyone in a certain group (in this case, fundamentalists) in what he considers to be all of their faults. He does not list any possible strengths of the group (in this statement) nor does he allow that there may be some variance within the group. He then links together these characterizations into an either/or proposition – with the bad “either” always being conservative evangelicalism. This is uncharitable at best and divisive at worst. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it is also extremely McLarenesque and often Emergentesque![3]

Another example from A Generous Orthodoxy comes to mind:

Rather than trying to capture timeless truth in objective statements systematized in analytical outlines and recorded in books and institutionalized in schools and denominations, narrative theology embraces, preserves, and reflects on the stories of people and communities involved in the romance of God—always beginning with and always returning to the treasury of stories in Scripture: the good, bad, ugly, and undetermined lives of those who have sought God and found God and lost God and served God and heard and ignored God and opposed God and betrayed God and returned to God and loved God all the more for having been forgiven much. In the process, it seeks to understand the direction and purpose and meaning of the larger narrative (the story of emergence) that these individual stories constitute.[4]

I think McLaren is too smart to not know what he is doing here. And yes, that means I am questioning his motives.[5] The baby is writhing on the front lawn even before he can be thrown out with the bath water. McLaren has decided what he doesn’t like from the beginning and everything is painted in that light. Can a believer not hold “timeless truth in objective statements” and at the same time seek “to understand the direction and purpose and meaning of the larger narrative?” This is a false dichotomy, or at least a gratuitous overgeneralization.

A recent interview of McLaren in Criswell Journal demonstrates the same tactic:

I wish people were more interested in the question of how the Religious Right has changed our evangelistic context. The name ‘Jesus’ is heard differently now than it was thirty years ago because of the amazing ‘success’ of the Religious Right. If I say ‘Jesus’ to many of my friends, they don’t think of someone who came to forgive sin; they think of people who want to shame people for their sins. They don’t think of someone who had special good news for the poor; they think of people who want to give every possible advantage to the rich because they think the poor are to blame, largely, for their poverty. They don’t think of someone who overturned the status quo, but of people who represent the status quo. They don’t think of someone who talked about turning the other cheek, but of people who defend preemptive violence. So, I wish people would seek to understand the rising dissatisfaction surrounding how the Religious Right has ‘rebranded’ Christianity, and how Emergent and other conversations like it are seeking to rediscover the Jesus of the Scriptures and fairly represent him and his message to our world.[6]

Carson summarizes this tendency in EC in this way:

...a fair amount of its heat and overgeneralizing seems to spring from the mistaken assumption that most of traditional evangelicalism is just like the conservative churches from which they came. That betrays the narrowness of many of their backgrounds and helps to explain why their rhetoric and appeals to postmodern sensitivity sound so absolutist: this is the language and rhetoric on which they were weaned.

His solution to this in part is:

...there are lessons to be learned by reading history more broadly, by becoming intimately familiar with Christians in other languages and cultures, by enlarging the frames of reference in which we can comfortably move. We are then far more likely to become self-critical.[7]

Thus, EC needs to make a more careful diagnosis. Although much of what is identified as sickness in evangelicalism is accurate, this habitual over-generalization (i.e. all fundamentalists are angry and proud of it) and guilt-by-association (lumping together straw-man definitions of good attributes with genuine spiritual ills) clouds the real issues and makes the proposed cure very suspect.

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[1] By this I mean the kind of child who won’t answer the question, keeps trying to change the topic, won’t leave off until he gets what he wants, purposefully speaks in innuendo to get stabs in along the way and that type of thing. I am not suggesting McLaren himself is childish or immature, but I am saying this writing style is quite detrimental to real discussion. It is almost condescending. I did not sense this to the same degree in his public speaking, although it was certainly present.

[2] Orthodoxy, 117.

[3] For example: “Catholic contemplatives, it seems, have had an easier time with joy than non-charismatic Protestants, preoccupied as they tend to be with modern rationality, abstract theory and depressing topics such as total depravity.” Orthodoxy, 177

[4] Orthodoxy, 289-290.

[5] He himself admits to be wrong-headed when he writes in the Introduction: “A warning: as in most of my other books, there are places here where I have gone out of my way to be provocative, mischievous, and unclear, reflecting my belief that clarity is sometimes overrated, and that shock, obscurity, playfulness, and intrigue (carefully articulated) often stimulate more thought than clarity.” Orthodoxy, 23.

[6] Criswell Theological Review CT n.s. 3/2 (Spring 2006) 5-14. Accessed online at http://criswell.wordpress.com/files/2006/03/3,2%20InterviewwithBrianMcLaren(Streett).PDF on March 31, 2006.

[7] Conversant, 86 and footnote 32. Carson’s critique suggests that the majority of EC leaders have come out of rather aberrant, legalist, fundamentalist, almost works-righteousness churches that really had no spiritual life in them to begin with. This false representation of genuine Christianity is then assumed to be what every other evangelical church is like – hence the very narrow and over-generalized view presented by EC leaders. This conclusion is substantiated by the published testimonies of most of the EC leaders.

Where Emergent is Good

Diagnosis of One Particular Form of Evangelicalism

One of the skills of an excellent physician is the ability to quickly and accurately diagnose the illness. EC certainly has some good diagnostic skill (with several qualifications). For if EC is nothing else, it is a reaction to the sham Christianity and false spirituality that abounds in today’s church. The examples of this in McLaren’s writings are numerous and woven throughout. So, he can easily draw attention to artificial and schmaltzy church music; inattentive hearers of the Word that leave their pews to go back to living like the world; inauthentic Christian communities that breed fake and even destructive relationships; the cocooning of Christians into non-evangelistic lumps of selfishness; the false assumption that “Christian” means white-collar, suburb-dwelling Republican; and a revolting contentedness with surface answers to life’s most genuine and difficult questions. He writes:

...unfortunately so much of what we’re currently fighting against (“we” meaning the church in America for starters) isn’t the real enemy, and so much of what we’re fighting for isn’t the real prize. Largely we’re fighting to get something back—a lost status as the civil religion of the West, control (political, too often) over things that are out of our control, a privileged position as the favored religion of the Empire, protection of the middle class from the lower and upper classes, and so on. These are futile fights.

We’re also focused on fighting symptoms like abortion, promiscuity (hetero or homosexual), divorce, and profanity. We might add terrorism to the list. But these are not the disease. These are in many ways the symptoms of the very disease that we inadvertently tend to support, aid and abet, defend, protect, baptize, and fight for—a system sick with consumerism, greed, fear, violence, and misplaced faith (in the power of the Economy and the State and its Weapons).[1]

Phil Johnson goes into more detail about where EC has effectively identified weaknesses in Evangelicalism:

For one thing, they are right to reject the professionalism and big-business approach to ministry that has been popularized by most of the influential megachurches.

They are right to point out that millions of American evangelicals live lives of gross hypocrisy and narcissism, ignoring the needs of the poor while indulging themselves with entertainments and luxuries...

They are right when they complain about the way the evangelical movement has sold its birthright for a mess of Republican Party porridge...

And they are right when they suggest we have not done enough to reach the outcasts and counter-cultural people in our society. I think their approach to reaching those segments of society is all wrong and largely counterproductive, but to adapt a phrase from D. L. Moody: I like the way some of them are trying to reach those people a lot better than I like the way many evangelicals simply ignore the task of evangelism.[2]

Carson agrees, describing what he considers to be the movement’s strengths as “reading the times; pushing for authenticity; recognizing our own social location; evangelizing outsiders; and probing links with the tradition.”[3]

The fact is, most of us would agree with much of EC’s assessment of modern evangelicalism. I am equally turned off by many of the weaknesses EC identifies and agree that we need the Lord to rescue us and our churches from them. But just identifying the problem is only one part of a good diagnosis. The doctor who rightly tells you that the lump on your neck is cancer doesn’t do you a bit of good by instructing you to jump up and down three times a day shouting, “Ookey-tonga!” in order to be cured. That remedy does not match the disease – it’s not even in the same ballpark. Is it possible EC has made a similar error?

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[1] Orthodoxy, 185.

[2] From http://emergentno.blogspot.com/2006/03/phil-johnson-critical-look-at-emerging.html accessed on April 3, 2006.

[3] For a full description of these terms, see D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2005), especially chapter 2.

Persons, Churches and Organizations Strongly Associated with Emergent – How it is a Movement

Since EC is a movement among many individuals that crosses virtually every denominational boundary, it would perhaps be helpful to identify some of the more prominent individuals.

Most folks by now have heard of Brian McLaren. If not the most outspoken proponent of EC, he is by far the most prolific. Until January of 2006, he was the pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland – a church he both helped found and then pastored for 24 years.[1] Two of his most recent books, A Generous Orthodoxy and The Secret Message of Jesus have been extremely influential and widely read. He speaks at numerous conferences and gatherings all over the world and is held by the majority both in and outside of the EC camp as a primary spokesperson. Much of what I will comment on in this paper will be in direct reference to his written works.

Besides McLaren, there are other generally acknowledged leaders in EC. Some of these are (in no particular order) Tony Jones, Dan Kimball, Scot McKnight, Doug Pagitt, LeRon Shults, Chris Seay, Shane Claiborne, Tony Campolo,[2] and Donald Miller.[3]

More locally, a quick glance of the emergent.ca and resonate.ca websites yields names such as Darryl Dash, pastor of Richview Baptist Church in Etobicoke; Pernell Goodyear, founding pastor of The Freeway in Hamilton; Jared Siebert, one of the founding church planters at Next Church in Kingston, Ontario and now Director of Growth Ministries with the Free Methodist Church in Canada; and Joseph Moreau, the “point leader and communcator” [sic] for EcclesiaX, a church plant in Ottawa.

Other EC leaders or members of the conversation hail from Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist (many brands), and virtually every other major evangelical group or denomination. There is some indication that Roman Catholics and even religious Jews are a part of the movement, but whether or not they would understand themselves to be “in” is a disputed point.[4]

Besides these, there are many, many more individuals, pastors and churches that either embrace much of the EC mindset or parts of it. Mark Driscoll, Seattle, WA, (Mars Hill Church / Resurgence / Acts 29 Church Planting Network) would be a prime example of this. He has clearly cut away from the primary EC personalities while holding on to some parts of what it means to be emergent.[5] This fact alone makes defining and critiquing EC that much more difficult! This study admittedly focuses on McLaren and others – that is unfair in some ways, but I am writing a paper, not a book![6]

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[1] McLaren was replaced by Matthew Dyer “in order to focus on his speaking and writing ministry nationally and internationally.” http://www.crcc.org/section.php?SectionID=29 accessed March 30, 2006. I note this as it makes it virtually certain that we will be hearing much more from McLaren in the months and years ahead.

[2] Although Campolo’s name would be disputed by some – perhaps even him.

[3] For a brief biography of each and a more complete listing see the appendix: “Names, Groups and Events Associated with Emergent.”

[4] There is certainly no question that Revisionist Emergents such as Pagitt and Jones see Jews as being a part of the conversation. See the Appendix One: “Does Emergent Embrace Practicing Jews as Fellow Believers in God?”

[5] See for example Driscoll’s web apology to McLaren and Doug Pagitt after taking the two of them to task for their wavering stance against homosexuality: “Since leaving that team I have been increasingly concerned about some of the theological conversations that are taking place, which has led to frustration and anger on my part.” http://theresurgence.com/apology accessed on March 30, 2006.

[6] Bolger would certainly agree that my attention on McLaren is unbalanced: “The attention on Brian McClaren [sic] plus a small number of other authors such as Spencer Burke, Steve Chalke, Dan Kimball, Dave Tomlinson distorts the discussion because these authors are not working to create an epistemology for the emerging church. My research among more than one hundred emerging church leaders indicates that other authors have had significant impact on emerging church thinking, authors such as Jack Caputo, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Nancey Murphy, Henry Nouwen, Miroslav Volf, Dallas Willard, N.T. Wright, and John Howard Yoder to start.” http://thebolgblog.typepad.com/thebolgblog/2005/05/d_a_carson_beco.html April 2, 2006.

Phil Johnson balances this to a degree however when he writes: “It would be easy, actually, to critique the emerging church movement by reviewing some of Brian McLaren's books, starting with A Generous Orthodoxy. The problem with that approach is that McLaren clearly does not speak for everyone in the ‘emerging church movement.’ Whenever critics try to analyze the movement by examining what McLaren has written, people within the movement simply dismiss the criticisms by suggesting that whatever McLaren says is his own opinion, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the movement itself. That's partly true and partly a deliberate evasion. The emerging subculture clearly fosters an environment where theological mavericks like McLaren are pretty much encouraged to throw whatever bizarre and even heretical notions they like on the table for discussion. So I do think Brian McLaren is fair game, and because he is such a large figure in the movement, I can't really ignore him.

On the other hand, it's also true that although McLaren has had a profound influence in the shaping of the emerging church, he doesn't necessarily speak for everyone identified with the movement. To critique Brian McLaren is to critique Brian McLaren. It doesn't necessarily go to the heart of the movement itself.” http://emergentno.blogspot.com/2006/03/phil-johnson-critical-look-at-emerging.html. Accessed on April 3, 2006.