I’ve heard it many many many times where people say, “Postmodernism is dangerous.” “Postmodernism is corrupting this generation.” When I ask why they feel that way, they say that Postmodernism is throwing out the truth.

“What do you mean by that?” I ask.

“Postmodernism says what’s good for you is good for you. But don’t impose your ideas on me.”

That’s not postmodernism. That’s relativism or cultural relativism. Postmodernism has elements of cultural relativism, but at it’s core, it’s not relativism. That’s not postmodernism’s central message and before we reject postmodernism, we have to know what postmodern thought actually is.

Postmodernism is called postmodernism because it is a reaction against modernism. It rails against the excesses of modernism. A lot of the classes I took in school were focused on postmodern thought, and while there are some elements of relativism in postmodernism, that’s not what it’s all about. That’s not postmodernism’s focus. Just so you know I’m not just making this up (from wikipedia):

“Postmodernism is a term originating in architecture, literally ‘after the modern’, denoting a style that is more ornamental than modernism, and which borrows from previous architectural styles, often in a playful or ironic fashion. Later, the term was used in painting, music and philosophy for any pluralistic style that is a reaction against the pretensions of high modernism^[1].”

Well what exactly is modernism? Again from wikipedia:

“It is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology or practical experimentation.^[1] “

So modernism believes that men have power over their own lives through reason, science and technology. The excesses of modernism would be that reason and science are the ultimate sources of knowledge and truth.

What postmodernism says is that truth is not limited to reason and reason cannot explain everything. That’s why you see a return to spiritual mysticism today. Postmoderns are seeking the truth in a lot of different places. The traditional bastions of truth like institutional churches, government, military power, etc are all being challenged. Yet postmoderns are still seeking. I don’t think they’ve found what they’re looking for. Art and beauty are making a comeback. Image is becoming more and more important. Very little is black and white like human logic and reasoning would like you to believe. More and more things are a shade of grey.

But that doesn’t mean that postmoderns don’t believe in an absolute truth. They merely don’t believe that absolute truth can be deducted and reasoned. They don’t believe that the human mind is capable of controlling and dictating truth.

What does that mean for Christianity? Well Christianity has come under the heavy influence of modernism but how and why? And how has postmodernism influenced Christianity? What can we learn from postmodernism and what should we throw out? I’ll talk about that in the next entry.

photo by Cindy

The Emerging Church is simply the postmodern church.

Of course any definition is a gross generalization and over simplification. Postmodernism resists generalizations and as a result the Emerging church seems to have avoided definition for a long time. They are an eclectic bunch and they define themselves so differently. Some emergents do not want to be associated with the movement when they clearly share so many characteristics with the movement. Some give very biased definitions of the emerging movement.

Examples of this:

Check out this Driscoll video. Some people are emerging but not emergent. Any normal person would assume that the words emerging and emergent were the same or related.

This article lumps Brian McLaren and Erwin McManus together.

Wikipedia says Flood (San Diego) is theologically aligned with the Emerging Church. Their website used to say “Flood is an emerging Christian church in San Diego, CA…” but they have since taken that down. Those words can still be found in google’s cache.

C. Michael Patton writes how McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Dan Kimball and Mark Driscoll all define the Emerging Church differently.

Open Source Theology tries to cover so many aspects of the emerging church in it’s definition, that the definition loses meaning. Would that definition fit in any dictionary?

I think as a result, those outside of the Emerging movement have defined it for everyone else. This is having pretty disastrous effects for the emerging movement as books by highly respected theologians are coming out attacking the movement such as D.A. Carson’s book. Yet those who attack the emerging movement don’t really understand it’s eclectic nature and thus usually focus their attention on one or two major players. For example, Carson and Millard Erikson focus mostly on McLaren.

So the Emerging Church has been mischaracterized. Whose fault is this? It’s because the emerging church leaders themselves have refused definition themselves. Once someone defines McManus as being part of the emerging movement, he denies it because he does not want to be affiliated with McLaren and Pagitt. Flood puts up a statement saying they’re part of the emerging movement, and then takes it down.

I think the leaders of the emerging movement are finally seeing the harm they are causing themselves by dodging definitions. They are finally seeking to define themselves and categorize themselves. This is an example of that where they sub-categorize the emerging church into “Conversational,” “Incarnational” and “Attractional.”

Photo by Cindy

Why should you care about the emerging church? Traditionally there have been two sides to the Christian circle, liberals and evangelicals. Liberals were not orthodox theologically–but the cutting edge of Christian thought has been liberal thought, and they were very active in advancing social justice for underprivileged people. Evangelicals have not been very active on the social justice front, but were active in evangelism and had solid theology. The emerging church is trying to bring Christ to the postmodern world and as a result are encountering a lot of social justice issues. At the same time they are pushing evangelicals to look at theology in a new way while remaining faithful to orthodoxy.

So if you care about issues such as racism, sex trafficking, homeless, starving in children in Africa, women in ministry, homosexuality–a lot of the issues that conservative churches are ignoring–you should care about the Emerging Church

If you are interested in contextualization, postmodernism, ethnic/cultural issues, missiology, and house churches/ecclesiology, then you should be interested in the Emerging Church.

If you want to reach out to your non-Christian friends but don’t know how because they are so different from you, then you should be interested in the Emerging Church.  How many of you have had friends that you’ve grown up with in the church, drop out of church and Christianity?  You should be interested in the Emerging Church.

The context of MacArthur’s interview is his ripping of Doug Pagitt. (BTW MacArthur ridicules the concept of “context” in the interview also.) He calls Doug Pagitt, “not a pastor and not a Christian.” Do you think MacArthur has a right to call into question anyone’s salvation? I think that right is reserved for God alone. I don’t agree with everything Pagitt says, but MacArthur has no right to rip him.

I think calling MacArthur a loser pales into comparison of what MacArthur did to Pagitt… What’s worse… calling someone a loser? Or calling someone “not a Christian?”

Its one thing if he does it based on solid biblical truths… but in this case, he’s just wrong about the bible also. In otherwords, he strips Pagitt of his salvation based on incorrect interpretation of the bible. So he’s wrong about Pagitt, AND he’s wrong about the bible.

If you don’t agree, then tell me where in the bible it says that the church’s ONE function is the truth? The emphasis of MacArthur’s ministry is the truth. While you may say that the truth encompasses love, I think its clear by MacArthur’s ripping of Pagitt, that MacArthur will sacrifice love whenever he gets the chance. Christ emphasized LOVE in his ministry. MacArthur emphasizes truth… and sidesteps the love issue by claiming “love is included in truth.”

Its great that MacArthur has a big church and has been preaching for many years. That doesn’t make any of his teachings correct. Just because someone has a big church and a good ministry means that you listen to anything he says? You need to judge his teachings based on the bible. Judge the merits of his teachings based on the teaching themselves. Don’t say, oh he’s been preaching for such a long time, he must be correct. That’s just lazy. There are so many people with big churches that are teaching lies. Are you going to believe them too?

Yes I want the Ephesians unity of the church. That’s the entire point of this post. MacArthur’s teachings are ripping apart the church. He called Doug Pagitt’s church “not a church.” He called Doug Pagitt, “not a pastor.” He called Doug Pagitt, “not a Christian.” MacArthur needs to be held accountable for those claims. Wake up people. Stop drinking the MacArthur kool aid. Think, actually think about what he’s saying rather than swallowing it whole. I’ve seen MacArthur’s teachings directly destroy the fellowship of so many brother’s and sisters. His teachings are divisive, myopic, and the worst part, they’re just plain unbiblical. Again, tell me where in the bible it says that the church’s ONE function is the truth?

Anyone who rips apart the church based on untruths IS a loser.

Man John MacArthur really is a dinosaur… he said it himself:

“I’m going to seem anachronistic if not an outright dinosaur at this point. I believe the church has one function, and that is to guard the truth, to proclaim the truth and to live the truth. So you take the Word of God, you teach it, you proclaim it, you protect it, you defend it, and you live it, and that’s a church. The Word of God rightly divided, rightly understood.”

Where the HECK does he get this crap from? That’s what a church is? I don’t think the Word of God EVER gives that definition for the church. Proclaim the truth.. YES. Live the truth? YES. Guard the truth? Where in the bible does it ever say to GUARD the truth? As if the truth needed guarding? I think the truth can speak for itself. Defend it? Protect it? The truth is not so fragile that it needs us feeble minds to defend it protect it.

Not only that, but equating guarding, protecting, defending the truth with the church? And to claim that the church has ONE function? ONE function? Ridiculous. What happened to love? Clanging gong… Resounding cymbal… sound familiar? This guy sounds so SCARED, that his culture and way of life is melting away.

I can’t believe such a respected pastor, teacher, theologian, would make such unbiblical claims and not even attempt to back up his claims with the Word of God that he claims to want to “protect.”

What a loser.

The first post I wrote about Mark Driscoll was in January and I expressed my mixed feelings about the guy.

I read an interview with him on some guys blog and I have been listening to some of his sermons from iTunes.

Emerging Church

In the interview he talks about the emerging church and how he believes there are 3 strains of the emerging church.

1. Relevants

2. Reconstructionists

3. Revisionists

He actually has 4 strains. He has a “Reformed Relevants” strain, but I think its basically the same as “Relevants” so I lumped them together. Revisionists are people like Brian McLaren, where their theology has basically been compromised.

He says that “Relevants” are theologically conservative, and “innovative” in terms of church forms. “Reconstructionists” are theologically conservative, but seek to revise church forms. In otherwords people throwing out sunday sermons, buildings, and meeting in house churches are “Reconstructionists.” But people like him and Erwin McManus and I would also add Flood and Epicentre are “Relevants.” He says he has some concerns about Reconstructionists. I wonder what those concerns are. He probably still really loves sermons and thinks that God’s word cannot be communicated effectively without them? I don’t know. I’m just speculating. But I’d be interested to know what his concerns are.

I relate to this guy

Driscoll is pretty firey and on his blog he’s made some firey statements about like pastor’s wives and Brian McLaren that he had to apologize for. I respect him for apologizing, but I also really relate to him in the fact that he gets passionate and loves to use a firey tone, which may be to his detriment. I also relate to him in that he was a speech major and he seems to really enjoy speaking :p.

Still Concerned about his complementarian stance

Last time I posted, I said that I thought he was reductionistic and disliked how he speaks as if he’s an expert, when he really isn’t. Well I listened to his debate on women in ministry with Dr. Robert Wall from SPU. Actually it wasn’t the entire debate. It was just his own side of the argument. You can find it on the Mars Hill Church website. Just go to media, and search for “SPU debate.” First of all, Driscoll, who doesn’t have a masters degree is debating with Dr. Robert Wall, a professor who has a Th.D and a Th.M. Not that it makes his argument invalid, but if I were Driscoll, I wouldn’t debate with a guy in front of a huge audience who is much more educated than I am on the issue.

All of those qualifications wouldn’t make a difference if his argument is top quality. Unfortunately, his argument from 1 Timothy 2 is like he was preaching the passage rather than debating it. He never qualifies any of his assertions. He basically makes the distinction that women can teach and have authority, they just can’t teach and have authority from an elder position. That’s such a fine line and a fine distinction and I really don’t think he supports that assertion very well from 1 Timothy. I can’t even tell you more of his argument or what he said, because that’s all he basically said. His debate was more of “stating his opinion” rather than giving arguments supporting his opinion. That’s fine for a sunday sermon, but in a debate? Just reinforces my perception that the guy just reads Grudem and Piper (he says these are two guys he really admires) and just regurgitates it without really understanding any of the underlying issues.

So again, mixed feelings

The guy is definitely interesting. I still don’t know what to think of him. I really like some of his ideas, kinda concerned about the lack of thought in other areas.

I’ve been listening to some sermons by Mark Driscoll from the Mars Hill church in Seattle and I have a lot of mixed feelings about the stuff he talks about.

On one hand, I really agree with some of the stuff he says about preaching and preaching exegetically, thematically and topically. I listened to this talk he gave about preaching and how much he struggled with being able to preach and everything. That was pretty cool. I love his emphasis on preaching and how powerful preaching from the word can be. I really agree with that stuff. He attacks the Emergent movement in some ways criticizing the dialogical and narrative preaching stuff. I pretty much agree with him on a lot of those points.

Then I hear him criticize the trajectory hermeneutic and apparently he’s a really strong voice for complimentarians. Just listening to him talk makes him seem really well read and like he knows a lot about the issues, but at the same time the content of what he says about those issues is very simplistic and reductionistic. Though I’m not sure about the trajectory hermeneutic, I found it very strange that the guy could so simply dismiss it as dangerous. But then I thought, this guy must know what he’s talking about. He’s a pastor of a big church, probably a PhD or something.

Then I do some research on the guy and find out he doesn’t even have a MDiv or a Masters from a seminary. He’s working on a degree from western right now. How can a guy who doesn’t have the education yet make any statements about trajectory hermeneutic and the women in ministry debate? It makes me think he’s just reading guys like Piper and without really knowing, just takes Piper’s word for it.

I suppose the issue is that his tone is that of an expert or authority on the issue. In actuality, he is neither an expert, nor an authority.

Don’t really like that.