15AR20-23

AR 20:23 - A sympathetic, secular analysis of the Emergent Church

Apologia Report 20:23 (1,252)

July 8, 2015

In this issue:

CHRISTOLOGY - How God Became Jesus, where it falls short

EMERGING CHURCH MOVEMENT - "the most vocal, influential, and debated movement among US Christians since the Religious Right's rise"?

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CHRISTOLOGY

How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature - A Response to Bart D. Ehrman, edited by Michael F. Bird, Craig A. Evans, Simon Gathercole and Charles E. Hill [1] -- Robert M. Bowman, Jr.'s review in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (58:1 - 2015, pp174-177) includes significant criticism and insights in areas where more work needs to be done. For example, Bowman finds that Michael Bird "spends two pages discussing the angelic figure Metatron, which Ehrman never mentioned [in his book How Jesus Became God (2)]. ... Neither Bird nor any of the other contributors engage Ehrman's extended discussions of the relevance of the Roman emperor cult for the origins of belief in Jesus as divine" which Ehrman mentions in three different sections. Bird also "fails to engage Ehrman's position" regarding Jesus' authority over angels.

"Bird does not address Ehrman's basic characterization of Jesus' proclamation as that of an impending apocalypse that proved false when Jesus was executed by the Romans. ... Bird also misrepresents Ehrman as claiming that a saying of Jesus was authentic 'only' if it was dissimilar to Christian belief."

How God Became Jesus "contains no response to Ehrman's fifth chapter, in which he explains why he thinks the resurrection of Jesus cannot be accepted as fact on historical grounds and that Jesus' appearances can be categorized as 'bereavement visions.'"

Chris Tilling's chapter "faults Ehrman for not providing extended exegesis of NT passages other than Phil 2:6-11, a criticism that would apply moe to Tilling's material than to Ehrman's."

Bowman concludes: "It is perhaps understandable why professional evangelical NT scholars skirt or simply miss [the questions Bowman raises in this review], which are never addressed in How God Became Jesus. That is too bad, because a critical engagement with those comparisons can help the cause of Christian scholarship. In a society increasingly aware of the multiplicity of competing religious claims in the intellectual and spiritual marketplace, we cannot afford to ignore those questions."

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EMERGING CHURCH MOVEMENT

"Emergent Church Practices in America: Inclusion and Deliberation in American Congregations" by Ryan P. Burge and Paul A. Djupe -- "The emerging church has been identifiable for about 15 years now and has led one researcher [James S. Bielo (Anthropology, Miami University)] to conclude boldly that, 'Ultimately ... the Emerging Church has become the most vocal, influential, and debated movement among US Christians since the Religious Right's rise to political and cultural prominence in the late 1970s.'"

The authors' introduction reports that "The movement claims to be emergent in the scientific sense, building truth from the ground up though complex social interaction, rather than collecting people in order to disseminate truth."

Advocates "argue that younger Americans are no longer identifying as Christian due in large part to the rapid advances in technology that have given young people unprecedented access to understanding other world religions. ...

"Emergence is a component of complex systems theory, in which higher order organization results from a few simple rules and is not dictated either from on high or by individual preference. Thus, an emergent church model is quite a radical one which prioritizes interaction among those in attendance and describes the agency of a diverse group to determine, perhaps unpredictably, not just the direction of the church but its beliefs as well. ...

"Liberal churches ... have democratic polity that govern how the organizational church is run, but there is still a core that is not up for debate. The emergent church agrees with the importance of relevance, but leaves the determination of what to adopt, how to interpret it, and how it should be relevant to people in dialogue. In other words, this form of postmodernism and deliberation agrees that truth is what people collectively make of it rather than something specified a priori. ...

"Brian McLaren, credited as 'the emerging church's most influential thinker,' points to Middleton and Walsh's Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be [3] as a turning point in his understanding of Christianity that led him to embrace the emergent church movement. ...

"One of the foundational principles of the ECM is an emphasis on the subjective interpretation of the bible [sic]. This lack of objectivity is rooted in the understanding that human beings are the product of the environment in which they were raised - the philosophy they were taught and the historical context in which they grew up. What further complicates biblical interpretation is the limited ability of language to describe the divine. ...

"One of the manifestations of the emerging church movement's understanding of relativism is the desire to be as inclusive of outsiders as possible. This inclusivity is extended both to those who do not prescribe to any religious faith or those coming from a different religious tradition. ...

"This focus on inclusivism runs counter to the sense of embattlement that evangelicals typically perceive. After conducting hundreds of interviews with evangelicals across the United States, Christian Smith concluded, 'Evangelicals observe that every racial, ethnic, religious, political, and ideological perspective is given fair time, except for the Christian perspective.'"

The author's conclusion also includes the observation that in the ECM "There simply is not much commitment to maintaining high boundaries and much more to reaching beyond the ingroup for new members."

In the section "Emergent Church Identities," the authors note that "More religiously conservative clergy are less likely to be emergent, as are clergy in rural churches. Interestingly, older clergy are more likely to identify as emergent than younger clergy."

The authors conclude that emergents "are inclusive, non-dogmatic, and committed to discussion, but are also convinced that all religions are not equally good. That is, they are committed to a general Christian belief system, but it appears that anything else is on the table, able to be discussed and debated, discarded, or adopted by members. Moreover, it does not appear that emerging churches are merely upper class debating societies, but are actually full of a mix of people, though our measures on this score are not ideal. ...

"What is particularly striking, however, is how little emergents differ from their denominational affiliates. Despite the considerable depth of the emergent critique of modern denominational religion, the expression of denominational religion is not far off the mark. The average clergyperson in [this study] is inclusive, not exclusive, and committed to deliberation ... though a little less than ECM clergy."

As far as the limitations of this study, "the sample does not capture all practice and cannot comment on the average Christian church or clergy person in America. That also means the sample does not offer comment on the average ECM clergyperson in America, but merely the average ECM clergy person in these denominations. It is entirely possible that non-denominational ECM clergy are even better exemplars of the norms and values espoused by the movement's leaders. Given the distributions of the variables we consider, however, it is hard to make this case." Review of Religious Research, 57:1 - 2015, pp1-23.

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature - A Response to Bart D. Ehrman, edited by Michael F. Bird, Craig A. Evans, Simon Gathercole and Charles E. Hill (Zondervan, March 2014, paperback, 240 pages) <www.ow.ly/tNSKa>

2 - How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, by Bart D. Ehrman (HarperOne, March 2014, hardcover: 416 pages) <www.ow.ly/tGmuW>

3 - Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern, by J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh (IVP, 1995, paperback, 250 pagesIVP, 1995) <www.goo.gl/2QATqe>

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