Some professing Christians, particularly of the liberal variety, claim that little (or no) delving into doctrine is worthwhile for the world. After all, they claim, God is so mysterious and lofty that we can’t possibly know Him fully. And it could be arrogant to say we “know” something for sure about Him.

But I doubt people who prefer the label “emergent” have come up with that view on their own. Haven’t we already heard this attitude in other believers too? Yes, some doctrine squabbling is nitpicking. But some believers seem to think it’s all worthless nitpicking, or arrogance.

Author Brian McLaren seems to think so, too. Lest this seem like another contemporary McLaren pick-on, this actually comes from D.A. Carson’s older book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church.¹ After spending a few chapters in a deep yet readable compare/contrast of “premodernism,” “modernism,” and “postmodernism” frames of thought, Carson moves to evaluating what he terms the false antitheses (either it’s this, or it’s this!) common to “emergent” profess-ors.

First, Carson quotes more of McLaren’s book The Church on the Other Side.²

When we “do theology,” we are clay pots pondering the potters, kids pondering their father, ants discussing the elephant. At some level of profundity and accuracy, we are bound to be inadequate or incomplete all the time, in almost anything we say or think, considering our human limitations, including language, and God’s infinite greatness.

Our words will seek to be servants of mystery, not removers of it as they were in the old world. They will convey a message that is clear yet mysterious, simple yet mysterious, substantial yet mysterious. My faith developed in the old world of many words, in a naive confidence in the power of many words, as if the mysteries of faith could be captured like fine-print conditions in a legal document and reduced to safe equations. Mysteries, however, cannot be captured so precisely. Freeze-dried coffee, butterflies on pins, and frogs in formaldehyde all lose something in our attempts at capturing, defining, preserving, and rendering them less jumpy, flighty, or fluid. In the new world, we will understand this a little better.

Here it is again: the absolute antithesis. Either we can know God exhaustively, or we are restricted to the mysterious. Of course it is always true that we cannot know God exhaustively: we are not omniscient. God is infinitely greater than we are. Moreover, the best of the modernist theologians were among the most adamant on this point. It did not take postmodernism to discover that God is infinitely greater than we and in that sense forever remains mysterious.

But although the comparison of elephant and ants is helpful at one level, it overlooks the fact that in this case the ants have been made in the image of the elephant, and this elephant has not only communicated with the ants in ant-language, but has also, in the person of his Son, become an “ant” while remaining an “elephant.” If the ants were left on their own to figure out what the elephant knows and thinks and feels, “mystery” would be too weak a word. Yet in the case of the revealing elephant with whom we have to do, he has told us ants what he is like, what he thinks, what he feels, what he has done, and what he is going to do—not exhaustively, of course, but truly.

True, we must never think we have domesticated God, making him a specimen, a frog in a bottle of formaldehyde. But which of the great modern theologians ever thought of God in those terms?³ On the other hand, if this God has disclosed a great deal about himself, is it not appropriate to talk about and think and write and sing about the attributes that he himself has chosen to disclose in the language of the ants? Is this reducing God to a frog in formaldehyde? Surely not: it is merely the mark of faithfulness to the self-disclosure of this gracious God.

Because we are small and sinful, we will sometimes misunderstand and distort what he has disclosed. Sadly, we will sometimes be tempted to pretend that we know more about him than we actually do.

But when he has disclosed so much, it scarcely honors him to say, “Ah! He is so big, everything is so mysterious, that I cannot say a single true thing about him.” Only if “true” demands omniscient truth (that antithesis again!) is that a responsible position. Otherwise, it is merely a new idolatry: we refuse to take God at his word and prefer to worship the dogmatic not-knowing of hard postmodernism.

Directions to an “emergent” church?

Today I finally finished (first draft) a novel whose story and images were born Sept. 22 (a date significant for other reasons too), 2007. Pre-revisions, it’s 42 chapters. It wasn’t intentional; I wanted 40.

So, that is one reason why I didn’t post a new column for yesterday.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been learning a lot about the “emergent” movement, and particularly its emphasis on saying the Christ-died-in-place-of-sinners idea is not right (calling it “barbaric,” or in the infamous words of Steve Chalke quoted by Brian McLaren, “cosmic¹ child abuse.” A writer acquaintance of mine, Rebecca Miller, has been writing a lot about these “emergent-cy” doctrines. Her Jan. 25 installment, The Emerging Heresy, caused much “conversation” and I found myself writing a lot of comments and rebuttals in response.

A few of those comments are excerpted below, but I encourage readers to have a look at the full back-and-forth thus far. It’s well worth a deep read, for a helpful cross-section about what many “emergent” activists are teaching, possible reasons why, and the need to address them with as much truth and grace as we can, and maybe even a little sarcasm.

From what I can tell of “emergent” Christians, they may mean well in their re-imaginings and all that sort of thing. I fear that what they are doing is taking one hammer in hand, namely, that of avoiding What the Church has Done Wrong in the Past — either actual wrongs, or perceptions thereof. Many such people seem to have backgrounds in legalistic churches, and/or megachurches that cared more for programs (ostensibly doctrine) than they did for people, the issues of the world, etc.

With that hammer in hand, every problem begins to look like a nail. And the result is that too many “re-imagining” folks swerve to opposite extremes. With the chief end of man reset from “glorify God and enjoy Him forever” to “we must fix the problems in the church, and then the world,” legalism roars back into force, more hip and socially aware and creative than before.

The three issues at the heart of this debate: God’s nature, the seriousness of man’s sin, and Christ’s Atonement for sins.

[. . .]

McLaren and others have referred to the idea of God’s plan to crucify His Son to satisfy His wrath as “divine child abuse.” For all that exploration and conversation and open-mindedness, they make an exclusive claim about what Christ’s death was *not* about. Scriptures clearly saying the contrary are thrown aside for the sake of the System. The System takes this as axiomatic: God needing to punish His Son on behalf of those who would believe is a “barbaric” concept.

[. . .]

Again I cite: a plain reading of Romans, a plain reading of Hebrews, plain reading of the entire Old Testament, plain reading of the whole Bible — respecting the (divinely inspired) authors’ intent from the beginning, ignoring (as much as possible) our own 21st-century, philosophical, “enlightened,” chronologically-snobbish cultural constraints.

Cheez, it hurts to see my Savior’s sacrifice so denigrated. By believing this, one says three things about the God one claims to value more highly than such a “barbaric” God.

1. “My sin isn’t so bad.”

God could not be so offended by humanity’s rebellion, or my own personal desire to use Him and his gifts as a means to my own idols, as to require a punishment. I’m either a basically-good person, or I’m a victim of sin, and instead of being only angry at me, God should only feel sorry for me. (What a narrow and false dilemma! Yet Scripture dares to show that God is both/and, quite above reductionistic divisions of His character.)

2. “God isn’t so good.”

Along with elevating man’s nature far above the level permitted by clear Scriptures about his natural and willful wickedness, such a claim is an insult to God’s holiness. He’ll overlook sin; regardless of how He punished it in the Old Testament, He’s learned better now, and pretty much everyone is okay by Him because He’s figured out how to rise above it all.

Justice is cheap. Grace is no longer valuable and undeserved — it’s expected! God just indulges the little hellions. Universalism is constantly hinted at, and now (as many expected) directly taught by many “emergent” leaders. Reacting to the wrong “get a contract with God and you’re saved forever” notions, they have overreacted and said *no* conscious new birth (repentance and conversion) is necessary to be in God’s favor.

3. “God is about me, not about Himself.”

Contrasted with the clear truths that God wants to give of Himself to the world, to those who repent and believe in Him, because He is the most glorious “thing” He could offer — is the idea that His all-defining, all-central characteristic is “love.”

In this view, God’s “love,” undiscerning, always tolerant, never condemning a person for his free-will choices to reject Him as the ultimate good, is now His defining virtue. He does everything for the sake of just love, love, love — as certain people wish to define it, that is. Even the “Harry Potter” series, with all its “love, love” basis, was deeper than that.