Questions about these things come up from time to time and feed into blog articles. Here’s some notes I wrote in response to a recent request to say something about the issues and dangers with emergent church/deconstruction.
Emergent church is the idea that every so often (say 500 years or so), the church goes through a form of paradigm shift. Just as we saw the Reformation, it is argued that the church is going through something new again. Exactly what form it is, was at the time of the label being coined “still to emerge”.
Some are now using the term deconstruction. The idea is that you can abandon all of your beliefs and then reconstruct a new faith.
It’s essentially liberalism with a fancy name and as with the late 19th/20th century modernists/liberals in Europe it’s a reaction out of fear to the decline of Christianity/church attendance in the United States. It’s essentially the belief that you can hang on to your children and grand children by accommodating to the culture and abandoning what you believe. So essentially church remains a social thing hence there was a catch phrase about belonging before believing. This misses the point that the reason that US Christianity is following the trend of Europe is that Christianity has become essentially cultural. That’s why you get lots of “evangelicals” identifying with Trump even though his morals go against the Bible.
The other thing that is missed is that all of the evidence from here in the UK is that the answer to secularism is not to try and accommodate to the culture and abandon core beliefs but rather we have seen that it is churches which have stuck with the Gospel and the authority of God’s Word that are growing in the UK. The church groupings that bucked the trend in the UK are evangelical, specifically conservative (reformed) evangelical and Charismatic Pentecostal churches. This includes Anglican/Nigerian groupings like Redeemed Church of God along with FIEC (conservative evangelical) and New Frontiers (Charismatic/reformed). In the Church of England it has been Evangelicals associated with Holy Trinity Brompton, All Souls and St Helen’s Bishopsgate that have seen growth. Those church groupings are also the ones that are willing to get involved in planting churches into areas where there are no meaningful gospel witnesses and helping struggling churches with revitalisation. In blunt terms, if you want to see your church die then embrace liberalism including it’s contemporary manifestations “emergent church” and “deconstruction”.
The other thing to say is that none of it is new. It’s all old hat, tried and failed. Deconstructing was what Descartes tried. I don’t think it helped him much. Most of the arguments made are as I said, old liberal ideas, long ago dealt with and rejected. Not only that but Chalke was first putting his ideas out in 2003 and I think Maclaren before then. Bell was about the same time.
The key things seem to be
- God is love but then we define love on our terms so that (our human definition of) love becomes God.
- They hate the idea of penal substitution, that Christ demonstrated God’s love by taking our place and bearing the curse and penalty of sin in order to defeat sin, death and evil.
- They don’t want to believe in hell -so they end up universalist.
Initially, because they came from evangelical backgrounds they claimed that they could prove their ideas from the Bible but when proved wrong and when they went further especially on sexual ethics, they became more overt in their rejection of Scripture as God’s Word. They treat it as a human book, attempts at conversations between humans trying to understand God -and mostly getting it wrong.
They have created a preferable image of Jesus. So, he becomes the God who is love and contrasts with the wrathful god of the Old Testament. This is just a modern form of Gnosticism.
Often their approaches rely on caricatures and misrepresentations of what orthodox evangelicals both today and historically have said. They also don’t tend (from what I’ve observed) to be willing to engage thoughtfully and listen to those who disagree with and challenge them.
We might also note that the historical analysis is shallow and flawed. Yes, there have been great movements and turning points in church history. However, if we look at The Reformation, it was a return to orthodoxy and confidence in God’s Word leading to spiritual renewal and vitality. If there has been a modern equivalent then surely it is seen in the emergence of Evangelicalism as a movement which might be seen as having three strands
- A renewed confidence in God’s Word which has seen a renewal of reformed theology. Think of the work of Banner of Truth, of theological colleges such as Oak Hill, of serious scholarship from Carson through to Ovey. The recovery of preaching through Lloyd Jones, Stott and Lucas in the UK, Piper and others in the US.
- A renewed prioritisation of mission and Evangelism. Lausanne, Keswick, Billy Graham, Alpha, Christianity Explored etc,
- A renewed life and vitality with hunger for God’s Word going hand in hand with thirst for the Spirit. Whilst we might think of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements as being central here, much of this can be seen in the wider evangelical movement too.
Dare I say that it is somewhat arrogant in the light of those things for a movement, more comparable to the Counter Reformation to claim to be the big epoch changing event.
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On the Bible
- The line is that Christ is God’s perfect revelation so we must read the Bible through him as the lens.
- This is a classic example of grasping a partial truth. Evangelicals have always argued that we read Scripture through Christ, the OT interpreted in the light of the NT. Scripture points to Christ. He is the one who fulfils the law and the prophets.
- However, Jesus himself treats OT Scripture as God’s Word. He uses it to defeat Satan’s temptations.
- His “You have hears it said … But I say” model in the sermon on the mount is not to contradict Scripture/The Law but to go deeper. He never says that murder, adultery etc don’t matter he says that it is the heart not just the outward actions that matter.
- If all Scripture is God breathed and Jesus is God, then unless we are dividing the Father and Spirit from the Son, it is Christ’s Word. It is not that it is a neutral text that we read through the lens of Jesus. Christ is the author, the one who speaks (not just through) but the very words of all Scripture.
On atonement
- Jesus’ death was not merely a tragedy or the evil actions of men that God turned around for good. Isaiah 53 says that it was the Lord’s purpose/will to crush him.
- But it’s not that Jesus is a human victim of God’s wrath. He is fully God, it was his will to go to the Cross for us.
- We shouldn’t think in terms of models of atonement. That’s rather modernist. Instead we need to see the whole picture of what Jesus was doing. He was winning the victory, paying the price demonstrating God’s love and he was paying the penalty. In fact, that last point “paying the penalty/taking our place as our substitute is crucial in explaining all the other things we say about the Cross. Without penal substitutionary atonement we cannot really say why it was necessary for Jesus to suffer and die, we cannot show how it iwins the victory and we cannot say that it is in any sense a meaningful demonstration of God’s love. I remember Philip Hacking giving the illustration that if you were lying on the beach and someone ran up and shouted “I love you, I love you so much” then they ran into the sea and drowned, you would not think “Wow, they wrre very loving.” You would think they were crazy. If you were drowning and someone who cared about you jumped in to pull you out, risking their own life in the process, then you would know how much they loved you. Without penal substitution all the other so called models of atonement are senseless.
On God’s sovereignty
- Along with Open Theism, there’s been a move to deny that God either knows or controls the future. God is limited and only able to act in time and space in response to events.
- God is seen as a great risk taker. He risks all to win and save us.
- Given the lack of willingness to engage with what sin is, I’m not sure what we are being saved/won from.
- It’s a bad attempt at an answer to an old question, the problem of suffering and evil. It answers the question “how can a good and great God allow suffeirng?” It chooses the answer “He is good but he isn’t great.” He isn’t able to control things, that’s why he must allow suffering to happen.
- The problem with this response is that if God is weak/limited and is unable to stop evil and suffering, if he takes risks with us, then he isn’t actually very good or very loving either. Rather, he is very needy, he makes people in order to get them to love and serve him when he knows that he cannot protect them from harm
- Genesis 50 offers the better answer, men meant it for evil, God intended it for good.
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Emergant Church/deconstruction is neither new and refreshing nor helpful.
Faithroots 