8. You've got to hand it to the emergent church. They've managed to hook people in with the idea that they're "emerging" from the ruins of modernist Christianity, when instead they're staying in those exact same ruins. This isn't surprising, because it's exactly what postmodernism did to modernism in general. Consider:
It is ironic that postmodernists, who distinguish themselves by a refusal of high theory and grand narrative, have to jimmy modernity into an epochal straightjacket in order to claim to have moved beyond it.
- Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 19.
What the emergent church has performed is the illusion of a major shift; in reality they've changed the packaging of the message, but hardly any of the meaningful content. Where the modern church aesthetic consisted of corportate colors, straight lines and right angles, and sports arena-style sanctuaries, the postmodern church aesthetic consists of hip, alternative colors, crooked lines and varied angles, and meeting areas that resemble your local coffee shop. But the differences end at the aesthetic level. You'll still find the quasi-worship that dumbs the mind and numbs the heart; you'll still hear sermons that will claim to fix some aspect of your life but really won't, and you'll still find the same disregard for covenant, baptism, and Eucharist as in modernist churches. My friend Steven sent me a video in which a pastor and a member figured they should do communion, and wondered what that might look like.
The emergent church is right about the need to embrace postmodernism, but they get the point wrong. N.T. Wright hits the nail on the head when he says that a grasp of postmodernism is needed to cleanse the church of corrupting modern influences. The point of such baptisms is neither to continue being baptised or return to uncleanliness, but to embrace and dwell in union with Christ. That is the real way to get out of this mess.
2 comments:
My (limited) concept of much of the emergent church is that they understand the need to embrace postmodernism as primarily influencing our ecclesiology. But if the understanding of the gospel is already skewed by modernism, then a postmodern ecclesiology won't fix the problem. We can't divorce our ecclesiology from the gospel, but we have to be rooted in the gospel for everything else go right. It's only in this context that facing the challenge of postmodernism can help us.
I agree with your assessment of Emergent worship; I don’t much feel the need for backrubs with my theology. However, I’m not sure you can lump together Emergent practice with Emergent theory: the thought behind the Emergent movement is far more intriguing than what goes on in most Emergent churches. McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy offers some significant challenges to modernist orthodoxy without broaching the subject of church decoration. My guess is that the postmodern church aesthetic you mention is partly the confused reaction of people who have no idea how to react to non-Modernist ways of thinking.
(Also, I’m not sure that saying modernism doesn’t fit into a cozy progressive “straightjacket” is all that serious a blow against postmodernism :)
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