My alma mater seminary, Truett, has been apparently received an influx of what some affectionately call “the emergent boys”. For those of you not familiar with the term, “Emergent” refers to the nexus of churches that are reconcieving the question of faith and culture, having declared the old models corrupted and modernity dead and dying. While there’s some truth to the claims of Emergent, as a theologian-in-training, I have some big concerns with the approach that’s taken.
A prof of mine whose scholarship I greatly admire went to a conference in Chicago recently, with the keynote speaker one Tony Jones, national co-ordinator of the Emergent movement. For starters, Jones is no academic slouch, having graduated from PTS with a PhD in Practical Theology. However, my prof was not impressed with his way of setting aside the church’s historical way of calling balls and strikes in favor of a more “hermeneutical methodology”. I think the word he used was “entertainment”. I don’t think he meant that as a good thing.
Just to clarify, there’s hermeneutics and then…there’s hermeneutics. The church has always done hermeneutics. The patristic period was all over the map, making bold moves with its interpretations that eventually settled into a few general ways of reading Scripture, consummate with a regula fide, a rule of faith, the way of reading Scripture that no one ever really articulates, but that the churches know by virtue of their common life in the Spirit.
Here’s the kicker: to do this, to practice this kind of hermeneutic, you have to know your own history. Augustine, one of the early masters of these practices in reading Scripture, constantly refers to what has come before him in the tradition, not to subvert it or call his moves something new or innovative, but to show that reading Scripture in conversation with the larger church leads to fresh readings of Scripture that are always in line with what the church has always said. In reading Scripture with the church, one finds both consistency and fresh wind.
My concern with the Emergent methodology is that it lunges after the latter while often being too lazy to do the former, going after innovation and cultural relevance while not taking the hard time to know its own history. In describing Alyosha’s decision to become a monk, Dostoevsky writes that “many would gladly give up their lives and more, but few would give up years of their fertile youth to hard study”; in this, I hear a damning critique of those who would want to engage the culture of the world without knowing the church’s own voice. Instead of delving into the depths and riches of theology’s own history, we are tempted to settle for slipshod caricature and cheap paradigms which can be easily tossed aside.
But theology is harder than this. The church’s history is richer than this. This attempt to say anything new without first knowing what has already been said, and finding our resources there, is to risk repeating old heresy and succumbing to a cultural laziness which is already too relevant.
It’s ten days out from getting on a plane. The room is finally cleaned; Mom is coming down today to see her oldest kid before he goes off to parts unknown; the weather outside is muggy and something like a dirty dishrag.
I haven’t even thought about packing yet.
Last night, as I met with a group from church, we prayed through a passage of Scripture in Mark where Jesus calms the waters. A familiar passage, one I’ve thought about or heard a thousand times. The point of the exercise was what is called lectio devina, a holy reading of Scripture wherein you listen for God to speak as the Scripture is read. As I listened the first time, I was overwhelmed with the sense of powerlessness in the picture. Part of this no doubt was thoughts of Kenya rushing in, fueling my thinking as I prepare to do this trip I’ve been plotting for four years now. I love travel; I love being out in new places with my heart beating in my chest a little faster from having no familiarity with the things around me, of being in a remote part of the world with no connection. It’s kind of a rush.
But as I listened to the story again, I stuck on the word “perishing”, describing the disciples in the boat, their fear, their destiny of being at the bottom of the lake. And it occurred to me as Jesus calmed the storm that it was not the disciples alone who were in peril of perishing in this story, but nature itself that was at risk of perishing. And in that moment, I felt sorry for the storm, for it too suffered from disorder, of living in destruction instead of peace. The wind and waves roared, tearing themselves apart, to be silenced and set right by Jesus’ calm word: nature and humanity set right at the same word of Jesus. If we take Paul’s word in Romans at face value, that creation itself groans waiting for its redemption, I see no reason to not think that nature itself is a twisted smile of its making by a good God.
It follows that in the voice of Jesus there is a calm that sets all things right, not merely for the soul or for the individual, but for the whole scene: for governments, for wars, for famines and poverty, for conflicts and discord. The word of Jesus is not one for the soul primarily, but for the body and the soul, for the world of which people are a part. The peace of Jesus in the midst of storms is not reduced to simply giving us calm in the midst of wild circumstances, but for the making of peace in the presence of a world which would otherwise tear itself apart. The giving of peace was for people and storms alike; so we go, to challenge the storms of the world–not as separate phenomenon, but as one manifestation of the same storm, the same discord threatening to destroy itself, and needing quiet.
