By Phil Johnson @ http://www.sfpulpit.com/2006/12/01/introducing-the-ecm-part-4/#more-306Definition
With that as background, let me attempt to give you something that approximates a definition of this movement—this thing—that we all agree resists any kind of precise definition.
Some important disclaimers. I hope you won’t be surprised or dismayed when people who are devoted to the emergent subculture point out that my description of their movement is an oversimplification. They are also going to complain that some of the things I criticize don’t apply in every exhaustive detail to every person or every congregation in their movement.
Remember: I know that, and I have already acknowledged it. But I still think there’s great value in giving you a description of the broad contours of the movement, and that is what I am going to try to do.
Some in the movement will complain that I haven’t read enough of their literature; I haven’t interacted enough with the right emergent bloggers; or I haven’t visited enough of their gatherings to be a competent critic of their ideas.
All I can say in response is that I have read as much literature from the movement’s key writers as I can get my hands on; I have interacted directly with people in the emerging movement as much as my time and schedule will permit; I have already put many of my criticisms of the movement in the public arena repeatedly, and I have invited (and received) lots of feedback from people who are devoted to the movement. I have done my best to be fair and complete. And I assure you that I will continue to study the movement.
But I don’t agree with the notion that in order to be a reasonable and credible analyst of a movement like this, you have to remain neutral indefinitely and never become a critic. There is simply too much in the movement that warrants criticism.
As I said, I just want to be candid and clear for you. I wish time allowed me to be as nuanced as I would normally like to be. On the other hand, I think a tendency to over-nuance and over-qualify everything has already spoiled some otherwise potentially helpful critiques of this movement.
A definition (of sorts) in five parts. So allow me to give you a broad-brushed description of the “emerging church movement,” mainly for the benefit of those who are still having a hard time getting their minds around the concept of what this thing is. This won’t be the kind of pithy definition you can take down in a single sentence, so don’t even bother trying. But I will try to keep it brief enough to be manageable.
So here’s my definition:
1. The “emerging church” is a convenient name for a broad-based and growing assortment of similar or related movements that have flourished in the past half-decade—mostly on the fringe of the evangelical movement. “Emerging” congregations in one way or another tend to be keenly attuned to the postmodern shift in art, literature, and public discourse.
(Incidentally, Postmodernism itself is not easy to define, but in general it refers to a tendency to discount values like dogmatism, authority, absolutism, assurance, certainty, and large, commanding, exclusive worldviews—which postmodernists like to label metanarratives. Postmodern values would include things like diversity, inclusiveness, relativism, subjectivity, tolerance, ambiguity, pragmatism, and above all, a view of “humility” that is characterized by lots of qualms and reservations and uncertainties and disclaimers about whether anything we hold in our belief system is really true or not. Those are the very same values that are usually held in high esteem in the “emerging church movement.”)
By the way, I think its a mistake to see the emerging subculture as nothing more than the next generation’s version of the “seeker sensitive” church. It is that, but only in a certain sense. In some ways, the “emerging church” is a reaction against and a departure from the shallow, mass-movement professional showmanship of the slick megachurches like Willow Creek and Saddleback. Emergent types tend to value authenticity over professionalism. Many of their churches—perhaps a majority of their churches—are home churches or otherwise small-group gatherings that are informal and unorganized almost to an extreme.
Understand: this is a very diverse movement. Some in the movement might even say they are wary of postmodern influences, while others are advocating that Christians ought to embrace postmodernism enthusiastically. But, either way, they would all pretty much be keenly aware that postmodernism has molded the way contemporary people think, the way public discourse is carried on, the way public opinion is shaped, and the way judgments are usually made about truth-claims. Therefore, they argue, the church must adjust its message accordingly. And normally, in practice, this means some level of accommodation to postmodern preferences.
2. Now, here is another vital aspect of what distinguishes “emerging church movement”: Most congregations in the movement would describe themselves as missional, by which they mean they stress the importance of evangelistic outreach by involving themselves in the lives of unbelievers in the community outside the narrow circle of the church. They point out that the way believers live is one of the most potent and persuasive aspects of our testimony to unbelievers—if not the single most important thing of all.
2. Now, here is another vital aspect of what distinguishes “emerging church movement”: Most congregations in the movement would describe themselves as missional, by which they mean they stress the importance of evangelistic outreach by involving themselves in the lives of unbelievers in the community outside the narrow circle of the church. They point out that the way believers live is one of the most potent and persuasive aspects of our testimony to unbelievers—if not the single most important thing of all.
There’s nothing essentially wrong with that idea, of course, as long as we also communicate the truth of the gospel clearly and distinctly with words. The problem arises when you factor in the postmodern tendency to distrust or despise every kind of clarity, certainty, or authoritative truth-claim. It has often meant, in practice, that the emphasis on “missional living” results in an evangelistic strategy where gospel preaching is downplayed or deliberately omitted. (And I’ll probably have more to say about that if time permits.)
3. Here’s another (similar) feature of the “emerging church movement”: Emergent-style churches show a preference for “narrative theology” as opposed to systematic doctrine. The story of the gospel is ultimately more important than the theology of it. The simple narrative of salvation history must not get lost in the careful parsing of theological words and ideas.
Obviously, There’s an important germ of truth in that idea, too. The four gospels do tell us about the life of Christ in narrative format. They are collections of anecdotes and incidents from His life, not systematic doctrinal treatises about soteriology, or hamartiology, or any of the other-ologies by which we tend to categorize our theology.
Obviously, There’s an important germ of truth in that idea, too. The four gospels do tell us about the life of Christ in narrative format. They are collections of anecdotes and incidents from His life, not systematic doctrinal treatises about soteriology, or hamartiology, or any of the other-ologies by which we tend to categorize our theology.
People in the “emerging church movement” place a lot of stress on that fact, and in my assessment they tend to go quickly overboard. The fact that so much of Scripture is narrative doesn’t alter the fact that much of it is also didactic—and vice versa. Here, I think their obsession with postmodernism has got the better of some of our emergent friends, and they have simply reacted against rationalism by running to the opposite imbalance.
4. In this same vein, people in the emerging church movement often don’t hold the idea of propositional truth in very high regard. And this one of the key points many of them want to make: They believe that when you reduce a truth-claim to a propositional statement, you have actually done violence to the truth.
Of course, a proposition, by definition, is a premise that is either true or false. There is no third choice. (That is one of the most basic laws of logic, known as the law of the excluded middle.)
Postmodernists simply don’t like handling ideas with that kind of clarity. So there’s a tendency among emergent types to denigrate or devalue the very idea of propositional truth, logic, and rationality.
Postmodernists simply don’t like handling ideas with that kind of clarity. So there’s a tendency among emergent types to denigrate or devalue the very idea of propositional truth, logic, and rationality.
I contend that you cannot teach truth at all apart from propositions of some sort. Boil any truth-claim down to its pure essence, and what you have is a proposition. You cannot even tell stories without propositions, so if you were serious about dispensing with propositions altogether, you would have to forfeit narrative theology, too.
Now again, I think there is a germ of truth underlying this aspect of postmodernist thinking. Truth is more than merely a collection of propositional statements. Most of understand that there is a vast and important difference between knowing Christ and knowing facts about Christ.
On the other hand, knowing Christ in a true and saving way must necessarily involve knowing true facts about Him. You don’t really know Him at all in any biblical sense if you don’t know the basic facts about His deity, His death, His resurrection, and essential parts of the story like those. So there is a sense in which the propositional aspect of the truth about Christ is vital. Al Mohler says it this way: “while truth is always more than propositional, it is never less.”
By the way, the suggestion that we try to deal with truth in non-propositional form is not anything new with the “emerging church movement.” It’s an idea that was floated as one of the key tenets of neo-orthodoxy at least 65 years ago or more.
I would argue that the assault on propositional truth ultimately entails the abandonment of logic completely. It is an irrational idea. Francis Schaeffer said the same thing. He regarded neo-orthodoxy’s attack on propositional truth as the theological equivalent of suicide. He said when we abandon rationality in that way, we have crossed “the line of despair.” We might as well abandon the quest for truth itself. And in effect, that is the result of the postmodernist perspective.
5. Here’s a final element in my abbreviated description of the emerging Christian subculture: Most insiders like to portray their movement as an answer to the influence of philosophical modernism; a departure from modernism; something wholly distinct from modernism. As you know, modernism has assaulted the church for some 150 years, at least. It has always, consistently been hostile to evangelical truth.
Some actually believe the “emerging church movement” is so much the polar opposite of modernism that when you criticize their movement, they will accuse you of blithely and unthinkingly buying into the errors of “modern” thinking. They will often label you a “modernist.” And among other things, they will accuse you of parroting a brand of philosophical foundationalism that owes more to Rene Descartes and Cartesian foundationalism than it owes to the Scriptures. Lots of naive people have been drawn into the movement by sophisticated-sounding philosophical arguments like those.
That claim is based on the assumption that postmodernism itself represents a correction of the philosophical errors of modernism, rather than just a further step in a wrong direction.
How any Christian can uncritically adopt that view of carnal, worldly, humanistic philosophy is an utter mystery to me. It ought to be obvious to people in the church that postmodernism poses at least as much a threat to the truth and the clarity of the gospel as every other humanistic philosophy that has preceded it in the long parade of human foolishness that has brought us to the postmodern moment in which we are living.
Postmodernism is just the latest, and possibly the worst, in a relentless procession of bad ideas that ought to have conditioned the church to despise and distrust the folly of human wisdom (which, by the way, is what Scripture commands us to do).
Modernism at its very core and inception was an overt attempt to subvert and defeat the truth of Scripture with humanistic rationalism. Modernism failed, and failed miserably.
Postmodernism is not really a significant departure from modernism; it is just a similar attempt to subvert and defeat the truth of Scripture by glorifying irrationality, and by portraying all truth as hopelessly paradoxical, ambiguous, unclear, uncertain, unimportant, or otherwise unworthy of all the concern and attention philosophers have given to the idea. Postmodernism abandons the hope of finding any absolute or incontrovertible truth, and instead, the postmodernist looks for amusement by playing with words and language, and by questioning every assumption and challenging every truth-claim.
That’s no answer to modernism; it is a further step in the same wrong direction. 
So my assessment of the “emerging church movement” is that far from being the antithesis of modernism, this sort of “evangelical postmodernism” is really ultimately nothing more than Modernism 2.0.
I have been trying to highlight that point for the past six months or more on my blog by posting excerpt after excerpt from Charles Spurgeon’s criticisms of 19th-century modernism. (All that material is still online if you want to review it. Just do a Google search at my blog for “spurgeon” and “Modernism.” That will be enough to get you started.) It is very eye-opening to see that every one of the arguments and biblical points Spurgeon made against the so-called “evangelical modernists” of his day can (without any modification whatsoever) be applied against the “evangelical postmodernists” of our day.
Far from being antithetical, the two movements are ultimately just one and the same. The “emerging church movement” is this generation’s version of what our grandparents knew as modernism—updated in some ways, but ultimately, it’s essentially the same. Postmodernists today are using the same arguments and the same strategies that the modernists of the Victorian era employed. The results will be exactly the same, too.
You can begin to understand, I hope, why I insist that this topic demands to be dealt with with the utmost candor and clarity, rather than with evasions and equivocations. And I make no apology for that.
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