Chronological snobbery

I've been learning about the "emerging conversation" for a little while now, and I have to say every once in a while I just get the feeling like these guys are losing touch with reality.

You see, I go onto the Emergent Village web site because I'm a young 20-something in grad school with a particular bent toward intellectual and theological conversation. This is not normal for someone my age, or for anyone, really. But it's nice for guys like me to have an outlet.

And yet some are convinced that "Emergent" Christianity is going to be the next big thing. Just take a look at the video here. Also read what Phyllis Tickle writes in her post entitled, "The 18 Month Window":

In general, short-range predictions are fairly dangerous things. Like loose boards on an aging country porch, they tend to fly up and hit one in the face. I try to avoid them for that very reason. On the other hand, sometimes something is not only compellingly obvious in and of itself, but so too is the need for its telling. Whether I am accurate in my observations or not remains to be seen … very soon, in this case … but the possibility of error does not eliminate the obligation to speak the truth as one sees it, any more than it defuses the urgency.

This truth, as she sees it, which she feels is so urgent to express, is that churches are going to have to decide within the next 18 months whether or not they're going to be "Emergent" or not. Whatever that means.

I'm just really confused. Somehow this thing that almost no one I know in my non-Web-based life even knows or cares about is going to be the thing that transforms Christendom in the next... 18 months? ?? ? ? ? ?

I am just totally bewildered by it all. Hey, I just wanted to be part of the conversation, you know? I have questions, and I think lots of us have questions. Why is it that every movement that starts by having questions ends up thinking that they're so all-important?

Emergent types tend to have a lot of amazing theological points to talk about, and I'm really grateful for that. That's kept me thinking about things a lot this summer. Why, then, why would these folks go and set themselves up to be something that they're not? Just be a source for necessary conversation, and leave the pretension alone.

One commenter had a brilliant phrase to describe this pretension: "chronological snobbery." We all want to be at the most crucial moment in history. I guess there are both good and bad desires buried inside that.

On the one hand, we all have this desire to see the promised land we long for. On the other hand, we all want it to be now because we're thinking mostly about ourselves--our questions, our problems, and our brilliant solutions.

I'm sure this applies to the current political climate just as much as to religion.

I wonder what life could be like if I just lived every day as if no one will ever remember me. Maybe I could just do good for the sake of doing good, and not for the sake of being some super-important part of the narrative of the cosmos.

And who knows? Maybe someone would remember me, just not anyone super-important. And someone else would remember them, also not very important. And so on. None of us would be very important, but we'd all be part of something.

That something wouldn't take place at one crucial time in history, but it might just change the world. Or if it didn't, at least we each did something good.

There has to be meaning in that.

Our Story

I was listening to this fascinating podcast featuring Stanley Hauerwas over on Emergent Village (it's an older podcast, I'm just catching up). The topic of the speech given by Hauerwas was actually the theology of death... Kind of a dark subject, but it launches him into some amazing points.

The thought I had about it doesn't have anything to do with death, actually. What interested me was this thing Hauerwas kept saying about what he called the "modernist story:"

"The modernist story is that we should have no story but the story we chose when we had no story."

It sounds like a bit of a tongue-twister, but if you can decipher it, it's making an interesting point. This story is what modernists think of as "freedom." It's the ability to make up your own identity.

Hauerwas said the belief in this type of freedom has shaped our attitudes toward death. What occurred to me is that it affects our attitude toward the Bible.

If we think about how modernism has affected Christianity, it would appear that we can see it in the narratives we tell about ourselves--the "testimonies" we give as Christians. How a person came to Christ is essential in many churches. Without a credible testimony, you might not be admitted into membership.

Essentially, each individual Christian tends to feel that his story should be a fresh, originally rendering of Amazing Grace: I was lost, but now I'm found. This story becomes the story which defines a Christian's identity.

The reason I think this is a very modernist narrative is that it starts with the individual, and it is designed to give identity to the individual. This shapes how we read scripture: we are relentless in our pursuit of applications of scripture to our personal everyday lives.

We've taken the idea that scripture is God's word to us as individuals quite seriously in evangelical culture. A pastor might use no more than a single verse for his sermon text on Sunday, but you better believe he wants you reading through all the scriptures in your own quiet time.

And there are many churches where it is not uncommon to hear people saying they received "a word from the Lord" as they were reading scripture. A certain passage might "really speak to me" in whatever circumstance I'm dealing with. All of this is interpreted as God's providential ability to connect scripture with our everyday lives.

All of this is well and good, but I think it loses something very big. Scripture is fundamentally not my story, but our story; not only that, but it is a story that started thousands of years ago. My story is not the story that gives me my identity. The story that gives me identity is a story that existed long before I ever did.

Sometimes when I read scripture, I see absolutely no application to my everyday life. And I'm totally okay with that. The point of the text is not necessarily to teach me what to do, but rather who I am. I think it's application enough to be reminded that I was not here first, that life, the universe, and Christianity do not revolve around me and my story.

I can imagine most evangelicals sympathizing with this point, but still... I've noticed that the standard evangelical tendency is to make everything practical. By which we really mean, focused on individual lives.

What if pastors, instead of preaching from scripture in order to get some practical point across, used scripture to remind their congregations that Christianity is way bigger than their day to day lives?

I really like N. T. Wright's essay on How Can The Bible Be Authoritative? He argues that we interpret scripture by becoming the fifth act in the five-act play set up by scripture (Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, Church). This makes intuitive sense to me. It's basically saying our biblical interpretation would be more sound if we had the bigger picture in mind.

So yes, we can have the Bible give us wisdom on how to act in today's world, but it won't focus on our individual lives. It will focus on the big picture, on how to be part of the Church all over the world.

To the modernist, this is not freedom, but for the Christian, it is. Freedom for the Christian is not some abstract concept. It is a reality that is grounded in the history of flesh and blood human beings--one human being in particular, who died on a cross and rose from the dead.

It's too bad Christians often don't appreciate our history more.

Postmodern Christians and Truth

I just listened to an interesting sermon by Don Heatley, a man I had never heard of before, on the Emergent Village web site. After listening to it, I finally realized something about the emergents' postmodern approach to Christianity.

See, when I was growing up, I thought postmodernism was just silly. I bet lots of us evangelicals could imagine some conversation like this:

Postmodern: "I believe truth is relative, not absolute."
You: "That sounds like an absolute statement."
Postmodern: "No, not exactly."
You: "Oh, so I don't have to believe it?"
Postmodern: "Not if you don't want to, I guess..."

To my mathematical mind, it was as simple as a reductio ad absurdum: if truth is relative, then the statement "truth is relative" is not absolutely true, therefore truth is not actually relative, a contradiction. Now I realize I was missing the point.

What I think the postmodern means to say is that words fail to totally embody truth. This point shines through in Heatley's sermon, which emphasizes that the experience of God is mysterious, and can't totally be put into words.

Now many clever evangelicals would be quick to jump all over this. How can you be saying that the experience of God is mysterious and can't be put into words, when you yourself have used words to say that--and preaching from a biblical text, at that?

But words just have to be put in their place. The idea is simply that words fail to totally embody truth, not that words fail utterly to point to anything true. That is why for emergents, experiencing God and becoming more Christ-like are far more important than doctrine. Yet they immerse themselves in scripture as much as any evangelical, because the scriptures provide powerful glimpses of Christ.

A little while ago I argued that we Christians need a new epistemology--that is, a new theory about what we know and how we know it. The reason I think so is that I've seen certain kinds of epistemology totally ruin discussion: "You're not taking scripture seriously!" "Well, you're taking it out of context!" "Heretic!" "Closed-minded!" etc.

This isn't just people being rude, or mean, or whatever. This is the result of people having a certain conception of what truth is, and acting on that. For many, truth is "right there" in scripture, as if pulling truth out of scripture is like pulling ketchup out of a refrigerator. I think this is a seriously deficient understanding of truth.

It would have been more helpful if throughout church history we had taken more closely to heart the words of Jesus: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." For one thing, I think "truth" is much more connected to the way of life that one takes than it is to statements that one may pull out of scripture.

For another, these words of Jesus point to a more personal meaning of truth. You find truth by finding Jesus, not by finding the right words to say. Yes, I know, I just used words to say that. But the question is how perfectly you think words embody the truth. We must be careful not to make an idol out of words.

I have found that those who believe the words of scripture perfectly embody truth do more than just cling to those words. They cling to a particular interpretation of those words. If they admit there is more than one plausible interpretation of the text, then they've given up on the idea that the words perfectly embody the truth--it's not a perfect embodiment if there's room for error.

Perhaps the real irony to this whole thing, however, is that postmodernists really are often too absolutist (as is so often claimed). The statement "nothing is absolute" becomes a mantra, so that eventually the people who say it implicitly believe that it perfectly embodies a certain ethos that they're trying to achieve, and at that point they've defeated themselves.

My experience on both sides of this culture war has been that ultimately words are tools, and I've seen them used both to help and to hurt. I can only hope that my words can somehow be of help... and therefore I blog.