Church in the Present Tense: A Candid Look at What’s Emerging

Church in the Present Tense: a Candid Look at What’s Emerging

Edited by Kevin Corcoran, with articles by Scot McKnight, Peter Rollins, Kevin Corcoran, and Jason Clark, Brazos Press, 2011.

Reviewed by Dr. Jack K. Willsey, Professor of Theology

I am often frustrated by questions about what I think of the emerging church movement. There is so much variety within the movement, with both traditional and radical elements, that the questions cannot be answered without much explanation and many disclaimers. Church in the Present Tense provides a helpful resource for understanding and evaluating that diversity. A collection of eight essays, it is divided into four sections: philosophy, theology, worship, and Bible and doctrine, with two chapters in each. Available in e-book or print form (including a DVD of interviews with key figures), it gives the reader a good sense of the wide range of ideas and practices covered by the popular term, emerging church, along with opportunity to reflect on key issues.

In the introduction, editor Kevin Corcoran gives an excellent, succinct description of the emerging movement, as well as the content of the book. He then provides an essay in the first section: “Who’s Afraid of Philosophical Realism? Taking Emerging Christians to Task,” followed by, “Thy Kingdom Come (on Earth): An Emerging Eschatology,” in the theology section. Professor of philosophy at Calvin College, Corcoran writes clearly about the epistemological choices and present-oriented focus of many emerging Christians.

He is especially helpful in arguing for a path between the extremes of modernist realism and postmodern antirealism: “There is no need to embrace the creative antirealism so often associated with postmodernism when the resources for epistemic humility[1] are present in the Christian tradition itself.”  He represents his own position as embracing “chastened realism.” His second essay is largely descriptive of the emerging tendency toward realized eschatology. He detects a strong emphasis on God’s kingdom as present in a full sense, even among non-Christians. This may, in some cases, include an openness to soteriological universalism.

Peter Rollins (founder of Ikon, an emerging collective in Belfast, Northern Ireland) writes the two most philosophically oriented articles in the collection: “The Worldly Theology of Emerging Christianity” and “Transformance Art: Reconfiguring the Social Self.” The positives in his essays include discussion of the way our environment shapes who we are and become, often without our awareness. He emphasizes the need to “place that world into question” and to learn to create new contexts for transformed lives—what he calls “transformance art.” Negatively, many of his concepts involve hermeneutical ambiguity and undemonstrated social assumptions. While his emphasis upon transformed living within the world—as the antidote to an “ironic stance” of saying one thing and doing another—is well-founded, some of his practical solutions are unnecessarily radical.

The negative influence of popular culture upon Christian thought and practice is the topic of Jason Clark’s essays, “Consumer Liturgies and Their Corrosive Effects on Christian Identity” and “The Renewal of Liturgy in the Emerging Church.” His concerns grow out of his experience as a church planter and pastor in England. (He is also an adjunct professor at George Fox Evangelical Seminary, and coordinator of the Emergent UK online resource network.)

As the titles of his essays suggest, he critiques the commodification of church life through the structural commercialism of western society, which creates a secular liturgy that controls the rhythms and focus of life. How to create real Christian space within the dominant culture is the intriguing question raised in the first essay. The surprising answer in the second essay is a return to church liturgy, “Without a recovery and understanding of liturgy we are in danger of a collapse of ecclesiology and church into solipsistic worship aesthetics and private God spaces.”

Although a pastor in the “low church” tradition, Clark makes a strong argument for the importance of sacred liturgy in Christian formation that focuses life on a pace and rhythm (he prefers the term flow) designed “to shape us and mold us in the image of Christ.” This includes a short-term catechism and emphasis upon doing (service), knowing (history and identity of the Christian church), and being (reflection). He states, “…the aim of Flow is the liturgical stabilization and formation of Christian identity in the face of the liturgies and demands of consumer culture and formation.”

The book’s entire fourth section is written by the well-known and much-published New Testament scholar, Scot McKnight, professor at North Park University in Chicago. In the first essay, “Scripture in the Emerging Movement,” McKnight describes five common ways of misreading the Bible, then uses the concept of linguistic turn to argue for reading each text of Scripture as a wiki-story[2] of the one Story which lies behind the individual wiki-stories. He offers this as one of the emerging ways of reading the Bible—the one which he supports. The underlying principle of his approach is that language is capable of telling the truth, but not the whole truth. Thus the various biblical writers must be allowed to tell a part of the greater story in language suited to their contexts. This view of language also demands epistemic humility in interpretation of the stories.

McKnight’s second essay, “Atonement and Gospel,” raises an issue with which theologians in the emerging movement are admittedly struggling: How are gospel and atonement theories to be related? He skillfully illustrates the problem within evangelicalism by pointing out that Reformation language has changed the essentially narrative form of the gospel into a plan of salvation. The problem, he argues, is that this changes the gospel story into an explanation of how the gospel events provide atonement.

In his understanding, the latter is not unimportant, but the former is primary. Given the current debate raging among evangelicals over the doctrine of justification, this discussion is an important contribution. McKnight suggests that most emerging thinkers tend to prefer the story, and struggle with the explanation(s).

The DVD which accompanies the print edition of the book is interesting as a means of hearing from a number of influential leaders, including Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Brian McLaren, as well as viewing some representative communal meetings. It is disappointing, however, that the clarity found in the essays is sadly missing and some of the casual statements made in interviews are disconcertingly vague. I recommend reading the book before viewing the DVD.