{"id":206,"date":"2011-10-10T17:39:19","date_gmt":"2011-10-10T17:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/corbanblogs.wpengine.com\/ministry\/?p=206"},"modified":"2012-02-03T13:38:13","modified_gmt":"2012-02-03T21:38:13","slug":"church-in-the-present-tense-a-candid-look-at-what%e2%80%99s-emerging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/2011\/10\/church-in-the-present-tense-a-candid-look-at-what%e2%80%99s-emerging\/","title":{"rendered":"Church in the Present Tense: A Candid Look at What\u2019s Emerging"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Church in the Present Tense: a Candid Look at What\u2019s Emerging<\/p><\/div>\n

Edited by Kevin Corcoran, with articles by Scot McKnight, Peter Rollins, Kevin Corcoran, and Jason Clark, Brazos Press, 2011.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Reviewed by Dr. Jack K. Willsey, Professor of Theology<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em> Present Tense<\/em> 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<\/em>, along with opportunity to reflect on key issues.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cWho\u2019s Afraid of Philosophical Realism? Taking Emerging Christians to Task,\u201d followed by, \u201cThy Kingdom Come (on Earth): An Emerging Eschatology,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

He is especially helpful in arguing for a path between the extremes of modernist realism and postmodern antirealism: \u201cThere is no need to embrace the creative antirealism so often associated with postmodernism when the resources for epistemic humility<\/em>[1] are present in the Christian tradition itself.\u201d \u00a0He represents his own position as embracing \u201cchastened realism.\u201d His second essay is largely descriptive of the emerging tendency toward realized eschatology. He detects a strong emphasis on God\u2019s kingdom as present in a full sense, even among non-Christians. This may, in some cases, include an openness to soteriological universalism.<\/p>\n

Peter Rollins (founder of Ikon, an emerging collective in Belfast, Northern Ireland) writes the two most philosophically oriented articles in the collection: \u201cThe Worldly Theology of Emerging Christianity\u201d and \u201cTransformance Art: Reconfiguring the Social Self.\u201d 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 \u201cplace that world into question\u201d and to learn to create new contexts for transformed lives\u2014what he calls \u201ctransformance art.\u201d Negatively, many of his concepts involve hermeneutical ambiguity and undemonstrated social assumptions. While his emphasis upon transformed living within the world\u2014as the antidote to an \u201cironic stance\u201d of saying one thing and doing another\u2014is well-founded, some of his practical solutions are unnecessarily radical.<\/p>\n

The negative influence of popular culture upon Christian thought and practice is the topic of Jason Clark\u2019s essays, \u201cConsumer Liturgies and Their Corrosive Effects on Christian Identity\u201d and \u201cThe Renewal of Liturgy in the Emerging Church.\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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, \u201cWithout 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although a pastor in the \u201clow church\u201d 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<\/em>) designed \u201cto shape us and mold us in the image of Christ.\u201d This includes a short-term catechism and emphasis upon doing (service), knowing (history and identity of the Christian church), and being (reflection). He states, \u201c\u2026the 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s 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, \u201cScripture in the Emerging Movement,\u201d McKnight describes five common ways of misreading the Bible, then uses the concept of linguistic turn<\/em> to argue for reading each text of Scripture as a wiki-story<\/em>[2] of the one Story which lies behind the individual wiki-stories. He offers this as one<\/em> of the emerging ways of reading the Bible\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n

McKnight\u2019s second essay, \u201cAtonement and Gospel,\u201d 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<\/em> into a plan of salvation<\/em>. The problem, he argues, is that this changes the gospel story into an explanation of how the gospel events provide atonement.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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[1]The term epistemic humility<\/em> refers to recognition of human limitation in knowing and understanding reality, without accepting the antirealist claim that an adequate grasp of reality is beyond creaturely capacity.<\/p>\n

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[2] McKnight does not define this term, but clearly intends it as an analogy to the collaborative contributions of many sources to a larger work, such as the wikis compiled by students in on-line courses or the open-sourced Wikipedia<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":216,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,31,33],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-church-in-the-present-tense","tag-emerging-church","tag-kevin-corcoran"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/files\/2011\/10\/church-in-the-present-tense.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5W8wu-3k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.corban.edu\/ministry\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}