Why Liberal Christianity will not Emerge
The United Church of Christ congregation in our town decided this week to withdraw from the denomination as a result of the UCC’s decision to endorse same sex marriage. And, that congregation’s action illustrates why liberal Christianity will never participate in our movement in a substantial way.
I recall that in, A New Kind of Christian, Neo told Dan at one point that he had expected that liberal churches would emerge more easily than evangelicals. When I read that, I cringed, I disagreed and I was certain that, on that point, I will be proven correct.
It’s all about culture.
Within liberal circles there is the same sort of debate over how to respond to the emerging postmodern culture that we (and I really hate this term) ‘Evangelicals’ are having. But, the liberal choices are different. And, the choice has already been made. That decision is one that means emergence will not take place.
From our, evangelical, perspective, the choice is this: Either retreat from the emerging culture or minister to it. By definition, the people here are, at the very least, interested in ministering to the postmodern world. The options on the liberal side have worked out differently for the most part. For the liberals, the choices are: Either retreat from the emerging culture or accept it.
The people on the liberal side of this issue have decided to allow the secular culture to dominate it. Liberalism has always essentially equated to enculturation. It is, by nature, far less courageous in resisting culture than what we stand for. And, so, liberals who don’t hide out from the emerging culture merely go along with it. They support same sex marriage. They ordain homosexuals.
Now there is a warning in all of that for us.
We need to take great care and seek wisdom in our encounter with the emerging culture. We are to be in the world, not of it. We are to be salt and light. We are commanded to go into the world and disciple it. We must seek ways to be relevant to the emerging world. We can’t hide from it. Nor can we allow ourselves to overcome by it.
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May you find greater joy than ever as you reflect on the wonders of our Lord’s incarnation.
posted by bill Sloat at 10:50 AM
11 Comments:
Can I ask an honest question Bill? How many liberal Christians do you know well? How many emerging liberals do you know? How often have you worshipped together with liberal Christians in their own churches?
I ask this because from my own experiences with liberal Christian friends I don't find your generalizations to be very accurate to who they are, what actually defines them as liberal, or how they interact with culture. Truthfully, I think it's a gross overstatement to say that liberals have chosen wholesale accomodation to culture.
(And, as an aside, what happens when "liberalism" is no longer the dominant culture? It certainly seems to be receding recently under Bush, the Republican controlled government, and the growth of evangelicalism as the dominant form of Christianity in America. Pretty soon to be "liberal" is going to be positively counter-cultural.)
But I digress... what I intend to say is that I have several friends who are liberal Christians, and I even have some that are emerging, postmodern liberal Christians. And what I have found as I talk with them and worship together with them is that most of my stereotypes about them are wrong. Far from having sold out to culture, I find them to be thoughtful, highly intelligent (usually more intelligent and educated than the average evangelical) and concerned with wrestling with truth wherever they find it. In fact, it's this passion for truth that leads them to what we evangelicals too often characterize as cultural accomodation. But perhaps they're just not so quick to write off truth just because they encounter outside the walls of "Christian" culture. Maybe they've understood (in the words of Wheaton philosopher Arthur Holmes) that "all truth is God's truth". And maybe they're quicker to question their own assumptions about what they think the Bible means than we are (which of course is not at all the same thing as questioning the Bible itself).
For example, I have a friend who's a pastor at an ELCA church that is welcoming to homosexuals. Before I met her I used to think that liberals accepted homosexuality because they had ignored the Bible and conformed to culture. But when I met this pastor and began to discuss with her why their church believes as they do, what I found is that they weren't ignoring the Bible at all, they were simply interpreting it in different ways than I would have. They were trying to be faithful to scripture as they understood it.
Oh, and I found out that in their worship they focused on Christ and preached from scripture even more than my conservative evangelical Baptist church did. And surprise of all surprises: I discovered they loved Jesus too! ;)
On the other side of things, I also have other emerging liberal friends who are questioning their churches acceptance of homosexuality and their rejection of the miraculous in scripture. And these friends are not finding their options limited to either retreat or accomodation. In fact, one of these friends is planting a tri-denominational church down in Chicago - Episcopal, American Baptist & Evangelical Covenant - as a way of actually displaying the unity we have in Christ despite our denominational labels.
To be honest, as an "evangelical" (or probably, more accurately, a post-evangelical) I don't think our options are limited to retreat from or ministering to the emerging culture either. Both of those options seem to place ourselves outside of the culture. But if we truly believe in the incarnational nature of the gospel, then there is no way we can understand the gospel apart from how it is incarnated in a particular cultural context. You can't separate any of us and our understandings of the gospel from our postmodern, 21st century context than you could (or should) separate Christ and his announcement of the gospel from its 1st century Jewish context.
But that's a whole other rabbit trail, and I suppose I've already given us all enough to chew on and debate for a while.
Happy Holidays!
-Mike
Mike,
Awesome, awesome response.
Off the hook!
A little background on me: I was raised, up to the age of 17, in the UCC under the pastorate of an extremely liberal pastor. My college background—decades ago—involved earning a B.A. in Religion and Philosophy at a liberal arts college in which my naïve teenage belief in Scripture as God’s inspired Word was sneered at by the majority of the professors and mocked by most students. My graduate studies were at Drew University. I was on campus during the peak of the Sophia era. (The year after I finished my course work, during a celebration of the Lord’s Supper at the theology school, the University Chaplain exhorted the participants to take the bread and wine in honor of the great goddess Sophia.)
So, yeah, over the years I’ve known many liberals very well. However, I do understand that I haven’t known them very well on the level you describe. What I’ve known of liberals has been extreme, ideological liberalism.
In my opinion, one difference between your post and mine is that I was writing about liberalism and the CGGC as they exist at the macro level. You were describing your personal encounters with it on the micro level.
I introduced my macro level thoughts with a micro level illustration. Certainly, the pastor in our local UCC congregation—and the entire congregation—are at odds with the UCC as it exists on the macro level. And, this pastor had a struggle that you and I don’t have because of the denomination’s decision to change its value system regarding gay marriage in a way that essentially mirrors the movement of the secular and popular cultures. And, his issues, if he chooses at some time in the future in engage in emergent ministry, will be different than ours.
(As far as your digression is concerned: I’m not at all certain that liberalism is as close to losing its dominance as you suggest. It still dominates the print media. It still dominates broadcast network news reporting and prime time programming. And, it still controls, with an iron fist, college faculties. And, I believe that it will be a long generation until the vestiges of liberal hegemony pass away to any meaningful degree.)
Back on point: On a micro level, I am certain that there is the possibility for emergence to occur in individual ministries within liberal circles. Drew, a United Methodist institution, has many ‘evangelical’ (oooo, I just hate that word) graduate students. For decades, they came to Drew in droves to pursue Ph. Ds. to study with Tom Oden, the conservative Methodists’ guru. I know that many individuals in the liberal world have not guzzled the Kool Aid of small ‘l’ liberal theology and enculturation.
I know that not every pastor or congregation in liberal denominations follows the party line. I know, for instance, that there are a variety of ministries to gays among them, as there are among us. (Incidentally, there’s a lesbian trio, which attends Faith from time to time. And they are warmly welcomed by all of our people.)
My point was that, among liberals, there is a tendency to be ‘cutting edge’ as far as secular culture and popular culture is concerned. And, to the degree that liberal denominations are willing to embrace the secular culture they will be impotent to transform it. Your liberal friends will have to deal with the accommodationist culture of their denominations, not only the larger culture, in order to emerge. That will be true especially if the are ministering in established congregations, not in church plants. Their context is vastly different than ours in the CGGC.
The real question for us that is implied by my post for the CGGC on the macro level, is this:
Will the CGGC emerge?
And, I’m not confident that it will. But for different reasons than for our liberal brothers and sisters. Our denominational culture at the macro level is different. Our context is different.
In my opinion, as I’ve stated, I think we have a better chance to emerge as a denomination than liberal denominations do. And, the reason for that is that we have an attitude toward culture that gives us a better chance to view it as an entity in need of transformation.
You said:
“To be honest, as an "evangelical" (or probably, more accurately, a post-evangelical) I don't think our options are limited to retreat from or ministering to the emerging culture either. Both of those options seem to place ourselves outside of the culture. But if we truly believe in the incarnational nature of the gospel, then there is no way we can understand the gospel apart from how it is incarnated in a particular cultural context. You can't separate any of us and our understandings of the gospel from our postmodern, 21st century context than you could (or should) separate Christ and his announcement of the gospel from its 1st century Jewish context.”
You’ve hit on an extremely important point. And, it’s on this point that I have my most intense level of discomfort with mainstream Emergent Christianity, as I understand it.
It is a difficult thing to encounter culture with the hope of transforming it. The model I envision for my own ministry is the prophetic model. I believe that if Emergent Christianity is to genuinely magnify the Lord, it will have to be prophetic.
The Lord sends prophets into the world. In that sense, the prophetic ministry is, by its nature, incarnational. However, while the prophet must certainly be in his/her culture, the truth he/she proclaims must be separate, apart from and—can I say it?—above that culture. So, yeah, absolutely! We must encounter the postmodern world for what it is. But, if we ever stop being prophetic to the world—and to the church—we will stop emerging.
Hey Bill,
Thanks for the honest reply and for sharing your own background in liberal denominations.
Let me share with you a little of my own background with you. I've spent my entire life surrounded by conservative evangelicalism (mostly in the Baptist General Conference) and by the evangelical Christian sub-culture (e.g. Dobson, Colson, Contemporary Christian Music, Youth for Christ, altar calls, summer Bible camps, Right Wing politics, etc., etc, ad nauseum). I went to Wheaton College for 5 1/2 years and even worked for Christianity Today for a little while. So when I talk about emerging out of something, this is the context that I'm emerging out of.
To be honest I'm at the point now where I have about the same negative reaction to the labels "conservative" or "evangelical" that I used to have to the label "liberal". (And to be really honest, I no longer have much of a negative reaction at all to the word "liberal". At least when it comes to politics I'm already more liberal than most liberals.) And when I think about what it means to be emergent, I think it has to do with recognizing that both liberal "accomodationism" and evangelical "biblicism" are partially worthwhile and partially unhealthy reactions to Modernity. To me the emerging church is about recognizing and keeping the good in both approaches while at the same time realizing that both approaches have left us with a distorted gospel that needs to be rediscovered and revitalized for the oncoming postmodern era.
I think your macro/micro distinction is a good one. You're right to point out that my experience with liberal Christianity is primarily on that micro level. However, I think I'd want to point out that I think the Emerging Church as a whole, whether it's emerging from the liberal or evangelical side of things, exists almost entirely on the "micro" side of things right now. I know of no major denominations that have wholeheartedly embraced the emergent movement, and yet I know of individuals and churches across the whole spectrum (from ultra-fundamentalists to the most liberal) that are starting to reflect the themes of the emerging church.
In other words, if your assessment of the difficulties liberal Christians will face in trying to emerge from their liberal denominations is correct, then I think it is also correct to say that evangelical Christians are facing and will continue to face similar difficulties. I'm really not sure that our institutions are any more capable of emerging than the liberal ones are. I think where emergence happens at all it's going to happen on the micro level.
Beyond just the differences of macro vs. micro perspectives, I think we're also dealing with differences of degrees of liberalism. Just as it would be wrong to assume that a Wheaton College evangelical (or Winebrenner Seminary evangelical) is just as extremely conservative as a Bob Jones University fundamentalist, I think it would be wrong of us to assume that all Christians on the liberal/mainline side of the spectrum are of the same type. Not all "liberal" Christians are followers of Bishop Spong any more than all conservatives agree with Pat Robertson. Not all liberals reject the divinity of Christ or the inspiration of the Bible any more than all evangelicals believe in Right Wing politics or condemning all non-evangelicals to Hell.
So, for example, I'm not sure we should be using acceptance of homosexuality as the litmus test for how liberal a church is. Even within that issue I see a lot of room for degrees of difference. For example, there's a big difference between a church that accepts homosexuals because they don't think the Bible is inspired and thus can just ignore the parts they don't like, and a church that accepts homosexuals because their understanding of how inspired scripture should be interpreted and applied leads them to that conclusion. I'm familiar with churches (and practicing homosexual Christians) who would fall into either category, and in my mind there's a big difference between the two. Or to put it this way: I have a lot more common ground with the latter than with the former. At any rate I'm not sure that acceptance of homosexuals always ought to be taken as incontrovertible evidence of a wholesale selling out to culture.
(In fact, in regards to it's local culture in Wheaton, IL - the conservative evangelical capital of the world - the gay friendly ELCA church I mentioned before is really being counter-cultural in their attempts to live-out their understanding of scripture in that community.)
I do agree with you though that the church needs to have a prophetic role within society. And I totally agree with what you said about the tension between being incarnational in culture but also prophetic towards it. My own natural mode is to be prophetic, I've just come to think that the evangelical church has largely chosen the wrong things to be prophetic about. I believe we as Christ followers need to call our society to task for our materialism and enslavement to corporate greed, our disregard for the poor, our pursuit of the way of violence, our degradation of God's Creation, and our social isolation and lack of real community. But instead the evangelical church has chosen to make personal sexual morality their almost exclusive prophetic focus, and actually champion many of the spiritual ills that I think scripture speaks most clearly against. (E.g. most the things I just listed above.)
Plus I suppose I differ in methods. Where the evangelical church feels that gaining political power is the best way to change society, I've started to notice that the Old Testament prophets almost never had official power or influence. I think that if the church wants to change the world, then we need to start by being the change we wish to see. We need to present an alternative way of life, and alternative community, rather than seeking to impose our way of life on everyone else through legislation.
But now I've let myself get off on a political rant and this reply has gone on too long anyway.
Thanks for the conversation,
-Mike
Mike,
Thanks for the info on your background. We really have followed different paths. Or, at least, we have struggled against different cultures.
My post about liberalism’s difficulties with Emergence was to make the point that the Emerging Church is not a liberal thing—something I believe CGGC people need to understand. I suspect that the resistance we face in the CGGC, if there is any, will be from those who are afraid that people like you and me are liberals and want to turn this into a liberal church.
You may or may not have knowledge of our Seminary’s flirtation—forget flirtation, outright steamy affair with liberalism in the 60s and 70s. The battle to win it back from Death of God theology and other extremes of liberalism was traumatic for many. It is that victory over liberalism which some in the CGGC still take as our greatest achievement in the last 50 years.
The CGGC will never embrace the Emerging Church movement if what we stand for is seen as another assault from the left.
And, in my opinion, emergence is not a liberal thing. I genuinely believe that our brothers and sister on the liberal side have a significant struggle ahead of them if they are to ‘emerge.’ Christianity stands out when it resists being tossed about by the waves of popular culture. It did that when born again Christians in the 17th and 18th centuries were building orphanages, feeding the poor and sending out missionaries. It did in the 19th century when they were screaming for racial justice in the early 1800s, decades before the Emancipation Proclamation and for Women’s Rights as early as the 1830s.
For the most part, liberalism follows the whims of the popular culture. And, it will be harder for our liberal friends who take conventional wisdom too much to heart to be counter-culture enough to have a message that resonates beyond the content of the editorials in most daily newspapers.
Emergence, is not a specifically liberal phenomenon. In fact, in some ways, emergence is antithetical to liberalism.
Having said that, I agree with you: ‘Evangelicals’ have their own powerful subculture to counter. It will be too easy for evangelicals to continue to act out the notion that being Christian equates to being a registered Republican and voting in every election.
As far as the micro/macro issue is concern: Everything that has to do with following Jesus begins at the micro level. And, not at the congregational level; at the personal level. However, we are called to seek to bring about so much transformation at the micro level that there is an impact at the macro level.
This blog is one in which we share our micro passions in the CGGC macro universe. As I said earlier, my goal was to argue that emergence on the macro level is something the CGGC can embrace. In fact, I believe the young John Winebrenner would have screamed for emergence from his pulpit in Harrisburg.
Like you, I am very concerned that the evangelical church has often chosen the wrong things to be prophetic about. And, I’m not advocating being enculturated by the clichés of evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Attachment to any culture or subculture is sin. Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world. He wouldn’t have taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Nor would He have been on staff in Colorado Springs. If we try to bring 1950s evangelicalism or 1920s fundamentalism to the world, we’ll be wasting our time.
And, as I’ve said, I don’t like the term ‘evangelical.’ I don’t use it to describe myself these days. I believe that the coming of the postmodern world demands something qualitatively new. Evangelicalism, by its very name, calls us to recapture the spirit of the Reformation. The Reformation was a very good thing in the 16th century, but it has been nearly 500 years ago since Luther’s 95 Theses rocked the world. Reformation theology doesn’t ‘rock’ any longer. The church needs to stop refighting the theological battles of the 16th century and live in the here and now. The world needs a lifestyle-based proclamation of the Gospel that answers the questions of the moment.
And, I also despise the term, ‘liberal.’ That term really evokes the spirit of the late 19th century and the rise of biblical criticism and the Hegelian, Marxian and Darwinian notion that life in the world is progressing and that what is new is good. Ironically, in 2006, liberalism is old.
Together we need to hear the word of the Spirit for our own age and, to mix metaphors, that word will not come out of the old wineskin of liberalism, nor of evangelicalism.
Wow - Mike & Bill - some good stuff here. Thanks! One of the (many) things that came to mind was... if we could do away with the term "evangelical" what would we replace it with? Is "emergent" a suitable replacement? Revolutionary? What do you think?
Hmm. Regarding my question of replacing the term "evangelical"... never mind. It seems a bit silly after thinking about it. Especially after watching the Donald Miller dvd from Catalyst 2005. Was anybody there, or have you seen the dvd's?!? His is the only talk I've seen so far, and it is excellent. (and I think I'm finally starting to 'get' the micro/macro thing). :)
Dan,
Replacing the word 'evangelical' may or not be silly. But, reconsidering what it means to be evanglical is a task I believe we need to undertake. That's the reason I entered my thread about rewriting WE BELIEVE.
Evangelicalism is backward focused. On one level it is built on a desire to recreate the Reformation. That's not good. We are living in a time in which we are in transition out of the Modern. The Reformation was a manifestation of a early phase in the transition into the Modern from the Medieval.
On another level, it is the result of a mid 20th century effort to articulate an orthodox Protestant belief system that was moderate, not fundamentalist--more palatable to the thinking mind.
Moderation is not a Jesus thing. The last thing Jesus was is moderate. He sacrificed Himself radically in the incarnation and in the atonement. And, He calls His followers, well, to follow Him in that radical path.
Hey Bill,
Thanks for helping me understand your concern to communicate to others within the CGGC that the Emerging Church is not a "liberal" thing. Knowing the denominational history is helpful to me in that regards. Thanks for the background.
I agree with you that Emergence is not a liberal thing, and I too get frustrated with people who try to label us as that and thereby dismiss our perspective. In fact, in the past I've spent a lot of time trying to explain on other online forums why the Emerging Church isn't just liberalism.
However, I think I'd also want people to understand that Emergence is not not liberal either. Just as we're not conservative, but we're not not conservative either. I think the problem we have is getting people to get past those labels and false dichotomies, to realize that there are other options out there besides the extremes of liberal and conservative.
I think a better description of the Emerging Church is that it is generous (yes, as in "Generous Orthodoxy"). We could spend a lot of time defining ourselves by what we're not, and telling every other non-emergent group of Christians why they're wrong, but then, that kind of divisiveness is so much of the problem that we're trying to avoid in the first place by being emergent. That's why I greatly prefer McLaren's approach of trying to be a generous as possible with every branch of Christendom (without shying away from prophetic critique when necessary).
Actually, I've noticed that the Emerging Church often faces a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" kind of rhetoric from its opponents in the evangelical world (e.g. D.A. Carson among others). On the one hand we're critiqued for our generosity, saying that we're being too inclusive and too soft on liberals or Catholics or Pentecostals or whoever, and that we should be more clear about what we're for and against. But then, when the Emerging Church does offer critique for the existing church, we're accused of not living up to our own values of generosity and inclusiveness.
At any rate, I don't think we should be trying to hold onto labels of "liberal" or "evangelical" too tightly. None of them really describe what this whole emergence thing is all about, and the sooner we can help people to stop thinking in those kind of eithor/or dichotomies, the better.
But I confess that I still don't share your intense dislike of "liberalism". I guess my own experiences with liberalism (whether political or theological) have not been on the extreme end of things as yours have. For me, becoming more "liberal" by comparison to my conservative upbringing (if we're still going to use those distinctions) has been a refreshing, liberating and yet counter-cultural move. It hasn't been about following the whims of popular culture for me but about being challenged by scripture to rethink a lot of my conservative assumptions. In other words, if I've become more "liberal" (by some people's definitions), it's because that is where Scripture has led me.
Peace,
-Mike
Can I share some experiences? I'm not trying to make any point, just sharing experiences.
I've been pretty sheltered in conservative circles, just as I have lived mostly among white people. I've don't overly conservative, nor do I feel much tendency toward racism. But entering into different cultures is never what I expect it to be.
The most liberal circle that I enter is Habitat for Humanity. I would say the majority of participants are more liberal than I. The leaders I can think of come from United Methodists, ELCA Lutheran, Catholic, and Mormon. I sit and wonder is that pastor a lesbian? Is the mormon a cult leader? Sorry, but I do wonder those things.
It has been very good for me to sit and listen to my mormon friend, to even ask questions about what it is he believes without spending my time thinking about a rebuttal. Since we have met many times, it has firmed up in my mind what the differences are. Mormons however aren't very liberal.
There are two lutheran denoms in our area. The more conservative Missouri Synod people always make a distinction when I ask that they are not NOT ELCA.
I have been even more troubled by the issue that my daughter and her two best friends have been unable to take communion with each other. One is Lutheran (Missouri Synod) and the other is part of a Christian church. A call to the Christian church pastor cleared up that the one girl is welcome to take communion at our church, but I doubt I will pull her aside and tell her, and I doubt that her pastor will pull her aside and tell her.
The walls are everywhere. Emergent more than anything to me describes people who are peeking over the top wondering why there are so many walls WITHOUT losing their focus on Jesus Christ as Lord. They are trying to follow Jesus and find that they have to scale walls because Jesus isn't bound at all by these walls as much as we might wish he were.
That's a great way to put it Brian!
Mike,
In my opinion, it will probably become necessary to think in terms other than liberal or conservative or even in subcategories such as Evangelical.
If the postmodern world will be as radically different from the modern world as many are suggesting, the old categories won't work. They'll tie us to the past and prevent of from leading into the future.
In this thread, I introduced the categories only to deal with the contexts from which we leave the modern world to enter the postmodern world.
I dislike using the term evangelical for myself, in part, because it is a link to the old.
As I've said before, I believe we need to articulate something that is qualitatively different. Something that is neither evangelical, nor conservative, nor liberal.
I have not read "A Generous Orthodoxy" yet. And, I can't wait to do it. What I want to see is how well it creates a platform for the articulation of a postmodern Christian Orthodoxy that can free us from the constraints of the modern.
Luther and Zwingli and Calvin--and the Anabaptists, too--laid the seeds for that in the Reformation. They completely changed the discussion. I'm convinced that we need to change the theological discussion if we're going to touch the hearts of postmodern people who need Jesus now.
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