The Church: A Sinking Ship?

A dear missionary friend of mine asked me to read Brian Mc Laren's "New Kind of Christian". Mc Laren brilliantly packages his dissertation as a narrative where two men dialogue about the demise of all aspects of modernity (including modern Christianity). Yet, if the first fourth of a book is like the first five minutes of a movie, I have already figured out the ending.

Regardless of how he packages it, I suggest that his "arguments" thus far could be more appropriately dubbed observations. He seems to fall into the same iconoclastic rut most postmodern authors do: the kind that leaves a vacuum. Perhaps giving us guidance on how to proceed might be misconstrued as linear, modern thinking, yet to be fair I have not finished the book.

I think that I have read most of what Mc Laren is going to say in other texts like Barna's certificate of divorce from the modern church, "Revolution" as well as other texts I have not read like Sweet's "Soul Tsunami".

As much as I bristle against fundamentalism (a violent reaction to a world that appears to be spinning out of control) I find Mc Laren and Rob Bell's view of the world equally unpalatable.

I am beginning to feel like a man without a country.

I have often described myself as something of an "theological and ecclesiastical mutt". At bottom, I am a true Baptist insomuch that I adhere to the truly fundamental precepts of the Baptist views of congregational polity, immersion baptism, the Lord's Supper, authority and perspicuity of scripture, salvation by grace through faith. While I might diverge a bit in soteriology and quite a bit in eschatology I doubt I would ever challenge the rudiments of faith in the same way I see the Emergent Movement doing. Perhaps this makes me an unthinking drone. I tend to think it makes me solid.

What am I getting at?

There is "asking questions", and then there is "questioning". One stems from a genuine quest to re-imagine, and the other from a desire for "image". The EC camp seems to be getting off on the "cool factor" of asking "hard questions" and at times trying to be savvy simply by making nonsensical statements akin to the Medieval models of philosophy: people saying things like "it is impossible, therefore it must be true (Origen)". They seem to live, not on any cogent concepts of how we are to advance in this new age, but essentially on "schlock value".

Bell is creative, but apparently doesn't check his sources very well. For instance, in his film "Dust" he makes several unverifiable claims about the training of rabbis in the Second Temple period, such as that they had to memorize the entire Torah, a claim that I have never encountered in over a decade of study on the inter-testamental period (although I am hardly an expert). The trouble is, this makes him look like a fool; so unfortunately the things he does have to offer are lost in the mixture of fact and fiction. Although in that particular film, I seriously question his conclusion that Peter's problem was self-doubt.

Mc Laren recently came under fire, and I think rightfully so, for comments made at a recent gathering of student ministers where he stated that we should be less focused on eternity and try to direct students more toward social justice as a way to work out there faith. I think this is as inaccurate a position as what we might see from the modern fundamentalist movements.

The EC is in constant transition. Who knows where it will land, and what effect it will ultimately have. Yet, we have to understand a few things about the EC and the Postmodern (PM) worldview before we can even begin talking about them.

First off, there have always been EC and PM movements. Take Luther and Calvin for instance. They were both forward thinking and challenged their contemporary ecclesiologies; both in practice and theology. Mc Laren makes good points in his chapter about world views, citing Lewis (another PM thinker) that any Christian who believed that the Pope was not necessary would have been declared a heretic four hundred years ago. Yet today, half or more of the world's Christians have no sense of allegiance to the Pope what-so-ever. In other words, anyone who looks at a current system and says, "we can do this better" is by definition "post modern". This is partly because post modernism is "psycographic" (thought defined) not "demographic" (age and class defined). For instance, I would argue that my old philosophy professor, Dan Cochran was vastly more effectively postmodern than Rob Bell.

So, the question that I have to ask after this gruelingly long, "scrabble word" laden introduction is this:

Is the modern church a sinking ship?

Can we definitively say that it is time to cast out the last two thousand years of orthopraxy and even elements we have determined necessary to orthodoxy to keep the church alive?

I will not give more away on my view, but I hope you will give yours away. d