Missio Dei

This is the third part of the book review. You can find part 1 here.

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Chapter 3 - Summary: Who are the Emergent Christians?

Tony provides a few observations he made based on a tour of emergent churches. His observations: disappointment with modern American Christianity, desire for inclusion, and hope filled orientation, resonated quite a bit with me, although I would have added a more wholistic approach to following Jesus to the mix.

He then offers what I think is one of the primary tensions in the church: the influence of culture and the sacred/secular divide. The tension is the classic in, not of question in Scripture. Do we simply separate ourselves? We can’t. The call is to be in the world. So if we tread in, how do we avoid the undue negative influence so we eventually look like the world, a loss of “not of”. He briefly mentions the forays into media and politics.

Tony then explores the “envelope of friendship” in a dialog with a leading conservative fundamental pastor. It’s an interesting dialog between the mindsets. I particularly liked the term envelope of friendship. It helps focus on what connects us rather than what separates us.

The last section explores the delicate interaction of engaging in the political sphere. My only wish would have been for Tony to explore the more missional trends within the emerging church as an alternative to the world’s political process. Our ability to feed the poor and love our neighbor has always been the best answer to the world’s practice of legislation.

Chapter 4 - Summary: Exploring Theology

Tony first begins to tackle some of the theological underpinning’s of traditional evangelical Christianity. He explores some of the classics assumptions we make throughout history, things like dispensational rapture, Bill Bright’s evangelism, and the Jesus film. He identifies the fundamental, yet classic, flaw that God’s actions are predicated on our actions, which they are not. We are in fact predicated on God’s actions. He says,

“But God is a being whose activity is, by definition, not contingent.”

Tony follows with what these old assumptions do. They motivate people. Tony explores his own story through Campus Crusades and the Mainline church. What I found truly valuable is Tony’s choice not to demonize the people he had learned from. His new found postmodern faith allowed him to humanize and forgive them. But this experience also allowed him to see that it was the theology that created the system, not bad people.

It is this core, the base of which is love that allows us to communicate and relate to people we don’t always agree with. It is also one of the central attributes that draws me to the emerging church. Tony captures it beautifully. He also say,

“Good theology begets beautiful Christianity.” and “Bad theology begets ugly Christianity.”

This echoes the words of Jesus when he said,

“No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.”

Tony apologizes for the comment but I wish he wouldn’t. He’s simply echoing the words of Jesus.

He also touches on what I think is a deeper issue within the church, especially for men. He says,

” So many emergents have become disheartened with a Christianity in which all the answers are already known, all the orthodoxies already reified. Instead - and emergents have been accused of being a bit puerile themselves in this regard - they’re looking for a Christianity that’s still exploratory, still adventurous.“

This charge hearkens to Freire’s banking model of education. Traditional church simply deposits the right answer into us. The emerging church on the other hands creates a space for us to explore the intricacy’s of our faith in a context that is void of shame.

Tony posits one idea that I would counter, that the Gospel is complex. I don’t assert that the Gospel is complex for the simple fact that in the presence of Jesus, the children got it. I would assert that we as humans make it complex, and much of the journey in following Jesus is dumping our own complexities, which are simply our objections to following, at the cross. We make it hard because we don’t like giving up control. But the emerging church is creating a context and space for allowing each person to process that journey at their own speed. I would offer that part of the problem is that our theology is still emerging and how we see it is still in the cocoon. The ego still wants the answer. Where I agree with Tony is that God is too complex to put in a box, and refuses to allow us to do so.

Note: The following is a weighty section of the book and you may need to be careful not to rush to judgment. I encourage you to sit with what he is saying to make sure what you think you hear is what he really is saying.

Tony also posits three assumptions about theology that can easily be misconstrued. He says, theology is local, conversational and temporary. This dialog is deeply dependent on his use of the word theology and how he defines it: discourse about God. It is easy to assume he is talking about truth, which He’s not. He talking about the conversations we have of God. It is my hope that people see this because I had to go back and read this twice to get it. (If I’m wrong Tony, please let me know.) I believe the point he is making is that we need to walk in humility about how we come to our conclusions because they are based on determining factors like where we came from and how we think.

The evidence Tony uses to base a lot of this position on is the history reveals we’ve gotten it wrong on issues such as slavery, the Crusades, etc. I completely agree with Tony here and share his call to humility.

I particularly enjoyed the section “the slippery slope”. Once of my chief concerns with critics of the emerging church is that they are rarely complaining about issues in the here and now but about “what ifs”. His story is hilarious in how much it reveals the fear that hides behind the what if slippery slope. He also follows with a dialog on interpreting Scripture between the pick-and-choose brain, a Biblicist, and an Emergent that is truly funny in its wit and revelation.

At the end of each chapter he shares a story that presents the previous dialog in a real way. In this chapter, the following quote comes from a friend of Tony’s in the Anglican church.

“I realized that his job at the seminary was to hone the canon, to firm up the boundaries, not to expand the boundaries.”

Oh, how we like to create the box…

Continue on to Part 3 here…