Saturday, December 31, 2005

Emerging Question #5

Q5 - Where is the EM unashamedly bold?

This is actually somewhat related to Q3, and it stems from a Doug Wilson quote over on Justin Taylor's site:
Here are some great quotes by Chesterton on humility, from his book Orthodoxy. (HT: Douglas Wilson, who comments: "Read a couple emergent books and then read this chapter [3], or better yet, the entire book. It will be like clapping a oxygen mask on your face after bicycling up Mt. Everest."

"…what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason."

"…the new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn."

I am not (usually) much of a Wilson fan, but I am a huge Chesterton enthusiast, and I actually agree with the sentiment of both here. (The fact that Chesterton's comments are still so pertinent nearly 100 years after penned them certainly says something significant, both about him and about the "newness" of postmodernism.)

One of the things that continues to nag at me as I read EM stuff (and maybe this is just McLaren) - it's a sense of hyper-modesty and self-deprecation that sometimes comes across as being at least a little disingenuous. Emergents sometimes seem unwilling to say anything hard or absolute about anything. And that actually seems quite different from the Way of Jesus, who said LOT'S of really hard things.

So I'd just like to know - Where is the EM unashamedly bold? What does boldness look like for them?

1 Comments:

At 12:52 PM, Blogger Dan Passerelli said...

Volf had a lot to say about the nature of truth...very similar to the stuff we learned at Westminster, in terms of Truth residing with God and us being able to know truly because of God's revelation...though always in a limited way, and without the same perspective as God has. He talked about holding firmly to the certainty of God's truth, while at the same time holding my own understanding of God's truth with a light hand, being willing to be shown that I am wrong.

One example of an issue where the emerging church is being bold:
The global sex trade and the Protest4 movement in the UK

 

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