Spotted over at Jason Clark’s blog today was this link to a Tony Campolo article on the Emergent Church. Equates emergent with postmodernism thusly:
The Emergent Church is often somewhat indifferent to theological and social issues that seem urgent to mainstream evangelicalism. These church members tend to think that the crusade against homosexual marriage is a waste of time and energy, and they tend to reject the exclusivistic claims that many evangelicals make about salvation. They are not about to damn the likes of Gandhi or the Dali Lama to hell simply because they have not embraced Christianity.
Hmmm. Methinks I smell a problem here, or at least something over-implied. While postmodern thought may perhaps in general tend toward universalism or be soft on some of the issues that the mainstream church is hard on, I don’t think it follows logically that this is therefore true of the Emergent Church as a whole. For that to hold, one would have to presuppose that all Emergent Churches follow postmodern thought and that this thought is held above traditional evangelical theology. I may be the new blog on the Emergent block, but so far I’ve probably found my share of exceptions to this theory. Although I haven’t left my “regularly structured” church (at least not yet), I for one am attracted to the Emergent version of church structure (or lack thereof) and to many of the values found there… but while I maintain some latitude for difference, I will be unable to embrace whatever clashes with my more traditional evangelical theology on the major issues. Like soteriology, which is the only one Campolo mentions – and I think probably over-generalizes.
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