I’ve been reading a number of sites dealing with emerging theology over the last few days. As I’ve been reading I’ve started to notice some recurring themes which I thought I’d make mention of. Now I need to qualify so as not to create a storm of any kind here. Firstly, my reading has not encompassed all of emerging theology, I’m limited, I can only read so much. Secondly, these are just initial thoughts and reflections. And thirdly, I’m a historic evangelical and so whilst I have much sympathy and empathy for the emerging church, I read things through a historic evangelical lens, this is not to say that I don’t personally critique my lens time and time again. So here are my reflections:

Reflection #1

I’ve mentioned this before elsewhere, but it seems to me that a lot of the EC’s critique of evangelicalism deals with abuses within modern evangelicalism and not so much with historic evangelicalism. So for example I’ve seen people taking evangelical views of scripture such as authority and infallibility. The reason behind the challenge though does not always seem, to me, to stem from an intellectual or reasoned disagreement with the doctrines themselves (although this follows), but initially it seems to stem from frustrations with abuses of the doctrines.

So here’s the logic in an example: The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa used the Old Testament to justify apartheid. How do we stop people from doing this in the future? Well we neutralize the authority of the Old Testament. We have a dilemma – we can’t correct apartheid interpretation of the Old Testament because that would then be to impose our own interpretation which is governed by our time/cultural lens. So because we can’t correct we rather diminish the authority of the Old Testament. So instead of the OT being God’s Word it now instead becomes the writings of a small Jewish community trying to figure out what it means to follow God in their context.

Historic evangelicalism doesn’t pit those two against each other – the OT is God’s authoritative Word as well as being the writings of a small Jewish community within a particular context. The two are not necessarilly natural opponents as some would make it seem.

So whilst I think this sort of theology brings a healthy indictment upon much evangelical reasoning it fails, in my mind, to provide an accurate way forward.

Whilst on the subject of scripture, I’m also a bit alarmed at the poor knowledge of manuscript evidence when dealing with things like the integrity of the original manuscripts. Having a background in Classical Civilization, and therefore the study of ancient texts and their transmission, I have a bit of an upper hand on most – but I still hear arguments about whether the Bible has significantly changed over the centuries. I have secular Classics Professors who will testify to the integrity of the Old and New Testament manuscripts with far more conviction than some emerging folk.

Anyway, that’s my first reflection for now.