I spent some time (a lot of time) yesterday listening to Mark Driscoll (pastor of Mars Hills Church in Seattle) on everything Emergent/emerging church/postmodern Christianity. Highly enlightening. Probably the best thing I have read or listened to on as far as information from a conservative theological standpoint. If you have 90 minutes and care about this stuff you have to listen to this podcast. This happened back in the fall of last year but I wanted to wait until I felt theologically schooled to understand what he was saying.
Driscoll uses a lot of difficult theological language that might be confusing for some of you, so I will try and make it easier to understand in my notes. If you want to talk in depth with me about some of the deeper issues he gets into I am total game to get together/email/chat. I am passionate about this stuff. What I will put here is summarizing what Driscoll has said, not what I think. However, nothing I put in this summary will be something I disagree with. This is a great follow up to my posts last week on postmoderns in church.
I do not think Driscoll is God or that he is the only one with good thoughts on this subject.
He comes up with 2 streams within postmodern Christianity: relevant and revisionist.
Relevant
- He does not go into much depth with this.
- He call this evangelical and lumps into this group Dan Kimball and Erwin McManus to name a couple. I think it would be fair to put Driscoll in here as well. I think he doesn’t go into depth on this because he agrees with it.
- It is not changing theology, doctrine, or an evangelical view of the Bible, it is changing ministry methods. “The truth is timeless, the message is timely.”
Revisionist
- Doug Pagitt, Brian McLaren, and Rob Bell (the other Mars Hill guy).
- This group is highly influenced by secular philosophy.
- He goes into a lot of depth on McLaren and his influences and basically rips them to shreads because these influecnes are men on the Jesus Seminar, which basically believes that the actual person Jesus is not the Jesus spoken about in the Bible.
- Driscoll goes after Pagitt’s stance on homosexuality. Pagitt does not see homosexuality as a sin and believes salvation is possible for the homosexual. How Doug comes to these opinions is a really distorted view of creation that I won’t get into this because it is very complex.
- Much of this group is made up of Emergent folks (the organization). This was a group that in a roundabout way Mark helped establish and now does not agree with. Much of Emergent is described as a conversation which Driscoll is fine with until the conversation is leading to heresy. To Driscoll, original sin in Genesis 3 is described as beginning as a conversation. This is what we need to be careful with.
- I’ll go in depth on Rob Bell. He is widely loved and accepted by evangelicals and I think Mark brings up some great points about him. Rob Bell uses rabbinical authority in producing his messages and in his theology. He believes they are a key to Bible interpretation and hermeneutics. John 5:38-39 seems to remind us that rabbinical focus was not as it should have been. Rabbis were men who studied text but were rarely followers and believers in Jesus. Bell also believes in what I will theological evolution. This came about when Bell instituted women elders in his church. He came to a point where he thought that culture had evolved enough to allow this to be acceptable to God. The problem here is valuing our culture over the words of Scripture. The line is hard to draw if we are constantly viewing God in light of our society. He also attacks Bell for some of his influences which include some Buddhists.
- He believes this group is drawing from panentheism or new age thinking. Defined as: the belief of “Process Theology” that there is one God who is greater than the universe but so immanent that he exists in and through it. God therefore is interdependent with the universe.
Tomorrow I’ll share some of my thoughts. Feel free to be forthright in your comments on this no matter where you fall on these issues. That is what blogging is for.
I am very interested in the emergent church and its theology. So, I was eager to listen to this podcast. But when the first minute of the speech was a gratuitous and wicked depiction of a Catholic priest, I realized I was not welcome in your little world still filled with the anti-Catholicism around which I was raised in Virginia.
Evangelicals will only have something to say to the broader society when it gets over its ancient bigotries and hatreds.
I’m not sure I know what part of his message you are talking about.
The first minute of Mark Driscol’s presentation you have outline. Fortunately, it does not appear in the outline
I did finally go back and listen. I am now at about 1 hour into it.
If you took every time he said evangelical and substituted “Catholic,” I could have given the same talk–though the specific people he speaks of are not known to me.
Catholics have all the same critiques of the Jesus Seminar, the pantheists, the pan-entheists, wicca, New Age, etc.
We Catholic agree with evangelicals on all the major issues of the Culture Wars and New Age theologies. Peter Kreeft, is after all a Catholic.
Besided the historical Reformation divides, the real difference is that we Catholics dont hold bigotted views of evangelicals as evangelicals do toward us.
Hey Fr J-
Not being a Catholic or sensitive to those things I didn’t pick up on all that. Not saying it isn’t there, I just didn’t hear that and I certainly am not going to listen to that whole thing again, hopefully you understand after listening to the whole thing.
I felt Mark going after theologically liberal leaders not after Catholics. I don’t know that it would be fair to call his views toward Catholics bigoted, but I’m not him so I won’t fight that fight.
Dont worry Tyler. The whole thing is not anti-Catholic but alluding to a priest as spending his days in a bathrobe and slippers with a glass of sherry and probably being gay is just beyond the pale. It was an opening comment to a group of evangelicals designed to establish common enemies and therefore a bond with his audience. It is a common evil in ecumenical settings. I know. I’ve been there. I used to attend an evangelical church. Anti-Catholicism is just part of the DNA of evangelicals. It does not surprise me you did not notice it. This is a fact that just needs to be said.
Hrm…I think I listened to this one at the gym a few weeks ago, but I thought it was newer than last Fall. Check out his “tough questions” series, if he did it again, it’s amazing.
I think Pastor Mark does a great job of separating the different fields of thought throughout this message. Well worth the time!
Alright, so I have a few things to say. To begin with, I haven’t listened to the pod cast so I’m working with second-hand material which always seems to get me into trouble. Anyway, here are just a few thoughts: 1) It’s odd to me that Emergent folks would be accused of being influenced by “secular philosophy” because these are the very same people that are pointing out the many ways that modernity was and is flawed and how it’s influence has not done Christian theology well. Moreover, so-called secular philosophy has always influence Christianity in one way or the other throughout the centuries. Many early Christians (I would include St. Paul) were influenced by Hellenistic thinking. Let’s just abandon the masquerade of believing that some of us have managed to bottle up some pure 100% Christian theology void of any traces of anything secular. 2) Trying to say that certain folks have bent their theology to accommodate to the changes of what’s acceptable in culture by talking about homosexuality and naming women as elders doesn’t do much for me. For example, any church or denominational entity will have a robust biblical and theological justification for why they ordain women. It has less to do with what’s going on in the secular world and more to do with a difference of opinion when it comes to theology and tradition. The same could be said for issues of homosexuality. 3) Original sin is the result of a “conversation”? I just don’t get it.
Hey Ric-
Good thoughts. I’ll leave it to others to take on some of your points.
Regarding your question on original sin. Mark’s point was that Eve was almost coerced within a conversation to eat the fruit. He is saying that while everyone wants to say conversation is harmless, in that situation, it was pretty harmful.
Ric,
As a Catholic it is pretty easy to see that sola scriptura is the root of religious relativism. Leaving the interpretation of the scriptures up to individuals will eventually lead to as many churches as there are Protestants.
That being said, any “church” that has become pro-gay really cant call itself Christian any longer. Not that the gay issue is central, but scripture and tradition must be. If there is no longer adherence to the beliefs, practices and teachings of the ancient faith, then how can one use the name of that ancient faith?
I get your point Fr J but as time goes on I think we will see more and more churches who support gays and calls themselves Christian, so be prepared to fight this fight if that is your stance. Not that I agree, but you can see it coming.