{"id":78,"date":"2004-12-08T08:37:41","date_gmt":"2004-12-08T16:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=61"},"modified":"2004-12-08T08:37:41","modified_gmt":"2004-12-08T16:37:41","slug":"pitfalls-of-emergent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2004\/12\/08\/pitfalls-of-emergent\/","title":{"rendered":"Pitfalls of Emergent"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve been following my thoughts here recently, you’ll see I’ve been reading quite a bit about the “Emergent” movement and postmodern thought. I do think we Evangelicals need to deal better with the epistememological issues raised by postmodern thought. As I look more into Emergent, however, I’m growing increasingly concerned about how that movement is doing this.<\/p>\n

My sample of Emergent probably is skewed because it primarily comes from reading Brian McLaren’s books and haning out on The Ooze<\/a>. What’s really disturbing me is that much of the conversation seems to go beyond “how can we as committed Christians better understand our faith, theology and fellowship with each other in light of recent developments in epistemology” to a free-for-all that sometimes is, at best, sub-Christian.<\/p>\n

I’m not completely sure what the problem is, or even if there is one “problem.” It seems, however, that some folks take non-foundationalism or epistemological uncertainty so far that they have indeed bought into the “anything goes” of relativism. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to generate a discussion beyond the level of individual feelings, because there is no locus or loci of authority.<\/p>\n

Maybe the issue is that the higher level ideas — the real theological meat offered by folks like John Franke and Nancey Murphy — don’t trickle down to many at the popular level. All some people hear is “the old ways of thinking about truth and authority are being uprooted”; they don’t hear “and here is a better way to think about these things, that recognizes there is truth and authority, perhaps even more robust concepts of truth and authority, without foundationalist epistemology.” It’s a bit discouraging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve been following my thoughts here recently, you’ll see I’ve been reading quite a bit about the “Emergent” movement and postmodern thought. I do think we Evangelicals need to deal better with the epistememological issues raised by postmodern thought. As I look more into Emergent, however, I’m growing increasingly concerned about how that movement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epistemology","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-1g","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}