Emergents have told us all about the blessings of "conversation" and the benefits of "open-sourcing" on the Internet. It's been over a decade and we haven't noticed any benefits or blessings worth jotting down on a napkin, but we like to keep our eyes peeled and our minds open.

So this week we were amused to witness a bizarre but enthusiastic exchange between ardent men and women of meager intelligence who desire a better world. They developed their views on topics they supposed were relevant to the discussion, and they did that for us here.

Mike Morrell, a celebrated Emergent dunce and occasional Remonstrans visitor, concedes he's "done a poor job at unfolding [his] hermeneutic". We'll all agree, I think, that Mike has not exaggerated in the slightest; he did an atrocious job. But now he's trying to fix that with a 1,764 word essay wherein he spreads out assorted religious trifles, ideological knickknacks and theological fetishes in something he must believe to be a helpful arrangement.

He speaks of Jeremy Rifkin, Walter Wink, John Howard Yoder, René Girard, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dame Julian and Paul Young. I hope this clarifies Mike's hermeneutic for you; it strikes me as an appropriate summation of everything he said, everything he thought he said, everything he wished he'd said, or anything he might have meant by what he said.

Normally a misinformed person with incoherent fantasies culled from selected readings tends not to shed much light, but if there is a first time for it to happen, we should like for it to be here on Remonstrans.

You might also take to heart the insights of the soft and serious Sally Apokedak. Her concern is that we offer something to a suffering, tired, dying world. You can judge for yourself what this exchange has offered to a suffering, tired, dying world, and whether that suffering, tired, dying world should be grateful.

I leave you with a few personal faves from Mike's meanderings. The first is about an eschaton in our mist, and the second is about the latent energies of consciousness we might discover in inanimate matter. What a dirty, rotten shame we get no promise of the latent energies of consciousness we might discover in Mike's brain.

I know that it's a paradox: The suffering and mystery of this life, combined with what I hear when my soul is still - that reality of the ever-present eschaton in our mist, [sic] echoing Dame Julian's Showings from God: "Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well."

I think we're on the cusp of the next stage of human development, where our circle of care extends to humanity and then to non-human sentient life. Then we might discover that inanimate matter is itself charged with the latent energies of consciousness - the very heavens declaring the glory of God, as it were.

I remember in junior high school I used to think that the history of human thought would turn out to be one sorry sequence of intellectual spasms at the end of which man would be forced to accept the truth; that each gimcrack lie and any vain falsehood would be exposed as unworkable and would have to be abandoned. That is when, I thought, mankind would see the whole, trace the course of his descent, and at that moment every knee would bow and every tongue would confess.

What was I thinking?!

The only plausible defense I might offer is that I was a teenager and this was the Sixties: I never smoked marijuana, but I did ride in friend's and co-worker's cars. I probably inhaled. I'm hoping I can blame second-hand pot for this dereliction of reason.

Now, of course, I know better. The history of human thought has been a descent into a thick fog. Clarity is the last thing we can expect.

Kids today will not be able to blame second-hand pot because they have John Caputo, a tedious noise, being interviewed by Callid Keefe-Perry, a dreary racket. I didn't get to hear this back in the day. Anyone who thinks philosophy is a way to enlightenment is wheezing on something stronger than a nearby doobie. Callid sums up his interview by saying:

Man, was it amazing. The entire time he was like building up energy as if he was about to kind of take out into the, like, atmosphere of theology. It was incredible.

Getting "out into the, like, atmosphere of theology" just never happened. Grope with John and Callid through the thick fog of Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Heidegger, Kearney, Lacan, and Lyotard. And ask yourself again why "progressive theology doesn't point to anything important".

Pretend anything Caputo says makes sense. I dare you.

The last few posts were intended to bring us to a comment on our times. We interrupted ourselves with Mike Morrell's complaint—or should I say—we were ably assisted in making that point by Mike himself.

Mike then took offense at our interruption and tweeted: "So apparently it's now cool to make fun of mental health difficulties in the Reformed Discernmentalist..." and that tweet accounts for the weekend flutter of outraged illiterates and pottymouths who came by to give us all a demonstration of what they understand to be a commitment to God in the way of Jesus.

Those gifted enough to read the English language will have discovered that we were not "making fun of" Mike's mental health difficulties. If we wanted to pass comedic judgment on Mike's mental difficulties, it would not have been fair to limit ourselves to a single post of 519 words. In addition to which, the subject of Mike's mental health difficulties was never raised at any of the meetings of the Reformed Discernmentalists I ever attended.

We were marking his own observations and his own behavior. First, he connected his malady with the times he claims to be "keenly interested in and dispositionally calibrated toward". Second, he invited open source psychological advice on the internet. We not only linked to Mike's post, we even quoted him. Even the title directed the reader's attention not to an illness but to the sort of treatment being sought.

And this is not an aberration. Hugh Hollowell is also experiencing problems:

I feel lethargic. Listless. Depression is not the right word - but it is close. Very, very close. I feel overwhelmed. Out of control. Like I am sinking, and just dont have the energy to swim.

Notice the seventh comment by none other than Mike Morrell. He hopes at some later date to "compare madness", but a lot of the people who talk to him report that "Cod Liver Oil" is the way to go.

Cod liver oil.

But we should not let the hilarity of these examples distract us from the problem they illustrate. This is the world you live in. It is probably the only world your children will know; not that everyone is a crackpot of equal rank to Mike Morrell and Joel Hunter, but they certainly occupy a conspicuous place in the large assortment of crackpots. They certainly represent a threat to a coherent orthodoxy. People who get their dogma from Oprah, Animal Planet and the internet might not be the very best authorities on creation, the omniscience of God, sexuality, inspiration, or the qualifications of the clergy.

As we pointed out earlier, we cannot glibly dismiss current theological differences as "the finer points of theology". At stake are the essentials of at least three faiths; one would expect proponents of diversity to have picked up on this.

D. G. Hart has a relevant point: Machen was right and Noll was wrong in thinking that "contending for the cause" is unavoidable. Machen wasn't compelled by a desire to fight. History has shown that Machen was correct. And it is worse now than it was then.

So today we find ourselves in a special bind. Fundamentalism did (very much) discredit the ideas of a) contending for the faith and b) a trustworthy authority. It is hard to argue with anyone—from Fundamentalist to Emergent—who finds its record objectionable. And yet our moment certainly demands a contending for the faith.

Some fundamentalist organizations are trying to finesse this difficulty. One group resolved to meet the challenge by initiating relationships and establishing networks. That's not at all like taking a flyswatter to a tank battle, is it?

If contending for the faith is advocated by St. Jude, Martin Luther, J. Gresham Machen (and a few other notables), how will it be distinguished from the Fundamentalism of Curtis Lee Laws? Who will compare this madness?

Or will these differences just clarify themselves in the fog of war?

Our weekend fracas illustrates yet again that nothing ever changes—except perhaps to get even more ludicrous. It's been centuries now and the vicar of the Church of St. Sisyphus still hasn't had to come up with a fresh sermon.

Check out D. G. Hart on Assessing Machen. Machen was also a man accused of being too grumpy for his times. If only J. Gresham had been able to open up a relationship with his opponents and if only he'd tried to steer them in the right direction!

I do not think that we can avoid contending for his [Christ's] cause just because there are dangers to our souls in that contention.

In contending for Christ's cause there are most certainly dangers to the soul. As we have discussed. But as we reflect on the current congregation of heathens, we are compelled to ask again: Did the Fundamentalist Movement matter? If so, how?

Have the last 90 years been a total waste, or are there lessons we might learn from this long and dreary dance?

This was a week with some interesting juxtapositions. I was observing a discussion about whether Fundamentalism mattered. When one asks if the Fundamentalist Movement mattered, there are those who will leap to the conclusion that to reject the consequences of the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy is to argue that it didn't matter. This is not a conclusion anyone should leap to.

Then there was this cartoon—which works less well as a cartoon than it does as evidence for a psychological evaluation, and one of the responses was posted by someone (dc3) muddling through life without a functioning brain. American churches, he said, "...argue the finer points of theology"?

Not even close. American churches are most definitely not arguing the finer points of theology. Twenty-first century churchmen wouldn't know a finer point of theology if it drove in wearing a red and white striped hat and speaking in droll rhymes.

There was a time when some were fascinated—obsessed even—by the ten toes of Nebuchadnezzar's image, or the seven heads with the ten horns, or the Four Beasts. That has gotten a bit old. If dc3 over on the nekkid ex-pastor could tear himself away from his Clarence Larkin dispensational charts long enough to look out the window, he would observe a church arguing over Creation, state-sanctioned sodomy, church-approved sodomy, the ordination of sodomites, the omnipotence and omniscience of God, feminism, open theology, the inspiration of scripture.... The entire Evangelical movement just recently bifurcated over a definition of the Gospel.

Do you know how stupid one would have to be to judge these things "finer points of theology"?

Some rebound-fundamentalists like Tony Jones are just as dogmatic and doctrinaire about, for instance, why the PCUSA should follow a particular church policy. This in spite of a two-millennium proscription. Whatever happened to Tony's commitment to open source theology and to valuing all voices in the conversation?

"Sure," you say, "but that's Tony Jones. Isn't he that dimwit who goes around blathering about animalism and church membership for clones and theology after Google?" Yes, that's the one. And where is he making these laughable statements? In a mimeographed church newsletter? In the Skunk Holler Baptist revival tent?

No, these are the hot topics in Mainline and Evangelical Christianity.

Which brings us back to the question you must answer: Did the Fundamentalist Movement matter? If it did, how so? Did it offer anything more than a caricature for illiterate people like dc3? If some group like the GARBC wanted to revitalize Fundamentalism, would a good man be implicated in the attempt?

Consider the distinction T. S. Eliot gave us. If a loss of belief in God is important, how significant is it that entire generations came to misplace proper feelings toward God?