As an antidote to the arrogant claims of positive knowledge common a century ago, the new hermeneutic is refreshingly restrained. Yet just when it might be expected to teach us humility, it has become the most imperious ideology of our day. It threatens us with a new totalitarianism that is frankly alarming in its claims and prescriptions. *

Here is a typical postmodern thinker. I know her only as "suchabirch". She is answering the question: "Are there teachings or doctrines of Christianity that make it hard for you to believe?" (In particular she resents the fact that men are more "adept" as church leaders.)

I don't have issue with Jesus' teaching cuz I have a very personal relationship with Jesus, and everything he says seems to make sense. And if it doesn't, I figure out why I don't understand it, and I do my research and I reconcile what he said to what I know about God and he's a loving God and it works out.

I'm wondering what this theologienne knows about God that helps her reconcile what Jesus said with what she knows about the doctrines of Christianity. I wonder if in her research the humble girl ever read I Timothy 2. I wonder if, in the event St. Paul does not make sense to her, she does some research and reconciles his instruction with what she knows about Apostles.

Talk about imperiousness; I wonder if she would tolerate such brazen speculation in moderns.

If you know this girl, maybe you could ask her for me.

* D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God, p. 9

As soldiers of Christ, Christians must know their duties.

This issue of ChristianityTuesday gives you your marching orders so you will be prepared for the offense.

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If we take culture seriously, we see that a people does not need merely
enough to eat (although even that is more than we seem able to ensure)
but a proper and particular cuisine: one symptom of the decline of culture
in Britain is indifference to the art of preparing food.

I apologize for a second lengthy quote from Eliot. Excerpting Eliot is nasty business; it's a cruel thing to do to people who've already read him, and it's a disservice to those who have not: the force of his writing is not the flash of insight (although you do get a return on investment there) but the structure of an idea. I know a lot of fundamentalists who will snag a quotable bit and run with it. Evangelicals will read him and put down the book feeling like hippies who've dropped acid: they will have the sensation that they were exposed to a profound thought, but it will never amount to anything.

Emergents will never read him because people on couches are much more impressed with citations from Derrida. They'll treat Eliot worse than they treat Plato and Aristotle. Eliot was, after all, the quintessential modern.

Even if you don't agree with Eliot, you have no business talking about culture until you've understood what he's told the rest of us. The passage below will have the most meaning to those who've followed our discussion here for the past three and a half years.

He is discussing the three senses of "culture". He observes that we can speak of the culture of the individual, the culture of the group or class, and the culture of the whole society. These three senses are related to one another in a hierarchical way and it's necessary to understand this relationship.

But one of the features of development, whether we are taking the religious or cultural point of view, is the appearance of skepticism—by which, of course, I do not mean infidelity or destructiveness (still less the unbelief which is due to mental sloth) but the habit of examining evidence and the capacity for delayed decision. Skepticism is a highly civilized trait, though, when it declines into pyrrhonism, it is one of which civilization can die. Where skepticism is strength, pyrrhonism is weakness: for we need not only the strength to defer a decision, but the strength to make one.

The conception of culture and religion as being, when each is taken in the right context, different aspects of the same thing, is one which requires a good deal of explanation. But I should like to suggest first, that it provides us with the means of combating two complementary errors. The one more widely held is that culture can be preserved, extended and developed in the absence of religion. This error may be held by the Christian in common with the infidel, and its proper refutation would require an historical analysis of considerable refinement, because the truth is not immediately apparent, and may seem to be contradicted by appearances: a culture may linger on and indeed produce some of its most brilliant artistic and other successes after the religious faith has fallen into decay. The other error is the belief that the preservation and maintenance of religion need not reckon with the preservation and maintenance of culture: a belief which may even lead to the rejection of the products of culture as frivolous obstructions to the spiritual life. To be in a position to reject this error, as with the other, requires us to take a distant view; to refuse to accept the conclusion, when the culture that we see is a culture in decline, that culture is something to which we can afford to remain indifferent. And I must add that to see the unity of culture and religion in this way neither implies that all the products of art can be accepted uncritically, nor provides a criterion by which everybody can immediately distinguish between them. Esthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended into esthetic sensibility and disciplined taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art. To judge a work of art by artistic or by religious standards, to judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in the end to the same thing: though it is an end at which no individual can arrive.

First notice the place of honor accorded to skepticism. Civilized men do not move like male Emperor penguins in winter.

Make a note.

If you find men acting like penguins, or if you find them acting reflexively, despotically, or precipitously, don't bother asking for directions to their art museum. Save your bus token.

Second, notice that the connection between culture and religion is essential. Eliot even describes them as "different aspects of the same thing". I will not develop his point here—much better that you let him develop it for you from the first paragraph to the last. It's bad enough I've truncated his thought this much. But I will just interject a question relevant to our discussion here: Could we have any real confidence in a sub-culture that is totally oblivious to, contemptuous of, and hostile toward aesthetic sensibilities and disciplined taste?

I say this to our fundamentalist readers who have determined that Garlock and Hamilton have embarrassed everyone long enough and who suppose they can do better by just trying harder. I say this to our evangelical readers who suspect that John Mark McMillan is no Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and probably doesn't represent a move in the right direction.

Culture is not done by a few men working out of their trunks, attractive as that notion obviously is. It is slightly more complicated than that.

It may frighten you to consider that your contemporaries' aesthetic sensibilities and spiritual perceptions cut far closer to the theological bone than you ever suspected. But I hope that if you get a glimpse of Eliot's point you will appreciate what culture did for us before it was so stupidly tossed out.

______________________
* Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, January, 1948; Chapter I

I think our studies ought to be all but purposeless. They want to be pursued with chastity like mathematics.

---Acton

We see on every side fundamentalists, evangelicals and even emergents trying to assume the rôle of political demagogue and culture czar. What we do not see on any side is tillers of the soil.

Nevertheless, we can distinguish between higher and lower cultures; we can distinguish between advance and retrogression. We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity. I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture. Then culture will have to grow again from the soil; and when I say it must grow again from the soil, I do not mean that it will be brought into existence by any activity of political demagogues. The question asked by this essay, is whether there are any permanent conditions, in the absence of which no higher culture can be expected.

If we succeed even partially in answering this question, we must then put ourselves on guard against the delusion of trying to bring out the conditions for the sake of the improvement of our culture. For if any definite conclusions emerge from this study, one of them is surely this, that culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake: the artist must concentrate upon his canvas, the poet upon his typewriter, the civil servant upon the just settlement of particular problems as they present themselves upon his desk, each according to the situation in which he finds himself.

[...]

We cannot say, "I shall make myself into a different person"; we can only say: "I will give up this bad habit, and endeavor to contract this good one." So of society we can only say: "We shall try to improve in this respect or the other, where excess or defect is evident; we must try at the same time to embrace so much in our view, that we may avoid, in putting one thing right, putting something else wrong." Even this is to express an aspiration greater than we can achieve: for it is as much, or more, because of what we do piecemeal without understanding or foreseeing the consequences, that the culture of one age differs from that of its predecessor. *

These are not words with which to comfort the weary. They have only the advantage of being true.

Look at what is being published by CT, Soundforth, Pettit, and rethinkchristianity.com and ask yourselves, who is saying "we shall try to improve in this respect or the other"? Each one darkens understanding by asserting the grave error of the rest and affirming his own—what do they call them?—"preferences".

* Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, January, 1948; Introduction

The world today is a wilderness of pitfalls and obstacles waiting for the unsuspecting.  Witnessing successfully in this environment requires Christians to blend into their surroundings and knowing when to pounce.  Waiting for the best shot is a matter of patience and practice. 

This locked and loaded issue of ChristianityTuesday explores the skills required for hunting the big spiritual game.

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If you didn't know that the church is hopelessly compromised with respect to sex and sexuality, I suggest you reach up and press the Call Nurse button. She should be made aware of the fact that you just came out of your coma.

From the site we mentioned earlier (where they are rethinking Christianity) we find a guy who is no doubt a devotee of the Great Books:

If I could design my perfect church, I think it would be very small. A series of small churches. Really just kind of house groups that meet. There wouldn't be a center figure that we go every Sunday to hear. It would be all of us searching for answers in our smaller groups and then we may hold, you know, park events or community service events on Sundays instead of  "Hey let's get together and listen to this guy talk for 30 minutes and listen to a band play. That sounds like fun." I think it should be more searching for answers together. That would be my ideal church.

In pursuit of ever smaller churches and in a quest for even more answers we might watch someone "thinking through homosexuality" here.

One could question whether this is really thinking at all, which is why I didn't drag in some ADD/ADHD Ritalin-popping dropout. These are the musings of our friend of the eschatological hope, Kevin, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College; he has credentials and everything. He invites you to share your thoughts and concerns.

And of course if homosexuality bears rethinking, then the whole ordeal of coming out needs to be addressed. Declaring your perversion might be thought of—or re-thought of—as a sacrament.

Betcha didn't see that one coming!

Every time I get a preview of the new ChristianityTuesday cover I think Remonres has hit the nail on the head. And sometimes I go immediately to christianitytoday.com to make a comparison; just to see how we are tracking. This last time I found these gems:

The Ripple Effect We were drowning in anger and stress until we began swimming.
Diving In
The Spillover

Catchy, isn't it? Notice how it draws you in to the story. This is literature.

It is genuinely unnerving to think there are enough religious nuts out there for a corporation to find this drivel marketable, and I'm sure Ms. Poremba or some sadsack editor at CT gnawed on their erasers for a while to come up with those snappy leads and heads.

When one says the word culture most people think of Bösendorfers, marble arches, flocked wallpaper and parquet floors. And of course that's why there is a market for this bilge. People don't know what culture is or what culture does.

Someone recently mentioned Kirk's work Eliot and His Age. You ought to read that first, but after that you might also read The Intemperate Professor from which this is taken:

The late C. E. M. Joad defined decadence as "the loss of an object." In that sense, modern civilization exhibits many signs of decadence; I examine some of these, particularly in America. Whither are we bound? Too few have been making that inquiry in this century; and the man whose curiosity on that point withers, whether from smugness or hopelessness, is decadent; for he has lost sight of the objects of life.

Exploratory rather than exhaustive, this little book pokes into certain important aspects of our civilization. The failure of our great wealth to produce greatness of mind and art; the decay of our religious sentiments into mere sociability; the conversion of universities into amusement-parks, and of schoolmen into ideologues; the false premises and disastrous techniques of much schooling; and the decline of public interest in town and country—these are some of my subjects. I describe the marks of a confused culture.

[...]

The word "culture" I employ as my friend T. S. Eliot used it in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Culture is not a matter of museums and "artistic values," but rather that whole complex of imagination, sentiment, artistic achievement, and elevation of character which distinguishes the civilized man from the brute. Virility and culture are intertwined and complementary, not opposed. As modern culture decays, so modern manliness sinks; for both arise from a life with dignity and purpose.

CT is a museum to the decay of our religious sentiments. So is Soundforth and the various opinions of Frank Garlock or Brian McCrorie or Greg Howlett. And so is Tony Jones and Mark Scandrette and Kevin Corcoran.

These, as we have seen here on the pages of Remonstrans, are the thoughts of men living lives without dignity or purpose.

Why, in spite of our great wealth and freedom, has the church become so taken with what is cheap, banal and sterile? Naturally they don't think they have and they will be incensed to hear it from us. But how do we explain this profound affection they have for meaningless baubles? Russell Kirk wrote this book in 1965, 43 years ago.

If fundamentalists want to be serious, they should contend with the ideas in this book (as well as Eliot's essay). If evangelicals want a place in the Public Square, they should track Kirk's exploration. If emergents want change and authenticity—well, I know emergents aren't going to read this book.

As oil prices continue to increase and we become more aware of environmental concerns and impact, many church activities will need to be reconsidered and re-evaluated.  For example, how many more programs could be funded using resources currently dedicated to missionary ministries? With the availability of the internet and expanded communication world wide, missionaries can now go digitally to foreign lands where they once went physically. This valuable work can now be done online at a fraction of the cost.

This issue of ChristianityTuesday considers the impact of missionary work on the environment and the substantial savings that could be redirected if missionaries are brought home.

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I am warmly sympathetic to the comment that the statements of emergents should be laughed at: they are laughable. I strongly disagree that they should be ignored.

Clearly Helen Howell is not a thinker to be taken seriously. She has learned a few phrases which she repeats throughout her incoherent explanation of finding faith. One does resist the impulse to laugh—until one considers the context.

We have a perfectly good word to describe people on a journey who don't know their destination, who don't know whether they are following or deviating from a path, who deny there even is a path or a destination, or who suppose that that destination changes en route. We call these people lost.

And lest you think these people are not lost, that they have merely chosen a bad metaphor, listen to Tony Jones explain his faith:

Q: Do you feel like you're finding faith or losing it?

A: I'd say that if you asked me that question last week I would say I felt like I was losing my faith. And I think this week I feel like I'm beginning to find my faith, and it's almost for me almost a daily or even weekly thing for me. I mean I've struggled with this agnosticism, about just going is this whole thing real? And other days I just feel just complete confidence and passion that it is real. So I guess I've just had to learn to live in that cycle.

Last week he felt; this week he feels. Is this the faith venerated in Hebrews?

All people have doubts; no one lives down to the emergent's caricature. In the dark moments of his life, the most hide-bound, dogmatic Christian questions how his sufferings can be said to be good or how his presumptions might have been wrong. It is human to substitute our anticipations for God's providence. But Tony is not talking about disappointments which result from his misguided expectations. Tony "cycles" between agnosticism and confidence. And this is the same Tony who doesn't understand the new birth, who thinks he is born again every day.

How he felt and how he feels; these are his words.

It is entirely reasonable to say that if my expectations are my faith and if my expectations are regularly frustrated, I might be said to be cycling between faith and doubt. Unfortunately, this is not the faith of the New Testament or the historic church. Faith is what sustained the Apostles and Martyrs in the face of greater disappointments than ours.

So why is it important to be reminded of this?

Three quick reasons.

First, as someone already pointed out, this may affect people in our own churches. I would not say that that is the biggest fear, but it is enough of a reality to warrant certain adjustments in our attitude. If a particular kind of heterodoxy, no matter how goofy, threatens the faithful, it is a legitimate concern.

Second, goofiness can have a certain appeal. Just look at the history of the church; have none of the heresies been implausible? Were none of the cults attractive? The Christian life places certain constraints on behavior. It always has. And in our generation it has been the irksomeness of religion that has defined what has come to be labeled a commitment to "spirituality". This antipathy toward "organized religion" or "traditional church" makes a real appeal to today's hedonist. In Minneapolis and Boulder and Sedona. This can't go unremarked.

But there is a third reason which I think dwarfs the other two. We must view what I call "the long line". It is easy (and almost automatic) for us to listen to people like Helen and Marie and their leaders like McLaren, Pagitt and Jones and doubt that anyone else will be able to fill such small shoes.

Does the movement have any real traction? That's a fair question. Helen and Marie are going to grow up. When they bury someone they love, or when they face their daughter's pimp in court, or when they are very old and hatefully abandoned, then will be a hard time to reconsider the significance of Derrida's thought and the messiness of the path they chose.

In that respect I think there are good reasons to be hopeful that the emergence we now observe cannot survive. But don't make the mistake of thinking emergence will not leave a mark on religious awareness. I probably can't cite a better example than fundamentalism as a movement to be denounced and fundamentalism as an idea to be revitalized. Whatever appeal emergence has for decadent third-generation Christians who want to cuss and sport facial hardware and spout Derrida, those things are not the soul of the movement.

The soul of the movement will survive the body. The human cravings it now validates will remain, and religious people will just scavenge for something more promising.

I believe we need to view the long line. View the long line of American evangelicalism since the turn of the last century. Fundamentalism made a draconian concession in orthodoxy, reducing it to a minimal set of assertions useful to motivate a constituency. Neo-evangelicals compounded the problem by diluting even that minimal standard and giving it parity with social activism. Now they must periodically issue statements of what orthodoxy is and how much it means to them. They also have to huddle up to discuss what social activism involves.

Here we face another ideological child which denigrates orthodoxy altogether and makes of leftist programs an entire hermeneutic.

I don't mean to suggest this is the only trajectory to be observed; this is not even the only one suggested to me. I merely point out one as an example. For instance, consider the decline of religious sensibilities from fundamentalism through neo-evangelicalism to the reactions of the emergents. Give serious note to their claims about a loss of religious feelings in light of the decline in evangelical sensibilities over the last 100 years. I find their grievance persuasive; I just find their solution ridiculous.

Don't focus on the goofs, but do place their words and doctrines on a historical continuum.

Someone asked what sort of people one might find at the Church Basement mock revival. Check out these sofa spud reformers. You might want to go back and reread the opening of John Bunyan's

The Pilgrim's Journey

From This World to That Which is to Come;

Delivered under the Similitude of a Nightmare

Imagine Pilgrim laboring under his heavy pack and hearing the good news from Emerging Evangelist as he appears from behind a nearby bush.

Why do you think that so many people are questioning the traditional ways of doing church?

I think so many people are searching for authenticity that if something doesn't appear or seem authentic, then they question, and then when they question they will look for another place to find authenticity to express themselves and to be fed and to mull over things that resonate of reality, not just something that's fabricated.

And here's an idea like unto it:

I think a lot of people are questioning the ways they've been doing church because to be quite honest people are getting tired of doing church. They'll look for something that's real and they're tired of being fed, like, religion so I think that's why people are tired of the traditional ways of church.

While I consider it an unforgivable abuse of human speech, I took the liberty of transcribing this short treatise on faith: Helen's Uncertainty Principle.

Make of it what you can.

Do you feel like you're finding faith or losing it?
How does this make you feel?

I'm Helen Howell and I'm from Birmingham, Alabama.

I feel like I'm finding faith. I feel like I'm redefining faith; whereas I used to hold faith to be believing correctly and having a checklist of certain things to believe that I had to believe in order to be right with God or be acceptable to God. I'm finding that faith incorporates a lot more things than just certainty or certainty about certain things. So whereas I used to consider faith being certain about certain things, having a checklist, of scriptures I have to know, and being certain of what certain scriptures meant and never doubting that and never looking for a new interpretation, rather now coming to understand faith is incorporating doubt and faith as incorporating change and faith being a journey, involves mistakes and it's messy. I recently read an author who's talking about Derrida. Derrida said that in French pas means two different things, it means "step" as well as a "misstep" and applying that to journey, so when stepping, it's inevitable that we will misstep, when journeying it is inevitable that we will make mistakes. And so coming to understand faith is just setting out on the path and that faith is going to look different in different times and faith not being the feeling that I have arrived. I believe everything I am supposed to believe, I understand everything I'm suppose to understand correctly that there is some sort of indubitable foundation, but rather refusing to ever think that I have arrived, that I don't need to continue to grow or seek or to admit that my understandings were wrong. So faith is being much more of an adventure into the unknown and that's very freeing. I no longer have to fear that if I don't understand something correctly that I'm no longer right with God or that my fellow Christians, brothers and sisters from different Christian traditions aren't right with God because we don't understand things the same way.

So, that's all.

I'm sure more could have been said, and perhaps more was added in explanation of what was already disclosed. Maybe there's another disk.

While the earth is getting warmer, the church has gotten cooler with an increased consciousness of our worldly duty.  Each week, more christians tap into the hip and happening environmentalist sub-culture, showing seekers that the church cares.  This week's issue of ChristianityTuesday explores how a Green Church will usher in a Healthy World and outlines the responsibilities Christians have to spread the Gospel of Green.

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To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing-when a word half-understood, torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader the utter meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt except the dogmas of sciences of which we have read in the newspapers, when the language of theology itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysticism of popular philosophy, tends to become a language of tergiversation-Andrewes may seem pedantic and verbose. It is only when we have saturated ourselves in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find his examination of words terminating in the ecstasy of assent.

--- T. S. Eliot

It has not escaped our notice that among some people there isn't much love for the sort of word-dicing we sometimes engage in here. For some it is a major annoyance and for others it is an irritation they can easily dismiss with the words elitism, snobbery, uppity or, most often, divisive and unloving. Nothing warms the rube's heart like hearing three yahoos dismiss Plato and Aristotle. This attitude has the attraction of what Eliot calls the mysticism of popular belief.

We hear someone relating sexuality to the eschaton in a way that should make a roomful of high schoolers guffaw, but the only socially acceptable response is to entertain even more embarrassing insights from bystanders, or, if someone has been thoughtful enough to provide a couch, bysitters.

I have mentioned two names in the past. The first is Richard Mitchell. I do not know of anyone who skewered the guilty as deftly or as humorously as the Underground Grammarian. If you are philosophically disinclined, I think this is the best introduction you will ever get to the importance of clear thinking. From him I picked up the phrase "Language is the technology of thought." He was a real teacher living in a world of educrats.

I used to subscribe to his paper, and in one issue he offered to send fistfuls of his archives to anyone who would ask. I asked and got a nice packet of earlier numbers which you can now download and read for free. He also wrote books that you must read. They can be found and downloaded at this same site. He even gives you explicit encouragement to plagiarize his work. Can't say fairer than that.

I suggest you make a pig of yourself.

The second name we have mentioned repeatedly is T. S. Eliot's. Again, I think you ought to read everything he's written and I think you should memorize parts of it. I know some of you have already read bits of it, but for those of you still intimidated by the off-putting experiences you had in college, I recommend this introduction by Roger Scruton.

It is essential that our words mean things, and it is most necessary that our words about God have meaning. It is along about this moment that those who object will inform us that words have different meanings and that meanings change over time. This is the observation of a genius, of course. Lots of things change over time; nearly everything wears out, including our words. God does not change, yet the words we use to describe him do. Reading and understanding Eliot will help you understand how important it is that as meaning does change and as sensibilities must change with new experiences, change need not involve a loss of the permanent things.

In 2003 McLaren and Campolo published a book, Adventures in Missing the Point. The subtitle was How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel. Now Brian and Tony admitted that they didn't see all that much; that they were rubbing their eyes and trying to be aware of where their perspective had been foggy. They said they were trying to wake up.

They were not very good at waking up.

I think it would be fair to say that the emergent movement might well be remembered as Ichabod's Most Excellent Snooze. It is still sleeping.

Theirs is a disappointing but instructive experience. You should learn from it.

Emergents resented the church they were brought up in. I can't blame them for that; it's probably the only thing we agree on. It really was a disgusting place in many respects. It certainly disgusted me. I was a PK and had a certain proximity to it: I had a great view of the underbelly. When your mom goes fisticuffs with the head deacon's wife, you get something of a counterweight to your uplifting reading of Pilgrim's Progress.  I also ran with other PKs, and if you know anything about PKs you know they are a pestiferous and stiff-necked people. If Brian and Tony had ended their book at page 15, I could have been more sympathetic. Anyone who thinks Western Christianity since the 1920s was a healthy church needs to be physically restrained for their own safety and the family's peace of mind.

But the movement that survived the book was a serious failure. A mob of these village louts decided that if their hearts-and-lace churches weren't attractive, they would rebel. They would be crude, illiterate, profane, unlettered, tattooed, pierced, sacrilegious, pornographic, pompous and annoying, and they would play electric guitars. That would show the world just how committed to Christ they were.

There is a book by Steve Hughes which is not atypical. Here are some chapter titles which reflect the depth of their thinking:

I Know other Christians but You're Different
Street Preachers, Jesus Freaks, Bible Thumpers, & Other Annoying People
I Don't Want to Be a Christian
There's Nothing Holy about This Book, the Bible
What the Hell!
Dark Matter, Dinosaurs, Darwin, & Dark Chocolate
The Church Sucks
Jesus, Liberator of Women & Social Revolutionary
Las Vegas, Outer Space, Jesus, & You

This is not what booklovers would call a thought-provoking tome. This is not Reformation. This is just another buffoon with a trombone. These are just naked savages throwing spears at a church building. Or perhaps I should say it is just a picture of naked savages throwing spears at a church building.

What they didn't understand was that they were the product of that culture. Their pastors, Sunday School teachers, camp counselors, parents and families raised them with this prosaic, parochial, dim-witted attitude. They were not the first generation in the history of man to rise above the environment and clearly gaze at creation to perceive the eternal verities. They mock verities. They got their views exactly where their parents and counselors got their views: the world around them.

Their parents were moved by the art of Lawrence Welk, they are moved by the art of Paul David Hewson. This is not a revolution! The same mindless crooning; just a different band. Like their parents they are chasers of the wind.

They don't take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, they live as middle-class people (with outside financial support) among the inner-city poor. They sign sheets of paper on behalf of the poor people of Biafra or Darfur or Myanmar or they give pocket change to tsunami victims or for some other disaster du jour. Even their tepid liberality is formulaic, managed and predictable. Ask yourself, what sort of culture has its generosity stimulated by organizations like the United Way or Compassion International? Followers of Jesus or civic drones? Emergents lament the corporate and institutional church, but read their websites and see the enterprises and institutions that excite their imagination.

You'd think Jesus founded Greenpeace and sent his disciples out two by two as civil engineers.

A lot is being said now about culture; most of it is rubbish and is only polluting the stream. There are a few books by academics that are helpful, but a culture is not a few books written by people with the training and work schedules conducive to reading and writing.

Culture is not decoration; it is a people's expression of what is believed to be true, felt in the heart and sharable with others. To deny that there is even such a thing as truth is a mark of one's thrall to philistinism. If you are completely oblivious to aidos, morphe, phusis, schemata, and mimesis, you have nothing to say. Not about chastity, not about evangelism, not about good works, not about redemption and not about an eschatological hope.

The tragic thing is that emergents have not transcended culture at all, they merely updated the "culture-controlled church".

So the more debased the secular culture becomes, the further out of reach the Gospel becomes, and this is the fine work of fundagelicals and emergents.

Missing the Point 2.0.