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.