Because we know that a merry heart doeth good like a medicine, we left you last Friday with the discerning words of "suchabirch". We wanted your holiday to be as health-giving as it was possible for us to make it on our modest budget, so naturally we wheeled in the meds cart of the emergent church.

There will be a strong temptation to think that suchabirch is of such meager intellect that she could be dismissed after a polite giggle. Unfortunately what she is doing carries the weight of recent breakthroughs in epistemology and hermeneutics. We could well call what she is doing "the technology of emergence"; this is the way to do theology now.

Where the church once "focused on logic, evidence, proof, answers, scholarship, reasons, arguments, and appeals to authority", suchabirch helps us understand the new apologetic which "will focus more and more on beauty, goodness, experience, questions, mystery, community, and humility".

Apologetics is now a matter of speculating on the eschaton and rethinking sodomy; entertainment now includes soft porn, and the untimely teachings of the New Testament now make it hard for emergents to believe.

Hard times come again no more.

I have suggested often that we view the long line of history.

Emergents are not doing anything new here; this attitude has been encountered before. We have already run into this sort of "indolent impressionism" in lieu of theology. The people were better-read and they were what this writer called "men of marked intellectual power".

Modern writers have abandoned the historical method of approach. They persist in confusing the question what they might have wished that Jesus had been with the question what Jesus actually was. In reading one of the most popular recent books on the subject of religion, I came upon the following amazing assertion. "Jesus," the author says, "concerned himself but little with the question of existence after death." In the presence of such assertions any student of history may well stand aghast. It may be that we do not make much of the doctrine of a future life, but the question whether Jesus did so is not a matter of taste but an historical question, which can be answered only on the basis of an examination of the sources of historical information that we call the Gospels.

And the result of such examination is perfectly plain. As a matter of fact, not only the thought of heaven but also the thought of hell runs all through the teaching of Jesus. It appears in all four of the Gospels; it appears in the sources, supposed to underlie the Gospels, which have been reconstructed, rightly or wrongly, by modern criticism. It imparts to the ethical teaching its peculiar earnestness. It is not an element which can be removed by any critical process, but simply suffuses the whole of Jesus' teaching and Jesus' life. "And fear not them which can kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." "It is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hellfire"—these words are not an excrescence in Jesus' teaching but are quite at the center of the whole.

Amen and amen.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this was offered as a response to Brian D. McLaren. It is actually the response of J. Gresham Machen to what he called an "attack upon the intellect". That was in 1925. A sufficiently powerful computer will reveal that that was 83 years ago. *

Emergents are fearlessly forging ahead into the salad days of the previous century!

In Machen's day they weren't dithering about Derrida, but they were very much trying to rethink Christianity in such a way as to make Revelation comport with their own prejudices. This is an old game and one we should be able to recognize by now.

Whether it be fundamentalism, neo-evangelicalism or emergence, the enduring need of the hour is to recognize faithlessness for what it is. Allowing the crisis of the moment to determine the shape of your faith is always dangerous.

__________________________

* What is Faith?, J. Gresham Machen, Banner of Truth Trust, p. 25