Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

---Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

We've been keeping an eye on the deconstruction of Emergence which most recently took the form of "a re-imagination of Emergent Village".

I'm aware of the fact that this doesn't excite the imagination quite like the Grand Canyon, the Super Bowl, or a fundamentalist movie excite the imagination, but it is something we should keep an eye on anyway. I can also understand—to a point—why someone might be slow to devote a lot of time watching a few renegade dimwits using bad philosophy as a pretext for abandoning the faith.  What, you ask, do these degenerates have to tell us about religion?

This is where our problem starts, of course. It is vanity that prompts us to suppose that only cogent, prudent, well-articulated ideas will move people, and we may feel that crackpots who don't deserve a hearing shouldn't get our attention. I think this is a mistake. People interested in religion will also be curious about the thing that has supplanted religion.

McLaren, Jones and Pagitt are clowns, no doubt about it, but no matter how inept they may be as philosophers, historians and theologians, they are nevertheless disordering thought in the church. That should concern us for the same reason Dr. Mitchell was concerned about inanity on campus.

It will never be enough for a few academics to publish a couple of explanatory volumes on the meaning of post-modernism. Academics are the sort of people who will go to conferences to argue over what differences might exist between the sexes or who's to blame for international terrorism. Academics can pontificate about anything, and for every one part perception you get nine parts poppycock.

Emergence was a movement that pretended to care about language, art, respect for narrative, imagination and conversation, but what have we gotten in the way of language, art, respect for narrative, imagination and conversation? The poetry of Emergence ranks right up there with the liturgy of fundamentalism and the relevance of neo-evangelicalism. Imagine what sort of poetry, narrative, art and conversation we'd have if they were indifferent to these things; imagine a religious world informed by the sensibilities of Mike Stavlund, David Hayward, The Ooze, Mark Scandrette and Jon Birch.

What we get from Bronsink, Buist, Hartman, Scott and Stavlund is bafflegab; large hairballs of prejudices and platitudes. Gobs of tribal language, code words and verbal signals which merely identify us and them, which, oddly enough, is the attitude they hate in other people. Theirs was a cheap virtue in despising the commercial success of Amy Grant or Sandi Patty; the harder work of producing something less childish than A Lament for Creativity proves to be beyond their powers.

There is something inherently unconvincing about a klatch of bureaucrats working through their talking points or obsequiously reciting their hypothetical remedies. Men who know the life of the spirit do not talk like that.

Psalmists don't yelp at the world.

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Thy loveliness oppresses all human thought and heart; and none, O peace, O Syon, can sing thee as thou art!