I was asked to revisit an idea that came up in a recent comment. A reader entirely innocently, and even to a point quite rightly, compared Emergents to Liberals. There are very good reasons to make that comparison, and I would even say that at some points it is commendable to make those similarities explicit.

Unfortunately similarity is not identity. It is clear that Emergents have pitched their tent toward Liberalism; there is a traceable lineage and a recognizable attitude that I'm not eager to dismiss. So if someone says, or if you have ever said, that Emergence is repackaged or renovated Liberalism, that doesn't land you in the sin bin. I would say we have no quarrel worth mentioning.

By the same token there are some pretty drastic differences between Emergence and Liberalism. Differences that should not be lost in the shuffle or we will handicap our own efforts at understanding.

To those who will still think this is an unproductive quibble, consider the profound differences between the Emergence and Liberalism.

It is true that Emergence and Liberalism have a similar contempt for Scripture, but recall that Liberals wanted to retain the moral essence of the Gospel even as they eviscerated the writings of the Evangelists. They were wrong, of course, and they failed. But what they failed at was preserving a religious sensibility during the collapse of a worldview. Who looks to Emergence to preserve a worldview? What worldview could survive deconstruction?

Some Liberals were devout men. Don't take my word for this: I didn't know them. But J. Gresham Machen knew them, studied under them, and had the utmost respect for some of them. Emergence hasn't produced any such people.

As for sympathies with the Enlightenment or appreciation of reason, listen to Jones and Pagitt on the topic of Plato. You will choke with laughter.

Liberals were nothing like Emergents. They didn't cuss like sailors, they didn't get pierced and tattooed like aborigines, they spoke the language of the church and they understood its symbols. They had a culture. They were not hell-bent on destroying Western virtues and they didn't offer us doggerel as liturgy.

Emergents don't want to preserve a moral essence at all; they want to impose a political agenda. Look at the leftist activist agenda that defines the McLaren and Jones blogs.

And we may call a Hindu squatting beside the Ganges devout; no one calls an Emergent devout. An Emergent is committed. And the only use Emergence has for the fruits of the Spirit is as a counter-accusation.

Emergents have nothing but contempt for any religious sensibility. They flaunt their contempt for and ignorance of culture. Emergents celebrate the destruction of all moral constraints, even those acceptable in secular society and in foreign religions. They clearly have no use for education except to gain social status.

Why is this important? Is this quibble worth the trouble? It may not be, as I called it, a quarrel worth mentioning, but it may nevertheless be a distinction worth maintaining.

I think it is. I think so because of the obvious difference between people who preserve religious sensibilities and those who destroy them. People who want to maintain the moral essence of a religion are better than those who don't. People who want to inculcate moral sensibilities are superior to those who merely push a temporal and carnal agenda. Respect for culture is good and contempt for culture is perverse.

The difference between these things does not get you into Heaven or keep you out, but real Christians are interested in more than getting people into Heaven; there is a long list of good things the church ought to be preserving while it evangelizes the world. People who read the New Testament respectfully have picked up on that fact.

For thousands of years, actually.

I think these things are especially important because of our times. We live with people who can't define anything. We cannot distinguish between different things; we cannot compare like things.

Movements cannot declare their beliefs. Fundamentalism cannot define itself, and Evangelicalism is a totally useless word: if you use it you have to tell people what you mean and what you don't mean. What does justice mean any more? One Emergent told us justice means not flushing a toilet! What does holiness mean? What is Art? What is worship? How do we provide community? What is the eschaton? What is the meaning of the Incarnation? What is the Christian hope?

I do think that the first step toward reform is to recover the habit of using the right words to say the right things. If we had a fixed, common understanding of any of those italicized words in the previous paragraph, no one would be giving Emergence a second look.

As it now is, these words have only tribal definitions, and that is the confusion we cannot encourage.