It might be wondered if it is quite fair to characterize Emergence by quoting an airhead like Tim Soerens. We might be asked if Soerens wouldn't make a better poster child for ADD/ADHD than for a philosophical or theological school of thought.

We all know that if we had been told to write a definition of Romanticism and we handed in a slip of paper reporting that Romanticism came after Classicism, that Classicism appealed to ideal forms and concerned itself with order, balance, proportion...and then if we coughed up some extremely vague platitude about "the myth of" order, balance and proportion so as to suggest that Romanticism didn't have its own sense of order, balance and proportion, we would know exactly what kind of grade to expect.

So, getting back to my question, could we not be accused of finding the least credible proponent of emergence?

It's an intriguing thought, but I don't believe that case really could be made convincingly; not after the swashbuckling ignorance of guys like Mike Morrell, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and Tim King.

Let's take the case of Brian D. McLaren. Here is Brian posing the first of ten questions. Bear in mind that this is not a lecture or even a conversation, this is an episode. An episode with a sweepstake! It is an advertisement; it is a marketing device. In fact McLaren's blog is nothing but a marketing device.

(It's really all about gimmicks. It has always been about gimmicks. Gimmicks like Trucker Frank, the Church Basement Roadshow, the couches, the finger-painting, those daffy Sparkhouse chatterboxes, and that post-modern documentary video shot, presumably, for a basket-weaving class at Mars Hill Graduate School.)

In this episode coal cars are rolling along the horizon as Brian, standing appropriately among piles of organic material, introduces us to his first cage-rattling question: What is the Shape of the Biblical Narrative? Brian's complaint is that we don't understand the shape of the biblical narrative. According to this freelance dolt, we see Jesus only through St. Paul, St. Paul through Augustine, Augustine through Aquinas, Aquinas through Luther, Luther through Wesley, Wesley through Calvin, and Calvin through Hinn. Brian thinks we need to discover the real narrative of the Bible. He thinks we can hopscotch our way back to Abraham and "the Jewish narrative into which Jesus comes".

I hope you can appreciate the scope of McLaren's lunacy.

First the obvious falsehoods: we do not see Jesus only through St. Paul; we see him through Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, James, Jude, the author of Hebrews.... Likewise, we do not see St. Paul only through Augustine and we do not see Augustine only through Aquinas.... Brian McLaren might have learned this if he ever went to seminary. And Brian's oversimplification will make sense only to other seriously uneducated people. The shape of the biblical narrative is far more complicated, far more elaborate, and far more interfused than Brian can tell you.

Some of us understood this complexity a long time ago, and that's why we bothered to study Greek, Hebrew, Church history and systematic theology. We knew there would be disputes over texts, we knew there would be disagreements between theologians, and we knew there would be conflicts in our approaches to doctrine. We are not the ones who need to be told that our theology comes to us mediated by Prophets, Apostles, Evangelists, Fathers and Doctors, and Brian McLaren is not qualified to tell anyone which of our beliefs are assumptions and which are reasoned conclusions and which are inspired revelations.

Second, it is hilarious that the man who wishes to understand the shape of the Biblical narrative by going back to Abraham can't even read the language. I'm all for going back to Abraham, Moses, David, and Isaiah to understand the shape of the Biblical narrative. In fact I've recommended highly the work of Robert Alter for just that purpose. Who will be making the more preposterous assumptions about the shape of the Biblical narrative, Alter (who translated the entire Pentateuch) or McLaren? Is McLaren even able to draw all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet?

A significant pronoun begins this statement by McLaren:

We bring an assumption about what the big story is about. If we are willing to loosen up on those assumptions and let the Bible itself generate a narrative for us, I think what that will do is open up immense new territory for us.

The truth is that we all bring some assumptions. All we can do is work to eliminate as many assumptions as possible and draw as many reasonable conclusions as possible. Brian McLaren is dismissive of that work.

What this emergent episode tries to do is suggest that there is no difference between what Alter does and what McLaren does. Emergence is the superstition that what uneducated people do on couches can produce a useful understanding the shape of the Biblical narrative.

One begins to appreciate Mr. Pye's sentiment if not his choice of words.