Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation

Chapter 4: Resisters

84 Chapter 4 Resisters Christians must outthink the world for Christ! —Douglas Groothuis, “Outthinking the World for Christ: The Mission of Denver Seminary’s Philosophy of Religion Program” La Mirada, California When we heard about the conference that placed two of our types in direct contact with each other, we thought it was too good to be true. We would be able to see how representatives of our Innovators and our Resisters interacted with each other, in particular how they framed what they each saw as the important issues currently facing the church. This was a one-day conference sponsored by Talbot Seminary, and promoted as a “conversation with the emerging church.” The brochure listed as “leading the conversation” several faculty members from the school, along with several representatives of the emerging church movement and scholars who had been both studying and working with leaders from the emerging church movement. As listed in the brochure and the online announcement, the goal of the conference was to “partner” with the emerging church movement and to “help them with their theological paradigm.” The format was to be driven by several questions, such as, “What does it mean to be an ‘Emerging Church’? What is it emerging from and where does it want to go? Is this something we want to participate in? Chap-04.qxd 11/13/07 8:55 AM Page 84 Resisters 85 Are there things we should recognize and embrace? Are there things we should avoid? What honest critique might be helpful ?” Clearly this was going to be an eventful and interesting day of dialogue. Organizing the conference around the idea of a “conversation ” meant pairing a representative of the emerging church movement and a Talbot professor, with each addressing the same issue from their particular point of view. The topics included “Setting the Cultural Stage,” “Describing the Emerging Church,” “Conversations on Community,” “Conversations on Worship,” “Conversations on Homiletics,” and “Conversations on Postmodern Theology/Epistemology.” The first set of conversation partners were Robert Webber, a theologian who had written several books that have influenced leaders in the emerging church (see Webber 1999; 2002),1 and a Talbot philosopher, Garrett DeWeese, who had written a couple of short articles that were highly critical of what he saw as the postmodern tendencies of the emerging church movement. The “conversation” between Webber and DeWeese set the tone for the rest of the day. Webber spoke first and in story form—in keeping with the Emergent emphasis on narrative and story—using his own life experiences to illustrate his points, talking about various culture changes, most importantly how culture has moved away from propositional/foundationalist knowledge claims, and framing his own personal spiritual journey as an example of moving from a foundationalist epistemology and rationalist theology to a narrative and relational theological perspective. DeWeese, his conversation partner, then proceeded to essentially read from one of the articles he had published three years before (DeWeese 2002), completely ignoring Webber’s narrative presentation, while arguing that if the emerging church movement was compared to the 1960s and the Jesus movement—which he had apparently lived through and been involved with—then we’ve see all this before, there is Chap-04.qxd 11/13/07 8:55 AM Page 85 F i n d i n g F a i t h 86 nothing new in the emerging church, and what might be new is dangerously postmodern. The rest of the day followed that same pattern. The conference convener would announce each set of speakers, with the introduction of each Talbot speaker including all their academic qualifications, including a listing of their books and articles, thus establishing their academic and theological credentials, and presumably their authority in the conversation. We were constantly being reminded through this ritual introduction that these were the people who were going to “help” the emerging church with their “theological paradigm,” which, based on the introductions alone, suggested that they had the authority to critique and to correct the emerging church representatives. Further, just as with Webber and DeWeese, there seemed to be two separate conversations going on during nearly every presentation. First, a Talbot faculty member would get up and read his paper, each of which was an effort to set what he saw as appropriate boundaries for acceptable belief and practice, and then the emerging church representative would get up and essentially say, “Well, that’s interesting...