A Meeting Place for Those Who Aren't Afraid of the Border

About this time last year, I was working on an essay about the parallels between the modernist-fundamentalist controversy at the turn of the 20th century and the “emergent” brouhaha of today. Thought I’d share parts of that (never-fully-finished) essay with you:

When we look back at the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, we can find too many instances of uncharitable language and unnecessary exclusion. The great danger of differentiation is that one might develop a taste for it. But an equally great danger lies on the side of undifferentiated inclusion. Political parties can afford a big tent philosophy. After all, they are concerned with winning elections. But the Truth of our faith is not a matter of ballot boxes. We are not unified by common pragmatic ends for the world, but by common confessions of God’s work in the world.

I have no doubt that both Modernists and Fundamentalists wanted to do good things in culture. This fact has too often been overlooked. But wanting to do good things really isn’t the touchstone of orthodoxy. What separated the Fundamentalists from the Liberals was that Fundamentalists said social action guided by ancient wisdom was not enough.

You see, the liberals of the early 20th century decided it was “enough” to care about the world and the betterment of humankind. When the historical accounts of Scripture came to be an embarrassment, they were comfortable embracing the moral instructions. For them, it was “enough” to accept the teachings of Jesus. It was “enough” to view His Return as a symbol of hope. It was “enough,” for some, to view his Resurrection as a beautiful metaphor of the emerging body of believers with the message of compassion, hope and love that could transform the world (aided, of course, by the powerful right arm of Enlightenment science).

The liberals of the 21st century seem to be treading a similar path. While the voices of the Emergent Church have hailed postmodernism as a tonic to Enlightenment obsession with things like “proof,” “fact,” and “objective,” they have, I fear, failed to grasp the modern that follows the post. Today’s pop-culture power-brokers are no less convinced than their modernist forebears that things like Virgin Births and Resurrections and Garden of Edens don’t really happen. And they are just as willing to give Christians a “place at the table” if we spiritualize these historical events, sign their social contract and shut up about things like exclusive truth confessions.

And, so it seems, the 21st century liberals are playing ball. Where the doctrine of inerrancy might raise the red flags of ideological pluralists, they pretend the issue is a time-bound shibboleth. Where the doctrine of the Virgin Birth might call for seemingly naïve disregard for the “advances” of modern biblical criticism, they privatize the event as a matter of personal belief and allow others to keep jumping on the trampoline of faith. Where the doctrine of substitutionary atonement offends feminist interpreters, they limit Christ’s sufferings to the imperial forces of Rome rather than the just wrath of God. And where the doctrine of Christ’s return to usher in a new heavens and new earth might suggest environmental escapism, they minimize eternal issues and maximize our capacity to remake the planet.

Like the liberals of the early 20th century, the New Liberals are in the business of redefining the Gospel. With an incredible capacity for selective reading (of both history and Scripture), they have distilled the “secret message of Jesus” into a new elixir that, surprisingly, matches the our dominant cultural draught exactly.