The New Christians

Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

Tony Jones

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781506454955
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506454962
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

What the emergent church movement is all about and why it matters to the future of Christianity

Following on the questions raised by Brian McLaren in A New Kind of Christian, Tony Jones has written an engaging exploration of what this new kind of Christianity looks like. Writing dispatches about the thinking and practices of adventurous emergent Christians across the country, he offers an in-depth view of this new "third way" of faith--its origins, its theology, its views of truth, Scripture, and interpretation, and its hopeful and life-giving sense of community. With the depth of theological expertise and broad perspective he has gained as a pastor, writer, and leader of the movement, Jones initiates readers into the emergent conversation and offers a new way forward for Christians in a post-Christian world. With journalistic narrative as well as authoritative reflection, he draws upon on-site research to provide fascinating examples and firsthand stories of who is doing what, where, and why it matters.

Chapter 4

THE THEOLOGY, STUPID

If ever there’s been a political strategist who burns away the dross of political verbiage and applies the ‘‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’’ principle, it’s James Carville. Working for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, Carville penned a haiku and pinned it to the wall in the campaign’s Little Rock headquarters:

Change vs. more of the same
The economy, stupid
Don’t forget health care.

Since then, the middle line of Carville’s poem has been often adapted and is culturally ubiquitous.

Carville was right, of course. Despite political bloviations about cultural and moral issues, most Americans vote according to what they think will benefit them most financially. The economy—both the national economy and the household economy—determines many elections, including Clinton’s 1992 victory.

Similarly, despite all of the talk about worship styles in the emergent church—the return of ancient, Celtic prayers; the grungy music; the dialogical sermons— it’s really the theology underneath the styles that is most important and provocative. Indeed, the emergent innovations in worship rarely raise an eyebrow among the critics. What’s really intriguing about emergent Christianity? The theology.

For several years now, two camps have formed in the movement. Among some who are emerging, the methods of Christianity have become irrelevant, and they must change. But for this group, the message of the gospel is unchanging—it’s been figured out, once and for all, never to be reconsidered.

But to another group, the methods and the message of Christianity are bound to be reconceived over time. Indeed, if one changes the methods, one will inevitably change the message.

Another way of saying this is that the Christian gospel is always enculturated, always articulated by a certain people in a certain time and place. To try to freeze one particular articulation of the gospel, to make it timeless and universally applicable, actually does an injustice to the gospel. This goes to the very heart of what emergent is and of how emergent Christians are attempting to chart a course for following Jesus in the postmodern, globalized, pluralized world of the twenty-first century.

So while the excurses into philosophy and theology that follow may seem far afield from what instigated the new, emergent Christianity, they actually drive to the very heart of the phenomenon. Now, please allow me to introduce this discussion by telling a bit of my own story.

DARTMOUTH DAYS

I don’t know if they ever said it outright while I was in Campus Crusade for Christ in college, but the implication was there, and I didn’t have to dig very deep to get at it: Jesus’ Second Coming was predicated on me. Well, actually, on us. Our little band of fifty or so undergrads at Dartmouth College, along with our peers at campuses around the country, had a monumental task: to ‘‘tell the entire world about Jesus.’’

To that end, we knocked on the dorm doors after our regular ‘‘MnM’’ (Monday Night Meeting). We were expected to give money to the mission of Crusade and to spend our spring breaks doing evangelism in Panama City, Florida. We would play ‘‘slow-motion football’’ on the beach in order to attract a crowd; once the crowd had gathered, a player (at regular speed) would shout, ‘‘Thanks for watching our game! We want to tell you about someone!’’ Then the unsuspecting crowd would realize that about one out of every four crowd members was actually a plant, with an ample supply of tracts tucked into their appropriately conservative swimsuits. Some would flee, but others would stick around for the ten-minute presentation of the gospel. I don’t know whether they stayed primarily due to social convention or out of true spiritual curiosity. It didn’t matter.

We were also expected to seriously consider joining the Crusade staff upon graduation and go, as the Crusaders would have it, to the far corners of the earth and show the JESUS film on a bedsheet stretched between two trees to half-naked bushmen who had never seen a white man before. If it turned out that God hadn’t called me to be a missionary in Burundi, I was expected to support heartily (meaning financially) those who were.

I was in college in the late 1980s, so the millennium was breathing down our necks. ‘‘One billion new Christians by 2000’’ was the oft-trumpeted refrain.^[1] Of course, there are over two billion Christians in the world, but since half of those—Roman Catholics— weren’t considered ‘‘saved’’ by Crusaders, and lots of others—the Orthodox and the mainline Protestants—were probably not really ‘‘believers,’’^[2] there were actually far fewer than one billion of ‘‘us’’ in the world. The rabidity with which the Crusaders pursued evangelism was not the result of a desire to expand the commercial Christian empire, as one might suspect. (Bill Bright, the founder of Crusade was, by all accounts, a financially modest individual.) It was, instead, the result of this theological axiom: When everyone on the planet has heard the salvation message, Jesus will return.

This belief comes primarily from a verse in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. There Jesus is recorded as giving a fairly horrifying account of the ‘‘end of the age’’: wars, famine, earthquakes, persecutions, false messiahs, and ‘‘love grown cold.’’ Amid this chapter-long harangue, Jesus says, ‘‘And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.’’

Like many things in the Bible, it seems simple at first: an if A, then B proposition. If we preach the gospel to the whole world, then the end of the age will come. But a little reflection reveals more complexity. First of all, the exact nature of the ‘‘gospel of the kingdom’’ is a source of much debate among Christians; while some relate it forensically to the atonement (which is hard to imagine, since Jesus says these things before he was executed), others consider it closer to Jesus’ proclamation of the ‘‘year of the Lord’s favor’’ in Luke 4, harking back to the Israelite custom of releasing all slaves and forgiving all debts every fifty years. Further, this passage is not a conditional in Greek. That is, in Greek, it is not constructed as an if-then statement. Instead, the verb preach is in the future passive tense (will be preached or will have been preached ), and the verb come is in the future tense (will come). Although the original Greek lacks punctuation, we might punctuate it thusly: ‘‘And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations. And the end will come.’’ In other words, these two things will happen, but the latter is not necessarily contingent on the former. And to add to the complexity, we don’t know exactly how Jesus said it in his own language, Aramaic.

But most significantly, Jesus is talking about the immediate circumstances of the disciples, not about evangelism techniques two millennia hence. The entire passage is couched in the language of the here and now. Jesus is looking his closest followers in the eye and saying, ‘‘Many will come in my name—watch out that you not be deceived You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed… . You will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me ’’ Most biblical scholars— evangelical, mainline, and Catholic—agree that these sayings of Jesus presage events that took place before or during AD. 70, the year that the Roman emperor Titus sacked and destroyed Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.^[3] In other words, as Jesus concludes his predictions, these things would all happen within the disciples’ lifetimes: ‘‘I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.’’

And finally, ‘‘the world’’ to which the gospel would be preached was not the planet Earth. The only ‘‘world’’ known to Jesus was the Roman Empire and its peripheral trading partners —large, to be sure, but not nearly the scope of our world today.^[4]

But these grammatical and theological subtleties made little difference to the Crusaders. Nor did the verses just down the page in which Jesus makes it clear that no one, neither humans nor angels nor even the Son, can know the time of the end—only the Father knows.

But it didn’t escape the notice of the Crusaders that Jesus doesn’t say that all nations must accept the gospel of the kingdom, just that they must have it preached at them. What this bred was a new fashion of efficiency in the dissemination of the gospel— our ten-minute guerrilla evangelism dorm sessions and the JESUS film are good examples. The film’s Web site (http://www.jesusfilm.org) boasts that it has been translated into over one thousand languages and shown to over five and a half billion persons. It has resulted in more than two hundred million ‘‘decisions to follow Christ’’ (‘‘decisions recorded only at live screenings’’), but of course, decisions aren’t necessarily the point in the Crusader calculus. The point is to get it out and show it to every tribe and tongue so that Jesus will come back.

Here’s the major theological flaw with this kind of thinking: it makes the assumption that the activity of God is contingent on the activity of humans, while the biblical narrative seems to indicate that God acts independently of us. God is not likely sitting on a lofty perch, looking down on the earth and saying, ‘‘Well, I’d like to come back, but I can’t until the gospel is preached in all the world.’’

A similar defect afflicts the so-called dispensational view of the end-time made popular in the 1970s by Hal Lindsey in The Late Great Planet Earth and more recently by the jejune Left Behind novels. These propose the dubious theology that the world is going to get worse and worse and worse until it gets so bad that God has to intervene (but not before God whisks away all of the Christians and lets the rest of humankind rot in a satanic hell for seven years).

Again, the problem is that these theologies ultimately make God subservient to human beings— God is incapable of getting involved until we preach to all the nations, in the one case, or until the world is beyond redemption, in the other. Like the billboard I see every time I drive up to Brainerd, Minnesota, inscribed ‘‘Unless We Confess, God Cannot Bless,’’ it requires the activity of the Creator to hinge on the activity of the creation, specifically on humans.

But God is a being whose activity is, by definition, not contingent. God can forgive whomever God wants to forgive, whether or not the forgiven person has adequately confessed his or her sins. And God can return whenever God pleases. In fact, classical theism posits that God is the one ‘‘necessary being’’ in the cosmos— all others (including humans) are ‘‘contingent beings.’’^[5] That is, our existence is contingent on God’s existence. That’s why it’s so farfetched to manufacture a God who’s handcuffed until our ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More Praise for The New Christians
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• A Living Way Emergent Vision
• Preface to the 10th Anniversary Edition of The New Christians
• Preface to the First Edition
• Introduction: What Is ‘‘Emergent’’?
• Epigraphs
• Leaving the Old Country
• Dispatches from the Frontier of the American Church
• Who Are the Emergent Christians?
• The Theology, Stupid
• After Objectivity: Beautiful Truth
• Inside the Emergent Church
• Epilogue: Feral Christians
• Notes
• Appendices
• Acknowledgments
• The Author
• Index