The New Christians: Reflection #2

I have been so busy responding to other posts, that I hadn’t written a second reflection on The New Christians yet. So here you go.

Ton’s book is full of creative metaphors, stories, and allegories that help illustrate the concepts he is explaining. One of the ones I have been chewing on for a couple of weeks is the metaphor of the gospel as lava. The metaphor comes in a response to many of the criticisms emergents have received, such as: emergent is the new liberalism, it is anti-intellectual, it is faddish evangelicalism for cynics, and it is too connected and influenced by postmodern philosophers.

Tony writes, “Each of these criticisms has merit, but the emergents are a tough group to pin down. The gospel is a destabilizing force, emergents respond, an inexorable movement of God, and this make for unusual bedfellows. The gospel of God’s uncompromising love for human beings and all of creation, incarnated most perfectly in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, is just as predictable as the wild-eyed Messiah himself was.  Jesus refused to be domesticated by the cultural, political, and theological forces of his day.”

Thus this gospel from Jesus, this destabilizing force, is something that we may try to domesticate or tame down, but it can not. It is like lava: no matter how much crust has formed over it, it will always find a weak point and burst through.

Tony points to other moments where the gospel broke through our attempts to tame it down and control it through institutions and highlights those who surfed the lava of God’s love breaking through. Some of these include Augustine, St. Francis, Aquinas, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Martin Luther, and John Calvin.

In each of these examples, the overwhelming power and truth of God’s love displayed in the gospel burst forth from our attempts to control it and launched a new awakening of the gospel within the church.

So, if we accept that there is merit to this metaphor (and it is only a metaphor so it invariably breaks down at some point) the question for us to consider is, “Is the emerging church a new occurrence of the gospel breaking forth through layers of crust the modern church has built?”

To answer that, we need to first examine what some of the layers of crust might be. We need to start with institutions.

How have the modern institutions of the church tamed down the gospel or crusted it over?

How effectively do bureaucracy and the gospel go together?

Have the teachings of the Enlightenment shaped our understanding of the Gospel in such a way as to change or limit the gospel?

How can we effectively know when the gospel is breaking through our layers of crust and bringing about a new movement of God? What are the ways we evaluate such a bursting forth?

That should keep us going for while…