Emerging Church Versus Liberalism and Fundamentalism: The Great Misunderstanding
Knight's post caught my attention. In it, he says, quoting the Dunbar piece:
"Dunbar encouragingly writes, '[Emergent leaders] are quite explicit in their agenda to find a middle way between what they regard as the extremes of the 20th century church: liberalism and fundamentalism. Both ‘isms’ were responses to modernity—and postmodernity has undermined both. ... I think what the emergents desire is possible and I hope they will succeed. At this point the signals are mixed.'”
There may, in fact, be some Emergent leaders who are trying to find a middle ground between Christian liberalism and fundamentalism. But in most respects, I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on here.
You see, Dunbar was partly right by saying that both liberalism and fundamentalism were "responses to modernity." I don't think they were responses to modernity, per se, but rather the natural consequences of modernity. Both, sometimes overtly, sometimes unwittingly, are rooted firmly in and utilize the tools of the overall modernist package. Both produce a semi-Deist vision of God, with liberalism saying that its our job to do God's will for Him here on earth, while fundamentalism asserts that it is our job to escape this wicked world and to go off to be with God in that distant place where he resides. Both embrace the tools of rational, objective inquiry, but with differing results. In shorthand terms, both -isms constitute the opposite poles of the modernist spectrum, and feed off one another by focusing an inordinate amount of energy assessing and battling the perceived evils of the other pole.
The Emergent movement, at its best and clearest, does not seek to find "a middle way" between these two poles. The "middle way," in that picture, would be a kind of moderate modernism. That's not, I think, where this movement is headed. Postmodernity did, like Dunbar suggests, undermine both of these -isms, but it did more than that. It undermined the modernist foundations on which they were largely based.
The way forward, then, is not in between liberalism and fundamentalism but, embracing the postmodern critique of the modernism on which they stood, through it and out the other side. From death to new life. On a new plane altogether, as McLaren's Nero would say (at least before McLaren turned militant Anabaptist).
The concept of a "middle road," a metaphor for tolerance, is itself a modernist concept. It is low-grade parody of love, of agape. There should be no "middle way" sought, in my humble opinion, but a new way, out of the ashes of modernity, and the ugly twin step-sisters that it generated, to new life beyond the grave.
And that new life, that post-postmodernity, will, God willing, put behind it the stale objective/subjective dichotomy that characterized much of modernity's analysis and move toward a new epistemology, a new theological vision, one that is immune to the postmodern critique, because it is based in agape, in self-giving love. It will be immune to the postmodern critique because it embraces a Jesus-shaped view of "power," such it seeks truth not to oppress, but to love.
Imagine a Christianity that postmodernity can no longer critique.
Imagine that.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
But is the cycle such that a Christianity immune to one critique will become subject of a new critique once postmodernism is as old as modernism? It seems that fundamentalism and conservatism are two responses to the modernist critique that became immune (one by rejecting all things enlightenment, science, etc. and the other by embracing it). But now while perhaps immune to modernism, post-modernism will, like you said, shatter their foundation. Great blog!