(Ir)religiosity

“Emergent is dead” and emergent “break-up” posts seem to be in vogue lately.  The latest round have to do with the release of Brian McLaren’s new book, A New Kind of Christianity.  In the eyes of some he’s gone way too far; for others he is finally clarifying his own positions.  I tend to fall in the latter category.  I am still a few chapters shy of finishing, but it seems to me that this book is the next logical step in the evolution of Brian’s work over time.  In other words, ten years later he is putting more substance to the wild ride he started with A New Kind of Christian.  And the result is the most cohesive and the “best ordered presentation to date of emergent theology.” That last statement has, quite frankly, pissed some people off because Brian hasn’t conformed to their expectations or notions of “orthodoxy”¹ (although I think the subtext to some of the more vitriolic reactions has to do with some built up disdain over the trajectory of the conversation for the past several years) .  Hence the eulogies and dear John letters. The problem, though, is that people had fixed expectations.  This isn’t that type of conversation.  I’m of the opinion that emergence isn’t dead, rather it is evolving and maturing.

Among the more charitable critiques are those offered by Jeremy Bouma who, along with bidding emergent goodbye, is submitting some of the thought to some much needed, though perhaps misguided, thoroughgoing theological critique.  I raised some issues on a few threads that I think are worth exploring here a bit more.

Bouma’s main issue that is that the trajectory of emergent in the past several years (he cites Doug Pagitt, Peter Rollins, and McLaren among others) has departed from “historic orthodox Christianity,” a monolith to be determined by “the rule of the faith.”  In other words, emergent fails the litmus test.  The real question, though, is what is this rule of the faith and who gets to be the arbiter of orthodoxy?  Here Bouma cites both the Nicene and Apostle’s Creed (which, for the purposes of this post, I have no qualms with) alongside his own constructive theological interpretation of them.  This is where we run into problems. Read the rest of this entry »

1. I’m not one to suggest issuing moratoriums on buzzwords, but if I were this word (along with maybe “biblical,” “scriptural” and “heretical”) would be one of them.  It has lost virtually all of its meaning and is only used as a rhetorical trump-card [↩]

If, God forbid, the internet suddenly ceased to exist today I think I would start a revolution.  I, like many of us, am very dependent on the internet.  I use it for just about everything: communication, shopping, news, reading, etc.

But other than knowing that it wasn’t invented by Al Gore and that the internet and the world wide web are not the same thing, I know next to nothing about the history and development of the internet.

So, here is a brief history of the internet, going all the way back to 1957.

(ht)