The Clarity of Ambiguity: The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 5

Conclusion

In the end, Emergents make a number of fundamental mistakes regarding the perspicuity of Scripture.  First, Emergents are certain that Scripture is uncertain.  That is paradoxical at best.  How can one deny certainty with certainty?
   
Secondly, Emergents are selective in their denial of Scripture’s perspicuity.  They are willing to consider difficult doctrines like the virgin birth and the resurrection as obscure and open to debate, but are unwilling to consider more favorable doctrines such as God’s love and Christ’s command to love their neighbor as themselves as obscure or debatable.  It seems, then, that Emergents do not deny Scripture’s certainty, rather, they adopt a selective reading, and obedience that fits well with cultural trends.
   
Thirdly, Emergents believe that they are breaking new ground and setting new paradigms bringing Christians closer together instead of farther apart, but in reality, they are only reciting the same theology of the past that has been rejected.  Emergents sound more like Erasmus and the Council of Trent than they would like to admit.  MacArthur is right when he suggests that reading Emergents, at least in this aspect, is like returning to Rome prior to the Reformation.  Like the Catholic Church of the 15th and 16th Centuries, Emergents believe that the Bible is too difficult to understand and is clouded in ambiguity and mystery.  Where the two differ, however, is that the Catholic Church affirmed the Pope’s God-given authority and insight in interpretation, but in their rejection of authority and hierarchy, Emergents declare everyone too ignorant, blind, and culturally weighed down to properly interpret the texts of Scripture.
   
So though trying to push the Church forward, they are in fact pushing Her backwards.  To read the Emergents is to read the Catholic dissenters responding to the Reformed doctrine of perspicuity.  For example, consider leading Catholic theologian Dr. Johann Maier von Eck (who famously debated Martin Luther at Leipzig) who pointed out the already present divisions within the young Reformation movement.  Eck argues that the belief in perspicuity would lead to countless divisions.  He wrote:
   
By this example, taken from the modern heretics (who reject any other judge than Scripture) is shown how the Lutherans and Oecolampadians and Zwinglians fight over the sacrament of the Eucharist . . . Who among them will be judge?  Who will ever bring them into harmony?  Scripture or the Church?  (Apart from these no other judge can be provided).  It is not indeed upon Scripture, which each contends to be the judge, that they lay their foundation – all the while in their self-same words of Scripture – and thus they do not admit Scripture as judge against their own doctrine but they make themselves judges over Scripture.  Accordingly, the Church will necessarily judge. [1]

This is exactly the same argument Emergents are making today.  Emergents are trying to transcend division, religions, and denominations.  This explains their love affair with the word “post.”  Brian McLaren has written, “Already, many people are using terms like post-Protestant, post-denominational, post-liberal, and post-conservative to express a desire to move beyond the polarization and sectarianism that have too often characterized Christians of the past.” [2] Similarly, McLaren asserts, “Ask me if Christianity (my version of it, yours, the Pope’s, whoever’s) is orthodox, meaning true, and here’s my honest answer: a little, but not yet . . . To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall . . . But we keep seeking.” [3]  To seek is to invite, to affirm and promote is too divde.  Certainty, then, divides while obscurity and mystery invite.  Thus McLaren and the rest of the Emergent Church invite through obscurity and mystery.
   
Absolute truths, statements, doctrines, and dogmas promote division and arrogance and so  Emergents reject perspicuity out of fear of being divided from others.  Thus they reject what they call Foundationalism [4] and embrace mystery and ambiguity.  Rob Bell calls this “brickianity” [5]  Bricks keep people out.  Brickians (my word) “spend a lot of time talking about how right” they are.  “Which of course leads to how wrong everybody else is.  Brick walls keep people out, a faith like a trampoline invites “people to jump on it with you.”  Bell is “far more interested in jumping than . . . in arguing about whose trampoline is better.”  Bell’s point is that since God cannot be completely known, it is dangerous to assume that “my beliefs” are right and “your beliefs” are wrong. [6]
   
In this same vein, Rollins writes:
   
The emerging church is thus able to leave aside the need for clarity and open up the way for us to accept the fact that what is important is that we are embraced by the beloved rather than finding agreement concerning how we ought to understand this beloved (as if a baby can only really love her mother if she understands her). [7]

This is straight out of the box from the Catholic Church during the Reformation.  Emergents today and Catholics in the past affirmed the ambiguity of Scripture, the unknowingness of God, and the danger of divisiveness in the Church.  The only difference, however, is the Catholic Church has given the Pope the role of the one true interpreter while Emergents reject anyone can truly know what Scripture says or means. [8]
   
In the end, what is at stake is more than just the Reformed doctrine of Sola Scriptura and the perspicuity of Scripture, but the gospel.  To have a weak Bibliology is to have a wrong Soteriology.  This is not about hermeneutics, but about the gospel.  One’s view of Scripture is a gospel issue.  So though there is great reason to be concerned regarding the clear rejection of Scripture’s perspicuity, it is imperative that the reader be reminded that this is not a mere debate about semantics and dogma, but about the gospel itself.  If Scripture is unclear then the gospel itself remains a mystery. [9]  And if the gospel is a mystery, then God help us all!


[1]  As quoted in James Patrick Callahan, The Clarity of Scripture: History, Theology, and Contemporary Literary Studies (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, 2001), 134.
[2]  Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 74.
[3]  Ibid., 333.
[4]  One Emergent book describes Foundationalism as, “In a foundationalist world, people assumed that through careful reason, logic, and research a complete structure of knowledge could be erected and mysteries could gradually be replaced with knowledge.  This knowledge would accumulate like bricks cemented on a foundation, and assuming the foundation is secure and certain, humans could have rock-solid certainty from the bottom up.  Modern secularists tended to rely only on sensory data for their “bricks,” while modern Christians mined their bricks from the Bible, which was assumed to be intended by God as a source from which propositions could be extracted.  In either case, it was assumed that knowledge was like a wall or building engineered upon an undoubtable, unshakeable foundation.”  Leonard Sweet, Brian D. McLaren, and Jerry Haselmayer, A is for Abductive: The Language of the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), 128-129.  McLaren describes Foundationalism as “the dominant metaphor of the Enlightenment project: Truth is a system of propositions, laid like bricks and cemented by logic, resting on the foundations of indubitable and self-evident truths.  And the word “resting” is significant as well: The goal of foundationalism is a kind of rest, where everything is settled, questions are answered, doubts are removed, knowledge is known.”  McLaren, More Ready Than You Realize, 129.
[5]  Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis, 28.
[6]  Ibid., 27.
[7]  Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, 18.
[8]  In his debate against Luther, for example, Erasmus stated,“since Scripture is ultimately obscure concerning a great number of matters, especially the relationship of the divine and human will, it is necessary to plead ignorance as well as appeal to the judgment of the church (and its tradition in late medieval theology) to address the question of sovereignty and freedom.”  Taken from Callahan, The Clarity of Scripture, 135.  Here we see Erasmus affirming the ambiguity of Scripture and thus the obscurity of doctrine (in this case the issue of free will) just like Emergents do today.  However, note how Erasmus takes such ambiguity and places his trust in the gift of the Papacy who determines what is true and right doctrine.
[9]  McLaren has written, “Bona fide evangelicals are suggesting that the gospel is not atonement-centered, or, at least, not penal-substitutionary-atonement-centered . . . This suggestion represents a Copernican revolution for Western Christianity, in both its conservative Catholic and Protestant forms.  It may be judged erroneous – and likely will be judged so by many readers of this paper – but even those who dismiss it would be wise to consider the possibility that there is at least some small grain of truth to these ruminations on the nature and center of the gospel.  A lot is at stake either way . . . For reasons I have detailed elsewhere, I have put my eggs in the basket that suggests we need to rethink our understanding of the gospel – both for the sake of faithfulness to Holy Scripture, and for the sake of mission in the merging postmodern culture.”  Brian McLaren, “A Radical Rethinking of Our Evangelistic Strategy,” Theology, News, & Notes (Fall 2004), 6.

Tony Jones has also tweeted, “If you need a theory to worship Christ, worship your %&*$ing theory.”


The Clarity of Ambiguity: The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 1
The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 2 
The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 3 
The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 4 



For more:
Theology -  Thesis: Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology: From Cultural Accommodation to the Social Gospel
Theology - The Real Divide:  Luther, the Reformation, and the Fight Over Perspicuity - Part 1
Theology - The Real Divide:  Luther, the Reformation, and the Fight Over Perspicuity - Part 2
Theology - The Real Divide:  Luther, the Reformation, and the Fight Over Perspicuity - Part 3
Theology - The Real Divide:  Luther, the Reformation, and the Fight Over Perspicuity - Part 4
Theology - The Real Divide:  Luther, the Reformation, and the Fight Over Perspicuity - Part 5
Theology - The Real Divide:  Luther, the Reformation, and the Fight Over Perspicuity - Part 6