I agree with D. A. Carson’s assessment: one positive contribution of the Emergent Church is their desire to present an authentic Christianity that moves beyond a formal religious faith. This desire has lead many Emergent leaders to see the problems with nineteenth and twentieth-century evangelicalism and seek to offer something with more integrity.

Ref 21 Editors’ Note: We continue our monthly series of classic reformation21 articles with this 2005 piece by Dr. Jeffrey Jue.

In 2001, I returned from studying in Britain and landed a teaching position in Washington, D.C. My transition to the metro D.C. area was eased greatly by an old friend whom I had not seen in five years since his seminary graduation from Dallas Theological Seminary. He was a fresh, young, newl-ywed youth minister, ready to tackle the challenging demands of pastoral ministry. Like the majority of DTS graduates, my friend was theologically precise, socially conservative, and winsomely evangelical.

Five years later the clean-cut youth pastor now sported a fashionable goatee, had shed the “traditional” ministry career track in favor of opportunities which he described as “out of the box”, and was fascinated by progressive theologians wrestling with the ideological challenges of postmodernity. My friend had undergone a radical transformation and what emerged was my first confrontation with a self-conscious postmodern Christian. His experience, like many others, was an awakening stirred by the unassailable effects of a massive intellectual and cultural paradigm shift.

The Emergent Phenomenon

Postmodernity began as an intellectual discussion reserved for the halls of the academy.(1) Yet in the past decade we have seen it trickle down to more popular levels, including the evangelical church. Carl Raschke claims that the result of this trickle down effect has left evangelicalism in a state of crisis. Evangelicalism is facing “an intellectual challenge of a magnitude it had never before confronted”.(2)

The crisis has impacted many evangelical pastors, like my friend, who count themselves among a growing number of pastors/para-church workers/scholars/writers who are convinced that the evangelical church is ill equipped to handle the challenge of postmodernity. In response, these church leaders are attempting to address this challenge with a new Christianity, suited for the postmodern environment. D.A. Carson writes, “At the heart of the ‘movement’–or as some of its leaders prefer to call it, the ‘conversation’–lies the conviction that changes in the culture signal that a new church is “emerging.”‘(3) As Carson goes on to describe, the “emerging” or “emergent” movement connotes something which is connected with what preceded it, yet fully engaged with the progress of the present.(4)

What impact is the Emerging Church having? This is the question that inspired the recent cover articles of many prominent evangelical magazines.(5) The Emerging Church is undeniably a voice gaining great attention.(6) The most recognized Emergent pastor, Brian McLaren, was named one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America by TIME magazine.(7) Likewise the plethora of Emergent publications – including internet websites – is generating a phenomena that is beyond the infant stage. As in the case of all new movements, careful evaluation must follow.

Church History and the Postmodern Reader

The purpose of this article is not to provide a comprehensive critique of the Emergent Church.(8) Instead I would like to give a somewhat narrowly focused evaluation from the perspective of a historian and then offer some suggestions from church history to help address some of the concerns expressed by Emergent leaders.

At first it may seem misplaced to invoke a primarily retrospective discipline while commenting on an extremely prospective movement. Moreover, some readers might be anticipating a predictable traditionalist critique that eschews anything progressive. After all, the Emergent Church, like all postmodern thinkers, is attempting to move beyond the past and discard the shackles of modernity.(9) While many within this movement prefer to engage current issues or anticipate future challenges, the motivation for insisting upon a “new Christianity” is deeply historical.

Postmoderns agree that the age of modernity is declining and with it many of the modern assumptions, convictions, and propositions. All of the Emergent leaders insist upon this historical periodization between modern and postmodern as a necessary starting point from which to evaluate the Christian message and practice, and reformulate a Christian faith that is suitable for the postmodern culture. As a result, the Emergent Church claims that many of the so-called “modern” Christian distinctions are no longer appropriate.(10) According to McLaren, modern distinctions that separated Charismatics from non-Charismatics, Arminians from Calvinists, Liberals from Conservative Christians, and even Protestants from Roman Catholics must be revised in favor of a more generous orthodoxy.(11) Those in the Emerging Church advocate an orthodoxy that is not entrapped by the assumptions of modernity that were tainted by the rationalism of the Enlightenment.(12)

We must be careful at this point to describe the Emergent Church accurately. They are not suggesting that Christianity has no positive historical roots or that the form of Christianity needed to address the postmodern culture must be constructed de novo. In fact, certain leaders are returning to the “ancient faith and practices” for Christian examples which pre-date modernity. Thus, some writers are deeply interested in the history of the Church Fathers and Medieval Christianity.(13) It is difficult to argue against the premise that the study of history has played a crucial role in the intellectual formation of the Emergent Church. In his book A Generous Orthodoxy, McLaren writes:

My quarrel with accumulating orthodoxy does not mean I advocate a “know-nothing” approach to church history. The very opposite is the case. The orthodoxy explored in this book invites as never before to study not only the history of the church, but also the history of writing the church’s history (14).

As a historian this quote excites me. I believe that understanding church history is vitally important for today’s Church; and likewise the responsible method of studying church history is to examine judiciously both the primary and secondary sources. However, it is on this very point that McLaren, and many other Emergent thinkers, fail to follow their own suggestion.

Earlier we described the Emerging Church’s attempt to move beyond the era of modernity and many of the theological polemics associated with that period. Again, modernity is characterized by rationalism, primarily exemplified by the Enlightenment, which postmodernity now questions. When did this period begin? Many Emergent thinkers date the beginning of modernity with either the sixteenth or seventeenth century.(15)

Consequently, the Protestant theology of the Reformers, and the Roman Catholic theology affirmed by the Council of Trent were both modern constructions. I am confident that Roman Catholic historical theologians would protest this description; and I will let them defend their tradition. But it is historically irresponsible to claim that the Protestant Reformers believed that human reason and science were the sole means to obtaining absolute truth and certainty.(16) This is a claim that must, at the very least, engage the substantial scholarly work of Reformation historians who have given us a much more complex and nuanced history of Protestant Christianity.

Reading about the history of the church does matter. Although many Emergent leaders recognize the value of this and consider the study of church history fundamental for understanding the present culture, they have not moved beyond a superficial reading. To be fair, one could argue that I have taken McLaren’s statements out of context. His point is that we should study church history as well as how church history has been written, because he recognizes that all historians have biases. He is concerned with many who have written about the past in light of their present convictions, and thereby confirm the old adage: “those who win the battles write the history”.(17)

Again, on this point I have no quibble with McLaren. But how do we assess historians’ biases? To answer this question we need to place the historians and their work in a historiographical context. Following this approach reveals an interesting intersection where the seemingly divergent paths of Reformation historical studies and the Emergent church surprisingly cross.

History and Those Who Write It

By the early twentieth century scholars committed to a neo-orthodox agenda dominated Reformation studies.(18) These scholars attempted to read the writings of the Reformation through their neo-orthodox theological lens.19 The result was a reconstruction of Reformation theology that resembled certain neo-orthodox assumptions concerning revelation, Scripture, and the central function of Christology.(20) Likewise, this historiographical approach erected a divide between the untainted theology of the early sixteenth-century Reformers and the rationalistic theological systems of the seventeenth-century Protestant scholastics.

Ostensibly Calvin’s theology was lauded, but Calvinism (as perpetuated by men like Theodore Beza, William Perkins, John Owen and Francis Turretin) was denigrated.(21) At this point one might notice that this neo-orthodox historiography is very similar to the postmodern periodization. Neo-orthodox historians and Emergent leaders place the blame on the seventeenth-century as the precise historical moment when Christian theology was corrupted by the rationalism of modernity.

The implications of this historical analysis are staggering for today’s evangelicals. If the Reformation and post-Reformation signal the beginning of modernity, and postmodernity questions the modern intellectual and cultural assumptions, then one could argue that the theological heritage of the Reformation is obsolete.(22) What do we do now with the confessional standards of our churches which were written in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How do we assess the continual ecumenical dialogue between Protestants and Roman Catholics or any other post-sixteenth-century division? This historical analysis potentially calls for a complete postmodern revision of Protestant theology as we know it.(23)

Before we dismiss all of the theological output of the seventeenth century, we must return again to McLaren’s comments about those who write history. The neo-orthodox reading of the Reformation must be evaluated as well. The thorough historian must explore two contexts: the specific sixteenth and seventeenth-century context and the twentieth-century context of the neo-orthodox historians. From the perspective of postmodernity, both the historical period that these neo-orthodox historians sought to study and neo-orthodoxy itself are in fact thoroughly modern.(24) Thus, the way history was written by neo-orthodox historians (rationalistic, euro-centric, metanarratival, etc.) is vulnerable to the same modern shortcomings that are supposedly found in the historical subjects they were studying.(25)

To be consistent, McLaren’s postmodern approach should be equally suspicious of the modern influences in the neo-orthodox method.(26) Yet, McLaren and other postmodern Christians blindly accept this periodization and historical interpretation without carefully investigating either the theologians of the seventeenth century or the historians of the twentieth century. Postmodern and neo-orthodox historians agree that the rationalism of the seventeenth century, in philosophy and theology, marked the dramatic shift from pre-modern to modern.

What McLaren and other Emergent leaders and scholars have failed to do is carefully examine the historical sources as well as the writings of other historians who have contested the neo-orthodox historiography. The study of the intellectual history of the Reformation and post-Reformation first begun by Heiko Oberman and then continued by David Steinmetz, Richard Muller, and others is an attempt to introduce a new historical methodology. This method seeks to understand the Protestant Reformation and post-Reformation in its own historical-intellectual context, without the neo-orthodox premises. The studies from this new methodology paint a very different picture of the past.

Protestant Scholasticism: The Modern Culprit?

Did post-Reformation theologians like Theodore Beza, John Owen, and Francis Turretin depart from the teachings of Calvin and the other Reformers because of their positive appropriation of scholasticism? After all, was not scholasticism a form of theological rationalism perverted by Aristotelian philosophy?(27) Stanley Grenz and John Franke accept this reading in their postmodern assessment of the “modern” theology of Charles Hodge at Old Princeton, since Hodge was so dependent upon the seventeenth century.

They write, “Hodge’s own understanding of theology is generally derived from the scholasticism characteristic of post-Reformation Protestant orthodoxy and its emphasis on rationalism.”(28) At the end of this sentence Grenz and Franke cite the monumental work of Richard Muller. They are correct in citing Muller as the foremost authority on post-Reformation theology, but his four volume magnum opus entitled Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, in no way substantiates Grenz and Franke’s claim. In fact, it proves the very opposite. Muller’s work disproves the neo-orthodox historians’ claim that seventeenth-century Protestant scholasticism broke with the sixteenth century and moved in a rationalistic direction.(29) A few examples will illustrate this.

Historically the Protestant scholastics were contemporaries of early Enlightenment thinkers, but they held a particular view of the relation between faith and reason that did not anticipate the Enlightenment. Muller states,

The rationalization and intellectualization of theology into system characteristic of the orthodox or scholastic phase of Protestantism never set the standard of scriptural revelation and rational proof on an equal par and certainly never viewed either evidential demonstration or rational necessity as the grounds of faith. Quite the contrary, the Protestant orthodox disavow evidentialism and identify theological certainty as something quite distinct from mathematical and rational or philosophical certainty. They also argue quite pointedly that reason has an instrumental function within the bounds of faith and not a magisterial function. Reason never proves faith, but only elaborates faith towards understanding. There is, moreover, underlying this traditional view of the relationship of faith and reason, an anthropology in which sin and the problematic nature of human beings plays a major role – in significant contrast to the Enlightenment rationalist assumption of an untrammeled constitution of humanity.(30)

Scholasticism referred to a method for arranging and communicating theology, and not the content of one’s theology. Post-Reformation theologians were not abandoning the theology of the early Reformers in favor of a more rationalistic approach, but expanding, clarifying and codifying that theology. Take Francis Turretin as an example. Turretin was professor of theology at Calvin’s academy in Geneva from 1653 to 1687. In his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, he frequently used scholastic distinctions and arrangements. Yet Turretin was careful to differentiate between reason as the foundation or principle of theology and reason as an instrument or means for constructing theology.

The first, Turretin adamantly denied. Turretin explained that reason is never the foundation or principle of theology, but rather it is useful as an instrument for illustrating and collating theological doctrines.(31) It is interesting to note Turretin’s precision on this issue. He was not saying that reason is unequivocally antithetical to faith. Instead he clarified, [f]or a thing to be contrary to reason is different from its being above and beyond; to be overthrown by reason and to be unknown to it. The mysteries of faith are indeed contrary to corrupt reason and assailed by it, but they are only above and beyond right reason and are not taught by it.(32)

Turretin, and other Protestant scholastics, were not propagating a rationalistic theological agenda. Scholasticism was a pedagogical method for teaching a full Protestant theological curriculum in the first Protestant universities.(33)

Likewise seventeenth-century (as well as sixteenth-century) theologians saw themselves in continuity with a wider Western Christian tradition. While defending the absolute authority of Scripture, they went to great lengths to demonstrate their theological dependence on the Church Fathers, and their measured appropriation of certain aspects of Medieval theology. Irena Backus, David Steinmetz, and Anthony Lane have written numerous volumes detailing the substantial use of patristic sources by Reformation and post-Reformation writers.(34)

Protestants were eager to establish their theological continuity with the past and thereby demonstrate that the Protestant church was not a new invention. They looked to Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, and John Duns Scotus to confirm and refine their theological positions. Their intention was not to start a new church, but to recover the true “catholic” or universal church. Consequently, it is very difficult to sustain the argument that either the sixteenth or seventeenth-century Reformed theologians were making a radical “modern” break from their past.

In failing to take into account the current state of Reformation scholarship, McLaren and others have allowed their own postmodern presuppositions to shade their interpretation of the past. But are the results so problematic? The simple solution would be to shift the starting date of the modern age forward and possibly narrow the intellectual roots to the early Enlightenment philosophers. This correction would keep their critiques of modernism intact while maintaining a more accurate historical reading. While this may be an easy solution, the implications for this adjustment are significant.

Jeffrey Jue is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and serves as an Associate Professor of Church History and the Stephen Tong Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on reformation21.org—however, the original URL is no longer available.]