Yesterday, I read this article from ChristianityToday.com on the Emerging Church.
Evidently, this is considered a big movement in Christianity, although I'd never heard of it. The article tries to describe this movement but, I must confess, I didn't feel like I knew any more about the movement after reading it than before. It sounded vague and ephemeral, without doctrine or concrete dogma.
From there, I went to that standby, Wikipedia for a clearer idea of what this church is.
Or is it clearer? Well, the description of the church itself might be somewhat easy to understand (if you know what ecclesiology means). But where Evangelicals disagree with the emerging church becomes more difficult to translate to plain English.
While many Evangelicals have been open to some of the criticisms that the emerging church movement has offered, most seem to have rejected the emerging church movement's views of several key theological themes within their soteriology and eschatology as well as the openness of some in the emerging church movement to alternative lifestyles.
Translation:
While many Evangelicals have been open to some of the criticisms that the emerging church movement has offered, most seem to have rejected the emerging church movement's views of several key theological themes within their salvation plans and theology and philosophy about the end of the world as well as the openness of some in the emerging church movement to alternative lifestyles.
Sure, it isn't as succinct, but most people don't discuss their denomination's soteriology, they talk about their plan of salvation.
The rest of the article was no easier to understand, but the impression I've come away with is that this is a church with no doctrine and no Truth in the sense most Christians understand. Its appeal to a "postmodern" society is that there is no judgement about belief systems and a large reliance on individual expression of faith through works.
What I like about this theology is that its members tend to be very active in helping people and they believe that faith without works is not enough. What bothers me is that there doesn't seem to be any real doctrinal definition to the movement, which has led to cultism in other movements. I'm still trying to find out more, though.
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