# How many times have I taught about the attributes of God without telling stories about God’s character that illuminate and reveal the beauty of our unchanging Father?
# How many times have I dealt with heavy issues of suffering and pain purely from an intellectual standpoint, not allowing the beauty of Christ’s willingness to suffer on the cross to inform my presentation?

I would suggest that these are questions often raised and answered in emergent conversations and story-telling, and point to aspects of the emerging church movement with answers that respond much in agreement with Trevin’s contribution here. In fact I think there may be as many in the emergent movement prone to camp out in the midst of the traditional theological trees as in the post-traditional forest, so I don’t think being “Un-Emergent” is particularly helpful. Certainly Marc Driscoll, Acts 29 and associates are not a minor stream in the movement. As C. Michael Patton’s analysis of the movement suggests (“Would the Real Merger Please Stand Up?” reclaimingthemind.org), it may be helpful to distinguish between the Emergent Church and the Emerging Church streams of the movement, since the liberal to conservative, progressive to traditional spectrum runs pretty much the same gamut as the wider church traditions do. The altogether orthodox end of the spectrum he calls Emerging and the more liberal camp as Emergent.

On a somewhat different note, I think rather than focus on questions of doctrinal truth and/or inspirational story, we need to focus more on the one who is true and beautiful and the true and beautiful narratives regarding his person and work in creation and redemption as specifically seen in scripture alone. We all perhaps try to do that in our own way, but discerning between theological “truths” of tradition and those of scripture is never as simple as we would wish. For instance, Trevin says that ‘the only way that “God is love” can be true is if God existed as a perfect community of self-giving love long before God had a creation to shower his love upon.’ But is this a biblical doctrine because it expresses a truth from scripture, or is it from tradition? Where in scripture do we find this pre-time, “eternal triune relationship of love” described? Is it true because it is beautiful? Is this an argument from the Apostles or from human tradition? The idea of an eternal relationship of “timeless” and “unchanging” love leaves me as cold as that of a deist’s deity who has left us to our own devices, mostly because it is not inherent in the narratives or doctrines of scripture.

In any case, it may be that being decidedly “Un-Emergent” just means one is a part of a movement that has already “Emerged,” being committed to standing still in contemporary orthodoxy rather than either moving forward into greater clarity from scripture or back to the original clarity of the Apostles’ teaching.
I pray this is helpful to someone out there.
Yours in and for Christ,
Richard W. Wilson; St. Louis, MO, USA

But think about this very simple question: Where do we encounter this self-revelation of the Godhead? If someone were to say to you that in the most foundational thing about Christianity as revealed truth, “nothing that has happened or been experienced or even written, since the closing of the cannon, matters in the first order of things”, because it is not apart of that revelation,would you be able to accept that without feeling the urge to modify it or qualify it? I think studying theology is one of the greatest callings a child of God can ever dedicate himself to; but I also believe it must be kept in its place because of the inherent danger alluded to in this post: that of taking the primal place of Scripture alone in our teaching and preaching and in our churches.

Grace and Peace,
Raffi