Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the emerging church in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
My subtitle of this talk is Wandering from the Center: The Morphing Shapes of the Emerging Church. I shall begin with review, then proceed to revision, and finally end up with re-centering. So now you shall know where I am at any point.
Let me begin with review. About 5 years ago, when I wrote Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, I focused on such things as these. I surveyed largely or broadly those who call themselves emerging or emergent, both their beliefs and their practice. I noted the diversity but tried to say that there were some commonalities as well.
One could not help but note that, in part, the movement, although they prefer the term conversation, was a double reaction. It was a reaction against conservative churches, often labeled fundamentalist, and it was also a reaction, in some ways, against the seeker-sensitive churches.
The one group, we were told, was propositional. It wanted people to believe before they could get in. It was concerned about orthodoxy and systematics. It was far too little concerned about affections and the like. The other group was so much interested in pageantry and in how to communicate with the 70s crowd with wonderful performance that it was losing community, intimacy, and things like that.
So in some ways, the movement was self-confessedly a reaction against two other kinds of things, both of which were, in some measure, reprobated. The movement was also, by its own self-understanding, missional. Now as far as I know, that term was first coined by Tim Keller in 1989. That’s what Tim claims, in any case, but when he used it, he used it in a slightly different way than it has come to be used today. There’s something happy about it; that is, a concern for mission that embraces all of life.
In all fairness, many of the people in this crowd are particularly interested in going after those sectors of the culture that are largely unevangelized. For example, the media, the universities, the artsy crowd, and so forth, where by and large confessional evangelicals have not penetrated very deeply, with some notable exceptions.
I spent a lot of time on McLaren, partly because he was the most prominent of the leaders. It was easy to see that this crowd was trying to read the times, to understand something of the cultural shifts that are taking place, and to unpack them. At the same time, I provided something of a critique on a variety of matters, not least with respect to what the Bible says about truth, which was a category that most in the emerging crowd felt at least a bit uncomfortable with.
So that’s the review; now you don’t have to read the book if you haven’t already read it. I do this for all of my books, you see, and that way nobody buys them. I write all these books, then I review them in lectures, and then nobody buys the books. It’s a wonderful technique. Nobody accused me of being gifted in marketing.
Now let me come to revision. If I were putting out a second edition today (that’s not an announcement), how might I change or revise the book? Certainly the movement is morphing quickly and in unpredictable ways, so that it is not long before any publication is out-of-date. In fact, in some ways it’s even shown in the fact that the first book changed its title before it was produced.
The original title was going to be “Becoming Conversant with Emergent.” At least it had some poetry to it, but between when we settled on the title and when the book came out, there was a clearer and clearer delineation between emerging and emergent. If I had said “Becoming Conversant with Emergent,” it would have been too narrow a focus, so it became the boring title Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. That’s an index of how fast things were morphing even then. But, today, what would I change?
1. I think I would include more reflection on a broader range of things that are emerging.
Forget emerging is a technical term. There are things that are changing in church life in North America, things that are emerging whether they’re called emerging or not. That’s part of the strength and the weakness of the book by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures.
They include within their umbrella, movements or sectors that don’t call themselves emerging. Things that are bound up with the new perspective on Paul, for example, and other kinds of things that don’t call themselves emerging but that are emerging. They’re appearing. They’re surfacing in one fashion or another in the broader culture, movements, thus, that do not call themselves emerging.
The trouble is if you start doing this, where do you stop? For example, wouldn’t you want to say that evangelical Hispanic churches are emerging? They’re not emerging in the “emerging” sense, if you see what I mean, but they are emerging. Joel Osteen has emerged. Now he’s not emerging church either, but he has most certainly emerged.
Then there is a small but rising number of articulate African-American pastors in a confessional Reformed voice that are sweeping. The second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, is an African-American brother. Then there are books that have recently been published by Thabiti Anyabwile and a number of others that are really very profound indeed. This is an interesting development. Some things are emerging.
Then, of course, there are the astonishing, but still largely uncommented on, Asian-American churches. They’re all over the place, and on many, many university campuses today, the sector that is growing fastest in evangelism is the Asian student sector. Then, on other campuses, Asian students, some women, and the like.… In my view, on many campuses the most unevangelized sector is white males. That’s interesting too, isn’t it? But largely uncommented on.
Now there is the small but vociferous group of people who belong to what is sometimes called radical orthodoxy. Perhaps the best-known name connected with it in our circles is James Smith at Calvin. The problem is as soon as you start doing these great big sweeping surveys, in one sense you relativize the immediate focus of our interests here, the so-called self-identified emerging churches.
Yet by focusing so narrowly on these self-identified emerging churches, one may actually begin to lose a certain perspective on how many other things are emerging in the broader culture as well. I’ll come back to that point, and I think that if I were going back at it again, I’d try to locate some of these forces within the broader field of things that are emerging, for good and ill, in North American confessionalism.
2. More broadly, I would focus more attention on the clumps of evangelical fragmentation.
Many people have been saying for 20 or 30 years that the evangelicalism of 50 years ago is fragmenting. That is, it is pushing farther and farther out, and as it pushes farther and farther out, there are more and more people who call themselves evangelicals who no evangelical of 50 years ago would have recognized as such.
Thus, the definition of what evangelical is changes as well. In fact, there’s a huge debate going on in academic circles about the nature of evangelicalism. Those from the social sciences and sometimes from history, though not always there, spend a lot of time on understanding the movement called evangelicalism by identifying all the people who call themselves evangelical and then seeing what they believe, say, and do.
This moves right across the board from those who signed the Westminster Confession to those who handle snakes because, in some measure, all of them call themselves evangelical. Then shall we understand evangelicalism to be virtually independent of belief structures, historical orthodoxy, or the like, and merely a sociologically-defined movement? Or do we start, in order to preserve the term, saying that genuine evangelicalism must be connected in some identifiable ways with the evangel. It must be a gospel-related movement.
Then you have questions about what is the gospel, to which I’ll return. Do you see? Otherwise the term itself becomes merely one more sociological label. Now what is happening, it seems to me, is something a little different in fragmentation. It’s been going on for some time, but I’m a little slow, and it’s taken me a while to identify it.
Instead of merely fragmenting, it seems to me that now we’re fragmenting in clumps. That is, instead of having a thin gruel that is becoming thinner and thinner, we’ve got a thick stew with chunks here and chunks there. So that there is an emerging church chunk; a kind of revised, revived, Reformed confessionalism chunk; a sort of health, wealth, and prosperity gospel chunk; two or three charismatic chunks; and so on.
To some extent they overlap, but to some extent they’re really quite distinct. So, for example, 10 years ago in the Reformed chunk, you had the Ligonier Conference, but Desiring God Ministries was still almost unknown, Together for the Gospel hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had The Gospel Coalition, but these sorts of conferences are now drawing thousands and thousands of people.
Then there’s the emerging church chunk, which has its thousands. Meanwhile, the conference that is claiming to be the National Pastors’ Conference, which tries to bring in the greatest diversity of people from right across the whole spectrum.… Interestingly enough, that group, when it meets together, pulls in about 2000 pastors. T4G, just five guys on a platform, pulls in 5500 this year.
In other words, that which is trying to pull in the greatest diversity is not strong, it seems to me; whereas, what is stronger are identifiable clumps or chunks or tribes out there. From my point of view, that’s a greatly interesting phenomenon and a hugely important opportunity. I want to identify with whatever chunk is getting closer and closer to faithfulness to the Bible, don’t you? Forget the labels, but come back to the Bible again and again.
Where is biblical confessionalism in thought and word and deed being advocated and practiced the best? In the Lord’s mercy, as these chunks continue to grow and develop, there may be opportunities here that we had not foreseen to minister faithfully out of what I would call the center of historic Christian confessionalism. I’ll come back to that in a few more minutes.
3. I would now focus more attention on some of the links that have formed between the emerging church crowd and the new perspective on Paul crowd.
I don’t know you folks. I don’t know how much you have bought into these sorts of labels. The new perspective on Paul crowd is really a group of new perspectives (plural) with some commonalities, but it has broadly redefined what justification really is and has changed our understanding of the Bible story.
Probably the name that’s best known in this regard is Tom Wright. Lest I merely come across as someone who wants to slam him, let me say right off the bat Tom is an old friend. He was at Oxford exactly when I was at Cambridge, and we’ve followed each other and known each other now for 35 years and still speak occasionally at the same conferences.
Some of what Tom has done has been absolutely superb. His book, for example, The Resurrection of the Son of God, is the best thing on the resurrection of Christ done in more than half a century. So believe me when I say that one should not paint with too broad a brush when one is dealing with individuals connected with movements where one is suspicious.
Nevertheless, this movement, by and large, presents the gospel like this.… And this is now virtually indistinguishable from what is being done in the emerging church, with the result that the two groups reinforce each other by blurbing each other’s books, patting each other on the back, and so on, so the movements are beginning to coalesce.
Listen then; this is the Bible storyline, as faithfully as I can, in this heritage. “In the beginning God made everything good. Sadly, however, in our anarchy and sinfulness, we came to destroy everything that God made good. We break up human relationships, and in the wake of this there is hatred, divorce, racism, and war. We become unfaithful stewards of the planet that God has entrusted to us.
Instead of being faithful stewards, we are distinctly un-green. We destroy. We rape. We pillage. We usurp. But God in his mercy has come to us again and again across the eons of history. He came to us 4000 years ago in the choice of Abraham. He came to us in Moses and the giving of the Law. He has come to us again and again. Through the Old Testament narrative, we are told of these things.
Finally and supremely, he has come to us in the person of his own dear Son. His own dear Son came and introduced the kingdom, and by his death and resurrection, he defeated the forces of evil. He absorbed all of this iniquity himself, and he himself, by his resurrection, proclaims the triumph of the God who transforms all things.
Because we are invited into this kingdom, we participate already with God in restoring things: restoring relationships, restoring faithful stewardship in the creation, and fighting against all that is perverted, self-focused, consumerist, greedy, and all that is merely exploitative. Ultimately, God will bring in final resurrection existence. We don’t know exactly how, when, or by what means, but in a new heaven and a new earth, this earth will be transformed and will be entirely good.”
Have you heard the gospel presented more or less like that? It’s very common. Is it biblically faithful? The answer to that is actually a bit subtle. There’s nothing of what I said in that summary that is distinctly untrue. It’s also, I would submit, profoundly reductionistic, dangerously so, because what it omits is the personal nature of sin against God such that he stands over against us in holy wrath. It’s completely missing.
If you think I’m putting too much emphasis on a relatively minor tone in the Bible, I beg of you, take the time, go home, and with a concordance simply read every passage in the Bible that mentions wrath. You see right away that it’s not that we have transgressed against some quasi-independent moral order and God is presented as coming in to rescue us. We have first and foremost offended against him. He stands over against us as the jealous God in wrath, but he loves us anyway because he’s that kind of God.
Now unless you get that part right, unless people see that the offense is not against mother earth but against a God who stands over against us, you won’t get the cross right. You don’t see the importance of penal substitution unless you also see what it is we must be saved from. It’s astonishing how often the word gospel is linked in the New Testament to being saved from the wrath to come.
When Paul preaches the gospel to a man like Felix, Felix trembles because part of his presentation is of justice and the wrath to come. In the presentation of a gospel in this new perspective heritage, nobody is going to tremble about anything because, at the end of the day, we’re simply making our own disasters. There is no element of God’s personal, transcendent justice standing over against us, inescapable apart from the solution that he himself provides in the person of his own dear Son. The gospel itself gets transmuted.
So today if I were going back at this thing, I think I would show how there are links being formed from some of these clumps so that the so-called emerging church is increasingly linked with the new perspective, sometimes with radical orthodoxy, and the like. Let me give you another couple of examples.
It often produces an approach to the Gospels that focuses on the teaching of Jesus abstracted from the storyline of the canonical gospels that brings us to the passion and resurrection of Christ. For example, in McLaren’s book The Secret Message of Jesus.… Now I’m always a little concerned about titles like The Secret Message of Jesus, as if nobody had got it right until we arrived here. That’s always vaguely troubling.
He acknowledges in his book that the death and resurrection of Christ are important, but he’s not going to focus on those things; he’s merely going to focus on the ethics of Jesus. There are many good things that he says within this context. Many. Yet the feel of the whole is of a kind of 1920s liberalism with a postmodern tinge, precisely because it’s abstracted from what the Gospels are.
A German scholar, Martin Hengel, has rightly pointed out something that we should’ve remembered but have often forgotten: in the first century people didn’t speak of four gospels. They spoke of the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It’s not that there were four gospels.
Gospels was not yet a word that referred to a literary genre that takes up the first four books of our canonical New Testament. The gospel was the good news. There is only one gospel, but it is the gospel according to Matthew or the gospel according to Mark, so different witnesses thus bearing witness to this one gospel.
In that frame of reference, then, you immediately see that unavoidably, irreducibly bound up with this good news is not only that Jesus came and that he served, ministered, preached, healed, and all of that but that the storyline in each case, regardless of the witness, brings you to his death and resurrection announced by the Lord Jesus himself as the establishment of the new covenant in his blood and the fulfillment of the old Passover and, thus, the removing of the wrath of God in a context in which Jesus says in two of the Gospels that he came “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many,” which verse Scot McKnight tells us is not really authentic.
Gradually you begin to see that if you understand the narratives, the healings and all the rest of the Gospels … that is, the books that are the multiplied witness to the one gospel of Jesus Christ … correctly, then the narrative as it unpacks points you to the cross in every way. So over against McLaren’s The Secret Message of Jesus, I urge you to read Peter Bolt’s, The Cross from a Distance.
That’s only one book of several along this genre in which he takes us right through Mark (the cross from a distance) and shows how each section, each chapter, is tied up with a storyline that finally brings you to the cross and resurrection. You cannot understand the book unless you see where the whole thing is going, unless you see how each unit must not be interpreted independently of the whole story; it is the whole story of the gospel. Do you see? At the end of the day, it seems to me this is much more faithful reading of what we call the biblical gospels.
4. I think I would focus discussion on some more recent typologies of the emerging churches.
That is to say, instead of talking about them broadly, admitting that there’s diversity, and then picking up this strand or that strand a bit arbitrarily, nowadays there are sufficiently distinguishable typologies, or patterns, that it is worth commenting on them individually.
Scot McKnight speaks of five streams that go into the emerging lake. Mark Driscoll sent me a copy of a paper that he calls “Navigating the Emerging Church Highway,” which discusses the “four lanes” of the emerging church. Now in the case of Scot McKnight, he sees these streams being the following (all with p’s): it’s prophetic or at least provocative, it’s postmodern, it’s praxis-oriented, it’s post-evangelical, and it’s political.
Mark Driscoll’s analysis of the four lanes on the emerging highway is quite different. He says there is the Emerging Evangelical set, who are very interested in how to relate to culture; the House Church Evangelical set, who are very interested in how you organize and do church; the Emerging Reformers (that is, those who basically hold historic Protestant soteriology and the like but are, perhaps, a little more adept than some at engaging with the culture); and then what he calls Emergent Liberals. Here he puts people like McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Rob Bell.
He argues that the first three are largely orthodox; that is, there is no fundamental Christian confessional stance that is overtly overthrown. I think that’s broadly true, although there’s another worry with them to which I’ll come right at the end. Now it is worth recognizing these different groups.
Part of the trouble is that when these groups get together, they so often seem to rejoice so much in being emerging that the commonness of being emerging transcends whether or not other parties in the so-called emerging crowd are confessional. Do you see what I mean? As a result, the emerging category, the emerging label, trumps everything, and I think that is a strategic mistake. Surely nothing must trump the exclusive claims of Christ, the nature of the gospel, who Jesus is, and the like.
5. If I were doing it again today, I’d focus more attention on certain individuals whom I cheerfully ignored five years ago, partly because they weren’t as important then as they are now and probably partly because I goofed.
I didn’t talk much about Tony Jones. I spent a bit of time on Spencer Burke, but I’d probably spend more time today.
I hemmed and hawed, went back and forth, and then decided not to say anything about Rob Bell because at the time Rob’s location was not very clear. At the time, he was speaking to a church of about 1200, in largely orthodox categories that were really clued-in, culturally speaking, in some ways. Today, he speaks on the weekend to 10,000 and up, and by his own self-acknowledgment, he has moved in all kinds of ways since then.
In his book Velvet Elvis, Rob says, for example, “When Jesus died on the cross, he died for everybody. Everybody. Everywhere. Every tribe, every nation, every tongue, every people group. Jesus said that when he was lifted up, he would draw all people to himself. All people everywhere. Everybody’s sins on the cross with Jesus. […]
He says forgiveness is true for everybody. “And this reality extends beyond this life. Heaven is full of forgiven people. Hell is full of forgiven people. Heaven is full of forgiven people God loves, whom Jesus died for. Hell is full of forgiven people God loves, whom Jesus died for. The difference is how we choose to live, which story we choose to live in, which version of reality we trust. Ours or God’s.”
That’s certainly velvet. I’m not sure how close it is to Christian confessionalism on all kinds of fronts. I have a suspicion. I don’t want you to take this as gospel truth or anything. I have a suspicion. I think that one of the reasons for Rob’s remarkable success, numerically speaking, is his location. He’s in Grand Rapids.
Have you seen his NOOMA series of video clips? Many of you have. They’re worth looking at. Some of them are brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. But I think one of the reasons why they’re so impressive to Christians, why he draws so many Christians, is precisely because the ecclesiastical makeup of Grand Rapids is so substantially Dutch Reformed.
You find a Dutch Reformed Church on every second block, maybe two in one block, and as a result, you have a very substantial population that has been well taught, catechized, and confessionally informed. It brings all of this with them at a time, too, when these churches are sometimes viewed, even by those who attend, as maybe a bit stuffy or culturally conservative. Then along comes somebody who seems to be saying the kinds of things that are broadly in line with this confessionalism but that are alert, alive, and so on.
So if you bring that background to his little NOOMA clip on forgiveness, for example, so that you’re already thinking in Christian categories about what forgiveness means and then see his little NOOMA clip on forgiveness, you think, “This is brilliant. It is so astute in how you get across what is meant by forgiveness.”
What you must do, however, is then ask yourself, “If you weren’t a Christian; if you had no understanding of what the Bible says; if you didn’t begin with a biblical view of God, a biblical view of sin, a biblical view of the need for repentance, of turning away from sin, of how forgiveness has been paid for by the death of Christ.… If you didn’t know any of that sort of thing, you didn’t bring any of that sort of thing with you, and then you viewed this clip, how would you read it?”
I’ve been doing university missions now for 30 or 35 years. When I began, if I were dealing with an atheist, at least it was a Christian atheist. That is to say, the God in whom this person disbelieved was the Christian God, which meant the categories were still on my turf. You can’t assume that anymore.
Even in the South, increasingly, there is a large sector of university students who don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They’ve never heard of Abraham. Virtually all of the God-talk words … faith, Spirit, God, life, repentance, abundant life, you name them … in every case they mean something different from what I mean.
So within that framework, if you show the NOOMA clips and you’re now not in Grand Rapids, but let’s say on the streets of New York City or out in Seattle, I suggest that they won’t convey enough gospel to save a flea. In other words, they pull a substantial number precisely in the context of Grand Rapids because there are so many catechized people there, which is another way of saying that America is a highly diverse place these days.
While there are Bible Belt cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and confessional cities like Grand Rapids, which are nevertheless in some ways becoming more secularized in any case, there are also cities like Seattle or downtown Phoenix (which is the least churched major metropolitan area in North America) and cities like New York.
Within this framework, I suggest to you we need more clarity and explanation and unpacking of the gospel not less, or else we are simply going to be misunderstood. If I were doing the whole thing today, I would include discussion of some of these chaps.
6. I’d focus on some of the emerging reactions to emerging.
It was harder to do five or six years ago since there weren’t so many of them. Nowadays there are quite a lot. They’re really interesting. Have you seen the recent book by a couple of young guys: Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be? Even the title makes you want to read the book, doesn’t it? It really is quite penetrating and quite funny at the same time.
There are today an increasing number of people in that camp, which tends to make the emerging crowd already feel a bit old-fashioned. Just as the sort of seeker-sensitive bunch that focused on the Generation X types from the 70s and so on now feel just a wee bit dated, so also we’re just on the cusp of beginning to feel that some of the emerging crowd are already feeling just a wee bit dated as a reaction is coming to some of these kinds of things. So if I were revising, that’s probably how I’d revise.
Now I want to talk about re-centering in the light of these developments. I mentioned the outline of the whole Bible that is not uncommon in emerging church contexts and in new perspective on Paul contexts that leaves out the wrath of God, the personal dimension of God’s justice, and the like. A lot of things that are said in that survey are nevertheless true. There is a new heaven and a new earth, we are pressing toward resurrection existence, God does invade this world to come and change us and call us to himself. So a lot of things that are said are true.
Doug Moo, who teaches New Testament at Wheaton College, likes to say that what is going on in some of this argumentation is the backgrounded material is being foregrounded, and the foregrounded material is being backgrounded.
Now what he means by that is things that are true in the Bible but not taking up the primary place of the storyline are receiving all of the emphasis while the things that Paul calls “the matters of first importance” are relegated to things that are hidden back there just a wee bit, conceded now and then in a little footnote, but they’re not the thing about which we’re passionate.
I think that’s very astute. That is to say, one of the things Christians must constantly try to do is to be faithful to that which the Bible itself calls the matters of first importance. That’s what Paul addresses, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15 when he tells us what the gospel is. He says, “These are the matters of first importance: Christ died for our sins according to the Scripture, he was buried …” and so on. It’s entirely in line with what he says earlier in the letter. “I was determined when I was among you to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
In other words, it is important to focus on Christ, what he achieved on the cross, his resurrection, the purpose of all of this in the biblical narrative, and how God is simultaneously satisfying the demands of his own justice (as Romans 3 puts it), both so as to be just while also justifying the ungodly. These matters are of fundamental importance. Part of faithful re-centering is bound up with that kind of careful reading of Scripture, which brings me to my second comment.
I’ve been teaching or preaching now for something close to 40 years. I won’t tell you which side of 40 I’m thinking of. During that time, I haven’t learned nearly as much as I should’ve, but I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned, for example, that every time I speak millions stay away, so I’m never offended when one more does. Another thing I’ve learned after 40 years is that people don’t learn everything that I teach, not in preaching sessions, not at Xenos, certainly not at Trinity. They don’t learn everything I teach. They just don’t. Do you know what they learn?
They learn what I’m passionate about because what I’m passionate about, I’ll also repeat, and it will become the organizing set of principles that shape everything else I teach. That’s what they learn, which is another way of saying that if the gospel becomes something that you assume, but what you’re really passionate about is cultural analysis or even (dare I say it?) apologetics, while the gospel itself becomes merely what you assume, you’re only a generation away from heterodoxy because your students will pick up not all the structure of what you’re teaching but what you’re passionate about.
So sometimes if I raise, with some of my friends in these sorts of movements, “Yes, I hear what you’re saying about postmodern epistemology, I hear what you’re saying about perspectivalism, I understand that sometimes we haven’t said enough about the sins and dangers of consumerism and all of that, but where in your preaching recently have you handled the cross, substitutionary atonement, and being saved from the wrath of God, from hell itself?
Where have you talked about pursuing a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, and not merely transforming this order? Although that’s important. Where have you done that recently?” Then the comeback often is, “I believe in all that stuff too. What are you picking on me for? Why do you always have to focus on that sort of fundamental stuff?” But the issue is not just whether you yourself believe orthodoxy but what you’re passionate about, where your heart is, what is of transcendental importance to you.
That, I think, is what troubles me about some of the emerging church groups that are not, in fact, heterodox but focus so much time on modes of communication or the like is that somehow what is really exciting to the younger generation coming along is not the gospel itself. I think that’s deeply troubling.
In other words, we want to take our concordances and work through the Bible, for a start, with every instance of the word gospel and see how it is tied in to everything. Work through gospel in the Thessalonian epistles, work through gospel in Hebrews, work through gospel in Philippians, work through gospel in Romans and see how it is tied to so much. Then remember that Paul says, “These are the matters of first importance.”
To be so excited about what is absolutely central in reconciling fallen, broken, rebellious people made in the image of God to the God who is our maker, our final judge, and, please God, the only Savior. That is absolutely central. So with all of the importance of figuring out how best to communicate with a particular subsection of our culture (I’m not denying that for a moment), it cannot hold a candle, first of all, to being passionate about the gospel itself.
Related to this, I think, is the need for a deeper understanding of what the gospel is. At the risk of oversimplification, I think we can err on two sides. One is a stripped-down gospel where gospel is merely the sort of insurance ticket that gets you out of hell, and then after that you have all your discipleship and training techniques, and the real life-transforming stuff kicks in. So the gospel really gives you eternal life.… “Whew, that’s done; now let’s get on with the real transformation stuff.”
So we provide a course on discipleship, how to handle your money, how to fix your marriage, how to bring up your children, and on and on, because the gospel doesn’t do that. All the gospel does is give you a certain kind of legal standing before God. That’s all it does. That’s the stripped-down version of the gospel. I think that is hugely mistaken.
When you look through all of the examples of gospel, you discover how the gospel, rightly understood, is itself genuinely transforming. The gospel is something that is, at one level, easily understood, and yet at another level slips out of our fingers so very, very fast because we start self-justification all over again.
We understand that the gospel is genuinely of grace, and then we work hard at trying to understand it. Then we pat ourselves on the back because we have understood it. As we pat ourselves on the back, I’m not quite sure that we’re actually living under grace anymore. Do you know? We learn, because of the gospel, how important it is to preserve our relationship with God. Now suddenly we have a bad day, and we wonder if God is really going to bless us because we’ve had a bad day.
I’ve used this illustration before; forgive me if you’ve heard it, but it’s important to see. It’s tied up to the nature of the gospel. You wake up in the morning. It’s raining. The alarm clock hasn’t gone off, and you’re grumpy. You’re late. You don’t have time for a decent breakfast. You reach for a clean pair of socks, and there are no clean socks. You sip some orange juice and beat it out the backdoor. You know that you’re going to be late for work. You put the key in the ignition, turn the key, and the battery is dead.
When you get there, the boss chews you out; this at a time when the economy is already reduced and you’re not too sure of your job. Then at the coffee break some colleague brings up some religious matter, and instead of trying to share anything of faith in Christ or the like, you snap his head off. You’re grumpy and self-righteous.
You work all day. Eventually you get home, and there’s a nice little note saying, “Out to a meeting. Spaghetti in the fridge.” The children are out of sorts. Eventually you pray that night, and it sounds like this: “Dear God, this has been one rotten day. I know I haven’t behaved very well. I’m sorry. Your will be done. Jesus’ name, amen.” Am I the only one who’s ever done that?
Another day you wake up, and the birds are singing through the open window. It’s bright and clean. You woke up before the alarm clock, and you feel refreshed after a good night’s sleep. You smell bacon. “Bacon! Good grief, what are we celebrating? This is fantastic!” You have a clean pair of socks. You have family devotions before you go out to work. You put the key in the ignition, and the car starts.
You get there early, and the boss commends you for the way you’re showing up early these days. At the coffee cooler, the same person comes up (obviously didn’t learn the lesson the first time around), but this time you answer with humility, respect, and godliness. You actually get to the cross of Christ. You invite them to church, and they say they might actually come. Eventually you get home, and around the family table there are devotions. The kids are right little angels.
Then you go to bed, and your prayer sounds like this: “Eternal and majestic heavenly Father, in the rich plentitude of your grace, I bow in your presence and thank you for the eternal love that you have bestowed upon me, having loved me in Christ Jesus before the world began.”
You go on and on, and you get all your theology in there. You review all the attributes of God and all the names of Jesus. Then you pray for your friends, your relatives, the missionaries that you know, and the first cousins twice removed. You go on and on, and then finally you say, “In Jesus’ name,” and you go to sleep justified.
The only problem is I can’t figure out on which of the two prayer days you’ve been acting more like a pagan. Imagine having the infernal cheek to think that you are accepted before almighty God on the basis of what kind of a day you had. That’s a misunderstanding of the gospel, isn’t it? So the gospel demands obedience, the gospel demands discipleship, but the gospel also demands that all of this be out of the matrix of gratitude for God’s grace, living in thankfulness before God for what he has done.
The gospel transforms in that way. It is massively transforming, but not simply because of legal transfer but because of all of the showering gifts that come upon us: the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of Bible instruction, the communion of the saints, the fellowship with believers in Christ Jesus, and the anticipation of the glory to come, all secured by that same glorious gospel. We respond in the gratitude of grace.
The other mistake is to put too much into the gospel. There was an article not too many months ago called “The 8 Marks of a Robust Gospel,” in which, under the rubric gospel, just about everything except the kitchen sink got thrown in. The gospel also includes the first and second commandments, for example. Well, the first and second commandments are extraordinarily important. Jesus himself says that the Law and the Prophets hang on them, but it’s not the gospel. It’s not the gospel.
Reread 1 Corinthians 15, for example, to find out what the gospel is. It’s just not the gospel. There is a sense, you see, in which if you put absolutely everything under the rubric gospel … all the patterns of your discipleship, all the structures of your morality, all the importance of God-centeredness in every domain of life, and so on … then you begin to lose how the gospel is the good news of what God has done exclusively in Christ Jesus to reconcile guilty men and women to himself by faith in his Son.
You lose what the story is. You lose what the good news is, and you’ve got all of life, worldview, and everything else in it. Instead of flowing from it, it’s actually in the gospel. As a result, when you preach the gospel, you start preaching all kinds of things that really have a much greater feel for merely the demand of God than for the good news of what God has done.
If we’re going to re-center on the gospel, we need to do some serious study about how the gospel works in the pages of the New Testament. If I had a lot more time than I do, that’s what I’d spend time on right now. I’d work through passages like that.
For those of you who are interested in some of these matters, I do suggest that you go and listen to some of the plenary addresses. You can get them in both audio and video downloaded for free on thegospelcoalition.org, topics like what is the gospel and how the gospel works out in our lives.
Next are the exclusive claims of the gospel. There is simply no way one can avoid them. It is worth remembering that during the first three centuries of the Christian church, until the time of the Constantinian settlement at the beginning of the fourth century, the charge that was most frequently made against Christianity from the pagan world was it was too narrow, exclusivist, and, thus, bigoted.
That was the overwhelmingly sweeping charge because, although the various pagan forms of belief had their own preferential gods, structures of thought, and this sort of thing, none of them insisted that theirs was the only possible way to the divine, but along came Christianity and advocated precisely that.
They did so because of texts like “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” “Neither is there salvation in any other.” “It’s by the name of Jesus that we shall be saved,” again and again reiterated in the pages of Holy Writ. For entirely bad reasons, there is a sense in which Western culture, by and large, is returning to the paganism/empirical pluralism of the first centuries of the Roman Empire.
In one sense, it is easier to read the New Testament today and see its immediate application to our lives than it was 50 years ago when I was a boy growing up, precisely because there is much more cultural diversity. If you like a diversity of restaurants, that’s not all bad. Already there is a new definition of tolerance that is operating in our culture, such that you’re not allowed now to say that anybody is wrong about these sorts of matters.
These were exactly the kinds of things that the New Testament believers faced for the first three centuries. Well, the New Testament believers didn’t live three centuries, but the New Testament believers and those that followed immediately in their train. For the first three centuries the Christians actually faced that kind of attack above all.
In one sense, we need to take our cue from the Bible itself, which you can read right off the surface by going back to Colossians, John’s gospel, 1 John, Romans, Galatians, and the Apocalypse and see again and again how this emphasis on the exclusive sufficiency of Christ trumps absolutely everything.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, our confidence, finally, is in the Christ who said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Historically, in the peculiar and marvelous providence of God, Christ, the head of the church, has used pressures on the church to develop clearer thought, renewed understanding, and renewed seeking of his face.
Whatever you think of the new perspective on Paul, for example, and all that it has generated about debates in justification, let me tell you, it’s helped an awful lot of Christians to study these matters afresh again. Do you see? Now, it seems to me, that these peculiar kinds of pressures coming from the emerging church, and so on.… This is not a time for panic, still less for hate and animosity, or, God forbid, self-righteousness.
It is a time to think through fundamentals all over again and come back to what the gospel is, to what faithfulness looks like in our living and in our teaching, and within this framework still learning what we can about cultural sensitivity and learning to communicate to a new generation in a culture that is morphing so very, very quickly. Let’s bow in prayer.
Heavenly Father, in some ways this is far too negative a way of tackling things. We need to come back, as we shall later in the day, and look at your most Holy Word for all the wonderful things that it does say about how to respond and what to believe and how to think, but we remember the Old Testament men of Issachar who did know their times.
We want to be people who read our times aright too. We do not want to be locked in time warp so that we really do not know how to communicate with people around us, nor do we want to sacrifice the gospel out of the plea, simply, that we might be better communicators, having lost what it is that must be communicated.
So grant us, Lord God, minds and hearts that are full of your most Holy Word, but minds and hearts, as well, that are full of love of neighbor, such that we will learn how to share the gospel and our lives, and above all so work by your Spirit within us that we return to the cross and gaze with renewed adoration at him who died upon it and rose again that we might be justified before you, for there lies all our hope, all our confidence. Despite all of our feeble efforts and our frequent sins and mistakes, there lies our confidence. We are accepted in him.
Grant, Lord God, that our lives may be characterized with a holy joy of the Lord, gratitude for what you have given to us in the measureless gift of your dear Son, and, in consequence, a care for men and women around us that cannot be hidden, is never merely drummed up, and is not artificial but comes out of the sheer relief of knowing we have been loved with an everlasting love, of knowing that our sins are forgiven, of knowing that already we have the Spirit of God as the down payment of the promised inheritance, of knowing that we are in a line of believers across the centuries who together lift their voices heavenward and cry, “Yes, even so come, Lord Jesus.”
So make us, we pray, faithful and discerning in our generation, for the glory of Christ Jesus, in whose name we pray, amen.
Female: I have never heard of the emerging church, and I still don’t think I know what it is. Can you give a brief definition?
Don Carson: I’d be glad to. Part of the problem for a speaker like myself who is brought in is I don’t always know where everybody is in the crowd, and so I’m sorry I didn’t take more time to unpack that. In some parts of the country, it is completely unknown, so you should not be at all embarrassed that you have to ask the question. By and large, it’s bigger on the two coasts and in metropolitan areas than it is in the center of the country or in rural areas, but even that’s not absolute.
The emerging church is a movement that really started in about 1993, give or take, with two or three people especially.… Mark Driscoll was one of them, although he now disassociates himself with much of the movement … who really set about asking this question: “In the light of the rapidly-changing emerging culture, how should the church respond, how should the church emerge, in such a way as to be faithful to the gospel but able to communicate that gospel to others faithfully?”
It’s a good question to ask. In a time when a culture is very stable, when it’s not changing quickly, then you don’t have to ask that question too often, but when culture is changing really, really fast.… Let me give you an example. All of us here who’ve done any Christian witness at all, haven’t you had times when you started sharing your faith with somebody, and then you suddenly realize you’re on different planets? You’ve gone by each other? Haven’t you had that experience?
You say something, and they completely don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You don’t really understand what they’re talking about, and you’re just on different planets. If you haven’t had that experience, I suspect it’s because your circle is entirely amongst the churchified, but if you work outside that circle, then it happens all the time.
A couple of years ago I was asked at the last minute to be on Larry King Live. They needed an evangelical talking head for something or other, and because it was the last minute they sent up a car for me in the northern suburbs of Chicago, where I live, to get me downtown.
Now I’m not normally driven around in a limousine, but this time I was. It doesn’t happen very often, but I was enjoying it.… Except that, on the way down, I was crammed in the backseat reading my papers ferociously on the topic at hand so I wouldn’t look like an international twit on national TV. When I got down there, I went and did my talking head bit, and then the guy was driving me home.
It turned out that the driver was a 59-year-old Jew who had lost his parents and most of his relatives in the Holocaust. He had divorced his wife. He had a 33-year-old daughter and was married to another woman who was pursuing her PhD in religious studies, so we started talking along these lines. He knew I was there to talk about religion in some sense.
I asked what his daughter was doing, and there was a long pause. He said, “Well, actually, she was in her SUV in Kansas a few weeks ago. It flipped on the ice, and she’s now brain-dead. We’re just waiting to decide when we’ll pull the plug. She’s only been married two or three years. She was ever so happy, and now she’s brain-dead.” I said to him, “How are you coping with this?”
He said, “I’ve decided that you just have to say, ‘Molecules bounce. Molecules bounce,’ ” by which he meant, “You know, things happen. What can you say? They’re neither good nor bad; they just happen.” So I said to him, “Yeah, I suppose that’s what you want to say about the Holocaust too, isn’t it? Molecules bounce.”
Well, he was outraged, which was what I wanted. He said, “Molecules bounce! That was evil. That was disgusting. That was revolting from the beginning. How can you possibly say that? It was evil. It was Shoah, the supreme evil!” So I said, “You’ve got a category for outrage then, do you?” He said, “Are you saying that my daughter’s death is evil?”
I said, “Of course. I’m not saying that she was more evil than anybody else, but the Bible certainly speaks of death being the last enemy. It’s the mark of our fallenness, of our rebellion against God, of God saying, ‘Thus far shall you go, and no farther.’ Of course. But that’s also why Jesus coming back from the dead is wonderful news. It’s good news because it overcomes this evil. You have a right to be outraged at death!”
Then I said, “Would you look at things differently if you really believed there is life after death?” He said, “Oh, I know just what you mean. My daughter has a lovely garden in Kansas. I think she’d like to come back as a butterfly.” Zing. Different planet. One more time.… I’m not mocking him; I’m just saying we all have these conversations all the time, don’t we?
So insofar as people were beginning to ask, “How do you communicate the gospel to people who are outside, who are not in our dark suits, with hymns that were all written by Wesley, with a certain kind of churchified atmosphere, and where people all know their Bibles. How do you begin?”
It was the right sort of question, but in many respects the so-called emerging church that was trying to respond to an emerging culture eventually became more and more interested in cultural analysis and trying to understand what was going on in the move from modernity to so-called postmodernity, from modernism to postmodernism, with different structures in epistemology (that is, in how you claim to know anything), a diminution of certitude about anything, and so on.
So much more emphasis on relationships, so much less emphasis on truth. Much more emphasis on the affections and much less emphasis on confessionalism. Much more emphasis on acts of kindness, less on being right. Eventually, instead of saying you must believe in order to belong, they tried to get you to belong and then hope that you’d come to believe. A whole lot of things got changed because of all of this, until eventually there are fragments of this whole movement now that really deny all kinds of the historic gospel.
Now I laid out a lot of that stuff in the book that I mentioned in the beginning, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, so if you’re a reader, that book might be of help. It’s now a bit dated, as I’ve just indicated by this whole talk, but it does lay out, as carefully as I can, what some of these things are actually about and how to begin to think about them.
Male: This might seem like a bit of a rabbit trail, but in wake of what we’re hearing here, in wake of what has happened in the church in America and what is happening in the church in America, can you speak for a minute about how we should think about foreign and domestic missions? There are millions and millions of unreached people on other continents, but the church is in the state that it’s in. How should we think about that?
Don: Is the subtext to your question: “Should we, therefore, stay home and answer our needs here and let the rest of the world go hang?”
Male: No.
Don: What’s the subtext to your question, or is it just wide open?
Male: It’s just something that I’ve wrestled with because I feel like there’s a great need overseas. I feel like that’s where we should be going, but I feel like America is in a very precarious situation, and we need to watch what’s going on here as well. I mean, that’s what this whole thing is about.
Don: Yes, although it is important to say somewhere along the line that although we have a responsibility for “Jerusalem first, then Judea, then Samaria, and then the end of the earth,” and at the moment, we start with our own patch. In some sense, that’s correct. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of any Christian is not the preservation of America. Now lest you say, “Don, you’re a Canadian. I can tell by your ‘outs’ and ‘abouts,’ ” it’s not the preservation of Canada either or of the British Empire or of anything else.
So yes, we do have a responsibility at home, but you don’t find all of the early Christians deciding that they had to do an exhaustive job of evangelizing Judea before they went to Samaria or the area that we now call Palestine or Israel before they went to someplace else. Wherever Christians went, they gossiped the gospel in the first instance. Then eventually, mandated by the church in Antioch, they sent two of their best to start evangelizing and planting churches elsewhere.
Never, ever think in either/or categories along these lines. Now historically people have made mistakes both ways. The so-called CMA, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, so emphasized overseas missions for many years that eventually they overextended themselves and their home base wasn’t big enough to support it. They reversed gears a bit and made more emphasis here precisely because they saw what was happening.
Now there are some that are saying the dangers are such here that we have to focus all of our energies here, but that can be an excuse, at the end of the day, merely for becoming self-focused, as if we’re at the center of the universe. To my mind, one of the most exciting things that’s happening on the campus where I teach, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School …
I don’t think I have ever seen such a high percentage of (I say young. Most of these are in their early 30s) relatively young pastors-to-be who are passionately committed to the inner city somewhere or to overseas, very often in a Muslim context by any means. I could tell you all kinds of stories. I can’t even tell you some of the stories because if they leak out, they’re just too dangerous for these people. I think that’s wonderful, and I’ve got to tell you, I come from a heritage, too, where …
I published a little book a few months ago called Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson; that’s my dad. You see, one of the things that goes wrong in a conference like this is you hear Mark Driscoll, and he’s big. You think, “I’m not. He’s big.” Then there’s always a danger of people saying things like, “Yeah, yeah, but that’s Mark Driscoll. I can never be Mark Driscoll,” and you’re right; you can’t.
Then you go to a John Piper conference. You hear John Piper, and you think, “Well, that’s wonderful. I’m encouraged. I’m also rebuked. I’m humbled, and I feel like two cents,” and you go away feeling discouraged; whereas, 98 or 99 percent of the pastors in America who are doing all the work are, in fact, quite ordinary pastors.
My father was a quintessential ordinary pastor. He learned the other language in Canada. He came from the UK but learned the other language. He started seriously learning French really at 26. He eventually became a church planter in French Canada, and most of his life preached to vast crowds of 30 people. He never wrote a book, never pastored a big church, never spoke at a national convention.
During the times, many of his colleagues were beaten up and thrown into jail. He went through some devastating difficulties pastorally in his life. Then my mother died of Alzheimer’s. He nursed her and at the age of 78 went back to preaching again. In the midst of ordinariness, he exhibited faithfulness, prayer, and carefulness. He was interested in the whole wide world; you could see by his journals and his reading, but at the same time, he was trying to pastor faithfully small flocks here and there.
Then in the late 50s, by which time I was in high school, what was then called the Congo Rebellion took place. It was the emancipation of Congo as it then was from Belgian colonialism to become Zaire. It’s gone through two or three name changes since then. In the danger at the time, many, many missionaries left because of all the violence, including some Americans who came back here. They were looking around for someplace else that had French roots and French language at least.
Some of them inevitably turned their eyes northward to Quebec, and suddenly we had an influx of missionaries who knew the language. They might not have known Canada or Quebec, but at least they had the language. So people like my dad and others were thinking, “Whew. Thank you Lord.” Not one of them lasted for more than six months. Not one.
So then, at 14 or whatever I was, I turned to my father and said, “What’s the matter with these? Are they all quitters?” You know, at 14 you know an awful lot. He said to me.… He was the mildest of men. He was an ordinary pastor. He said, “Don, you’ve got to understand that these people have planted churches, they’ve built hospitals, they’ve seen Bible studies, churches have grown, and they’ve been fruitful. Then they come to this place, and it’s so hard. Nothing is moving, and they think that they’ve misread the call of God because the call of God means you go someplace where you are fruitful.”
So I said to him, “So why don’t you go someplace where you make your life more fruitful?” He wheeled on me, and he said, “I stay because I believe God has many people in this place,” using the language of God to Paul when he’s discouraged in Corinth. The doctrine of election, rightly functioning, becomes an incentive to faithfulness.
If you only go where there’s a lot of fruit, then you send missionaries to South Korea but not to Japan, but when the saints go marching in, Samuel Zwemer, with his eight converts, five of whom got killed, is not going to be a whole lot farther down the line from Billy Graham or George Whitefield. God just doesn’t measure things that way. So I just think that it is entirely the wrong-headed question to ask this or that. The need is everywhere. We’re global Christians. Some are going to be called there; some are going to be called there. Think big; be faithful small.
Male: [Inaudible] might fit into this spectrum that you and Mark have talked about here this morning?
Don: A little different. It’s not quite the same thing, but there is a lot of emphasis on relationships and so on, some of which I heartily applaud but which are not always well-tethered to the gospel itself. It’s slightly adjacent. To use the language that I was using earlier, if I were talking about developments that are emerging more broadly.… But he’s not always associated tightly with the leaders of the emerging movement itself.
Male: My question is in regard to how you would dissect or give an analysis of Scot McKnight. You mentioned him, and I read most of your book. I read his review or an essay on the emerging church and his view of it. He’s more favorable to it, but it seems like he’s unfair, too, to begin with in terms of saying you focus too much on McLaren, even though you say at the outset of your book that obviously there are exceptions to the rules and so forth.
Why doesn’t he just address the issues that you bring to light in the people that you do address in the book, address the theological issues within that, instead of just saying you aren’t fair? How do you give an analysis of Scot McKnight?
Don: You’d have to ask him that. Scot is a friend. We used to teach on the same faculty. I would only say that theologically I am not sure he’s on the right track on some of the points I’ve already indicated, but on the other hand there’s no way he’s in the McLaren camp. Of the various streams that he lays out, that Mark Driscoll lays out, Scot is in a more conservative one of them.
I don’t think he’s focused enough on what the gospel is. I think that his understanding of the cross, for all of his excellent technical scholarship at a certain level, is skewed in several respects. He knows that I think that, but I don’t want to start assessing his motives or how he got there or anything. Those are the kinds of things that ultimately only God can know. So I’d rather deal with the arguments in the public arena and what he says, rather than trying to unpack why he says something or does not say something or the like.
One of the things that Tim Keller is so good at.… Tim Keller has become a really good friend. If you want models for how to evangelize effectively in a postmodern, emerging-culture world, Tim and a whole lot of others become really good models because they are rock solid on what the gospel is, absolutely rock solid, but at the same time they’re really good at communicating with the new generation. So to my mind, the concern to communicate with the new generation is a good one, but there are better models than most of the emerging guys.
Some of those better models include a chap like Tim Keller. One of the things that he is very good about.… If you haven’t read anything by him, read his book The Reason for God. Somebody defined it as a book for “skeptics and for the believers who love them.” Isn’t that a great blurb? Man, I wish I had written that line. I’ll tell you one of the things he does that comes to your question.
When he is answering objections, he always, always presents the objection at least as forcefully as the objector would raise it. In other words, he doesn’t sugarcoat it. He doesn’t slant it so that he’s answering a soft form of it or the like. If somebody says, “Yeah, but what about the question of evil,” or “Why did the Christians kill all those people during the Crusades?” or whatever, then he presents the question as raised by an objector in its most forceful, powerful, in-your-face form. Then he begins to answer it.
So then it becomes the question that is being addressed rather than the motives behind the question, to which we have so very, very little access. So I strongly recommend the kind of apologetic that he takes on many of these sorts of issues, and that’s the way I’d want to respond to Scot or anyone else along these lines.
