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March 7, 2008
Can the Emerging Movement Move Beyond 'Complexification' to Clarity?
Waiting to see what emerges from the emerging movement.
I don't pick up The Chronicle Review--an insert in The Chronicle of Higher Education--expecting to be spurred to reflection on the emerging movement. And I'm quite sure that was not what author and UCLA history professor Russell Jacoby intended. Nevertheless, his intriguing article, "Not to Complicate Matters, But...," collided with other reading from my week to produce that rare but welcome guest--a helpful insight. In short, Jacoby is frustrated with scholars' growing penchant to "complicate," "problematize," or "complexify" issues and think in so doing that their work is complete. To make his point, Jacoby cites mock and actual examples that will sound familiar to anyone who's laid their hands on a peer-reviewed academic journal in the last decade:
"I hope today to complicate our notion of cahiers - grievances - and the role they played in the States-General of 1789." The professors and graduate students at the symposium nod appreciatively. They have heard or read similar justifications untold times before. The author explains that he or she will "complicate" our understanding of some event or phenomenon. "In this article," writes an ethnic-studies professor, "I seek to complicate scholars' understanding of the 'modular' state by examining four forms of indigenous political space." Everyone seems pleased by this approach. Why? The world is complicated, but how did "complication" turn from an undeniable reality to a desirable goal? Shouldn't scholarship seek to clarify, illuminate, or - egad! - simplify, not complicate? How did the act of complicating become a virtue?
Towards the end of the article, Jacoby approaches territory that sounds more like an apologetics classroom at a Christianity liberal arts college than what one would expect from a professor at a large state university with works such as The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians to his credit (although, to be fair, Jacoby is also Honorary Vice President for Life in the American Pessimist Society, so maybe he's just cranky as a rule):
The new devotion to complexity gives carte blanche to even the most trivial scholarly enterprise. Any factoid can "complicate" our interpretation. The fashion elevates confusion from a transitional stage into an end goal. We celebrate the fact that everything can be "problematized."...We revel in complexity. To be sure, few claim that the truth is simple or singular, but we have moved far from believing that truth can be set out at all with any caution and clarity.
It's Jacoby's claim that current academic devotion to complexity "elevates confusion from a transitional stage into an end goal" that provides the link to the emerging movement. The very fact that this amorphous movement moves under the designation "emerging"--coming into view or existence--suggests a critique parallel to Jacoby's.
In late 2003, Peter Rollins, whose book How (Not) to Speak of God, has been described by Tony Jones as "the best bloody book on the emerging church yet," responded this way to an interviewer's question, "What would your 'emerging church survival kit' contain?"
An empty space? really. I think that if you want to survive Christianity, and I am not sure if its possible yet, you need one of those cartoon tunnels, something that can create a womb-like space in the being of your beliefs and religious services, a virgin space where the word of God can impregnate you...
The problem with using a metaphor of gestation--or even the designation emerging for that matter--to describe a movement is that it necessarily entails a coming birth, a definitive coming into existence. In order for the complicating, complexifying, and problematizing work of the emerging movement to prove fruitful to the Church, it will have to move beyond this transitional stage at some point, and deliver the greater goods of illumination and clarity. Here's hoping for a healthy baby.
Comments
Bravo, Derek! May the emerging movement take this insight to heart. Thanks for your clarity on the issue.
Posted By: Stan Guthrie | March 8, 2008 10:26 AM
There is much I have appreciated about the emerging church movement. But the refusal to be clear is not one of them. There is a significant difference between being humble about one's beliefs and refusing to state what they are.
Jesus was not simple. He was not always clear. There are a lot of things I don't understand. But he was never complex for the sake of complexity. My confusion is more often because it is too hard than because he hid behind needless complexity.
Posted By: James Wartian | March 10, 2008 12:21 PM
Some good food for thought. I'll try to be simple about complexification: It all depends on what the need is. When a particular audience may be making broad, general conclusions from an oversimplification of something complex, it may be needed. Conversely, sometimes complexity needs to be boiled down to something workable, useful.
One "simplicity" in Christianity is supposedly that of "the Gospel."
The more I practiced and studied my evangelical faith (for about 27 adult years), the more I realized the "simplicity of the Gospel," was a serious misnomer, at least as traditional Christianity (Evangelical and beyond) expresses it. As long as there is supposedly a need to "be saved," that won't change.
I go beyond where the emerging movement is, in trying to re-cast the gospel. But whatever Jesus was, his simplification of the "commandments" down to love of God, neighbor and self, is one of the most useful ones ever, and one that even most former Christians, other non-Christians, and current Christians can agree on.
Posted By: Howard Pepper | March 10, 2008 1:45 PM
In my experience, emerging Christianity is pretty simple. In general - with apologies for generalizing - most emergent types can boil down what we're talking about into one phrase - walking in the way of Jesus. Following Jesus. Jesus is Lord. You get the point.
That gets complicated, usually, in response to folks who've overcomplicated their own tests for Christian fellowship into a 5 or 10 or 20 point systematic theology and creedal statement. Emergents resist that, pointing out honestly that people can follow Jesus as Lord and still differ widely on doctrinal interpretations.
Most emergents will be careful to state that they speak for themselves, not anyone else. That's not over-complicating things, that's being honest. Push them individually on what they believe, and they'll answer as honestly, in my experience. But the point for most of us is relationship (conversation) more than conformity. Which admittedly can be messy and frustrating as well as uncomfortable - such is life.
Posted By: Chris Cottingham | March 10, 2008 3:15 PM
As someone who studies a lot of the movements in the church, the emergent church is like many others, it is reactionary. Like Luther's 95 thesis, Authors like Brian Mclaren and Rob Bell are going against the norm of Christian literature. Also like other movements it is also highly cultural and insync with the worlds values. Not that these certain values are wrong or unbiblical they just follow the emphasis of the culture of the time. Like other movements the emergent church will pass and the church should learn from it, while at the same we as Christian need to know the basics of the Christian faith as a body of christ following the word and proclaiming Jesus as our savior and lord.
Posted By: Justin LaPeare | March 10, 2008 11:41 PM
I was struck recently by two very different thinkers, who offer essentially the same critique of 'postmodern' approaches.
Miroslav Volf, on the "Postmodern Option: We should flee both universal values and particular identities and seek refuge from oppression in the radical autonomy of individuals . . . wayward and erratic vagabonds, ambivalent and fragmented, always on the move and never doing much more than making moves."
Ajith Fernando, on "the postmodern mood: The postmodern generation has been called 'an instictually stimulated generation' where 'people prefer to feel than to think.' Postmodern people are uncomfortable with principles outside themselves governing their decisions and behavior."
Today, it seems to me that we are on the verge of giving up too much: the substantial for the ethereal, the scriptural for the cool, the true for the illusion, the right for the feeling.
Posted By: Mark Wilcoxson | March 11, 2008 12:47 PM
As I become more exposed to the emerging conversation, I get more and more impressed at how much they live out, "In the essentials, unity; in the non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity". Traditional evangelicals have quoted that like crazy, and I think they believe it. The question is, "what is essential?" If what is essential is simply following Jesus and becoming His disciple more and more each day, then I would say that the emerging churches have a very unified, very simple and straightforward, message - much more so than those divided by nonessential interpretations on baptism, communion, election and eschatology. Please remember that our unity is - and always has been - in Christ Jesus.
Posted By: tomfishstory | March 11, 2008 4:46 PM
As a post-academic, I applaud your (Derek Keefe's) insight into Academia's infatuation with complication and complexity, not unlike the Sophists of old. Complexity has been a mask for a long time.
But let's keep it simple, Mr. Keefe: Your insistence that to have value, the "emerging movement" must go beyond its "transitional state," seems a misplaced "hoping for a healthy baby." Misplaced because you're insisting it become something it is not.
Jesus of Nazareth was transitional---in any stretch of the imagination or definition of the term. And the mystery and power of his message and his life were vital as long as they were---and are---transitional, emergent, which is to say ALIVE. The transformation that Jesus experienced and promised was based on continual transition, continual renewing, continual striving to open oneself fully and continually to the "Kingdom of God" (or "God's Imperial Rule") that was at hand.
No need for complexity, no need to form a theology or a church. The only need is for a return to that most beautiful message in the hardest of times.
Posted By: Tom Tomshany | March 12, 2008 10:09 PM
The funny thing about "movements" is that they often try to reinvent the wheel as they try so hard to toss off the trappings of the old things. You see it in political movements, social movements, art movements and even religious movements. We are constantly told "Get rid of the old, embrace the new!" And that mantra has become so much of our culture that it pops up even as people talk about the modern church. On one hand, we have Christians clamoring for a rebellion against postmodern philosophy and a sort of return to orthodoxy, while on the other hand we have emergent churches calling for getting rid of common notions of orthodoxy to get to what is essentially a postmodern church. We ditch the past thousand years of study and theology and such, and we try to find new notions of what it means to be a Christian -- notions we try to assert are just like those of the first Christian churches. And yet, I get this sneaking suspicion that today's emergent churches are rapidly becoming tomorrow's evangelicals, and today's evangelicals are becoming tomorrow's mainline denominations. I wonder what will "emerge" after that?
Posted By: Glenn | March 14, 2008 11:13 PM