So, will September 2008 go down in history as the time when capitalism ended and the banking system collapsed, or the time when the idea of "emerging church" blew up?
The former is clear enough. The idea of socializing the losses but not the profits of the banks is certainly ... interesting: it seems somewhat uneven. But I long-ago decided that I do not understand macroeconomics - my only fear is that it sometimes seems that no one else does, either.
As for the "Emerging Church", well, there are certainly lots of people running a mile from the term: Jason Clark is moving on, and making his emphasis his "Deep Church" perspective instead. The sainted Dan Kimball and others are pointing to a post by Scott McKnight, inviting us to distinguish "emerging" from "emergent". The wise Tall Skinny Kiwi went so far as to have a post on "now that we have stopped emerging". And so it goes on. And on.
Trying to put things into a named box seems often to be an attempt to close down a debate, and attempt to coral lots of diverse people into the same corner. So if the whole "emerging church" label has passed its usefulness, it doesn't seem a big deal. If this helps to disentangle those with very conventional evangelical theology but lots of relevancy (certainly Driscoll, probably Kimball) from those who are more ... adventurous (the Emergent folks, MacLaren, and so on) perhaps that's rather good.
If MacLaren is right, and we are in the midst of a one-in-400-year sea-change in culture and theology, you can hardly expect it to happen in one leap, anyway. And if that turns out to be a load of froth signifying nothing, well, that's life, too. I wonder what the next name will be.
Ideas, good. Simplistic names, bad.
2 comments:
Forget macroeconomics. Study the psychology of crowds, it will be much more informative in the current 'crisis'. Don't tell my economics professors I said that.
:-)
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