Today I have my first day back at university and I am toying with the idea of starting my revision. I read Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical from cover to cover and didn’t like it very much, although the revised American edition seems really good in comparison. Take a look inside on Amazon and you will see that the text has critical marginal comments throughout. The willingness on the part of emergent types to be self-critical and their openness to be criticized by others is really refreshing. I wish that thinking Christians would charitably take up the opportunity to engage with the emerging church as we may not always have it.

Are there any who would be interested in a more extended series of discussions of emergent church-related issues on this blog? I could post very short posts introducing particular subjects for discussion and we could all talk them through in the comments.

I have wasted far too much time over the last few days interacting with people on the Derek Webb forums. Most of the discussion has taken place in this thread in response to the claim that I have a weakened doctrine of the atonement and ‘do not affirm objective penal substitution’. However, most of the debate ended up being on the subject of election (follow the thread through and you will see what I mean).

I have decided to stop posting on the forums again. It wastes far more time than I have to spare and does little good. Almost all of the people on the forums seem to be already convinced that I am wrong (because I am an FVite or NPPite, or something like that) before they ever carefully read what I am saying. They seem unable to conceive that there might be another way of framing the theological issues and consistently impute to me the worst implied beliefs that they suppose follow from certain of my statements, even though these implications only follow within their frame of reference. *sigh*

This brings me to the reason why I distrust much evangelical scholarship: it seems incapable of delaying judgment on a particular issue for long enough to intelligently understand its more challenging conversation partners on their own terms. There seems to be a paranoid fear that we will be led astray if we actually seek to charitably understand those with whom we find ourselves in disagreement. People are continually pressed to come out against positions, even if they have not done the relevant reading and digesting. As a result complicated theological positions are reduced to stereotypes.

Evangelicals are well able to deal with stereotyped positions: Arminianism, Roman Catholicism, Liberalism and the like. The fact that very few people actually hold to the stereotyped positions that evangelicals (particularly of the Reformed type) attack does not really trouble evangelicals. They just insist that the deep theological error of the stereotype is merely crouching just below the surface. When such Reformed evangelicals encounter the work of someone like N.T. Wright or Peter Leithart (for example) they either try to shoehorn them into existing stereotypes (they are ‘closet Romanists’) or construct new, equally distorted stereotypes (FVism or NPPism).

I believe that such stereotypes are an attempt on the part of evangelicals to keep their world tidy and uncomplicated. Stereotypes are a way of domesticating troubling theological opponents. Evangelicalism in general (this is one area where Tomlinson is right on target) seems to suffer from the desperate need to find security in being right and in having a world that is neat and ordered, everything being labelled and categorized. In large part this follows from the failure of the evangelical imagination, which is as serious a problem in many quarters as the failure of its mind.

Thinking in terms of binary oppositions is part and parcel of this way of looking at the world — Roman Catholicism/Biblical Christianity, Arminianism/Biblical Christianity, NPPism/Biblical Christianity. The idea that the world might be far more complicated than this and that they are not just two roads to two destinations (‘All expressions of Christianity are on the path to one of two destinations, Rome or Geneva’) does not seem to occur to some people. Oh well.

I will probably post on the subject of election some time in the next few days, if I want a break from revision. I have tackled the subject many times before. My basic position is incredibly simple and is one that first came to me from study of the text of Romans and Ephesians. However, it has huge implications and cuts through a Gordian knot of problems that have surrounded most Reformed ways of approaching the issue.