Source: http://www.thinkchristian.net/
Folks of the emergent persuasion have had a tendency to use and sometimes overuse the prefix "post" in the conversation. Post-modern, post-denominational, post-Christendom, post-evangelical, etc. As I have argued before, I do not think that postmodernism is really a "post" at all. It is really a different way of being modern primarily in post-industrial economies. Too much focus on the "posts" is not helpful in the long run since it creates a level of unsettled ambiguity that makes lasting change a slippery outcome.
Nick Fiedler perhaps unwittingly began a fruitful conversation last week regarding the supposed "death" of emergent Christianity for which Tony has posted a list of various responses from across the web. As I argued, I do not think emergent Christianity is dead, but the idea that it was going to be "revolutionary" is in fact anemic at best and this is perhaps what the disappointment is really all about. As Blake has posted, it became something that produced something that was not expected and this is not a bad thing. It is more than frustrated evangelicals now and hence more than those who are looking for a radical revolution in evangelicalism. Perhaps it always was more than just this, but it it clear that in movement is not best identified by this response.
The term I am using to describe this unexpected outcome is not post-denominationalism since denominations still exist in various forms of "churches" all over the map of the American religious marketplace. I am calling what is occurring meta-denominationalism. It is the experience or desire being beyond yet with denominational structures of religion. So what does this mean?
In the past year or so in which I have been listening to the conversation before I became a more or less active participant, traditional denominations began to form cohorts of their own to discusshow emergent Christianity works within their own denominational structures and how this movement might work to create new shapes and structures inside of these traditions. No doubt some within these cohorts are after something revolutionary. Others, like myself, are more interested in carving out a space that can act like a little portal to other Christians in other denominations where we can unify at least some aspect of our churches and denominations. Since Robert Wuthnow's classic book The Restructuring of American Religion (1990) the idea that denominations are more fluid and similar than ever before due to the convergence of theological ideas and leveling off of social classes has been re-asserted by others and re-confirmed again and again. In other words, a Presbyterian (USA), a Catholic, a Methodist, and a Baptist may all have very similar views of the world that are actually more alike than with others of their own denomination! In previous decades this was highly improbable. Now the new question we are hearing people ask is how to find connections to engage that unique niche in the American religious marketplace and to come together in an effort to share similar religious experiences and views of the world that the denominational structures alone can no longer hold by themselves.
This is essentially what Brian McLaren has shown to be an significant outcome in the structure of this conversation we call emergent. It was his own religious experience that he describes in A Generous Orthodoxy. McLaren's version sounds a bit like Wade Clark Roof's analysis of baby-boomer religion where it is about individuals collecting and reconfiguring once disparate religious experience in their own reflexive pastiche. But what I think is happening with emergent is both a rediscovery of our own religious traditions through a conversation with others and the discovery and construction of new structures to hold and shape religious experience.
As sociologists have argued, as measures of social class even out more and more between denominations similarities become more pervasive. As this phenomenon has reached a certain level of maturity in American religion, those same traditional denominations have been in decline. While no evidence suggests that these two observations are necessarily correlated, other factors such as birth rate and young adult retention affect mainline declines, they are both phenomenon that people in the church experience on a regular basis in worship, programming, meetings, etc.
The idea of meta-denominationalism means that people are gathering in various media to understand the convergence of their religious experience and then to find ways to carve out and construct new spaces to enrich their theology, worship, and relationships that denominational structures inherently limit. In some ways it is a new ecumenism without the pretense of a grand unification of Christianity as an expected outcome. But it is a convergence of ideas and experiences that is new for many people. Meta-denominationalism means emergence through convergence. I think that's something rich and powerful to embrace as participants in the continuing and progressive revelation of God's kingdom. Don't you?
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A total tangent, but it seems odd to critique use of the term "post-modern" since the designation and definition of that term comes not only from outside the emerging conversation but from outside Christianity entirely. Whether it really is post modern or not isn't the point. It is a label used to refer to a specific movement in philosophy, and it is a (sufficiently) normative label that to subvert or replace it will only generate confusion and muddle conversation. I can get behind not wanting to extend the metaphor to post-everything-else, but post-modernism isn't something that we have the capacity to redefine as we see fit.
i think i have argued not to use it because i have seen it a) used to refer to things that i would argue are not postmodern, b) after reading about it for many years, i am convinced that what we call postmodern is really a form of modernism and nothing more. that is to say, i think that continued reliance on the term as an identifier has already muddled the conversation because no one has a clear idea, in my judgment, of what it actually is they are referring to. or people use it to refer to something that has no referent which is about the most postmodern thing in the conversation! ironically enough…
I agree that many people in the emerging conversation don't really understand post-modern philosophy or what the implications of it are, and therefore espouse all kinds of things that have nothing to do with it.
When you say "what we call post-modern" do you mean 'we' the emerging conversation, or 'we' people at large?
Actually, to take Drew's point further, postmodernism is not limited to philosophy, and is adapted in highly specific ways for different intellectual concerns. Textual criticism and metaphysics are two different disciplines, for example, which are impacted differently by postmodernity. Political science, another discipline, may look at it as the trend for people to move beyond commitments to social movements, such as post-feminism as a way for young women to enjoy individual freedoms fought for by feminism without having to participate in any meaningful struggle to hold onto those freedoms. So it becomes a discussion of the individual vs the collective. As opposed to metaphysics, where it is a discussion of transcendent forms (as I understand it from Derrida and Kevin Hart, Drew, though you've clearly read much more theory about it than I have), or religion where it may concern certainty vs uncertainty. It's an often confusing term.
I do wonder though, Drew, if meta-denominationalism is also a result of the Christian publishing industry and the media representations of Christians from conservatives as all believing one thing, holding one truth. Like so many church goers raising their children as Dobson would, regardless of denomination, or something like that. Living over in the UK, I'm wondering how sociologists consider social class in the U.S., where it seems everyone considers themselves to be middle class.
people at large including the emergent conversation. i linked to a couple of posts that cover my thoughts on that in more depth. Thanks!
class is definitely part of it since as people become more affluent they tend to become more theologically liberal. one way to phrase it is that there are not a whole lot of poor or oppressed people who have time to be post-moderns even if we in the educated affluent parts of the world call it something postmodern. marx and nietzche as well as kierkegaard were fully modern and we often forget that. very few "postmodern" thinkers would call themselves postmodern. derrida did not apply the label to himself. heidegger certainly did not. baudrillard is one of the few.
unfortunately, not a lot of theology deals with class as something constitutive of theology and belief in the US. to your point, while the publishing industry has marketed out difference among conservatives, the problem is another sociological terms called pillarization. with this each denomination and each church forms a pillar of belief that essentially cordons off different groups form each other based on membership roles. what the fluid boundaries of info. tech have dome with the emergent conversation is to help people related to others beyond these boundaries to realize that basically what wuthnow argued about denominations is true – people from different denominations have very similar religious experiences despite what the old traditional boundaries tell us. and i do think this is related to class as much as anything.
Ok, yeah, I think that's a problem. Whether culture at large uses "post-modern" in a way that is "correct" or not isn't something we can control by confusing the dialog by making a decision to use language in a different way from the people to whom we're speaking.
Philosophical dialog at large is far too broad and sprawling for us to try to step in and reform the use of and definition of terms.
I think the "post" made for a clever marketing tool–which raises all sorts of questions anyway. Any perceived "death" of emergence is going to kill some publishers, but I digress…
I think the "emergence through convergence" is something worth embracing. I'm (somewhat) embarrassed to say I once tried to point at this phenomenon through the metaphor of "Lost".
The analogy breaks down on any number of levels, but the idea that a group of people could/would have to form community out of something as random as a plane crash is not dissimilar to the religious structures of modernity–denominational allegiances prevailed (save in the occasional mixed marriage of Methodist-Baptist, Lutheran-Presbyterian, etc.)
This held until the me-generation boom of mega-churches where congreagations in urban and suburban areas homogenized. Though some emergent congregations could be accused of attracting niche followers, it was/is most often on hegemony of ideals, not class or (necessarily) geography.
As institutional allegiances breakdown, the "convergence" across all manner of media, social networking, global expansion/contraction is still being born. As such, folks like me tend to view chance encounters and meaningful faith encounters as canon, a realm that only a few of the people I go to church with inhabit.
I'm not sure the thorough-going implications of each of these movements (or the latent ripples of one, if it be one) but i'm grateful for the way you've articulated it here. It's the air we breathe, and I for one think it promising!
The original metadenominationalism was Catholicism. That's *exactly* what Iraeneus was writing about 1900 years ago, and what Pope Paul VI was writing in Lumen Gentium, and what Pope John Paul II wrote about in Crossing The Threshold of Hope.
Emergence is just Vatican II for Evangelicals.
The original metadenominationalism was Catholicism. That's *exactly* what Iraeneus was writing about 1900 years ago, and what Pope Paul VI was writing in Lumen Gentium, and what Pope John Paul II wrote about in Crossing The Threshold of Hope.
Emergence is just Vatican II for Evangelicals.
[...] where differences coexist among theological similarities. It is, as I have described it, a meta-denominational movement. It has become this even as people from numerous denominations have joined together with a shared [...]