Where bad science and hermeneutics intersect

If we believe that the same God who created asn evolving universe is revealed in an evolving Bible, we can derive some fascinating insights from contemporary studies of genetics. Today's chickens, it turns out, still have the genetic information in their DNA that was used to produce long tails, scales, and teeth in their ancestors the dinosaurs. During embryonic development, some of those primitive dinosaur characteristics still manifest themselves in chicken. (Human embryos similarly have stages where they sport gills and tails, so it is said that our ontogeny recapitulates our phylogeny.) We might say that the Bible similarly retains the record of its own evolution, and in our individual spiritual development we may personally recapitulate earlier stages.

Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 273.

It is tough to even know where to start with this quote. Do you start with the hopelessly outdated (Contemporary? Really?) and abandoned arguments for evolutation based on embryology? (I always knew that dinosaurs had something to do with my spiritual formation. I just could never figure out precisely what. Thanks!) Do you start with the retreaded developmental hypotheses of source criticism? I have not read the entire book in question, so I don't want to be unfair or uncharitable to McLaren, but I was under the impression that he was a prominant voice for the emerging movement. So why is he acting so modern by restating all of their old arguments?

A contemporary discussion on inerrancy and authority...

What role should the Bible have in society? A panel discussion with Tim Keller, Alister McGrath, and Brian McLaren. It's well worth a watch.

Scripture as missional and identity-shaping

The best way to describe Scripture is that it is identity-shaping. The Bible tells us who we are, where we are, and where we are going. In fact, its identity-shaping, Spirit-mentored direction propels its readers into a missional life. Eugene Peterson warns of the danger of making the Bible after our own Trinitarian image: my Holy Wants, Holy Needs, and Holy Feelings. Instead, if we read the Bible aright, we are remade--since the Bible as been sent as a word from God to us--into God's image, the perfect Eikon, Jesus Christ...

...This is what it is meant by Scripture being missional: Scripture is designed by God to work its story into persons of God so that they may become doers of the good.  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create restored Eikons who are in union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world. Scripture, I somethings have to tell myself, is not designed just to be exegeted and probed and pulled apart until it yields its (gnostic-like) secrets to those who know its languages and its interpretative traditions and who can then divulge their gleanings behind pulpits on Sunday mornings or in monographs and academic journals (very few care to read).  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create missional people who learn from their missional praxis how to see Scripture as amissional text that shapes them so that they can live in the story that the church tells in Scripture.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 146-147.

You might be emergent if...

Emerging Church Hermeneutics

Emergents sometimes exercise a deconstructive critique of the Bible’s view of God. Sometimes I hear it in ways that are no more interesting than Marcion’s old (and heretical) critique of the violent God of the Old Testament. Yet upon close inspection, the rumblings are subtler and more sophisticated, and the struggle is palpable and genuine. For some emergents, the Bible includes portrayals of God that cannot be squared with their understanding of a God of love.

Scot McKnight, “The Ironic Faith of Empergents,” Christianity Today, September 2008, 63.

Emerging Church Hermeneutics

Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we’re unwilling to question.

Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christian, 50.

Emerging Church Hermeneutics

The coordinators of Emergent have often been asked (usually by their critics) to proffer a doctrinal statement that lays out clearly what they believe. I am merely a participant in the conversation who delights in the ongoing reformation that occurs as we bring the Gospel into engagement with culture in ever new ways. But I have been asked to respond to this ongoing demand for clarity and closure. I believe there are several reasons why Emergent should not have a "statement of faith" to which its members are asked (or required) to subscribe. Such a move would be unnecessary, inappropriate and disastrous. Why is such a move unnecessary? Jesus did not have a "statement of faith." He called others into faithful relation to God through life in the Spirit. As with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, he was not concerned primarily with whether individuals gave cognitive assent to abstract propositions but with calling persons into trustworthy community through embodied and concrete acts of faithfulness. The writers of the New Testament were not obsessed with finding a final set of propositions the assent to which marks off true believers. Paul, Luke and John all talked much more about the mission to which we should commit ourselves than they did about the propositions to which we should assent. The very idea of a "statement of faith" is mired in modernist assumptions and driven by modernist anxieties.

Continue reading LeRon Shults at http://emergent-us.typepad.com/emergentus/2006/05/doctrinal_state.html

Emerging Church Hermeneutics

A trademark feature of the emerging movement is that we believe all theology will remain a conversation about the Truth who is God in Christ through the Spirit, and about God's story of redemption at work in the church. No systematic theology can be final. In this sense, the emerging movement is radically Reformed. It turns its chastened epistemology against itself, saying, "This is what I believe, but I could be wrong. What do you think? Let's talk.”

Scot McKnight, “Five Streams of the Emerging Church,” Christianity Today, February 2007, 38.