First, some background on what I focused on this past week might be helpful. After the Rob Bell Adult Forum my wife Mary searched for information about Rob Bell. She watched a documentary called The Real Roots of the Emerging Church to gain a better understanding of Emerging Christianity, which she understands plays a big part of Creator's community life, as evidenced in our Convergence membership.
In her wisdom Mary watched this apologetic for a more fundamentalist or "traditional" view of Christianity, and rather than focus on their criticisms she instead outlined their categories and descriptions of their observations and views of the Emerging Church. The documentary attempts to steer clear of personal attacks on individuals and target their teachings. They do not succeed but the more important takeaway is their charge of the "bad theology" in what they call the movement's apostasy.
My first inclination is to simply invoke a rubber-and-glue reversal, to label theirs as the "bad theology" but I'll delve deeper. They outline their reasons for judging this to be a product of postmodern epistemological error. They start with claims where "fact" and "truth" are used interchangeably. They understand the Emerging Church to be an outgrowth of a postmodern perception of the world.
The narrator states "At the heart of postmodern errors is a rejection of truth as universal and absolute, as unchanging and knowable. Christians base their faith upon the fact that God has spoken through his son Jesus Christ. Thus language must be capable of conveying truth." Then their author Eric Ludy proclaims, "Christianity is very clear in its historical roots that we find our moorings and our basis on the fact the Bible is fact. Our experiences are not our lead instrument. Postmodernism uses experience as the lead instrument and sticks fact in the background".
I personally hold a faith that the Bible conveys truth in a unique way, but not on the "fact that the Bible is fact". I don't agree historically that Christians would all accept this. I believe, as many adherents to an Emerging Church view likely do, that scriptural language is capable of conveying truth and does this above and beyond fact. To give one example, Jesus mostly used parables for his teaching. Parables illustrate spiritual truths without relying on "factual" accounts. Does that mean nothing in the Bible can be read as factual? Obviously not and I do not feel there is a slippery slope in thinking the Biblical truth is not based on "the fact the Bible is fact".
As a Lutheran, and more broadly as a Protestant, I currently have the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in mind. The historical impact of the Reformation was undeniable. Yet scripture did not change (although access via translation did change), historical "facts" did not change, God's nature did not change. Some men's understanding of now God is manifest in the world changed based on how scriptures were understood.
Karen Armstrong has written a book titled A History of God. In reading this book there is a sense of new revelations man makes about God. Historically God can be seen and understood as a tribal God. Scripture, when looked at from that perspective, conveys something very different. To say God never changes and so our understanding of God cannot change does not bear up to close scrutiny for me.
There are even Bible passages that describe this spiritual evolution, Romans 8:19-22: "The whole creation is eagerly waiting for the full revelation of the children of God. . . . From the beginning until now, the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth."
Defining deconstruction as a tool that makes all truth claims subjective puzzles me as an English major. Objective fact is supported by evidence. Deconstruction is a poor tool to refute factual evidence. That said, is "bad theology" behind this documentary? I will say the arguments so far do not convince me today.
Back to this Sunday's Worship, Pastor Ray used a compact mirror during the Children's Talk and had them look into the mirror and asked them what they saw. This was to physically illustrate for them the word for Εἰκὼν in the Gospel reading, which Pastor Ray pointed out could be translated as image instead of head as printed in the bulletin. Pastor Ray tied this to associations with God and image in Genesis. This is also an example of where the all-encompassing claims the documentary made on "facts" and "truth" confuses rather than clarifies. Genesis reads man is created in the image of God. Does this establish the "fact" that God has a physical body like man's? Looking at an image of someone the mirror, should this be described as looking at an image of God? If a coin has an image of an emperor with the inscription God or Son of God is that inscription accurate?
Thinking of everything in the Bible as factual will not lead to an answer for any of those questions.
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