Absolutely Not!

Exposing the Postmodern Errors of the Emerging Church 

Phil Johnson is executive director of Grace to You, and is a frequent commentator on the emerging church and related issues. His talk from the Shepherds 2006 conference is available here  and here. At the second link you can also view several dozen comments and see how some supporters of the emerging church movement responded to Johnson’s paper.

I found little or no emphasis on conversion in any of more than a dozen books I read about the "emerging church movement."

Here are some excerpts from the talk (page numbers relate to the first link above):

• [V]ery few of this movement’s most obvious features are truly inventive. The philosophy and even some of the novelties of style are really not that much different from what was happening during my junior high school years in the youth group of the liberal Methodist church I grew up in (p. 2).
• [T]he suggestion that we try to deal with truth in non-propositional form is not anything new with the "emerging church movement."  It’s an idea that was floated as one of the key tenets of neo-orthodoxy at least 65 years ago or more (p. 6)
• Postmodernism is not really a significant departure from modernism; it is just a similar attempt to subvert and defeat the truth of Scripture by glorifying irrationality, and by portraying all truth as hopelessly paradoxical, ambiguous, unclear, uncertain, unimportant, or otherwise unworthy of all the concern and attention philosophers have given to the idea. Postmodernism abandons the hope of finding any absolute or incontrovertible truth, and instead, the postmodernist looks for amusement by playing with words and language, and by questioning every assumption and challenging every truth-claim.

     That’s no answer to modernism; it is a further step in the same wrong direction.

     So my assessment of the "emerging church movement" is that far from being the antithesis of modernism, this sort of  "evangelical postmodernism" is really ultimately nothing more than Modernism 2.0 (p. 7).

• [I]f you want to begin to understand how anyone might try to write a theological justification for the irrational agglomeration of unorthodox ideas that is circulating in the "emerging church movement", read the book these two men [Grenz and Franke] jointly authored, titled Beyond Foundationalism (p. 9 ).
• The "missional" emphasis in the "emerging church movement" seems to be entirely focused on an effort to adapt the church to the culture, with very little stress on the church’s duty to proclaim a message of repentance and faith in Christ that calls men and women to forsake the world.

     In other words, the "emerging church movement" seems to be all about the conversion of the church, rather than the conversion of the sinner.

     In fact, I found little or no emphasis on conversion in any of more than a dozen books I read about the "emerging church movement" (p. 14).