Emergent Christianity And Its Forbears. Morphing Into Something Old But New
Posted: Sunday, January 31, 2010
by Christofer French
Rain Dancer Associates, LLC
I once studied the Bible quite intensely for a game show in the 70's. This was after I was a minister, and after my formal biblical studies. This experience - speed reading through the Bible about 4 or 5 times - gave me a startling "subjective" experience. I saw Biblical history more as a FILM, a dynamic fluid picture, not a series of snapshots, as most people do. They quote the Bible, because it is scripture and take their viewpoints and criticisms as if they were permanent and hard fast, locked in bits of authority. Kind of like "bullets" fired from their ecclesiastical guns. It was then that I realized that all of history can be viewed as a film and not a series of freeze frame photographs, concretized in hard structures. There is a marvelous program on educational TV done by a Brit who interlocks historical events through wonderful commentary. Because of this experience, I started looking at history and religion from the 30,000 foot level as if I were an observer aloft. This then became my way of understanding what appear to be vast and apparently unrelated ideas.
Point One: The word "Emergent" is such a nice label. It binds up the discussion in a semantic box. Term creation is a game in itself. The establishment always gets to label new movements to put the new thing in its place in relation to the establishment. I am not going to choose to comment in about the doctrinaire and approach of Emergent Christianity. I would like to comment on the movement of change in Judaism and Christianity, and how what the people are experiencing is much more important than thinkers and "professional priests" would like to confess. The concept of "emergence" is omnipresent in the flow of history. When the indigenous peoples of Central and South America "embraced" Catholicism. They would only embrace it, if their local deities came along. The Roman Catholics "permitted" a different kind of Roman Catholicism. One intermixed with native gods. The iron clad Romans are your best studiers of demographics. They are the ORIGINALS. But then after employing their adaptive responses to what the people want, then, they concretize it to give it stability and control.
To shorten up a gigantic topic. I know what scripture is. But you know what? In 150 AD they didn't have a Bible to refer to. In 325 AD they were going to go through thousands of books to determine what "scripture" was. Who were they? Priests who were a part of this EMERGENT Christianity thing. They knew they had to pay much attention to all the other beliefs, which is why they came up with Easter (Ishtar) and Christmas (Saturnalia). Then when King Henry VIII decided that he was going to create Episcopalianism because of his personal issues, that set up a big movement. And Protestants, God love "em, used to run for the bushes when the establishment came after their flesh in grand and violent and bloody purges. The Protestants were the second big EMERGENT GROUP. Then the now emergent Protestants fought the once emergent Catholics in bloody wars to determine who was the most godly.
When Christ began teaching, he was in a very hellenized world. Very few current establishment authorities really want to talk about that. Greek thought permeated the Middle East from 300 BC forward. It was in fact Greek liberalism that allowed the Judean world to stretch its wings. They were perhaps to learn poorly from the Greeks or too well, because the Romans were administrative hard cases and were not like the Greeks. Roman implacability was demonstrated in the destruction of Jerusalem, which created one of the original EMERGENT EVENTS. The modern world was created when the Jews were sent on the Roman roads without a building, and Christians, because of the destruction of the temple, also went to the Roman Roads in the form of the original disciples. So Jesus impetus coming up with "not very Jewish" ideas and lots of Jewish ideas highly modified, blending current themes and being VERY ICONOCLASTIC, started the template off. So, Christianity was going to be the ULTIMATE DEMOGRAPHIC experiment, a product of writers and preachers who didn't have universities to graduate from, only the leather on their feet, their full beating hearts and their electrical minds, alive with dangerous and profound new thoughts.
I promised to go back three thousand years. Solomon's Temple is the rock hard establishment thing built to make a mark on the world. And that it certainly did. HOWEVER. Jerusalem was a Jebusite town that his father David conquered by way of a secret passage. This little town had only been theirs for a small time by the time the Temple was built. Of course, Mt. Zion was traditionally where Abraham and Isaac had their date with destiny, so its not like it wasn't historically important. But at this point, this was the ultimate EMERGENT NATION. And then what happened? 400 years later, the Babylonians came into town took the Jews to Babylon and that started a whole new movement - JEWISHNESS. As they sat in captivity, they came up with a new way of approaching their Torah. When they came back from Babylon, the rag tag group of Jews which had "wept and there sat down next to the Juniper tree" on the banks of the river, made a new commitment to being righteous. And they vowed they would never again be guilty of being unrighteous. Then they were EMERGENT. In Jesus time, the Jews were the ESTABLISHMENT in their country. But then just 30 years later, they became EMERGENT again. Jewishness has ALWAYS been in flux, hellenized, Babylonianized, and in dynamic change.
It is a great mistake to see Christianity and especially Protestant establishment as the fixed Establishment, even though that is the urge in all peoples to see themselves as establishment. Then people and new ideas come along, gather in big groups, start paying their tithes to new guys with new ideas who set them all aflutter. Just like the Jews who came from Babylon, just like the Christians who hit the Roman roads, just like all the movements of Christianity from 100 to 400 AD, just like the the Cathars and the Albigensians, and just like Henry VIII, and Calvin and Wesley and Luther, and just like the explosion of Jewish thought with the Kabbalah in Spain in the 1200s and 1300's, and just like those funny righteous types who sailed to America because they hated the English Establishment in 1620, everyone is once emergent, then try to become establishment and there's lots of name calling in between.
One of my ancestors was Carlos P. Healy, he came to America in 1640. But he was not a Puritan. He was from Liverpool. He wanted some of this New World, and he settled in the area and ended up marrying into the Puritan crowd. He set up a farm in a swampy part of Boston that he ended up selling to some guys who wanted his farm to build a new EMERGENT UNIVERSITY on. They wanted to compete with all those old English schools that had been around forever, and were the ESTABLISHMENT back then. So, these new guys gave Carlos some money so he could move west. (the "west" then was western Massachusetts and New York -The Frontier which is always Emergent). So, the Healy clan ended up selling their swampy farm to some guys who wanted to name their college after an actual guy in England. They wanted to call it HARVARD. Damned upstart Americans.
Then fast forward to western New York in the 1830's when the "puritan" population exploded out of New England and spread across the northern midwest and ultimately all the way across to Seattle. One of Carlos's forbears was Brigham Young, and he came up with some really WILD emergent and revolutionary ideas, after Joseph Smith had "seen" them. They didn't become EMERGENT, but they did become distinctive. And they might have been killed - every last one of them - had the old Roman Catholics been around, but alas, it was America, it was the 1800's and there was this place called Utah. Kind of like the Essenes, who went and sought a place in a "Utah-like desert" who, strangely, probably, influenced, what was his name? Jesus.
It is hard to see ourselves in a flow of history, because darn it - this is our lives and there is nothing more current and de Rigeur than the Present. Gamaliel said it best though, just as much a historian as a theologian when asked about what would become this new Emergent Jesus. If it lasts and it works for people and something comes of it - then you have to salute it and pay attention (That's paraphrased!)
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