emerging versus emergent

in looking for another possible video, i saw that dj put up this video of mark driscoll discussing a difference between "emergent" & "emerging" church. i like his conclusion of becoming missionary in america at the end.

Comments

[Jonathon Norman]

being a missionary to an emerging culture is what the conversation is all about in my thoughts, as well.

[Stephen]

my problem with driscoll, he sums it up in one comment...Emergent is Liberal. For shame driscoll, lets label a strain so we can get rid of it.

[Stephen Fife]

Sorry battery died before I finished my thoughts. Then Driscoll proceeds to throw out a very modern term when he is "supposedly" post modern. He uses the modern term of "secular". A term invented by the modern church to describe the "outside" world. The post modern view is that God ordered all things so there can be no line between sacred and secular.

Sorry to wander on your blog Gav, but sometimes I just like to point out inconsitencies.

[gavin]

i'd agree with you completely stephen. not the biggest fan of driscoll and this statement, but in a 3 minute blurb it does a little to sort the labels of emergent and emerging. and considering our recent modernism wall, i thought it a decent video to throw out. and like stated, i like the 'missionary' part at the end.

[guy]

One of my things is how ironic our use of the terms "conservative" and "liberal" can be. Not that I never use them; I do, but I try to establish a context in which the terms are actually helpful and not caricatures.

Ok, on to my comment: Driscoll calls the "emergent" movement more liberal on issues like subtitutionary atonement, authority of Scripture, exclusivity of Christ, and original sin. I'm willing to bet that by "liberal" on subtitutionary atonement he means moving away from the penal substitutionary theory (though seldom called a theory in conservative reformed/evangelical theology today). If I'm right on him, he would be representative of many conservative evangelicals, especially of the reformed variety. The irony to me is that if one reckons "most faithful to the biblical text" as being the more conservative view of the atonement, then penal substitutionary theory is a liberal view. This has been very well demonstrated, I think, in Joel Green and Mark Baker's book "Recovering the Scandal of the Cross," and handled nicely in an issue of the UM magazine Circuit Rider that Joel Green edited a year or so ago. Jonathon offered excellent posts a while back to the same effect. There are several ironies in the use of "conservative/liberal" in theological debate and dialogue. But this issue is one of the hallmark cases.