Balanced Emergent? or One of Those Waaaay Over on the Other Side

Spend ten to fifteen minutes in the blogoshere reading some of the post of those party to the emergents and you'll find numerous reviews of Spencer Burk’s new book “Heretics Guide to Eternity.” They run the total gamut; from a “thought-provoking book” to a book written as a “parable on universalism today."

But Rick Presley's sees this book like no one else; a fulmination. And with that, he exposes what he sees as a subtle shift taking place among the emergents.

I emailed Rick and chucked at his “Abbie Hoffman comment: Burn, Baby Burn” and he wrote the following:

I really wish Spencer Burke had written a more thoughtful book when he penned his Heretic's Guide to Eternity. I think the book had a lot of potential and really wish Spencer had given a little more attention to dialogue instead of diatribe. If his intended audience is the timid Evangelical looking for something better than the rigid legalism or dead orthodoxy of their current congregation, he did little to attract them to the emergent conversation. I can tell you that not many "recovering fundamentalists" will find his approach welcoming or sympathetic. As a former practitioner of the Church of Christ, you probably know many of these people who really don't like where they're "at" but they are scared by the incendiary anarchists who are too far to the other side.

I think there is a broad middle out there of people like Stephen Shields who really like the emerging church/conversation but want to distance themselves from the Emergent ChrisiAnarchists. If you go on lists like PoMoXian and Emerging Theology (what used to be Postmodern Theology, John O'Keefe's group) on Yahoo groups, you find a lot of rancor, disillusionment, bitterness and people who are "cultural Christians" but want nothing to do with evangelicals or evangelicalism. A number of these people even describe themselves as "Christian atheists" without the slightest hint of irony.

Meanwhile, conservative Christians who want to tap into the benefits of contemporary culture like Rob Bell of Mars Hill are being edged out of the conversation by the hardcore Emergents. Sad to see but it looks like the emerging conversation has split into very different streams. Anytime a group of "inclusive" Christians start talking about who is and is not a "real" one of what they claim is not a movement, it's time to say like Elijah, "I am no better than my fathers."