Christian Humanist Podcast Episode 5: Response to Feedback

Christian Humanist Podcast RSS Feed

The Christian Humanist Podcast’s November 17 episode, in which our three hosts discussed Emergent and the New Calvinism, generated so much feedback that the three of us felt that we ought not to give it any less than a full-bodied treatment, but since our recording time can only run an hour each week, and since we didn’t want to start shorting one week’s moderator cleaning up the last week’s moderator’s mess, we elected to move long feedback to our respective blogs.

So in this post, I’m going to respond at some length to the email that Sam Mulberry of CWC radio sent to thechristianhumanist@gmail.com and also address the comment that Eric left on this blog post. Because I did not secure permission to cite the email, and because the ideas deserve some explication, my response will take the form of an essay rather than a question and answer session.

At the end of last week’s episode I felt deeply conflicted. ?One reality that, as moderator, I feel like I underplayed is the wide range of responses among Christians to the crises of the Internet age.? Another is the common threads that I see between these responses.

The Varieties of Post-Evangelical Experience

The movements that Time Magazine calls the New Calvinism aren’t by any stretch the only heirs of Calvin–as Eric notes in the comment to the blog post, folks like Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius van Til, not to mention Karl Barth and Francis Schaeffer, have been finding Calvin helpful for Christian teaching and life long before Emergents and New Calvinists began fighting.? Moreover, I would guess that many if not most of those folks who find good teaching in Calvin are not among those whom Michael Spencer (in his podcasts, though I can’t find the phrase on his blog) calls “The Young, the Restless, the Reformed.”? On the other side of the equation, the Emergents aren’t the first or the only ones to respond favorably to post-structuralist linguistics and post-nationalist politics; one only has to think of the Yale post-liberals (George Lindbeck, Hans Frei, Stan Hauerwas, and company) and the Radical Orthodox movement (John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, William T. Cavanaugh, and others–mostly faithful Roman Catholic parishioners) to see that postmodernism often fits quite well with mainline Protestant or traditional Catholic ecclesiologies.

Such concessions do not mean that intellectual influences are meaningless; our discussions of the pluralism of Emergent and the sectarianism of the New Calvinists treat real trends among both groups, and the fact that the movements demonstrate true diversity does not negate the intelligible common threads among them.? To hold up those moments when these tendencies lead some to reject fellowship or leads others to render the concept of fellowship meaningless is not the same as to say everyone affiliated with either “camp” is the extreme case, but neither is it to say that the extreme is unrelated to the trend.

In other words, our conversation in the podcast, limited as it was to an hour, necessarily left out some things, left some generalizations unchallenged, and left to our intelligent, discerning, and awfully cute listeners to take what we were doing as one moment in the conversation rather than an attempt to wrap everything up.

The Virtues and Vices Common to Christians of all Stripes

While I neglected, as moderator, some of the genuine diversity in both movements, I also neglected to note that certain vices of both groups seem endemic in our historical moment rather than flowing from either theological movement exclusively.? When at the end of the podcast we discussed the phenomenon of the “hip pastor,” I should have noted that such a figure is not unique to the Emergent movement but that many of the “hip pastors” of which I’m aware head up congregations that most would call garden-variety Evangelical or seeker-sensitive Evangelical, and at least one certainly hails from a New Calvinist gathering.? On the other hand, it would be hard for me to think of a person less impressed with his own Cool than Tripp Fuller, friend and cohost of an Emergent podcast.

Likewise, when we discussed towards the end the age-segregation that characterizes so much of modern American Christianity, I should? have noted more forcefully that the most segregated churches I know, in terms of age, tend to be hard-liners theologically rather than the theological freewheelers that often get identified with Emergent.? In fact, of all the Emergents I know personally, I could count those younger than me (I’m 32) on one hand, while those in their forties and fifties are much more numerous.

With regards to the New Calvinists and their exclusion of difference, certainly some of those Emergents most impressed with Darwinian evolution exclude those not ready to read Bible through Origin of Species from “respectable” circles. ?I realize that’s not the same as a formal anathema, but formal anathemas really aren’t all that common among New Calvinists, to be fair. ?On the contrary, to illustrate the virtue of hard-nosed but open-armed fellowship, I could hardly commend anyone more readily than my friend and (at least at one point) New Calvinist Jeff Wright. In fact, when I spent a year as a contributing writer at The Conservative Reformed Mafia, a New Calvinist collaborative blog, I did so at Jeff’s invitation and even after I made perfectly clear to him that I’m not a Calvinist and not entirely impressed with the American Right Wing.? If anything, my time among that crew convinced me that certain iterations of conservatism are in fact worthwhile for a thinking person.

And as for moralism, I see that in both movements. ?I often joke that in order to tell whether one’s interlocutor is right-wing or left-wing, ask them, in succession, about sex and money. ?The left-winger will be a libertine with regards to sex and the worst sort of Puritan about one’s place in economic systems. ?The right-winger will be a moralist in the bedroom but joyfully promiscuous in the marketplace. ?Despite the fact that I always feel like he’s trying to sell me something I’d otherwise rather not buy, I do think G.K. Chesterton’s riff about the capaciousness of the Catholic tradition is right on the money here: call them repressed if you will, and point to their celibate clergy, but those Catholics by far have the sexiest Christian art, and if you hadn’t noticed, they do have much larger families than Protestants, agnostics, and other such folks. ?And although they have a much more robust sense of Christians’ obligations to promote economic justice, they also throw the best parties.

In other words, as I mentioned briefly in the podcast, both Emergent and New Calvinism exhibit some common virtues and vices, some symptomatic of the historical moment and others flowing from a grace that transcends these conflicts.

Tony Jones and Common Ground

A few people (not all in the context of this podcast episode, but I can answer them here as well) have asked me in particular about Tony Jones, one of the more visible authors in the Emergent movement.? I actually became aware of Tony Jones well before I ever heard about Emergent, buying a copy of his book Postmodern Youth Ministry while I was still in seminary.? I loaned that book to a youth minister friend of mine and never got it back, so I bought another copy in 2004, which I loaned to another youth minister and once again never got it back.

I’ve not yet bought a third copy, but I don’t rule out the possibility.

What I appreciate about that phase of Tony’s work is that he was obviously conversant with the texts and projects of Derrida, Foucault, and company but seemed to see that a turn to Aristotelian traditionalism, mediated through folks like Stan Hauerwas and Alasdair Macintyre, would be a more fruitful avenue for resisting the particular vices of certain strands of postmodernism.? In other words, in resisting the faults of counter-Enlightenment Evangelicalism (perhaps foremost its obsession with certain genres of apologetic literature), Jones, like me, saw the best response to be a reinterpretation of a full-bodied tradition rather than a flattening of tradition for the sake of avoiding scandalous particularities.

For better or for worse, Jones seems to have moved to different places intellectually.? Given some of his recent blog posts at beliefnet.com and recent podcasted conversations with Bart Ehrman and John Caputo among others, Jones seems to have given up on what he sees in Hauerwas and Macintyre, favoring instead an intellectual project that looks, where I sit, rooted far more in the traditions of the Enlightenment’s pan-religious relativism than in any tradition that holds the Scriptures or Church tradition normative.? To his credit, Jones has objected at liberal Protestants’ diminution of the Incarnation in a recent blog post, but I’m among those folks who see his journey as leading to places that most Christians shouldn’t follow.

I bring up Jones in particular because his own career demonstrates a diversity of relationships to recent intellectual struggles, first demonstrating a post-liberal resistance to certain tendencies of postmodernism, then embracing the flux and particularity of poststructuralism, and eventually landing in a more Enlightenment-flavored (and, I must confess, seemingly sycophantic) approval of the nineteenth-century-style modern methodologies of an ideological biographer like Ehrman.? To say that I reject Tony Jones would be as false as to say that I approve of him; the fact of the matter is that I’m planning (I’ve decided since I started revising this post) to buy a third copy of a book from his early career, but I pity his capitulation to Jesus-Seminar-style historicism.

Some Closing Thoughts on Christian Confession

I wanted to do a show on Emergent and the New Calvinism because I thought that each corrected a deficiency in the other. ?The Emergents, for all their baggage, bring to the Christian intellectual life an unflagging commitment to the unity of Church, sometimes going so far that they render everything Christian (and thus nothing Christian) but nonetheless approaching things in a spirit of listening. ?My hope is that the three hosts of the Christian Humanist Podcast emulate that kind of listening tendency, especially when David Grubbs and I end up fighting over the same bone as the mean old dogs we are.

On the other hand, the New Calvinists can teach the rest of us the value in vigorous and unflinching examination of our own claims to be Christian, always pressing on each other and on other Christians (when they’ll acknowledge us) to return to the text of Scripture and to hard-nosed philosophical inquiry to make sure we’re no mere sentimentalists but Church Militant, always pressing on towards the goal. ?I’m very glad for all the butt-kickings I took as the token Erasmean on The Conservative Reformed Mafia; those folks forced me to be an Erasmean all the way or go home.

Ultimately I confess that the Church is both One and Apostolic (and Holy and Catholic as well, but that’s for another day), and even though I know my Orthodox friends will rake me over the coals for praising two fighting Protestant movements for keeping those two in tension, I do so anyway. ?I’m glad the conversation doesn’t end, and I’m glad there’s actually something to talk about, and that’s why, for the time being, I think of myself at the very least as a fellow-traveler both with the New Calvinists and the Emerging Church.