An Emergent Theology for Emerging Churches (Paperback)

~ Ray S. Anderson (Author) "A friend who read an earlier version of this book said, "Well Ray, it looks like you may be reinventing the wheel!..." (more)
Key Phrases: Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, Spirit of Christ (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fuller Seminary theology professor Anderson bases a theology for today's "emerging" churches on the church in first-century Antioch. Like that ancient church, today's church may need a "new theological orientation," and like today's "emerging" churches, the Antiochian church was "mission-minded." Anderson emphasizes the vital, ongoing activity of the Holy Spirit, arguing that new churches that don't have an established structure to fall back on must rely entirely on the Spirit's guidance. He cautions emerging churches not to become watered-down spiritually, but to remain true to the specifically Christian task of helping usher in the kingdom of God. Sometimes Anderson could be more concrete. For example, in one chapter he explains that just as "the work of God through Christ became a narrative text" that helps the church apply Scripture, our own stories can interpret biblical texts. The example he offers is of a seminary where, decades ago, the stories of real women helped people reinterpret biblical discussions about gender. Anderson does not take the next step and spell out new stories emerging in today's church that might similarly press Christians to reinterpret Scripture. All in all, this is a solid, though not especially original, book.
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Review

"...shows emerging practitioners how to anchor church innovation to biblical theology--both historic and eschatological--better than anything I know." -- —Todd Hunter, National Director, Alpha USA, and former National Director, Vineyard USA

"The most important questions are what the theology is behind what is happening in and among emerging churches." -- —Dan Kimball, author of The Emerging Church

"The notion of 'emerging churches' reminds us that the church is always the becoming church." -- —Eddie Gibbs, Donald A. McGavran Professor of Church Growth, School of Intercultural Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary

"This book introduces important theological perspectives to a new generation of leaders. This creative and faithful voice is greatly needed." -- —Brian McLaren, author/activist (anewkindofchristian.com)

"This book will be a blessing for anyone seeking to become 'a new kind of Christian.'" -- —Jenell Williams Paris, Bethel University, St. Paul, Minnesota, Solomon's Porch

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Product Details

• Paperback: 236 pages
• Publisher: InterVarsity Press (August 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0830833919
• ISBN-13: 978-0830833917
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #277,240 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars light reading on a weighty conversation, April 18, 2007

By	Nicola Gibson "nic" (FL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I read this book on recommendation of friends. I have read a number of books in the emerging conversation, and have been very impressed by some and not so impressed by others.

This book I think is seriously off target and not a significant edition to the conversation for a number of reasons. First the premise of the book is a derivation of emergent theology from the Antioch passage of the book of Acts 11. This is a biblical passage of all of a half chapter- 1/3 of a page. So the theological analogy of the whole of the book reads to me like trying to fill a theological swimming pool form a glass of exegetical water. There is far too much weight put on the difference between Jerusalem and Antioch; it is strained, and data is fudged to make it work. This straining is quite bad in a couple of places. Anderson broke my trust be doing this and his words lost their critical weight. If I'm reading a book about a movement by an `observer' who I know is a professor and not a practitioner, that person had better give me the strength of his office- critical and careful thinking.

Secondly, it reads a little like a young life talk. It is written very enthusiastically, but it is not a manifesto or a theology in a very serious sense. Everything of substance that has been said here is said many other times in the Emergent/Emerging literature in different and sometimes better words. And someone in IVP's editorial department should have had a talk with him about the number of exclamation points he used. It is crazy!!!!!!

Thirdly, it is a positive book I think to a fault. Those who are very enthusiastic about the emerging church are already not critical enough about it's theology. And those not enthused have a critical eye on it. So for Anderson to write such an uncritically reasoned volume that is a 'theology' misses the mark on both sides- it does not correct the excesses of the one nor is it self-critical enough to draw in the other. I think this is especially true if Brian McClaren is going to be a major movement figure you are going to quote. Anderson should have taken the pastoral responsibility to know if he is going to put Brian's work forward as good and insightful, then he should also have given a word of warning, especially about Generous Orthodoxy (see my review).

Fourth, and honestly, this book never really drew me in. This is not because it was either too conservative or too liberal. It just didn't have the theological octane to interest me and didn't hit me where I'm living. I thought it was loosely written and could have been about 115 pages instead of over 200. As a practitioner I the field, this book was not for me. I do know why so many big names say such nice things about the book on the back of it, but I suspect it is a relational dynamic, or includes the fact that some of these people are quoted prominently in the book.

Not recommended.

Nic gibosn

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Underwhelming, November 27, 2007

By	adam mcinturf - See all my reviews

I attend a church, that, although it often rejects the label, is for all intents and purposes and emergent church. I'm also a student at a Bible College, majoring in Greek and Theology. Often, these worlds seem to be at loggerheads, and navigation between the two can sometimes be a difficult task. I want more than navigation, you know? More than the two aspects of my life - the academic and the spiritual/social/religious/so forth - to just put up with each other. More than a conversation between two mutually exclusive entities, the goal is for the two to indwell eachother. For faith to seek understanding. For learning to pursue the "reasons of the heart" as Pascal would have it. Not a cold, detached, and inhuman sort of knowing that builds a tower of Babel and fractures its social scene in the process, but a personal, intimate knowledge of the One who has become on my behalf everything I have hated in myself and also everything He wants me to be.

To keep it personal (this is a blog you're reading), I love my church. I love a place where the people of God are intent on finding the "we" songs in hymn book of life and singing them together. And I'm ok with it that we're trying to be cool at the same time, playing Menomena at the refreshment table, which always cuts 15 minutes into the start of the service. But I also love my Greek, my staying up late to translate the uneccessary Letter of Aristeas, and spending all my free time with Calvin, Barth, and Luther. These (and of course my friends who don't fit into the former) are the things I have any passion left for. And even if both seem to conduct themselves as though they had no need of the other, I know they do, and I'm determined to introduce them to each other as friends and mutually indespensible resources to each other.

So I cracked the book with high hopes of Anderson, a self-confessed Dogmatic theologian (trained under the distinguished tutelage of T.F. Torrance) turned maverick theological pragmatist, funneling me in the right direction. As the title promises, this book is something of a collection of building blocks for an emergent systematics. It never pretends to be that definitive theolgy, but contents itself with being a series of overtures in the various directions that he feels theology needs to be taken in order to be of any use to the emergent church (which it must, if it is to have any justification for its existence). Thus, the table of contents holds the topical material of classical systematics: Theology Proper, Christology, the Doctrine of the Word, Ecclessiology, etc. Except this time with an emergent twist.

What is the emergent twist? The book's contribution does not consist in this, in defining or advancing the notion of emergentism. For this he simply relies on the standard articulations offered by McLaren, Kimball, and company of missional polity, vintage faith, and Q and Not You band t-shirts. (By the way, I'm not sure where a recent Amazon reviewer got the idea that Anderson is writing as an outsider. Anderson is a member of one of those Lutheran churches that uses the dual service format of traditional and contemporary, the latter of which is a self-defined emergent service). This reliance is not a critical one. Anderson takes up this work under the presumption that the emergent movement is necessary, and for the most part an accurrate expression of Christian faith in the modern world. If you have criticisms to level against the emergent church, then I probably applaud you. But Anderson's work won't be a useful place for you to direct them, since he assumes from the outset that emergentism is justified, and so doesn't attempt to defend or establish it. It would be like trying to critique communism through Guttierez's Theology of Liberation. You can't do it to either, since both take as their intended audience those who have already embraced the truthfulness of the respective movement. And so the authors see it as their job to give a theological backing to a movement that their readers have come to participate in for other reasons. This book is "an attempt to provide an emergent theology for a contemporary form of emerging churches that is biblically based and culturally relevant" (24).

Now, if the Jerusalem posse of James and his followers was an instance of biblicism to the exclusion of contemporary culture, and if, say, Gnosticism (which Anderson might have done well to bring up as an opposing book end) is a sell-out to culture, then it is precisely in Antioch that Anderson finds his prototype for the missional-mindednes of the emerging church. Falling pretty well in the trajectory of F.C. Bauer and Rudolf Bultmann (company he certainly doesn't keep when it comes to other issues), Anderson maintains a strict opposition between Jerusalem religion and Antioch faith. For him, the former is defined by a dependence upon historical continuity with the Law, the temple, all the physical and earthly trappings of the cultic apparatus of Judaism, and most of all, with the historical Jesus. The latter, however, has been liberate from the shackles of historicity and continuity, and depends rather on the presence of the Spirit of the post-resurrection Christ of faith. (Despite maintaining that "the Spirit of Paul's Christ is that of the historical Jesus," (69) the way Anderson's argument bears this out is that Paul's Christ of faith allows us to have our historical Jesus without having anything to do with Him). The presence of Paul's Christ of faith in the emerging church means, for Anderson, that the church is now free to present itself in any form that is expedient, since the presence of Christ is not affected by temporal, geographical, or liturgical proximity, but through His spiritual indwelling. "Emerging churches do not need well-defined boundaries because they have a real presence of Christ at the center." Essentially, the entire argument of the book depends, first of all, on the opposition of Antioch faith to Jerusalem faith, and then with the association of the emerging church with Antioch and the modernist/traditionalist hold outs with Jerusalem.

As can be seen from the scripture index, Anderson's enthusiasm for Antiochene faith churns out a functional canon made up of Luke-Acts and the Pauline epistles. While maintaining the theoretical importance and authority of the rest of the bible, Anderson unabashedly insists that emerging churches must look to Paul and the missionary church of Antioch for their "core theology."

As you can probably already see, I'm somewhat critical of this book, betraying the fact that my hopes for having my chaotic world set straight were not satisfactorily met. Since if you understand the Antioch vs. Jerusalem distinction, you basically understand the book, I'll just get on with it and tell you what I think.

First, while I'm not one for brashly throwing around scary labels like Marcionism, but when someone starts advocating one portion of the canon over against another we should be wary, even if its for pragmatic reasons. Scripture's authority exists not in principle, but in its being the norm for the life and practice of the church. A church that neglects the practical releveance of a portion of the canon for the church (such as that composed by the Jerusalem faction) has rejected it's total authority. Thus, there has to be a better explanation as to why the Jerusalem church than that it was theologically mistaken. My short suggestion is that the Jerusalem church wasn't mistaken in maintaining continuity with Judaism, but rather with their mistaken understanding of what Jesus' death meant for their Judaism. As the New Perspective successfully demonstrates, Paul never underwent a conversion to a new religion. He remained a Jew his entire life, and saw himself as standing in continuity with his former faith throughout his post-Damascus road life. It was simply that the sign of membership in the covenant community was no longer circumcision, but faith in Jesus Christ and baptism. So, I think the biggest criticism I have against this book is that it shows no awareness whatsoever of the New Perspective's view of Paul, which, if it is correct, absolutely invalidates Anderson's vision of Antioch's emerging faith.

Second, Anderson has an uncanny knack for setting up false dichotomies. Historical continuity vs. the presence of the Spirit, fellowship vs. institutionality, human spirit vs. holy spirit, hierarchy vs. community, the church for itself vs. the church for the world - he could go on. The irony in this is that emegent theology is supposed to be a departure from modernism. Intrinsic to modernism, though is just the sort of ontology that makes dichotomies like these possible. A theory of being that requires the presence of to be attended by the displacement of whatever was there before. Modern physics, right? Well it shouldn't be brought into theology! This competitive ontology is what causes all of our problems in the providence vs. free will debate. Just like we have to stop thinking that God's willing something has to mean the absence of any freedom on my part, we have to stop thinking that the Spirit can't be free to work in traditional forms.

Third, most of Anderson's book doesn't really have a whole lot to do with Emergent theology. All that antagonism towards tradition - any Evangelical has been hearing that his whole life. As Halden likes to point out, trying to get away from tradition is what modernism is all about. We don't need emergent theology for that.

As a last note, I'd like to add that after reading this book, my impression of Anderson himself is a good one. He seems to be a good churchman who is devoted to the health of the body. His theological instincts, apart from all that dichotomizing, are pretty similar to my own on a lot of things. And I can't help but... Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Message of Grace, January 4, 2008

By	Harold S. Morton III (Casco, ME USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a pastor (and a former student of Ray's &a Fuller Seminary graduate) the hardest thing for me has been dealing with moribund churches in a changing culture--fortress mentality churches that act as if it's OK to let the world go to hell while they stay happy in their fortress doing church as it's always been done. Never mind the fact that, aside from a few creedal statements, there is very little to point to that the church has "always" done, or believed. Ray's book is not a systematic theology--it doesn't claim to be one. In the end of the preface he says, "I am concerned for what it [i.e. the emgerging church] is 'all about' and the chapters that follow are my attempt to answer this question." Ray is very quick to point out places where an emergent church *without any theological moorings* can drift into heretical waters; if I might try to say for Ray, I might say, "If the emergent church is going to try to engage culture--as opposed to standing against culture--here is a theological basis that might be worth building upon.

For people wanting orthodoxy (like most of the other reviewers?) Ray's book will fail to deliver. Emergent churches, I think, are trying to apprehend a new epistemology, new hermeneutical lenses for reading hte Bible, and a new spirituality--and the defenders of orthodoxy will never like the answers apart from their usual orthodoxy. In Ray's defense, he speaks to all three to a greater or lesser degree. Emergent epistemology is tied to revelation whereby God speaks and gives us each a personal narrative (personally I think this answer is right as far as it goes, but it's incomplete and is deserving of fuller consideration). Hermeneutics then is, in part, the process of reconciling God's narrative (the Bible) with our personal narratives (what God is doing in our lives, part of which is revelation). Our "spiritual act of worship" (Romans 12:1) is our lives in the *world*...not our lives at church. The answers that Ray gives challenge absolutist thinking, compartmentalization of our lives, and works-based spirituality (which I believe most American evangelicals suffer from). I consider myself to be evangelical, and I see Ray's book as a message of grace to for those--me included--who have labored under the fear that they are not spiritual enough.

For me as a pastor, I found Ray's exposition to be easy to follow, personally challenging in places, and full of comfort for me in the trenches. Most of the chapters end with a section titled "[A] Concluding Nontheological Postscript"; typically these sections dealt with lots of real-life pastoral problems, e.g.: church members claiming to be more Spirit-filled than the pastor, church members quibbling about inerrancy; church members complaining about hypocrisy (e.g. not following Jesus' command to the rich young man in Mark 10:21); doubts and self-accusations that pastors feel inwardly. These sections gave me great encouragement and refreshment and made me feel like I was not alone in the trenches.

This book is a nice addition for one's library of emerging church books. The proverb is, "Well begun is half done." Ray has begun the conversation regarding emergent church theology well, but it won't be the final word. But then, if you knew Ray, you'd know he leaves the final word to God :-)