A Postmodern Orthodoxy

One of the disadvantages encountered by those trying to understand society is due to the inability to perform experiments in a controlled environment. In the hard sciences – chemistry or physics, for example – this isn’t as much of a problem. The scientist in the lab can conduct experiments in which certain variables can be changed and others can be removed, making it possible to determine what factors cause specific results. Sociologists (and anyone else that’s trying to understand society) can’t do this, and as a result, reams of statistics are quoted, some of which do not tell us exactly what we would like to think that they mean. Even when the statistics themselves are properly understood, they’re frequently used in misguided attempts to imply that certain attributes cause others, when in fact they just happen to show up next to each other. Correlation doesn’t imply causation – i.e., just because two things happen at the same time (or one follows the other) doesn’t necessarily imply that one caused the other.

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I haven’t been carefully observing evangelical Christianity for long enough periods of time to categorize myself as a keen observer of trends in the church. However, in the short period of time that I’ve actually been watching, I’ve seen a few movements within the church that propose – to put it mildly – some striking changes with regards to theology or the way the church operates. The examples that most easily spring to mind are (a) the house church movement, which has been around for awhile, and the (b) emerging and (c) emergent church movements – now (correctly) categorized as two separate movements. For purposes of this discussion, we can get away with oversimplifying our description of the emergent/emerging movements by suggesting that they are embodied, respectively, by Mark Driscoll and Brian McLaren. Both of these movements are still (relatively) new on the scene.

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I’ve recently been thinking about ecclesiology – odd way to start a blog post, perhaps, but in any case, it’s been prompted by the discussions that I had with Bob that were sparked by this this discussion over here and grabbing a copy of Barna and Viola’s Pagan Christianity. Both the discussion with Bob and the book by Barna and Viola are centered around ecclesiology, so it’s a happy coincidence that I ran into both of them at more or less the same time, as it results in more coherent thoughts about ecclesiology than I would otherwise have. Well, possibly the thoughts are more coherent . . . I’ll leave that for you to judge.

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