Fads have become the engines that drive culture in the 21st Century. Corporations chase fads in order to profit from them in various ways. Corporations also create fads as a means of marketing their products. The ideal marketing program is the establishment of a cult following such as Harley Davidson has done in the motorcycle world. To understand this phenomenon see GoingFaster.com, BusinessWeek.com and TheMotleyFool.com
The latest fad to hit the church scene is known as “The Emergent Church” (Emergent Church Vocabulary). So, what exactly is the emergent church? It’s hard to tell because it is still emerging. Nonetheless, careful examination of the roots of “emergent theory” (The Concept Of Emergence) will reveal the driving spirit behind the fad.
The term “emergent” was coined by the pioneer psychologist G. H. Lewes who wrote:
Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same — their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components in so far as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference (Lewes 1875, p. 412)(Blitz 1992).
…the concept behind the term has been in use since at least the time of Aristotle. John Stuart Mill and Julian Huxley are just some of the historic luminaries who have written on the concept.
Source: Wikipedia
The alert Christian will note that the sources of emergent theory are not biblical or Christian. Rather, they are Godless in nature and Liberal and/or Socialist in character. The historical roots of emergent theory reveal that it is antithetical at every point to Scripture and Christianity.
In philosophy, emergence is often understood to be a much stronger claim about the etiology (cause) of a system’s properties. An emergent property of a system, in this context, is one that is not a property of any component of that system, but is still a feature of the system as a whole. Nicolai Hartmann, one of the first modern philosophers to write on emergence, termed this categorial novum (new category).
Systems with emergent properties or emergent structures may appear to defy entropic principles and the second law of thermodynamics, because they form and increase order despite the lack of command and central control. This is possible because open systems can extract information and order out of the environment.
Emergence helps to explain why the fallacy of division is a fallacy. According to an emergent perspective, intelligence emerges from the connections between neurons, and from this perspective it is not necessary to propose a “soul” to account for the fact that brains can be intelligent, even though the individual neurons of which they are made are not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Source: Wikipedia
Note that this explanation attempts to provide philosophical explanation for the emergence of new categories of being, what is considered to be the creation or development novel categories, levels or entities of being where no such category, level or entity existed previously. In other words, the emergent theory is ultimately attempting to explain what the Bible calls creation from a Godless, evolutionary or materialistic perspective. It attempts to explain the origin and appearance of mind and soul without reference or recourse to God or to Scripture. The root and the goals of the emergent theory are not insignificant.
The Emergent Church
As for church, “Emergent” is a name that is being used at the moment to describe the church’s response to the current emerging culture, and the peculiar aggregation of believers being called up out of this culture to follow Jesus back into it.
“Emergent” as it is used in “emergent theory” is a name given to the phenomena (sic) of how new organizational structures progress from low-level chaos to higher level sophistication without a hierarchical command structure. Emergent theory explains how birds change direction, how slime mold moves, how ant colonies are built and how Amazon.com knows so much about us. The process involves constant communication and feedback among the lowest level of organization, pattern recognition, local action affecting global behavior, and takes into consideration the element of unpredictability in a chaotic system. Solomon was wise in suggesting that we observe the ways of the ant and be wise (Proverbs 6:6) And the emerging church has been wise in allowing the vocabulary from emergent behavior to give a window of insight to the traditional church.…
New churches among the emerging culture generally have an organizational structure that is best described as “emergent.” Emergent organizations (ant colonies, slime mold) organize from below rather than top-down, they depend on feedback for adaptation, show decentralized thinking, and respond locally in a way that affects the global situation. In writing about the “Character of the Emergent Church,” Kester Brewin sees emergent systems as being open systems, adaptable systems, learning systems, having distributed knowledge, and modeling servant leadership” (From The Complex Christ: Signs of Emergence in the Urban Church).
“Our minds may be wired to look for the pacemakers, but we are steadily learning how to think from the bottom up” (Steve Johnson, Emergence).
Emergent behavior is a good way to describe how new churches are responding to a complex world of chaotic unpredictability and multiple possibilities. One of the defining features of emergent churches is that they are usually started with no predetermined ideal of what they will mature into or what size and shape they will become, since they will be also be shaped by the culture they transform. Another word for this is “missional.” Unpredictability opens the possibility for a miraculous intervention and retooling by God during the process, as long as structures are simple, and communication is constant.
Source: LeRon Shuts Blog
One of the things that concerns me most about the so-called emergent church is the character of some of the organizations that are actively involved in shaping it, including the seminary I graduate from. PSR is actively involved in shaping the emergent movement.
And PSR is undoubtedly the most radically Liberal seminary in America that still claims to be Christian. However, its close association with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and the Swedenborgian movement suggest that it has long since left any version of orthodox Christianity. PSR also hosts the The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry and has been, if not the earliest, at least one of the most significant institutions promoting the acceptance of homosexuality is society and in Christianity. These facts give me great difficulty, and my subsequent conversion to historic, biblical Christianity since graduating from PSR continue to weigh heavily upon my spirit. If nothing else, the Lord has given me through my conversion an unusual understanding of the spirit, forces, philosophies and theology of this movement.
So, what does this have to do with the emergent church? PSRs new motto is “Equipping historic and emerging faith communities for ministries of compassion and justice.” PSR has positioned itself to be a driving force in the emergent church. Caution: steep decline ahead.
The emergent church is not a new phenomenon that is arising from some advanced state of society, as if it were some sort of new evolutionary entity or institution. Rather, it appears to be more akin to Ephesian 4:14: “…tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” The appearance of what is being called the emergent church is a fruit of a particular kind of theological cascade. The nature of the theology that has given rise to it can be seen in the article below: Emergent Evolution.
Further reading:
- Five Streams of the Emerging Church
- Root & Fruit — Essay about Five Streams of the Emerging Church (above)
- Emergence — Self-Organisation, Systems Theory, Power
- Emergence and the Origin of Life
- The Emergence of Consciousness
The following article has been reproduced to provide an example of how the Emergent Theory has been developed and incorporated by those who are hostile toward Christianity. Note how the Emergent Theory is being used to further prop up the materialistic Theory of Evolution as a new attempt to explain “spontaneous generation.”
Emergent Evolution
If Random Evolution is associated with old-style (reductionist) materialism, scientism, and strict Darwinism, Emergent Evolution is the natural outgrowth of new style materialism, Pantheism, Holism, systems theory, ecology, Gaia theory, and other more developed paradigms.
Emergent evolution agrees with Materialism and Materialistic Pantheism in considering the physical universe as the substratum of existence. But it also sees this reality as able to unfold higher levels of organization that transcend it and that are not defined by its limitations, or predictable by its laws. To give a trivial example, Life emerges (evolves) out of Matter. But life cannot be explained or defined according to physical or chemical laws that are otherwise very capable of explaining inanimate matter. Life represents something totally new. It has emerged out of matter but it constitutes a new grade of organization, a “symmetry break” so to speak. In a sense, life is a “singularity” as far as inanimate matter is concerned, it is a whole new grade of organization, functioning, expression.
And in the same way mind emerges out of life, and represents a whole new grade of organization that cannot be explained in merely biological or metabolic terms.
I personally consider the emergent paradigm to be an extremely profound yet at the same time simple, obvious, common-sense way of explaining the universe. Moreover it provides a way to link both science and materialism on the one hand, and metaphysics and spirituality on the other. Thus we find materialistic thinkers like James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis propounding an emergent theory of life and planetology (the Gaia hypothesis). They came upon this from a materialistic perspective, yet it is a hypothesis that goes beyond materialism (even if its founders are dead against the intuitive New Age and Neo-pagan interpretations, and I am sure would not be at all pleased to see what had become of their superb theory even on the present site ;-).
Coming to Emergent Evolution from the other direction, metaphysical and spiritual thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo see evolution as an emerging out of matter of higher qualities, culminating in the spiritual culmination that Teilhard terms the Omega Point and Sri Aurobindo Supramentalisation. Although both Teilhard and Aurobindo advocate a teleological stance, what they say is also pure Emergent paradigm. Carl Jung is another great visionary who seems to hold an emergent theory of evolution (the Collective Unconscious and then Consciousness evolving out of the original nonconscious biological and elemental substratum), even if he does not articulate it such a specific or clear manner.
And straddling and incorporating both camps are those like Erich Jantsch, who’s incredible book on systems theory and cosmic evolution, the Self-Organizing Universe, is, to my mind at least, one of the most fascinating and inspiring works of science ever written.
All of which gives us a map of the cosmos and cosmic evolution as a process that is dynamic not static, meaningful not purposeless, yet in keeping with both the spiritual and the materialistic perspectives.
Source: Kheper website, over 1500 pages, dedicated to a new scientific and esoteric evolutionary paradigm concerning the nature of existence and its infinite metamorphoses, and the transformation of the Earth and the planetary consciousness to a post-singularity state of Supramental (Infinite Truth-Consciousness) divinisation