Lots of the emerging blogs in my feed reader have been popping up with references to Scot McKnight's piece on ChristianityToday entitled 'Five Streams of the Emerging Church'. (TSK popped first.)
I found this has clarified my understanding of 'emerging church' more than anything I've read so far. Of course, it is limited to a USA scope, nevertheless ...
Includes a precise distinction between 'emerging' and 'emergent' - things emergent are associated with Emergent Village. And the following are my favourite quotes:
On Prophetic
"The emerging movement is consciously and deliberately provocative. Emerging Christians believe the church needs to change, and they are beginning to live as if that change had already occurred."
On Postmodern
"Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry." (LeRon Shults)
On Praxis-oriented
'A notable emphasis of the emerging movement is orthopraxy, that is, right living. The contention is that how a person lives is more important than what he or she believes. Many will immediately claim that we need both or that orthopraxy flows from orthodoxy. Most in the emerging movement agree we need both, but they contest the second claim: Experience does not prove that those who believe the right things live the right way. No matter how much sense the traditional connection makes, it does not necessarily work itself out in practice. Public scandals in the church—along with those not made public—prove this point time and again.
'Here is an emerging, provocative way of saying it: "By their fruits [not their theology] you will know them." As Jesus' brother James said, "Faith without works is dead."'
On Post-evangelical
"The emerging movement tends to be suspicious of systematic theology. Why? Not because we don't read systematics, but because the diversity of theologies alarms us, no genuine consensus has been achieved, God didn't reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative, and no language is capable of capturing the Absolute Truth who alone is God. Frankly, the emerging movement loves ideas and theology. It just doesn't have an airtight system or statement of faith. We believe the Great Tradition offers various ways for telling the truth about God's redemption in Christ, but we don't believe any one theology gets it absolutely right."
On Politics
Well here I hit the limited USA scope of the article and this section says more about the limitations of a democratic system that allows only two parties than it does about emerging church.
