Galileo: Historical Christian (Church) Belief?

Keep­ing in mind my pre­vi­ous post con­cern­ing Doug Pagitt, I’m reminded of another prob­lem I have with Pagitt’s writ­ing which I don’t believe is reflec­tive of just Pagitt, but also ‘emer­gent the­ol­ogy’ as some­thing of a whole.

In my pre­vi­ous post we saw Pagitt give praise for the dif­fer­ent ways the Gospel has been pre­sented to dif­fer­ent cul­tural con­texts, includ­ing dif­fer­ent under­stand­ings and pre­sen­ta­tions of God. From how I’ve read and under­stand Pagitt’s book, how­ever, this doesn’t seem (to me) to present a united, coher­ent whole. Con­sider how Pagitt opens the first chap­ter of his book:

I am a Chris­t­ian, but I don’t believe in Chris­tian­ity.
At least I don’t believe in the ver­sions of Chris­tian­ity that have pre­vailed for the last fif­teen hun­dred years, the ones that were per­fectly suit­able in their time and place but have lit­tle con­nec­tion with this time and place. The ones that answer ques­tions we no longer ask and fail to con­sider ques­tions we can no longer ignore. The ones that don’t mesh with what we know about God and the world and our place in it. I want to be very clear: I am not con­flicted because I strug­gle to believe. I am con­flicted because I want to believe dif­fer­ent.¹

Wasn’t he just prais­ing dif­fer­ent cul­tural pre­sen­ta­tions and under­stand­ings of God (Celtic under­stand­ing of the Holy Spirit as a wild goose)? I know there will be dis­agree­ment with me on this point, some will tell me to read against what Pagitt has said (’…the ones that were per­fectly suit­able in their time and place but have lit­tle con­nec­tion with this time and place.’). To illus­trate my point, con­sider Celtic Chris­tians, they aren’t exactly a new inven­tion (if we’re to believe Ire­neaus, approx. 2^nd cen­tury?) and yet their under­stand­ing of the Holy Spirit is some­thing Pagitt sees (saw?) as rev­o­lu­tion­ary (or per­haps he would say, ‘uh-oh!’ induc­ing).  Or con­sider Pagitt’s objec­tions to a Hel­enized or Greek under­stand­ing of God, rather than a Hebrew under­stand­ing of God (ch. 5). With respect to the Hebrew con­cep­tion of God against the Greek, I’m afraid I don’t fol­low Pagitt in see­ing any sort of con­tra­dic­tion. Why can’t God be per­sonal and immutable? I don’t under­stand why one pre­sen­ta­tion and under­stand­ing of God is accept­able whereas the other isn’t.

I find it’s a very ambigu­ous thing to say, ‘I don’t believe in the ver­sions of Chris­tian­ity that have pre­vailed for the last fif­teen hun­dred years’. I feel any sort of objec­tion I raise to what Pagitt has writ­ten will sim­ply be met with, ‘well, it wasn’t a preva­lent ver­sion of Chris­tian­ity!’ That’s no answer: preva­lent accord­ing to whom?  I’m attracted to Chris­tian­ity, his­tor­i­cal Chris­tian­ity, because it answered the ques­tions I and many oth­ers are and were ask­ing. It’s an easy thing to put to the side ‘old beliefs’ because they aren’t answer­ing some of (not all) of the ques­tions we’re ask­ing today. What we have to keep in mind, how­ever, is that if these ques­tions weren’t pre­vi­ously answered, we’d be ask­ing them today. We’re build­ing off the foun­da­tion they laid. We also can’t blame a pre­vi­ous sys­tem of belief for fail­ing to answer ques­tions we’re ask­ing, we’re com­par­ing two com­pletely dif­fer­ent cul­tures and sets of pre­sup­po­si­tions about the world. We wouldn’t crit­i­cize those liv­ing hun­dreds of years ago for fail­ing to pre­vent global warm­ing or for fail­ing to stop the destruc­tion of the o-zone, would we (I could be mis­taken, how­ever I’m fairly con­fi­dent we wouldn’t)?

I don’t mean to come off as hav­ing a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem with Pagitt, I don’t. What I talk about above is some­thing I see as a prob­lem with the emer­gent / emerg­ing church and the books they sell, the mes­sage they pro­mote, the ser­mons and the ’speeches’ they give (or spreaches?). Don’t hear what I’m not say­ing; there is a lot of good in the emer­gent church that has hith­erto been under­mined by an inad­e­quate view of the truth. I don’t believe it’s so much that the emer­gent church has missed the point as it has exag­ger­ated the wrong things. As Al Mohler has said:

If you get the truth ques­tion wrong, you’re going to be aber­rant in every dimen­sion of the life of your church and in your per­sonal under­stand­ing of Chris­tian­ity. If we forgo that, if we sur­ren­der that, if we come off the heights of that com­mit­ment, then I don’t care what you’re going to call it; emerg­ing, emer­gent or what­ever, it’s going to be a new form of lib­er­al­ism in the church.²

Related posts:

1. Galileo: Truth isn’t Absolute
2. Church Abuses: Should We Aban­don the Church?
3. Intel­lec­tu­als and “the church”