09.10.08

a postmodern evangelical ecclesiology

Posted in culture, ekklesia, formation, reviews, theology at 7:01 am by len

Frank Emanuel sent me his Master’s Thesis as part of a conversation on the taxonomy offered by Robert Webber in The Younger Evangelicals. This little chart (reprinted below on August 28) is helpful and for many would be a new lens into many of the conflicts we now experience in our churches. Frank’s paper has a beautifully written summary of incarnational (or emerging) theology.

But similarly, David Fitch wrote The Great Giveaway (published 2005 by Baker). At the time some of us missed it. David cheated and used two titles. On the cover page we read, The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism and other Modern Maladies. But on the Intro page the title is offered as, “The Great Giveaway: Toward a Postmodern Evangelical Ecclesiology.”

David’s book is on my short list for must-reads in the past five years. It is not just that good.. it is that important. I dug it out last week because I had a vague memory of the first chapter and a sense I had missed something. To my surprise, the first chapter is titled, “Our Definition of Success: When Going from Ten to a Thousand Members in Ten Years is a Sign of a Sick Church.” I need to reread this chapter. And this morning let me leave you with one quote:

“Because evangelicals articulate salvation in such individualist terms and because modern science and individual reason carry such authority for evangelicals, we do not need the body of Christ for daily victorious Christian existence” (17-18).

Read my review HERE.

3 Comments

  1. ron cole said,

    September 11, 2008 at 9:03 am

    Len, ” the Great Giveaway “, has been on my short list for awhile, but after reading your review I pulled it to the top this morning. Man, that quote bites.
    Thanks Ron+

  2. len said,

    September 12, 2008 at 7:30 pm

    Ron, doesn’t it? Funny how we can miss the implications of our (weak) theology.. and then complain about resulting practice..

  3. Frank Emanuel said,

    September 14, 2008 at 9:27 am

    Thanks for the kudos Len. Sounds like a book I have to track down. I’m still waiting on my marks for my paper.

    I’ve shifted my focus a bit this semester, I’m looking at the various ways that theologians are doing political theology. My hope is to guage where evangelicals are at in this conversation (it is one with a long history already in traditions like the Roman Catholic church) and what moving forward might look like. My gut feel is that there are lots of folks doing this stuff but too busy doing to write about it (even when they have the tools to analyse what they are doing). My buddy Brad says the whole game is changing, that makes me feel fortunate to be part of such a hopeful time for the evangelical church.