Actually Scot Mcknight’s latest article in the most recent edition of Christianity Today focuses on Brian McLaren, but McKnight acknowledges McLaren’s formative and continuing influence within the Emergent segment of the broader emerging movement. The article re-confirms McKnight as one of the most astute observers of the emerging movement. The article also highlights his well known disproportional interest in and sympathy with the Emergent stream within the wider movement.

Does McKnight’s special interest in Emergent, given his prolific writing. speaking, and blogging, secure a disproportionately higher profile for the Emergent stream than it deserves? Don’t know. But I wonder.

I divide the movement into two major segments or streams: (1) the Emergent stream: a variously doctrine-wary or even doctrine-averse stream best epitomized, as McKnight recognizes, by EmergentVillage.com, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Tony Jones. And (2) a doctrine-friendly stream perhaps best represented by the ACTS29 network of church planters but also associated with the names Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller and, among Southern Baptists, Ed Stetzer.

Has anyone seen significant data on the numbers involved in the emerging movement? Any good numbers out there that show how big the movement might be or the relative strength of the two major streams of the movement? How big is ACTS29 for example?– keeping in mind that ACTS29 is not a denomination and, despite strong reformed theological affinities and shared convictions related to church-planting in a post-Christian context, nevertheless accommodates significant diversity within its circle of church planters.

Back to McKnight’s CT piece. Though McKnight has proven himself a great friend and skilled defender of the Emergent stream within emerging, he has also identified blind spots and weakness within Emergent that he fears could jeopardize the movement, sabotage its prospects for growth, and call into question its claim to be a movement that, in the words of Brian McLaren, seeks “to plant and nurture biblical communities of faith.”

McKnight’s more longstanding concern has been the bad conscience Emergent has displayed for proselytizing. McKnight recognizes that good news should be not only lived but also proclaimed and that where squeamishness for evangelism takes hold, it compromises the viability of any would-be Christian movement. A case in point–Protestant Liberalism. Liberals found a welcome resting place within the wider culture which easily accommodated their hyper-sensitivity toward the views of the unconverted and their embarrassment about their own faith, its history, and its tradition. The same characteristic psyche that helped liberals “make friends” also ensured that they would not “influence people,”– at least they would not exert the kind of influence that results in conversion, church-planting, and church growth. The Emergent segment of emerging may be headed for a similar fate.

But in this latest of his critiques, McKnight puts his finger on a theological weakness that undoubtedly underlies Emergent aversion to conversion: its inability articulate a view of the Cross that takes the full biblical revelation seriously. However much McKnight celebrates Emergent recovery of the implications of the Incarnation for a truly Christian understanding of issues related to the poor, the sick, and the oppressed, he also notices neglect of great portions of the biblical witnesses–dimensions of witness that center on the chief purpose of the Incarnation, namely that the Incarnate one might do a unique work on the Cross. McKnight puts it this way:

“The most stable location for the earliest understandings of the Cross, from Jesus all the way through the New Testament writings, is the Last Supper– and not a word is said there about violence and systemic injustice. Other words are given to explain the event: covenant, forgiveness of sins, and blood ‘poured out for many.’ Insight into the Cross must begin here.”

Could it be that Emergent failure to comprehend or make much use of the Cross in its thinking involves a pattern of highhanded theologizing that traces back at least to the turn of the 19th century? I have in mind the grand attempt of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) to rescue Christianity in the face of an Enlightenment assault upon the church’s supreme epistemological touchstone, the revelation of God in Holy Scripture.

Formally, at least, is not the chief distinction between “liberal” and ”conservative” or “evangelical” theologizing the opposing postures they take before the witness of the Bible? A true liberal admits, with Schleiermacher, that the theologian stands above the Bible and sifts wheat from chaff, selecting from the Scriptures those teachings best suited to advance the agenda brought to it by the theologian or the preacher etc. In this sense, liberals are not answerable to the Bible. Rather, the Bible serves as a resource for their use.

Conservatives, on the other hand, express formal answerability to the word of Scripture. That’s a big difference. And the danger lurking where the church would stand over rather than under the Bible as the authority for her faith and practice was recognized clearly by Karl Bath: it is the danger of idolatry. Whenever we stand above the Bible and imagine a competence for the sifting of wheat from chaff among its contents, we do, wittingly or not, make a god!

On what basis do Emergents sift biblical wheat from biblical chaff? Irony of ironies–they sift according to their DOCTRINE!  That’s right. The doctrine-wary and doctrine-averse Emergents are eat-up with doctrine whether they realize it or not. They may not admit it, and some may not recognize it, but in fact, Emergents not only have doctrine but are deeply shaped by it. The cluster of unrecognized doctrines active and embedded within Emergent thinking is indicated by such terms precious among them as: authenticity, missional, community, mystery, and post-christian/post-modern. Take note that this same set of terms are just as indispensable when doctrine-friendly emerging types (such as those one finds associated with ACTS29) describe themselves.

Yes, Emergents have doctrine. What they lack is any kind of identifiable, stable authority to which those doctrines become answerable–not the Bible, not the Christian tradition, not anything apparently, beyond their own emerging sense of what the world needs now. While use is made by Emergents of both the Bible and the tradition, neither is allowed to trump or even penetrate Emergent protectiveness of its own un-recognized doctrines. Both Bible and tradition are ransacked for their usefulness to the predetermined Emergent cause, a heavy slice of which seems to be its sour attitude toward evangelicalism.

For this reason McKnight cannot simply issue a straightforward appeal to the Bible in his warnings to Emergents where the Cross and Evangelism are at issue. He shrewdly appeals also to Emergent construal of “kingdom” (another of Emergent’s embedded “doctrines”).

Are not McKnight’s concerns well founded? Are we in a position today to identify with any clarity the underlying malady plaguing Emergent? Might that malady reside precisely in Emergent failure to anchor itself to anything more substantive than the conflation of its own diagnosis of the pathologies latent within existing models of church with its own idiosyncratic prescription for addressing those pathologies? Answers to such questions will reveal to what extent Emergent belongs to that other, older movement known as Christianity and whether the communities of faith nurtured within its ethos can rightly be called churches.

Are not the doctrine-friendlies within Emerging attempting something more promising for those who covet faithfulness to the Bible and inclusion within the global and historic church of Jesus Christ as well as relevant Christian living and church-planting within a post-Christian context? If the doctrine-friendly emerging types such as ACTS29 retain their commitment to Holy Scripture, their welcoming of historic doctrinal anchors along with their zeal for conversion-seeking evangelism and church-planting, they may well leave a mark on Christianity in the West that will long outlast anything likely to come from the still largely unformed and wandering Emergent stream of the movement. I hope they do.