impleri

Next question is

#2: Is the “emerging” movement fundamental a church of protest? And, if so, is the primary target of the protest evangelicalism? What are its targets?

i think this question is much easier. The emerging church movement is a movement of disillusionment. While the church groups the EC “emerged” from were focused on a stringent hierarchy and maintaining some balance of top-down leadership, the EC wants to break that order and return to an egalitarian structure. Charisma (leadership quality, not speaking in tongues or raising the dead) is becoming the focus again. Leadership is being invested into people of various backgrounds who are able to lead charismatically.

Protest is a pretty strong word to use for the EC, especially if one considers that the EC wants some kind of harmony and/or acceptance. Protest excludes that possibility. If the EC had to be characterised as a protest, i’d suggest its target is Fundamentalism (again, think Niagara Conference in the 1890s and not a specific denomination). Fundamentalism arose as a result of Darwinism and was meant to define Christianity as being totally against any kind of science. The five fundamentals that came from the conference were: (1) inerrancy of Scriptures (total perfection of the text with no contradictions, writing errors, even to the last jot ant tittle) which was a rather new concept, (2) the diety of Jesus (and hid virgin birth), (3) the substitutionary atonement, (4) literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and (5) the literal return of Jesus in the Second Coming (which required some kind of view of Revelation that excluded amillenialism and preterism). Some of these don’t seem too bad–and they’re not. Yet, by taking this relatively radical position in the 1890s, the fundamentalists were able to set up a strong dichotomy between “sacred” and “secular” that had slowly faded away since around the time of the Reformation.

It became such that these fundamentalists decided what was orthodoxy and what was not. Belief in evolution (even the one scientifically proven)? Wrong. Belief in a metaphorical interpretation of eschatological events in the Bible? Wrong. The radicals defined Christianity instead of the texts. They defined the method of interpretation (which excluded any kind of critical or grammatico-historical approach). That is what the EC may be protesting: a group of humans claiming authority on things well behond human understanding.