Let’s start with Scot Mcknight’s first question:
#1: Does “emerging” refer to the postmodern culture in all its varieties, or to the church hat accompanies that shift in culture, or to the ideas that are part of that culture, or to the gospel that responds to that culture, or to the gospel taking shape in a new way in a new cultural paradigm?
When using the phrase “emerging church” (EC for short), one may be tempted to think of something arising out of something else.
Lacan’s Contribution
Fundamentalist and conservative “Christian” groups want to paint the EC as coming out of the culture (the “secular” to be more precise) and into the Church (or the “sacred” to be more precise). Yet this isn’t wholly the case. Since Lacanian “deconstruction” (yes, Lacan not Derrida)….(this can be found even before that in the structuralism of Saussere), the concept of restricting the relationship of “signified” to “Signifier” into a 1:1 representational model has been severely questioned. The groups that try to put the EC into this model fail to understand the “from what” and “into what” which the EC actually emerges.
One thing that came as a result of Lacan’s work in inverting the formula
Signifier -------------- signified
into
signified -------------- Signifier
is that a single Signifier can refer to multiple signifieds. Or, let’s be more realistic here and use an actual example: bathrooms. Let’s say we’re at a restaurant and a man and a woman need to go to the bathroom. As they approach the bathroom area, both doors are identical with the exception of the sign above the doors that say “Gentlemen” and “Ladies.” The actual Signifier here is the door and not the signage. We can remove the signage and the door on the left (which previously had “Gentlemen” over it) is still the men’s room (signified). Yet, the doors are identical. The man could say “we are at ‘Gentlemen’,” to which the woman may counter, “no, we are at ‘Ladies’.” Here, there is no empirical difference between the Signifiers, yet due to social constructs, they do represent different signifieds. The Real is masked by some Symbolic/Imaginary difference.
Through Derrida
Thanks to Derrida, we have a neat word that describes this difference: differance. In French, the word difference (from which we get an obvious English translation) is pronounced the same as the non-word differance. The only difference between the two is in the written form of the words. Now, this is where Derrida drags up some of Heidegger’s works. Personally, i’ve worked with some of Heidegger’s “untranslated” works (particularly Band 69 of the Complete Works, Besinnung), so i’ll briefly outline what Derrida is taking of Heidegger and resignifying for our present discussion.
In later works of Heidegger, he becomes increasingly interested in a clearing of Being. From this clearing, the horizon of meaning can become disclosed to Dasein. To put this in simple terms: we originate from a small clearing (much like one in a forest) and our network of signification and representation expands, but always starting back at this original clearing. This resonates in Derrida’s (in)famous statement: “There is nothing outside the text.”
Here, we are not speaking of relativism in which one can define and assign meaning however one wishes. Rather, we are speaking of hermeneutics. A particular word gains its meaning only when used in its given context. We, as the reader/observer, will not properly understand the meaning of something without knowing its context. In this way the signified of the Signifier “play” does not become known to us until we are given its context: “it’s useless to play a trick on someone expecting it.” The Signifier “play” could have originally been interpreted as “on-stage dramatic re-enactment”, but without its context, its meaning cannot be known.
Furthermore, the distinction in differance may come into a better light by looking at language. When saying “differance“, the hearer does not know which the speaker is using (the one with an “e” or with an “a”) without appealing to the written text. Those who wish to make language something purely spoken have to deal with the difference of differance and, arguably, cannot deal with it. Language is both the spoken and the written.
More Questions
All of this will lead us to seeing that meaning of words in a given language are wholly self-referential. A given word cannot be defined without appealing to another word. So, how can we discuss origins without discussing meaning? How can we discuss anything without assuming the others with which we discuss are using the same arbitrary assignments of meaning? How can one analyze the EC without learning its context? To what extent is its context?
An “Answer”
My answer here is fairly anti-climatic: we can’t. Even by trying to come to an agreement of terms, we are already assuming an agreement of terms. To what does “emerging” refer? Well, it depends on who is defining it. Who’s “right”? Mostly everybody.
If i may suggest a responce, the EC isn’t simply a group of people emerging from one thing into another, but rather the intersection of two different cultures. By rejecting the dichotomy of “sacred” and “secular”, the EC invites the “secular” into the “sacred” and pushes the “sacred” into the “secular.” The EC is secularizing the Gospel. Not in the way of “making it impure”, but of “making it for all.” There seems to be evidence that this is what the early group of Jews that became the first Christians did…especially Paul. i’ll leave us with a quote from Carl Raschke’s The Next Reformation:
[Altizer sensed] Barth’s emphasis on the utter transcendence of God found in its cultural instantiation in churches that only had to take the passionately human character of a crucified Christ with a grain of salt.
