Conversation with Emergent-Friendly AAs

Go here. (Next Gener.Asian Church website).  Join in on the discussion as I (Billy Park) converse with thoughtful Emergent-Friendly Asian American Pastors about the Emerging Church movement.

This entry was posted on April 14, 2006 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Emerging Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Conversation with Emergent-Friendly AAs”

  1. Billy Park Says:
    April 14, 2006 at 7:42 pm

    Emerging “Neo-orthodoxy”
    I understand that the Emerging Movement (or Conversation) is diverse, and that diversity is celebrated. That’s is my concern with it. Celebrating a diversity of theological perspectives is not normally a good thing. As a graduate of Princeton Seminary (’89) and Wesleyan Univ. (’86), I was exposed to much diversity of mostly liberal theologies and perspectives. I studied liberation theology, feminist theology, Barth’s neo-orthodoxy, and even Asian American theology. The Emerging theology seems to embrace either Christian existentialism on the one hand and Barthian neo-orthodoxy on the other. Neo-orthodoxy was an attempt in liberal circles to rescue some sense of historic biblical Christianity. They affirmed the authority of the Bible without believing the text of Scripture was really the Word of God. It was in the “dialectic” between the reader and the actual written words that God’s Word came to be. The Bible “became” the Word of God. Is this not in some sense what many in the Emerging Church is embracing? God speaks in the “conversation” or interaction, not “God has spoken in His Word.” McLaren writes books that echo neo-orthodoxy - “A New Kind of Christian” , “A Generous Orthodoxy”. I understand that McLaren says that “my primary audience is the “spiritual but not religious” people who are interested in what Jesus was about, but are generally turned off by the Religious Right, institutional religion, etc.” Wanting to reach a diverse group of people with the Gospel is commendable and right, yet the Gospel cannot be changed. Ravi Zacharias and others have said, “There are many angles at which you can fall, but there is only one at which you can stand straight.” Brothers, instead of testing every angle, let’s find out the straight and narrow path of the Bible, of Christ, and of the Gospel.

  2. Billy Park Says:
    April 14, 2006 at 7:42 pm

    In response to my last sentence, I know what some would say, “who’s to say what is the straight and narrow path?” At Princeton Seminary, I remember a conversation that a liberal friend had with a seeming naive conservative friend. Conservative: “I believe in biblical theology.” Liberal: “What is biblical theology?” The liberal viewpoint is that there are many biblical theologies but not one comprehensive theology of the Bible. Well, I must say that I have come to believe in ONE biblical theology because I believe in the unity of the plan of God and the unity of the Bible. What is this one theology? I believe it is best expressed, though not perfectly, in reformed covenant theology - understanding the centrality of Christ as the focal point of Scriptureand understanding the centrality of covenant as the frame work of Scripture.

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