Jesus Cropped from the Picture

Chapter 15: The Emerging Method

T HE EMERGING METHOD has its roots in the Traditional and Pragmatic methods. It shares many of their commitments to the Bible, Christ’s redemptive work, andmaking the gospel understandable to the culture. However, it seeks to break away from the Traditional and Pragmatic methods over their use of Rationalism (or “Modernity”). The Emerging Method appeared in the 1990s in an attempt to contextualize the gospel in a Postmodern culture. Many of its members are young people who have come to faith in Christ since 2000 (see Appendix 5, “The Splintering of Western Protestantism”). Despite these general parameters, finding a precise definition of the Emerging Method is a formidable task. First, the Emerging Method runs along a spectrum from those who are closely committed to historic Christian faith to those who have abandoned the authority of Scripture and are more like liberals than conservatives. Within the same Emerging church there can be a variety of commitments to apostolic, orthodox faith. Second, Emergings resist characterizing themselves in precise terms. They are suspicious of propositional statements stated in categorical terms, 88 especially with respect to theology (for example, “The truth about God is ___”). They are pessimistic about the shelf-life of what others view as “transcendent, objective truth.” Third, any movement is difficult to define during its infancy, especially one using “emerging” as its moniker.

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