Thursday, February 15, 2007

Scot McKnight on Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches


The book is a 5 perspectives book. Each author writes out his or her view on each topic, and then the other four interact. The five authors are:

Mark Driscoll: Biblicist theology
John Burke: Incarnational theology
Dan Kimball: Missional theology
Doug Pagitt: Embodied theology
Karen Ward: Communal theology

It is not hard to guess how this approach works out as the book strolls along — Driscoll takes on each topic with gusto and comes up looking like what he is: a Reformed emerging pastor; John Burke comes up looking like a sensitive pastor to postmoderns who is a conservative evangelical on each of the three topics. Both are orthodox in Scripture, Trinity and atonement; Driscoll is more defined than Burke. Burke is more concerned with building bridges in our pluralistic context; Driscoll tears the bridges down.

Dan Kimball comes up looking like a pastor to postmoderns with sensitivity to issues while at the same time not defining specifics; he keeps theology at the basic level of common agreements in orthodoxy. He’s an evangelical in theology: inspiration, Trinity, and substitutionary atonement.

Doug Pagitt discusses at length the conversational nature of theology and doesn’t really address the three topics; Karen Ward looks at each topic in nonpropositional, communal, and ritualistic ways.

- Scot's full post on Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches

1 comment:

J. K. Jones said...

Good post. Interesting that you note that “Driscoll tears the bridges down.”

Bridges can accept two way traffic. If we build a bridge on the wrong issue, we could end up with someone thinking they are on the Christian side when they are not.