I’ve read Joshua Moritz’s take on the emerging church. Moritz paints, I think, a fair picture of the emerging church, and even defends in against critiques like Carson’s. For an article in a theological journal, it refrains from judging the movement from a checklist of criteria about what is good church and what is not, and seeks to gain an understanding of the worldview its members may have (though mentions Brian McLaren a little bit too much to make me think he knows any other emerging church “leaders”) and bring to the contemporary faith question.

But Moritz does offer a criticism of the emerging church that I would like to comment on. He asserts that while the emerging church rhetoric seems against systematic theology, it falls into the trappings of the discipline in its conversations:

It would seem that the vast majority of Emerging thinkers who reject systematic theology are faced with the same conundrum, in that every in-house Emerging discussion over theological matters that I have witnessed so far – be it in books, on blogs, in sermons or in lectures – has transpired predominantly via prose. In this way Emergents make constant use of the language and categories of systematic theology while at the same time denying its legitimacy and denouncing it as irredeemably modern. If one it to take seriously the Emerging Church’s focus on praxis informing theology, I would ask why this should be the one exception. [...]

[...] If we cannot speak of God how can we assert so confidently that none of our categories apply to God? I fear that some Emergents might be wandering down the road of Nominalism while insisting they are Critical Realists. The rejection of modernism notwithstanding, theological and philosophical incoherency is still not a virtue – even among the most hard-lined postmodernist philosophers. (p. 33)

I have to hand it to Moritz – it is a fair observation. Emerging church blogs (for example) do tend at time to delve into sophisticated diatribes about many issues that a large number of us would fine academic and perhaps inaccessible. However, though a fair observation, it doesn’t make it a worthy criticism of the emerging church at large.

Firstly, his knowledge of emerging church thinking is limited to “books, blogs, in sermons or in lectures” where he sees discourses akin to the systematic theology we find in bible college. Well, d’uh. If you’re going to look at books, lectures, sermons and even blogs, you’re going to get that kind of prose. It’s the nature of writing. Writing is linear, logical, rational and propositional. emerging church writers are going to write like a systematic theologian, because they’re writing for an audience that wants to consider emerging church theology by reading. If Moritz wanted a statement of emerging church theology by listening to music or visiting an art installation or mission project then he would read something altogether different.

Secondly, I think the emerging church, by and large, is not biased against systematic theology as much as it has reservations about the place of systematic theology in the contemporary church. As Mary Hess puts it well, “systematic theology leaves people out of the conversation” and its the systematic theology conversation that bears its great weight in thinking and talking about God in the church. For “Emergents” (Moritz’s term, not mine), systematic theology may inform the church’s present and future, but it does not make systematic theologians the church experts, the first go-to for advice and decision-making. If other media can carry other types of thinking about God and church and discipleship and faith and etc then “Emergents” will embrace them, in order to listen out for other voices and bring them to the conversation.

What do you reckon?