Nick Bogardus

I’m a little late posting about this book (it came out last year) because, well, Amazon doesn’t ship to M*ngolia. For all of 2008 I kept a running list of books I wanted to get when we came back to the States and Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be) by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck was near the top. I finally picked it up after Christmas and read it in about two weeks.

I really could not recommend a book more highly for my generation at this moment than this one. Like Phil Johnson, I found myself saying “Wow.Wow.Wow.” in every chapter.

The book is written by a young pastor and one of his congregants (who happens to be a sports writer) who, as the title says, should both be ‘emergent’. The book is a wonderful combination of entertaining, thoughtful, concise, profound, analytical, encouraging, humble, and corrective all at once. I sincerely believe this should be required reading for Christians between the ages of 18-35 or for anyone interested in the current state of the Church. It is a book that goes against the prevailing wind of our culture and against many of the loudest voices in Christianity and, in doing so, it challenges what you (as a Christian!) believe in a way that is both prophetic and pastoral. I say prophetic because the book challenges and corrects current errors in The Church with clarity and vigor in a way that points people to Jesus; and I use pastoral because it is done with a deep care and love for God’s people.

As a bit of a teaser, here is a sample of some of my favorite quotes:

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“[Regarding the emergent church’s emphasis ‘the journey’] Because the journey is an experience more than a destination, the Christian life requires less doctrinal reflection and more personal introspection. The postmodern infatuation with journey feeds on and into a preoccupation with our own stories. If my parent’s generation could be a little stoic and not terrible reflective, my generation is introspective at a level somewhat between self-absorption and narcissism. We are so in-tuned with our dysfunctions, hurts, and idiosyncrasies that it often prevents us from growing up, because maturity is tantamount to hypocrisy in a world that prizes brokenness more than health” (34).

“Young people will give their lives for an exclamation point, but they will not give their lives for a question mark, not for very long anyway. Once the protest runs out and the emerging church has its own blogdom, and conferences, and church networks, and book deals, there will be no exclamation point, and all that’s left will be ethical intentions and passionate appeals for kingdom living. This will not sustain a movement - the protest will for a while, but once that’s gone there will be no great vision of God, no urgent proclamation of salvation, no eternal judgment or reward at stake, just a call to live rightly and love one another. That message will sell on Oprah, Larry King, and at the Oscars, but it won’t sustain and propel a gospel-driven church, because it isn’t the gospel.” (127-28)

“The main problem in the universe, according to many emergent writers, seems to be human suffering and brokenness. Make no mistake, suffering and brokenness are a result of the fall, but the main problem that needs to be dealt with is human sin and rebellion… Christians don’t get killed for telling people that God believes in them and suffers like them and can heal their brokenness. They get killed for calling sinners to repentance and proclaiming faith in the crucified Son of God as the only means by which we who were enemies might be reconciled to God (Rom. 5:10).” (194-95)

“[Regarding all the angst and shame about the church’s track record when it comes to the arts:] I’m still a little unclear as to the reason. Is it because churches aren’t displaying art on their walls? Neither are insurance companies, but nobody is up in arms about that. My hunch is that there is this feeling that churches aren’t adequately “supporting” artists (musicians, writers, visual artists) in their midst. However, I don’t exactly see churches “supporting” software designers, salesmen, or farmers either. That’s not the church’s purpose. And it seems that the artists who are making the most noise about “not being supported” are the ones who may not have the talent to really cut it in the marketplace anyway. I don’t know of any working artists (musicians, actors, writers, painters) who complain that their church doesn’t “support” their efforts. Art is tough. Making a living at art is tough. It’s tough on families and marriages. That’s simply the nature of the game.” (143)

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You can buy it new, buy it used, download a chapter online.

I’m curious if you’ve read the book as well. What did you think? What did you gain from it or disagree with?

(Those are jello cubes by the way.)

What can we learn from even the briefest glimpse of history?

Every year, John Piper performs a great service to the Church and does a biographical message on the life of a significant figure from church history. He’s done Augustine, Athanasius, Luther, John Newton, J. Gresham Machen, and Charles Spurgeon among many others.

They are a great service to the Church at large, especially laypeople, because of the tremendous perspective you can gain from even the slightest grasp of history.

For example, what can the life of William Tyndale - a martyr whose legacy is the very English Bible you have - teach us? More specifically, what can the controversy between Erasmus & Thomas More on one side, and Martin Luther & William Tyndale on the other, teach us about the current state of the church?

Here are a few excerpts from the message notes of nearly identical message that Piper gave two years ago:

“Daniell puts it like this:

Something in the [Erasmus’] Enchiridion is missing… . It is a masterpiece of humanist piety… . [But] the activity of Christ in the Gospels, his special work of salvation so strongly detailed there and in the epistles of Paul, is largely missing. Christologically, where Luther thunders, Erasmus makes a sweet sound: what to Tyndale was an impregnable stronghold feels in the Enchiridion like a summer pavilion.

Where Luther and Tyndale were blood-earnest about our dreadful human condition and the glory of salvation in Christ, Erasmus and Thomas More joked and bantered….

…I linger here with this difference between Tyndale and Erasmus because I am trying to penetrate to how Tyndale accomplished what he did through translating the New Testament. Explosive reformation is what he accomplished in England. This was not the effect of Erasmus’ highbrow, elitist, layered nuancing of Christ and church tradition. Erasmus and Thomas More may have satirized the monasteries and clerical abuses, but they were always playing games compared to Tyndale.

And in this they were very much like notable Christian writers in our own day. Listen to this remarkable assessment from Daniell, and see if you do not hear a description of certain emergent church writers and New Perspective champions:

Not only is there no fully realized Christ or Devil in Erasmus’s book … : there is a touch of irony about it all, with a feeling of the writer cultivating a faintly superior ambiguity: as if to be dogmatic, for example about the full theology of the work of Christ, was to be rather distasteful, below the best, elite, humanist heights… . By contrast Tyndale … is ferociously single-minded; the matter in hand, the immediate access of the soul to God without intermediary, is far too important for hints of faintly ironic superiority… . Tyndale is as four-square as a carpenter’s tool. But in Erasmus’s account of the origins of his book there is a touch of the sort of layering of ironies found in the games with personae.

It is ironic and sad that today supposedly avant-garde Christian writers can strike this cool, evasive, imprecise, artistic, superficially reformist pose of Erasmus and call it “post-modern” and capture a generation of unwitting, historically naïve, emergent people who don’t know they are being duped by the same old verbal tactics used by the elitist humanist writers in past generations. We saw them last year in Athanasius’ day (the slippery Arians at Nicaea), and we see them now in Tyndale’s day. It’s not post-modern. It’s pre-modern—because it is perpetual.” [all emphases mine]

This particular message is available in it’s entirety at the Desiring God website.