Entering the "Conversation"

Jargon is everywhere around us. We all use it to one extent or another and it can mark us, meaning we can often times understand where a person is coming from by the word choices they make. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can be very helpful in the work place where technical jargon is used as a shortcut so as to compact much information into short sentences much like using acronyms.

However there are also those who use jargon to obscure ordinary word meanings so as to say something which sounds one way to the average listener (or reader), but to the initiated will mean something different. Enter the Emergent Church.

I have read bits and pieces of the seminal Emerging Church work titled, "An Emergent Manifesto of Hope" over the past couple years, but have decided to read it from cover to cover. I have carefully read through the introduction written by one of the book's editors/authors Tony Jones and am just as concerned as I have ever been about this heretical movement. Of course, I have read the introduction before but this time around I am marking up the pages of my own copy of the book and inspecting each sentence as if I were a crime scene investigator looking for a murder weapon and for fingerprints.

Like most close-knit groups, Emergent uses its own language for the initiated, or jargon. Take for example the word "conversation". According to Webster's dictionary, we ordinarily use that word to mean an "oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas". In short, a "conversation" is a verbal exchange. People have held conversations since Adam and Eve conversed with God in the garden of Eden. But the word "conversation" for the Emergent holds a different meaning, it is as Jones metaphorically puts it a "singing together". It is a dialectical process where all members of the "conversation" dialogue together as "friends"—a word which also has a special technical meaning for Emergents—for the purpose of synthesizing a "truth". The metaphor for "singing together" illustrates that each voice singing adds to the overall sound which is not the same sound as a single voice. And, while a single voice could sound "bad", the sound of all singing together will be considered "good" no matter how it sounds.

One thing I missed in the introduction to this book the last time I read it is the starting point of this so-called "journey" Emergents like to refer to is rationalism. Jones writes that in the early days of the Emergent church, before they even called themselves "emergent", they struggled with how to describe the movement they were leading. Were they a "club", a "network", or what? Jones writes that they kept coming back to the word "friend", but what is interesting to note is the following:

"We just kept coming back to the word friend. We wanted to recover that word and to invest it with theological meaning (emphasis mine). We knew this wouldn't be easy, for not only were we fighting the meaninglessness of a word that had been overused, but we also had the creeping suspicion than many of us didn't really know how to be true friends" (ibid. p. 12)

By "friend" they mean "relational connection" which is not the ordinary sense for the word which is "one attached to another by affection or esteem". The above quote is a striking admission on two points. The first is that they struggled over what friendship means. I must confess that sounds far too "tin foil hat" like even for this self-proclaimed philosophy geek. But it also reveals the depths they were going with their rationalism, everything and including ordinary terms like "friendship" were up for redefining.

The second point is a bit more obvious; notice that they wanted to "invest" the word "friend" with theological meaning. Rather than let the scriptures define the word for them, they found a word that they believed could adequately describe their movement, they redefined the word, and sought to justify (or "invest") their idea with scriptures. The beginning of their enterprise started with themselves and not with what the scriptures teach. Jones may as well have asked "How can we shoe horn some doctrine into what we think describes our little movement here?"

What is going wrong with this movement from the outset is it starts with humanity at the center, and not God. It begins with self and information about all the meanings of words and concepts of the movement hang upon the rationalizations of the members of the movement. Then they ask, "How can we invest these words with theological meaning?"

What these fledgling members of the Emergent Church were doing—and continue to do—was to introduce what they may have believed were "new" or "emerging" meanings to theology and the only way to really market such a change to twenty first century people was to utilize a dialectical process referred to as the conversation. The Emergent Church didn't originate the specialized use of the word "conversation" as we can often hear it used in the media and elsewhere, but they have capitalized on it. It is a process through which they can introduce new jargon and gain acceptance for it under the guise that we are all "friends" (which means we are relationally connected) who should tolerate even disparate "voices" in the conversation. If a person accepts such reasoning, then it is open hunting season for the false teachers who can drop into this so-called "conversation" any damnable teaching they so desire, have it heard, and demand for it tolerance.

In the coming weeks I will have more to write about this book. I don't have a series of blog postings lined up, but will write somewhat impulsively as usual. :)