Why Brad Cecil Is Emergent (When He Shouldn't Be)
Anyone who’s read Tony Jones’ book The New Christians will now be familiar with the name Brad Cecil and his seminal contributions to the network that has since become known as Emergent Village. Since Jason Mitchell unearthed Brad Cecil’s blog last month (see Jason’s “Top 10 Reasons Why Brad Cecil Is Genius and I Love Him”), I’ve been planning to post a link to it here.
Today, Tony Myles posted a nice intro to the new book Why We’re Not Emergent, and, without taking anything away from that, I also wanted to share Brad Cecil’s insightful post “Why I Am Emergent (By One Guy Who Shouldn’t Be).”
Cecil writes, “I was, in every sense of the idea, a staunch fundamentalist with a dispensational hermeneutic and conservative evangelical theology, proudly defending capital ‘T’ Truth. ... But, something funny happened: I couldn’t get away from nagging thoughts and ideas about the conceptual limitations we face as human beings, the limits of language, the vast number of 1st order assumptions we work with, the hermeneutic principles required to interpret the Bible or the irony of the vast number of theologies that exist …
“I reluctantly started reading the thoughts of people who I was taught to avoid, I had heard that they had an agenda to put God to ‘death’ and sought the final destruction of all things of faith but, I found something altogether different than I expected — I found that so much of their ideas made sense to me and instead of the end of faith these thought leaders were observing a ‘return’. I found reluctant atheists and some excited Christian philosophers who were processing similar conclusions: postmodernism didn’t mean an end to faith — it meant a return from the margins for faith.”
He goes on to give 8 answers to the critique that “defining emergent is like ‘nailing Jell-O to the wall’ and ‘postmodernism means a hundred different things.’” Cecil says, “I disagree — it isn’t all that hard to describe if you are listening and reading.”
Cecil closes with a beautiful affirmation of why he is emergent.
Read Brad Cecil’s “Why I Am Emergent (By One Guy Who Shouldn’t Be)”
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Brilliant. Emergent, despite it’s reputation for being all about questions and not having any answers really is not all that difficult to understand or comprehend. It’s about a way towards a more authentic Christianity in a postmodern world. It’s about Christians seeking to live in the way of the kingdom in an increasingly pluralistic society.
While many discussions of postmodernism can become cumbersome Brad’s brief explanation is both lucid and easy to read. If more people would read his post, we might not have so much confusion over this whole Emergent movement.