Have you read Brett’s book or just this article? He’s after the pragmatic problems.

I think I see what McCracken is trying to say and I share similar frustrations but I felt he was too dismissive of some worthy people, churches and the emerging church movement. You know where to read more of course.

Anyway, clicking around here makes me realize that I have neglected my Google Reader for too long … I’ll see you around.

If anything the emergings have gone the opposite way by bringing to light that the marginalized and unpopular gravitated toward Jesus, not the in-crowd. It’s interesting that if McCracken had done a little more research, a number of his points would have been an affirmation of the emerging/younger evangelical movement, not a negative critique.

Dang…if only more church leaders would take this observation to heart and seek to correct the problem.

To articulate what exactly I think that is, God has not left us in our alienation from him but has (I’m going to be an unapologetic dogmatic theologian at this point) implanted his own internal relations, that between the Father and Son in the Spirit, within the matrix of human relations, histories and cultures, giving us an access point to himself. The eternal relation between the Father and Son is translated into a relation between God and humanity so that as we are bound to Christ by the Spirit, we become participants in that eternal relationship of love. Christ is then universally relevant because in him and only in him God has bound himself to humanity and has bound humanity to himself. Of course, this binding has taken place through a particular man who was deeply contextualized in the dramatic history of Israel and it is always that Jesus in all of that historical contextualization that is universally relevant. I’d say the ability of that particular humanity to be universally relevant to all other humanity is a function primarily of the Holy Spirit, though we might also secondarily talk about the continuity of human history giving a sense of unity to the variety of human cultures to which Christ came. Yes, Christ was deeply contextualized in his particular sitz im laben which is significantly different from my own, but this is a distinction of degrees, not kind; the Son wasn’t incarnated as a Toydarian on Tatooine, but a human being on earth. One can be guilty of overstating the distance between the two horizons.