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TechnoratiKluck is no scholar himself. “I really feel like I was probably the last guy who would ever write a book like this,” he said. But after reading various emergent literature, he said "a number of theological red flags became apparent even to a guy like myself with no theological training."
One of the major red flags DeYoung points out is the emergent view of the Gospel. More and more emergent books are not placing the substitutionary atonement for everyone's sins at the center of the Gospel message, he said.
"So the Gospel becomes this message about a broken world and Jesus as the great example, he died on the cross as an example of suffering for what he believed in and showing how to overcome evil in our own life and evil in the world. Here’s an invitation to follow Jesus and bring about this new world and this shalom," DeYoung said. "That sounds like a great message but it’s missing the offense of the cross, it’s missing the fact that we can’t obey God’s commands, we need a savior, substitute for our sins."
"So I see an emergent Gospel that is more law than Gospel. It’s more imperative about what we need to do and not, first of all, indicative statements of what God has done for us," the URC pastor stressed.
Emergent Christians have also adopted the postmodern view of knowledge that God is so beyond human comprehension and so infinite that it is heretical to describe Him in human language, DeYoung noted.
Although it’s a humble attitude, DeYoung argues that such a view "undercuts God's ability to reveal Himself in the Scriptures."
"He is always a god who wants to speak to us, who wants to reveal Himself to us," he said, while acknowledging that humans cannot understand God exhaustively. "He has explained to us in the Scripture, through Jesus Christ, what He’s like and we can know it."
The authors stress several times in the book that they wanted to critique the emergent church not in a mean-spirited argument but as Christians writing about Christians. Their disagreements are strong, but not bitter, they insist.
“There’s something unique about Christians critiquing or challenging other Christians,” Kluck commented. “There’s definitely biblical precedent for that but I think it needs to be done in a humble and loving way. That was our goal. We probably failed at times but that was definitely what we shot for.”
Kluck and Deyoung have not chosen to take the well-traveled emergent road and their current church in East Lansing seems pretty bland, has bad coffee and is full of people with "boring testimonies," they said. But they love it.
Note: The terms "emerging" and "emergent" were used interchangeably in the article as was done in the book.
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