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TechnoratiCP: What do you want to really highlight from your writings in the book?
Kluck: Encouragement for local churches that are faithfully preaching the Gospel that don’t get written about because I think there are a lot of them.
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Questions for DeYoung
CP: You note that emergent Christians will say that no one speaks for the emerging movement and that no one speaks for anyone else in that movement. Is that why nobody can really define emergent and those who try to have such trouble defining it?
DeYoung: That’s certainly one of the reasons. They like to call it a conversation. The nature of a conversation is more ambiguous, anamorphis, and when their statement of faith for emergent village says they don’t believe in statements of faith that makes it very difficult to [identify] what are these folks really about? I think there’s enough overlapping themes to try to speak of it as a movement but because it’s a conversation, because emergent by definition doesn’t want to be codified, they don’t like systematic theology, it becomes very difficult to say “here’s this group of people and they believe this thing.”
CP: You did suggest that emergent leaders write up a statement identifying what they believe. I see the need for that, but even evangelicals these days seem to be having a problem with writing statements to identify themselves – like the evangelical manifesto that recently came out. Do you think Christians overall are having problems identifying Christianity and how do you feel statements of faith can be effective for the emerging church?
DeYoung: Certainly there’s a lot of difficulty with definition in what is an evangelical and even what is a Christian and is it to be doctrinally defined. I don’t expect that the emerging leaders are going to read our book and say “I guess we better drop a statement.” But they seem to revel in ambiguity and slippery, in my opinion, on a number of core issues. They admit to that in some of their books – “You think we’re being evasive? Well, we are. So we’re not going to tell exactly what we believe about hell or what we believe about inclusivism vs. exclusivism and the uniqueness of Christ. We’re not going to weigh in on these debates about the inerrancy of Scripture or we’re not going to make a pronouncement about homosexuality.” Now I understand that people can be confused and we all have issues that we don’t quite understand but these are some pretty key issues and if you’re key leaders and teachers, whether that’s what you want to call yourself or not, it seems to me that it would be wise and helpful for the church to speak with more clarity on some of these issues. Continue »
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