The first-ever meeting of the Emergent Cohort of Central Jersey, tonight at 9p.m. at Charlie Brown’s on Route 1 in Lawrenceville. Stop on by! Read more

Excellent post here. Read more

As you might have guessed from the titles of these posts, the most substantive issue raised in the comments on my earlier rant was the question of authority. That is, from whence will authority come in the emerging church? And why are we to think that this authority will be any less corrupt than the authority under which our churches now suffer? I’ll do my best to speak to these questions. First, however, I want to explicate the issues I... Read more

Now that he’s gone, it seems that Ol’ Dirty Bastard won’t get to fulfill his destiny. Read more

I just love it when Doug gets mad. And, yes, he’s talking about you. (Maybe me too, if you read it closely.) Read more

Now I’ll try to respond to some of the issues raised in the comments following my rant. I’ll deal with these fairly briefly, because I don’t consider them the substantive issue at hand — we’ll deal with that once we’ve cleared the table. 1) To those who say there is no emerging church: Then why do you keep blogging about it? Your statements of non-existence do not in any way really refute the existence of these communities of faith. That’s... Read more

Well, my earlier rant has provoked some good and thoughtful discussion (and, of course, some not good and not thoughtful discussion). I’m sorry that I haven’t responded yet, but, as Chris noted, I’ve been buried in work this week. I also make a habit of not getting involved in the comment section of my blog, for that seems to cause either lots of comments like “Thanks, I really like what you had to say, too” (which no one likes to... Read more

In What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?, A.K.M. Adam lays out some very helpful (and readable) content on postmodern hermeneutics. For instance, in Chapter One, he uses a three-part typology from Cornel West to explain postmodernism: Antifoundational: PM “resolutely refuses to posit any one premise as the privileged and unassailable starting point for establishing claims to truth.” Antitotalizing: PM “suspects that any theory that claims to account for everything is suppressing counterexamples, or is applying warped criteria so that it can... Read more

Moltmann wrote the third, and final, book in his ‘programmatic’ cycle in 1975; it’s called The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology. In 1990, when it went to paperback, he wrote a new preface, a paragraph of which has serious implications for the debate currently taking place over my last post: “While I was writing The Church in the Power of the Spirit, my intention was to argue for church reform, and today this... Read more