Sunday, March 04, 2007

Is the Reformation Over?

Rethinking the Push for Detente with Rome

by Phil Johnson, Executive Director of Grace to You

The Wrong Kind of Unity - Here is a recent post from his blog, PryoManiacs, on this topic. Regardless of the content of this post and others he has some of the best graphics I've seen on any website, great stuff.

Beside his group blog above and The Spurgeon Archive which he runs here is his main website with his sermons and articles.

Others talks given by Phil Johnson:

You Can't Handle the Truth - Addressing the tolerance of postmodernism

Absolutely Not! - Exposing the postmodern errors of the emerging church

Dead Right & Dead Right - Part 2 - The failure of fundamentalism

This post continues a series began on this topic. To review other posts on this topic go here & here.

2 comments:

Fred said...

Phil Johnson asks some good questions.

The simple fact is that there is really no more unity of agreement among Roman Catholics than there is among Protestants.
I've often hear this response to Catholicism. It presumes that the essential unity is one of ideas - yes, Catholics have fights over many different ideas, but our unity is in Christ not some idea of Him.

Also, this topic was addressed in a way during the pope's retreat this year by Cardinal Biffi: two ecumenisms (one good, one evil) were proposed.

I'll put the money quotes into a new post.
Fred

Eric Lee said...

Unfortunately, I do not have time to read all of these, but I have begun to read over Johnson's presentation on the emerging church. And, I must say, wow. For somebody as smug as him, he really shows that he knows next to nothing at all about it. Like, it's realllly embarrassing.

Now, I am not a part of the 'emerging' church, nor am I a supporter of it, and in fact, I am rather critical of it, but he starts off on a really embarrassing note when he says the following:

By the way, I realize it would be very stylish if I took the other approach. If I gave you an
ambiguous review and a totally dispassionate analysis, so that when I finished you couldn’t
actually be sure whether I think the emerging movement is a good thing or not, that would fit
perfectly with the postmodern paradigm favored by emergent types. And I’m sure a lot of them
would congratulate me for it. But that would not reflect my own honest perspective, and I’d
prefer just to be totally frank with you. So that’s what I’m going to do.


The problem with most people who know nothing -- like Johnson -- about what is 'emerging' and what is 'postmodern', is that what they end up actually critiquing is modernism itself. It is not postmodernism which claims to be 'dispassionate' and 'objective', but precisely the metanarrative of modernity which has claimed such a thing. It is precisely postmodernism and other forms of confessional analyses which admit to their biases: their historical situatedness, cultural situatedness, etc.

And witness this canard:

On top of that, this is a movement that hates formal structure, so it has been resistant to any kind of definition or careful boundaries that would make its shape easy to discern or describe. It’s a movement that is purposely foggy and amorphous, fluid and diverse—and most in the
movement want to keep it that way.


Hahaha! Everybody I know who associates themselves with the 'emergent' conversation thirsts for structure! And it's not merely anecdotal, either, because the emergent thing, while it is made up of some churches which explicitly call themselves 'emergent', is often made up of people who are embedded within their local congregation (whether it be Methodist, Nazarene, Calvinist, etc.) who are obedient to their denomination. He then goes on to try and fend off critique by saying that most people object to this, trying to dig himself out of the hole he is digging, but he fails to consider the very real possibility (which is an actuality!) that what he is saying is just wrong. No wonder he always hears objections: because he loves building straw-men.

I'm sorry, I can't read any more of this guy's dribble because he just sounds like another uninformed, un-wise man yelling at the kids to "get off my lawn."

And I have nothing to do with emergent! (which I find so ironic)

Oy.

Peace,

Eric