Doug Pagitt at Logos 5

Last night I attended a brief chat session with Doug Pagitt here in Grand Rapids. I guess he would qualify as a leader of the Emergent movement. I think his most recent book is BodyWorship, which seems interesting. It's about different postures you could use in prayer. I think it might be a "worth buying."

I don't think I heard or interacted with him enough to know exactly where he's coming from. I wonder if that's part of the schtick--be suggestive and vague and see what happens? Today I heard a group tried to get him to say that he was a Christian and I think he resisted. It reminded me of Barth refusing to discuss any absolute proof of the historicity of the resurrection. He believed in it, but refused to discuss proofs. Maybe Pagitt was making a similar point? You don't claim to be a Christian; you show it? Or maybe I'm giving him too much credit? Maybe he's not really that clever.

So who knows what he really thinks about anything. But I wanted to mention four "red flags." I put these under the heading of "Things emergents say that they think make them sound intelligent and prophet-like, when in fact it's, yawn, didn't-Reimarus-say-that-in-the-1700's stuff."

1. Pagitt was driving some distinction home between the kingdom of God Jesus preached and the gospel as "Jesus rose from the dead."

Again, what he meant by this, I don't know. I could put the refusal to call himself a Christian into a pot with it and conclude that he believes God is bigger than Christianity, that the kingdom of Christ is just one subset of the bigger kingdom of God. I chuckled when he said something like "not that the 'God from God, light from light' stuff of the creeds isn't important--it was some really good work they hammered out in the second [sic] and third [sic] centuries" (P.S. sic means note the error).

Observations:
a. This is as old as the hill. And of course it's true that Jesus did not primarily preach about himself. But orthodox Christianity sees the gospel that Paul and Acts preached as a more detailed and specific version of what Jesus preached, not as one valid subset among other valid subsets (e.g., Islam?).

You can take the path of the early 1800's Unitarians, the heirs of the Puritans who abandoned the Trinity. You can take the path of early 1900's liberalism and focus on Jesus the social worker, leaving off the dying for sins part. You can just ask WWJD and forget about the resurrection and incarnation part that is what is actually distinctively Christian...

... but at this point you will have to redefine what you mean when you call yourself a Christian. Maybe you will even resist using that word to identify yourself because you are now identifying with the bigger "kingdom of God" that Jesus preached and, perhaps, you think the church perverted.

2. The idea that the church establishment perverted the original teaching of Jesus is as old as the hills. I mean, I can respect you if you really believe this, but don't pretend like you're Yoda or some newly enlightened one--you're a couple hundred years late for the most recent version of this scenario.

Here the red flag words are "religious leaders" and "Constantine created the church establishment." It's the whole Da Vinci schtick. Again, good novel, but not good history. Christians who focus on Jesus' relation to the religious leaders of his day immediately set off my "Okay, this person is going to make a parable of Jesus' relationship to the religious leaders and draw an analogy to the 'true,' Erwin McManus, Barna Christian versus established denominations and churches.

Well there were authoritative bishops as early as 112 when Ignatius was making his way to Rome, so the Constantine theory is off about two hundred years. Indeed, 1 Timothy sets down rules for authoritative leaders in the church. And the parable is not a good one. The best parallel with the religious leaders of Jesus day does not focus on the leader part or the established part but on the spiritual part. Are you so focused on the letter of Scripture that you miss the Spirit? Are you so focused on how important you are that you don't think of others or that you manipulate the means at your disposal to your advantage? Hey, do you reject Jesus as the divinely sent Son of God because of your idea of the kingdom of God? Then you're approaching a good parallel to the religious leaders of Jesus' day.

3. Don't drive a wedge between the social and spiritual ministry of Jesus. I don't know that Pagitt did this. But he completely flubbed any attempt to explain why many conservatives of the early 1900's rejected the idea of a "social gospel." In the early 1900's, you had a lot of educated ministers who stopped believing in things like the divinity of Christ and the resurrection. To retain their Christian name, they changed the Christian message purely into a matter of helping the needy and the disempowered. Sound familiar? Some conservatives wrongly overreacted and completely rejected Jesus' social message (by the way, when many conservative Christians see Democratic values and socialism as anti-Christian, I think we are witnessing a "hang-over" from this earlier era).

We must not do the same thing our forebears by making the gospel purely spiritual. The gospel is for the whole person and indeed the whole world--even for the environment.

But the turn to Jesus' social teachings when you begin to doubt the resurrection bit... that's a hundred years old. It's a both/and, not an either/or.

4. The kingdom of God is "in you." There's the Gnostic twist that makes the kingdom of God an individualistic, privitized religion. Two comments:

a. This verse in Luke is a bit of an oddball among all the kingdom of God sayings in the gospels. The vast majority of them really seem to look for a real, visible kingdom at some point. To focus purely on this verse as the key to the kingdom of God language is to use the exception to make the rule. And by the way, the Jesus Seminar will love you cause that was one of their favorite verses too.

b. I actually think the phrase is better translated "among you." It fits that a modern individualist would translate it as an introspective, personal venture. I think it fits much better with Jesus' world to understand it in corporate terms.

So these are the "red flag" words and phrases.

"You know Jesus' preaching of the kingdom wasn't about his own death and resurrection."

"Jesus rejected the established church of his day. He hated religion too."

"Constantine invented Christianity."

"Jesus preached that the kingdom is inside you, not in a church building."

These are at best, half truths. At worst, they're downright perversions. Beware when you hear "enlightened ones" saying things like these. They may be perfectly innocent comments, well intentioned. Other times they may be subtle prods to push you away from orthodox Christianity.

I do respect the person who is up front in saying, "I'm not a traditional Christian."

But don't wander into something--know where you're drifting!