Emerging Pensees
thoughts on God, faith, life, and the emerging church... btw, "pensees" is French for thoughts. get your mind out of the gutter ;)
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Name: Mike Clawson
From: Austin, Texas, United States
About me: A follower of the way of Christ, a "postmodern" Christian, an amateur theologian/ philosopher, a husband, a father, a student, a friend...
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John Armstrong on Richard Cizik Thanks for the post. I had no idea there was a "Christian" view on global warming. Heh! That was excellent. I'm printing it out and making copies.

As is being discussed on Scot McKnight's blog, that kind of ideological intolerance unfortunately holds true in both directions. There are influential circles in which questioning the prevailing conventional wisdom on global warming, taking John Armstrong's stance re. the morality of homosexual pracitce, or suggesting that one opposes civil unions would result in treatment the same or worse than what Cizik received at the hands of the NAE and the religious right.

If only all people regardless of their stance on the issues, would exhibit the spirit of a John Armstrong or Scot McKnight. President-elect Obama seems to be trying to set an example. I hope more take heed. I don't disagree Karl, but at the same time, I find that whenever the response to an issue like this is "but the other side does it too", it tends to minimize the seriousness of the actual offense and dis-empowers the victims of injustice. Let's take care of the plank in our own eye before worrying about the speck in the liberals'.

(And I do say "our" since, while I have been an evangelical - and still am by some definitions - I've never been a classical liberal.) No, two wrongs don't make a right. Nor does the fact that "the other side does it too" make it ok. I'm all for strongly criticizing the group of which one is a part. I didn't realize you still considered yourself evangelical.

Most people, left or right, save their strongest criticism for the "other" - either the other that they have always considered their enemy, or else the other that represents a view they used to hold but hold no longer ("the heresies men leave are hated most").

Ideological intolerance is a human problem, not just an evangelical problem or a leftist problem. But for the evangelicals it's their own problem when it exists within their ranks, and for the liberals it (within their ranks) is their own problem, etc. Yeah, I agree we should each take care of our own house first. It's kind of hard to hear the "you're so intolerant" message when it's coming from someone who is from another "camp" and who is pointing out your camp's failures when theirs is rife with the same thing. We've already covered this ground, but whether or not I'm still an evangelical pretty much depends on who I'm talking to and what they mean by it. I like Nick Fiedler's (of the Nick & Josh Podcast) approach, which is basically that he doesn't want to force himself on any group that doesn't really want him as a member anymore. So if I claim to still be an evangelical there are going to be some who accuse me of not really being one and abusing the label. And if I say I'm not one, then there are going to be those who think that I'm drawing lines too narrowly and say that I'm still within the camp. To which, at this point, I just reply "Hey, whatever you want. Doesn't much matter to me anymore."

At any rate, evangelicalism is what I know best and what I'm still focusing most of my attention on, so it's what I'm most qualified to critique. I can't critique the "liberals" because frankly I don't know enough about them yet. (Except that as I study in a liberal mainline school I'm finding that they're not actually living up to all the extreme stereotypes that I've always heard about them. Contrary to evangelical belief, not every "liberal" Christian actually is a Jack Spong. That last point is true. Not all liberals are Jack Spong, no more than is every evangelical a James Dobson. It's more nuanced in both cases, than those unfamiliar with the given subgroup would suggest.

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Classic Pensees
  • - What is the Emerging Church?
  • - The Converging Church
  • - How to Read the Bible
  • - Did the Exodus Really Happen?
  • - Hell Q&A
  • - Three Approaches to Scripture
  • - Does Forgiveness Require Repentance?
  • - Emma at the Petting Zoo
  • - Biblical Support for Women in Ministry
  • - What is Sin?
  • - What Good is the Bible?
  • - The God of Thin Places
  • - Immigration: Real Solutions
  • - What is Postmodernism?
  • - V for Vendetta
  • - What is Justice?
  • - Roots
  • - If It's Good Enough for Kids...
  • - Aslan Is Not Jesus
  • - Community Transformation
  • - Theology is Like Designing a House
  • - When I Am Weak...
  • - Why I'm Not Patriotic
  • - What is Truth?
  • - What this "postmodern" journey is all about...
  • - The Relational Nature of Sin
  • - Caught In-Between
  • - Three Routes of Escape
  • - What If God Really Existed?
  • - A Tale of Two Churches
  • - Cautions for Emergents, Part 1
  • - Cautions for Emergents, Part 2
  • - We Were There First
  • - Take NAFTA for instance...
  • - Let Them Come
  • - A New Perspective on Jesus
  • - Was Jesus Political?
  • - Contextualization or Isolation: Then and Now
  • - A Tale of Two Movements
  • - Abortion: Talking Past Each Other
  • - Epistemology or Ethics
  • - Why Faith?
  • - A Failure of Compassion
  • - Parables Aren't Always About God
  • - Do You Have a Soul?
  • - Is it all just trivial?
  • - What about the Disturbing Parts of the Bible?
  • - Into the Woods
  • - American Exceptionalism or Imperialism?
  • - Why Believe In God?
  • - Owning "Emergent"

Previous entries
  • Are Emergents Merely Liberal?
  • Liberalism, Evangelicalism and Emergence
  • The Wild Goose as a Sign of Hope
  • Blog Hiatus... Obviously
  • Review of Marcus Borg's "Putting Away Childish Thi...
  • Favorite Austin Eats
  • Busy Summer
  • Escobar on New Men and Social Change
  • Walker Cleaveland's "Brief History of Presbymergent"
  • More Conferences


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Sunday, December 21, 2008
John Armstrong on Richard Cizik
My friend John Armstrong (president and founder of Act 3 ministries) has had one of the best responses I've read to the forced resignation of Richard Cizik from the NAE that I've seen out there. He has a series of five blog posts in which he discusses this incident as a sign of the decline of the NAE and the evangelical movement as a whole back into an increasingly fundamentalist orientation. I think he's right on, and I'm glad he's the one saying it, and not just us younger emergent types, because he's been around long enough, and has been an active part of many of these influential evangelical circles to really know what he's talking about. Other evangelicals may be more inclined to listen to someone like him than to those (such as myself) whom they can simply slap a label like "liberal" or "emerging" on and then conveniently ignore. Anyhow, I applaud him for having the courage to go out on a limb, to name names, and to level some hard critique at his own movement.

You can read his responses here:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Labels: evangelicals, John Armstrong, Richard Cizik

 
posted by Mike Clawson at 4:07 PM | Permalink | 6 comments
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