Good if you are interested in the different church movements or the emergent church, specifically. that's obvious enough. Not terribly helpful as an exhortation to better living and Christ likeness. But very informative. ( )

Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be, by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck is a great resource if you want to find out about Christianity’s Emergent Movement. In eleven chapters DeYoung and Kluck tag-team their way through the maze that is the Christian postmodern (emergent, emerging) belief system.

It’s tricky in that it comes from no one spokesperson but a network of people across denominations who endorse each other’s books, interview each other, and seem to be generally affiliated.

DeYoung is definitely the heavy hitter of the two authors. Using examples from the writings of prominent emergents such as Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Tony Jones, Spencer Burke, Leonard Sweet, Doug Pagitt and more, he ferrets out the emergent position. With his gifts for analysis and logic he exposes it as: against formal doctrinal statements; for questions, doubts and uncertainty; super-critical of the modern evangelical church; controversial concerning Jesus especially regarding the significance of His death and resurrection; almost completely silent on what happens after we die, and more. As a Reformed pastor he has a rich and broad-based knowledge of the Bible and church history, and is able to compare the teaching of postmodern Christianity to what the Bible says and previous theological movements.

Kluck is the color commentator of the two. His chapters consist of vignettes of his experiences, visiting an emergent church, interviewing apologist D. A. Carson, attending the funeral of an old saint etc. They give us a break from the DeYoung’s heavy braininess and do a little showing versus telling.

Here are a few quotes that give a flavour of some of the conclusions DeYoung comes to (of course where needed he cites footnotes for statements like the below, and examines and explains the ideas at length):


Postmodernity: “The postmodern Way, as Leonard Sweet puts it so candidly, is an experience. The journey is more wandering than directional, more action than belief, more ambiguous than defined” - Kindle Location 417.

Propositions: “Few things are so universally criticized in the emerging church than propositions” – K.L. 1033.

Theology: “The task of theology in the emergent model is to express communal beliefs and values, to set forth that community’s particular ‘web of significance,’ and ‘matrix of meaning’” – K.L. 1161.

Kingdom of God: “For those in the emerging church, Jesus’ message of the kingdom is a manifesto about God’s plan for humanity here and now. It is the secret, and subversive announcement that God is working out His plan for peace, justice, and compassion on earth …. Joining the kingdom is not a move in status (i.e. from unsaved to saved) but a move in practice” – K.L. 2847.

Atonement: “So the atonement did not accomplish anything on our behalf. God’s attitude toward us didn’t change. Jesus simply enacted and represented the forgiveness that was already in the heart of God” – K.L. 3037.

Hell: “…hell is just one imagery among many to describe the negative consequences of rejecting God’s way” – K.L. 3075.

If, up till now, you’ve only heard about the emergent church or skimmed the surface of what its champions believe and teach, DeYoung and Kluck’s book will take you deeper.

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This book would land somewhere around 7 stars. It is a bit of a slow read, especially at the beginning. The chapters alternate - one by Kevin followed by one by Ted. Kevin's chapters are very deep (although not always that content laden...) while Ted's chapters are very fluffy and fun (and definitely not content laden). They definitely make a good case against the Emergent teachings, although the book is written specifically for those in Emergent circles and therefore is a bit weak in some areas. Overall, it is a good book with a good message and hopefully one that is widely read amongst young, dissatisfied evangelicals as well as those solidly in the Emergent camp. ( )

Does offer a few decent critiques of Emergent (and a few bad ones as well), but what they would replace it with is often undesirable. I'm also unconvinced that they understand Emergent that well. ( )

This book starts with an extremely measured and theologically responsible summary of 'emergence' in which Kevin DeYoung concludes - surely rightly - that many of us are already to some extent 'emergent' within the existing churches; it approaches its conclusions with what seems to me to be a similarly thoughtful plea against the extreme 'coolness' of emergence - the way in which it is not only self-knowingly cool, but (I find if I spend too much time with it) stiflingly so.
I think that this framework provides a sympathetic basis for an exploration of emergence in the (mainly) North American churches - but I was much less persuaded by the authors' teasing out of questions, in between, about the basis of 'certainty' - especially doctrinal certainty, and - needless to say - the morality of gay sex. At times their plea for 'boundaries' and clarity of principle seemed to me to reflect a restlessness with the possibility that, in fact, some things might not be clear, rather than a sound epistemic reason for thinking that they are so: I mean - it isn't good enough to say that Christian attitudes to gay sex, for instance, or the Virgin Birth, MUST be definite simply because we feel uncomfortable with uncertainty.
Let me put some cards on the table. I agree with Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck that we either think homosexuality is OK or we don't - and I agree that we ought to be transparent about that: I don't agree with them that it necessarily follows that the church need be a place in which everyone has to accept a single normative view about the issue. To that extent I think that BOTH sides are a bit shifty. I take the gay issue in so far as it is a cipher - THE cipher, whether we want to accept it as such or not - for the whole agenda of the debate within the churches.
But, mainly (thankfully), the text of this book is not about sex. It is a more doctrinal account of 'immoveable theological assertions', as 'orthodoxy' is described about half way through; and it is about the importance of doctrinal formulae which the authors are at pains to demonstrate are very much more (and more ancient) than mere constructs of 'modernity'. And that is surely true.
At this stage I want to step outside the debate and ask both sides to define their concept of orthodoxy. It seems to me that in the emergence of relational and fluid concepts of doctrine the emergents are possibly much less trendy than they seem: for all of their appropriation of postmodern modes of thought, the kind of Christianity which they describe contains resounding echoes of the apophatic theology which has been an intrinsic part of Greek Nicene Christianity from the beginning. [If the debate about emergence goes back, endlessly, to Mars Hill, we might want - once in a while - to hang out there specifically with Dionysius, maybe: and YES, I know that the mystical texts come from much much later.] We might legitimately ask what 'orthodoxy', properly, IS - and whether an 'immobile' set of statements from the Reformation really has good claim to supersede the more dynamic ('relational', 'spiritual', 'fluid' - you choose your descriptors) 'Orthodox' orthodoxy of the Patristic Creeds, as articulated through the theology of people like the ('Spirit-led' AND 'Bible-based') Cappadocians, to pluck some names from thin air. We could play endless word-games over all of this, and DeYoung and Kluck would surely be right that many in the emergent movement (or whatever it is: a 'village'?) have no more time for St Basil's theology of the Holy Spirit than they do for John Calvin's understanding of the importance of the Word. But in the moderate emergence, these echoes of the deep Tradition are certainly worth noticing - and they require the debate to be framed in a much more nuanced way than simply an argument about whether it is possible to be Christian and postmodern. The Gospel, even, tells us to bring out from the treasury things both new and old - so let us do so.
Having said that, I agree with this book that 'normal' Christians may well be driven 'bonkers' by emergent statements such as this: 'God is nowhere. God is now here. God is present; God is absent. The future of faith rests in the tension between these words.' It is exasperating! But the idea that just because we find the jargon and the lattes and the profanity (I was HUGELY cross to chase up an expletive used by Tony Jones in 2006 and unrepeatable in this book to find only that it was 'bloody') - just because we find these things irritating does not mean, in itself, that there is no ambiguity at all between what in the old days might have been called the transcendence and the immanence of God. Let's all just step back and chillax a bit, please.
So: I disagree almost completely with the basis on which this book is written (and a little bit of me died when, midway through, DeYoung started on the centrality of 'propitiation' in our understanding of atonement: I know enough Greek to be aware that the nuances of this word include 'reconciliation' and 'mercy' - rather emergent words, one might think - before they contain c16th, let alone Calvinist, interpretation) - but I share with the authors, whose styles are completely different, and refreshingly so (Ted Kluck nicely earths the text in real life; DeYoung nicely grounds it in serious theology; either on its own would be as stifling as the emergent literature itself can be), a sense that emergence does need to deal more adequately with some of its ambiguities if it is to be entirely persuasive.
The final paragraphs - which are an exegesis of the words given to the seven churches of Asia Minor in the Book of Revelation - are extremely apt; more than that, they are eloquent and moving: if every single one of us on every side of these 'conversations' heeded them, that itself would be blessed.
Read this book: be enormously stimulated by it - but don't necessarily agree with it. ( )