Why is the Emerging Church Drawn to Deconstructive Theology?
April 25, 2007
The Church and Postmodern Culture website has been doing a series on the emerging church and deconstructive theology. There have been some really great essays written.
- Difference, Humility and Surprise, by LeRon Shults.
- The Difference That Faith Makes, by Carl Raschke.
- Subversive Syntax, by Tony Jones.
- The Will to Action, by Jason Clark.
- Why Deconstruction?, by Peter Schuurman.
I think if I had to give a quick answer to the question, it would rely heavily on the Christian mystic tradition, the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius) and his Mystical Theology and a discussion on apophatic/negative theology. Pete Rollins touches on this in his book, “How (Not) to Speak of God.”
Tags: Deconstruction, Deconstructive-Theology, Emergent, emerging-church, Pete-Rollins
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Adam Walker Cleaveland: I am a 28 yr old 
April 26th, 2007 at 9:04 am
If I had to suggest an answer to the question asked in the title, I’d say that what the Emerging Church emerges out of what was an epistemologically over-determined context and in the hopes of escaping the theological dead end of American evangelicalism, sets to the work of deconstruction, which at least runs the risk of the Emerging Church being more about what it is not, a much needed negative moment, but ultimately unable to propel it beyond the the gravitational pull of that from which it emerges. Ironically, because this context also had strong anti-intellectual tendencies, this flirtation with so-called postmodern philosophy quite often suffers from reductionist accounts of writers and therefore fails to see that these writers undercut much of the theological foundation which many in the Emerging Church would like to see retained.
April 26th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Amen. And Amen.