I just listened to John MacArthur wax ridiculously on a CD entitled “What’s So Dangerous About the Emerging Church?”
He thinks modernism is bad because it tries to find truth with reason. He thinks postmodernism is bad because it acknowledges that truth (while it does exist) is beyond our limited experience. The only world view he thinks is acceptable is one he calls premodernism, which according to MacArthur was the dominant world view of the entire world for all of history before the enlightenment.
His criticizes the emerging church for not having a historical grounding and then he goes on to criticize us for being interested in the traditions of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. Apparently for John MacArthur historical grounding means grounded in the last 300 years, not before that.
The issue I have with a guy like MacArthur is that he hasn’t done his homework. He is arguing against a straw man that he’s created because it’s easier to fight. He acknowledges that the emerging church is diverse and amorphous and then defines us in the easiest possible way and uses that definition as a back drop for his dismissive comments. He mocks the “humility” of the emerging church with such arrogance the contrast is almost, well funny. Man, he would have hated my last message.
