I have Dissidens to thank for making me aware of “Emergence”, a piece of idolatrous performance art posing as an “evolution” of the Church. Even the Emergents themselves aren’t sure what they stand for, but the primary thrust of their message is clear. They argue that a new type of Church is emerging to replace the old order established by Peter. Just as Peter’s Church replaced the old cult of sacrifice (they argue), it is now time for the outmoded institutional and legalistic system of Peter to give way to a more spiritual, loving, and free expression of Christ’s community. The Emergents talk breathlessly of “hope”, “change”, “dissolving barriers”. They sing songs about “all the people, living life in peace”, hand out books by Brian McLaren, and imagine a world where “I’m OK, You’re OK”.
McLaren proudly wears the label of “postmodernist”, having failed to get the memo that deconstructionism is dead and has been thrown out of most universities. Does adherence to a thoroughly discredited decades-old sophistry make him a “traditionalist”? Inquiring minds want to know. We could write an entire book about the putrid relativism and pop-cultural staleness typified by the Emergents, but that is not the point of this blog post. In this blog post, we will see how Emergence is of one spirit with the medieval heretic Joachim of Fiore.
Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), wrote in his 1976 book, “The God of Jesus Christ”:
“The most fascinating form of the yearning for the Holy Spirit was formulated by a pious abbot in southern Italy in the twelfth century, Joachim of Fiore. Joachim was deeply conscious of the deficiencies of the Church in his time: the hatred that separated Jews and Christians, the old and new people of God, from one another; the hostility between the Church of the East and the Church of the West; the jealousy between clergy and laity; the high-handedness and greed for power displayed by the Church’s men. …
He longed for a Church that would be truly in accordance with the New Testament and the promises of the prophets and, indeed, with the deepest yearnings of a man’s heart, a Church in which Jews and Gentiles, East and West, clergy and laity, would live in the spirit of truth and love, without precepts and laws”
Does this sound familiar? This is exactly the set of problems that the Emergents set out to solve, and lays the blame in the same place. Joachim had a “vision” of a “new order”, dominated by the Spirit, just as the previous order had been about the Son, and the order before that had been about the Father. Joachim saw Church history as an “evolution” toward a time when the old rules would no longer be needed.
Ratzinger continues (bold for emphasis added by me). This portrait of Joachim could just as well be a portrait of McLaren:
“There was thus some truth in the early Franciscans’ view of Joachim’s doctrine as a prophetic premonition of the figure of St. Francis, for Francis gave the most beautiful answer to Joachim. Indeed, this was the only correct response, for Francis’ life was a winnowing fork that separated the spiritual and the demonic in Joachim’s work (something that the saint’s successors could not do). His motto was “sine glossa” (without commentary). He sought to live Sacred Scripture, and especially the Sermon on the Mount, without making fine distinctions and without evasions. He wanted the Word to take him at his word. Something that is distorted by all kinds of speculation in Joachim became perfectly unambiguous in Francis, and this is why he has been such a radiant figure down through the centuries: the Christianity of the Spirit *is* the Christianity of the lived Word. The Spirit dwells in the Word, not in a departure from the Word. The Word is the location of the Spirit; Jesus is the source of the Spirit. The more we enter into him, the more really do we enter into the Spirit, and the Spirit enters into us. This also exposes a false element in Joachim, namely, the utopia of a Church that would depart from the Son and rise higher than him and the irrational expectation that portrays itself as a real and rational program.”
This is very relevant to the question of the Emergents, because they paint Church history as a series of evolutions, where the old order is left behind and the new order “emerges”. Ratzinger is having none of it. Supported by scriptural references and exegesis which I have omitted for brevity, he concludes :
“This is why Irenaeus’ sketch of the trinitarian logic of history is so much more correct than Joachim’s. For Irenaeus, this is not an ascent from the Father to the Son and then finally to liberation, to the Spirit. Within history, the direction taken by the Persons is the exact opposite of this: the Spirit is present at the beginning as an instruction and guidance of man that is yet scarcely perceptible. He leads to the Son and, through the Son, to the Father”.
No Comments