One of the most exasperating features of emergent church thinking is the constant tendency to set propositional statements over against narrative. Abandoning propositions, they are trying to recover the idea of pastor as story-teller. As I have pointed out before, this is like abandoning verbs and nouns in favor of sentences, or lumber for houses. Stories are made up of propositions. “In a castle by a lake lived a little boy with his green dragon” is proposition. “Jesus rose from the dead” is a proposition.
The confusion is so widespread, and yet so simplistic, it is worth asking what on earth the emergent folks are reacting to. For it must be a reaction, and clearly does not represent a well-thought out position. When they reject propositional theology in favor of story, what do they think they are rejecting? I believe the problem they have with “propositions” is caused by the fact that ministers do not act like they believe their propositions (whether they are found in dogmatic theology, may its tribe increase, or in stories). This problem is actually as old as dirt, and the reaction to it does not deserve to be dignified with a breathless, cutting edge term like post-modernism. When Jesus came along and began teaching with authority, and not as the scribes, the twelve disciples did not begin identifying themselves as post-scribal. What the postmodernists and emergent church johnnies are reacting to is the perennial problem of ecclesiastics who have positional authority without having what we call moral authority. But moral authority is granted by the Spirit of God, and not by spastic reactions to the dull guys who are currently in charge. It takes more than just quitting your job as pastor in the ho-hum church and starting up a new “emergent” church in a nightclub to obtain moral authority. Where is the improvement if we move from dull people doing normal things to dull people doing weird things?
If your living room is dull, nothing changes just because you rearrange the furniture. Of course, if you get really exasperated with the Dullness, you can liven things up for about fifteen minutes if you paint the couch with orange latex. But after that, it is still a dull place to be, and the couch is sticky.
The rabbis who did not have the authority that Jesus had could not have remedied the problem by getting an eyebrow pierced. Okay, a bit of excitement for a sabbath or two, but when we all settle down again, he still preaches like dishwater left in the sink overnight. And if he goes for another three weeks, and tries to regain the previous excitement by getting the other eyebrow pierced, you have a good picture of the vanity of the emergent church. Ironmongery and sticky couches will never give you something to say. And if you have nothing to say, that fact will always be evident to everyone shortly.
Propositions are among the most thrilling gifts that God ever gave to us. But sin blinds us, and those who cannot see this are spiritual dullards. This includes people who professionally handle their dusty books propositions in the Ssshhh! Library of God, as well as those who pretend to throw propositions away in order to tell us all a Really Exciting Metanarrative. But for starters, exciting metanarratives don’t have words like metanarrative in the title. In Anglo/Saxon, this word would be rendered as Bigstory, or in western parlance, Tall Tale. As they reject propositions, I await the results with the same anticipation of a customer in a diner who has ordered an omelet from a cook who doesn’t believe in eggs anymore. In either case, all who treat propositions with contempt are spiritual dullards — and whether they are scribes or post-scribes doesn’t much matter.