Beyond the Emerging Church: The End and the Beginning of a Movement - Thomas Hohstadt
Thomas Hohstadt is concerned about the emerging movement. Will it “become a mere blip on the radar of time?—a stylish fad for the disaffected few?—a rapture for nerds?—a grace for geeks? . . . And, we wonder if we’re just past mistakes? Is the movement “déjà vu all over again”?” (4) Hohstadt believes that the emerging movement has overly polarized differences between itself and the contemporary church. He writes, “This book is an apology for those mistakes and a wakeup call for my friends in the emerging church movement” (4). While modern thinking possesses harmful excesses, gullible postmodernists have too easily thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Objective absolute truth is not an illusion. One interpretation is not as good as any other. After all, “To say there are no absolutes is in itself absolute” (10). Truth is “not something we create – it’s something we encounter” (11). We must beware of the narcissism of postmodernists that strenuously deconstruct Truth. Instead, we must recover “a ‘knowing of the heart’ that transcends our subjectivity – our intellect – and our differences” (14). For my extended summary, click HERE.