The “Emerging Church” of the 1820s?

A guest post by Brandon Hensinger:

Did the Emerging Church attempt to Emerge in the 1820’s?

Louis Berkhoff (1873-1957) completed his Systematic Theology in 1932. In 1938, he decided to write a Preface To Systematic Theology, in which he describe the history, nature, and task of Systematic Theology (referred to as Dogmatic Theology by Berkhoff). Berkhoff does an excellent job of laying out what the history of Systematic Theology is, showing how the first attempt at constructing a Systematic Theology was done by Origen, in his book Peri Archon (First Principles), then eventually Augustine authored Enchiridion (“Handbook”). He walks through history showing many different views of the discipline of systematics, and when he reaches the 1800’s, he spends a significant amount of time discussing the views of Shleiermacher, a German theologian, who wrote several books during 1810-1840.

While reading Berkhoff, and at the same time reading more about the position of the emerging church, (which is that generally they are less concerned with the orthodoxy of the past and “the old way of doing things”), I found it to be amazing that there actually appears a very similar view to that of the emerging church which emerged by the hand of Schleiermacher. The similarity in view is especially evident in 2 areas: the nature of doctrine, and the discipline of Systematic Theology (referred to as dogmatic theology by Schleiermacher).

Schleiermacher views the nature of doctrine as “the intellectual expressions, authorized by the Church, of the inner meaning of the religious experiences of the Christian community.” This “theologian” would argue that doctrine’s source is not scripture, but the Christian consciousness. Under his position then, doctrine can change decade by decade, or even year by year, all depending on what the church is experiencing at that time, and what the culture mandates. He views doctrine as a description of the experience of the Christian faith. He holds that doctrine is clothed with authority because it is sanctioned by the communal consciousness of the church, not because it has it’s content in scripture. The emerging church would seem to hold a similar opinion, in that they move with the ebb and flow of cultural mandates. Doctrine to them isn’t something absolute, and authority would seem to lie in what the church agrees upon as a whole, because their focus is “freedom”, not wanting to be held by any tradition.

He also views Systematic Theology as “not doctrines nor facts which have been revealed in a supernatural manner, but experiences of the human soul, or the feelings which the religious soul experiences in its relations with Jesus the Savior.” He would hold that Systematic Theology is the science of the Christian faith and therefore must receive its material from faith, not from Scripture. The reason he believes this is because he looks at religion not as knowledge or moral action, but as a feeling of dependence on an ultimate reality, which arises only in the Christian community. He would believe that by systematically laying out the experiences of the church over history, that he would then be able to form a Systematic Theology, and emphasizes that it would not be absolute, because the “truth” about what the church is experiencing is always changing. He would see theology as the study of faith, whose object is always changing.

The emerging church again seems to hold so much similarity here with its focus on the “now” and little on the past.

Thus, perhaps the positions of the emerging church aren’t so “new and emerging,” and simply prove (again) the wisdom of Solomon: “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc 1:9).

–Brandon Hensinger