‘Emerging church’ is the collective term for the individuals in Western culture who are emerging from this process of the theological and subjective deconstruction and reconstruction of Christianity yet continuing to find community amidst this process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Emerging church groups have typically contained some or all of the following elements:

• • a minimalist and decentralised organisational structure;

• • a flexible and at times mongrel approach to theology whereby individual differences in belief and morality are celebrated and accepted with difference as normative;

• • a holistic view of the role of the church in society (this can mean anything from greater emphasis on fellowship in the structure of the group to a higher degree of emphasis on social action, community building or Christian outreach);

• • a desire to reanalyse the Bible against the context with the goal of revealing a multiplicity of valid perspectives rather than a single valid interpretation;

• • a high value placed on creating communities built out of the creativity of those who are a part of each local body.

The multivalent approach to grounding some operational definition for ‘emerging church’ only serves to further exemplify this anti-movement movement. A master's thesis analysing the emergent church movement operationally defined the phrase ‘emergent church’ as a ‘mood, generative conversation, dialogue, phenomenon, even as a friendship amongst its church leaders that share common features’.Footnote ¹ Consider the following response from a pastor asked to define what it means to be an ‘emergent church’:

This ‘radical redecoration’ includes an embrace of paradox and uncertainty in regard to:

• • constantly changing philosophical understanding of subjectivity, from modern to postmodern, from a world of absolutes and certainty to a world of questions and searching, of challenge and anxiety, of opportunity and danger;

• • constantly changing social and economic systems, in the midst of a growing global economy and the rise of the internet and other global media, which make the world seem smaller and more connected, yet also more fragmented and tense;

• • a rabid embrace of constantly changing spiritualities as religions of the world cope with new challenges and opportunities, religious and ethnic strife, the loss of confidence in traditional authorities, the shift of Christianity's strength from the global north to the global south.

Theologically, what is arising in the ‘emergent movement’ frames with Tillich in numerous ways, but is most clearly seen in the meta-question of religious form in relation to content and meaning. As Tillich makes clear in ‘On the Idea of a Theology of Culture’, religion is not conceived as one cultural function among many. Rather, religion is the directedness toward the unconditional depth of meaning in each of these cultural functions. Tillich writes in ‘On the Idea of a Theology of Culture’ that ‘[t]hrough existing realities, through values, through personal life, the meaning of unconditional reality becomes evident . . . before which personality and community are shattered in their own self-sufficient being and value’.Footnote ³ The unconditioned depth of cultural functions is ‘not a new reality, alongside or above other things’. It is not a being, nor the substance or totality of beings; ‘it is – to use a mystical formula – that which is above all beings which at the same time is the absolute Nothing and the absolute Something’. This turn to the existential, mystical and apophatic in Tillich's ‘Theology of Culture’ is core to the ‘emergent church’ move toward the ‘organic vintage-faith approach’ for the ‘post-seeker-sensitive’ which is grounded in the non-foundational. Critiquing what he terms the ‘modern linear approach’ that has everything planned and focused on ‘the message as the focal point and centrepiece of the service’, Dan Kimbell states that the ‘organic vintage-faith approach’ provides a form of worship as ‘gathering’ which highlights ‘the experiential . . .[that] is woven into and flows throughout the gathering as the focal point and centerpiece’.Footnote ⁴

The methodology of cultural engagement in and through the ‘emergent church’ movement is drawn from the dialectic methodology central to Tillich's ‘Theology of Culture’ where authentic religious experience is found amidst the triadic interplay of content, form and meaning (Gehalt), to which he links the terms autonomy, heteronomy and theonomy. Content denotes something objective in its simple existence. The act of giving form to content creates a recognisable structure within the cultural sphere. Meaning is something else again: it is the depth-meaning, the spiritual substance of a cultural product. In a traditional formulation of Tillich's paradigm, content is accidental, meaning is essential and form mediates between content and import. The accent placed on this formulation methodologically vis-à-vis the emergent church movement is a distinctly therapeutic one whereby the content of cultural engagement is deeply subjective rather than objective. In this ‘neo-correlational’ turn, the Tillichian methodology is employed in the manner described by Stephen Pattison as a ‘critical conversation’ rather than a ‘critical correlation’ – in short, culture has something to say: let them who have ears, hear.Footnote ⁵ Throughout the ever-burgeoning literature in discussion surrounding the emerging church movement, the notion of meaning is made clear through ‘emergent church’ writers in Brian McLaren and Leonard Sweet's The Church in Emerging Culture and Dan Kimbell's The Emerging Church where the revelation of a predominant meaning consists in the fact that the form becomes more and more inadequate to the meaning. Meaning in its overflowing abundance shatters the form meant to contain it. In their book Alternative Worship: Resources from and for the Emerging Church, Jonny Baker and Doug Gay frame the direction of ‘emergent worship’ as ‘hammering out what it means to be the gathering people of God – postscientism, postrationalism, and, most importantly, post-Christendom; what it is to worship God when gods are ubiquitous and every god-story, valid’.Footnote ⁶ This ‘hammering out’ of form via the overabundant surplus of valid ‘god-story’ is akin to Tillich's notion of the authentically pre-eminent form of religiously charged cultural products readily shattering and reforming. This act of shattering and reforming presupposes resources by which to enact change. In an attempt to catalogue some of the theological sources driving the emergent movement in his book A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren notes the importance of acknowledging the legacy of what ovulates a theological movement: ‘in whatever way Protestants feel they emerged from Catholicism – or in whatever ways post-Vatican II Catholics feel they emerged from pre-Vatican II Catholicism – they can't despise their roots or reject their past’.Footnote ⁷

In this regard, I will address three foundational movements which are implied but not overtly noted in ‘emergent’ discourse yet remain engraphedFootnote ⁸ to a distinct theological heritage and the contemporary emergent resonance. These movements are as follows:

• • Schleiermacher's notion of ‘feeling’ as an authentic categorical form of knowledge forged through radical reflexivity is the proper domain for authenticity in the emergent movement.

• • As underscored in Tillich's Theology of Culture, the church as ‘emergent’ is profoundly imminent and therefore necessarily social, positivistic and historical.

• • Theological anthropology is understood primarily through our freedom over and (at times) against the necessity of redemption.

First, receptivity to the manifestations of God is possible in immediate self-consciousness or ‘feeling’, which is the proper domain of authentic faith. This metanoia, from the priority of reason and rationalism in the emergent movement, has numerous reference points, but the corrective turn, taken by Schleiermacher in reference to Kantian metaphysics, marks a turn akin to the anti-Enlightenment turn taken by the emergent and is therefore important to review. The heritage of the inward, affective turn of radical subjectivity is rooted in the notable quotation by St Augustine in this regard: Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas (‘Do not go abroad; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth’).Footnote ⁹ Augustine is in line with Plato before him in his search for a unifying principle under and throughout the oppositions and complex divisions of the world. But Augustine draws a new direction in his avocation of in interiore homine as where habitat veritas.

Dwelling in this modality of being in a radically reflexive repose, Augustine is not a precursor to the Cartesian tautological turn of ‘thinks themselves thinking’ but the Schleiermachian turn of ‘feel ourselves feeling’. Schleiermacher claims that ‘feeling’ is the mode of receptivity in which humans are both open to the interactions between rationality (mind) and sentience (being) as well as open to the absolute ground of those interactions. He defines feeling as ‘immediate self-consciousness’, which removes feeling from the sphere of changeable emotions to the deeper one of what Heidegger will later call ‘fundamental moods’ (Stimmungen) and Tillich will later call ‘ultimate concern’. Schleiermacher claims that feeling is not merely subjective self-awareness, but is genuinely intentional – it points us to not merely ourselves, but toward that within which, noting St Paul's praxeologically devotional refrain in Acts, ‘we live and move and have our being’.Footnote ¹⁰ An intuition of what is felt always accompanies feeling. As such, feeling is the primordial unity of the subject–object interactions. Feeling is the proper domain of the primordially receptive nature of human being. And, crucially, feeling as it ‘emerges’ is the proper domain of authenticity in the recovery of the unity of subject–object relations both within ourselves and beyond.Footnote ¹¹

Second, to be ‘emergent’ is necessarily social, positive and historical. In the fourth of his Speeches, Schleiermacher says, ‘once there is religion, it must necessarily be social. That not only lies in human nature but also is preeminently in the nature of religion.’Footnote ¹² In this regard, human beings have a desire to communicate religious emotions and meanings to each other. Accordingly, emergent communities are therefore infinite and immeasurable by this understanding, but in addition, authentic communitas must, akin to Schleiermacher's argument regarding religion, have a principle of individualisation in itself, for otherwise it could not exist at all and be perceived.Footnote ¹³ According to this principle, authentic Christian faith cannot simply appear in the world as there is no natural form of what Christian community nor practice is. Christian faith and the community that gives form to its expression therefore necessarily appear in the world as a concrete historical community as vocare or vocation – a ‘called out’ (or ‘thrown out’ as Heidegger would state) community which forms and overcomes divisions between self and other and self and God. Moreover, as the emergent movement has made abundantly clear, there are necessarily a plurality of authentic forms and practices of Christian faith. That is to say a multivalent understanding of what it means to be authentically Christian that draws from and supports a myriad of sources, based upon the plurality of possible intuitions and feelings engraphed into the diverse firmament in which we find ourselves (and are found). As Schleiermacher notes in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers, he applauds rather than laments the condition of pluralism which exists among the multiplicity of human communities.

Additionally, the neo-correlational theology of the emergent movement aligns itself with Schleiermacher through an essentialist theological anthropology which grounds and empowers a finite human freedom under the sovereignty of an infinitely free and loving God. In emergent communities, radical human freedom is not only acknowledged but celebrated. As Schleiermacher rigorously construes human freedom as limited, finite and relative freedom, in contrast to Kant's moral philosophy, so does the emergent movement uphold a robust liberty core to humanity which challenges both Reformed and Wesleyan notions of atonement. As we see through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the notion of transcendental freedom stands at the centre of both Kant's theoretical and practical critiques. For Kant, transcendental freedom is the idea of an absolute beginning point, out of which a rational subject (or moral agent) can produce an object (an action as real state of affairs) quite independently of the natural nexus of cause and effect. As rational beings we are conscious of ourselves as acting and thereby bringing about new states of affairs within the totality of the world and its causal structure.

In his early essay on human freedom (Über die Freiheit), Schleiermacher abandoned the idea of transcendental freedom in favour of a more limited notion of freedom ultimately grounded in the religious response to the infinite whole as it reveals itself in finite reality. In contrast to Kant, Schleiermacher turned to the empirical experience of the moral agent. Schleiermacher argued against Kant that action is always determined by our strongest desire. All human action is moved by instincts or impulses. But that does not mean that reason is inherently restricted in its freedom. For Scheiermacher, there is a definitive moral impulse within the actual life experience of the empirical self. This moral impulse competes with other impulses in the deliberations of the agent to become the incentive of action. The originating cause of moral action therefore lies within the empirical self, rather than outside it. With this early critique of Kant's idea of transcendental freedom, Schleiermacher brought together what Kant had previously argued – namely, the nexus of sensible inclinations and moral duty – by making the moral impulse one of the affective desires which can determine a moral act. In so doing Schleiermacher did not deny the moral law, but rather claimed that the law is given through the sentient experience of the self and must be interpreted by it. This move is consistent with the previous steps in manuvring between idealism and empiricism-positivism. For Schleiermacher, the receptive power of feeling is the ground of both knowing and doing; it ensures the unity of theoretical and practical reason. In this regard, both knowing and doing presuppose givennessFootnote ¹⁴ – on the one hand, the givenness of objects which the self strives to know and on the other hand the givenness of situations which call for the self to act. Feeling is the capacity to receive givenness and hence it is the condition of the possibility of knowing and doing for finite, sentient creatures. In this regard, feeling is the essential ground of relative freedom. In feeling, the self is immediately aware of itself and thereby is immediately aware of the primordial unity between subject and object. As one grounded in feeling, the self is also immediately aware of itself as responding to the infinite world of givenness, including the direct encounter with other human beings. In feeling, the self has an accompanying intuition of the whole universe which is not primarily intellectual or moral but is affective at the deepest level. In this vision of religious identity, all primacy given to transcendence falls silent and leaves open an imminent human freedom which is grounded and realised into the world.

This level of unbridled imminent freedom as the foundational aspect of our humanity informs ‘emergent church’ writers in regard to their unilateral correlational methodology which begins with a focus on what individuals and congregations ‘want and need’ and then articulates a theology which responds to and fulfils those wants and needs through a call to human freedom toward others and God. In this way the correlation model drawn from Tillich attempts to find a better way of making Christian community meaningful and relevant both to the congregation and to the culture at large. Drawing upon recent reimaginings of the Celtic tradition, the ‘emergent church’ movement argues for a theology of authenticity which is contrasted with what they term the ‘Roman model’ of ‘finding out what God says’ and then ‘applying’ it to specific human situations. Such a traditional approach (or what Dan Kimbell terms ‘consumer church’ model) is seen as dictatorial and restrictive, allowing no room for human meaning and response, and, more importantly, ignoring the complex web of reality which human beings already inhabit and into which the theologian is attempting to speak the knowledge of God.

In a similar vein of post-evangelical critique of the modern church brought forward by the ‘emergent church’ movement, Don Browning in A Fundamental Practical Theology responded to this perceived deficiency of authenticity in practice by detailing a thorough practice-to-theory-to-practice model which predates the ‘emerging church’ movement yet bears important points of contemporary reference. Browning spends some time in this work justifying both the necessity of congregational studies and the practical theology with which such studies are associated. He suggests that religious communities carry a sense of tradition, or ‘group memory’ which often serves to balance the corrosive effects of modern Western individualism. They are in this sense, carriers of a crucial ‘practical wisdom’. He writes:

Browning elaborates on this idea of tradition by contrasting a ‘popular’ view of theology with what has actually developed in contemporary theological circles. He notes that, for too many academics, ‘theology’ is a mysterious and arcane discipline and to speak of such a thing as ‘practical theology’ conjures up echoes of ‘practical astrology’ or ‘practical alchemy’. Akin to emergent self-understanding, practical theology, as articulated by Browning, is to be a reflection on the historical self-understanding of a particular religious tradition, a reflection which wrestles with expressions of faith which involve the language of myth, story, symbol and metaphor. Browning notes by way of contrast the neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth which, while more contemporary than the Scholastics, still involves the authoritative model of God's self-disclosure to a receptive (meaning ‘passive’) Christian church. By way of analogy, think of a physician who prescribes a cure for a patient without actually going through the careful rigours of a full medical diagnosis. This authoritative model which Browning implicitly rejects actually finds its way back into his congregational studies at several key points. He refers to Barth in this regard in support of his core thesis:

Notice that the term ‘revelation’ is fused to the terms ‘apodictic’ (incontrovertibly true), ‘theory’, ‘impractical’ and ‘unrelated to the average person’. It is placed in direct opposition to human understanding, action and practice. Curiously enough, however, when Browning later recounts a series of analytical descriptions of a failing church congregation, he observes that each description, while striving for objectivity, implicitly compares the congregation to an ideal of what a church should embody. I would argue here in passing that such a normative ideal is only possible if we incorporate at least a few bricks from traditional revelatory theology into our practical theological edifice.

Browning elaborates on his disagreement with Karl Barth by observing, along with hermeneutical writers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, that the theologian does not approach God, scripture and the historic witness of the church like an empty slate or a Lockean tabula rasa, waiting to be plugged into a situation like some kind of announcing angel. Akin to the voicing of ‘emergent thinkers’ Browning would argue that we are already situated within a specific time and culture, bringing to the texts and practices of our faith a whole complex of often unquestioned assumptions. He uses the term theory-laden to describe these assumptions and practices, pointing out that

This changes when a religious community hits a crisis of some kind. As a community moves from stasis to paradox and liminality, it begins to ask questions about its practices which seem to be failing. It attempts to describe these practices from a variety of viewpoints in order to understand the questions precipitated by the crisis. Eventually, the community re-examines the texts and events which constitute the source of the norms and ideals which guide its practices, questioning its own inherited tradition and normative sources in light of the questions engendered by the crisis. Here the decision is often made whether to find new possibilities and interpretations from within the tradition, or break with the past and look for answers outside of traditional boundaries. Browning notes that traditional or ‘confessionally oriented’ communities may stop here, while more critically oriented groups may go on to devise various tests for the practical adequacy of these new meanings. Finally, these new meanings and practices are implemented and continue until the next crisis, whereupon the whole process begins again. To use Browning's phraseology, the movement is from a crisis of present theory-laden practice to a retrieval of normative theory-laden practice to the creation of a more critically held theory-laden practice. In short, theology is re-envisioned as a movement from practice to theory and back again to practice.

What remains to be seen in the current movement called ‘emergent’ is whether or not an approach reimagined as ‘neo-correlational theology’ drawing upon the tradition of Tillich, Schleiermacher and Browning actualised through the ‘emerging church’ movement tacitly relies upon a more traditional theology which it explicitly rejects. The challenge addressed by Browning and intimated throughout Tillich's profound reflections on culture is the difficulty in maintaining that praxio-centric nexus of engaging traditions of faith and the immediacy of culturally grounded worship without becoming traditionalism par excellence.

With the rising awareness and affirmation that the postmodern age is the age of the Spirit (or spirits) – is the ‘emergent’ movement only flirting with a liberty and release from formalism toward authentic engagement with meaning through content only to fall back into modern concepts and practices which reinforce that which they seem intent on moving beyond?Footnote ¹⁸ Granted, there is a mass turning away in Protestantism from humanistic rationalism to premodern religions (Radical Orthodoxy, Ancient Future Faith), spiritualities within the established religions and the syncretistic spiritualities which are a melding of any blend of spiritualities of the individual's choice. Tillich describes this context in The Protestant Era as a Kairos moment, ‘But an age that is turned toward and open to, the unconditional is one in which the consciousness of the presence of the unconditional permeates and guides all cultural functions and forms. The divine, for such a state of mind, is not a problem but a presupposition. Its ‘givenness’ is more certain than that of anything else.’Footnote ¹⁹ Whether emergent understandings of the Christian can maintain this vision remains to be seen.