Justin Taylor touches the emerging elephant and reports

Colossians Three Sixteen » New Attitue (Breakout: Justin Taylor):

Going only to the emergents to understand EM, says Taylor is like going to the personal ads. Everyone always says something like: “Hobbies included listening, long walks on the beach and giving people flowers.” No one says: “Hobbies are drinking a lot of Mountain Dew, staying up late to play video games and I have bad breath.” In order to get the full picture, we must seek input from all angles, not just the “personal ad” perspective.

Taylor lists a couple of different lists of “Four Things that EM is Concered With” One of the lists, taken from Wikipedia, the first list includes: 1) Authenticity, 2) Missional Living, 3) Narrative Theology, 4) Christlikeness and the second list taken from Emergent includes: 1) Commitment to God in the way of Jesus, 2) The church in all its forms, 3) Committed to God’s world and 4) Committed to one another. Notice that in all of these affirmations is the implicit charge that the “other people” don’t do these things.

Taylor rightly argues that EM cannot fully be understood apart from Postmodernism, which cannot be understood apart from Modernism, which in turn, cannot be understood apart from Premodernism. Broadly (VERY broadly) speaking, Taylor argues that Premodernism might be summarized in the word “supernatural,” Modernism in the word “scientific” and Postmodernism in the bumper sticker “Question Authority.” While these are admittedly oversimplified, they are at least somewhere to begin.