Emerging Liberalism

The so-called Postmodern cultural influence is simply another brand of progressivism with no particular goal at all.
To be postmodern is grabbing at any excuse to attack conventional thinking. There is a masquerade of logic. When they bother, postmodernists claim a different kind of logic from Aristotle, but then they keep trying to use it when it suits their agenda. It becomes little more than an excuse to ignore the rules of logic they don’t like. If you understand the “logic” of feminism, you understand postmodernism. The academic term for it is “radical subjectivism” and the trump card is always, “I/we feel…” If the spokesperson has three friends willing to say they agree, their consensus trumps reality in their minds. Even Aristotle is better than that.
Within Western churches, postmodernism is one more brand of humanism rising up in judgment against God’s revelation. In the strictest definition of terms, it’s not Christianity. It falls a bit short of “following Jesus,” who said things like, “No one comes to the Father” — AKA, Ultimate Truth — “except through Me.” He also said the entire Old Testament (Protestant canon at least) was a trustworthy record of divine revelation. It’s one thing to attempt shedding modern Western epistemology as I do, but another thing altogether attempting to cherry pick from established Post-Enlightenment cultural mythology plus New Age Mysticism and calling it “deep thinking.”
Thus, the emergent church movement is really just about anything other than conventional churchianity, so long as you mention the name of Jesus. By no means do I defend the mainstream Western Christianity, but emergents are hardly any better. They keep dredging up well-known heresies from Church History, and somehow imagine it’s new. The one reason I associate with emergents at all is because they don’t run me off the way most mainstream churches have.
Nor do I have kind words for Purpose Driven (PD) religion. That’s just postmodern Pharisaism. That is, the whole thing carries over some Western cultural Christianity, scraping off Scripture passages in a severe case of eisegesis, as if painting Bible verses on everything makes it right. We call it “Jesus frisbee” religion; some of the cheapest junk becomes holy when you stamp one of the popular images of Jesus on it. When you stand back and examine the impact of PD writings, it’s really nothing more than justifying a search for very worldly success, though tilting in favor of emotional stability over property. It’s just self-help psychology with Bible quotations. This, too, hardly meets the definition of Christianity. Oh, and they love to use the most brutal corrupt politics to take over churches; the procedures are explained in their leadership literature.
The one thing PDs never deal with correctly is the absolute sense of terror Jesus felt in the Garden of Gethsemane. Not because of the impending arrest; He stopped that cold just to prove He could (John 18:4-8), right before He allowed the lynch mob to proceed. Rather, it was the depth of sorrow over taking upon His utterly sinless conscience the guilt of all the world’s sins — past, present and future. Then He died, a complete failure in human terms, after warning everyone following Him He expected them to follow His example. What’s utterly insane is how PDs imagine modern Western middle class society is a perfect reflection of Christianity, and that following Jesus must somehow result in furthering that society.
It’s okay when the Fundies label me a liberal, because they don’t understand true conservatism which draws on the most ancient traditions of Scripture. We know for certain Aristotle had been exposed to Hebrew Scriptures, but rejected them largely because of the underlying intellectual assumptions. Yet Fundies somehow imagine God used Aristotle to correct everything which came before. I keep warning people this was the precise same mistake which gave rise to the Pharisees and the Talmud and the first place, and that it repeats the fundamental choice which resulted in the Fall in Eden.
There is none so blind as those who will not see.