The actual draw for the conference was the roster of guest speakers. But it was the ones I was least familiar with that had the most impact on me.
Donald Miller
Though I don't see eye-to-eye with Emerging author Don Miller on everything, I can't help but like the guy. He is so candid about his thought life, his doubts, his shortcomings, his vices, and his all-around goofiness that he's like a favorite cousin you find cool, challenging, and consistently befuddling. He's a big, teddy bear kind of guy who looks like he could have played center in football but couldn't pull himself away from TV and Doritos long enough to bother. He wears rumpled clothes and has a buck-toothed grin that makes him look like a 1950s child star when he smiles. And he smiles a lot, especially when a joke goes over well.
Miller's self-deprecating wit, his conversational style, and his arms-length relationship with his evangelical background are his trademarks. You feel like he's hanging out with you at dusk, sitting on the hood of a car, swapping life stories and wondering about why crap works the way it does. It's like he circled around things in life until it dawned on him that - even though its representatives are often lame and its concepts seem outdated - Christian spirirtuality (an Emerging euphemism for Christianity, minus the supposed institutional "baggage") actually had the answers he was looking for.
Even though he tries to maintain a fairly liberal and liberated life, deep down he's fairly orthodox in his beliefs. He just doesn't dress them up in 19th century traditions, rules and regulations, and both fear- and comfort-based judgmentalism. He wants to leverage ALL of church history and teaching, not just the post-Awakening "convicted, converted, and conservative" stuff.
Miller sees Postmodernist Christianity as a corrective to the Rationalist theology of the past three centuries (give or take a few years) so he's pretty stoked about protesting the reduction of the gospel into a set of beliefs (he calls them The Five Bullet Points). He is adamant that subscription to set of doctrines does not make you a Christian. And he is right. Correct beliefs are no indicator of salvation. Satan believes in the virgin birth, the atonement, etc. and he ain't saved.
Miller is insistent that we must have an experiential relationship with Christ as well and that this relationship - like any relationship we have with another person - cannot be broken down into formulas and systematized. Or rationally explained!
He drew a great parallel with marriage. I'll make a hash of it but here goes:
He once asked a friend, Tony, "Why do you love your wife?" His friend ticked off several reasons: She was a Christian, she was great-looking, she was intelligent, etc. Then Don proposed a hypothetical to him. Suppose, Don asked, if he found an insanely beautiful woman with a body like a Greek goddess, was NASA-physicist smart, and was a dedicated missionary who made Mother Teresa look like a gal handing out tracts. Would he then transfer his affections to that woman?
"Of course not!" Tony replied.
"But all those things you listed as why you love your wife are even more present in this woman."
"That doesn't matter."
"Then you still haven't told me why you love your wife," Miller said.
"I just do. That's all I can tell you."
It's a mystery. And in our rationalistic society, where everything must be explainable and quantifiable, we hate mysteries.
But it's the same with loving Christ. If you can only rattle off a list of things you know about Jesus, if there's no inexplicable passion that you know is true but you can't put into words, maybe you don't know Him.
Side note: Even though it's honest, that "I just do. That's all I can tell you" line will not work on your wife. Unfair but true.
Miller says making the Christian life about following 4 steps to salvation and 5 points to understanding God and avoiding 7 deadly sins is a left-brained template foisted on a right-brained Bible. There are true things that are simply a mystery and cannot be dissected or proof-texted.
While his biggest-selling book, "Blue Like Jazz," doesn't expound on it satisfactorily, he is very clear in his public speaking and teaching that this is not an either/or propostion. You must use both approaches - right belief and experiential relationship - but they are both imperfect in this world.
Right belief can point you to the right place but it is always filtered through human reason and swayed by cultural biases (like fiscal conservatism and prohibition - neither of which is mandated by scripture). Like Miller says, the chances of your theology always being right are a million to one. Experience can indicate you made it to the right place but it can be influenced by flawed emotions and manipulation. We need both.
I cannot recommend highly enough that you read his books, particularly Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What. If you're a seeker, read Jazz first. He goes into how and why he finally came to believe Christianity despite all the religious trappings. If you're a Christian, read Searching first, because it will assure you he really does believe before you read Blue Like Jazz. In fact, it's so passionate it'll make you wonder whether you believe! There are some chapters in both these books that were so good they rank very near C.S. Lewis in my affections.
My greatest concern with the Emerging movement is that it can undermine assurance. About salvation or about God in general. There's an intentional humility in saying, "No one has anything completely figured out." But for some, that is becoming their overarching belief, not Christ. And that's pretty uninspiring, really. Not to mention scary. I will address this movement at length at a later time.
Here's a video clip of quotes from Don's session.
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