To close this series of analyses of Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy, I focus on the theoretical center both of this book and, McLaren says, of his other works on Emergent Christianity. It is the chapter called, "Why I Am Emergent."

The term emergent itself evokes the narrative of postmodernism, in which human beings finally escape the death grip of modernism, with its rationalism, abstractions, and arrogant truth claims.

All that is considered horrible in modernism could be represented by G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), the German philosopher. He constructed an intellectual system founded on the belief that the world's history is the continuous realization of freedom, the evolution of an idea into reality. The claim to have penetrated such abstract clouds, the claim to systematize all of life, the claim to know the end from the beginning - this is the arrogance postmodernism says we're emerging from.

McLaren describes emergence as the growth of the new out of the old. The new neither rejects nor duplicates the old, but rather takes old material to nourish its own growth. Human history is like the growth of a tree (p 277). "Each ring represents not a replacement of the previous rings, not a rejection of them, but an embracing of them, a comprising of them and inclusion of them in something bigger."

McLaren says he has been using this model in his recent books (p 278). In A New Kind of Christian, he presented a "schema" in which human history has five "epochs": "prehistoric, ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern." The Story We Find Ourselves In presented seven "episodes" in the Bible. In Finding Faith, he gave us four "stages" of faith development. "Each stage enfolds, embraces, integrates, and revalues the gains of previous stages, and, in so doing, rises to a higher level."

He sees doctrinal disputes as instances of emergence (p 279). Protestants emerged from Catholicism, and post-Vatican II Catholics emerged from pre-Vatican II Catholicism, and "they can't despise their roots or reject their past." Emergence is the dynamic that makes generosity the most important characteristic of orthodoxy.

The theory of emergence allows McLaren an idiosyncratic definition of sin (pp 281-282). "Sin, in this model, can be understood as lower levels or rings resisting the emergence of higher levels or rings . . . ." He explains that "sin mucks up God's original intent for the story of creation, sabotaging emergence by replacing it with stagnation and decay."

Sin is like a parent who tries "to freeze the adolescent in the adolescent phase . . . . She cannot comply even if she wants to. She may rebel. She may become depressed . . . . She may become a twisted semi-adolescent or even a suicide statistic. But she cannot simply stay the same." (p 282)

The emergent narrative is clearly in the driver's seat there, not the actual meaning of words like hamartia. We haven't time for such pedantry.

There is a great deal one could say about the impact of emergent theory on what McLaren is calling orthodoxy. I will limit myself to two comments.

First, the procedure of taking orthodox words like sin and redefining them is an old one. It does not yield orthodoxy. It yields orthodox-sounding phraseology. How much McLaren is simply trying to provoke the folks back home with his new doctrine of sin, and how much he really believes it, is impossible for me to say.

Secondly, after interacting with McLaren, with his model for this and schema for that, with his neat-n-tidy epochs and episodes and stages, with his quasi-Hegelian, synthetic view of human history, I am struck by how very abstract he is, how very modern.

What were we emerging from again?