Theology and the emerging church

One of the charges I hear leveled against the emerging church is that it is weak on theology. Like every generalization, you can find examples of shaky theology that seem to prove the case. It’s just as easy, though, to find examples of shaky theology within evangelicalism, for instance. That doesn’t prove the case. A lot of the questions being asked by the emerging church are theological in nature. The primary concern is not how to cater the Gospel to make it more palatable. Quite the opposite. The concern is to understand where modernity might have obscured the Gospel. It’s an attempt to see the Gospel through a different lens than that of modernity. You don’t get more theological than trying to answer the question, “What is the Gospel?” That seems to me to be the primary question that’s being asked. Everything else is gravy. Dan Kimball is an example of an emerging church pastor who is not ducking the theological issues. Dan says this in the latest issue of Preaching:

One week I talked about what was death in the Old Testament…It’s somewhat like teaching a theology class. We’re specifically going into word studies, we are hitting a lot of historical context. I think what people are looking for in our culture is depth, We talked about hell an entire night, so that’s almost like the total anti-seeker model, you might say