Review of Deep Church by Jim Belcher
If you want to start a fight among Christians these days there’s no better way than to bring up the “Emerging Church” in conversation.
In his recent book, Deep Church, Jim Belcher doesn’t want to start that fight, he wants to finish it.
Belcher may prove to be the man for the job. In the last eight years – since the publishing of Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian heralded the coming-out party of an emerging group of dissatisfied Christian thinkers and leaders – hardly anyone has tackled the differences between traditional and emerging Christianity with such irenic aplomb (Scot McNight comes to mind). Jim seems to care just as deeply about the people in the debate as he does about finding a “third way” beyond the muck and mire of traditional vs emerging name-calling.
Early on we hear about his own struggles with the issues these two camps represent, and we learn, surprisingly, that he feels profoundly out of place in both. He’s an insider and an outsider struggling to plant a church that is both biblically faithful and culturally prophetic. Therefore, he’s personally invested in sorting out the intersection of the gospel and culture in an increasingly post-christian America.
This is what Jim Belcher does best in Deep Church; he establishes himself as a reasonable referee in an unreasonable fight. Like a fatherly figure wisely stepping between two schoolyard pugilists Belcher knows the fight is necessary; but hoping to avoid any serious injuries he offers the boys a set of oversized boxing gloves. We breath a sigh of relief. It’s about time, we say to ourselves and settle in for a little level-headed maturity. Consequently, it’s hard not to trust him as he gently but firmly admonishes the low-blows of the combatants and offers a “third way.”
There’s no better example of this in Deep Church than the manner in which Jim handles the differing uses of the word “postmodernism.” By telling his own story of coming to terms with “postmodernism” Belcher manages to create a sense of humble empathy for both sides of the debate.
Likewise, the recounting of his priceless conversation (yes, I’m jealous) with Nicholas Wolterstorff concerning foundationalism is worth the price of the book alone. There may be no more inspirational and hopeful point in Deep Church than when, after a discussion about the traditional church’s captivity to foundationalism, Belcher asks where the Emerging camp might have also gone wrong. Wolterstorff answers,
“I think they have made a similar mistake as the traditional church,” he responded. “If the traditional church thinks that their theory of being commits them to a foundational epistemology, the emerging church
makes the opposite mistake. They think that their postfoundationalism commits them to an anti-realism metaphysics. That we can’t know reality apart from what the individual or the community comes up with. But the truth is, reality is there. I see it. You see it” (p82).
This is humble and hopeful clarity! That’s no small accomplishment in this increasingly vitriolic debate, and it’s precisely this fashion of honest, transparent guidance amid complex and emotionally-charged issues that makes Deep Church a fine book.
On the other hand it isn’t long before we discover something disconcerting: the fix is in – and the referee is in on it. After a few overlooked sucker punches it becomes clear that Jim Belcher has a favorite in this fight. He wants one of these fighters to win – and if the winner happens to suffer a bloodied nose, all the better for instilling some much-needed humility.
This preference becomes especially clear in Chapter 6, “Deep Gospel.” In it Belcher visits a theme he earlier acknowledged to be a core issue dividing Traditional and Emerging Christians: the definition of the gospel itself. But here Belcher abandons his former creative transparency and prefers instead to fire jabs alongside his Traditional cohorts, saying:
“As [our church leadership] wrote about our gospel commitment, we wanted to stress the atonement as well as the kingdom of God. We wanted to make it clear that Christ’s cross, which paid for our sins and took away our guilt, is the foundation for Christ’s victory over evil and oppression, and allows us to join God’s family and his kingdom reign” (120).
To be fair, Belcher wants to connect the Atonement to the Kingdom, but by the end of the chapter his use of the word “gospel” has become synonymous with “atonement.” Though Belcher mentions the influence on Emerging leaders of theologians like Anabaptist John Howard Yoder and Anglican N.T. Wright, he never engages with Yoder’s views that being a Christian is an embodied political salvation, or with Wright’s work regarding justification, atonement and an understanding of the gospel as the essentially political proclamation of Christ’s overall Kingship.
Instead Belcher seems content to reduce the gospel to one particular view of the atonement, penal substitution – a great irony, since most of Chapter 6 is vociferously dedicated to avoiding any such “reductionism.” There’s no better representation of this reduction than Belcher’s presentation of his church’s core commitments:
Gospel – Community – Mission – Shalom
In other words, Community, Mission, and (perhaps most surprisingly) Shalom are not the gospel. Atonement is. This may or may not be true, but Belcher knows better than anyone that this is a major bone of contention with Emerging leaders, and unlike the discussion on foundationalism vs postmodernism, here Belcher doesn’t make the same effort toward uncovering a genuine gospel “third way,” and that may very well be what divides Traditional and Emerging Christians permanently – just as it has divided Christians since the early Church councils.
Overall, Deep Church is a very good book. One could find no better overview of the Traditional/Emerging debate, and one could certainly find no better mediator to date. However, as the book develops it becomes increasingly clear that Jim is pulling for the traditional church in this scuffle. Sure, he wants the traditional church to take its licks and wake up to the reality of postmodern shifts in America and beyond – that is, he wants the “Great Tradition” in Vestments and Levis – but by the end of the book Belcher’s “Deep Church” begins to look suspiciously like an advertisement for the Presbyterian Church of America.
well done