The 19^th century German philosopher Georg Hegel was famous for his theory of the “dialectic.” He said an event or idea served as a thesis, there was then a sharp reaction to it known as the antithesis, followed by a synthesis, which sought to combine the best features of both the thesis and antithesis.  Got that?

            Well, if you do, you’ll appreciate Jim Belcher’s new book, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional.  Belcher, a PCA pastor from southern California, writes out of his own life experience; growing up in a traditional, conservative church culture, he was looking for greater intimacy, community and rootedness to the past.  He found his Protestant upbringing and experience to lack these things.  In more recent years, he observed a phenomenon and movement known as “emergent” which seemed to be “protesting” some of these shortcomings, calling forth with a prophetic voice for the church to change and was intrigued. 

            But he noticed something; in the last decade, traditional and emergent voices were like two ships passing in the night: they weren’t really talking to each other but past each other, speaking two different languages.  And because of this, both sides became reactionary, producing talks and books that tended to create “straw men” caricatures of each other that were often unfounded in reality.  And where there is no real conversation, there is no learning from each other.

            If they did, Belcher argues, perhaps they would discover a third way, what he calls “The Deep Church.”  In his book, Belcher critiques and praises traditional and emergent churches, looking for the best of both in order to be the church in the world.

After defining the emergent church as a protest movement (something my friend and our worship pastor, Troy Bronsink, also a national leader in the emergent movement, cringes at a bit, seeing this more as a Spirit-led movement of God’s reform), Belcher says emergents reject a number of things including the Protestant captivity to “Enlightenment rationalism” (moving away from revelation to natural reason, given rise for modern conservatism and liberalism),“belief before belonging” (doctrine used as a “gatekeeper”, uninviting skeptics, doubters and the marginalized who don’t yet believe but seek to first belong), “uncontextualized worship,” (worship that “does not speak to the world around it”), “ineffective preaching” (“speaching” as Doug Pagitt calls it, heavy on doctrine, lacking real challenge), and “tribalism” (an unwillingness to diversify the church to reach new people groups).

            While largely agreeing with their critique of the modern, traditional church, in subsequent chapters, Belcher says that the emergent church has done a better job of deconstructing the flaws of the traditional church than maintaining clarity about what is reconstructed.  For instance, in his chapter, “Deep Truth,” Belcher says that the emergent church is right to call Christian faith philosophically “post-foundational,” meaning that truth is not “self-evident” apart from revelation from God (e.g, you can’t prove with certainty the existence of God through natural means), making us reliant upon the here-and-now work of God’s Spirit to illumine our hearts.  But, Belcher argues, emergents run the risk of “Anti-realism,” which places revelation, in a very neo-orthodox sense, in the hands of the community of faith and, if unchecked, makes the faith community or individual in the community authoritative, disbelieving that the Word in and of itself can properly illuminate what is real.  Though he has not read or heard emergent leaders go as far as to make that authoritative jump, he believes “they are not always careful to distinguish their enthusiasm for post-foundationalism from anti-realism.”

            At another point, in a chapter entitled, “Deep Gospel,” he agrees with the emergents on their desire to take the focus off belief in the “doctrine of justification” as the only defining mark of the Gospel, making the life of Jesus and the “kingdom of God has come” message critical to Christian faith, but believes that the pendulum may have swung too far the other way, tending the emergent faith towards legalism (among some emergents, not all he says).  In essence, he says, without teaching on justification, atonement and forgiveness through union with Christ, we can put the message “be like Jesus” ahead of the grace of Jesus that empowers us to be like Jesus.

            Belcher believes that the best way to combine the best of both approaches to Christian fidelity is to go beyond the Reformation and beyond current postmodern responses in the church to what he calls the “Great Tradition,” the work of the Patristics and their creeds from the early church that offer an orthodox and unified tradition that can transcend time.  If we do that, Belcher argues, we’ll find the only true commonality on which the mission of the church can be based.

            Deep Church will probably leave some practioners of traditional and emergent methodologies frustrated and feeling misunderstood, though Belcher goes to great lengths to minimize this.  Indeed, after discussing much of this with Troy, he sensed that there was much more understanding to be had on Belcher’s part to unearth all of what emergent means.  So perhaps, in the final analysis, as a seminary professor of mine used to say, “language is imprecise.”  Still, this is a great read for anyone but especially for those still looking for a paradigm beyond traditional and emergent structures as they understand them.  It reminds us that the traditional church (the church of the Reformation) and the emergent church (a reforming movement) are part of the “church as always reforming” ethos and that we must still continue to reform.

To order Deep Church at Amazon, click (here).