CRN.Info and Analysis

On Mike Corley’s Blog, he is asking for people to write in five questions that they would ask emerging churches. In his radio show, he opened it up for people from the emerging side to ask the discernment ministries / traditional church five questions. Head over there and ask some thought provoking questions for people to consider!  However, please respect Mr. Corley’s wishes and just ask questions.  Hopefully this will later turn into a discussion.  Remember, they are our brothers and sisters, even if that mindset is not reciprocated .

It seems that Ken isn’t the only one in the “watchdawggie” crowd that builds straw men.  Besides his link to Brian Flynn’s men of straw yesterday, he (or whoever is lurking behind the mysterious “Editor” at Slice 2.0) has linked to another bit of gossip/slander couched as “discernment” today in his efforts to smear other Christians.  This guy, Roger Oakland, has taken a page from the Ken Silva School of Logical Fallacy.  To wit:

For example, I anticipate there will be statements similar to the following one made by Emerging Church supporter Darren King in an article he wrote titled “A Response to Reactionism Against the Emerging Church”:

It is clear that while those of us engaged in the Emerging Church conversation might find new perspectives a helpful thing, there are others, within the larger Christian community, who find these fresh perspectives not only unhelpful, but actually threatening. These people tend to operate under very circular, rigid belief systems. And for these people, any idea that infringes on any one corner of the “faith infrastructure” causes what amounts to a fight or flight response.

This statement illustrates how someone with a rigid perspective (biblical perspective) is perceived by someone with an Emerging Church perspective (“fresh perspective”). From Darren King’s viewpoint, if someone is not willing to abandon their “faith infrastructure,” (the Bible) for the “fresh perspective,” (ideas that are unbiblical or anti-biblical) the person is considered a dangerous crackpot.

Well, sometimes a crackpot really is a crackpot, as you’ve demonstrated with yourself, Mr. Oakland.

For the uninitiated, a straw man is “an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “set up a straw man” or “set up a straw-man argument” is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent. A straw-man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it is in fact a misleading fallacy, because the opponent’s actual argument has not been refuted.”

Or, to be more blunt, a straw man is a lie about your opponent which you then paint him with.  In Christianity, we typcially call this ’slander’ or ‘libel’, but the less scrupulous might just call it ‘discernment’.  The typical test of a straw man is to say, “would my opponent agree that my re-wording of his argment is a valid statement of his position?”  If the answer is no, congratulations, you’ve built a straw man!

In this particular case (and others in this article, and ALL THROUGHOUT Ken’s miss-ives) the straw man is the chief tool of persuation.  Notice that Oakland builds the straw man, step by step:

He re-defines the term “rigid perspective” to mean “Biblical perspective”, an opening falsehood that I’m sure that Darren King did not intend with his terminology “rigid perspective” (which more likely implies a false sense of security in having the only possibly valid interpretation of scripture, leaving no room for potential error in interpretation).  He then defines the term “fresh perspective” to mean “emerging perspective” (which is probably closer to the truth).  The purpose of this redefinition is to (falsely) set up “emerging perspective” to be antithetical to “Biblical perspective”, thus slandering Mr. King via straw man fallacy.

Next, Oakland defines King’s term “faith infrastructure” to be “The Bible”, once again creating a falsehood via redefining Kin’s words to mean something not intended.  Finally, as the coup de grâce, Oakland uses his previous straw man (”fresh perspective” = “unbiblical/anti-biblical perspective”) to create an entirely new slanderous falsehood.

The remainder of the article is just more of the same nonsense - a web of lies.

This is what we’ve come to expect, though, from most critics of the emerging church. Lies, falsehood and deceit (not exactly the Fruits of the Spirit, one might add).  Yes, there are things to criticize in any movement, but I think a commenter on Bob Hyatt’s site hit the nail on the head a couple weeks ago during the Kimball/TeamPyro discussion:

i’m a guy who is so much “in the same camp” as these guys on most issues. i love spurgeon, i’ve been called to be a calvinist, i even use jonny mac’s commentaries and other materials fairly regularly.

and i understand why they’re scared of emerging things. i’m not someone who jumps at change (the first time i read your article which used three critera for determing whether you are emerging or not i just assumed you were some pot-smoking west-coast hippie dude), but when i allowed myself to honestly evaluate some of the claims coming from “your camp”, i had to start rethinking things.

what makes me sad is that i’m coming to the conclusion that this is about power. i had hoped it wasn’t. i had hoped there were more pure motives, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

this is about labelling people with a scarlet “E” so that their own “sheep” will steer clear of anyone who might raise some difficult questions…

because they don’t think it’s okay for a pastor to say, “you know… i’m rethinking that, so i don’t have a good answer now.”

It’s a sad state of affairs when the “watchdogs” like Ken and Mr. Oakland have become more like the corrupt shepherds of Ezekiel 34, recondemned by Jesus in Jericho.