By Barry Taylor
In my chapter, I write a little bit about how some in the church seem to be held captive by what I term “pseudo-orthodoxy. ” I have noticed a few comments here and there wondering what this means precisely, so I thought I’d clarify it a little. One of the things I have noticed about those who are resistant, fearful, or perhaps just concerned about change (or new theological or ecclesiological explorations) is that they often use a commitment to “orthodox” faith as a way of challenging things they either don’t like or don’t understand. The easiest way to derail something these days, it seems, is to question its legitimacy. Quite often these critiques are couched in an assumption that what is happening in and through the emerging church is somehow a departure from orthodoxy, but I would argue that orthodoxy is not the issue here at all.
Instead, what we are experiencing is a clash of differing visions about how we should view and understand the Christian life. Those who raise the issue of orthodoxy often assume that their view of the faith is somehow more of a direct continuation of ‘traditional’ Christianity than that of the emerging church, but I would argue that their faith has its roots in the encounter between Christianity and the Enlightenment—in other words, it is modern, not classically orthodox.
Marcus Borg writes about this in his book, An Emerging Christian Way, positing that there are two paradigms which he calls quite simply (1) the earlier paradigm, and (2) the emerging paradigm. These paradigms are pulling at each other in the North American Church today. In his view, both are products of modernity, certainly at different ends of the chronological spectrum, but both are engaging with the concepts and constructs that have shaped Western culture for the last few hundred years. This is what I mean when I speak about “pseudo-orthodoxy.” I call it that because I see it as a call back to modernity, and to a particular period of modernity, as much as anything else. Many of the critics who direct their concerns towards the emerging church and others who are rethinking faith today naïvely assume that their form of “orthodoxy” has a direct line all the way back to the early church and, therefore, is not to be questioned or challenged. I would argue that this orthodoxy is simply a particular manifestation of the Christian faith that is also a particular, cultural manifestation of the very thing they desire to criticize and inhibit; namely, a dialog between faith and cultural context.
I am all for orthodoxy; I believe in orthodoxy; I am against the idea that modern Christianity has any monopoly on what exactly constitutes orthodoxy, or can assume, out of a misplaced sense of finality about our understanding of the Scriptures, that it has the right to hold people back from exploring. As my friend Pete Rollins might say, orthodoxy is not necessarily about believing the right thing, but believing in the right way. For me, the path to believing in the right way involves questioning the assumptions and the underpinnings of our faith.