Living in History

Occasionally I imagine how the future generations will view our time in history. History had always been somewhat interesting to me, particularly because I like learning stories, but it really became important when studying the person of Christ and the Incarnation. I became convinced that history was important to God. Through the Incarnation, he came and became bound by time and a particular culture and place in history… to be more like us. So time is important. Humans are necessarily time-bound beings. Which is to say, humans are historical.

So, that begs the question, what will our time in history look like when it is the past? We are able to look at the centuries that have come before us and analyze them… how will we be analyzed? I don’t think most people go around living their life in terms of how they will be analyzed in the future… ocassionally, perhaps, but people are much more concerned with living in the present. I don’t think Martin Luther wondered what a college student in 2008 would think about his 95 Theses… he was much more concerned with the current state of affairs.

So in light of these thoughts, I thought it worthwhile to read Frank Viola’s assessment of the Emergent Church movement. he writes it as one who is thinking historically; who has looked at phenomena that are just as reactionary, and how most people don’t acknowledge the flaws until it is too late to change them. Here is a call to change the emergent church before it is too late. This article is a bit dated, but still interesting. His bias is quite clear in that he supports house churches, which undoubtedly have their own problems, but still is a really good article for explaining some of the main components of what Emergent churches tend to look like, and what those flaws are.