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Below are my archived responses to Tony Jones’ question: “What Do Emergence and Pentecostalism Have to Learn from One Another?”. I encourage all to visit that thread on his blog.

It has been said that those who’ve done the best at evangelizing have not always done as well at catechizing and vice versa. While there is danger in overgeneralization, there is often some insight we can gain. To the extent catechesis fosters re-cognition, evangelization fosters real-ization. The first movement is propositional, evidential, rational, presuppositional, moral and practical and the next is existential, experiential and robustly relational. The distinction is between seeing the path and walking it, between conceptual map-making and participatory imagination.

Both the emerging church conversation and pentecostalism do seem, in my view, responses to a modernist rationalism. Interestingly, my own reflections on these matters have not so much dealt with the emergent and pentecostal as recent phenomena via a vis the postmodern critique, but have employed a postmodern (postfoundational) approach to bring together emergence as a useful heuristic device as has been appropriated in the hard and human sciences, in general, and a pentecostal perspective as gathered from the Biblical narrative re: the implications of the Incarnation & Pentecost. So, there are two contexts that interest me, one being an overarching narrative and the other a specific historical event.

Regarding the recent phenomena, to some extent, pentecostalism has better instilled first fervor and a fully realized first naivete. Emergence has perhaps better served as a vehicle for 2nd naivete. This works much like the Zen formulation of first, there is a mountain (pre-critically), then there is no mountain (critically), then there is (post-critical). It might be rendered: first there is a premodernist essentialism (naive realism & enchantment), then there is a modernist nominalism (nonrealism & disenchantment), then there is a constructive postmodernism (critical realism & re-enchantment).

Emergent and pentecostal perspectives, held together in a creative tension, provide an answer to modernist excesses that have led to a/theological nonrealism, moral relativism and practical nihilism, as well as sterile scholastic rationalisms and Wittgensteinian fideisms. Taken together, we get a more holistic theological anthropology that mines all of the value to be realized from our pre-modern, modern and postmodern experiences without the need to cut out and invalidate large swaths of our Christian tradition.

We do not want to lose our “First, there is a mountain”-encounter of Pentecost and the fire of first fervor gifted by our participatory, analogical imagination, nor do we want to lose the “Then there is no mountain-recognition” provided by our conceptual map-making and dialectical imagination, as we move into the reappropriation of “Then there is” and we realize through our 2nd naivete and pneumatological imagination that everything that’s old is new again, as we see the original realities come alive in inculturated forms that reveal that the Good News is as fresh and vibrant and relevant to humankind as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

I have seen some in their Pentecostal experience get rather stuck in a pre-critical first naivete. I have encountered some who, from an Emergent stance, have gotten stuck in a radically deconstructive nonrealism, what some have called Evangellyfish, washed up on postmodern shores, unable to get fully back into the swim. Those who severely critique both movements are generally describing these elements of Pentecostalism and emergence, which are mere caricatures of what these movements are and can become as they exploit the creative tension that they offer each other in ongoing and ever-fruitful mutual critique.

We have enjoyed the fruits, in interreligious dialogue, as our rather exclusivistic ecclesiocentrisms have slowly yielded on the ecumenical front to a more inclusivistic Christocentrism. Without forsaking our own Christocentric stances, we might foster an even more fruitful interreligious dialogue by opening same with a pneumatological inclusivism. Pentecostals & Charismatics have led the way on such mutual understanding within Christianity, sharing our experience of Spirit. This may be the model for advancing dialogue and understanding between the Great Traditions, too? Pentecostals might have some suggestions for a way forward.

Pentecostals also have something to offer regarding emergence, human anthropology, epistemology and the science and religion dialogue. Counterintuitive on the surface? Scroll down to this list of articles in the Dec 2008 Zygon: Pentecostal Voices in the Theology-Science Conversation .

Finally, I’m sure most have at least heard of the distinction between our dialectical and analogical imaginations. Amos Yong has made some proposals regarding the pneumatological imagination and the difference it can make in one’s approach to reality. My own panSEMIOentheism, what I call a radical emergence, is grounded in my experience in the Charismatic Renewal in the 70’s.