A Note on 'Authenticty'

Although Part One and Part Two remain below, I just don't have time to write a comprehensive summary of my view of this book, so the part three I was hoping to complete has been shelved. I've been away a lot, including a couple of weeks study at PTC Melbourne, which was a fantastic time of learning and spiritual growth, but has also resulted in more work in the form of readings and assessments over coming weeks. I must also focus on home, family and pastoral responsibilities.

However, one of the many books I bought in Melbourne (resulting in paying Jetstar the exorbitant rip-off amount of $60 for excess luggage on the way home!) was Don Carson's Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. I don't intend to write a review of this book, but it has highlighted to me another potential pitfall for Andrew McGowan's book, especially with its American published title of The Divine Authenticity of Scripture, and I want to say something briefly about that.

Before becoming more "conversant" with the emerging church movement, I didn't realise that the word "authenticity" had been appropriated by the "Emerging Church" as somewhat of a banner term. Emerging Church leaders seem to use it in at least two ways. Carson quotes Spencer Burke talking about his personal 'epiphany' experience in these words: "In that moment I realised that God could handle severe honesty. Authenticity, in all its messiness, is not offensive to him. There is room for doubt and anger and confusion. There was room for the real me." That use of the term may not be directly relevant to McGowan's The Divine Authenticity of Scripture, but Burke goes on to develop a further use of the expression flowing out of his mystical experience of God. He speaks of "the search for authentic expression."
This search led him into an emphasis on the works of various Christian mystics throughout the ages, and a corresponding implied relative devaluation of works emphasising the objective truth bases of Christian faith and practice, perhaps even including the bible itself, though that may be too harsh an assessment. Certainly 'Authenticity' seems to have become within this movement a term they see as a critical corrective to the controlling use of other terms such as 'Veracity' or 'Orthodoxy' that emphasize propositional and/or confessional Truth rather than Experiential/Relational truth.

It is this general use of the term by the Emerging Church that could become relevant to the debates surrounding McGowan's book, since he also uses the words 'authentic' and 'authenticity' in speaking about Divine Revelation, and he, like the Emerging Church, makes critical comments on the role that Enlightenment thinking and Modernism have had in 20th Century Fundamentalist and Evangelical apologetics and theology.


However, McGowan's preference for 'Authenticity' (or Authority or Infallibility) over 'Inerrancy' in describing the nature of Divine Revelation, is completely different from the Emerging Church's preference for 'Authenticity' over absolute truth claims. It is entirely equivocal language, from a different social context, arising from a different set of controversies, and employed from a different theological basis. So, I would urge American reformed evangelicals to be careful not to confuse the title of McGowan's book with the use of the term 'Authenticity' in Emerging Church dogma (which they do have despite protestations to the contrary!). Professor McGowan remains firmly in the Reformed Protestant tradition and is in no way arguing for the bible as merely a story we experience (as it might become in the more extreme Emergent views). He is not in any way arguing against the bible's propositional truth claims. On the contrary, unlike some of the Emerging Church writers, he does believe the Bible is authoritatively and authentically the Word of God that speaks absolutely to us of timeless and incontrovertible truths, not just invites us on some vague experiential journey with God.