The Middle

I am sitting in Atlanta airport right now waiting a flight to Newark where I am going to go spend 2 days with my mother before heading back to Atlanta and speak at an event at North Point Church. 

I had an interesting thing happen on the plane which caused the Jimmy Eat World song "The Middle" to get stuck in my head for the past two hours. It still is in my head, although here in the aiprort Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive" is playing through the sound system and I am mentally trying to keep that out of my head and keep Jimmy Eat World in there instead. I am from New Jersey, yet have not ever quite connected with Bon Jovi. I recently had dinner with Zach, the drummer from Jimmy Eat World when they played in Santa Cruz and Zach is quite a thinker and someone I love chatting with.

I was re-reading my good friend Tony Jones' book The New Christians straight through. I had read through the manuscript but wanted to re-read it now that it is in hardback form. As I wrote in the blurb for the book on the back cover, I think this book is the finest book out there which gives an overview of Emergent Village's values, thinking, history and direction and I highly recommend it for those looking to get a glimpse into all things emergent.

Tony writes about the desire for Emergent to be a "third way" (page 21) or a "middle" of sorts, not being a "left or right" in terms of avoiding fundamentalism or liberalism or what comes with those options of politics and theologies.

I finished re-reading Tony's book and then I pulled out another book I have been wanting to read and it's The Reason For God by Tim Keller. Tim is the pastor of Redeemer Church, a church of 5,000 in New York City. Tim is Reformed and pretty conservative theologically as a strong evangelical.  He has spoken at Mars Hill Seattle with Mark Driscoll and seems to run in those circles, which would be somewhat different theologically from Tony and Emergent. I was sitting in the plane and after just finishing Tony's book, I opened up and began reading Tim's book and in the Introduction on page xix, I start reading the same exact thing as Tony said. Tony said that Emergent is striving to be the "third way" - and now I am reading that Tim and what he is saying here is also striving to be the "third way" (same words used as Tony).

Tim, as someone who is a conservative evangelical and Reformed is claiming that we need a Third Way or "middle" and his book walks through some apologetics about questions about evil in the world, hell, world religions etc. Tim hopes that his book will be a third way of conversation and his answers to these questions are refined to a strong evangelical conservative response as the "third way".

This "third way" topic is interesting and I recently blogged about it before and have been in several conversations about it with people.  But as I have "The Middle" song in my head, I find it interesting to think about who shall end up defining the "third way"? What will define the boundaries that form a middle? If one defines the middle or third way in one way, and another defines the middle in another way - how do we know which third way is the actual third way?   

My plane is boarding right now. I will walk into the plane and be pondering this.

  ** Saturday ---  My friend Kristin Culman let me know that even Deepak Chopra is now thinking of third ways.