"what think ye of christ?"

this is the question dorothy sayers poses @ the outset of the opening chapter of creed or chaos?, her defense of dogma in the face of the (then) 20th century assault against right belief. over the past few months, i've thought a lot about the "emerging church" movement and its aims, and i have come to the place that i'm pretty much on board w/ it except for one thing: its seeming lack of emphasis on orthodoxy. i'll admit i want some way to make sense of the world, and maybe that makes me overly suspect of churches or movements that appear to elevate praxis and individual experience over objective truth. whatever the reason, i remain a bit skittish, although i'm willing to give the emerging church the benefit of the doubt (due in no small part to the fact that many people i love and respect, and whose lives bear the marks of christ far more clearly than does my own, are, in a word, "emerging"). but all of us, not least myself as i go about the business of becoming a priest, should remember who and what we are. our message isn't that of religious pluralism or relevance or tolerance for the sake of tolerance (although tolerance is imperative); it is the gospel. we do well to heed a caution from sayers:

the central dogma of the incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. if christ was only man, then he is entirely irrelevant to any thought about god; if he is only god, then he is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. it is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the incarnation of our lord jesus christ. unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe @ all.