“A few years back,” writes Alan Rifkin in The Los Angeles Times Magazine, ”a mentally ill man wandered on the campus [of Fuller Theological Seminary] from the streets of Pasadena, touching off an interdisciplinary turf war that sounds like legend but is fact. The School of Psychology wanted to arrange for professional counseling; two faculty in the School of World Missions attempted an exorcism; and the School of Theology, mortified, tried to debrief him.” Rifkin’s feature story, “Jesus With a Genius Grant,” is one of the best pieces of writing on the booming “post-evangelical” (or “post-conservative,” or “emerging church”) movement The Revealer has seen in the secular press — or, for that matter, the evangelical press. Taking as his frame the transformation of traditionally traditional Fuller Seminary into a hotbed of evangelical intellectuals, Rifkin tells the tale of the Fall — not from Eden, but from evangelical unity (admittedly, a myth from the beginning), leaving liberal and worldly evangelicals on their own to create a new kind of Christianity. What’s so new? Emerging Church provides a simple guide, while Vintage Faith presents a slightly different definition. Open Source Theology, meanwhile, offers the new believers a virtual church, as does the curiously titled Ooze, which is bold enough (with a name like that, how could it not be) to ask tough questions about the trend: Namely, is it just another trend? And one geared toward yuppies only at that?
