Accident and Emergentcy

The difficulty with having a conversation with those of an emergent persuasion is that they very often sound so much like atheists.
Now, when I talk to atheists and agnostics, I know where I stand. They are unbelievers and therefore gentle entreaty and persuasion is employed. There sometimes comes a point when no further dialogue is possible or fruitful, but there's rarely rancour on part (unless I've behaved badly, which happens) because I genuinely pity them and what should I expect from unregenerate minds?
But the emerging church is different. The emergent church claims to have this regenerate mind of Christ.
So it's really disconcerting to have them rehearsing the same attacks against the faith that evangelicals have been rebutting for donkeys years. I think this is why some of my fellow believers get angry in their dealings with ec people - they are honestly shocked to hear brethren repeating arguments that have mostly been taken wholesale from those who hate God.
It's hard to know how to deal with that. I've seen instances of an astonishing lack of charity on both sides of the equation. A poor befuddled traditional believer sees post-modern believers taking pot-shots at the Word of God, and the traditional believer responds with rebuke, which in one sense, is appropriate. The 'pomo' responds harshly, saying the rebuke proves how un-christian traditional believer are, and so it escalates.
But the traditional believer can very often make similar unhelpful assumptions, coming at debate believing the emergent believer is deliberately being duplicitous, which is rarely the case.

It's all a very confused state of affairs. From what I have seen, both in real-life experience, and through online interaction, I think the problem is essentially monumental miscommunication. And no, I don't mean a lack of wanting to join the 'emergent conversation'. It goes back a little further than that.

I think the problem is the last generation of traditional evangelicals. I think we got lazy.
Just as the principle of holy living became distilled into a list of what was and wasn't acceptable, stifling discernment, once the first flush of textual criticism had been ably dealt with by commited bible-believers, these things just became a check-list that you just signed up to when you became a believer.
Discernment became something like a sixth sense to test whether there were any demons about. Christians forgot how to think.
And so a new generation, who don't know what consistent scriptural backing lies behind important doctrines - like the Trinity, inspiration of the scriptures and justification, are unhappy with a patronizing 'because I said so' approach, and rightly so.
But the vocabulary neccessary to answer the legitimate questions isn't readily available. Not because it isn't available at all, it is. William Wilberforce stood against slavery, and did so from the perspective of Christian belief. He didn't have to challenge the inerrancy of scripture to do it, either.
I'll freely admit that I cannot articulate his argument, because I've never been in a position to have to defend it, but I aim to change that. I've had to do the same with the position of women in scripture, and I'm a reasonable apologist for a complementarian worldview now, as well as being able to present the gospel whenever I get the opportunity. I didn't learn any of that when I became a believer.
This is precisely the problem - church has become a club or an aid agency, rather than a training ground for soldiers.
So what happens? Some wolf comes along with arguments about the trustworthiness of scripture that no-one at church can answer and the believer finds themselves adrift. They try to interact with the liberal arguments from a losing vantage point - they give away the premise because they can't defend the Word of God. That kind of interaction has a simple name - it's called capitulation. And once that is done, it's only a matter of time before the believer is swamped in humanism.
This isn't something to rebuke the baffled believer about - it's an understandable end-game.
The traditional church must bear responsibility for the emerging church. The emerging church makes many accusations about the narrowness of traditional viewpoints, but I think the baby flies out of the window with the bath-water in most of the emergent writings I've read. The problem is simply that the traditional church dropped the ball. In a world where everything is subject to change and whirling around, mired in subjectivity, the solution is not to start whirling around as well, the solution is to stand firm, hold fast and be ready to give an answer for the faith.