Molly Worthen

“It was evangelicals' sense of rudderlessness - their desire for an authority to guide them in questions of dogma, life, and worship - that led them to rediscover liturgy and history in the first place. The irony was that in their smorgasbord approach to non-Protestant tradition, in their individualistic rejection of the rules of any one church in favor of a free run of the so-called church universal, in their repudiation of American nationalism in favor of cosmopolitanism, young evangelicals were being quintessentially evangelical and stereotypically American, doing as they pleased according to no authority but their own. The principle of sola scriptura was far clearer in theory than in practice. No matter evangelicals' faith that, with the 'illumination of the Holy Spirit,' 'Scripture could and should interpret itself,' too many illuminated believers came to different conclusions about what the Bible meant. Inerrantists who asserted their 'literal' interpretation with absolute certainty could do so only by covertly relying on modern, manmade assumptions. Other evangelicals were now searching for similar assurance in the authority of church history and the mystery of worship.”
― Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism

“The emergent Church is the latest act in the wave of antimodernist revolt by liturgical renewal and charismatic revival, a rebellion whose central insight is that rationalistic fundamentalism, as much as liberalism, is a mass of worldly accretions. The historical record and human feeling, not the illusion of inerrancy, are supposed to command authority in the post-Christian age. Yet American evangelicals' craving for clear authority is second only to their refusal to let any authority boss them around. Skeptics note that the Emergent Church is a movement of quintessentially evangelical individualists. 'By constantly appealing to the "capital T" Tradition, and then in effect picking and choosing from its offerings, they do not succeed in living out any of the traditions that flow from the Tradition, but create their own eclectic, ad hod churchmanship,' wrote D.A. Carson, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. 'It is controlled by what these emerging thinkers judge to be appropriate in the postmodern world - and this results, rather ironically, in one of the most self-serving appeals to tradition I have ever seen.”
― Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism