Condemnation and blame too prevalent in the emerging church discussion?

Here are some challenging thoughts from Dallas Willards' great book The Divine Conspiracy which have me wrestling with the whole tone of the discussions many blogs are involved in concerning the modern vs. the postmodern expressions of the church.

A few decades ago there emerged in American society something called the generation gap. It did not exist in the world of my youth, in the forties and fifties. It was caused by exactly what Jesus here calls our attention to: "the law of reciprocity of condemnation," we could call it. Popular arts, sexual morality or immorality, disenchantment with "the establishment," the Vietnam War, and the draft, racial segregation, the role of education in society, and other factors, were all a part of the mix.

But it really doesn't matter much now what "caused" it and who "started" it. The fact is, we are now saddled, as a people, with a conceptualization of youth against age and age against youth, of generation against generation. There is a mixture of blame, misunderstanding, mistrust, condemnation, and even shame between age groups. We now have names that more or less strongly incorporate this mixture, such as "boomers," "busters," "Xers," and so forth. And we have many other ways of clustering people into mutual condemnation groups. Heartfelt acceptance of the gospel of the Beattitudes alone can offer relief from this dreadful battle of condemnation and countercondemnation.

Powerful words to weigh as we all seek to follow Jesus more faithfully and discuss these issues for all to see.