Cracking nutshells

I read this quote from Tony Jones on Adam's blog Pomomusings from a series he is doing on the Kingdom of God. I liked it so much I wanted to remember it:

Making room for the questions is one of the aspects of emergent Christianity that many seekers appreciate. As a result, emergent Christians often get labeled as “slippery.” They’re told they don’t answer questions directly but answer instead with another (often deconstructive) question. But, these questions are actually attempts to get to the assumptions underlying the initial question.

So questioning is not an act of defiance on the emergents’ part. It is a trait of integrity.

When someone asks, “What is the Gospel, in a nutshell?” I often quote my friend, philosopher of religion Jack Caputo, who wrote of the philosophical impulses of “deconstruction”: “Nutshells close and encapsulate, shelter and protect, reduce and simplify, while everything in deconstruction is turned toward opening, exposure, expansion, and complexification, toward releasing unheard of, undreamt of possibilities to come, toward cracking nutshells wherever they appear.”

Quote taken from Tony's new book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier