The Grandparents of Emergent Theology

Have you ever heard a sermon where the main focus seemed to be to bludgeon "a Sovereign and limited God" into the text. Am I alone on this? Or have others felt as if much of theology and sermonizing exists to place God inside a controlable box? These sermons usually combine well with Jonathon Edwards "Sinnners in the Hand of a Helplessly Angry and Wrathful God: the one who Pasionate about His Inability to get Over His Wrath Without Killing Something or at Least Pretending that His Children are Someone Other than Themselves" That being said, (over and over and over) What I've come to realize is that the sovereignty nuts out there are so adamant about God's complete inability to choose against exercising total exhaustive control over everything because the God of the sovereignty nuts is still so terribly limited. If that God did not always have to exercise total and exhaustive control over everything inside the small box that was made for Him, then he would barely be any kind of God at all. If he were to sovereignly opt to only partially control things inside the small box we made for Him, would he even be God? No! (here “reformed” theology confidently answers for us) That would be against the nature of God! God can not that! (anytime a statement starts with the phrase "God can not...", you should disreguard it as a silly yet moderately dangerous statment)
Maybe this is the problem. God has been put in a box because an authentically sovereign God without any limiting container whatsoever is uncontrollable and might threaten things we value. Outside the box, God might tell us our that systems of reason, ethics, theology are not his prefered ones. God might decide to turn everything upsidown on us. We can't have this, so we long ago, we put God inside a box and anytime we think about something that does not fit well into The God Box, we can be relieved to find that God is limited to being a deity who can only exist inside the God Box. This got me thinking about how annoyed I get with the New Revised Standard Version of Jonathan Edwards Now to be fair, John Piper may not be a NRSV of Edwards, since the NRSV tends toward gender equality,... but I will not digress there.
However, my negativity aside, I realized something new and shocking. Piper's appeal to many people might not be that he valiantly holds to the "old rugged truth" against the creeping liberalization of the church, but rather that he has newly revived/revised something of true value that was lost inside Christianity. Perhaps, Piper's appeal is that he has resurrected the idea of a sovereign God!
Let's all be happy! For real, that is a true and important idea that was needed in order to assert that God was truly God over everything inside the box humanity created now commonly known as "nature and reason". When culture became obsessed with these things to the point where they dominated our perception of reality, we put God inside this box so as to keep God somehow real and in the philosophical conversation. The problem is we forgot that God might also exist outside that box we made. One might even say that we now forgot to let God out of the box.
While the God preached by the sovereignty nuts is still clearly placed inside this limiting box, it is possible that the God Box and their limitations for what God of the box can and can not do, is not an invention of John Piper or other contemporaries. Perhaps, the limited God in a box is a remnant they have yet to begin deconstructing because they are only laying important groundwork by preaching God’s sovereignty while it is their children and grandchildren who will be the ones to carry this sovereignty to its fullest and most Biblical meaning by deconstructing the God Box itself. Ironically the ideas/emergent theology my church thinks itself in opposition of might be the ones that are actually taking on the task of fully liberating God from this box we created. In a sense the Emergents and open theists might never exist without ideas that began from the sovereignty nuts. One might argue that Emergents would have emerged eventually based on their thorough reading of the Bible, but I don't think their thorough reading of the Bible would even exist if it weren't for the soverienty in a box theologians.

Perhaps, Piper's appeal in one theological generation is the same as guys like Mclaren and Rob Bell now in the Emergent theological generation. Perhaps Piper’s appeal was that he began preaching a fresh and dynamic God who was free from some of the constraints created by modern theology/culture and the presiding traditions.
Perhaps, the Emegents are continuing down the road Neo-Edwards people have already started by now questioning the limiting God box concept as a whole and pointing out that a sovereign God actually can forgive sin whenever He wants for whatever reason He should choose (he often does so in the Bible!). Perhaps they are continuing down that road in pointing out that a sovereign God might create a universe that unfolds progressively over the ages and is brought to completion in any way he soveriegnly chooses, even if that way does not correspond well to our systems of thought. Perhaps God choose a universe that aligns with the existentialists where there is no systematic and rational right or wrong, only obedience and disobedience to God. Perhaps God is much more dangerous than we thought... now maybe we should consider putting him back in the box just to be safe. I would not want God to reorder my world, a truely soveriegn God could be flip my world upside down. I'd feel like I was having to be reborn and would have to relearn everything like a little child.

Now speaking of children, is it possible that those silly Emergent people are just the theological teenagers of today who are failing to appreciate the knowledge of their parents and failing to credit them with what they have accomplished. Perhaps Emergents fail to see why their parents went about things in one way, because teenagers are often too caught up in knowing the few places where they know their parents are truely inconsistent and wrong to appreciate what they have learned from their parents. The parents are too appalled that children are not following exactly in their footsteps to appreciate the ways and reasons each child may differ from themselves. Perhaps it bothers the parents that the children now possess a little hindsight can legitimately see places the parents have messed up. Can or should the children seek to change their parents? Absolutely not! Few things could be less fruitful. However, these children might want to consider ways in which they can now better express their appreciation for the work of their parents in hope that someday their parents will then come to appreciate the different route their children have taken.

Therefore, it is with much graciousness that I now lay down much disagreement in order to say thank you to the "sovereign God in box theologians". Without their efforts, we would probably not even be able to even see and be aware of the problems with "the box" that we fight against.
John Piper, Jonathan Edwards, D.A. Carson and others too numerous to mention, you are now invited and welcomed as honorary grandparents of the Emergent Church!

"The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our own making is always strong, but must be resisted."--J.I. Packer