As Reformed folk, Presbyterians theologized continually. Twain even opined there should be two Sundays in the week because, "If all-powerful Providence grew weary after six days' labor, such worms as we are might reasonably expect to break down in three." And he agonized over "the right to be punished as a Presbyterian hereafter; that is, the substantial Presbyterian punishment of fire and brimstone instead of this heterodox hell of remorse of conscience of these blamed wildcat religions. The heaven and hell of the wildcat religions are vague and ill defined but there is nothing mixed about the Presbyterian heaven and hell. The Presbyterian hell is all misery…"

So Twain fits the second of McKnight’s criteria, too. Overall Twain was clearly leaning toward the emergent side of things, drinking as judiciously as any Baptist, arguing theology, and longing to be free from Reformed tradition.

But he was never quite there. His Presbyterian leanings gave him pause.

"It ill becomes us to hunt up flaws in matters which are so far out of our jurisdiction," he worried. "I hold that no man can meddle with the exclusive affairs of Providence and offer suggestions for their improvement, without making himself in a manner conspicuous. Let us take things as we find them…."

But he added that "it goes against the grain to do it, sometimes."

Pause or not, then, Twain protested. He bristled that the local Presbyterian pastor, Dr. Wadsworth, would "get off a first rate joke and then frown severely at any one who is surprised into smiling at it. This is not fair…he gravely gave the Sunday school books a blast and spoke of ‘the good little boys in them who always went to Heaven, and the bad little boys who infallibly got drowned on Sunday,’ and then swept a savage frown around the house and blighted every smile in the congregation."

"This is not fair" spat back at the minister sums up Twain‘s troubled relationship with fire and brimstone Presbyterianism; for sure Twain came down on the side of "the bad little boys who infallibly got drowned on Sunday." Here lays the core of Twain’s cantankerous take on Reformed theology: he took up Adam‘s cause against an austere God as if Adam were one of the "bad little boys" unjustly punished; unjustly, because Presbyterian predestination assured Twain that they had to be little bad boys. As just such a doomed little bad boy Adam becomes Twain‘s distorted metaphor for the whole broken human race, which was God‘s fault in Twain’s view.

Over a lifetime, Twain argued with God using Adam as a foil. He had an "obsession with the biblical story of Adam and Eve…in thinking of [his childhood in Hannibal he] seemed like some banished Adam who is revisiting his half-forgotten Paradise." Pitying the banished Adam Twain opined, "…he was not made for any useful purpose….most likely not even made intentionally… working himself up out of the oyster bed to his present position was probably a matter of surprise and regret to the Creator."

In this way Twain used satire to blame God for the human condition:

• "Necessarily the scene of the real turning point of my life (and of yours) was the Garden of Eden… I cannot help feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve. That is, in their temperaments. Not in them….[it being God‘s fault that they were] afflicted with temperaments made out of butter….What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam and Eve had been postponed, and Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place—that splendid pair equipped with temperaments made not out of butter, but of asbestos. By neither sugary persuasions nor by hellfire could Satan have beguiled them to eat the apple."

Satire or not, however, a critic notes a deeply serious underlying conflict in Twain:

• "[He] appears to have embraced the implications of the new science with a vengeance; but…the more he gave in to those implications, the more he returned in his musings and story-telling to the subject of Eden and Adam and Eve….evidence can be assembled to indicate that at one level of his thinking, at any rate, he was classically troubled…over the choice between Genesis and Darwin."

To put this into perspective, Mark Twain‘s Adam, like his Presbyterianism, is cast against the backdrop of a conflicted 19th century Protestantism struggling to "do church" in a modern way—modernity was the contested platform claimed by both liberals and conservatives. While contesting science, one construct of many resting on the platform, neither much questioned the philosophical swamp underlying the platform. Twain did; so although he rejected what he supposed to be the fallacies of fatalistic theology, notwithstanding Darwin he could not fully embrace the utopia promised by modernity‘s mechanistic scientism.

He was caught, as it were, in a conundrum, an emergent un-emerged from Eden. On the one hand, he could not get back to Eden on tenets of science and evolution, yet, on the other, he was destined (or so he thought) to yearn with compassion for that past day of glory lost to all the underdogs of Adam‘s race among which he saw himself as one. Yet, he supposed, the God who had created Eden kept it from him. "There is a God for the rich, but none for the poor," Twain wrote to his brother, expressing disdain for the elitist God of Hannibal, Missouri‘s Presbyterianism juxtaposed with his own concern for social justice. The irony is that on Twain‘s own terms his compassion was a curse not a blessing, a twist of fate from which he could not free himself nor do little about; thus, "The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority."

Twain saw Adam emerging from the biblical account of Eden into the Darwin‘s acxcount of the Descent of Man and while he thought the transition inevitable he intensely disliked what this implied (at least to him). And so Twain pushed back: keep the bloodied baby in Eden for awhile, the proto-emergent Adam un-emerged; Twain disdained what he thought the human race had become, and would run back to Hannibal, the Mississippi, steamboats, and childhood if only he could.

Indeed, one observer "…sees Twain‘s Adamic humor as a way to ‘fend off claims against Adam‘s existence.’ Of course, Twain…admired Darwin‘s work and even used it to build his own philosophy. However, Twain‘s Adamic humor seems to be bittersweet, nostalgic for the idea that Adam really was the father of mankind yet still poking fun at this idea. Twain continually juxtaposes Darwin‘s account of human origins with that of the Bible, for example…Twain gives Adam, Eve, and Cain the credit for making all of the fossils that would later so perplex geologists."

Now, in all of this it just seems that the enigma of the emerging church would have been ideal for Twain‘s predetermined temperament, which he argued posited the illusion of human choice in a deterministic world. Twain would have been quick to unravel the enigma by pointing out that what we hail as the vanguard of renewal led by heroes (or villains) of faith turns out to be just one more fatalistic movement in a dialectical evolutionary drama over which we have no control. Twain would argue that for good or bad emergents do not choose to emerge; they are evicted by forces set in motion when Adam, Eve, and Cain were sorting out fossils for geologists to find.

He would argue, too, that if the mainstream church seems fossilized, fossilization is but one inevitable aspect of the drama. Do not despair, out of this new life is bound to emerge. That we are here and the fossils back there proves this—they signal not merely death but also new beginning. This movement of never-having-arrived is everything; to arrive is to be static is to die and disappear. Thus, happily, you can never get away from the emergent un-emerged but emerging just like Twain‘s Adam clinging to Eden!

Of course, Twain‘s Adam is satire, right? So all of this is tongue-in-cheek, right?

Before answering, consider that the present emergent enigma stems in part from Protestant tradition beginning with Luther trying to abort a similar dialectic of renewal following the Reformation. Missiologist Ralph Winters observes that Luther forbad the emergence of orders independent of the parish. Ironically, Winters describes how the Roman Church over the thousand-plus years between Constantine and Luther had learned to cooperate with the inevitable corporate birthing process in a productive, orderly, renewing way; mere inevitability was turned to a purposeful, strategic advantage. Based on a naturally occurring dialectic similar to that seen in the Antioch church out of which came Paul‘s missional band (Paul, Silas, Mark), the Roman church applying a similar dynamic (albeit gleaned from the Empire) learned to cooperate with the smaller more dynamic and clearly focused missional community. Rather than condemn, criticize, and repress, the diocese/parish nurtured the pregnancy, worked through the unavoidable pain of the birthing process, swaddled the messy, bloodied newborn, fed, taught, trained, and so on, but then cut the apron strings soon enough to respect the integrity of the dialectical process and keep the relationship on a mutually beneficial basis. Out of this understanding came the monastic orders which, notwithstanding notable failures, were the life stream of Christianity for more than a millennium. If the wheels eventually came off the baby carriage, tricycle, and bicycle, too…well, that is another story.

In any case, Protestantism would reject the notion of Catholicism doing anything right, and for this reason reject the notion of "orders," or anything similar. Winters believes in was a major mistake by Luther and those who followed.

Winters laments that, "Had it not been for the so-called Pietist movement, the Protestants would have been totally devoid of any organized renewing structures within their tradition… However, the Pietist movement, along with the Anabaptist new communities, eventually…reverted to the ordinary pattern of congregational life…"

This would stifle the dynamic of essential renewal well directed, a local, missional dynamic incorporating the incarnational Jesus in a tangible, visible, practical, irrefutable ministry of loving service; rather, it would foster a climate of abstract theological debate, liturgy drained of life, and the elect always wanting feathers to be fluffed. The climax would be fossilization, on the one hand, igniting explosive splintering on the other.

Paradoxically, like forbidding sex to naked couples on a desert island, there resulted a rash of new births flooding Christendom with thousands of bloodied babies in the form of denominational offshoots. It is simply that the church is a living organism indwelled by the life-giving Holy Spirit destined to conceive, gestate, and reproduce as an ongoing dynamic dialectic. If very different from Twain‘s mechanistic process, it is nevertheless an inexorable ongoing movement. Further, the Holy Spirit spawns corporate movements first to achieve individual conversions second despite our blind immersion in modern molecules of individualism—historically the fruit comes in droves as a result of fresh corporate movements and rearrangements led by the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:41; 4:4; 6:7; 8:14; 9:31; etc., etc.)

Indeed, the parish church sans a missional dynamic in Twain‘s case fossilized as a frozen monument to morbid human stupidity; only to spawn what Twain labeled "wildcat religions," many of them splinter groups with zeal but no wisdom. Twain disdained them. Yet, fossilized and frozen, the same parish church aided in conjuring up the likes of Twain. He saw his church as cold, demanding, and judgmental. The result was he spent a lifetime flailing God, himself, and others with cords of guilt imbedded deeply in his soul, guilt absorbed in childhood from an overly austere religion unable to communicate except through fear. It left him stuck in preadolescent childhood, always trying to beat the genie back into the bottle from whence he supposed both he and the Hannibal version of Presbyterianism came and, in doing that, he hoped, send Adam back to Eden.

Now, if this were merely a post on Twain, we could transition here into an exploration of his early life, near-naïve sweetness of his mother, death of his father, and the macabre peep show his father‘s autopsy was turned into by Twain stealing glimpses of it through a keyhole. But we have other fish to fry. The focus is Twain‘s Adam as Twain‘s own proto-emergent un-emerged (Twain would keep him in Eden) as a negative juxtaposed with a positive: the emergent church un-emerged. It is emerging, of course—from something—but we insist it will never get outside its own skin, the church, which is not only skin, but bone, flesh and blood, too. It is far less than positive to think that any part of the body of Christ can abandon any other and proclaim, "We have emerged; we no longer need you!"

At the same time, only a fool would dismiss the movement as a fad, the work of men, or as some see it, loose cannon headed for heresy. In fact, based on what we have argued above it seems very much the inevitable work of the Holy Spirit renewing the church, but with a caveat: we are being led by the Spirit toward an ideal that has its roots deep in the past from which one olive tree grows; it has never been uprooted, transplanted, or otherwise disturbed by the whims and wishes of man—you do not support the root, the root supports you (Romans 11:18). You cannot emerge from the root except as a branch very much attached to the main trunk intended to bear fruit for the sake of the tree and the glory of God. To attempt to emerge further is audacity at best, heresy if accomplished, which is to be cut off and risk Twain‘s deepest morbid fear: that "substantial Presbyterian punishment of fire and brimstone."