Brian McLaren and Jim Wallis: Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

Brian McLaren has two remarkable posts up at the moment which explain his strategy and his goals in his speaking and writing. He basically admits that he is trying to nudge Evangelicals leftward and this is why he has tried to stay within the Evangelical world so long. He has been a theological liberal for a long time, but only gradually revealed his true leanings so as to take as many souls with him out the door as possible.

The first post is on the Sojourners website where he defends Jim Wallis and Sojourners against criticism from the Left based on the fact that Sojourners magazine refused an ad from a pro-homosexual group aimed at local churches. The criticism seems to be two-fold: (1) "why aren't you openly with us on this issue when you are with us on so many others" and (2) "you are being hypocritical because we both know you favor the liberal position on sexuality." So how does McLaren defend Wallis?

Basically, his argument comes down to this: Sojourners is trying to influence as many Evangelicals as possible toward a left-wing, welfare-state, big government politics by portraying themselves as advocates for poverty reduction. And it is working; a sliver of the left wing of the Evangelical spectrum is being seduced [my word] into Marxism. And this is Sojourners' mission. In the world of left-wing politics there are many Soros-funded advocacy groups, but only one that has a realistic chance of appealing to left-wing Evangelicals and so Jim Wallis can perform a service for the radical Left that no one else can. Why destroy that potential by taking a position Evangelicals oppose so strongly it would drive them away?

In this post, McLaren links in this post to one on his blog in which he chronicles his journey from a conservative to a progressive position on homosexuality. What I found interesting is how far back his openness to theological liberalism, cultural Marxism and progressive politics actually goes. He writes:

I speak as a person who inherited the conventional conservative position about homosexuality, but who began questioning it in my teens when one of my close friends came out. When faced with the choice between a) truly listening and seeking to understand this friend and b) showing what compassion I could without endangering my status in conservative Christian circles, I chose b). I suppose my response during my "conventional phase" could have been worse, but it could have been much better.

When I became a pastor, more and more gay people came out to me and data started to accumulate that indicated problems with my inherited understanding. I went through a stage where I sought to be as personally understanding and humane to LGBTQ people as I could while still holding, however tenuously, to a theology that stigmatized them.

So his leftist ideas about human sexuality go all the way back to his teens, before he ever became a pastor. So, you may wonder, how did he ever gain a reputation as an Evangelical writer? It was no accident, but a deliberately crafted strategy:

But at this point I was a pastor and had to deal with the conflict between two commitments: first, one of my primary job requirements - to keep together rather than divide my congregation on the one hand, and second, to stand up with integrity and be counted as an advocate for people I had become convinced were being treated with neither justice nor compassion. I negotiated this tension by speaking up when I could and by seeking to use my influence to increase sensitivity to people whom I felt were being treated by Christians in a truly sub-Christian way.

But at every turn I felt that I couldn't speak out too strongly too fast without dividing the church that I was called to serve. . . .

You might ask why I didn't go ahead and take a stand, letting the chips fall where they may. After all, I had inherited a conservative position on the role of women in church leadership, and our church crossed that boundary and never looked back. The honest answers to that question are complex and many (perhaps a subject for another time). . . .

One essential dimension of my decision to hold back was my desire - and sense of calling - to hold together a fragile coalition.

He wanted to hold together a coalition, which is exactly what he claims is motivating Jim Wallis to cultivate ambiguity about where he stands on biblical morality. In other words, he wanted Evangelical money, Evangelical support and Evangelical converts to his liberal position. He wanted Evangelicalism to underwrite its own destruction.

To the extent that Evangelicals embrace McLaren's sordid sexual ethics and his vacuous and heretical theology, they will witness institutional decline as their hold on the Gospel evaporates. To see the future, one only has to look at the rapidly declining liberal Protestants in the Episcopal Church. The future is statistical decline, cultural irrelevance, and eventually death.

Evangelicals lives only by the Gospel; Evangelical churches grow only because they have a life transformational Gospel to preach. Take that away and substitute a vaguely humanistic therapeutic message and socialism in its progressivist form, and there is no future. The Gospel is Good News about sin and salvation, heaven and hell, a supernatural Savior and a living God who answers prayer. If one turns these doctrines into symbols of social justice with a Marxist tinge, one eviscerates them of meaning and significance.

Brian McLaren and Jim Wallis are trolling for poorly-taught, Scripturally-ignorant, emotion-driven, easily-deceived prey on the left wing or other fringes of Evangelicalism. They pretend to be (kind of) Evangelical even though they have really embraced a new religion and they are dangerous to those sheep who wander around outside the sheepfold. Tragically, there are a lot of wayward sheep and sleepy shepherds today and so the pickings are not slim at all for the wolves.

Let us recall the warning of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesian elders:

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish everyone with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. (Acts 20:28-32) [ESV, my bolding]

Elders of Evangelical churches have a duty to speak out and warn the flock about those who are "speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them;" men such as Brian McLaren and Jim Wallis, who are wolves disguised as sheep. Make no mistake: book royalties are not their goal, they are after souls. And they are extremely open about it.

A Serious Theological Interview on MSNBC: Now I've Seen Everything!

The internet is buzzing with controversy over yet another Emergent Church pastor with an "edgy, new book" questioning something the Church has affirmed for 20 centuries. So Rob Bell has a book at #4 on Amazon that may or may not teach universalism, if it actually teaches anything clearly, which seems to be in question. I have not read the book, but I have followed the reaction to it with some amusement because I've seen the same movie before with different characters.

I did see this interview of Rob Bell by Martin Bashir at MSNBC (see below). The interview is astonishing because it features an interviewer asking tough questions of a trendy liberal type instead of just lobbing the usual soft balls and sneering at conservative doctrine and conservative Christians. I thought is was outstanding journalism and MSNBC ought to be commended for rising above its usual liberal bias.

The interviewer, Martin Bashir, asks Bell to clarify if he is or is not a universalist. Bell refuses. It appears that the marketing strategy of the book is to claim to be (1) in the mainstream of Christianity and (2) pro-universalism in a vague manner. It seems to be "working" from a sales and marketing perspective and Bell stays right on script. The only problem is that he looks foolish, evasive and dishonest when confronted by an interviewer who really tries to get to the bottom of what he actually believes.



A partial transcript can be accessed here. Kevin DeYoung's 20 page review of Bell's book, which Bashir quotes in the interview, can be accessed here. Paul Edwards has a very interesting 30 minute interview with Martin Bashir about the whole incident, which can be heard here.

Some bloggers have accused Martin Bashir of being biased against Rob Bell just because he attends Tim Keller's Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. It figures; when you can't refute the message, shoot the messenger.

Bashir answers Edwards' question about this by asserting that the job of a journalist is to get at the truth on behalf of the audience and that his personal beliefs have nothing to do with that duty. Quite right. The issue that Rob Bell's supporters have to deal with is not whether Bashir was or was not of one opinion personally or the other. Suppose he was completely opposed to Rob Bell; the question still is why does Bell do so much squirming and equivocating instead of answering clearly and with calm conviction? Why is Bell so reluctant to answer a straight-forward question? In the interview, he looks much more like a politician than a pastor. In fact, he looks like Romney answering questions on health care at a Tea Party rally! The question is: why?

Bashir opines in the interview that Bell is using the medium of writing to work out his own anxieties, insecurities and unresolved issues from his own conservative upbringing. When Bashir asked Bell if this was true, Bell owned up to it rather than denying it. In Emergent Church circles this is not seen as a bad thing at all; it is the way many Emergent Church pastors preach, in fact. But when a pastor writes a book he ought to remember James' injunction about the higher responsibility borne by teachers in the Church and he ought to remember that ineffective shepherds are judged harshly in Scripture. Using one's megachurch platform to address a theological issue is not the place to work out issues best confined to sessions with one's spiritual director.

The Emergent Church is basically a series of youth groups that got out of hand. Some day, one can only hope its leaders grow up and take adult responsibility for protecting the sheep entrusted to them by God. After all, they don't ultimately answer to the blogosphere but to the Good Shepherd Himself.

David Fitch on Homosexuality: Where is He Heading?

David Fitch has written a number of posts on the issue of homosexuality. I can't begin to summarize everything he has to say it; he seems to have an awful lot to say about it - for whatever reason. But since I made an off-hand reference to him in a previous post and got some push back, I thought I should clarify what I am saying and not saying about him and why I'm concerned for a brother theologian. So I'll try to give a thicker description of what I see as problems in what he has been writing lately and why.

In a post entitled: "Women in Ministry and the Gay/Lesbian Question: The Post-Evangelical Terrain As I See It" Fitch sets out to address the issues of the ordination of women and homosexuality together and map out how the Emergent Church and the Neo-Reformed approach them in order to set the stage for his own "Hegelian synthesis" position that transcends them both while retaining the strengths of each: The Neo-Anabaptist Missional position. He characterizes the Neo-Reformed position as "No Women in Ministry/Not Affirming to Gay/Lesbian Sexual Relationships" and the Emergent position as "Yes to Women in Ministry/Affirming of Gay/Lesbian Sexual Relationships."

In a post entitled "On Being Missional with the Gay/Lesbian Peoples Among Us" Fitch writes:

Is it possible to “be Missional” among the gay/lesbian communities without a clear affirmative stance towards GLBT relations? Said another way – Is it possible to participate in “God’s Mission” in today’s world while making a clear statement that would not affirm GBLT sexual relations as normative for the Kingdom of God? Many would flat out say “no.” For many, to be missional/emerging is to not only accept but affirm gay and lesbian sexual relations as normative. Any other position is judgmental, positivistic (even primitivistic) towards Scripture and sets us apart and over against the gay and lesbian communities among whom we seek to minister God’s grace.

Although I may agree with some of this, I find myself still at odds with many of the underlying assumptions that drive these conclusions. I’m asking for a rethinking of this question for Mission.

I have been unhappy with the evangelical proto-type response to the gay/lesbian communities in United States. There has been a “sick enjoyment” present in pointing to the sin of GLBT sexual relations on behalf of evangelicals. It’s a defensive and protective reaction. Many times, subtly, the gay/lesbian is used as an object to justify our sense of moral status which so often proves duplicitous. It is like pointing to the sin of the gay/lesbian sexualities enables us to cover up our own deep complicity with the same sexual malformation in ourselves.

Here Fitch accepts the story that the pro-homosexual activists and their liberal Protestant fellow-travelers tell in order to label and dismiss Evangelicals. This narrative is full of gratuitous assumptions about our motivations and is highly judgmental. Yet we are asked to accept it in order to avoid being labeled as judgmental! Sorry, no dice. This is not a fair description of Evangelicals or Roman Catholics or the Bible or the entire Christian tradition up to 1960 - all of which have viewed homosexual acts as sinful, disordered and unnatural.

After rejecting the Emergent approach as simply accepting of homosexual acts, Fitch proposes a third way:

This leads me to put forth what I see as a third option to the above two options (as I have admittedly stereotyped them). Over against position 1.) which “welcomes but does not affirm” (common among the Neo Reformed missionals), and position no. 2 which “welcomes and affirms”(an admittedly simplistic summary of many in the pEC) I propose a 3rd position, the position of “welcomes and transforms.”

In a post entitled "The Mission and GLBTQ Relations: Three Committments of a Welcoming and Mutually Transforming Missional Community #1" Fitch fleshes out what this third way would look like as follows:

I want to propose that such a sexually redemptive community is based on three commitments that reflect the embodied (incarnational) posture of such a community in the world.
1.) We All Come Broken
2.) We Make No Pre-Set Public Statements on What We are For or Against in Sexual Relations (please do not jump to conclusions on this).
3.) We Embody Spiritual Disciplines that Nurture the Life in Christ for God’s Mission in the World including Listening, Reading Scripture Together, Confession of Sin, Repentance, Dependence Upon the Spirit and other practices that affirm Life, Sexuality, Friendships, Creation and place them all within what God is Doing for Restoring the world and Reconciling it to Himself (missio Dei).

Does Fitch really think that Reformed and Evangelical churches do not acknowledge and embody #1 so that a new approach has to be invented to include it? Apparently so.

The biggest problem with the evangelical church’s witness regarding sexuality among our society, nevermind among the GLBTQ, is that we ask others to change their sexual behavior without seeing the duplicity in our own sexual behaviors and orientations. We therefore come into a context, whatever its sexual issues are, from a power position, claiming everyone else is screwed up but us. This defies the incarnational logic of Christ, and the way the Triune God works in the world in Christ by the Spirit.

Again, what we have is a gross caricature of the traditional position. I have never personally seen an Evangelical church that deserved this description and it is the Reformed more than any others who stress that we are all sinners who stand equally before the foot of the cross in need of forgiveness. You can accuse Reformed and Evangelical preaching of a lot of short-comings but not that one. When Fitch writes this sort of stuff he sounds like he learned everything he knows about Evangelicals from reading books by John Spong and James Barr and by watching Kieth Olbermann on TV.

But it is #2 that really sets off alarm bells. We are not to proclaim that sexual sin is sin? Or are we? This is rather unclear. Fitch clearly says that he does not accept homosexual behavior as compatible with redeemed Christian life . . . so why does he say we should make no such statements in public? He apparently thinks that somehow playing down our position on sexual morality until the outsider has come inside the Church will make it easier for the non-Christian to accept our view once we finally disclose it.

This is just weird because the first thing I thought of when I heard this was Robert Schuller and his approach to emphasizing the positive as his explanation for why he never preached on sin. The second thing I thought of was the seeker-sensitive approach to "re-branding" the church in a way that is less offensive to the secular person. And this is proposed as the way to be "Anabaptist" and "radical"? It is enough to make one's head spin.

I have a number of other problems with Fitch's mapping of the question.

1. For one thing, the perspective is too narrow. In reality, what Fitch calls the Neo-Reformed position is the Roman Catholic and Evangelical position and what he calls the Emergent position is the Liberal Protestant position. The Neo-Reformed position actually is the position of the entire Christian tradition until the past few decades when a heretical, doctrinally adrift, and culturally compliant, liberal Protestantism has gone completely off the rails and succumbed to a fit of cultural conformity in the name of "inclusion" and "relevance."

2. This leads to a second problem, which is that the truth is not necessarily half way between any two given positions. If you think that 2+2=4 and I contend that 2+2=104, it is totally incorrect to assume that the correct answer must be about 54. And when it comes to behavior that is emphatically and clearly condemned by Scripture, the mere fact that a doctrinally deviant group claims that Scripture is wrong does not compel a reasonable person to conclude that we ought to seek a compromise position between the two extremes. Fitch would likely claim that this is not what he is trying to do, but it seems that way when you read how he sets up the two extremes and tries to go down the middle.

3. A third problem is more of a quibble over language, but language does shape our assumptions and therefore is very important. He frames the debate as one of "women in ministry" even though the Neo-Reformed position actually leaves plenty of room for women to participate in ministry even while reserving the office of elder for men only. This overstates the actual Neo-Reformed position to the point of making it ridiculous and is thus skews the discussion.

4. Another problem I have with this approach is the way it takes the seems to take the whole idea of sexual "orientations" as a given without being critical of the idea of (1) defining people by their sexual preferences, which is inherently dehumanizing and (2) the idea of a fixed "orientation" that is equivalent to skin color, which is an incoherent concept and scientifically unproven. In essence, I am complaining that too much of the pro-homosexual rhetoric and talking points is accepted at face value as a starting point and this makes Fitch's position a less than serious discussion of homosexuality as a moral issue.

5. As an extension of the last point, I also think that Fitch takes the issue of homosexuality far too seriously. I am not saying that we should not take individual people who are struggling with homosexuality temptation seriously; on the contrary, we should love them and help them find healing and forgiveness through the transforming power of the Gospel. But I find the singling out of homosexuality from a vast array of other sexual sins as if there was something different about it that made it an exception to be troubling. In my experience, this lifting up of homosexuality as a special and exceptional sin is a prelude to coming round to a position of approving of it. Maybe David Fitch is on a journey toward doing that and maybe he is not. But I think we would be better off focusing on people as ordinary sinners made in God's image to whom the Gospel is addressed instead of accepting their self-description as "homosexuals."

Areas of Agreement:
I have been very critical so far in this post and I really need to bring this to a close. But let me just suggest two areas of agreement with Fitch and one suggestion for advancing this discussion.

1. I agree that the ordination of women and the normalizing of homosexuality belong together as part of one discussion. For a long time (over 20 years) I thought it was unproblematic to accept women's ordination and maintain the traditional position on homosexuality, but now I have changed my mind. I think that there is a good reason why these two issues have been linked right from the start of second wave feminism and the sexual revolution in the 1960s.

2. I agree that Evangelicals need a better theology of marriage and a better theological anthropology. I don't think the problem is with our doctrine of sin or our doctrine of sanctification, but I do think we have not done enough philosophical and theological work on these two issues. We have tended to rely on proof texts and leave the heavy theological lifting to the Anglicans. Unfortunately, the Anglicans, for the most part, have wandered so far off the reservation that no one is doing the philosophical and theological thinking that we need if we are to avoid being taken captive by worldly philosophies and heretical thought.

A Suggestion:
In view of the above weakness in Evangelical thought, I suggest that we take a long, hard look at John Paul II's Theology of the Body. Here is a biblical theology that can undergird the traditional Roman Catholic and Protestant natural law position on sexuality and marriage. And here is a challenge to the modern thought that underlies the individualism, hedonism and nihilism of the sexual revolution. The Theology of the Body is philosophically informed and theologically profound. It reinforces traditional sexual morality while simultaneously deepening its meaning and developing profound theological linkages to the doctrine of the Trinity and to implications of virtue for the doctrine of sanctification.

Maybe, if we turn our attention away from dead liberal Protestantism and emergent liberal wannabes, we can re-engage the deep riches of the theological tradition in such a way as to make people realize the shallowness and emptiness of the modern preoccupation with autonomy and self-fulfillment as the meaning of life.

Christianity and McLarenism: A Response to "A New Kind of Christianity" - Part II

- Continued From Last Post -

4. Salvation by Good Works: Turning the Biblical Gospel Upside Down
On p. 204 Mclaren explains his revised understanding of the Final Judgment. It will be the "life and way of Jesus - not a list of laws, rules, or beliefs - to be the high and gracious standard by which history's events and our own lives will be valued and evaluated." So what we believe about Jesus is irrelevant. Whether we have put our trust in His amazing grace or not is beside the point. McLaren has nothing to say about the Lamb's Book of Life in Rev. 20.

On the one hand we have the most depressing moralism: "God will examine the story of our lives for Christlikeness - for a cup of cold water or a plate of hot food given to one in need . . . " By this standard none of us has a hope. But, on the other hand, there is a breezy and cheerful denial of eternal punishment: "So when we say, with the writer of Hebrews, that 'it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment,' we are not saying 'and after that the condemnation' (Heb. 9:27). We are saying, with John, that to 'see God,' to be in God's unspeakable light, will purge us of all darkness." (p., 205)

He twists the Scripture here so as to make it say that we will all escape condemnation even if we have no personal faith in Christ. There is no eternal punishment, no hell, no eternal separation from God. The promises made to believers are applied to humanity as such. All that is important is that we do good works, but even when we don't we still will experience salvation.

5. Undermining the Authority of Scripture: From Constitution to Library
In chapters 7-9 McLaren works hard to subordinate the authority of the Bible to the enlightened common sense of late modern, Western culture. He says that we should move from viewing it as a constitution (i.e. a document with authority) to a library (from which we can pick and choose what suits us).

He sees the Bible as the record of the evolution of human ideas about God and the trajectory is from viewing God as violent, tribal and punitive to seeing God as peaceful, universal and tolerant, that is as Christlike. The 19th century liberal Protestants who advocated this type of evolutionary view of the Bible engaged in a lot of detailed biblical criticism to rearrange the order and structure of the Bible so as to get the structure of primitive to higher to line up properly. But McLaren does not engage in that level of detailed consideration of the text. For him, what is important is that have a common sense conception of what is loving and good and then we project that on Jesus, who then becomes our criterion for choosing what in the library is "relevant."

The problem for the evolutionary view of the Bible is that there is grace in Genesis and wrath in Revelation. And the biblical Jesus speaks as much about hell and judgment as most of the Evangelical theologians and pastors McLaren rejects as "gatekeepers," "prison guards" and other unsavory labels.

6. Having a Crisis of Faith? Get a Consultant
Chapter 21 is a kind of altar call plus some follow up advice for those who come forward in response to McLaren's call for conversion. He starts out by assuming a victim/martyr position and assuring the potential convert that in ten years' time it will be easier for them because of "some of us who have pioneered the early paths and taken the brunt of the first rounds of unfriendly fire from people who, like Gamaliel's colleagues, want to 'keep it from spreading further among the people.' (Acts 4:17)" (p. 242) He is pretty clear he is in a war and he expects to win.

He gives some advice to people who find his new religion compelling and want to join. If potential converts find their pastor or priest strangely uninterested in McLarenism, they should not bother them. Instead they should consider leaving their church and starting a new congregation. Instead of trusting their own pastors and leaders, McLaren advises them to "get a consultant." Now, it just so happens that McLaren and his friends, Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt advertise themselves as "consultants."

Conclusion
At the end of the day the most fundamental question is the one Jesus posed to his disciples: Who do you say that I am?" (Mk. 8:29) Brian McLaren sees Jesus as the one who proclaims the new society of the kingdom of God, a teacher of ethics whose message remains when all the doctrinal accretions have been swept away. J. G. Machen, in his classic, Christianity and Liberalism, critiques the liberals of the early 20th century who argued for such a view of Jesus:

"In another way also the teaching of Jesus was rooted in doctrine. It was rooted in doctrine because it depended upon a stupendous presentation of Jesus' own Person. The assertion is often made that Jesus kept his own Person out of His gospel, and came forward merely as the supreme prophet of God. That assertion lies at the very root of the modern liberal conception of the life of Christ. But common as it is, it is radically false." (p. 33)

In the end, McLarenism is another religion and not Christianity at all because it does not do justice to the biblical portrayal of Jesus Christ.

Christianity and McLarenism: A Response to "A New Kind of Christianity" - Part I

Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity is ambitious, direct and defiant. Although McLaren always couches his prose in a "Let's just raise some questions here and think about some possible answers" kind of manner, there should be no mistake that in this book he is advocating exactly what the title indicates: a completely new kind of Christianity that rejects historic orthodoxy, biblical authority and the Gospel of salvation from sin through the atoning death of Jesus Christ appropriated by personal repentance and faith. And he wants you to accept his new faith.

Brian McLaren once was an Evangelical, but he is no longer one. I don't know how much more clear and honest he could be about it than he is in this book. That is fine - there are no apostasy laws in the US and he can leave Evangelicalism and convert to Liberal Protestantism if he wants to do so.

But he needs to stop cashing in on his one and only claim to fame,which is that he used to be an Evangelical. This "used to be an Evangelical" status is the only thing that makes him remotely interesting to anybody. His views are mostly a century or more old and come from the dying wing of Protestantism. He has nothing really new to say. So the only angle he has is "Look isn't that a daring thing for an Evangelical to say!"

That worked back in the days of A Generous Orthodoxy and it persisted through The Secret Message of Jesus and Everything Must Change. When those books came out it was just barely possible to view him as a left wing Evangelical, a recently lapsed Evangelical or a progressive Evangelical. His followers were able to dream that what McLaren is today, all of Evangelicalism will be tomorrow.

At The Secret Message of Jesus stage, I was still willing to defend him as an Evangelical raising questions that needed answers and so I opposed the effort of some of my colleagues to ban him from speaking on campus. I knew that many of my students were reading him and falling for the old social gospel line as if it were new and so I thought engagement was the way to go. I guess I'm still engaging by writing this review, but I no longer think that McLaren can be regarded as an Evangelical asking questions: he is now a liberal giving answers. And he is calling for Evangelicals to abandon their faith and embrace his. Again, it is a free country and he can preach whatever message he wants. What he cannot expect is for the rest of us, who love our Evangelical theology and heritage, to treat him as one of us just so he gain an audience from the ranks of confused or gullible Evangelical young people. Pastors have a solemn responsibility to warn the flock against heresy, so McLaren should not take it personally. It is not about him, but rather about his heretical doctrine.

I don't intend to summarize the contents of the book and I don't want simply to repeat what others have said already. There are a number of good reviews of it on the net and anyone familiar with Google can find them. I've already noted some of the best ones - by McKnight, Bouma and DeYoung - on this blog. Here are two more by Nathan Gilmour: here and here.

What I want to do is to clarify where McLaren goes off the rails in this book and why he is a bad and heretical teacher to whom you should not listen. I know the blogosphere is often used as a place to throw around random comments and spontaneous opinions, but I offer what follows as a serious set of reflections that have taken about five years to formulate and which are set forth more in sorrow than in anger.

1. Up From Evangelicalism: McLaren's Theological Journey
In chapter 1 McLaren describes a crisis of faith he went through as a pastor: "I experienced a kind of spiritual crisis that started me on a quest: a quest for honesty, for authenticity, and for a faith that made more sense to me and to others." (6) He says that throughout this process his spirituality remained "intact" even as "my belief system was in a shambles." (8) He describes what replaced his lost beliefs as not a new set of beliefs, but rather as a "new way of believing," whatever that is supposed to mean. What he is getting here is not entirely clear, but it is clear from the book as a whole that he has traded in his old, traditional, Evangelical doctrines for modern, liberal doctrines.

2. Scrubbing off that Nasty Tradition Using the Handy, All-Purpose "Greco-Roman Narrative"
In chapter 4, McLaren shares what he calls "the Greco-Roman Narrative," which he claims is a story line borrowed from non-Christian culture and imposed on the Bible by the church in the 4th century. This false narrative is basically the traditional "Creation - Fall - Redemption" story line embodied in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds and taught throughout the history of the Church by pretty much every branch of Christianity.

But Brian McLaren has discovered that everyone from St. Augustine to Karl Barth has misread the Bible drastically and disastrously - except him. He doesn't quote any scholarly sources for his revisionist claims; he says this critique came to him in conversation with a friend. Maybe he got it from The DaVinci Code.

Aren't we lucky to be living in the age of McLarenism? Poor St. Anselm and St. Thomas, poor Martin Luther and John Calvin, poor John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, poor William Carey and Billy Graham. They all got it spectacularly wrong. But McLaren has now straightened it all out. This is what you must be able to swallow in order to embrace McLarenism.

The Greco-Roman narrative is the story of Western civilization, for McLaren, rather than the Bible. He claims to interpret the Bible in simple Hebraic categories rather than all those nasty old Greek categories, just like Adolf von Harnack and 19th century culture Protestantism. So McLaren's Jesus is more of an Teacher of Ethics than a Divine Savior. He proclaims the Kingdom of God, which is interpreted in ethical-political terms, and calls us to participate in building this kingdom on earth.

You can hear the chanting faintly from beyond the barricades: "Hey, ho - Hey, ho, Western civ. has got to go." If we could just tear down Western civilization - which for McLaren means Constantine, the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch burning, ecological disaster and capitalism - then we would have eliminated the obstacles to the coming of the Kingdom of God. (Or, we might have made the world safe for Islamic domination - but he does not consider that possibility.)

This handy little device enables McLaren to throw over the side the entire tradition of the Church for the past 20 centuries. He can pick through the rubble and appropriate a bit here and there according to his own preferences, but any doctrine or idea he doesn't like is instantly vaporized by his "Greco-Roman Narrative Zapper Gun." Original sin - poof - gone. Biblical authority - poof - gone. The uniqueness of Christ - poof - gone. And so on.

3. Don't Blame God - He is Doing the Best He Can!
McLarenism worships a different God than Christianity does. The God of Christianity is the sovereign Creator of the cosmos and Lord of All. He is Judge of Evil and He is holy. In McLarenism, however, God is a rather kindly, even indulgent, father who makes threats and then fails to follow through. He threatens Adam and Eve with death if they eat of the tree of the knoweledge of good and evil, but when they do so he does not kill them. And there is no Fall into sin (p. 50), it is just "a classic coming-of-age story, filled with ambivalence - a childhood lost, an adulthood gained." (p. 51) A hunter gatherer society turns into an agricultural society: that is the meaning of Genesis 3. God is less the Judge of all the earth and more of an indulgent parent working with his rebellious but lovable children.

Later in the book, McLaren's god comes into focus as not omnipotent and it becomes clear why McLaren cannot conceive of such a god actually judging the world in righteousness. (See next point). McLaren's god is a limited being who interacts with the world in order to try to steer and prod it in the right direction, but who is not sovereign or in control.

The god of McLarenism is the god of process theology in which god and the world are interdependent: "God is like a parent guiding a child with a will of her own." (p. 196) McLaren denies that eschatology refers to the end of this world. It is just "the beginning of a new spiritual-historical age or era." (p. 197) I suppose that would be the post-Western civilization age. The cosmos is evolving and we participate, along with god, in this process of evolution. Since god is not fully in control, it makes no sense to blame him for evil. We just need to work harder to eradicate evil ourselves and god will help us.

- To Be Continued in Next Post -

Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity

The book came the other day and I have read about half. I'll post a review within a day or two. Today has been busy, but tomorrow I'll have time to post. After reading half of the book I agree with those who say that it is Brian's best work yet in terms of clarity and systematic thinking. He lays it out and preaches for conversion to his new kind of Christianity. I don't think I'll be converting though.

Scot McKnight on Brian McLaren

Here is a review of Brian McLaren's new book, A New Kind of Christianity, by Scot McKnight in Christianity Today. He begins with the following two sentences: "Brian McLaren has grown tired of evangelicalism. In turn, many evangelicals are wearied with Brian." He goes on to say: "If evangelicalism is characterized by David Bebbington's famous quadrilateral—that is, biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism—then Brian has poked and, to one degree or another, criticized, deconstructed, and rejected each."

But, according to McKnight, McLaren is going much further in this book than simply challenging Evangelical distinctives. He is moving beyond orthodoxy itself. McKnight notes that McLaren has adopted an old way of reading the Bible, namely, the 19th century evolutionary approach of liberal Protestantism and then says:

"Reading the Bible through the lens of Jesus Christ is indeed the way to go. But to use Jesus against the God of Israel he worshiped and prayed to and loved and obeyed pits us against what Jesus himself is doing.

One must also ask the root question: How do we determine what is less or more "mature"?

In particular, the evolutionary theory of God contains another fatal flaw. It's not the fact that it was tried out in the 19th-century Religionsgeschichtliche Schule ("history of religion school") of Germany and has been shown inadequate (though it finds an occasional admirer in folks like Karen Armstrong). And it's not the fact that the category of "evolution" is about as modernistic and imperialistic of a category I can think of. No, the singular flaw is this: The flow of the Bible is not neat. It doesn't fit into an evolutionary scheme. There are as many mercy passages in the Old Testament as there are grace-and-love passages in the New. What's more, passages about God's grace stand side-by-side with passages about God's wrath (e.g., Hosea 1-3; Matt. 23-25). The evolutionary approach doesn't work because that's not how Scripture's narrative works. There is wrath in Revelation and there is covenant love in Genesis. And Jesus talks more about Abba and hell than does the rest of the Bible combined."

McKnight pulls no punches in this review and if this is what McLaren's friends think of his book, one wonders what those who have been suspicious of him all along will say. McKnight ends the review as follows:

"Alas, A New Kind of Christianity shows us that Brian, though he is now thinking more systemically, has fallen for an old school of thought. I read this book carefully, and I found nothing new. It may be new for Brian, but it's a rehash of ideas that grew into fruition with Adolf von Harnack and now find iterations in folks like Harvey Cox and Marcus Borg. For me, Brian's new kind of Christianity is quite old. And the problem is that it's not old enough."

Brian McLaren's New Kind of Christianity

Brian McLaren now blogs at the liberal Huffington Post website. In a post on his new book, A New Kind of Christianity, he makes it clear that he is finished with conservatism and advocates a constantly evolving religion that has no fixed reference points and which is therefore able to develop and change along with its host culture in such a way as never to come into real, out and out conflict with the culture. He writes:

"It is the past around which many faith communities orient themselves - faithfully preserving a deposit or rule or articulation of faith that they inherited from their ancestors. That orientation engenders a sense of dignity and strength, along with an inherently conservative bias. In this past-orientation, most or all of the important questions are already answered once and for all. Our job, should we choose to accept it, is to learn and accept those answers, and make sure our children and grandchildren do the same.

Of course I agree that we must preserve and conserve what is precious and good from our past, and even our embarrassments and mistakes must be remembered so we can learn from and be humbled by them. But there's another way to conceive of our faith communities, an identity that includes but is not limited to a conservative orientation. We can see ourselves at heart as creative, prophetic, progressive, emergent, missional, and forward-looking people on a quest. A quest orientation challenges us to retain all our memories from the past, but then turns our focus towards the future, a future we hope not merely to endure, but by God's grace, to help create.

A quest orientation unleashes for us the transformative power of questions. Instead of seeing ourselves as a community bound together exclusively by age-old answers, we see ourselves as a community animated by what humorist-philosopher Garrison Keillor calls (with a wink) "life's persistent questions" - the questions that each generation struggles with and then passes on to the next generation to become their own. On the macro scale, those questions are few and deep: Who are we? How and why are we here? What is the good life? What matters most? What dangers, toils, and snares must we be careful to avoid? What is sacred, and why? I think all of us know that simply memorizing rote answers to these kinds of questions, while it has some real value, shapes a life far less radically than spending a lifetime asking, re-asking, struggling, and grappling with them does."

Here he tells us that the frequent Old Testament calls to remember, teach your children, memorize the Torah and be faithful to tradition and the many New Testament calls to "hold fast to the faith," "guard the gospel," and "pass on what you have received" are really just obstacles that create the kind of faith that has an inherently conservative bias, which for him is a bad thing.

The key sentence comes after he tells us that: "Of course I agree that we must preserve and conserve what is precious and good from our past, and even our embarrassments and mistakes must be remembered so we can learn from and be humbled by them." The first part of this sentence seems encouraging: so he does admit that we have to preserve something. But what he gives with one hand, he takes back with the other by implying that there is just as much bad in our tradition that needs to be jettisoned as good to be preserved.

There is no hint here that there is any criterion by which the distinction must be made, that is, no fixed tradition concerning the life, death, resurrection, ascension and second coming of Jesus Christ that is constant and to which the rest of our doctrine must bear witness. Instead, in the next sentence, he tells us that there is a different way to conceive of faith communities (which for him replace the Church, being more amorphous and less defined) and he tells us that this better way is to be open to the future, which we will create, instead of being chained to the past.

One could hardly ask for a clearer expression of modern, liberal Christianity in the tradition of 19th century culture Protestantism. The fact that this is served up as "postmodern" and "new" is a deception that can only fool the gullible and the ignorant. Liberal progressivism is not new, not is it anything but a continuation of the same old same old of modernity.

What we see here is not so much a "new kind of Christianity" as an "old kind of heresy."

The Emergent Church: RIP

Over at Mere Orthodoxy, Matthew Anderson has a good post on the death of the emergent church. He provides a link to this obituary, which is hilarious. The best bits are:

"She is survived by her parents, the Seeker Church, and Sojourners; her paternal grandmother, the former Deconstructionism, now Postmodernity; her maternal grandmother, French Nihilism and her paternal great-grandparents, the Social Gospel and Fundamentalism. . . . Her father, the child of California’s Jesus Movement lived primarily in the Chicago suburbs, while her mother lived in Washington, DC with boyfriend the Democratic Party. Her parents have since reconciled."

That last line especially just nails it! That is how the world is different because of the Emergent Church.

Mike Wittmer has a blog series going on Brian McLaren's new book A New Kind of Christianity here.

As Matthew points out, Jeremy Bouma has a good post on why he left emergent here.

Bill Kinnon has an initial reaction to Brian McLaren's new book here.

Brian McLaren, on his blog, suggests that anyone who does not like his new book is a fundamentalist. (Calling your opponents names is a whole lot easier than taking their critiques seriously.)

I'll be posting more on Brian McLaren's book. I figure I may as well order it; I don't see any way around having to read it. From the hints given by those who have already read it, however, it seems that we may finally have McLaren saying what he really believes instead of ducking and weaving so as to keep everyone off balance thus making a fair and clear critique difficult.

Emergent Theology: A Review of "How (Not) to Speak of God" by Peter Rollins

Several people, including current and former students, have asked me to comment on Peter Rollins 2006 book: How (Not) to Speak of God. It has a glowing foreword by Brian McLaren and it purports to be a contribution to the "emergent conversation." The back cover claims (with the usual modesty of back covers everywhere) that the "emerging church" movement "offers an unprecedented message of transformation that has the potential to revolutionize the theological architecture of Western Christianity." Well, obviously no hype there.

It is characteristic of all things postmodern to claim that modernity has been left behind and that we should pay no heed to that very modern looking man behind the curtain. I'm afraid I just don't buy it. A transcending of the modern would look very, very different from what we see in the Emergent Church, which has been called (rather unkindly) the seeker sensitive movement for overgrown youth groups. But it is true that, as Os Guiness points out, the great flaw in the emergent conversation is that all the critique is directed toward a modernity that is supposedly dead anyway, while the contemporary (pop) culture is swallowed uncritically. As long as attention can be distracted by all the "bad, old modern stuff," we don't have to be specific about what the positive program is going forward. Ah . . . but I forgot, it isn't a program but a conversation. A very convenient dodge, that. Does it mean the emergent church is all talk and no action? Does that mean it is just a debating society in a non-academic but still very ivory tower? Or does it just mean: “Don’t try to pin me down on what I believe because I’m not sure anyway.” Anyway, you already knew I was skeptical. On to Rollins.

Like all good books, this one is organized around one "big idea" and it explores that idea from different angles and discusses the implications of that idea for a number of areas. The big idea of this book is that God is unknowable. On the very first page, Rollins writes:

"Christian faith, it could be said, is born in the aftermath of God. Our fragile faith is fanned into life in the wake of what we believe to have been the incoming of a life-giving encounter in which we feel connected with, and transformed by, the source of everything that is. . . such faith cannot be reduced to the mere affirmation of religious dogma . . For Christians testify to having been caught up in and engulfed by that which utterly transcends them.” (p. 1)

Rollins goes on to explain that naming God is only naming our experience of God (p. 2) and that all doctrines that pretend to give a true knowledge of God are idols. (p. 14) He argues that this position is not liberal because it does not give up on the possibility of speaking of God, as liberalism does. While Rollins never names who he means by “liberal” in this book, he seems to have the John Spongs of the world in mind, those who call us to move “beyond theism” to some sort of totally immanent, post-Christian humanism. Rollins rejects this move as one extreme and then describes “Fundamentalism” all theology that purports to declare truth about God (which pretty much takes in everybody from Irenaeus to Augustine to Aquinas to Calvin to Wesley to Newman to Benedict XVI).

“Very briefly, fundamentalism can be understood as a particular way of believing one’s beliefs rather than referring to the actual content of one’s beliefs. It can be described as holding a belief system in such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in direct proportion to how much they differ from one’s own.” (p. 26)

How on earth is one to respond to such unmitigated nonsense? I can only suppose Rollins finds it convenient to go to a “fundamentalist” doctor when he is ill; that is, one who rules out wrong beliefs in making the diagnoses and stubbornly clings to the “fundamentalist” notion that a belief system built on the existence of germs and antibiotics is superior to one built on the ideas of witches and spells causing all ailments. Or does Rollins believe that “fundamentalism” is only defined this way with regard to religion? If so, he is essentially agreeing with the modern doctrine that religion should be private, rather than public, because religion deals with values while science deals with facts. The restless ghost of Hume mumbling about the inability to derive an “ought" from an “is” haunts the pages of Rollins’ book along with the grisly ghost of Kant ceaselessly flogging his belief in the inability of man to know anything about God.

Although there are no footnotes to Bultmann and Tillich (and there should be) any reader who is familiar with neo-orthodoxy can easily recognize Rollins’ ideas as broadly similar to those of these early 20^th century writers. God as the source of our being, faith as an encounter with that which cannot be named or described, orthodoxy as idolatry – it is all rehashed once again. One is left scratching one’s head thinking “But I thought all that stuff was dead and buried. Has Rollins not heard of the 1960s when neo-orthodoxy ended in the death of God theology, which itself lasted less than a decade?” Is Rollins urging us to go back to the 1950s?

Oh, but Rollins apparently has heard of the “shattered spectrum” of the 1960’s revolt against all theological systems, including the neo-orthodox ones that had arisen during the first half of the 20^th century in opposition to the over-optimistic social gospel of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. The Great War dealt a hard blow to Western optimism and the presumption of progress and the Niebuhr brothers savaged a liberal Protestantism that overlaid a thin religious veneer over a Rotary Club optimism in its role as the culture religion of Modernity.

But the neo-orthodox emphasis on sin and tragedy didn’t last long. When New Left of the 1960s arose, a chastened optimism returned in the form of Marxian views of history, ideology and revolution. Latin American, Black and Feminist Liberation theology preached a message of Christian love re-defined in terms of personal liberation from poverty, restrictive morality and traditional ethics. Rollins gives clear evidence of having bought into liberation theology in his book as he puts forward as a substitute for doctrine about God a teaching that love is all you need.

One has flashbacks of reading Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics at times while reading this book, right down to the examples of the Nazis at the front door when you have Jews hidden in the attic being the reason why lying is sometimes good. (p. 57f) Rollins opposes “ethical systems” (one presumes he means divine command ethics here) to love. (p. 65) He goes on to expound his Marxian (pragmatic) view of truth that could have been lifted straight from John Dewey.

“If we take truth to mean any act which positively transforms reality, rather than describes reality, then there is no problem acknowledging that, while denying there are Jews in the house is empirically incorrect, it is true in a religions sense precisely because it protects the innocent.” (p. 57)

The problem with this view is how one knows what it means to positively transform reality as opposed to negatively transforming reality. Not all change is for the best as even Rollins would acknowledge. (If you doubt this, ask him if the election of Sarah Palin in 2012 would constitute “progress.”) So what constitutes good change as opposed to bad change? Traditionally, Christian thought (and the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophy) would answer that good change is change that brings people and society into a closer approximation to the Good. The Good is objective reality, at the apex of which is (for Christians) the God who created the world according to his divine wisdom. So change that brings us closer to God and his will is good and that which takes us away from God is evil. Good and evil are knowable categories precisely because God has revealed both himself in Jesus Christ and his will in the Law and supremely in Jesus Christ. But for Rollins, we cannot know God or objective truth of any kind. So how do we evaluate whether we should join the revolution or oppose it, take up a given cause or ignore it, vote for this candidate or for that other one? In theory he has no way to decide; in practice he simply follows the politically correct crowd.

There are a couple of fundamental mistakes in the book that lead to great problems. One is on p. 14 where he mentions the Old Testament prohibitions against placing the divine into representational form and then, astonishingly, equating this with the idea that God can be revealed thorough the human logos. He completely ignores the fact that it was precisely the Word of God that came to the prophets that was the way that God communicated with Israel. The prophets denounced idolatry in words, which were the only fit way for the true God to be revealed. Then, when Jesus came, he was the Word of God made flesh. Rollins applies the Old Testament strictures against images of God to both Old and New Testament revelation through the Word. The baby (the Word of God) is thrown out with the bath water (idolatrous images of God).

Of course, there is truth in the big idea of the unknowability of God. All the great theologians of the Tradition have known that God is greater than any human words or concepts used to describe him. And this fact is precisely why we can only have true knowledge of God by means of God’s self-revelation culminating in Jesus Christ. The revealed word of God is the Bible’s answer to the dilemma of the human inability to know God by human reason or imagination. Through Christ and the Scriptures we can know God truly, though not exhaustively. What we know of God is certain because in Christ we have seen God. Throughout the book, Rollins attempts to imagine God, to think of God in human categories – doing exactly what he says should not and cannot be done. Yet, how could be otherwise once revelation has been rejected as it is in this book? I found no evidence that Rollins views Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of God in this book; if he believes it, he draws no implications from it.

Rollins explicitly disavows the teaching that the Church has Good News for the world: “In contrast to the view that evangelism is that which gives an answer for those who are asking, we must have faith to believe that those who seek will find for themselves. . . the job of the Church is not to provide an answer . . . but to help the religious question to arise.” (pp. 40-41) Rollins gives a good summary of his views in the sentence: “Christianity thus engages in a pragmatic discourse which intends towards the one who lies beyond all language.” (p. 41)

When pressed for specifics, Rollins defines this rather abstract concept of Christianity as being reducible to love. He interprets I John 4:7-16 as follows:

“Here John equates the existence of religious knowledge with the act of love. Knowledge of God (the Truth) as a set of propositions is utterly absent; instead he claims that those who exhibit a genuine love know God, regardless of their religious system.” (p. 57)

Rollins selectively quotes and misinterprets Scripture here for his own ends. In fact, the very chapter he quotes begins with a doctrinal test for how to tell a false prophet from a true one:

“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.” (I John 4:1-4)

Here we have just one example of the New Testament proposing a doctrinal test for false prophets. Against Docetism, John affirms the humanity of Christ. In I John 5:1-5, he also affirms the Messiahship (v. 1) and the deity of Jesus Christ (v. 5) as propositions to be believed. So the foundations of the two natures doctrine of Chalcedon are laid already in I John: one person who is fully God and fully man. We could also refer to I Cor. 15:1-2 or to Romans 10:9-10.

“That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” (Rom. 10:9-10)

The Apostle Paul fits Rollins’ definition of a fundamentalist. For all his talk about a postmodern critique of the modern idolatry of pure reason, the reality is that Rollins stands with the modern philosophers in their rejection of revelation and their Cartesian starting point of the autonomous self instead of the self-revealing God of Scripture. His real problem is not with modernity, but with Scripture itself and with the orthodox tradition of theology preached by the Church down through all ages beginning with the Apostles.

This book could only appear to be “new,” “profound,” a “third way beyond liberalism and fundamentalism” to those who are biblically illiterate and blissfully ignorant of history. There is nothing here that Bultmann and Tillich didn’t already say and the move to liberation as the content of salvation was already made in the 1960s by Gutierrez, Cone and Reuther. There is no Gospel here; only a dreary moralism and a free-flowing religiousity detached from historic Christianity. So why are young Evangelicals eating this stuff up? Why don’t they recognize it as modern, liberal heresy?

All the answers I can think of are depressing. But it is a fact that sound doctrine is seldom preached from the seeker sensitive churches and the megachurches and that much of Evangelicalism has sold its soul to pragmatic church growth techniques derived from the social sciences and has embraced experience as its authority just as much as liberal Protestantism has. So when its young people are lured into hoary, old, liberal Protestant heresies via the Emergent Church, it should look at itself in the mirror and ask some hard questions about the place of expository preaching and Christian education in the contemporary church. All Rollins has to offer is a temporary half-way house between Christianity and Spongism. Can we not offer something better?

The Emergent Church: An Analysis

I just read the book, Why We're Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be) by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck published by Moody Press (2008). I think it is one of the very best books on the Emergent Church I have read and I won't hesitate to recommend it to students and anyone interested in this movement.

The biggest thing I took away from a reading of this book is the description of the Emergent Church as essentially modern. In fact, it is an extension of the same kind of cultural accommodation as is the Seeker Sensitive trend and before that the Church Growth Movement. If the more traditional Evangelical movement was tempted to compromise with modernity, the Emergent Church is tempted to compromise with postmodernity. Since I don't see postmodernity as a very sharp break with modernity, I don't see Emergent as all that different from what it is rebelling against. This tendency to compromise with culture is a besetting sin of the Church in every age and our age is no exception.

Another point made well in this book is that what Emergent people reject and criticize as "modern" is often much older than modernity and, in fact, predates the Enlightenment by centuries. For example, the analytical, verse by verse, word study kind of expository preaching often castigated as "modern" is demonstrated by DeYoung to be characteristic of Medieval and Patristic preaching. He gives other examples as well.

Postmodernity in its extreme forms is a rejection of all of Western culture going right to the pre-Socratic roots of the rational search for order that constitutes one of the two roots of Western civilization (with the other being the Bible). So by flirting with postmodernism, Emergent is flirting with a rejection of much more than merely modernity.

Another critique of the Emergent modus operendi is that Emergent writers and speakers hide behind the fact that they are just having a "conversation" and their contention that propositional truth is not possible whenever someone refutes their positive theological claims. But when the Emergent writers move to politics, they suddenly become very propositional and certain in denouncing what they perceive to be injustice. Like the 19-20th century liberal Protestants they tend to be fuzzy on doctrine and laser beam precise on politics. All this reveals their unique contribution to be 1) not new because it has all been said for decades by the liberals and 2) not credible insofar as their criticisms of more orthodox Evangelicals are just a rejection of theology in general rather than new and better theological proposals.

This book is balanced, fair, respectful and devastating. There is a tendency to focus primarily on the writings of Brian McLaren, which is fair enough since he is the most prolific writer in the movement. I don't see how anyone can read this book and come away thinking the Emergent Church has much of value to offer anyone today.