Jake Allen’s Ockhamist.com

D.A. Carson has once again put his scholarly prowess with the pastoral heart to good use in Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications. He has basically read everything on or by the Emerging Church movement (or emergent/YS) and is somewhat troubled by what he sees. Not completely, mind you – there are many good and faithful qualities in the desires of many “emergent” leaders. But often the desire to be inclusive leads to the danger of excluding the gospel – the whole counsel of God, once and for all revealed to the saints.

Carson’s critique of postmodernism, and specifically the emergent view of postmodernism, is spot-on and insightful. Those of you who have read The Gagging of God will find a lot of repeat material here. What is appropriate to Carson’s restatement of this material here is that he asks the question, Has the emerging church correctly understood the cultural changes from the postmodern influence? The answer is “not exactly” and Carson carefully and methodically backs it up. Using representative samples from the movement, he critiques the emerging church’s tendency toward manipulative reductionism, its condemnation of confessional Christianity, some theological shallowness and instances of intellectual incoherence.

One example is his corrective of Dan Kimball’s writings promoting the need to “deconstruct” and “redefine” biblical terms. Carson gives Kimball the benefit of the doubt that Kimball merely wants to explain terms to biblically illiterate people in terms they can understand. But he takes Kimball to task for throwing around loaded literary and scholastic terms without a proper understanding of the freight they bear.

Some readers might think Carson spends a tad too much time on Brian McLaren. It is understandable that he would do so, given McLaren’s grandfatherly guru status. Still, I think that Carson demonstrates in text and footnotes that he is very engaged with the literature of the emerging church and could reasonably take his arguments down the paths of many authors – including Robert E. Webber, Joseph R. Myers, Jonathan R. Wilson, Stanley J. Grenz, and Steve Chalke.

Throughout, Carson writes with a lucid style. He is clearly more intelligent and better informed than you, but he really wants you to understand. He does not dumb-down the message and remains very precise. The experience is like having a natural conversation with your “smart” friend.

One of my favorite paragraphs is:

“As for Calvinism, McLaren says that there are two ways for Reformed Christians to honor Calvin and his fellow Reformers: defend and promote their post-medieval formulations, or ‘follow their example in seeking to construct formulations of faith that are as fitting to our postmodern times as theirs were to their post-medieval times.’ This is a bit like saying that an American is not someone who adopts the heritage of American values (however tweaked or gently modified), but someone who crosses an ocean to look for another country.” (179)