The final chapter of DA Carson’s book is a biblical meditation on Truth and Experience, and largely a gentle, but well-informed, commentary on 2 Peter 1. Here’s his opening line: “A good deal of the discussion of this book could be recast as a debate between the claims of truth and the claims of experience” (218). For the traditionalist, there is an emphasis on truth-claims, but with the Emergent movement there is not. But DA Carson knows there is plenty... Read more

This chapter is easier to cover because of the nature of the chapter: Chapter 7 of DA Carson’s book tones down the rhetoric. DA Carson is a biblical theologian (shaped as he is by the Reformers and esp the Calvinistic Baptist tradition, and now an Evangelical Free Church leader), but whatever you want to say about him, he knows his Bible and he wants this whole Emergent movement to be biblical (more biblical would be the expression). So, in chapter... Read more

No one who reads Brian McLaren or who finds him to be a significant theologian can afford not to read the seventh chapter of DA Carson’s book. Here’s what I mean: if DA Carson is right, McLaren’s book is seriously problematic and not just in a pedantic or miniscule way: if DA Carson is right, McLaren is seriously wrong. Here’s DA Carson’s essential conclusion: “Every chapter of this book [Generous Orthodoxy] succumbs to the same elementary analysis. Every chapter has... Read more

We now turn to chapter 5 of DA Carson’s book on the Emerging church. Patient listening is required, and that means patient sorting out of his argument and points, if we are to hear what is being said. I make no apologize for trotting out his case for the simple reason that we have to know what he is saying before any kind of reasonable response can be put forth. When I am done sorting out his case at the... Read more

In this fourth part of discussing DA Carson’s new book on the Emergent movement, I will consider a chapter on “Personal Reflections on PM’s contribution and challenges” (PM=Postmodernism). He begins with Premodern epistemology (reducing the postmodernity to an epistemology, which has its own problems, especially when it comes to explaining the Emergent Movement as a part of that PM). Essentially, God is the Knower and all human knowing is coming to terms with God’s All-Knowingness and Knowledge. He adds a... Read more

In this third installment of DA Carson’s important new book, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, we will briefly summarize and ask questions of his third chapter, a chapter on how well (or how well not) the Emergent leaders understand contemporary culture. Let me emphasize again that DA Carson opens with comments on the diversity of the Emergent movement, and so any comments that “this doesn’t apply to us” is not fair to him. He speaks to four weaknesses in... Read more