Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church
A necessary read for those interested in the "emergent conversation." Carson presents a relevant and thoughtful look at the musings of the emerging church with a heavy emphasis on the literary corpus of Brian McLaren. Unfortunately much of the critique of emergents (at least that has found its way to my perusal) has lacked both the relevance and the forethought of Carson's work. Carson attempts to provide his own critical analysis of "post-modernity" in terms of culture and (primarily) epistemology, and then turns to a critical analysis of the emergent church's relationship to post-modernity. Carson essentially paints the emerging church (read McLaren) as quite rightly exegeting the culture, yet failing to do so in light of the consistent Christian witness to the content of Scripture throughout the history of the Church. Carson alleges that emergents play loose with the truth, and consistently look to extra-biblical sources for the normative Christian life.
I quite appreciate Carson's views, however, in spite of some very accurate assessment to the place of truth and the Bible in emerging conversations, I see Carson failing to completely comprehend some of what McLaren's aims are. The most appropriately representative example being his use of the character "Neo" to illustrate McLaren's beliefs and attitudes. (Neo being the primary espouser of some fairly radical ideas throughout the course of McLarens's trilogy of so-called "creative non-fiction") McLaren states at the outset of his trilogy that none of the views of his fictional characters are to be confused with his own. This continues throughout Carson's book. I was dissapointed that the place of spiritual authority was again left out of the conversation, as this is the issue I see as the issue with emergent Christians; however, one can quite easily see the correllation between the issue of spiritual authority, and the issues of truth and biblical authority that Carson addresses.
I would recommend this book to anyone approaching the emergent conversation from any angle. Carson gives the discerning reader plenty of food for thought, and attemtps to give appropriate praise and criticism to the emergent church, wherever either is due. His consistent pattern is to hold true to his best understanding of scripture, in spite of his own culturally inculcated desires that would speak in contradiction to that understanding. For this, certainly, he is to be commended.
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