McLaren McKnight Nice Guy Fest
***Thank you Scot McKnight for working so hard to understand and interpret the emerging movement to a widening audience. As a professor in a Southern Baptist Seminary I am doing my best to correct Donald Carson’s distortive reduction of the movement “almost” to the writings of Brian McLaren that too many evangelicals have already accepted. The straw man is already knocked down. Carson’s reductionistic caricature matters to me because I believe many dimensions of the emerging movement offer much needed insights for the global church, including evangelicals and my own Southern Baptist denomination.
I do question whether Brian McLaren is as gracious and unassuming as McKnight depicts him. I mean in his writings, not his stage or coffee table persona. We know he has got that disarming “conduct” down. But what we write matters too, as McKnight has rightly noted in his critique of Carson’s book on emerging.
As Mcknight notes in his excellent paper delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary, we do not know for sure how big the emerging movement is or will become. We do know that the Southern Baptist Convention is quite large. There are also many Southern Baptist pastors, mostly youngish ones, who are part of the emerging conversation. I am convinced that the SBC would benefit much from certain insights and emphases prized within the emerging movement conversation.
However, I do think that McKnight gives McLaren a bit of a pass regarding how gracious he is. McLaren is, as McKnight says, a provocateur. For those he sees fit to caricature, critique, and often dismiss, (such as conservative evangelicals, you know, like Southern Baptists such as myself) the provocations sting, not only because we find that they hit their target (though they sometimes do) but because of the caricature element, the straw man knocked down. These reductionistic slams strike many of us as mean spirited. I am not sure the designation provocateur is a sufficient fig leaf for one so pumped up about praxis to hide behind.
I do question whether Brian McLaren is as gracious and unassuming as McKnight depicts him. I mean in his writings, not his stage or coffee table persona. We know he has got that disarming “conduct” down. But what we write matters too, as McKnight has rightly noted in his critique of Carson’s book on emerging.
As Mcknight notes in his excellent paper delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary, we do not know for sure how big the emerging movement is or will become. We do know that the Southern Baptist Convention is quite large. There are also many Southern Baptist pastors, mostly youngish ones, who are part of the emerging conversation. I am convinced that the SBC would benefit much from certain insights and emphases prized within the emerging movement conversation.
However, I do think that McKnight gives McLaren a bit of a pass regarding how gracious he is. McLaren is, as McKnight says, a provocateur. For those he sees fit to caricature, critique, and often dismiss, (such as conservative evangelicals, you know, like Southern Baptists such as myself) the provocations sting, not only because we find that they hit their target (though they sometimes do) but because of the caricature element, the straw man knocked down. These reductionistic slams strike many of us as mean spirited. I am not sure the designation provocateur is a sufficient fig leaf for one so pumped up about praxis to hide behind.
posted by Mark DeVine at 5:04 PM
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