DeVine on MacLaren

While I cannot agree with the Acts 29 Network's Reformed beliefs, I can agree with Mark DeVine that MacLaren and the emergents who trail him are certainly sloppy as philosophers, historians and theologians:

"I find MacLaren helpful if I am looking for insights into culture or if I want to know what can go wrong within evangelical churches and how anger and hurt might manifest itself among those who have had bad experiences in evangelical churches. But I do find McLaren alternately sloppy and disingenuous where the Bible, theology, church history, historical theology or evangelicalism are concerned." --Mark DeVine,
http://www.theologyprof.com/maclaren-and-acts-29-making-distinctions-among-missional-and-emerging-voices/

Disingenuous? I can't judge about that. But precision is not a postmodern virtue; nor can it be, since postmodernism's Nietzschean DNA predisposes truth to be a subjective, pragmatic matter. The simultaneous strength and weakness of the emergent phenomeneon is that it is loathe to make distinctions. Modernism was all about analyzing, separating, distinguishing, identifying, categorizing. The postmodern church seeks to undo all that, but all too often purchases unity by embracing contradiction. (Note: contradiction, not paradox.)

The Reformation was a Modernist phenomenon. In taking his stand, Luther wound up separating himself from his past. John Calvin's Institutes are a model of theologial analysis. It will be interesting to see how Reformed folks "emerge," because to do so they will have to deny their identity as Reformed, it seems to me.

Postmodern emergent churches will never be "precise" enough for

TULIP lovers; and similarly, TULIP lovers will never be inclusive enough for MacLaren types.

Far better, I think, to make the U-turn, and have my cake and eat it too among the premoderns, who refuse to cast their lot with only the analysis of ratio or simply the sythesis of intellectus, and instead employ both. You can't build cathedrals with only a knowledge of mathematics and geometry, but you certainly can't build them without it.