This week my time has been filled with preparing for tomorrow’s Awana Grand Prix and car show event. It’s fun seeing the excitement of the kids and the even greater excitement of the parents as they prepare their pinewood creations for race day. I’m pretty confident that some people take this thing way too seriously, but the results are quite impressive. If you don’t take my word for it, do a google image search for “pinewood derby cars”.
Anyway, the link de-jour is a panel discussion between Al Mohler and other Southern Theological Seminary faculty on Brian McLaren’s book “A New Kind of Christianity”.
The whole discussion is well worth your time. Here’s just one of many excellent snippets from the discussion going to the heart of the concept of the fictitious greco-roman narrative (not sure which faculty member this is):
His [McLaren's] Greco-Roman narrative paradigm is a clumsy invention that has had no existence either in secular or religious history, and there is a reason he never quotes Aristotle, he never quotes Plato, Kant, he never quotes anyone because he can’t find anything to sustain it.
Mohler’s theory of the book:
“I think this book is very credible, very convincing, very liberating, very fascinating, and extremely compelling so long as you don’t read the Bible! The problem is the Bible, that’s the great issue. If you actually read the Bible your going to end up having to say this is just a dishonest attempt to make the Bible say what it doesn’t say, or to refuse to admit that the bible does say what it clearly says. Because at the end of the day his narrative subversion just doesn’t work.”
Follow-up question #1: If these things are true, does this make McLaren the biblical wolf in sheep’s clothing? (though one member of the panel says that with this book McLaren ditches the sheep’s clothing)
Follow-up question #2: What Biblical examples do we have regarding our interactions with false teachers? I’ll prime the pump with a couple: Jesus and Nicodemus, and Paul and the Judaizers/gnostics and such.
