Charles Wear posted an article by Jordan Cooper on next-wave. Its a really good article and I hope y'all find it as interesting and as thoughtful as I did.
The 'Emerging Church' threat By Jordan Cooper
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Thoughts, rants, laughs,bad grammar and misspellings of a southern girl trying to just make it through the journey of life.
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4 comments:
Well, I think there's a good deal of lack of interaction from both sides. I'll point out that D.A. Carson doesn't need to fundraise, as Cooper suggests: he's a salaried, tenured research prof at a sizeable seminary: he's never going to be a big seller amongst the mainstream since he writes mostly at a scholarly level. Let's face it: people aren't going to reach out and grab "Justification and Variegated Nomism: The Paradoxes of Paul", or "Greek Accents" off the shelf of your local Christian bookseller as they check out with their Purpose Drive Life Journal and latest edition of CCM magazine. So to appeal to "fundraising" is probably not accurate in this instance. In noteable instances with other personalities, the charge of "preaching to the choir" and "building the base" are probably more accurate; I think Dr. Carson is probably more inquisitive than anything. Here's an excerpt from the Preface of his book on Emergent:
"Whenever a Christian movement comes along that presents itself as
reformist, it should not be summarily dismissed. Even if one ultimately decides that the movement embraces a number of worrying weaknesses, it may also have some important things to say that the rest of the Christian
world needs to hear. So I have tried to listen respectfully and carefully; I hope and pray that the leaders of this movement will similarly listen to what I have to say." That doesn't seem like appealing to the base to me; Carson has his own beliefs, of course (and so does McLaren, for that matter), but in anything I've read by Dr. Carson, base-appeals are NOT what I'm getting from the man. I haven't heard the audio, so I don't know what's going on with that. I do know he read almost anything he could get his hands on by Fish, Derrida, Rorty etc. before commenting on postmodernism. It just doesn't seem like his style.
Secondly, the charge about ignoring mission just doesn't stick to Carson. After all, he arranged a whole convention on finding mission in postmodern context, and then had all the plenaries from that confrence published in, "Telling the Truth". In fact, in Gagging of God, Carson flat-out states that modernism has failed and we need to focus on contextualizing our message properly in mission and devotes sections of a couple of chapters and the final one, arguing not only cultural contextualization, but theological contextualization in mission as well.
Lastly, I find it interesting that Cooper cites Newbiggin in seeming opposition to Carson, when in fact Carson quotes Newbiggin favourably multiple times in Gagging of God.
I have nothing against Jordan Cooper, and I know already know that Carson's take on the Emerging Church is going to be, "these guys are creating an ad hoc spirituality and making a mockery of the need to interact with Scripture", but after reading that blog post, I'm far more suspicious of Cooper now than I am of Carson.
So, having noted that Carson's Emergent book is on sale for $10 at amazon.com, I ordered it, just to say "cram it!" to Cooper. ;) Nah, I'm not that mean-spirited.
I find it a little unsettling that Jordan launches against Carson without providing the reader context or even narrative to back his calims of an attack against the emerging church or the use of the book to "fundraise". not that i find it unbelieveable that htis happens,but there is a sense that cooper is guilty of the same charge he is leveling.
I don't think any of this does any of us any good. another reason that i don't believe the church is emerging or is ready to emerge is that even the "emergent" among us are modern at the core.
sigh...
I feel like I need to read the article again. I must have been in some weird mood, becasue I remember some of the things he said were very good. :P
although this has accused some really good discussion between Blake and I.
I also found some other articles later that only proved that EC is just another marketing movement and causing more lines to drawn. this concerns me and let's me know more that for people like us there might be a 'place'. ya know?
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