New Perspective Paul Archive
Articles related to the New Perspective on Paul.
Book Review - A Generous Orthodoxy (12/30/04 - 0 Comments)
In this article I will be reviewing Brian McLaren's book A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN, known hereafter simply as A Generous Orthodoxy. This is going to be quite a long book review - probably the longest I have written. To spare you having to read the full text if you are not so-inclined, I will ruin any sense of expectation by giving in advance my general impressions of this book. In short, it is awful. I consider it, in terms of content, one of the worst I have ever read and it stands as damning evidence of what passes for Christian reading in our day. Though it was easy to read, and even enjoyable at times, throughout the text Brian McLaren has consistently, deliberately and systematically dismantled historical Protestantism. From Sola Scriptura to hell to biblical inerrancy, nothing is sacred. At this point, those who are devotees of McLaren, The Emergent Church and post-modernism, will no doubt already have felt their blood boil and will be ready for a fight. I would encourage those people to keep reading. Those who are more traditional Christians will be grappling with an all-too-familiar feeling that this book represents yet another attack on the faith. And that is exactly what this book is. The remainder of this review will concern itself with showing how this book does away with biblical faith, replacing it with something far less godly and far more human. In short, something that is simply not Christianity.
It is difficult to critique the writing of people like McLaren because discerning what they actually believe is far more difficult than finding what they do not believe. Settling on those beliefs is akin to nailing Jello to the wall - it is a near impossible task as the Jello has no consistent form or shape, always changing, always conforming to what contains it. We are often left to read between the lines, interpreting what the author believes in light of what he rejects.
One has to become accustomed to McLaren's rather odd style of writing. He is able author who writes in a conversational tone, continually pokes fun at himself, uses many long sentences and, by his own admission, uses parentheses far too often.
