I've recently picked up D. A. Carson's book, "Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church." It is a very informative read. Carson writes in a very straight-forward manner, not masking anything. I feel like I'm sitting in one of his lecture classes.
Carson attempts to offer a survey of the emergent church movement, although I'm not sure if he focuses too heavily on authors like McLaren, and also lumps some authors such as Kimball into the mix that would separate themselves a bit from emergent (granted this book is about two years old). In his summary, Carson highlights what he feels are the strengths of the movement. However, he also points out what he feels are its greatest weaknesses.
Carson continually returns to what he sees is the Emergent movements blanket condemnation of modernism and everything associated with modernism. He thinks that Emergent is too quick to write off modernism and too quick to jump into postmodernism, which he debates is even an accurate description of the current cultural movement.
Further, Carson seems to isolate the shift of postmodernism to strictly region of epistemology. I'm surprised by this, because by reading and listening to various Emergent thinkers, I find that epistemology is only one area in which a cultural shift is noticed. There are also changes in ecclessiology, missiology, understandings of salvation, and much more. I think Carson ignores a lot of this.
Has anyone else read/listened to any D. A. Carson? If so, what did you think? Any reccomendations for online resources? I know Carson's book, "Becoming Conversant..." was originally presented at Cedarville University as a series of lectures, and as such a response was posted online
here.
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