A good starting ground for Wright might be his new book which is due out in the US any time now.

i also agree that it is somewhat valid to say that we can’t know anything of faith for sure in an empirical, post-Enlightenment sort of way. but, as i said in my post, i do believe that the Holy Spirit gives “ears to hear and eyes to see” and that we can be sure that all that is revealed to us as our eyes are opened to see Truth can be counted as certain for us, even if our only reason for doing so is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

thanks also for the book suggestion, i’ll definitely have to check that out. as Mr. Wellcome said in his comment on my initial post in this series, this book only represents a small slice of the conversation and i definitely want to get more takes on the Emergent issue. so any recommendations there would be appreciated, as well as a recommendation on a good place to start (except for What Saint Paul Really Said) reading N.T. Wright.

I agree that if indeed McLaren is buying into Von Harnack, that is cause for alarm. I see no value in pitting Jesus vs. Paul. One of the things N. T. Wright has helped me to see is that Jesus and Paul are even more of a single thread than I even perceived before.

However, I do think there is another way to view contextualization that doesn’t give away the store as McLaren appears to do. I am fascinated by VanHoozer’s canonical-linguistic theo-drama model (presented in his Drama of Doctrine book) that sees the church as improvisational actors (improvising the expression of the Gospel in each time and place) under the direction of the Spirit but taking their cues and directions from the canonical Scriptures. It is that last part of the chain that McLaren seems to weaken.

As to the question of faith and certainty, I think it’s possible that you’ve misunderstood McLaren. If not, I do at least know emergent leaders whose critique is of a cartesian, foundationalist kind of certainty, not of the witness of the Spirit as you put it. I think it is only honesty to say that, no, I do not have “absolute certainty” about the Scriptures in the modernist, rationalist sense of “certainty,” but I do have the firm assurance of the witness of the Spirit to the testimony of the Word. Thus, I do have a kind of certainty, but it is not the certainty of the scientist in the laboratory (whom I would argue, from a Van Tillian perspective, does not really have an absolute certainty either, but rather has faith in certain presuppositions that can’t be ultimately “proven” but upon which he bases his trust that his experimental results are indeed “truth.”)

Doug Wilson today posted something on his blog (as part of this post) in response to this question: If you (Wilson) are wary of modernity’s affects on the church and so is McLaren, aren’t you really on the same page? Wilson says where he and McLaren-style emergent diverge is in the area of certainty. McLaren seems to say there is no certainty of any kind; Wilson says there is no modernist certainty…but there is a biblical certainty. Here’s the quote:

I want people to leave the false certainties of modernity for the genuine certainties of Scripture. They [McLaren-style Emergents] want people to leave the false certainties of modernity for a bundle of uncertainties masquerading as humility. The one thing that emergent preachers cannot do (and remain emergent) is thunder the Word. “Thus saith the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, hear the word of the Lord, you sons of men . . .” And yet Scripture says that the one who speaks should speak as the very oracles of God. Given their assumed (and unassuming) ethos, they simply cannot do this. Not without ground level repentance.

And finally, I think you are correct that McLaren blew it in his interaction with Sam. At first I was willing to let McLaren off the hook, giving the benefit of the doubt that his “I didn’t know how to answer him” comment was simply being honest about feeling overwhelmed in trying to answer for the Holocaust. All of us have experienced moments when we are left a little speechless because we know a pat answer won’t suffice. But then you very skilfully pointed a way that McLaren could have used the son’s sacrifice to explain what Jesus really did do on our behalf. But instead, McLaren whigs out with a “God must be proud of your son” answer. That makes him sound as if he’s more concerned about people’s feelings than their souls; as you point out, not a good qualification for a minister of the Gospel