This is a portion of a post written by Kevin DeYoung on his blog, reviewing Brian McLaren's newest book. It's an excellent post.

This is where you can read the rest of Kevin's review: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/

Problem 1: A Stifling Approach and Sweeping Caricatures

For all the rhetoric about desiring an honest dialogue and inviting criticism as “a gift” (13, 25), McLaren’s actual approach to argumentation makes probing conversation more difficult. When he positions himself as a martyr (243) and equates attacks on him with attacks on the abolitionists (87), it hardly encourages disagreement. In fact, he ends the book by referencing the first-century Jewish rabbi Gamaliel who famously advocated a “wait and see” approach to the new Christian movement (242ff.). The idea being: let’s give McLaren a break and just see how things turn out. That’s one approach, and appropriate in some situations (though Luke never actually commends Gamaliel). But the apostles never advocated a “wait and see” approach with false teachers in their midst. There’s a time to wait and a time to correct, reprove, and rebuke, (2 Tim. 2:25; 4:2; Titus 1:9).

It’s also hard to engage in conversation when McLaren paints such an unflattering picture of those he imagines will oppose him. Traditionalists, he argues, approach Scripture the way they do so they won’t get fired from their jobs and so the “love gifts” will keep flowing in. Insiders “who depend on the constitutional system [of reading the Bible] for their salary and social status will be unlikely to question it and equally likely to defend it passionately” (80). This is grossly unfair. If you are serious about receiving critique, it doesn’t help to position yourself as a martyr all the while slashing and burning the opposition to whom you have indiscriminately imputed the worst possible motives.

No group can exist without a devil, McLaren says at one point (175). This is probably true. In which case I suggest the best devil is the devil. But for McLaren, the devil appears to be fundamentalist conservatives. Case in point, this description of the Christian community in the 1980s and 1990s:

A large number of both Protestant and Catholic leaders aligned with a neoconservative political ideology, trumpeting what they called “conservative family values,” but minimizing biblical community values. They supported wars of choice, defended torture, opposed environmental protection, and seemed to care more about protecting the rich from taxes than liberating the poor from poverty or minorities from racism. They spoke against big government as if big was bad, yet they seemed to see big military and big business as inherently good. They wanted to protect unborn human life inside the womb, but didn’t seem to care about born human life in slums or prisons or nations they considered enemies. They loved to paint gay people as a threat to marriage, seeming to miss the irony that heterosexual people were damaging marriage at a furious pace without any help from gay couples. They consistently relegated females to second-class status, often while covering up for their fellow males when they fell into scandal or committed criminal abuse. They interpreted the Bible to favor the government of Israel and to marginalize Palestinians, and even before September 11, 2001, I feared that through their influence Muslims were being cast as the new scapegoats, targets of a scary kind of religious inspired bigotry. (7)

I have no problem critiquing the uneasy marriage of evangelicals and the Republican Party, but no conservative Christian would recognize himself in McLaren’s caricature. This description displays the same emotional badgering and intellectual bankruptcy that we find today in those on the right who think Obama is the anti-Christ and every liberal is a clandestine Bolshevik.

But McLaren writes like this all the time. For example, he describes those who haven’t entered the “postmodern transition” as “institutional children of the era of Sir Isaac Netwon, the conquistadors, colonialism, the Enlightenment, nationalism and capitalism” (8). Really? Are we that bad? I don’t think most people even know about the conquistadors, except maybe that they got trounced for a while on the tag-team circuit in the WWF.

And we haven’t even gotten to his description of exclusivists who believe conscious faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for a saving relationship with God. These sort of people use John 14:6 like a “revolver” (212). They are “inherently anxious,” “vulnerable to paranoia,” and intent on ridding the world of everyone they disagree with (212-13). “Ultimately, then, your group is normative and belongs here; others are anomalies and don’t belong. They don’t really have the same right to exist that you do.” Has anyone ever used John 14:6 to argue that non-Christians don’t have a right to exist?

McLaren’s not finished. He says that in this exclusivist mindset the only options are: (a) convert and eliminate otherness, (b) colonize and dominate, (c) ignore and exclude, (d) persecute and shame, or (e) cleanse the world through mass murder. I’m not making this up. You can find the breakdown on page 213. Why not say “Offer the bread of life that they might experience forgiveness of sin and enjoy God forever”? I can’t tell if McLaren thinks he is describing actual people and positions or if the “them” for him are so heinous that he can’t imagine describing them in any other way. Either way, the demonizing hardly invites ongoing dialogue.