I've run into another snag on my series about New Creation. It's conceptual more than anything - I know where I want to go but I want to make sure that I'm getting there in an honest way. I've been doing a bit of reading in the prophets, and I've decided that I don't think it's coincidence that we in American Christianity read so little of the prophets and also think so little about new creation. The prophets are rich with this theme, which makes it imperative that their voices are incorporated into my current project in the right way. So I'm doing more thinking right now, and its mostly along the lines of what role exile plays in the OT's theology of new creation (exile being the condition to which most of the prophets were speaking). Exile from the garden and exile from the land are parallels, I think, and I'm not quite sure how that changes my approach. And NT Wright's insights along these lines are helpful as well - if he's correct in asserting that Jesus' understanding of his own mission was to bring the exile to an end, then this is something that needs to be incorporated. In short - I have no shortage of data and what I think are some good categories, but it's a bit of work matching them up.

In the meantime, I recently received a review copy of McLaren's new book Everything Must Change that I've been working my way through. I have to confess that I'm having mixed feelings about it. I'm about two thirds of the way through it, and I think he's missing some significant pieces. I mention this here because I think those missing pieces would be filled quite nicely by a robust view of new creation, but I'm just not sure it's there. As a result, I'm not really finding the "third way" that this book is supposed to represent (as defined against the traditional conservative and liberal approaches). Don't get me wrong; there's a lot of good stuff in the book. But it's mixed with some not-so-good stuff, and it feels incomplete.

I'm also finding that I have a hard time taking some of his points seriously when he's attempting to argue from scripture. I don't really think (for example) that the feeding of the five thousand is a prophetic denunciation of consumerism, or that the parable of the landowner in Matt 20 is really about distributing wealth. It seems as though the farther I get into the book, the more the arguments sound canned and scripture interpreted to fit the arguments - a practice that he rightly critiques earlier in the book. I put the book down after lunch today and my most immediate thought was that Brian would benefit from teaming up with a really good biblical scholar, someone who knows how to exegete well. And I think this is particularly unfortunate given his context; he already knows that he's going to be critiqued, so why not do as much as possible to put his arguments in the most credible light? I think there are a lot of folks who will read this book looking for something to criticize, and those folks will be all over sloppy exegesis. That those folks are, generally speaking, often the ones who need to hear what he has to say makes it worse. He really doesn't say much that I find objectionable - I'd happily agree with many of the arguments that he advances, if he were more cautious about how he makes them and, specifically, what he does with scripture in order to get there.

To get things moving on the blog again, I'm going to attempt two posts a week - one from EMC, and one that continues my reflections on a theology of new creation. I'd like to take a shot at rearguing some of McLaren's thoughts in what I consider a way that's more true to the text, and I think that along the way we'll find that many of the holes can be filled by incorporating this theology into McLaren's arguments.

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