I should have made the distinction. Sorry.

From the later review we get assessments like.

Chapter 2
* No one can accuse the emergent movement of having low self-esteem! In this chapter, McLaren compares himself and his compatriots to such revolutionary figures as Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin (!), Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, and Galileo. [14-15] Unfortunately, with McLaren offering a highly inaccurate rendition of the latter’s experiences and of the history of geocentrism, the bad news is that the emergent movement’s members may indeed succeed as revolutionaries, albeit in an era where Wikipedia is treated as a reliable source. To that extent, the comparison to Paine, et al becomes tragic rather than inspiring.
* On the bright side, McLaren does well to rebel against any who, as he says, “tell us to be quiet and accept the conventional answers we’ve been given in the past…” [22] The problem, as we will see, is that it is hard to see where McLaren derives the alleged “conventional answers” he claims to be denying. To put it in a nutshell, we will be left with the distinct impression that the “conventional answers” are mere caricatures that McLaren has invented whole cloth.

It’s a two part review.

[edit: I see now that the link is in fact a review of the earlier rather than the later book.]

I wouldn’t take Sarah’s denunciation too seriously, I doubt JP does.

James does look at Brian McLaren here but isn’t particularly complimentary. However he doesn’t call him a disgusting individual or academic fraud, he does make this comment though.

I read about 60 pages of the book before I had to stop reading. McLaren constantly engages a sort of passive-aggressive manipulation-by-whimsy-and-sympathy narrative; this is shown in how he tries to refute the usual view of hell (which, I again remind the reader, I do NOT endorse) with emotional rhetoric rather than reason and/or exegesis.

Neither of these, however, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. What did THAT was his irresponsible scholarship, and particularly, his giving credence (by presentation in the mouths of characters) for ideas that resurrection was borrowed from Zoroastrianism and that the name “Pharisee” came from the word “Farsi, or Persian”.

Given JP’s fascination with reading works written by actual scholars with actual knowledge of their subject matter, it’s not surprising that he’d give McLaren short shrift. Incompetence and post-modernism seem to go hand in hand.

His reputation is one of “sneering contempt, personal invective, and childish insults.”

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/forumdisplay.php?f=86

I’ll admit that even a few quick Google searches haven’t really let me know what JP Holding is. I grant that my concerns are particular to my expertise in the most recent post in this exchange; you’ll find it under 12 March 1010.

As I told Andrew, I mainly brought up the modernism bit to make a transition into that part of the review, and as I told him, it was a joke, not an assertion that claimed to divide the world at the joints. I do remember some good discussions over at the PoMo and the Chu board, and sometimes I entertain the possibility of heading back over there, just before I look back at the pile of work that I’m behind on.

I probably, in three posts, should have addressed the Hebrew question, but you’re right that I haven’t yet. My main objection to the binary “Greco-Roman vs. Hebrew” is that every iteration of Christianity from Paul’s letters to the synoptic gospels and so on and so on is some sort of blend between the two. I recognize that the Chaldean Talmudic tradition to some extent rejected the middle-Platonist stylings of Philo and others, but I’m of the mind that rejecting the Greeks is still to be in some sort of relationship with the Greeks.

As I’ve noted in these posts, I prefer, when talking about Greek philosophy or modernist philosophy or feminist philosophy or any sort of philosophy to see citations from particular texts rather than broad statements about “THE Greco-Roman view” of this of “THE postmodernist view” of that. That’s why I’ve been enjoining (with varying degrees of clarity and success, I grant) that people talk about the content of ideas first and talk about sources and associations with fashionable and unfashionable intellectual movements later.

There is something I’ve learned, though: When J P Holding refers to someone(ie,McLaren) as “a thoroughly disgusting individual”, that person must have made some compelling points.

Holding also calls McLaren “an academic fraud”. That bit of irony doesn’t escape even me.

now, a question. i haven’t read mcclaren’s book and you know i don’t have a background in philosophy so help me out here nate. are you, along with some other review i read somewhere, saying that hellenization didn’t affect, and namely distort, the way evangelicals practice christianity in 2010 in the west? i had read several articles contrasting the greek and hebrew ways of knowing and the conclusion seemed to be that many of the oh-so-conservative evangelical/fundamentalist misreadings were due to thinking like greeks rather than hebrews. this one by george e. ladd was quite interesting the greek versus the hebrew view of man. i had heard this idea from a number of places so to now hear–if i’m understanding you correctly which i’m not sure i am–this is inaccurate leaves me needing more info.