[addendum, 3/7/10: Robert, I do have to admit a bit of amusement that at McLaren's own blog, he refers to McKnight's review not as "my old buddy Scot's take" but as "the Christianity Today review." I shouldn't be that way, but I suppose one should confess one's small-mindedness. ]

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/march/3.59.html

The reference to Rorty was a postscript, the thrust of my post was that there does appear to be an apparent misunderstanding, by those who took issue with your review, and that misunderstanding appears to be a confusion about whether you were speaking about effective or excellent (read virtuous) communication.
It is only if there is no misunderstanding, but rather a rebuttal that there are no issues of excellence at stake, only issues of effectiveness, that the Rortian postscript will apply. If that were to prove to be the case, then your remarks would by no means be irrelevant since whether they would be regarded as valid is yet to be decided, thus obliquely raising one of the pragmatic problems with truth-as-victory which is the elusiveness of a point in time when victory may be declared.

[...] Why Getting Plato Right Does Matter: A Follow-up on my McLaren Review – Philosophy Theology &#… [...]

I probably should have written more on the Hegelian angle, but I figured the Calvinist blogosphere would pick up on that more than they did. That McLaren considers himself “more evolved” than his interlocutors and that he sees the “seeds” of future developments inherent in those stages’ contradictions reads like something straight out of Phenomenology of Spirit, and it’s a progressive view of history that I don’t share. I do think that dialectic reasoning is a mighty handy tool for doing history and for other pursuits, but I suppose I’m suspicious of that particular metanarrative. (Oh, wait. I thought the people incredulous in the face of metanarrative were the… no, it can’t be.)