You may have read here on Andrew Jones’ comment that Doug Pagitt has invited Don Carson to spend some time with him at Solomon’s Porch.
Well I can report that, apparently, this won’t be happening. Someone who wants to remain anonymous, but is close to Carson emailed me saying they wanted people to know that he is just totally uninterested in spending time with people from the Emerging Church – which they felt reflected very badly on the book:
"Carson has shown little interest in making contact with anyone involved with emergent and the probability that he would visit one of the emergent churches, like Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is highly unlikely. His unwillingness to dialogue with leaders of emergent (or attend any of their gatherings) seems to make the title of the book ‘Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church very ironic."
What a shame. I hope it isn’t true. Whatever the outcome, let’s make sure that we remain open to ‘the other’…
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3 responses to “Carson won’t be meeting Pagitt…”
D. A. won’t converse with Pagitt
[^] Seminary professor & author D.A. Carson who among others has leveled some scathing criticisms of the emerging church was apparently invited to talk with Doug Paigitt of Soloman’s Porch (an emerging church recently featured on the PBS…
Well, I’d like to invite him on a pub-crawl and a curry… and I promise not to converse about Emerging Church… think he’ll go for it?
It would be fair enough to criticize *books* without needing to hang out with their authors — after all, most readers of Pagitt’s books aren’t going to trek to Minneapolis, and publishing texts that takes them out of the context in which they were conceived and turns them into ‘bodies’ of work that are recontextualized in reading communities that may have assumptions quite different from the author’s.
I haven’t read Carson, but from what others say about his book, it sounds like one of the biggest category errors he makes is trying to talk about “the Emerging Church” (i.e., communities of people) on the basis of their pastors’ books — or perhaps more accurately, a reading of these books that ignores that they were produced in a context. I don’t find that surprising; people of Carson’s theological bent often make similar mistakes with Paul’s letters, treating them as if they were treatises in systematic theology rather than a means of carrying on at a distance conversations that began, for the most part, in person.
Blessings,
Dylan