Preface to my response

We owe it to one another, and I feel I am a journalist in all this rather than someone to spar with, to listen as carefully as we can. Hence, I belabored a point by point summary of what DA Carson says. I am confident that what I said adequately represents him; and though I occasionally made some evaluations, by and large I left him alone.

If we are to live as those who love God and love others, then we must at all costs seek to listen to the Other. And when we do we find that our lives are opened to the Truth more than if we shut ourselves off. So, we need to listen to DA Carson, just as he needs to listen to the Emergent folks.

I really care that I am fair both to DA Carson and to the Emergent movement, and I really care that I’m doing my best to understand both and represent each as they wish to be. Getting one’s arms around this wondrous new bunch of Emergents is not an easy task, and so I’m asking for a little slack if I’m not appreciating how diverse it really is. But here goes…

In other words, I really do care if I have lived according to my book, The Jesus Creed, and whether I have followed the gentle light of Alan Jacobs in his Theology of Reading.