51I3HlyvUeL._SCLZZZZZZZ_ I highly suggest heading over to Christianity Today and checking out Scot McKnight’s review of A New Kind of Christianity.  It reads as a fair, but critical review[1] of McLaren’s work.

McKnight is critical of McLaren’s attempt to write a myth of Christianity’s Constantinian Fall and the creation of Theos.  He does like, for the most part, McLaren’s view of the Bible, but finds the following flaw of McLaren’s evolutionary idea of God:

In particular, the evolutionary theory of God contains another fatal flaw. […]  The flow of the Bible is not neat. It doesn’t fit into an evolutionary scheme. There are as many mercy passages in the Old Testament as there are grace-and-love passages in the New. What’s more, passages about God’s grace stand side-by-side with passages about God’s wrath (e.g., Hosea 1-3; Matt. 23-25). The evolutionary approach doesn’t work because that’s not how Scripture’s narrative works. There is wrath in Revelation and there is covenant love in Genesis. And Jesus talks more about Abba and hell than does the rest of the Bible combined.

McLaren has responded to McKnight’s review at his blog (in a post).  If you read the review, please go and read the response.

Notes:
  1. I have not finished the book yet, I must admit [↩]
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