A Place Called Vertigo Book Review:: A Generous Orthodoxy?

Here you go. A Place Called Vertigo :: A Generous Orthodoxy? I'm also working on a book review of a lesser know book. Hopefully i will get it done before I leave on vacation. The blog is offline, but the archive of this post is here.

Book review on McLaren.

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While I agree that we often fight the symptoms of the disease and not the disease itself, I find McLaren's diagnosis of the disease incorrect. It is not the system; the system is another symptom. The disease is ourselves! In the previous chapter, McLaren dismissed the doctrine of "total depravity" as "depressing" (page 177). Yet Scripture is clear that the disease is our own sinfulness/depravity—e.g., Genesis 6:5; 1 Kings 8:46; Psalm 14:1-3; Ecclesiastes 7:20; Jeremiah 17:9; Mark 7:20-23; Romans 3:9-23, 7:7-25, 8:5-8; Ephesians 2:1-3; 1 John 1:8-10. Regardless of how "depressing" McLaren finds the doctrine of total depravity, the important thing is whether or not this doctrine is true! If we are, as David said, "sinful at birth" (Psalm 51:5) and if it is true that, as David and the Apostle Paul said, "there is no one who does good" (Psalm 53:3 and Romans 3:12), then the "system sick with consumerism, greed, fear, violence, and misplaced faith" is just another symptom of the diseased humans who, as Paul tells us in Romans 1:29-31 (NIV, emphasis added), have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. . . . envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. . . . [and] are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. . . . [and] invent ways of doing evil. . . [and] are senseless, faithless, heartless, [and] ruthless."