Hey Brian! Pipe down!

the A-Team is tired of taking Brian McLaren's jabs lying down...

“But Timbo,” you say, “McLaren is writing a foreword to Grenz’s book, and he doesn’t have space to cite the text or develop an argument!” I agree, and this is precisely the problem. Throughout his writings, Mr. McLaren relies on subtle “suggestions” which are undeveloped and/or unsupported by facts. There often appears to be more innuendo than insight, more assumption than analysis. When McLaren wrote the words of conservatives in his fictional trilogy, many of us felt that he was putting words into our mouths as well by misrepresenting what we believe. A rule of criticism is to be able to express alternative viewpoints in ways which a proponent of that viewpoint would be able to recognize it as his own: this McLaren emphatically does not do. What he often does instead is uses an inappropriate forum in which to respond to his critics, and this brings us to the issue of appropriateness in discourse, wherein McLaren has moved from mere provocation in his own books to more of a passive-aggressive judgmentalism in his contributions to and endorsements of other books