As a student at Regent College (the Canadian school—not Regent University in Virginia, which is a rather different sort of place) from 1997-2001, I had the opportunity to get to know Dr. John Stackhouse just a bit, and to appreciate him both for his first-rate theological mind and for his acerbic and rather black sense of humor (most notably expressed in his occasional turns as singer-songwriter in chapel). I’ve continued to appreciate him ever since, both for his books and more recently for his blog.
The newest post on his blog at the moment finds Dr. Stackhouse taking a swipe at D. A. Carson—and not fake Carson, either, but the real one. From the sound of things, it seems like Dr. Carson, ordinarily one of the best and most worthwhile NT scholars out there (at least on the evangelical side of things), needed a quote for his book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications and couldn’t find one from an actual emerging-church figure that fit—so he found the best quote he could find, from an article Dr. Stackhouse had written a decade before, and jimmied it in. Unfortunately, the result was that Dr. Carson ended up significantly misinterpreting and misrepresenting both the quote and its author, as Dr. Stackhouse points out (at some length).
Unfortunately, I say, for two reasons. The first is that this sort of academic misfeasance, minor though it may be, only weakens the argument Dr. Carson was trying to make. Whether you agree with his view of the emerging church or not, that’s no good thing, because to the extent that his challenge is valid, it needs to be heard and addressed—and to the extent that it isn’t, it still needs to be presented as ably as possible so that it can be answered as fully as possible. Second, this sort of misreading/uncharitable reading, whether deliberate or due to sloppy work, is unbecoming of Christian scholars, and yet (as one of Dr. Stackhouse’s commenters notes) we’re starting to see it with distressing frequency in arguments between Christian academics. Another example would be the exchange between Roger Olson and John Piper over the I-35W bridge collapse, as Alan noted over at The Thinklings. It’s getting very tiresome, and I think it makes Christians look bad. We ought to have the grace to extend our fellow believers at least the first courtesy of disagreement: the assumption that though they might be wrong (as we see it), they are wrong for good reasons. To assume that since they’re wrong, it must be for bad reasons (whether intellectually bad, morally bad, or both) is uncharitable and un-Christlike, and we need to stop doing it.