Premise
Try this on for size: most of the best Christian authors are dead.
Ramblings
If I try to think of authors today that will be quoted by folks in 20 years, I can only think of a bare few. In fact, I can only think of one at the moment- Philipp Yancey. There should also be room for Fee and Stuart, though I believe that they will probably never write a third book together.
What about Max Lucado? Rick Warren? Tim LaHaye? Yes, I know that LaHaye wrote books before Left Behind. Yes, I have still never read a Max Lucado book (no reason, just haven’t).
I read from authors like Brian McLaren and others about the emerging church and enjoy their insight into modern culture. However, anyone that has to coin new words and phrases to describe God, Jesus, his Church, and other theological concepts in English just isn’t trying. At this point, English has more words that are not used than some languages possess in their vocabulary. We have words that differentiate between an animal and the food the animal becomes (i.e. lamb & mutton, deer & venison). We have words for the fear of a specific number. We have floccinaucinihilipilification. We have almost one hundred words for shades of blue. We have a dictionary that comes in 20 volumes and is four feet long when stacked horizontally. What is the necessity in expounding on concepts described in a series of letters written in an adopted second language by creating words and phrases unavailable in a 500,000 word vocabulary after hundreds of years of study? There isn’t. It is simply lazy thinking.
Why do I favor dead writers? They aren’t in it for money anymore, they know how to think, they know how to use words, and they know how to read a book. Give me Tozer. Give me Spurgeon. (Do you know he could sell out theathers at speaking engagements?) Even give me Matthew Henry. How about Cotton Mather and John Wesley?
Coda
In any case, the link at the beginning is food for thought. For the record, I am not against emergent church theology. I am against the need to coin new words and phrases to decribe things. For example, calling a local church a tribe. No local church I have been to has ever operated in the same context or even with the same connations as a tribe. County School Board is a more accurate phrase to my experience. However, I am not against the concept that our current culture (Postmodern is a category of art) has different needs in understanding the Gospel than the generation that preceeded it. The Gospel as understood by the original teachers and students was spoken to a world very different from our own. Without a good way to translate across the divide (called hermenutics), the message can be warped or misunderstood.