Gagged

I planned to read all of The Gagging of God by D. A. Carson before I was to go and see him this weekend. I started this book about two months ago and I am only up to chapter 5 of 14. I started off strong, but as time progressed, I wasn't returning to this book and I don't think I have picked it up in a month.

The book is a bit of a hard slog. Each chapter has a few parts and within each part there maybe up to 11 more points that Carson wants to explain. Carson would review some thinker and explain their ideas and then retort on how they might of missed the point. He is well researched and has lots of footnotes. But the thing I found was that I have no idea who these people Carson is retorting to in the first place so I don't know how prominent or influential their ideas are anyway.

Some of the stuff in the book was above my head, so that didn't help. I mean I read the words, but I wasn't sure of the meaning... perhaps in our post-modern society that doesn't matter. The book is about Pluralism and how it has effected our thinking and interpretation of the Bible. Carson argues that modernism had some flaws in it, so we should be embracing some aspects of our current post-modern society, but there are some flaws in it as well.

I have heard Carson talk about how the modern idea of tolerance is actually intolerant from exclusive ideas (such as Jesus been the only way to Heaven) and I am sure he would have covered this in the book, but I didn't get that far into it. My advice is if your not an academic in interpretation of the bible or on epistemology then maybe just listen to some talks by Carson instead of reading this book.