Nice, Rachel! Yeah get this book. Well worth the personal areas and well worth the gift for someone in need...

Thanks, Tejas. Not yet through the Apple Store. Though if you have the Kindle or Nook app for iPad you can buy it through either of them and read it that way...

Thanks for your thoughtful response, Jazz. I promise to work through (most of) these soon!

Thanks John! I hope it does generate "loads" of discussion :)

Thanks for your words, Jason. Yes, I'm with you: I grow tired of Church bashing...from WITHIN the church. My wife said we have plenty enough people OUTSIDE the church bashing on the Bride, why do we need a voice from within? I'm all for critiquing American Christianity, but sometimes I'm just like, "enough already!"

Thanks for your comments and, yeah: wait for the rental!

I'm not sure if he mentioned this at SXSW, but in the GR showing Miller said that it was a $1.5 million film production budget and he needed $6 mill to break even. You'd probably know how that works more than me, but that seems like a lot to try and grab as an indy film...

I also enjoyed several parts and could definitely resonate given my own baptist-eque background. It was certainly a funny, entertaining film. But I, like you, am a bit baffled at the overly positive reviews. WORLD Magazine came the closest to critically reviewing it. My group had several good things to say about it, but also several concerning things. I hoped to share some of those to help peeps better evaluate it. Glad you liked the review!

Thanks for your perspective John Q. I felt the same as you, and had a friend along who spent time at Disney confirm my gut, but didn't feel qualified to speak to the directing and compositional angle of the film. Will be interesting to see what happens on April 13 and 14. Unfortunately, I'm not confident it will pass the all important make-or-break opening weekend...

Thanks, Julie. That's probably a fair response. It was quite unlike the book, though it had been quite a while since I'd read it. And maybe I'm just at a very different place than I was when I read it. But the movie sorta spoiled my fond memories of the book! Watch at your own risk :)

Hi Ron. Thanks for your comment. And please understand this is the intro of a 104 page examination with 441 footnotes of supporting research. This paragraph is a summation of that research, so I understand how it could come off as fear-mongering and unsupported half truth paraphrasing.

If I could push-back against your "Bell and McLaren are not biblical scholars": yes, granted, they are—or I guess, have been—pastors. But that doesn't get them off the hook for their ideas, and in fact heightens the necessity to respond given their pastoral influence at the populist level that McKnight and Wright could and will never have. Furthermore, both make theological claims and commentary on the Bible. So whether they are true-blue "biblical scholars" is irrelevant given what they are doing and who they are.

Thanks for the book recommendation! And for the record, I have a holistic view of atonement akin to Scot's which he articulated in A COMMUNITY OF ATONEMENT. Good book and appropriate method for understanding—as much as we can, because I mean, how can we really understand what happened—at the cross. Your recommendation of looking at the Kingdom through the cross is a good one for sure. And I'll tell you from my research that how one views the cross directly impacts how one views the Kingdom, so you're spot on!

Thanks again Ron.

Agreed, Craig. And my evaluation of Schleiermacher et al is not their liberalism, per se. My evaluation of them is their ideas—about sin, Jesus' person, Jesus' work, and salvation. Liberalism is a theological and historical category because there is continuity between their ideas in the same way that Evangelicalism is a theological and historical category. In my estimation what makes Schleiermacher (and his successors, including Emergents) bad isn't because he was the Founder of Liberalism or because he was liberal, but because of what he says about sin, Jesus, salvation, and Kingdom.

Yes it doesn't mean all his ideas were false or perverse. But what he says about sin, Jesus, salvation, and Kingdom are—in my estimation anyway!