Apprising Ministries brings to your attention the link to an audio clip from a sermon by D.A. Carson called “Keeping Up With The Conversation” posted over at Reformation Underway.

In it Carson shares his view of popular emerging church pastor Rob Bell, where he says—among other things—that many people read Bell “in the best possible light because they’re bringing their Christian culture with them.”

Then using the topic of forgiveness as an illustration, Carson hits the eternally deadly spiritual problem with Bell’s Emergent Church pseudo-Christian message dead on target:

In other words, he shows a little clip on one of his Nooma videos—on forgiveness, let’s say—that would be completely gospel-free to anybody who is Biblically illiterate.

But if you bring in your Christian assumptions on what forgiveness looks like—because you know what Christ was doing on the Cross—and you’re making the right confessions already, you read your Christian assumptions into that video and you won’t see just how empty it is of real substance because you brought all of your Christian catechism with you.