(12 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
Loading ...A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren
Ten years ago, Brian McLaren started asking probing, unconventional, and sometimes-controversial questions about his Christian faith. As a pastor-turned-author, he discovered that he wasn’t alone: Many people worldwide were asking similar questions; the conversations and action that followed have created a movement. From The Church On The Other Side and his New Kind of Christian novel trilogy, to A Generous Orthodoxy and Everything Must Change, Brian has been on a journey to re-envision what it means to faithfully follow Jesus in the 21st century.
Brian isn’t finished questing and questioning. Whether you love his work or it makes you nervous, whether you’ve read his every book or have lost track with him these past few years, his latest offering is his most important and striking to date: A New Kind of Christianity. In it, Brian asks ten questions that attempt to integrate our inner lives with our outward actions, to align our beliefs with how we live in increasingly interconnected global community. These questions are:
- The Narrative Question: What Is the Overarching Storyline of the Bible?
- The Authority Question: How Should the Bible Be Understood?
- The God Question: Is God Violent?
- The Jesus Question: Who is Jesus and Why is He Important?
- The Gospel Question: What Is the Gospel?
- The Church Question: What Do We Do About the Church?
- The Sex Question: Can We Find a Way to Address Sexuality Without Fighting About It?
- The Future Question: Can We Find a Better Way of View the Future?
- The Pluralism Question: How Should Followers of Jesus Relate to People of Other Religions?
- The What Do We Do Now Question: How Can We Translate Our Quest into Action?
TheOOZE will be working extensively with Brian to explore the issues he raises; stay tuned to TheOOZE.tv for exclusive interviews!
catepa
A new kind of Christian started me on a life-changng, life-giving giving journey. I can’t wait to read this book and add my thought to the blog.
Jan 20th, 2010
miketodd07
I’m sitting in Bethlehem with Brian right now… can’t wait to read this one.
Jan 21st, 2010
JaimeeHolmes
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2010
A New Kind of Christianity
I’ve said it before… I LOVE to get “happy” things in the mail (you know, the non-asking-me-for-money type stuff)… In fact there is only one thing I love MORE than getting happy things in the mail. It is getting FREE HAPPY things in the mail.
I was SO SO very happy to get my free copy of Brian McLaren’s new (not even released yet!) book, A New Kind of Christianity, Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith. I have been in need of a really engaging read for some time now, and I have a feeling this may be it!
Check it out… Here are the “Ten Questions:”
Part I: The Narrative Question
What Is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?
Setting the Stage for the Biblical Narrative
The Biblical Narrative in Three Dimensions
Part II: The Authority Question
How Should the Bible Be Understood?
From Legal Constitution to Community Library
Revelation Through Conversation
Part III: The God Question
Is God Violent?
From a Violent Tribal God to a Christlike God
Part IV: The Jesus Question
Who Is Jesus and Why Is He Important?
Jesus Outside the Lines
Part V: The Gospel Question
What Is the Gospel?
Jesus and the Kingdom of God
Part VI: The Church Question
What Do We Do About the Church?
Part VII: The Sex Question
Can We Find a Way to Address Human Sexuality Without Fighting About It?
Part VIII: The Future Question
Can We Find a Better Way of Viewing the Future?
Part IX: The Pluralism Question
How Should Followers of Jesus Relate to People of Other Religions?
Part X: The What-Do-We-Do-Now Question
How Can We Translate Our Quest into Action?
Ooooh! Doesn’t that make you want to go get the book? I have to admit, I already bristled a bit at a couple of those questions… sign that this should be interesting and challenging!
If you’d like to take a look inside the book or preorder it, check out THIS LINK
Ok, now let’s see if I can resist posting anything until I finish the book in a few days!
Feb 3rd, 2010
earlbarnett
Book Review: A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren
A New Kind of Christianity is nothing like I expected it to be. I assumed that I was picking up another defense of the Emergent Church tradition. What I picked up, instead, was the first truly Emergent volume of systematic theology. I know… I was confused too.
However, McLaren’s book is far from the type of systematic theology that you’d find written by Evangelical Fundamentalists. Rather, A New Kind of Christianity is a systematic theology more akin to that of Stanley Grenz or Jürgen Moltmann (who McLaren cites as inspirations in his Introduction), but geared toward the average reader. It is a systematic exploration of the traditional Christian doctrines with an intentional focus on inclusivity and refusal to assert the final answer on any doctrine. McLaren never says “Thus says the Lord!” Instead, he spends his time saying “Evangelicals: Thus the Lord DID NOT say!” I will leave discussion of his success in this endeavor to other readers.
McLaren divides his theology into two primary categories, and positions his theology around 10 organizing centers. The broad categories are: 1) “Unlocking and Opening” and 2) “Emerging and Exploring”. McLaren describes these categories as “something real and something wrong” (7). The transcendent revelation of Godself (the something real) composes the reality. The cultural baggage clouding the revelation of Godself (the something wrong) therefore must be removed, so that the Church may embrace and embody that revelation in its present context. To achieve this two-fold goal, McLaren first focuses, in ‘Unlocking and Opening’, on how the Church ought to understand narrative revelation, the authority of revelation, the nature of God, the person of Christ and the nature of his Gospel. McLaren then turns, in ‘Emerging and Exploring’, to questions about the nature of the Christian Church (ecclesiology), human sexuality (theological anthropology), the future (eschatology), pluralism, and, finally, how one lives a life that embodies the previous nine discussions (though it is also scattered throughout as well).
What is different about this systematic theology, however, is its limited focus and pastoral concern. Brian McLaren has carefully selected his topics and language to accommodate any reader (McLaren opens his Christology with an extended quotes from Mark Driscoll and the movie Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby). This is both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
An observation of McLaren’s that I found quite notable was in Chapter 8: From Legal Constitution to Communal Library. In that chapter, McLaren argues that the Bible cannot be read as a political constitution, a handling of the biblical text “as if it were an annotated code instead of what it actually is: a portable library of poems, prophecies, histories, fables, parables, letters, sage sayings, quarrels, and so on” (79). Obviously, here McLaren is speaking mostly to an American, Evangelical audience, but his message is moving and necessary, nonetheless.
Unfortunately, however, McLaren’s theology is also often poorly defended and fraught with inconsistencies. Admittedly, as a developing theologian, I am not McLaren’s intended audience and am trained to find such shortcomings. Nevertheless, as Brian would readily admit, theology matters in people’s lives; it is not just an academic discipline. Therefore, I am concerned that emerging Christians will blindly adopt A New Kind of Christianity as its theology without asking the tough questions back to McLaren. I think that Brian McLaren has a great start to an Emergent systematic theology, but needs to be pushed to address his larger inconsistencies, such as “How Jesus can be the truest revelation of God when we have no direct access to Jesus, only second-order reflections on Jesus, mediated through the Gospel writers?” or “What is the role of the Spirit (a noticeably absent character in McLaren’s book) in the Emergent Christian’s life, and the Christian’s reading and interpretation of Scripture?”.
In summation, I think that A New Kind of Christianity is a great first-step towards developing a systematized, emergent theology (as paradoxical as it may seem); however, I don’t think McLaren’s book leaves many questions unanswered, and therefore room for a more exhaustive work. I recommend this book for anyone who wants their beliefs challenged and their faith strengthened. But I also suggest reading this book with a community of others. While McLaren has some great ideas, he also has some ideas that need a lot more work.
Feb 7th, 2010
edan0889
Over the weekend I received a copy of A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren thanks to my friends at TheOoze Viral Bloggers. I have read about half of the book. Intriguing. I am overwhelmed with questions and a few ahas (not to mention a few hmms). McLaren’s responses to questions are truly meant to invite dialog and tomorrow, I might have the opportunity to participate in a conference call with the him. However, if it happens, I suspect I will simply listen with marbles in my mouth. In the meantime, I am heading back to my reading chair.
http://edan0889.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-kind-of-christianity.html
Feb 8th, 2010
Pam Hogeweide
I loved the Viral Blogger’s conference call with Brian, Mike and Spencer tonight. I thought it went well and very much enjoyed the intimate feel of it. Like a private radio broadcast, sorta kinda.
I posted up a summation of the phone conf with a brief response of some of my thoughts. You are welcome to take a peek…thanks again for organizing this. I look forward to future phone confs with authors!
http://godmessedmeup.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-am-part-of-network-of-bloggers-who.html
Feb 10th, 2010
JaimeeHolmes
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2010
Questions…
So I told you I’m reading Brian McLaren’s new book, A New Kind of Christianity, courtesy of viralbloggers. I’ll be honest. This is actually the first book I’ve read of his. I’ve read a few articles, some excerpts here and there, but the reason I jumped on this book so fast was all the hype surrounding the author.
I’ve heard the words “heresy” and “controversial” used so very many times regarding McLaren… I had to find out for myself. Now I know I am supposed to be reviewing the book, not the author… But I have to say, while I’m sure I don’t necessarily agree 100% with all his conclusions, as a person who asks questions myself, I find myself endeared to McLaren as one not afraid to question.
I picture the author as someone who when asked a question, though he is able to provide many possible answers, may also answer with “I don’t know.” And that is refreshing.
I have to wonder… Why all the hype? Just an observation from my own experience, but I think that pastors (and I am generalizing here) feel the burden of responsibility to not just shepherd, not just seek Jesus themselves, but to “defend the Faith.” And when “The Faith” extends into matters of theology, it becomes dangerous to not have all the answers. What happens if people find out you don’t have the answer? What happens if we can’t be sure where God stands on important issues? What if The Bible doesn’t actually have an answer to every question, every problem, every issue? Now, don’t get me wrong and label me a heretic… I believe the Bible has THE answer… Jesus. But what if it doesn’t have a black/white, do this/don’t do that type of answer to every question?
I love that McLaren is brave in asking these “Ten Questions That Are Transforming The Faith” (Narrative, Authority, God, Jesus, Gospel, Church, Sex, Future, Pluralism, What-Do-We-Do-Now). I think just asking these questions… admitting that as Christians, we don’t have all the answers… acknowledging the importance and validity of these questions (and others like them)… I think that’s a step in the right direction. To say, Ok, so we don’t have it all together, and we refuse to make stuff up or continue to stand on what we know deep down is shaky ground… We’re not going to cop out like that anymore… I think to repent like that to the unbelieving world around us really means something. And I think that rather than discrediting us… Christianity (what pastors with “all the answers” are afraid of), not being afraid to ask GIVES credit to God… where credit belongs in the first place.
So thanks Brian McLaren for not being afraid. Thanks for not having all the answers. And thanks for putting it into wonderful, hope-inspired, beautifully thought and written words in your book A New Kind of Christianity. I pray that as a result, the rest of us will allow our hearts to be soft and teachable enough to ask our own questions, even when there are no answers, and continue to stand on the one answerable question, Jesus…
Posted by Jaimee Holmes at 11:08 AM
Feb 10th, 2010
Lon
I recently finished Brian Mclaren’s latest “A new kind of Christianity“.
I recall Mclaren’s earlier book that became a trilogy – a new kind of christian – being banned in many churches. I get the sense that a lot of concepts or challenges presented in that book have since shaped many churches, even if indirectly.
A new kind of Christianity will undoubtedly cause at least just as much of a stir, if not more.
Here’s a few of my quick thoughts.
People are going to love it or hate it. It’s hard not to be provoked and challenged by the questions he brings up.
McLaren’s often known for offering great questions and little in the way of answers. I got the feeling this was a bit of a ‘coming out’ book (though I think McLaren honestly puts where he’s at every time he writes, he’s just a bit further down that path now).
Hardcore/New Calvinists will hate much of the answers he provides.
The premise of most of his arguments is based on the framework in which we see things. Change the framework and everything within it changes. The new kind of christian focused more on the modernist mindset, he goes further back with this book showing how much of our theology is based on a Greco-Roman platonic worldview obsessed with either/or states and perfection.
Process theology and the general arc of the biblical storyline also shapes how we continue to evolve in our faith and humanity
I think many churches will have a hard time matching up what McLaren proposes and their current statement of faith (ie. his views presented on Scripture, the second coming, etc.) At the same time I think most statements of faith are profoundly lacking, incomplete, and rarely represent the actual practice of the church anyways.
McLaren usually does an impressive job with ignoring critics and smothering those who differ with kindness, so I was surprised when he took an unnamed swipe at Mark Driscoll (he’s going to have a field day with this one). There’s definitely some extra edge in this book (but none more than the fury his critics have heaped upon him)
I wonder if there will ever be healing between the different ‘camps’ in the future?
Overall, I’m glad McLaren does what he does, even if I don’t agree with all of his ideas and approaches. My guess is critics will continue to hate him, because he isn’t what they want him to be. He’s not a defender of the faith (as it is). He’s not someone who’s just proposing new methodologies to timeless truth (as we know it).
I find it odd that many of us will allow ourselves to consume and be shaped by music, media, technology, etc. that may have a radically different theological concepts from us, but vehemently not want someone like McLaren to be heard.
Our planet is in enough of a jam as it is, can’t we just let the guy feel his way forward and share what he’s learning with the rest of us?
There’s some extra chapters available on his website that people should also dig into.
Feb 10th, 2010
Chris Wiles
McLaren has already made a name for himself within the emerging church movement, and his previous works have had a polarizing effect within the Christian community, and there is little doubt that this book will have a similar effect.
THE POSITIVES
First, I must affirm McLaren for his willingness to tackle these tough questions. “We must stop being ashamed of our questions,” he writes, “and we must stop pretending to be content with unsatisfying answers” (p. 257).
There are many people, both within the church and without, who are asking these questions. I found myself liking one of McLaren’s previous works, A New Kind of Christian, for this very reason. While I found myself disagreeing with so much of his later ideas, I cannot overstate the value of his willingness to ask these questions.
Secondly, McLaren writes with a disarming, engaging prose that is worthy of both admiration and emulation. In a phone conference tonight with the Ooze Bloggers, McLaren affirmed his willingness to dialogue with anyone so long as the conversation was founded on “mutual respect.”
And to that end I seek to emulate this sort of irenic tone when I must turn to the parts of the book that I found so deeply troubling – and they are many – out of an earnest desire to disagree without being disagreeable.
THE NEGATIVES
Brevity precludes me from addressing all ten of these questions in one review, though in the future I would like to return to these questions for the purpose of further dialogue and engagement.
I will instead distill my objections to two key issues that questions touch on in one fashion or another: (1) perspectivalism and (2) the kingdom.
PERSPECTIVALISM
Perspectivalism: McLaren rejects the traditional ways of viewing scripture. The traditional way of viewing scripture is based on finding Jesus by looking back through history (Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Augustine and Paul) rather than allowing the Biblical narrative to unfold on its own and present Jesus as its centerpiece. The problem with our approach, according to McLaren, is that it carries with it the philosophical baggage of what he calls the “Grecco-Roman” narrative, one in which Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy has led us to rigid, dualistic categories regarding justification, atonement and the afterlife. This would later give rise to a “constitutional” view of scripture – that is, seeing it as an amalgamation of doctrines and formulas rather than allowing the narrative of scripture to speak on its own.
Now in one sense this is an excellent point. One of the positive contributions of postliberalism has been its emphasis on meeting the stories of the Bible on their own terms. McLaren advocates this, contrasting the “constitutional” approach of rigid fundamentalism with what he calls a “community library,” a way of seeing scripture as the body of literature of an ancient people.
Which raises an important question, which he was gracious enough to answer in tonight’s phone conference. If there was a danger in the Grecco-Roman narrative, surely there is an equal danger of looking at scripture through our own postmodern, postcolonial lenses?
His response was very gracious though ultimately unsatisfying. He conceded that there is a danger, but stressed the need for a multi-perspectival approach – looking at scripture through multiple cultural lenses rather than coming down on any one viewpoint.
The problem is that he is coming down on one viewpoint. A multi-perspectival approach is itself a viewpoint. And within this approach we find that he is indeed advocating one, solitary way of approaching the text, one in which the “us-versus-them” dichotomy surely arises in his selective reading of scripture.
One of my professors, Doug Blount, refers to McLaren’s approach as the “hermeneutic of taste.” He explores the text of Genesis, detailing the mercy of God towards his wayward people, without the emphasis on judgment and punishment. In so doing he ignores significant passages – the flood, Lot’s wife, Sodom and Gamorrah – favoring only those that support his view of God’s mercy.
He later justifies this approach through what might be called an evolutionary approach to scripture. Biblical writers could only describe God in terms familiar to their day. We now understand God more fully. For McLaren, “The images of God that most resemble Jesus…are the most mature and complete images” (p. 114). But McLaren seems unaware of the implicit cultural elitism of an approach that defines ancient cultures as “primitive” and our culture as advanced (at least with respect to one another).
It becomes clear that he is advocating one way of viewing the text, and he cannot avoid the influence of our current philosophical systems through some form of self-declared immunity. At best, it reflects a lack of personal awareness and examination, and at worst it is the epistemological equivalent of saying “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
Further, viewing God through the lens of Jesus (as above) raises a still more important question – who is this Jesus?
THE KINGDOM
For McLaren, the gospel is the kingdom (and vice versa). Mind you, the gospel is not about personal salvation and going to heaven when you die, as the fundamentalists would have you believe. Rather, it is about making God’s kingdom a present, unfolding reality.
Never mind the fact that John’s gospel uses the phrase “eternal life” more than any other gospel (replacing the synoptic emphasis on kingdom). For McLaren, the gospel is couched entirely in social terms, such as the elimination of poverty and hunger and care for the environment. Far from eliminating the cross from the gospel, McLaren simply redefines it in social terms, and as such the entirety of the gospel is seen through the lens of God’s program of setting things right.
True, there is a social dimension to the gospel (cf. Luke 3, where Jesus, reading from Isaiah, claims to be a liberator of the oppressed). But this should not eclipse or minimize the spiritual dimension of the gospel. What we have is a form of theological reductionism, one that ignores the spiritual dimensions of the gospel in its singular focus on social issues.
The implications of this are staggering, and while I wish to retain respect for McLaren, ignoring the importance of personal salvation is theologically dangerous ground, one that is sadly based on misreading (or even selectively reading, as demonstrated through his reading of Romans) the text, a mistake that Christ’s followers cannot afford.
CONCLUSION
It is one thing to call our current understanding of Christianity incomplete. It is another thing to call it inaccurate.
True, I don’t like the bathwater of our Christian culture, but I still love the baby – let’s not throw one out with the other.
N. T. Wright offers a helpful illustration. In the Louvre, the Mona Lisa is behind panels of protective glass. Wright remarks that often all that can be seen are the reflections of observers, which obscure the beauty behind the reflective surfaces. But Wright says that when we become aware of these reflections, we can look through them, to see the painting beneath. Likewise, our task is not to ignore the biases, opinions and baggage we bring to the faith, but to recognize them, see through them in the hopes of finding the beauty within.
I love Brian McLaren for his generosity and for his quest for peace and truth. My prayer for him and all God’s people (perhaps myself especially) is that dissatisfaction with cultural expressions of the faith not dull our sensitivity toward God’s truth.
Truth, says Milton, is like the mangled body of Osiris – scattered far and wide and in need of reassembly. In the coming weeks, I would like to explore these questions more deeply, in the hopes of showing that what is needed is not a new kind of Christianity, but a need to gather the truth from the generations that have come before us, and to pass these truths on to those who go after.
Original post appears at: http://thornscompose.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/a-new-kind-of-christianity-brian-mclaren-book-review/
Chris Wiles is an avid writer and speaker. You can read his blog at http://www.thornscompose.wordpress.com or follow him on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/wilescj
Feb 10th, 2010
holy heteroclite
Note: this review from my blog includes several links, you’ll need to see the original post to make the links clickable:http://davewainscott.blogspot.com/2010/02/going-to-hell-with-mclarenor-at-least.html
–
Some people seem to think Brian McLaren is not only a heretic, but passive-aggressive..
even headed to hell.
From my take on, and brief experience with Brian, he might laugh and agree with at least two out of those three. I’ll bet he even enjoys the “Going to Hell with Brian McLaren” Facebook group (He’s probably a member!)
McLaren comes off so charitable with critics…and man, does he have them.
But he’s also got to offer what he sees as the truth..tough spot.
His new book, “The New Christians: Ten Questions That are Transforming the Faith” just arrived from Ooze Viral Bloggers, who also offered a conference call last night to bloggers not fortunate enough to get/steal one of the review copies.
I haven’t read it all yet, so will just post a few thoughts now.
Suffice to say I will be drawing from it, maybe even walking through it with our “One After 909″ boys.
Okay, I too am a harry tick….but I’m not planning on going to hell.
You’ll have to decide for yourself how you see McLaren addressing disagreement; for some history and assessment, see Len’s links.
Here on the Viral Blogger site is a summary of the Ten Questions the books deals with, and some good reviews. See also reviews on Amazon.
Random notes:
* I am intrigued by the potential for a “participatory eschatology” (20). See his older quote on eschatology that clinches the case that he is a hellbound heretic among those who prefer “endtime pornography” (Not McLaren’s phrase).
* I love the phrase “something real and something wrong” in today’s Christianity (37).
* It is good to ask large questions like “Where did the (traditional, usual) six-lined narrative” of Scripture come from? The charts surrounding this are helpful. “What we call the biblical story line isn’t the shape of the story of Adam, Abraham, and their Jewish descendants. It’s the shape of the…Greco-Roman narrative”(37)
I much appreciate Chapter 21, “Living the Questions in Community.”
As one who in a former life “belonged” to both the “ecclesiolae in ecclesia” subsets of my mainline denominations (evangelical and charismatic), I enjoyed his take on “How can we help [our open church or denomination] experience transformation and change?” (Lest you actually start trusting too much in institutional church by reading McLaren, this section should be balanced with Eugene Peterson’s hilarious account of his annual “sex and drugs” church report)
A. Get a consultant
B. Build new parastructures to foster new approaches to faith rather than trying to bend existing structures toward that end.
C.Expect to bring in a new day with new people…quotes Kuhn: “Almost always the [people]who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field of the paradigm they change.”…
D. Add, don’t subtract….for example, supplement founding documents with something newer (and shorter!)
E. Develop a theology of institutions:
“..a lot of us have foolishly identified institutions as the problem, as something to be eradicated, not realizing that our anti-institutionalism only serves to create new institutions by accident. The accidental institutions are all the more unhealthy for being reactionary and invisible (to their founders, at least) rather than reflective and visible.”
F. Preach the Bible. I know, I know…some are shocked to hear him say that.
Of course, you need to hear what he says elsewhere in the book about how we have been guided by a “constitutional” model as opposed to the preferred “collective library” model of the Bible.
G.Employ experiential learning. I love this section, and have used a lot of what he has previously said on this as I teach preaching.. “Yes, preachers must preach towards the desired future drawing from Scripture, but many won’t ‘get it’ until they also go through an ‘abductive experience’…that helps them see in a new way. Mission trips often create these experiences by exposing people to a world of great need…as do vision visits (where you visit another church to experience what they’re doing…”
H.Keep your short-term expectations low, and long-term hopes high.
Quotes an old African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Final note:
Partly because of all I went through in the aforementioned denominational experience,
here’s what I posted on Mac’s facebook when he asked what questions his friends might ask McLaren on the conference call (Mace was booked for it, and said if he had time he might be able to ask Brian our questions… haven’t seen his report yet, or if he actually asked my question:
If not too late, my question might be:
“I loved the beginning of the ‘Sex Question’ chapter..may be best chapter intro of our day. In light of all the great stuff you say about ‘fundasexuality,’ is it ever appropriate for us as leaders to ever say ‘the practice of homosexuality is a sin’ ? And is this your biggest frustration that people keep asking this question? And that people criticize you for not coming out and saying it? What would it take for you to ‘come out’ on this issue?
Of course, if he actually answered that, it will be the first time ever, and the heresy hunters will be linking big time to my blog once I post his answer (:
http://davewainscott.blogspot.com/2010/02/going-to-hell-with-mclarenor-at-least.html
Feb 10th, 2010
Bill Nieporte
Book Review: A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren
From time to time, I am provided books by “Viral Bloggers,” provided I am willing to write a brief review and post in on my blog. I do this joyfully because I love to read and the books are free in exchange for a honest review. There are many viral-bloggers, however, and only a few books. Often I am unable to obtain a title that I want.
When Brian McLaren’s new book, A New Kind of Christianity, was made available to the viral-blogging community, I quickly went to the site to claim a copy. Unfortunately, I was too late. All available books were snatched up in a matter of minutes.
Still, as a big fan of McLaren’s books, I could not let this one pass me by. So, I went to my nearby bookstore and paid out my own money for a chance to digest more of McLaren’s thoughtful prose. Now that I have read the book, I consider it to have been a wise investment.
The opening pages of the book were very amusing for me. In them McLaren describes how he’d become known as a “dangerous” heretic. That’s hardly anything that anyone might aspire to. McLaren does, not to cause trouble, but rather to address the very real challenges that confront Christianity in this post modern era. Like him or not, we ought to be grateful for voices like McLaren – people who are willing to ask hard questions and not accept the pabulum of traditional orthodoxy.
McLaren’s desire is to see Christianity survive the political polarization that has come to exist between fundamentalism and liberalism. The response for McLaren, however, is not to find some “middle ground,’ but rather to find a new way of being Christian in the emergent age. Of course, this is fraught with danger. Still, the church has experienced these types of reformation before. The aim of this book is to provide a somewhat ordered and structured guide through the rough waters that Christianity finds itself in.
McLaren structures his book around “Ten Questions” which (as they are being answered) are “transforming the faith.” These questions are as follows:
The Narrative Question: What Is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?
The Authority Question: How Should the Bible Be Understood?
The God Question: Is God Violent?
The Jesus Question: Who Is Jesus and Why Is He Important?
The Gospel Question: What Is the Gospel?
The Church Question: What Do We Do About the Church?
The Sex Question: Can We Find a Way to Address Human Sexuality Without Fighting About It?
The Future Question: Can We Find a Better Way of Viewing the Future?
The Pluralism Question: How Should Followers of Jesus Relate to People of Other Religions?
The What-Do-We-Do-Now Question: How Can We Translate Our Quest into Action?
While ordered and structured, McLaren’s book is hardly systematic. The questions McLaren’s asks are more pastoral than theological. They are the kinds of questions I hear asked, in one way or another, from a wide variety of people across the conservative/liberal perspective. To this end, McLaren’s thoughtful and easy to read volume should lend itself to some wonderful coffee house discussions.
A New Kind of Christianity is probably the best ordered presentation to date of emergent theology. To this end, that it important, since the “emergent church” movement has typically been a bit lightweight when it comes to this kind of material. If you are new to the movement and want to get a good idea of what it’s all about in the words of one of its greatest thinkers, then rush out and get your copy right now
This blog also posted at http://nieporte.name/?p=514
Feb 10th, 2010
katherand
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book.
I’ve read a bunch of reviews. The thing I’m seeing very frequently is the comment that Brian Mclaren is controversial.
May I submit that such statements may be false?
I see it more that any queries (questions and quests) for truth are inherently controversial because Truth itself is controversial. And this is true not just for nonChristians of every stripe but most especially for Christians.
Feb 11th, 2010
DashHouse
In the middle of A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren gives us a picture to describe how he thinks we need to change.
“Before…we are like lawyers trying to save an old contract, adding more and more fine print on page after page, until the provisions are weightier than the original contract. (This is good work, I suppose, and must be done for a generation or two, but it is not the work to which I feel called.) At some point, though, more and more of us will finally decide that it would make more sense to go back and revise the contract from scratch. And that work has begun. It is nowhere near complete, but the cat is out of the bag…”
And that cat is on a tear. McLaren attempts the impossible, essentially tossing out what you always thought was true, and starting again from scratch. The Fall of Genesis 3? That’s really a coming-of-age story. The storyline of the Bible? It’s really about the downside of progress, and about how good prevails in the end anyway. The Bible is a community library, and the violent, tribal God of the Genesis flood is “hardly worthy of belief, much less worship” – but those were early days, and our view of God is always changing. Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion, nor is Christianity the answer in itself. In short, almost everything you know about God, the Bible, and Christianity is wrong, according to McLaren.
Disagree? It’s probably because you have a Greco-Roman worldview, or worse. You may be someone who gets “authority and employment” from the old way of reading the Bible, which means you have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. To go back to McLaren’s earlier image, you’re maybe a lawyer who loves fine print and who hates cats being let out of their bags. You’re probably like the theologians and pastors who:
“…sew on a patch here, cover up that bit over there with some duct tape, put a nice coat of cheerful paint on that section over there, play really uplifting music to distract from that bit under there, move the furniture so that part doesn’t show, and so on.”
You’re either misguided or have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. Either way, it’s hard to disagree without looking pitiable.
What to make of all of this?
First, I want to say that McLaren does make some good points. He puts his finger on some real problems. This isn’t damning with faint praise. It’s important, because it’s what makes a book like this so compelling. Lots of people are going to buy what he says because they resonate with his critique.
Second, I’m grateful that McLaren has articulated his views. I suspect that there’s going to be less guessing about what McLaren believes in the future. I don’t think his views are a surprise to a lot of us, but they’re in print now, and it’s going to be a lot easier to talk about them.
Third, I’m going to predict that this book gets a lot of traction. I joined a conference call with McLaren last night and heard a number of people – including pastors – rave about the book. I think it’s going to be one of those books in which the fans and critics speak past each other. The early reviews seem overwhelmingly positive. They won’t be surprised if people like me don’t like it. He takes some swipes at Mark Driscoll and John MacArthur, and sometimes comes across in a belittling way to evangelicals in general. He takes swipes at his critics sometimes that leave me gasping – and the fact that he does it with a friendly smile doesn’t really help. This is going to be a polarizing book.
I really have to say that this is one of the most frustrating books I’ve read. I have a friend who says off-the-wall things. Half the time he’s profound; the rest of the time he’s just a bit random. I felt that way with this book. There are some potentially profound sections, but there’s lots in the book that left me baffled. I can’t remember reading any book that left me shaking my head so much. So much hinges on his assertion that we read the Scriptural storyline through a Platonic worldview, for instance, but I was far from convinced. His interpretation of Job, which he used to explain how we should read Scripture, left me scratching my head. His conclusions (or proposals) are so sweeping, and based on such baffling premises sometimes, that I hardly know where to begin.
Finally – and most importantly – this is not a minor tweak of Christianity. It is a repudiation of the church’s understanding of God and the gospel. It really is tearing up the contract and starting all over again. McLaren says we’ve got the whole Biblical storyline, as well as our ideas of God and Scripture, all wrong. He’d rather be an atheist, he says, than believe in the God that many of us think is found in the Bible. You don’t get any more basic. We are talking about two fundamentally different versions of Christianity and the gospel.
That’s what makes this book so hard to critique. Supporters of the book will say that I’m critiquing it from a Greco-Roman mindset, using the Bible as a constitution text rather than as a community library. So my criticisms will be expected. McLaren’s proposals go all the way back to the level of presuppositions, and unless you share his presuppositions it will be like complaining that the color red isn’t blue enough. Fine, they will say, but it wasn’t meant to be blue. He’s not only giving us a new version of the Christian story, but he’s making it very difficult to critique his new version using the resources of the old one. But I’m simply not convinced that he’s made the case that he thinks he has.
Like McLaren, I believe we need to honestly examine our beliefs and practices, making corrections even when it’s costly and uncomfortable. I believe that every generation needs to rediscover the gospel. But unlike McLaren, I’m not ready to toss the creation-fall-redemption storyline, or think that I’ve moved on from the God of Genesis 4-6. I’m simply not ready to say our old understanding of the gospel is wrong. We may need to rediscover it and be changed by it, and grow in our understanding of it. But that’s different than tearing up the contract and starting all over again.
A few years ago, I was struggling with some of the issues McLaren raises. But I found that some of the answers being proposed were less, not more, satisfying. I believe that our biggest need is not for a new Christianity, but instead to rediscover some of the contours of the gospel we may have forgotten. We don’t need a new contract; we need to “guard the good deposit” that’s been entrusted to us (2 Timothy 1:14).
We really don’t need a new kind of Christianity. We need to do a better job of rediscovering, and living in light of, the one we already have.
Feb 11th, 2010
Jamie
There will probably be many reviews of this newest offering from Brian McLaren. There will be many warnings about this from Christian watchdogs. There will be many applauding this book. Maybe there will be a lot that fall somewhere in between. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I’m going to tell you how it affected me.
I felt a deep sense of awe and gratefulness for Jesus. I felt my love and appreciation for him grow. Brian proposes that we not try to fit Jesus into our already established ideas of what God is like (inside or outside of the Bible), but establish our ideas about God around Jesus. Jesus is the culmination of our ideas about God. To see Jesus is to see the exact representation of God and the clearest picture of God. This was very freeing and exhilarating for me.
I’ve struggled with the Old Testament and Jesus. I mean, even praying through the Psalms, I recoil at some of the stuff in there when compared to Jesus and the kingdom he is announcing. Why the difference and tension? Brian says that God meets us where we are. There is a progression in our ability of understanding God and at the top of that progression is Jesus.
I realized that Christianity has always been in flux and is not static. It has been growing, revising, evolving. I guess I’ve known that but this book was a good summary of a lot of this evolution in one place. I’ve been afraid during some points in my faith, especially in the last 5 years or so. Prayers have been offered like the following:
“Jesus, I don’t know what I think about a lot of things anymore, but keep me in your sights. You know I love you and want to live my life for you, but a lot of what I thought was true I see differently. I don’t know about all of this questioning. I don’t know about all of these major shifts in thinking about you, the Church, and life. But I’m holding on to you more than I ever have.”
And at several points during my reading I just got good with the idea that this isn’t an isolated experience in following Jesus. It’s been here all the time. Brian recounts a lot of the changes that happened and I reflected on some of the ones I’ve noticed myself. I thought about the Jewish/Gentile waters that had to be navigated with the birth of the Church. It was there as the Jews watched Gentiles become followers of Jesus. They were God’s chosen people and were to separate themselves from Gentiles. Jesus tells his apprentices to go into all the nations. Peter is sent to a Gentile centurion’s house (as a Jew he wasn’t allowed to even go into a Gentile home). He said this when he showed up at Cornelius’ house: ”You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean…”(Acts 10) I cannot imagine how shocking that was to Peter. Jesus was challenging Peter’s thoughts and ideas about God. And Jesus still does that today. Instead of seeing this as something abnormal I’m learning to embrace it. Yes, my thoughts and paradigms may be changing, but I find Jesus right in the middle of it all.
I also felt at peace with my spiritual quest and being okay with the fact that others may not agree with me. I’m on a journey as we all are. But I’ve often felt uneasy that I may be in a different place then some of my friends. I’ve wondered if the questions I’m asking would be deal breakers and cut off our spiritual friendship or strain them. And I’d much rather keep unity with others than bringing unhelpful or inappropriate questions up to others if that’s not where they are. Brian has written with so much grace and humility towards others in this book. His encouragement to let people be where they are was very good for me. If a “new kind of Christianity” would be hurtful or unhelpful to someone, don’t offer it. Don’t try to rock their boat. Bless them where they are. But if we are journeying along and we do have some people who are asking similar questions, we can start having good and appropriate conversations about the questions we are having.
So in summary, I haven’t cited any sources for the book or given the basic structure of the book. I haven’t even given the main theme of the book. Here is a link to the amazon.com book page and here’s another link for a collection of reviews for this book where you can get more of the details. This book was hard to put down because each section builds into the next. I would recommend this book for anyone who has been questioning the Christianity and picture of Jesus they have been offered. I don’t recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t like Brian McLaren or to anyone who thinks a new kind of Christianity is a ridiculous or dangerous idea.
There was so much dealt with in this book that I may write some posts in the future regarding the 10 questions that Brian brings up in the book.
Feb 14th, 2010
jdblundell
Originally posted at: http://www.casadeblundell.com/jonathan/faith/a-new-kind-of-christianity/
Brian McLaren’s new book, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith, drops tomorrow (Tuesday, Feb. 9).
I received a free advance copy from the publisher late last week and have been devouring it every chance I get (which with two toddlers at home hasn’t been that often).
In it, McLaren offers the top 10 questions he’s been hearing from people about the Christian faith as well as 10 responses to those questions (as opposed to answers — which are simply statements — which lead to hate and debate… he expounds much more on this in the first couple chapters).
So far I’m loving everything I’ve read. I won’t say I agree with everything yet (especially since I haven’t the full book yet) but what I’ve read is definitely in line with a lot of other things I’m reading and thinking as of late.
I’ve dog eared numerous pages already but I want to share a few thoughts from the first few chapters…
McLaren shares a prayer that Rev. John Robinson gave before the pilgrims set sell from Holland to the New World (America) on the Mayflower:
I charge you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth from my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word.
The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His will our God has revealed to Calvin, they (Lutherans) will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they where left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented. For though they were precious shining lights in their time, yet God has not revealed his whole will to them. And were they now living, they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as they had received.
McLaren shares that this is an attitude of a man on a quest. He realizes that there is much to be learned about God and that there is a “futher light” to be embraced, where more and more of God is revealed.
I have to continue asking my question, “Can we really know and understand all there is about a God who is fully mysterious and ‘unknowable’?” (Job 38-41) Seems illogical to think we can.
I remember when Probe Ministries came and did several classes on apologetics at our church back in the day and they offered a simple illustration that’s stuck with me ever since.
Using a white board they explained that the white board represented ALL the knowledge in the entire universe, everything anyone could possibly know.
They then asked several people to come forward and to shade in, or make dots representing what they felt was their own knowledge and understanding in comparison.
Eventually the board would look something like this:
(see image in original post)
As you can see, some were a bit prouder about their knowledge, others stayed towards the humble side of things.
The Probe representative went on to say that no matter who you ask, no one will ever claim to know everything about everything.
And thus, those who deny the existence of God are jumping to the wrong conclusions because God may be waiting for them just outside their colored area (their understanding and knowledge) and in an area of knowledge they’ve yet come to understand.
So essentially, until you know everything about everything you can’t logically deny the existence of God.
As I read McLaren’s book and refer back to my own questions, I have to wonder, what if we took that same white board and asked a slightly different question, “Color in everything you know and understand about God.”
How much would you color in? Would the board look any different?
Yet, in our faith we’ve often become so locked into our doctrines and dogmas that we’ve left no room for questions or differing views in our understanding of God (myself included).
I think that point goes right in line with what McLaren is hoping to address with his book.
One of the overarching questions he asks is, “What would Christianity look like if we weren’t afraid of questions?”
Rather than welcoming questions and doubt (see the story of Thomas after Jesus’ resurrection – John 20:24-30) we’ve come to understand and accept Christianity one way — our way.
We’ve come to see Jesus through the eyes of Paul; and then Augustine’s view of Paul’s view of Jesus; and then Aquinas’s view of Augustine’s view of Paul’s view of Jesus; and then Luther’s view of Aquinas’s view of Augustine’s view of Paul’s view of Jesus and so on and so on.
And ultimately, many of these views were shaped by Greco-Roman culture and philosophy, as opposed to the Jewish tradition and narrative that’s so vital to Scripture.
McLaren is hoping we’ll look at each of the 10 questions and responses he offers through a different lens, through the biblical line of Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah and John the Baptist.
And in that mind, he suggests we pray with the spirit and attitude of John Robinson:
Lord, we acknowledge that we have made a mess of what Jesus started. We affirm that we are wrong and Jesus is right. We choose not to defend what we have done and what we have become. We understand that many good Christians will not want to participate in our quest, and we welcome their charitable critique. We acknowledge that we have created many Christianities up to this point and they all call for reassessment and in many cases, repentance. We choose to seek a better path into the future than the one we have been on. We desire to be born again as disciples of Jesus Christ. Now grant us wisdom and guide us in our quest and create something new and beautiful in and among us for the good of all creation and to your glory, Living God.
I agree. And look forward to continuing my quest not only with this book, but for many many years to come.
Feb 15th, 2010
ngilmour
A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith
When I praise Plato and defend my teaching Republic to college freshmen, I often say that Plato’s excellence lies not in the fact that he’s always right but that when he’s wrong, he’s wrong in compelling ways, ways that inspire me to imagine a better alternative. While Brian McLaren is no Plato, parts of his most recent book A New Kind of Christianity have that Platonic character to them, getting things very wrong in ways that set me thinking about how I’d improve on his points. Other parts of the book resonate quite nicely with things that I try to do as a Christian teacher or realize now that I should try to do. But other parts still, alas, smack of the sleight-of-hand, the well-poisoning, and the other dirty trickery that make me mistrust apologetics literature of various sorts. In other words, A New Kind of Christianity is a complex book, not consistently excellent but nonetheless very helpful in places.
Brian McLaren Gets it Right
As Phil Rutledge pointed out in response to our podcast on the Haiti Earthquake, when I talk about the Bible, I tend to talk not about one unified document but a library, various not only in cosmetic details but in a more robust sense of genre, asking certain questions in this book that lie out of bounds in other books, offering teachings here that seem to stand at least in tension with teachings there. (I should note the obvious, namely that I do not speak for the other Christian Humanists on this point or necessarily on any given point.) I tend to think that the flexibility of such a collection is part of the Bible’s strength, that the practice of being Christian community is richer because Christian teachers can pull from a broad range of resources depending on the contingencies of the moment without having to pretend that every moment is the same as every other moment. When we need a text that shakes us out of complacency, the Bible has a book for that. When we lean over the precipice of despair, the Bible has a book for that. And so on. I think that McLaren offers a handy next step in that thought process, noting that the Bible is a true collection of texts precisely because of the “spaces between” those strong positions of Deuteronomy or 1 Chronicles on one hand and Ecclesiastes or Job on the other.
Furthermore, McLaren highlights the God-defining character of Christ and insists that the Palestinian Jew Jesus of Nazareth and not the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover is a better starting point for disciplined reflection upon the character of God. I know that making the historical Jesus that radically central flies in the face of much systematic theology (including that of Thomas Aquinas, one of my favorites), but I agree with McLaren that such a move is ultimately more faithful to the gospel of John among other Scriptural witnesses.
Finally, when McLaren gives counsel towards the end of the book to those folks who are persuaded by McLaren’s New Kind of Christianity but worry about the ramifications, given that their congregations and pastors are dealing from the old deck, his advice is consistently irenic, advising folks to be a blessing rather than trying to seize power and reminding folks that concern for real living people in all of their complexity is as important a part of conscience as is getting one’s epistemology right. There’s one bit of advice in there that I find suspicious, but for the most part, I think that McLaren provides some good, solid, charitable advice for folks on intellectual journeys that sometimes frighten fellow parishioners.
To say it one more time, this book does get some things very right, and by no means should anyone think that it’s error, error, error all the way down.
Brian McLaren Gets it Wrong
That said, as someone who loves intellectual history and who values some degree of historical precision, I do blame this book for playing fast and loose with historical categories and with historical intellectuals for the sake of scoring cheap rhetorical points. One of the jokes that was current during my days at The Ooze forums was that the Emergent words for “really quite bad” were “modern” and “modernist,” and the word for “so much better, don’t you think?” was “postmodern.” McLaren seems to have left that ugly and misleading binary pair only to settle on another pair, just as ugly and even more misleading, the Manichean dualism of “the Bible” and “Greco-Roman religion.” Resisting the temptation to examine every instance of “Greco-Roman” meaning just plain “bad,” I’ll point out a few that drew a chuckle from me for their historical naivete: Greco-Roman religion, apparently, has no place in it for homosexuality (175–apparently all of that Athenian praise for pederasty as superior to love-of-women doesn’t count), does not allow for multiple religions (212–never mind the Roman Empire’s grand scheme of syncretism that incorporated pantheons as diverse as the Celts’ and the Egyptians’), and worships a pernicious idol called Theos, who stands as enemy to the Biblical Elohim (65–I suppose the New Testament authors didn’t get the memo that the Greek language had that idol mixed in there).
McLaren relates that the content of his “Greco-Roman” tradition came about as the fruit of a conversation he relates in which an epiphany came to him, namely that the broad outlines of the traditional Evangelical narrative (he extends it to Catholic and Magesterial Protestant traditions as well) derive not from Biblical narratives but from Plato. Unfortunately, McLaren casts Plato only as the first step in a larger metanarrative, and that move is what makes things go downhill in a hurry. In McLaren’s “six-line narrative” to which he refers again and again as he digs into his ten questions, Plato is only the first stage in the grand narrative, ruined when the world falls from Platonic perfection (which sounds more like Plotinus’s realm of Ideas) into the “storied” world of Aristotle.
I’m certain Aristotle would have been surprised to find out that he was writing a simple sequel to Plato rather than supplanting his philosophy, but even more surprising to Alexander’s tutor would no doubt be that, according to McLaren, Aristotle held that forms do not have any existence, properly speaking, save as mental constructs. (If Dante’s right that Aristotle is in Limbo, where he might converse with future ages’ non-Christian philosophers, no doubt someone has told him by now that the forms as purely mental was actually one of William of Ockham’s central contributions to philosophy in the fourteenth century.) Aristotle, of course, developed the philosophical idea of entelechy, the teaching that forms do transcend individual instances of a species and do stand as real, philosophically speaking, but reside not separate from objects but within the objects themselves. Perhaps more surprising still to our beleaguered Athenian would be that, after dwelling in the Aristotle trench, the eternal souls that Plato does talk about (though sometimes in terms of reincarnation) return to a “Platonic” stasis, some by achieving salvation (another category rather alien to Plato and to Aristotle) and then reaching a final Platonic (neo-Platonic?) ideal, and some by falling into what McLaren calls “Greek Hades,” a construct that of course predates Plato and Aristotle by a few centuries and, in most cases, has little to do with punishment for wrongdoing.
If all of that sounds familiar through the haze of misused Greek texts, it’s because the “Greco-Roman narrative” that McLaren would impose upon Plato and Aristotle (the tag team!) is far more akin to what Origen, Augustine, and other Christian writers would call the narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. Although certain iterations of that narrative sequence deserve criticism, McLaren does nobody any favors (especially those of us who love teaching Plato) by inventing a syncretic thought-system that simply does not exist in classical texts and then loading that cumbersome burden on some of Christianity’s best classical tutors.
As a passing comment in the introduction to one of his chapters, McLaren notes that, although he’s not been a seminarian, he has read “thousands of theological books” (78). I suppose my hope for McLaren and other Christian writers is that we slow down a bit, perhaps read dozens of theological books, but get their arguments right when we classify them.
Brian McLaren Gets Sneaky
Given the unfortunate choice between saying that McLaren is forgetting the actual content of Classical philosophy and saying that McLaren is being duplicitous, I’ll choose the memory lapse. But other things in the book look too much like sleight of hand to get a pass, and although I won’t cast the first stone, I do feel duty-bound to note some of the suspicious-looking passages.
In an early section of the book, McLaren relates a talk he gave at a conference in which he lined up seven people on the stage, each representing a historical figure. In a diagram that I won’t reproduce here (I’m going to be cross-posting this review, and so I’m trying to keep html to a minimum), McLaren labels seven stick figures as follows:
Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Wesley or Newton, Pope Benedict or Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham
After he briefly notes that folks who get their theology from this stream aren’t “directly seeing Jesus” (36), he gives the people in the row a different set of names:
Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Amos or Isaiah or Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus
His point seems to be that the reading of Biblical texts that will follow in his book, unlike the “Greco-Roman” version of things, would work forwards up to Jesus rather than backwards to Jesus, therefore giving a different sort of story.
The problems are obvious, of course: without even reaching for my bookshelf, I could tell you in which books Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Erasmus, Calvin, and Pope Benedict talk about the six figures that McLaren seems to think he’s rediscovering. Beyond that, McLaren’s progressive theology, a tradition that doubtless deserves a hearing in its own right and on its own terms, has its own “hidden six” that McLaren never names. So if I might offer one possible lineup, some whose influence I detect globally and others with page numbers where I detected some of their influence:
Jesus, Vico (50-51), Hegel (239), Marx (239) or Darwin (14-15), Nietzsche or Wellhausen, Foucault (31) or Freud or Bultmann, Ehrman or Crossan or Spong
Such is not to say that the Traditionalist Six automatically deserves more of a hearing than do the Progressive Six. But I do think that anyone, left-wing or right-wing, should have the honesty to name one’s own influences rather than pitting one’s own Bible-loving self against one’s traditions-of-men enemies. All of us who come to the Christian tradition know Adam and David; let’s have some honest conversation about how we’re using them and how they influence us.
Beyond the invisible-influence suspicion, I had some real troubles with the ways that McLaren talks about professionally trained authority figures. In one passage he would say that folks who hold seminary credentials likely have good intentions but, because of their need to support themselves and because they haven’t progressed along his (Maslow-flavored–this is another instance of invisible influence) color-coded scale of theological awareness. In another he would refer to clergy-types as prison guards (31) who are keeping folks from their spiritual freedom. And with regards to formal training itself, McLaren in this book, as in his other books, makes a point of boasting that he’s not had formal seminary training (though apparently he’s read thousands of theology books), but late in the game, giving advice to clergy who think their congregations might be interested in moving up a step on the Maslow-McLaren rainbow, writes thus:
First of all, as someone who loves Plato (the real Plato, not the one whom McLaren invents earlier in the book), I immediately recognized Plato’s community-leader-as-physician riff, and I chuckled (just for a second) that McLaren was now out-Platonizing Plato.
Second, once the immediate amusement wore off, I remembered the mercenary and self-serving motives assigned to folks who actually dedicate their lives to one place as pastors, and I was quite angry that he reserved none of that fury for hirelings who jet around the country collecting “consultant fees.”
Third, I realized that both Brian McLaren and Tony Jones pitch themselves as consultants, and after a bit of Google searching, I realized that Doug Pagitt and Len Sweet also advertise themselves as consultants. That’s when the anger turned to suspicion.
Please understand that I’m an equal-opportunity religious-consultant-hater; if Mark Driscoll or Jim Dobson or Ken Ham do the same, I don’t like that either. As an Aristotelian (the Aristotle whose Nicomachean Ethics I love, not the Ockham-Aristotle that McLaren invented), I believe that leadership happens best, especially for communities dedicated to reconstituting the body of the Cosmic King (that would be churches, folks), when those communities look within rather than shuffling through resumes, and I’m inclined to hold consultants far below the permanent-hire-from-out-of-town in terms of the goods they do for a community.
I realize that not everybody is as suspicious of out-of-town “experts” as I am, and I’d be fine if McLaren were consistently sanguine. But as it stands, it looks like he decided to use this book, which pitches itself as a moment of honesty, as a platform to promote himself and his Emergent Village buddies while calling dedicated ordained folks prison guards, and that’s an inexcusable bit of duplicity.
Brian McLaren Gets the Nod
As I wrote at the beginning of this marathon review, a book’s excellence lies not in its being right but in its being interesting. Given that criterion, I’d still recommend this book for folks interested in reading some philosophical-progressive alternatives to modern evangelicalism. There are some moments of sloppy thinking and others of outright self-serving dishonesty, but on balance, I can accept those sorts of things in a book that spurs me to think for a while, and I think that this book did. If you run into folks like the ones in the book’s opening anecdote, folks who tell you that Brian McLaren is too dangerous a writer for Christians to read without throwing their souls into peril, do those folks the courtesy of saying what the old lady in McLaren’s story told him: “I don’t see what the fuss is about” (2).
Feb 16th, 2010
holy heteroclite
Here’s part 2 of my review.
Again, Note: this review from my blog includes several links, you’ll need to see the original post to make the links clickable:
http://davewainscott.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-kind-of-christianity-review-part.html
“A New Kind of Christianity” review part 2..Greco-Roam fridge repair and loud farts
As I have now finished McLaren’s
“A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith,”
.. and believe it is in several senses his most important book yet……..
here is a follow up to my first post (here) and kind of
a walk-through review of Book One of the book.
Let me say that even though I may not eventually follow everywhere it leads, I love the book, and think it is a vital read for anyone one wants to “get” the current (click each phrase to see who has coined each phrase)”weird moment is history”/ Deep Shift //Reorientation/Great Emergence/3rd Reformation/4th Great Awakening/4th Rummage Sale”/New Kind of Christianity”….which in the end (literally: p. 255) McLaren clearly admits is not truly something new, but something quite ancient which is finally re-emerging..for those brave enough to run with it.
If you’d like to be such a runner, or are just brave and Christian enough to test it out, the new McLaren book should be read in tandem with Wolfgang Simson’s “Houses That Change The World,” Tony Jones’ “The New Christians,” Phyllis Tickles’ The Great Emergence” …and pick at least one of Len Sweet’s books, please.
“New Kind” has been called everything from called the first Systematic Theology of the Emerging Church to an evil missive from a son of Lucifer.
It’s not either, but much closer to the first (:
The basic ideas are that he six line narrative; “what we call the biblical story line isn’t the shape of the story of Adam, Abraham, and their Jewish descendants. It’s the shape of the…Greco-Roman narrative”(37); and that we have read the Bible wrongly through a constitutional lens rather than viewed it as a “community library.”
What this means and implies is not small news, it is the good news that we have missed via our “adventures in missing the point” (to reference another McLaren title).
For those of us trained in the West, this changes as much as everything.
As the Fly once told us, “Everything you know is wrong.”
But remember said Fly emerged later (at a Christian festival, no less, with a reconstructive “Everything you know is right.”
We live in the weird and wonderful times in between those two prophetic proclamations.
It’s a new kind of day.
A few thoughts regarding the book in general, and then onto Book One.
On a practical and positive note:
Often at the beginning of a chapter, transition statements and summaries are quite helpful.
Also, for some reason,and to my surprise, book one to me was twice as thoughtful, exhiliriating and rewarding as Book Two (the practical “so what do we do now” section)…though some sections of the second book ( exegesis of John 14′s “prepare a place for you,” and the Chapter 21 suggestions for those seeking to become change agents, are hugely helpful.
I am not sure why this is; perhaps the call to reorient our worldview and narrative; to betray our blinders and bibliolatry is so crucial and fundamental that we still must spend (too much) time and deconstruction there. Then again, “nothing is more practical than theory.”
One minor annoyance: the cute coupling of phrases like “shrinking, wrinkling,” translation/ transition,” “stealthy and wealthy” became a bit to distracting after awhile…and these examples are just from the first ten pages! But he is an English professor, and I do the same thing in a much cheesier way!
On to some highlights and commentary from each section.
PREFACE:
This quote nails the”re-forming” times we have been given:
Paradigms and dogma can be defended and enforced with guns and prisons, bullets and bonfires, threats and humiliations, fatwas and excommunications. But paradigms and dogmas remain profoundly vulnerable when anomalies are present. They can be undone by something as simple as a question. (16)
Too bad American evangelicals have been taught that questions are never part of the answer!!
PARTS ONE (‘THE NARRATIVE QUESTION”)AND TWO (‘THE AUTHORITY QUESTION”):
If it is at all possible that we have been seduced and hijacked by the Greco-Roman six points, we must be willing to at least ask and pray if such is so.
Most of us inevitably and unquestioningly (the heart of the problem, this refusal to even ask questions about everything we have inherited) read and wrestle with the Bible as one particular story line with six sections: 1) Eden/perfection), 2) Fall, 3) History/condemnation, 4) offering of salvation, 5) heaven/return to perfection or 6) hell/eternal punishment.
So first of all, can we ask, is this six-line metasermon really there?
Secondly:
Does it contribute to a higher vision of God, a deeper engagement with Christ, a more profound experience of the Holy Spirit? Does it motivate us to love God, neighbor, stranger, and enemy more wholeheartedly?
If not, how does Scripture shape iteslf? What if instead of reading church history backwards through Luther, Augustine, et al, we went back to the beginning and followed the flow?
What if we started not with our inherited Greco-Roman glasses, but with the eyes of teh father of faith, Abram?
In this video, McLaren draws (in the sand, no less. The critics will inevitably ask, “Who does he think he is: Jesus?”) a version of the six-sectioned narrative he draws in the book, and offers a more biblical
Brian McLaren: Q1 – The Narrative Question
by theoozetv
Now hang on as we fill in the new (old) narrative:
“But Genesis is, in many ways, not the main story of the Hebrew Sriptures. It is more like a prequel…to the prime narrative…which comes to us in Exodus (56)..
This so dovetailed with a section in Ray Anderson’s (ahead of his time) book, “The Soul of Ministry,” that I must bring it into the conversation:
“Where is the theological beginning point of the Old Testament?” I asked a group of pastors…I received a variety of answers, with Genesis the most cited. “No,” I replied, “I want the theological beginnimg poimt, not the htonologiacl.
“Exodus,” someone shouted out, and we were off and running.
Exodus precedes Genesis in the same way that knowledge of God as Redeemer precedes knowledge of God as Creator.
-Anderson, p. 6
McLaren makes the case that Genesis is creation/reconciliation, and Exodus liberation/formation (66)….but the latter is ultimately of foremost import.
So much so that even “[in John], Genesis themes are strong, but Exodus themes are stronger. (131).
The third part of the biblical narrative, then is the sequel to the primary (Exodus), just as the first narrative (Genesis) is its prequel. The third narrative being “the sacred dream of the peaceable kingdom.”
Are we in sync then with the Greco-Roman six line narrative or 3D Jewish narrative of the “world of God as creator, liberator and reconciler” (66)?
Part of our problem, as McLaren has previously taught, is that we love static “states.”
McLaren doesn’t draw this out fully, but “state” here, stands for state as staticness (which physics helps us debunk, as well as state as “empire.” The first reformation produced a state, but this current reformation is about a quest.
“At this moment in history, we need something more radical and transformative than a new state, we need a new quest..more than a new static location,we need a new dynamic direction” (17)
“The Lord has little taste for states.” (48), so we are called to move from state to story.
And from a “constitutional” view of the Bible to a view of it as a dynamic, Jewish, three-dimensional “community library.” Here is where McLaren reminds us of everything we know intuitively, but have not been allowed to admit under reigning views of infallibility: the Bible is a lively collection of genres, and each had their own context. He uses the Book of Job as a case study; seeing Job as a fractal (93) and microcosm for all of Scripture, and Scripture’s many voices.
Isn’t it amazing that in Job itself, “God himself has “told us that a large proportion of what is uttered in the book of Job [by Job's friends] is false and foolish (89), but we continue to be formed by the G-C narrative, a constitutional paradigm, and the eisegesis of radio-orthodoxy,
and preach from all parts of Job as if they are the unified words of God.
Job, then, is a helpful model of the whole Bible, and that narrative, authority and revelation in a s a sense emerge out of the honest, unedited library, and “conversation ” of Scripture itself.
For those we see McLaren as dogmatic and dangerous here:
Perhaps the approach I am recommending is no better..But here’s what I hope; that this approach will not try to put us under the text, as conservatives tend to do, or lift us over it, as liberals often seem to do. Instead, I hope it will try to put is in the text, in the conversation…in the Spirit, in the community of people who keep bumping into God…even now.
(97)
And for those who have him a hellbound hellhound, hear how Christ-centered he is.
Mike Morrell’s corrective:
One of the things I appreciate the most about Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity is its refreshing Christ-centeredness.
-link
Mike quotes the book:
The Quaker scholar Elton Trueblood approached the Bible this way. One of Trueblood’s students told me that he often heard his mentor say something like this: “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.” In other words, the doctrines of the incarnation and deity of Christ are meant to tell us that we cannot start with a pre-determined, set-in-stone idea of God derived from the rest of the Bible, and then extend that to Jesus. Jesus is not intended merely to fit into those pre-determined categories; he is intended instead to explode them, transform them, alter them forever and bring us to a new evolutionary level in our understanding of God. An old definition of God does not define Jesus: the experience of God in Jesus requires a new brand definition or understanding of God.
Trueblood’s insight, in my opinion, is the best single reason to be identified as a believer in Jesus, and it is an unspeakably precious gift that can be offered to people of all faiths. The character of Jesus, we proclaim, provides humanity with a unique and indispensable guide for tracing the development of maturing images and concepts of God across human history and culture. It is the North Star, if you will, to aid all people, whatever their religious background, in their theological pilgrimage. The images of God that most resemble Jesus – whether they originate in the Bible or elsewhere – are the more mature and complete images, and the ones less similar to the character of Jesus would be the more embryonic and incomplete – even though they may be celebrated for being better than the less complete images they replaced.
This is why we cannot simply say that the highest revelation of God is given through the Bible (especially the Bible read as a constitution, or cut and pasted to fit in the Greco-Roman six-line narrative). Rather, we can say that, for Christians, the Bible’s highest value is in revealing Jesus, who gives us the highest, deepest, and most mature view of the character of the living God.
– A New Kind of Christianity, pages 114-115
In fact, if he has a potential fault, it might be that in over-correcting from Greco-Romanism and bibliolatry, he can push us to center too much on Christ (gasp)..
when our true center is even bigger than Jesus.
(see Len’s post, and mine, on this topic relative to Alan Hirsch)
Which leads us to next section, reminding us it is ultimately all about:
Kingdom.
Next blog post, that is..
But here’s a good summary and preview:
“A linear prose argument may be the best way to teach engineering or refigerator repair, but to teach matters of the spirit, literary forms work better–with all their twists and turns and circlings and returns and refrains, their imagination and provocation, their soina and sneakiness…He throws down metaphor after metaphor..to jolt the imagination”
Ahh, that’s what we fear…. Eugene Peterson:
“metaphor is a loud fart int he salon of spirituality,”
Next time:
PART THREE: THE GOD QUESTION
PART FOUR: THE JESUS QUESTION
PART FIVE: THE GOSPEL QUESTION
…and some shocking video by perhaps the biggest heretic of our day (Hint: it’s not McLaren…but maybe another Mc..maybe a Mac..)
Feb 17th, 2010
edwardgoode
I first ran across McLaren’s writings a few years ago when I read A Generous Orthodoxy. I remember being struck by his work at a very deep level especially in that he was actively wrestling with many of the same questions and things I was wrestling with – notably how to move beyond the simple dichotomies of liberal/conservative, right/left, etc. I had found myself in a place in my faith journey personally and in my ministry context that many of the “pat answers” that were easy to offer to people simply did not work and as I reflect back on it, I wonder whether those “pat answers” ever truly worked in the first place.
Since reading Orthodoxy, I have read several others of his books, but its been a while since I picked them up. I have kept up him largely through podcasts where he has spoken at various congregations or interviews I read online. I also noticed the same things he points out early on in his new book, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith – that he has become a target for many (really from across the theological spectrum, but especially from the more conservative sides) of not a New Kind of Christianity, but a New Kind of Heresy. It is with that background that I came to this new book, A New Kind of Christianity.
About halfway into the book as he makes a shift from more general questions about the faith to more specific ones, he says the following:
I imagine some readers at this point are feeling liberated and energized. Having explored our first five questions, you may feel like an Alka-Seltzer has been dropped in the center of your brain, and your imagination is fizzing with possibilities as relief comes to some of your theological indigestion. The Christian faith has never looked so good to you, and you’re saying things like, “Wow. Maybe I can be a Christian after all.” Others are outraged, and what you’re saying about this book and its author probably shouldn’t be made public (although it probably will be). A lot of readers are somewhere in between, maybe a little shaken and dizzy, with all kind of ambivalence churning. (pp 159-160)
I think this sums up the experience of reading A New Kind of Christianity. This is not a book for the faint-of-faith-heart. McLaren, not in a vengeful or mean-spirited way, clearly tackles (in a scratching the surface sort of way) the big questions and seeks to lay out a new way of exploring and experiencing and sharing the Christian faith. The core message that I heard in the book involves trying to understand the Gospel through the primacy of Jesus. An early point he makes in the book about the overarching storyline of the Bible is that much of what we understand of the faith today is reading Jesus backwards through the lenses of current day people like the Pope & Billy Graham, back through Calvin/Wesley, to Luther, to Aquinas, to Augustine, to Paul, and eventually to Jesus. In other words, its like the process that many art historians go through as they explore the different layers that are on classic paintings. As they explore those layers, they find that there is a deeper, more vibrant picture that is underneath the centuries of fading, additions, and damages. I will comment on this a bit below.
For McLaren, he is seeking to instead read Jesus forward through the lenses of those who came before Jesus and paved the way rather than trying to interpret him. In this way, what we are today seeing first is Jesus and beneath that layer, we see John the Baptist, Amos/Isaiah/Jeremiah, David, Moses, Abraham, and Adam.
The visual illustration he gives is of taking a physical Bible and imagines Jesus (Gospels) as being the spine between the Old and New Testaments. Instead of lifting up either side as ways that push the spine down below the Old or New, McLaren imagines it more like this image.
McLaren speaks to the concept of Jesus as the spine to which the Old Testament leads and from which the New Testament follows. In essence, the initial core of the book to me is the idea that the church has moved away from a Jesus first understanding of God and instead an interpretation of who Jesus was and what he was (and is) about seen through the lenses of the later writings in the New Testament, tradition and history since that time.
He makes it very clear that he is not saying that the rest of the New Testament is invalid, but instead that the primary source is the stories of Jesus we have in the Gospels and that we need to remember the focus of the rest of the NT is trying to understand how to read the Gospels and to live them out in their specific contexts and situations.
I could go into greater depth on the other areas, especially as he gets into more specific “issue” questions in the 2nd half of the book, but they are guided by what he lays out in the first half of the book.
As I read the book, I found myself vacillating between wondering if this is something in the nature of a 95 Theses like Luther posted on the door in Wittenburg (which at the time probably did not seem like it would lead to what it eventually led to) or just another writing talking about how the church has gone off the rails in some ways over the last several hundred years. There are plenty of things that have been written over the years that have said exactly that. Is McLaren saying something different here? I also wonder whether we can truly get beyond the layers that have been laid upon Jesus over the centuries and see Jesus as the primary lens. Going back to my art illustration…yes, we can see beneath the surface of the added layers, but even if we get to the bottom, its still not as it was when it was original.
I don’t think McLaren is writing the book as a new theology text or anything of that sort, but instead an invitation to a conversation where people are listening to one another and speaking with one another with a willingness to be changed in the process. If you do read it, know that you will likely be pushed in some very significant ways and there will be things that McLaren writes that will make you stop and say, “excuse me”? But he raises important questions for our day, our experience, and our faith.
http://www.edwardgoode.net/2010/02/18/a-new-kind-of-christianity-by-brian-mclaren-a-review/
Feb 18th, 2010
frgregoryj
The critiques I’ve read of Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith condemn it as heretical. Key to this judgment is that they all evaluate the book based on a canon of orthodoxy that I would characterizes as a loosely post-Reformation Protestant-Evangelical-Fundamentalist theological standard. The irony of these critiques is that it is just this standard of orthodoxy that McLaren is rejecting. Flipping it around, though he doesn’t use the word, McLaren is calling his post-Reformation Protestant-Evangelical-Fundamentalist critics heretics and presenting himself (explicitly) as a new Martin Luther, a as man called by God to reform the reformation and the daughters of that tradition.
Viewed in this light, the debate about McLaren, the emergent church movement and a “new kind of Christianity” is the theological equivalent of intramural flag football. You got a lot of guys on the field but none of them are particularly fit or skilled. And certainly none of them play at a professional level.
To push the analogy just one more step, the professional level that McLaren and his critics merely imitate, is the catholic tradition of theological orthodoxy of the Church Fathers and the sacramental, liturgical and ascetical practice of the historic Christian Church. Whatever our differences, this tradition is to be found in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
Unfortunately McLaren and his critics are estranged from these Churches and this matters because the further one travels from the canon of faith and practice embodied in these two Churches, the further one travels as well from the Gospel.
For all their theological differences, qwhat McLaren and his critics do share is the lived conviction that the catholic tradition of theological orthodoxy is not incarnated in any single Church. They do not so much read the Fathers as skim them and so protect themselves from the ecclesiological conclusions that would, necessarily, undermine the notion their faith in the Church as an invisible collect of all believers everywhere rather than an historical, visible society, with shared faith, lead by a common episcopate and which meets together in the one celebration of the Eucharist.
Whatever else McLaren and his critics may disagree about, they agree in rejecting the understanding of the Church that informed the faith and practice not only of the patristic era but the contemporary Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
The judgment is not mine to make, but they are, I hope, men who love Christ and are sincere in their desire to live the Gospel. But in the end in having separated themselves from the Church (and for the context of this argument, we can put on hold an adjudication of the truth claims of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches relative to each other), they lack the one thing needed to bring their faith to fruition.
When I was ordained to the priesthood, Metropolitan MAXIMOS told me that I must have a special care for those who love Christ and lack the priesthood. His Eminence went on to explain that without the priesthood, there could be no sacrifice of the altar–that is there could be no celebration of the Eucharist. And without the Eucharist, without this rational and unbloody sacrifice, love, while real, would be stillborn.
It is this the cry of this stillborn love that I hear in both McLaren and his critics.
This no doubt sounds harsh. And it sounds so because it is. McLaren and his critics are not arguing over the Catholic and Orthodox faith but market share. They stand within traditions that are built on the more or less intentional rejection of the normative character of the first 1,000 years of Christian Tradition, from Church Tradition. Apart from this Tradition, however, they have no standard to adjudicate their claims relative to each other.
The tragedy of their debate, the reason I find it stillborn, is that to accept this standard, means to undermine the very thing they are debating: the post-Reformation Protestant-Evangelical-Fundamentalist vision of the Christian life.
But this is after all a review of McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. So let me end with a word about the book.
McLaren is not presenting us with a new kind of Christianity but simply a re-working of Evangelical Christianity. While he claims his work is post-modern, it isn’t. For that we should look to the works of John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and David Bentley Hart. Read these theologians and the intellectual and spiritual poverty of McLaren’s work and the emegent church movement is clear.
Whatever good points there might be in his re-working, in the end McLaren’s “new kind of Christianity” demonstrates the inherent and internal theological and spiritual weakness of the Reformation in general and of Evangelical Christianity in particular. That weakness is the weakness of a merely partial faith, a faith that is not orthodox (or Orthodox) because it is not catholic (or Catholic) and not catholic (or Catholic) because it is nor orthodox (or Orthodox).
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory
Feb 18th, 2010
johnchandler
What if? No. Really…what if.
I think I’ve read each book that Brian McLaren has authored. I’ve certainly reflected on a few of them on this blog. Between his books, and hearing him speak, and even a brief conversation or two, I’ve always been drawn to his genuine, and generous, spirit.
While McLaren has garnered plenty of critique (and that’s putting it mildly), I have appreciated his posture and willingness to bring difficult questions into public dialogue. And through all the critique, it has seemed to me that most of his work has been about asking questions while implying, or sometimes gently suggesting, a few challenging answers. He’s done a lot of asking, “What if?”
There is a shift in McLaren’s newest book, A New Kind of Christianity. There are reviews around the internet and few are fully embracing McLaren’s latest work. Most suggest that he has gone too far as reviewers distance themselves. My take, as the title of this post suggests, is that the gentle proddings of his “what if?” questions have become a more assertive “what if…” set of suggestions, or as he would say, responses.
I want to read this book as an open and expanded understanding of Chrsitianity — one that will broaden and challenge my own thinking. It certainly seems like the quote I posted from his introduction last week invites that very thing.
But, in his most assertive book, Brian isn’t just inviting an expanded understanding of Christianity. In this book, he states that he is looking toward something different than most North American evangelicals have experienced. He suggests that those, like me, who try to stand with one foot in what we have known as orthodoxy, while broadening our views of Christianity, will be unsuccessful.
I guess it must be that I don’t take things as far as he does, because I don’t agree with him on this point. In the last five years, I’ve grown to a broader and richer understanding of the Christian faith than I’ve ever had, while still standing firmly within a creedal understanding of Christianity. I have authors like NT Wright, Dallas Willard, and even, um, Brian McLaren, to thank for this.
I’m not entirely sure what Brian was hoping for in this book. Time will tell what he accomplishes, but those who read should read with discernment. Of course, those who read any book should read with discernment.
Feb 19th, 2010
Robb Ryerse
Brian McLaren has done it again.
When I read A New Kind of Christian trilogy several years ago, I was in the midst of a spiritual and emotional depression. I was, in McLaren’s words, “between something real and something wrong.” I had begun to question a lot of what I had been taught, a lot of what I preached, a lot of what gave me identity as a Christian and as a pastor. And I knew that if I expressed my questions and doubts, it would cost me my job. A New Kind of Christian gave me the courage to step out and journey onto some terra nova, leading eventually to the launching of Vintage Fellowship, the emergent faith community I have the inexpressible privilege of shepherding.
For me, Brian McLaren’s books are like a turn-by-turn GPS, always one step ahead of me, guiding the way. In the same way that A New Kind of Christian charted the path I would journey, so now, I believe A New Kind of Christianity will chart the path that Vintage Fellowship is journeying.
A New Kind of Christianity has framed the ongoing discussion our faith community is having. It’s like Brian has been having coffee with us. He asks 10 essential questions:
-What is the overarching storyline of the Bible?
-How should the Bible be understood?
-Is God Violent?
-Who is Jesus and why is he important?
-What is the gospel?
-What do we do about the church?
-Can we find a way to address human sexuality?
-Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
-How should the followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
-How can we translate our quest into action?
McLaren engages each question thoughtfully, opening up a space for discussion, dissent, and development. I am sure my fundamentalist friends will not be OK with his questions, let alone his proposed answers. But I am no longer a fundamentalist, and I love the space to explore and wonder. Many times throughout the book, I felt affirmed, reading a perspective on a question that I shared. Many more times, I was challenged to look at a question from a new perspective. And what a blessing that space is.
As tremendously important as McLaren’s framing of the quest for a new kind of Christianity is, maybe his most important contribution to the discussion is his gracious and gentle manner. He describes some of the reaction his teaching has engendered. And he responds to some of his critics. He could have reason to come on strongly, defensively, and argumentatively. He never does. He maintains the kind of irenic spirit that I think makes God proud. I hope that I can emulate it.
Constantly searching for metaphors to help map the territory ahead, McLaren describes the maturation process of humanity in general and religious thought in particular in terms of the colors of the spectrum. As I read his description of the movement from red to yellow through green and blue to violet, it was as if I was reading my own story. In short, reading A New Kind of Christian and launching Vintage Fellowship was my journey into the indigo shade of honesty. But I am ready to move beyond honesty to peace. I am ready to continue my quest. I am not confident of much, but I am confident of this: A New Kind of Christianity will be a map I return to again and again as I seek to lead myself, my family, and my church into the violet horizon of a hopeful, peaceful future.
Thanks, Brian, for doing it again.
Feb 19th, 2010
Danny Coleman
Brian McLaren has emerged as a voice that asks aloud the questions that many of us have wrestled with in silence. As a result, he has been lionized (and sometimes idolized) by those who find resonance with his theological ponderings. He has simultaneously been demonized and even slandered by those who are disturbed by his explorations into what it means to follow Jesus in the 21st century. He has become both an antenna and a lightning rod for the light and heat generated by the friction of Christianity’s transition into post-modernism.
I have just finished reading McLaren’s latest book, A New Kind of Christianity. Having read several of McLaren’s other books, I would consider this one to be essential. I mean “essential” in two different ways:
1. “Essential” in the sense that A New Kind of Christianity is a streamlined and tightly focused distillation of ideas that McLaren has explored elsewhere. This book seems to contain the concentrated essence of what McLaren’s theological labor has produced thus far. I often found points which he had sketched out in previous books now re-drawn in sharp, clear and muscular form. As a result–at under 300 pages–this book packs a great deal of theological, intellectual and inspirational punch.
2. “Essential” in the sense that A New Kind of Christianity is *the* Brian McLaren book to read, whether you haven’t read anything else by him or whether you have read everything else by him.
A New Kind of Christianity is built around the exploration of ten important questions that Christians throughout the world seem to be asking more and more and with greater urgency. These questions are:
1. What is the overarching story line of the Bible?
2. How should the Bible be understood?
3. Is God violent?
4. Who is Jesus and why is He important?
5. What is the Gospel?
6. What do we do about the Church?
7. Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
8. Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
9. How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
10. What do we do now? (How do we translate our quest into action?)
McLaren doesn’t so much provide pat answers to these questions as give thoughtful responses which leave the door open for further exploration. His tone throughout is humble, circumspect and low-key. This is not a book for people who want a pedagogue to tell them what to believe. Rather it inspires you to bring your own theology into the light and take an honest look at what you believe, why you believe it and if, perhaps, you ought to rethink a thing or two (or ten).
As an example, early on McLaren provides a brilliantly simple visual representation of the Biblical narrative according to Western “Greco-Roman” Christianity (aka Catholicism & Protestantism). He then proceeds to carefully deconstruct that “Greco-Roman” narrative and present an alternate “Hebrew” narrative which is vibrant, hopeful, appealing and, frankly, makes a whole lot more sense. One begins to realize that this “New Kind of Christianity” is also very ancient.
As a Quaker, I found myself surprised at the parallels to Quaker theology which I found all through this book. I had an opportunity to ask Brian about this on a conference call and he responded very enthusiatically. He is quite familiar with the theology of Friends and spoke in glowing terms of Quakers. Perhaps George Fox & Co. were at the far bleeding edge of what has come to be called the Emergent Church Movement! In the book, McLaren refers to those throughout Church history who, like the Quakers and Anabaptists, provided a “minority report” on what it means to follow Jesus.
On that same conference call (courtesy of The Ooze), McLaren said that it took him far longer to write this book than any other book he has written. It shows. Now that I have finished reading it, I plan to begin re-reading it immediately. This is an extremely important book. Buy it. I am not exaggerating when I say that if I could afford to, I would get a copy for every Christian and every spiritual seeker I know.
Feb 19th, 2010
kristinemac
I must confess as I approached A New Kind of Christianity I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. I’ve read a few of Brian McClaren’s books in the past and while I don’t always agree with his assertions I believe the conversation he and others like him in the Emerging Church movement have put forth to the greater church community have been interesting and thought provoking.
However, I find in A New Kind of Christianity a more adversarial tone which belies it’s stated intent to “further the conversation.”…continue reading review at http://bigfishministries.com/kristine/?p=2689
Feb 22nd, 2010
Steven Burleson
I finished up a New Kind of Christianity a few weeks ago. I think I read it all in one weekend. I haven’t read all of Brian’s books, but I can say that this one is going to stir the waters for a lot of people. Through the book, Brian asks us to take a journey with him to deconstruct our Greco-Roman understanding of the Christian faith. To be honest, the book didn’t raise a lot of new ideas for me. However, I do believe that, for someone unfamiliar with ideas Brian raises in the book, this is going to be an awakening. As usual, Brian interacts with the ideas he proposes with grace and understanding for those who may struggle through the pages. Overall, I think this book is a great introductory travel guide that will guide new Christians into further discussion on where we are going as a faith community.
http://treehousemonastic.com/2010/02/24/a-new-kind-of-christianity/
Feb 24th, 2010
Ron Cole
Review part One…ANKoC
I’ve reached the mid point in Brian McLaren’s latest musings, ” A New Kind of Christianity.” So this is likely a good place to pull over to the side of the road and digest, and put some thoughts to paper. My first thought is this book will get a lot of people navigating towards it just because of its title ” A New Kind of.” If anything, it was marvelous marketing strategy. To attract the fundamentalist, so they know what there up against; and the emerging conversation so they get a glimpse of what may be on the horizon. But the reality…it may be more old school, than new school.
I think his musings will be shocking for much of Christendom that still lives in the corridor of modernity, and will be seen as heretical by much of the North American Evangelical church. But, I think Brian McLaren draws a lot of his so called newness from an ancient well of wisdom of historic Christianity that the Evangelical church oblivious to. He draws from the apophatic theological influences in Christianity such as Miester Eckart, that drew – not only from Gospel and Pauline narratives, Peter Rollins draws a lot of wisdom from this well in his writings. Also from Neoplatonism, influential thinkers such as Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Eriugena. And also from a writer Percy Walker, his influence and interest in philosophy and semiotics.
So the fact all may not be ” new ” is ok, because I think Brian McLaren, in his musings takes us on an important journey to renewed paradox, tension, mystery, non-dualistic thinking…and profound redemptive imagination. In a moment where we find ourselves at the edge of religion, and science, if anything Brian McLaren helps us to re-imagine hope…a way out of the box of religion.
So., lets quickly look at the contents of Book One, ” UNLOCKING AND OPENING.” It is broken down into 5 questions, The Narrative Question; The Authority Question; The God Question; The Jesus Question; and the Gospel Question.
In the Narrative Question we discover the unspoken story line of the Bible that we explicitly taught- or implicitly taught that could be diagrammed by 6 lines. (1) Eden, (2) Fall, (3) Condemnation, (4) Hell, Damnation, (5) Salvation, (6) Heaven. He also talks about the Greco-Roman Narrative this mindset that gives us a skewed image of God that Brian McLaren says is similar in many ways to the Greek god Zeus. He calls him Theos who loves spirit, state and beings, and hates matter, story and becoming, since once again the latter involves change, and the only way to move from perfection is down ward towards decay. Anything that drops out of state of perfection must be destroyed, or made to suffer. Hence our six line reading of the biblical narrative. Brian, tells us it’s time to exit the Greco-Roman narrative to quietly and courageously walk out the door and leave it’s six lines behind. Then Brian takes us through setting the stage for Biblical narrative. The protagonist of Genesis bearing with a rebellious and foolish humanity time and time again. It’s a stage where humanity seems to rise in steps of worldly influence and power, but with each gain, humanity descends into loss. I think what will upset many is Brian Mclarens musings around Adam, Eve and the apple…
Notice the text does not say they will be condemned to hell, be ” spiritually separated from God,” be pronounced ” fallen ” or ” condemned “, or be tainted with something called the ” original sin ” that will be passed on to their children. There is only one consequence indicated in the text: they will die – not spiritually die, not relationally die, not ontologically die, but simply die.
For Brian McLaren, the Biblical narrative, God’s unfolding drama is nota narrative shaped by the 6 lines of the Greco-Roman scheme of perfection, fall, condemnation, salvation and heavenly perfection or eternal perdition. It is a narrative about the downside of ” progress “- a story of human foolishness and God’s faithfulness, the human turn toward rebellion, and God’s turn towards reconciliation, the human intention towards evil and God;s intention to overcome evil with good. We might say it’s a story of goodness being created and re-created.Is this Pelagianism, shadows of Charles Finney, Asa Mahan, or Winkie Pratney. I applaud this bold, imaginative reading of the narrative. For some it will be a huge leap,a non-duality interpretation might be too much paradox, to much mystery. But, in it there is a redemptive imagination that will attract the mind of all humanity, not just the religious.
Brian McLaren then asks the Jesus Question. I think a lot of people are going to find his image of Jesus is too toned down. Not being as powerfully portrayed in the creeds, and as in some of the Pauline narrative, people may be confused by where Brian is going. It is all narrative, Brian attempts to sew the eternal mystery, that incarnational thread that is Jesus from beginning to end. Jesus is the center, or backbone of the story. Jesus holds the story, and all creation together. Brian McLaren’s Jesus is seen in the Genesis story of creation and reconciliation; the Exodus story of liberation and formation; and the Isaiah story of new creation and a peace-making Kingdom…and as NT Wright says, the inauguration as seen in the gospels. Is Brian McLaren’s Jesus too small…
In this light, Jesus’ offers of ” life of the ages ” and ” life abundant ” sparkle with new significance. When Jesus promises ” life of the ages ” ( a better translation of the Greek zoein aionian, I believe, than, ” eternal life “, the meaning of which is poorly framed in many minds be the 6 line narrative ), he’s not promising ” life after death “, or ” life in eternal heaven instead of eternal hell.” Instead Jesus is promising a life that transcends ” life in the present age ” an age that is soon going to end in tumult. Being ” born of God ” and ” born again ” or ” born from above ” would in this light mean being born into this new creation. So again, Jesus is offering life in the new Genesis, the new creation that is ” of the ages “…meaning it is part of God’s original creation…( page 130 )
But even these few examples, selected from so many more, make it clear that Jesus, contrary to my dear loyal critic’s assertion, did not come to save souls from hell. No, he came to launch a new Genesis, to lead a new Exodus, and to announce, embody, and inaugurate a new Kingdom as the Prince of Peace. ( page 135 )
So is Brian McLaren’s vision of the Kingdom verses heaven drastically different from Bishop NT Wright’s in Surprised by Hope,… christians wrong about heaven, says bishop.
For Brian McLaren, it is absolutely clear, the gospels, the good news is about ” the Kingdom.” But readers will be challenged by the openness of the ” New Kind of Christianity ” Kingdom message, for many it may be to pluralistic, almost bordering ” universalism.”
Beyond that, I always assumed that ” kingdom of God ” meant ” kingdom of heaven “, which meant ” going to heaven after you die “, which required believing the message of Paul’s letter to the Romans, which I understood to teach the theory of atonement called ” penal substitution “, which was the basis for a formula of forgiveness of original sin called, ” justification by grace through faith.” ( page 138 )
An increasing number of us, when freed from the constraints of the 6 line Greco-Roman narrative and associated constitutional reading of the Bible, gain courage to speak what has become joyfully clear to us in this fresh reading of the gospels: Jesus did not come to start a new religion to replace first Judaism and then all other religions, whether by pen, the pulpit, the sword, or the apocalypse. …
Instead, he came to announce a new kingdom, a new way of life, a new way of peace that carried the good news to all people of every religion. A new kingdom is much bigger than a new religion, and in fact it has room for many religious traditions with in it. ( page 139 )
Even with in the context of the 6 line Greco-Roman narrative, I’ve always been mystified that the redemptive story seems to go back as far the Exodus story, where God liberates his people. But in the context of the Genesis story, to the original sin which initiates the first line, this is the embryonic origin of humanity void of any religious label. So even in a narrative reading as Brian lays out, and even in the 6 lines…Jesus should be seen as liberator, reconciler for all humanity…outside the context, and inside the context of all religions. So Brian McLaren’s offers a hope for all humanity, a redemptive imagination that should rekindle hope, and a way forward beyond religious exclusiveness.
Christian universalism musings are not new, there have been many passionate followers of Jesus that have explored this theological understanding. Brian McLaren just awakens us again to it’s redemptive imagination.
So I know pull back out onto the road and read Part Two, and I look in the rear view mirror and exhale. Many in the church will be repulsed by ” A New Kind of Christianity “, but I wonder how many who have left the church in the last 10-15 years will be attracted by this message. I think Brian has given us nothing new, it comes from depth of ancient wisdom… he gives us a breath taking image of an ongoing relationship between God and humanity.
Review Part 2 … ANKoC
So I’m just closing the back cover of A New Kind of Christianity, and Brian’s tweak of Luther’s introduction and Thesis 1 of his Ninety-Five Theses, could be a synopsis and forecast of future faith conversation and practice…
Out of love for truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following proposal is offered…Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when he said Poenitentiam agite , willed that the whole history of the Christian faith should be repentance, rethinking and quest.
Book Two, ANKoC is titled ” Emerging and Exploring ” and is broken down into five parts; The Church Question; The Sex Question; The Future Question; The Pluralism Question; The What-Do-We-Do-Now Question.
In the first two parts there really isn’t, at least in my mind much new thinking. For those you have followed the emerging/missional church conversation, Brian reinforces much of what has been said in recent years…diversity of forms, structure, practice.
What if the Christian Faith is supposed to exist in a variety of forms rather than one imperial one? What f it is both more stable and agile–more responsive to the Holy Spirit–when it exists in many forms. And what if, instead of arguing about which form is correct and legitimate, we were to honor, appreciate, and validate one another and see ourselves as servants of one grander mission, apostles of one greater message, seekers on one ultimate quest. That, I’d say, sounds like a new kind of Christianity. ( Page 164 )
Again, if you’ve read ” The Emergent Manifesto of Hope ” or Ryan Bolger’s and Eddie Gibb’s, ” Emerging Churches “, Brian reinforces the reality that a lot of this has been evolving for the past few years. And the reality, I believe it will continue to play out in the way of Mega churches, fluid and highly small emerging/missional communities…to highly interconnected networks.
My only concern was I thought Brian’s question of ” What do we do about Church ” lacked a critique and vision around leadership, education…and seminaries. He asks the question, ” How does spiritual formation in the way of Jesus differ from religious education in the way of Christianity?” He seems to leave it dangling, and intentionally or unintentionally walks away from it. In a ” Google ” age our access to knowledge is limitless in terms of quantity, and terms of speed it is blindingly fast. To ignore this the church will join the dinosaurs in the ice age…becoming petrified, fossilized left for the digging of future cultural archaeologists to dig up.
The Web has pulled the global village closer together, Skype, numerous forms of social IM services connect us with one click. It is a very pluralistic world, high tech, a highly digital world of telecommuters…almost anywhere, any place from the palm of our hand we are joined. This the rapidly changing landscape of the world in which the church must not only live…but flourish. What kind of leaders can navigate the gospel message through its interconnected maze, and what about seminary training models…are they keeping up with the rate of change? Any kind of a new Christianity must seriously engage these questions. Brian scratched the surface, my hope is new voices will take us on a deeper quest.
Again it is with the human sexuality question, ” Can we find a way to address human sexuality?” In the laboratory where I work on certain instruments we have a ” panic button ” that we cover in a thick gage plastic so it can’t be pressed. For much of Christianity, human sexuality is a ” panic button ” covered secure, and to be avoided at all costs. Or, if it is pressed there is only one outcome…abandonment, cast out, condemnation, and a hell bound future. Brian engages us in an other way forward…
By coming out of the closet regarding their homosexuality, gay folks help the rest of us come out of the closet regarding our sexuality. And that is important, because the longer we hide from the truth of our sexuality…all of its beauty and agony, in all its passion and pain, in all of its simplicity and complexity…the sicker we will be, as religious communities, as cultures, and as a global society.
As in so many areas, we must blaze a new trail into that terra nova beyond binary and reactionary ideals of sexuality repressive funda-sexuality, on the one hand, and sexually unrestrained hedonism, on the other. We must pursue a practical, down-to-earth theology and an honest, fully embodied spirituality that speak truthfully and openly about our sexuality, in all it’s straight and gay complexity.( page 189 )
In the question, ” Can we find a better way of viewing the future?”, Brian moves of beyond the eschatological theory of dispensationalism to a vision of a future that is continually unfolding, expanding, and opening all flow from a generous, creative and liberating God. At every moment, creation continues to unfold, liberation continues to to unshackle us, and the peaceable kingdom continues to expand with new hope and promise. It is the mind boggling reality of ” May you Kingdom come, on earth as in heaven “, it is the final emergence of the two becoming one…the Kingdom fully coming into being.
But this is not a future we sit idle-ly for, like pedestrians sitting at a train station waiting for that final glory bound train for heaven. As, Brian beautifully puts it, it is a participatory future…
We could borrow from Hans Kung and others and call it an ” improvisational eschatology “. We could also call it ” participatory”. In a participatory eschatology, when we ask, ” What does the future hold? ” the answer begins, ” That depends. It depends on you and me. God holds out to us at every moment a brighter future; the issue is whether we are willing to receive it and work with God to help create it. We are participating in the creation of what the future will be.” ( page 196 )
Or from the words of Eugene Peterson’s The Message in Colossians, ” He was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.” As heirs to the Kingdom, we are called to be co-creators in the building of the new creation. A new kind of christianity is to live faithfully, actively involved with God in an unfolding future of hope.
And of course, who can look at the future with out having the judgment seat looming big on the center of stage of life’s grand finale’. Will it be the elevator to the ground floor, the depths of a burning inferno in hell; or will it be the escalator, up, past the pearly gates, ambient harp music, angels bringing cocktails and appetizers…to heaven.
Brian says, as a first step we must see judgment in our new eschatological context. We must stop defining it as condemnation. God’s judgment is far higher and better; it involves ” putting wrong things right.” It means reconciling and restoring, not merely punishing; healing, not merely diagnosing; transforming, not merely exposing; and redeeming; not merely evaluating.
Whatever the final judgment will be, then, it will not involve God ( please pardon the crudeness of this ) pulling down our pants to check for circumcision or scanning our brains for certain beliefs like products being scanned in a grocery checkout. No, God, will examine the story of our lives for signs of Christ-likeness…for a cup of cold water or a plate of hot food given to one in need, for an atom of mercy shown to one who has been unkind of unthoughtful, for a visit to a prisoner or an open door and a warm bed for a stranger, for a generous impulse indulged and a hurtful one denied, like Jesus. These are the parts of a persons life that will be deemed worthy of being saved, remembered, rewarded, and raised for a new beginning. All the unloving, unjust, non-Christlike parts of our lives…and of our nations, tribes, civilizations, families, churches and so on…will be burned away, counted as unworthy, condemned ( which means acknowledged for what they are ), and forgotten forever. ( page 204 )
A new kind of Christianity’s vision of the future…is challenging…it is an eschatology of re-creation, of liberation, of redemption, of restoration, of anticipation, of hope…a future in which we actively participate…Now!
“We wish to have Christians and Muslims come together to proclaim before the world that religion must never be a reason for conflict, hatred and violence.”
“…in this historic moment, humanity needs to see gestures of peace and to hear words of hope.”
“It is urgent that a common invocation be raised from earth to heaven, to implore the Almighty…the great gift of peace, the necessary condition for any serious endeavor at the service of humanity’s real progress.” ( Pope John Paul II )Nov 18, 2001, at meeting of world’s religious leaders, announcing International prayer meeting to take place in Assisi.
peoples of all faiths must shun the path of isolation and division
I use the above quotes from the late Pope John Paul II, to lead us into Brian’s question on pluralism, ” How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions ?” Brian leads us through the gospel narrative a fresh to help break us free from the checklist, the fragmented reading where we soul-sort…who’s in and who’s out. It becomes fascinatingly apparent that when Jesus pitched his tent in the midst of humanity, he never did it in the midst of one religious camp. Could it be that Jesus pitched his tent in that liminal, that trans-formative space between all religions. What would happen if the wind of God was moving us in a new direction?
We Christians could offer Jesus ( not Christianity ) as a gift to the world, and we would no longer consider it a requirement of faithfulness to insult other religions and call their founders demonic. We would no longer envision a day when all other religions would be abolished and only our own remain. We would no longer consider ourselves as normative and others as ” other.” We would stop seeing the line that separates good and evil running between our religion and others. We would be freed from the tendency to always think ” insider/ outsider ” and ” us/ them.” We would learn to discover God in the other, and we would discover a bigger ” us “, in which people of all faiths can be included.
We would consider it a matter of faithfulness to show the same respect to other religions and their founders that we would wish to be shown to our own. We would envision a day when members of all religions, including our own, learned to be reconciled with God, one another, and all creation. We would see that Jesus and his message of peace and service were right and true after all, and that Jesus was not a gift to one religion, but the whole world. We would consider all people God’s beloved, as neighbors in God’s world, loving them, serving them, enjoying them. ( page 215 )
For anyone not familiar with Brian McLaren this might not be the book into which you are first introduced to one another. For me this book was the culmination of a life’s journey as a passionate follower of Jesus. It is a mature, radical, revolutionary voice…with a profound sense of urgency. This is the closest I think I’ve seen Brian come to nailing his theology to the Castle Church door at Wittenberg. He digs deep into the fullness of the Biblical narrative, bringing to fruit the embryonic musings of his earlier book, ” A New Kind of Christian ” and from the themes of later books. The fruit of many years of listening, thinking, reflecting are fully ripe, ready to be picked, eaten…and digested.
Digestion, indigestion, heartburn, vomit…there is much to chew on in this book. I found at some points, I felt like a wall plug with too many things plugged into it…almost circuit overload. It’s almost as if you sense an urgency in Brian’s writing, that the Christian faith is at a tipping point. I think many of us have been living a parallel journey with Brian, and have been living in and out of the same questions. Brian brings them out into broad daylight, for us ” all ” to wrestle with.
Paradigms and dogma can be defended and enforced with guns and prisons, bullets and bonfires, threats and humiliation, fatwas and excommunications. But paradigms and dogma remain profoundly vulnerable when anomalies are present. They can be undone by something as simple as a question… ( page 16 )
I think of the fictional wise sage in Tolkien’s ” Lord of the Rings ” Gandalf, who Tolkien described ” seemed the least, less tall than the others, and in looks more aged, grey-haired and grey-clad, and leaning on a staff” and ” the greatest spirit and the wisest “, and so it is with Brian McLaren as he invites us to cross the threshold on an epic new quest. But in the back of my mind, there is anxiety and fear for my friend, I remember all to well what happened to Tolkien’s Gandalf…Yet it is said that in the ending of the task for which he came he suffered greatly, and was slain, and being sent back from death and was clothed then in white, and became a radiant flame.
I have no doubt Brian will face a lot hostility around A New Kind of Christianity…but I think future generations of passionate followers of Jesus will thank Brian for being bold enough to open a door of a deeper quest into the Christian faith…and inviting us to cross the threshold.
http://thewearypilgrim.typepad.com/the_weary_pilgrim/2010/02/an-ancient-recipe-with-a-new-labela-new-kind-of-christianity.html
http://thewearypilgrim.typepad.com/the_weary_pilgrim/2010/02/a-new-kind-of-christianitycircuit-overload.html
Feb 25th, 2010
JoeBum
Stones have been cast. “Too far!” “Not far enough!” Love him or hate him, Brian McLaren shows in his newest book that he is willing to be a prophetic pastor, a figure representative of a conversation and movement (which means people are way too harsh and unloving to him). Book reviews are floating all over the internet dealing explicitly and directly with A New Kind of Christianity’s (aNKoC) content. For years as most know, McLaren has been in the messiest and necessary business of asking hard questions of the church, Christianity, and cultural changes. But aNKoC deals with creating and coming to answers to ten of the most important questions being asked within and of Christianity worldwide according to McLaren:
• The Narrative Question: What Is the Overarching Storyline of the Bible?
• The Authority Question: How Should the Bible Be Understood?
• The God Question: Is God Violent?
• The Jesus Question: Who is Jesus and Why is He Important?
• The Gospel Question: What Is the Gospel?
• The Church Question: What Do We Do About the Church?
• The Sex Question: Can We Find a Way to Address Sexuality Without Fighting About It?
• The Future Question: Can We Find a Better Way of View the Future?
• The Pluralism Question: How Should Followers of Jesus Relate to People of Other Religions?
• The What Do We Do Now Question: How Can We Translate Our Quest into Action?
You can read the book or the reviews to find out the “what” that Brian is trying to say, but aNKoC’s true importance lies not in what Brian is saying but what he is doing with aNKoC. The real point of this book is to (1) recognize the real need to find language that is contextual yet faithful to Scripture & our deeper Christian tradition and (2) to guide actions into the kingdom/ethics/mission.
So what is Brian doing in aNKoC? He is giving Christians permission to reformulate doctrines in light of recent scholarship, conversations, cultural changes and most importantly mission. This book is both emergent and doctrinally focused (insert gasps here). And now more then ever with the growth of world Christianity and emerging, late capitalistic culture the church must learn to talk about doctrine in a healthy and humble way.
Bonhoeffer wrote, “it is only when one knows the unutterability of the name of God that one can utter the name of Jesus Christ” Thus what we DO know about God is that ultimately God is unknowable. So doctrine is not an end in itself, thus aNKoC is not an end in itself.
But the reaction and conversation on the blogosphere revolving around this emergent book of somewhat systematized theology of doctrines is symptomatic of the state of the church. First, these reactions reveal that doctrine is very important (it has fallen on hard times with all this pomo talk). In WWII, the Barmen declaration which deeply affirmed Trinitarian and Christological doctrines were used to attack the Nazi funded state church. Embedded in Walter Rauschenbusch’s theology are manifest destiny and nationalism. More recently, John Stackhouse has (wrongly) affirmed that God is in globalization. Doctrines are necessary for they reveal our convictions and ethics.
Second, doctrine is very important but we don’t know why. Liberals focus on the experiential kernel of doctrine, that we form beliefs off of hidden individual experiences. Conservatives focus on propositional, abstract truths that correlate to our doctrines, thus they believe what we say equals what is real. Both are wrong.
Doctrine is not an end in itself, but always exists to serve the mission of God. As Robert Louis Wilken writes, “Doctrines or theoretical concepts are never ends in themselves but always at service of a deeper immersion in the res, the thing itself, the mystery of Christ and of the practice of the Christian life.”
This week while at ChurchWorks (or does it? as Bass reflected), Diana Butler Bass spoke to a group of Cooperative Baptists and said “Historians know that people only argue about something when it’s going away,” in reference to the national debate around the identity of the USA as a Christian nation. We argue about being a “Christian nation” exactly because we are no longer a Christian nation (as if we ever were…thanks Rauschenbusch). In this same way, we argue about doctrine because as McLaren writes, “the bad news: the Christian faith in all its forms is in trouble. The good news: the Christian faith in all its forms is pregnant with new possibilities (aNKoC, xi). “
The “doctrine police” would do well to hear Martin Kähler, “Mission is the mother of theology.” Why did Peter find transformation and new doctrine at Cornelius’ house? Mission. Why did Nicaea, Gregory, and the early church struggle with Christology and the Trinity? Mission. Why is the church in the Western context finding new doctrine? Mission. Why is world Christianity growing and creating new doctrine? Mission. Why is Brian McLaren writing a book called A New Kind of Christianity? Mission.
Mission serves the kingdom of God that Jesus was crucified for proclaiming and doctrine serves mission and the one who was crucified by pointing toward the significance of Jesus’ life, not the life itself. It is the Scripture and Holy Spirit’s work in community to reveal the life of Christ and doctrine’s work to witness to that significance.
Our cultural context is one of great upheaval and change for several reasons. Not least of these are the effects of globalized late consumer capitalism creating a homogenous experience of liberal individuals who simply do not experience the world the same way people did 100, 50, or even 10 years ago did. In this globalized world the church, especially in the West, must be faithful to God’s mission by allowing the gospel to sprout new life, language, and doctrine in its new setting. The church exists not for itself (just like doctrine), but must exist for the other, for mission encapsulated by hope, justice, and love.
Language is a tricky thing, but best understand by its performative intent. Does this statement mean you are grieving, want me to do something, rejoicing, sarcasm, asking for help, etc? In understanding what you mean by your words’ performative function, I can truly grasp what you are saying, what you mean.
Doctrine’s performative action is witness. It exists to point to God, the unknowable.
While I do not agree with many of Brian’s methods or assumptions behind the doctrine’s formulated in aNKoC like the recasting of church history as negative (Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, the Pope, etc) or his simplistic “bad guy:” the “Greco-Roman” reading of the Bible; I do find great hope in aNKoC. Let us remember that Brian IS NOT seminary trained. Brian is a Jesus follower with a heart for God’s mission and in wrestling with this mission he is forming doctrines in service of the church…not vice versa. The world will not be saved by the few elite, seminary trained professionals for God’s mission is too vast, wide, and deep to be limited to experts.
In the West, atheism is growing in interest, pluralism and “therapeutic, consumer deism” is on the rise. The church in the West is in decline. Doctrines serve mission and right now that mission is failing because we are not believing rightly.
As Catholic Baptist theologian Barry Harvey of Baylor says, “doctrines order our transactions.” People are turning away from the church because our actions and transaction are not rightly ordered. We need new doctrines birthed out of the deep and rich traditions of Christianity. We are wealthy with theological reflection, but we must mine the wells and give to those who are willing to give their life to God’s mission the freedom and space to create new doctrines, just as Peter did, just as Paul did, and as Brian is doing (hey, it’s a biblical idea).
In so doing the church will find the “crucial difference…between telling us a story differently and telling a different story.” (Nicholas Lash).
I highly praise Brian as a brother in Christ willing to be a scapegoat for many and a refreshing voice for others. A New Kind of Christianity only deepens my belief and hope for giving people the space to discover new language and ways of putting together our story of God’s great redemption of the world in Jesus Christ. Brian is a mentor and friend to those who are tired of the conversation and Christianity as only thoughts/ideals/belief, old doing things the way they’ve always been done (badly and often without civility), and ready to give their life to a Kingdom come, but not yet. aNKoC is not the last word or the word after that, but gives permission to live into Christ and rethink that which is trying to be born. So quit throwing stones and go do it, be it, live it, and order yourself and God’s people back into love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control so that God may be in all and known by all.
Joe is a baptimergent minister who blogs here:
http://www.joebumblog.blogspot.com/
Feb 26th, 2010
kmcdade
Originally at http://whatsthemission.wordpress.com
In A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren finally comes to the point. He’s no longer trying to express his beliefs and remain acceptable to fundamentalists (which wasn’t really working anyway). He comes right out and says that it doesn’t make sense for God to condemn the majority of people who have lived on Earth to eternal conscious torment. He says that homosexuality itself isn’t evil. And he’s still saying that everything must change.
That was his previous book, Everything Must Change, which I thought was terrific as well. But McLaren explains in this book that a lot of Christians still aren’t ready to address the issues in Everything Must Change (crises of prosperity, equity, security, and spirituality), and that that’s why he wrote this book. Here’s a description of what happened on his Everything Must Change book tour:
During the Q & R session, most questioners simply ignored the four crises I had talked about. Instead, they focused on arguing fine points of theology with me – all within their conventional paradigms. It was as if they said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. But you’re decentralizing our preferred theory of atonement!”
And so he wrote a book directly confronting these conventional paradigms.
McLaren discusses ten key questions in this book:
* What is the overarching storyline of the Bible?
* How should the Bible be understood?
* Is God violent?
* Who is Jesus and why is he important?
* What is the Gospel?
* What do we do about the church?
* Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
* Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
* How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
* How can we translate our quest into action?
As a Christian, I’ve been asking myself these questions for a long time. And I’m actually pretty comfortable with my answers now (although perhaps that means those answers could use confronting, too). But these are also questions that I often hear non-Christians or marginal Christians asking, and maybe those are the people this book will really speak to.
I’m delighted that McLaren has written this book, and that more and more people are asking these questions.
Feb 26th, 2010
timothy_mathis
I’m headed out of town tomorrow, but before I leave I wanted to get in a post about the latest free book that the Ooze sent me – Brian McLaren’s “A New Kind of Christianity”. It turns out I already took longer than they wanted to write the review, so I figure I shouldn’t procrastinate any longer.
In short, I’d say to read it if you have any interest in religion. I haven’t really gotten into him before, but this one has helped me to see what all of the fuss is about. The book is a discussion of a series of questions that Christianity needs to address to continue to exist in a post-modern world. And they’re all good questions, and he points to good answers. He indeed does have his finger on the pulse.
In related news, my Facebook friend Wendy Johnson wrote a great post the other day about emergent Christianity and pluralism. This, I think, hints toward the biggest question for me (which is one that McLaren doesn’t get at directly in his book – though he does talk about related issues) – which is whether we should bother with reforming the traditional religions in the West, or whether they’re no longer playing an intended or valuable social role. That’s the big question for emergents. There might be some good answers. I’m not sure yet.
http://relativelyfaithful.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-kind-of-christianity.html
Feb 26th, 2010
SGill4613
I have personally been in the emergent conversation for nearly three years. For the past three years, I have had more conversations about what Christianity should not be, and very few about what it can be. This can be incredibly frustrating! More good people leave the church due to problems with theology and personal reasons and it hurts not only churches, it hurts the people who leave, as well as those who remain.
I am one who has remained. In fact, I spent half of my seminary career learning about the emergent movement, and every time I mention the “E” word, I am mostly met with blank stares. No one left in the church has any idea what “emergent” is, and those who do seem to have a negative idea about it. And rightfully so. This movement has had the mentality that everyone can lead their own band, leading to a lot of bad music.
After reading Brian McLaren’s latest book, A New Kind of Christianity, I have come to realize that those in the emergent movement might be viewed as marching to the beat of a different drummer, but wow is it one heck of a beat.
This book is not emergent systematic theology, but is simply a guide to taking off the multitude of smudged and dirty and coloured glasses through which we see the story of God who created all things good.
This book should be the first in every emerging library.
Feb 26th, 2010
Dan
A New Kind of Stirring the Waters
Do you remember the story of the man who was an invalid and waited by the pool called Bethesda for thirty eight years (John 5:1-15)? If you don’t, don’t feel bad, I had to look it up.
For some strange reason, I started thinking about this story in relation to my experience reading Brian McLaren’s newest book, A New Kind Of Christianity. It was as if I were that man waiting by the Sheep gate. Waiting for an angel to churn up the water and for someone to come along and throw me in so I would be healed.
Now you might be asking, healed of what?
Well, there are some things that make me uncomfortable… some questions floating around in my head that have never gotten a satisfying answer. Ten of these questions are addressed in this book. The funny thing is that the author doesn’t intend for his book to answer the questions. He wants us to listen to his responses and then perpetuate the inevitable conversation that will commence.
Below are the questions:
The Narrative Question: What Is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?
The Authority Question: How Should the Bible Be Understood?
The God Question: Is God Violent?
The Jesus Question: Who Is Jesus and Why Is He Important?
The Gospel Question: What Is the Gospel?
The Church Question: What Do We Do About the Church?
The Sex Question: Can We Find a Way to Address Human Sexuality Without Fighting About It?
The Future Question: Can We Find a Better Way of Viewing the Future?
The Pluralism Question: How Should Followers of Jesus Relate to People of Other Religions?
The What-Do-We-Do-Now Question: How Can We Translate Our Quest into Action?
Whether you agree with Brian McLaren or not… Whether you like him or not… Whether you think he is dangerous or not… You have to admit he knows how to stir things up, and this book is no different than his others (If not more stirring).
Since reading the book, I find myself looking at things through a different lens. Of course, some would be afraid that looking at things through new lenses would be bad, however I tend to want to take off my rose colored ones every once and awhile and enjoy a new view.
I began reading this book with much excitement. I like to dive into a book like this and swim around. Straightaway, I realized that this was no casual dog-paddle. I also realized quickly that McLaren’s intentions are not subversive as some would paint them. I have to admit, some of the things the author said made me a little uncomfortable, but along the way, I tried to remember that comfort is excruciatingly over-rated.
It confounds me how many people set out to attack McLaren and his writings, yet spend little time merely discussing their concerns in a civil (non-confrontational) manner. I tend to be swayed by the pacifist in these kinds of situations. Whether they are right or wrong.
By the end of the book, I came to understand that the author’s intent is merely a humble response to questions as he sees them. Therefore, I recommend this book with a warning: If you have been waiting a longtime to have your healing pool stirred or waiting for some one to throw you in, this book might just say to you, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” In other words: “Join the conversation.”
Weak analogy? Maybe.
http://edan0889.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-kind-of-stirring-waters.html
Mar 1st, 2010
adamellis76
Though I’m quite sure he would deny that anyone owed him anything, I owe Brian McLaren a debt of gratitude. Over the years, Brian’s writing has breathed fresh life and vitality into my faith. To say that I was excited when Viral Bloggers offered an opportunity to review his newest book would be an understatement along the lines of claiming that Bono is kind of interested in social justice, or that Glenn Beck exaggerates a little.
Reviewing the Reviews
As I was finishing the book, I watched as reviews began to pop-up on the internet. The less-than-surprising news is that hard-core Calvinists (including the “New-Calvinists”) hate it with a white-hot hatred they normally reserve for child abusers and made-for-TV movies on the Lifetime Network. Reading their reviews, you would think that Brian had done something to them personally, or had betrayed them in some sense (which is weird, sense they haven’t liked most of his books). I was disappointed to pick up on this vibe even in a review by Michael Wittmer, whom I had generally considered to be one of the more level-headed thinkers from that perspective. Scot McKnight, whom I have a great deal of respect for, and who is not really thought of as a Calvinist, wrote a review for Christianity Today that, while much kinder and respectful in tone, claimed that Brian wasn’t really saying anything new, but was simply re-packaging the Classical Liberalism that was typical of German Theology before the 2nd World War as typified in Adof Von Harnack. This struck me as odd, because Brian clearly intends to transcend such polarized categories (not merely repackage one category in a fresh way as “the right one), and the point at which Brian’s thought draws this criticism from McKnight, is actually closer to the much more contemporary (and 3rd-way) thinking found in the work of Peter Enns.
Most of the critics’ objections essentially stem from concerns about orthodoxy. Maybe it’s because I’m from a non-creedal tradition, but I’ve never quite resonated with the orthodoxy/heresy argument. (I realize I may have just painted a target on myself…but that kind of illustrates my point, doesn’t it). For starters, an enormous amount of what has historically been defined as “heresy” was so classified by people who were publicly executing people they disagreed with, in the name of the crucified Christ! I’m fairly sure that misses the point of the Gospel to a much greater degree than having different ideas about whether God and Jesus are made out of the same substance. Secondly, when certain subjects are off-limits for questions, it looks like we’re not actually interested in “truth”, but rather merely maintaining the status quo. Additionally, for large portions of church history, the “orthodox positions” were precisely wrong (Slavery, women’s rights, etc.) I could go on and on…but I won’t.
The Actual Book
A New Kind of Christianity, is the book that many of us have been wanting McLaren to write for years. Ever since he sparked our imaginations with the fictional conversations between Dan Poole and Neil Edward Oliver in A New Kind of Christian, we’ve been dying to see those ideas teased out in non-fiction. He structures the book around 10 crucial questions, identifying the first 5 as theological in nature, and the remaining 5 as practical.
1. The Narrative Question: What Is the Overarching Storyline of the Bible?
2. The Authority Question: How Should the Bible Be Understood?
3. The God Question: Is God Violent?
4. The Jesus Question: Who is Jesus and Why is He Important?
5. The Gospel Question: What Is the Gospel?
6. The Church Question: What Do We Do About the Church?
7. The Sex Question: Can We Find a Way to Address Sexuality Without Fighting About It?
8. The Future Question: Can We Find a Better Way of View the Future?
9. The Pluralism Question: How Should Followers of Jesus Relate to People of Other Religions?
10. The What Do We Do Now Question: How Can We Translate Our Quest into Action?
McLaren’s approach isn’t coercive. He explains that he isn’t attempting to answer these questions definitively but rather is responding to them and inviting us, as readers and willing participants into the conversation. He is seeking to get conversation out of the polarized deadlock that it is so often bogged down in, because of the bounded categories (liberal, conservative, etc.) imposed in modernity that serve to insure no real conversation can ever take place (which reminds me of the state of another country’s political system…but I digress).
What Brian offers here, in my opinion, is a beautiful way forward. Is it perfect? No, and he doesn’t claim that it is. Will his responses satisfy everyone? Ummm…I’ve never read any book that did that. Actually, I think it’s to his credit that he doesn’t pander to any particular category’s concept of “orthodoxy”. Does it transcend unhelpful categories and spark hopeful conversation that could point the way forward? It does (in my opinion)…if you have ears to hear, and eyes to see.
http://adamellis.blogspot.com
Mar 8th, 2010
mhasty
I have to be very honest. I’ve made it through 50 pages of this book in 2 hours. Normally I would have finished it in that time. In that 2 hours I’ve fallen asleep 3 different times. Normally I’m a fan of Brian’s writing style, but I felt this book so far has been very lacking. I don’t even want to finish it. The truth is this. I have a love/hate relationship with Brian’s writing. I normally don’t agree with much of what he has to say. (The same is true so far in this book). I hate that. The thing that I love is that he make me question and stretch myself in ways I normally wouldn’t on my own. I also have to say that Brian’s innocent tone in the early chapters saying things like “I don’t know how I became the center of such controversy.” make me laugh quite a bit. How can he not understand how he became the center of controversy. When you write about and speak about things against the cultural or traditional norm, when you speak of change, then people get up in arms. Drop the innocent act Brian and swallow what you’ve cooked for yourself.
http://thecommoncup.tumblr.com/post/445614700/a-new-kind-of-christianity-a-book-review
Mar 13th, 2010
jimmyd8466
I’ve read several of Brian McLaren’s books before and I’ve always appreciated his humility, his genuine love for God, his generosity in dealing with people who believe differently and the approachability of his writing style. There have been several times though where I felt he was deconstructing and asking questions and leaving us, the readers, to find the answers. This has made for some great conversations around his books but I’ve also felt like I’d love to know the conclusions that he came to on these same topics.
I had heard that his newest book “A New Kind of Christianity” might be the book where Brian moves from deconstruction to constructing new ways of thinking for a new kind of Christianity so I was thrilled to receive my copy from the publisher and I jumped right in.
The book is based around ten questions whose answers Brian believes will shape the way that Christianity will move forward.
The chapters about the narrative arc of the Bible, and how we should read and interpret were fascinating. Brian talks about how many believers view the Bible as a constitutional document that we go to for “case law” in order to defend our actions, or condemn others, when the Bible is written as a library of poems, histories, parables, and letters.
The chapter about a moving from the view of a violent tribal God to a Christlike God was especially eye opening to me. It sounds like a no brainer but it was really an AHA moment for me when Brian talked about the fact that not only is Jesus like God, but God is like Jesus. Brian says it this way, “The Bible’s highest value is in revealing Jesus, who gives us the highest, deepest, and most mature view of the character of the living God.”
This book covers lots of ground, and not only theology, but practical, down to earth material that helps us visualize what these new ways of thinking mean to the way that we live out our everyday lives.
Overall I found this book to be very respectful and humble. I found Brian’s writing to be motivated out of a deep love for Jesus and the people who are trying their best follow Jesus. I can’t say I agree 100% with everything Brian has written but I really appreciate the way he makes me think long and hard about what I believe and why. This book can be very challenging at times, especially if you come from a church background, but I would encourage you to read it with an open mind, and ideally with a few friends that could read through it with you and discuss your thoughts along the way.
http://culturedrivenlife.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-kind-of-christianity.html
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2U4280930PCFE/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Mar 17th, 2010
David
I’ve been really slowly working my way through A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren. It has been my impression that this book is way too important to blaze through just so I could post a review while it was new and exciting, which is always my temptation (yet rarely my reality).
I’ve just made my way through the first chapters that deal with the personhood and godhood of Jesus. I see why this book has been seen as dangerous to some, but overall, I think a lot of the reactions are really overblown.
Much has been made about the flimsiness of Brian’s Greco-Roman worldview that is visioned in the first part of the book. I find it quite dishonest of the critical reviewers who somehow pretend that Brian hasn’t acknowledged the shortcomings of this model within the pages of the book. It has usefulness, but like any grand schema it falls short when you subject it to scrutiny it wasn’t designed to withstand. Of course this is not a historical-philosophical model. It serves the purpose of distinguishing one reading of the Bible from Brian’s presented interpretation. If you want it to fall apart it will. So, I guess I say, good job, critics.
Anyway, that Greco-Roman narrative structure is hardly the thing that this whole book hinges on. Anyone who argues that is missing everything important here. Brian hangs his interpretation on the narrative story that he has studied the Bible through since before he wrote about it in The Story We Find Ourselves In. It doesn’t seem like much has changed from that second book of tales about Dan and Neil, but a lot of commentators like to suggest that Everything Has Changed.
But anyway, I’m halfway through the book. Every page is more exciting than the last. I just finished chapter 12 dealing with Jesus as pictured in Revelation. Brian does such an incredible job of laying out just why his particular reading of the Revelation Christ showing up as the slaughtered lamb whose power is found in his love is such an important (and, dare I say, True) reading.
By the way, I hate the book’s title. This isn’t a New Christianity. It is a Fresh Christianity. A fresh (and refreshing) way to live our devotion to the way of Jesus. I believe that Brian’s books must be read as a catalog with a trajectory. Not one of them should be read in isolation from the others. Everything Must Change is an important component if the New Kind of Christian series. A Generous Orthodoxy goes hand in hand with A New Kind of Christianity. This is a library of resources that has entirely refreshed my love and passion for living the way of Jesus in this world – along with having communities and friendships within which to interpret these contributions.
Wow. I sound like the biggest shill in the history of shills. But every generation has their prophetic texts. The don’t create a new Christianity, but awaken us to the best way follow, love and serve in our day as others have done in theirs. If you want to learn about some of those past visionaries I suggest subscribing to Brad Culver’s blog. So good.
Peace.
Mar 25th, 2010
Canadian Evangelical
wow
Mar 30th, 2010
SPalm
I have long been a fan of Brian McLaren – both the man and his writings. We’ve e-mailed back and forth through the years, been apart of a scripture project together (The Voice), shared multiple meals, and Brian spoke an important blessing into my life at a critical time. His “A New Kind of Christian” came along for me at the perfect time; a time when I thought I was becoming disillusioned with faith, but ultimately, I was disillusioned with the version of Christian practice I’d thoughtlessly inherited. Brian showed this to me. This is, perhaps, Brian’s greatest gift; causing people to reexamine, search, study, investigate and re-conclude. In this way, Brian is a one man Hegelian Dialectic. This is why so many people distrust and despise him and his work while others love him. In “A New Kind of Christianity, (ANKoCty)” Brian’s newest release, McLaren will not disappoint his fan or his critics.
ANKofCty endeavors to consider 10 questions that Brian says are transforming the faith. Truth is, these questions are not transforming the faith, but Brian wants them to, and he’s right to want it. The ten questions: (1) The Narrative Question, (2) The Authority Question; (3) The God Question, (4) The Jesus Question, (5) The Gospel Question, (6) The Gospel Question, (7) The Church Question, (8) The Sex Question, (9) The Future Question, and (10) The Pluralism Question are good ones, and Brian hopes to help push us ahead as we think through them together.
At the heart of ANKofCty is what McLaren calls, the “Greco-Roman” reading of scripture. This, it seems, is the root of our collective problems in terms of church and culture. Brian argues that freeing ourselves from this narrative releases us to answer the 10 questions Brian poses more faithfully. Within the Greco-Roman reading of scripture, Brian argues, there is no room for story or development, which ultimately gives rise to a “six-line narrative” that prejudices our reading of scripture. McLaren argues the “six-line narrative” leads us to all the wrong conclusions about everything – which Brian endeavors to demonstrate throughout the remaining pages of ANKofCty. In the end, Brian argues that we have read the Bible backwards with our filter coming through Paul, the apostles, Augustine, Plato and the Platonism and philosophical systems that are foreign to the true nature of the scriptures. Therefore, our view of Jesus and the Bible is not the Jesus OF the Bible, but a character – or caricature – inherited by thousands of years of interpretation lodged and birthed by the Greco-Roman narrative and Greek philosophy. This is Brian’s central thesis and gives rise to his conclusions.
I think Brian is both right and wrong. In fact, having read nearly all his books, I have never felt more strongly that he is both right on and far off course. This is what I mean: In terms of McLaren’s analysis of the Greco-Roman reading, he is dead on. The problem is that there is no way to avoid this, no way to time travel back through scripture and get something other than what we already got. This is where Brian is right and wrong. Having been raised in a “Restoration” movement, I know all too well the nonsensical pitfalls of thinking you can just skip over history, doctrine, theology, and theological and ecclesial development and get back to “the real thing.”
It cannot be done!
At best you miss the richness of the tradition that has given life to the faith that gives us life, at worst, you become a partisan to largely uneducated, ununified and incoherent belief system. If we were able leap backward over the hurdles of history to uncover a new way – or the grand old way – to read and interpret text without the obstacles course of 2000 years worth of interpretation and thought, then we would be forced to just to pick a method, system or interpretive lens and go with it arbitrarily.
Been there. Done that. Thank you very much.
All of that to say this; even Brian is coming at the text from somewhere “post-Jesus” in terms of history. Is he right in arguing that the method we’ve chosen is bad for hosts of reasons? Yes. Is it possible for us to read and interpret Jesus the way McLaren wants us to, without the narratives that have been imposed heretofore? Unfortunately, no.
This means that all of our conclusions, even Brian’s, have to be held loosely, with epistemological humility. Perhaps it is my own ecclesial history, but something in my gut churns at the thought of dismissing church history and the schools of thought developed through it. For this reason, I’m open to the idea that I may be seeing shadows and experiencing paranoia where there need not be. I may be reacting to something not explicit in the pages of ANKofCty.
At the same time, Brian has offered the most helpful way forward on a number of issues that are becoming tremendously important to more and more people – sexuality, pluralism, etc…. He is far from convincing his critics or those entrenched in either/or, black/white, privileged / unprivileged thinking, but Brian’s conclusions, I think, are generally pointing the church in the right direction – though I need more convincing in some areas, myself. Both critics and fans of Brian know where he’s going with many of the issues addressed in ANKofCty before they turn the first page, but what is good about his work is that he provides a useable way forward for conversation (for those willing to have it). Using the Biblical text, McLaren at least gets the ball rolling and establishes what can become common language around these issues. This, I think, is the great service Brian has done for us.
In addition, Brian explores Romans in ways many will find broadening. In fact, I read ANKofCty with my Bible open. Trust me: this does not happen often! What more can you ask of a book? Brian forced me to look into the scriptures and I found myself looking differently. That alone is worth the price of purchase. I doubt that I’ll ever be able to read Romans the same way after engaging ANKoCty.
Likely the most out of character elements of ANKofCty comes in chapters 12 and 13 dealing with The Jesus Question. To articulate his vision of Jesus, McLaren takes on two vocal critics who happen to hold in common the ability to be consistently wrong and increasingly sought-after. For those in the know, the critics are fairly easy to recognize, though Brian does not name them. What is out of character is Brian’s pointed language. Having spent time with Brian multiple times, I’ve found him to be irenic and generous, these chapters weren’t. At the end of chapter 12, I wrote in the margin, “Bam! One in ___________ _______________’s kisser.”
Between you and I, the rebuke was long overdue. Overdue not because scores needed settling, but because this particular critic has, and often does, misread Jesus and the Bible, offering an alternative gospel, in my view. This critic seems to envision Christian leadership as a full-contact blood sport and Brian gives him what he wants. Brian skillfully disarmed the violent, warrior-only version of Jesus, which had the added benefit of fitting nicely into Brian’s overall aims in ANKofCty. At the same time, he gave one particular critic the only kind of conversation he seems to understand. Harsh! In this way, the rebuke can be described as incarnational – speaking to people in their own language.
If Brian’s goal is to get people thinking and talking, ANKofCty is a success. Clearly not all will embrace his vision, yet others will be freed to pursue the Spirit in wild and new directions. Ultimately, ANKofCty is more than worth the time. I suggest reading it community. Drink from it slowly and invest in the ideas, maybe even choosing one question and digging deep over time. This is not a book for singular and individual thought. Brian has returned to what he does best – challenging the church. And he does so brilliantly this go round.
Mar 30th, 2010
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