Tag: emergent

I wish I had been wrong.  I wish I had overstated the case.  I wish this were a retraction post.

After calling Brian McLaren a “wolf-shepherd” in a previous post, I felt bad that I had dismissed him after just reading one excerpt of his new book.  After all, I was just going off of what other people said.  So I bought the book (on the fantastic Kindle app for the iPhone), and read it this past week.

It’s one of the saddest books I have ever read.  Because, like Rob Bell, McLaren is a guy who it is difficult to dislike.  He’s just so nice.  He seems to be very self-critical (in a healthy way) and looking to ensure that his motives are pure.

But to be honest, either he has never actually listened to our side of the argument (“our side” being those who hold to verbal plenary inerrancy) or he’s not interested in what we have to say, or both.

Here’s the thing: he addresses something in this book that desperately needs addressing in the conservative evangelical church.  We have earned the label of bigoted religious snobs.  We have confused capitalism with the kingdom of God.  We have abused the Scriptures, and then used those abused Scriptures to abuse and subjugate others.  We have targeted sins like homosexuality and witchcraft, while ignoring sins like racism and gluttony and greed.  All of these things are true.

And that’s about where my agreement with McLaren ends.

But like nailing jello to a wall, it is really tough to have a level-headed conversation with the guy, because in the book he’s already set the stage for how I am most likely to “attack” his position.  He’s in essence set the terms of engagement, and set them in his favor.  But here’s my three nails into the jello:

• He has a “trajectory theology” that is impossible to support biblically (though he tries).
• He is guilty of the worst kind of chronological snobbery.
• Throughout the book he attacks a straw man, with no indication that he believes we on the other side of the argument have even considered the questions he raises.

I’ll address each of these issues in separate posts, because this one is already getting longer than I’d like.

The final thing I’d like to highlight about McLaren and his “new kind of Christianity” is that it is not new in the least.  Since the earliest days of Christianity there have been folks who said that the key to understanding the Bible was to see it in this “new” light of knowledge.  They too would take scriptures and wrest them from clear meaning to indicate that the point is to gain a transcendent knowledge, and then to pass that knowledge onto others.  These folks were already around during the writing of the Scriptures.  They were called “Gnostics” taken from the greek word for “knowledge.”  So while it might be new to some readers, the idea of special knowledge leading to transcendence is simply the same old heresy being repeated in a new context.

What do you think?  (Melissa, I’m surprised you haven’t weighed in yet…)

In response to my last post, a friend pointed out how McLaren came from a conservative evangelical background, and so therefore is familiar with all of the arguments we on the “inerrancy team” might use to defend our position.

But my contention remains that he has never been on my team (or even listened to the arguments made by some of the brilliant men and women on my team), because in refuting my position he doesn’t even come close to accurately portraying it.  The conservative evangelical who he paints in the book is a detestable person, concerned only with money and position, eager to condemn others to hell, from the cab of his gas guzzling SUV, while reading a pro-slavery book with a Fox News sticker on it.  I’m with him in condemning that guy.  Not sure that guy exists on a large enough scale to write a book about, but I am totally for outing that guy.

If that is what McLaren was as a conservative evangelical, I’m really glad he’s a neo-hippie post-Christian universalist these days.  Anything is better than being a smug, hate-filled Bible-thumper.

McLaren sees a “constitutional” reading of the Bible (where you are forced to abide by the rules of, say, God…) as the root problem.  And then he goes about proving how you can’t read the Bible like a constitution, using the Book of Job.  He claims that if the Bible is 100% God’s word, then you have to trust all of the words of it, even the parts that contradict each other.  Like Job’s friends, who say one thing, and God (or the “character called God” as McLaren would have it), who says something different.  Rev McLaren, if you think that my understanding the Bible to be inerrant means that I have to take the clearly wrong things (like when Satan speaks in scripture) and the clearly right things (like when Jesus speaks in scripture) with the same level of authority, it is no wonder you left our team.  Not one reputable theologian would recommend such a foolish way to read the Bible.  Wise biblical scholarship takes into account the author’s original audience and intent, the context (historical and literary), and many other factors.  To say the Bible is God’s word doesn’t mean I must stop using my brain to read it.

One root issue is that the God of the Bible doesn’t fit into Brian McLaren’s box.  He sees God as nice, pleasant, and always extending compassion and kindness.  Like a benevolent politician, God’s just here to make you the type of person you already have the capacity to be.  A perfect God who would kill his enemies for their rebellion has no place in McLaren’s paradigm.  So, in an effort to not totally throw out the Bible, he is forced to reinterpret it so that the more “primitive” views of God in the Old Testament were given because the more simple original readers couldn’t handle the gracious God who would emerge later.  In a later post I’ll talk briefly about how insulting that is to folks like John Owen, Moses, Paul, David, etc.

The problem with this “trajectory theology” where interpretation changes based on original reader’s level of understanding is that frequently in the early books we see a gracious God. (the book of Jonah, for example, or the fact that he kicked Adam out of the garden and made garments for him–from a sacrificed animal–in the FIRST book of the Bible)  And toward the end of the Bible, after the “primitive” God had revealed himself to be the pacifist Jesus, we still see that same Jesus condemning people to hell, calling people names, and affirming everything that God did in the Old Testament. Not to mention the fact that Jesus speaks of the last days in ways that make it sound an awful lot like a war that God wages against his enemies.

It is impossible to both read the Bible honestly and take away from it that God changed from Genesis to Revelation.  He’s full of grace and truth from the beginning to the end.  He kills his enemies that refuse to repent and he redeems his enemies that humbly acknowledge that they aren’t right.  He’s both gracious and violent.  And the cross is the ultimate statement of both grace (toward us, his enemies) and violence (toward his own Son!)

So yes, Rev McLaren, God revealed more and more of Himself as the pages and books of Scripture were revealed.  But far from correcting earlier errors, in every case God’s revelation clarifies and upholds all revelation before it.  Without making any mistakes.

What say you, reader?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.  Comment below.

One of the most shocking things I encountered while reading Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity was the subtle assertion that Moses was a superstitious idiot.  Or maybe he was throwing stones at Peter.

The thesis of the book seems to be that Christianity needs to outgrow primitive ways of understanding God and the Bible.  We need, according to Rev. McLaren, to gain a higher understanding of Scripture that shows God to be in line with our advanced understanding of concepts like peace and the basic good of humanity.

Tied up in that thesis is the thought that we know more than those ancients, and our experience of the world is vastly different from theirs.  While I agree that humans have discovered some things that are far beyond the scientific advancement of Moses, I heartily object to the fact that he would any more readily believe that a man could raise from the dead or walk on water than I would.

While he might not have had the formula for gravity figured out, you can bet the Apostle Paul would be just as surprised to see someone levitate as you or I would.  And while King David lived in a far more violent culture than contemporary America, he still could understand “more advanced” concepts like peace and non-violence.  To assert otherwise, as Rev. McLaren does, is downright astonishing.

Either he’s never read anything by “primitive” people like John Owen, or he ignored the fact that the guy was brilliant. You can’t explain away his worldview by saying that God was only showing him as much as his primitive little brain could handle. Because his brain was neither of those things.

At one point in the book, in a striking reversal of his thesis, he lumps all of contemporary Christianity in with post-300 AD Catholicism.  So, JI Packer is right on par with Pope Urban II.  Or John Owen is on the same level as Constantine.  Billy Graham actually had more in common with the crusades than just his choice of names.  Which is it, Rev McLaren? Is more education and enlightenment the key, or are the modern theologians just as lost as Augustine?

He would answer “yes” to both of those questions.  The key is advanced understanding, and we’ve been stuck in a 1500-year rut as Christians.  Now we’ve got courageous leaders like John Dominick Crossan, Brian McLaren, and Marcus Borg to lead us into true knowledge.  Pretty heady stuff.  He paints himself as a new Martin Luther in the book.  But then it reads more like he sees himself as the new Jesus, come to save us from our sins (namely, seeing our sins as sinful).

He’d like us to think he’s just being meek and mild Brian.  But his chronological snobbery asserts otherwise.  What do you think?