1. The Narrative Question: What is the overarching story line of the Bible? What’s the big picture? Is there a discernible plotline in the library of the Bible?
2. The Authority Question: How should the Bible be understood? Can it be used to justify violence? Why is it I conflict with science?
3. The God Question: Is God violent? Why does God seem genocidal in many Biblical passages? “Is faith capable of becoming a stronger force for peace and reconciliation than it has been for violence in the past?”
4. The Jesus Question: Who is Jesus and why is he important? What accounts for the vast differences in understandings of Jesus?
5. The Gospel Question: What is the gospel? Is it information on how to avoid hell and go to heaven or a message of liberation and transformation for select individuals (or for all individuals?). Is there a difference between the Gospel of Jesus and that of Paul?
6. The Church Question: What do we do about the church? What must change for the church in the light of new understandings. How is the Spirit of God at work in the church and in the world?
7. The Sex Question: Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it? What about new discoveries in neurobiology, psychopharmacology, anthropology, and related fields? Why is homosexuality such a hot issue for churches right now?
8. The Future Question: Can we find a better way of viewing the future? Eschatology even influences foreign policy? What kind will contribute to a more just and joyful future?
9. The Pluralism Question: How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions? The world’s future is threatened by interreligious fear, hatred, and violence. Is Jesus the only way?
10. The What Do We Do Now Question? How can we translate our quest into action? How do we avoid the unintended consequences of even asking these questions (e.g. division, disruption, distraction)?
Monday, March 14, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Session 6: Question Ten and Conclusion
TENTH QUESTION: The What-Do-We-Do-Now Question
20: How Can We Translate Our Quest into Action?
The question is whether any of this is of God, or is it simply another human attempt to interpret reality? A LOT of people claim that God is at work in what they do (and send money so the work can continue!). McLaren wants to steer a middle course between overstatement about God’s involvement, and a catatonic inertia for FEAR of overstatement. He doesn’t just want to change some beliefs and ideas. He wants to see people inspired to put faith into action, action for the poor and action for peace.
First, we need to make room for God in our lives, to have a deep spiritual life. We need models in the people of the Spirit who have gone before, the saints who were full of God. His quest has not just been intellectual and theological, it has become personal and spiritual. So he affirms that a new kind of Christianity is not like a new tree planted some distance from an old one, but more like “green tips growing out on many of the fragile branches of the ancient tree of faith and spirituality that has been growing through history” (3861-71).
Helped by macrohistorians, McLaren offers a structure to explain the historical development of this quest. The first stage of development, he calls “the quest for survival.” God provides (or withholds) the essentials for survival: water, food, land. He labels this the red zone.
Then came our “quest for security.” In this stage, God becomes our warrior, protector, provider. We had to look for ways to engage God to “miraculously protect and provide for us, so shamans and priests—with all of their mysterious God-appeasing and god-recruiting rituals—became our combined Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.” We began to be afraid of God because we could be cursed with various calamities. This he labels the orange zone.
The third was a “quest for power.” Competing city-states needed a competitive advantage over other tribes. Our God was superior to all others. Our God was king, emperor, absolute dictator. Disobedience to him could result in eternal torture. We had a sense of awe and transcendence when contemplating a God far above humanity. This he labels the yellow zone.
Fourth was a “quest for independence.” As our kings protected us with increased power, they became corrupt and we felt exploited. And so we searched for laws and principles that even kings had to observe and submit to. God becomes the rational architect for universal laws. He becomes “the judge who enforces laws, mandates punishment, and negotiates settlements.” Some felt less of a need for God: the universe ran by its own laws. This he labels the green zone.
Fifth is the “quest for individuality.” Since the world was now a rational machine, “we were free to discover and express ourselves as autonomous or independent individuals, joyfully exercising our personal freedom through competition for goods and services” (3898-3907). God becomes our personal savior and “the spiritual life often involved mastering techniques for earning God’s favor and blessing on our ambitious plans for personal prosperity and individual achievement” (3907-16). We formed denominations and political parties.. He labels this the blue zone.
Sixth was the “quest for honesty.” We realized in the middle of the 20th century what we were doing to the earth and to each other: 2 world wars, a holocaust, segregation, apartheid, burning forests, covering the earth with cement, turning fossil fuel into greenhouse gases, driving wildlife to extinction, and multiplying high-tech weapons. We created uncountable prosperity while leaving the majority of people in abject poverty. We became obsessed with short term profit. Our capitalist system was grossly malfunctioning. And at least we wanted to be honest about it. We realized that much of what we had done had unintended consequences. We called this deconstruction, humility, repentance. McLaren labels it the indigo zone.
Finally, we come to the seventh quest, the “Quest for healing, for unifying and liberating what we’ve tragically divided and conquered, and the quest for rediscovering a larger and more beautiful whole…” Although he is reluctant to name this question, McLaren says every culture has a word for it: Shalom, etc. (3924-36). He shies away from using the word “peace” because of Western dominance, and prefers the African Ubuntu, which means interconnectedness, joined in the common goodness, committed to the well being of all. Our society now needs for survival to transform the “other” into “one another.” He labels this the violet zone.
He thinks there could be zones beyond these, like an ultraviolet zone of sacredness, awareness of the presence of God in all things. He also acknowledges that we are all in different stages of this quest. [McLaren pairs theologies with the stages on 3948-57). When our focus is in one of these stages, we tend to ignore “inconvenient truths” that might “obstruct or interfere with our more immediate quests…” We can be unready for the “higher zones.” If, like this book, we enter the quest for honesty, we have to acknowledge we are good at raising questions, but not answering them. We never get to ‘wise action.’ But we can become quite critical, looking down on people in the other stages. We forget that they “have worked, lived, fought, and died to build and defend” [them].
Ubuntu requires that we CLOSE distances, not enlarge them. So the paradox is that you can’t fulfill the quest from within the zone that inspired it. Entering a new zone, especially the violet or Ubuntu one, is NOT easy. It requires that we see the earlier stages as necessary, offering something essential “to the larger human quest” (3976-86). “From red, the world looks red.” The people in them are seeing God in the only way they CAN see Him. It IS a mistake to say that God is red, green, orange, etc., but it’s no bigger a mistake than to attack those people for saying so.
Such attacks will only make people defensive and retard much needed progress. The violet stage is most important now because we need people of all denominations to create a zone that welcomes all people “to mature and advance in the human quest” (3986-94). McLaren has a table with columns representing the various options for religious orientation (such as Christian, Muslim Buddhist, Hindu, etc.). But then he has two rows, one for the old style of the religion (emphasizing domination, exclusion, assimilation, isolation, revolution, competition and supremacy) and one for the new (the Ubuntu approach). He thinks it crucial that more and more people opt for the new (“that sees us in you and you in us and some of us for all of us”).
In Jesus, McLaren sees the whole spectrum of color that is God (Jn. 1:4). He includes and transcends all of them. McLaren catalogues what happens when we refuse to transcend a stage. Each stage has its own aberrations. Then he adds:
If we do transcend the previous stages but then judge and exclude all that has gone before, we will remain stuck in the indigo moment of stage six, unable to continue the quest. …As we get acclimated to the violet zone, we learn to see all previous zones as appropriate and adequate for their context, just as we consider infancy, childhood, and adolescence as appropriate and adequate to their time, not bad, evil, or wrong (4022-31).
You can’t climb a ladder without the lower rungs. They’re good, but you can’t stay on them forever. So McLaren says his approach is not absolutist, claiming one zone is right and the rest wrong, nor relativist, saying that they are all equally good or bad. It is holistic, integral and hierarchical, saying all are partial and that “greater wholeness is better than lesser wholeness.” He quotes Jean Danielou: “Sin is ultimately a refusal to grow” (4041-58).
McLaren knows that people who haven’t reached the violet zone will consider it naïve, silly or evil. “..it requires habits and skills of the mind and heart that are profoundly hard to learn and master” (4058-67). He sees, however, each stage as pregnant with the next. He is confident that people will continue to move forward for three reasons: (1) the presence of God, creator of an expanding universe; (2) the uncontainable message that is Jesus; (3) the breath and wind and fire that is the Holy Spirit—His music eventually calls us out of our corner to dance!
21: Living the Questions in Community
McLaren envisions the day when the new paradigm for Christianity will be the normal and normative one, knowing that he and others like him have paid a price of a lot of “unfriendly fire” from people who want to keep it from spreading. Those who are spreading it have a difficult task, and McLaren urges them to be good to themselves. He’s had to deal with his own reactions to negativity, from frustration to anger to withdrawal.
He had to learn to combine or hold in tension the “courage to differ” and the “grace to differ graciously.” He simply began to share with those who either ‘got it’ or WANTED to ‘get it. His secret? “Say as little as possible and only share more if people ask” (4120-4131). He knows how to state the positive aspects of his paradigm shift and to let friends off the hook if they make the friends nervous.
He acknowledges that “you have to live your way into a new way of thinking,” and not vice-versa. He writes: “..new ideas and understandings are worth little until they’re translated into the ways we pray, worship, and enjoy life in the Spirit and into the ways we interact with others—with our families and friends, with people of other classes, races, and religions, and so on” (4131-40). Then there’s the translation into work, economics, politics, recreation and our communal church lives. And there’s the rub, as McLaren does a Q&A .
1. If the pastor’s not interested, he encourages people to be as good a member as possible, neither forcing this on anyone nor hiding it under a bushel. Be a joyful presence inside your church, he advises, but don’t stay where you’re not wanted.
2. If this has provoked a doctrinal crisis of consciousness, McLaren suggests some words to use with your pastor that allows him not to fix you but to suggest a peaceful transition to another church without causing anger or division.
3. If the Pastor can’t get his congregation interested, McLaren is adamant about NOT forcing it on anyone, but inviting a few interested people to a conversation rather than a series of sermons. This may mean the pastor’s having to go elsewhere rather than waste his or her time. It’s not a failure; it’s allowing people freedom.
4. If some of the people want this new approach and others don’t McLaren encourages them to “plant a new church” (instead of defending theological turf) but not in a divisive spirit. Then he talks about the fact that people who try this find that “church” carries too much baggage:
So instead, they form what I call faith communities. Some are more formal and large and other informal and small; some last a long time and others a few weeks, months, or years; some have regular meetings and high commitment and others simply enjoy social interaction and the conversations that emerge spontaneously during meals, walks or working together (4169-78).
…I believe we need thousands of them, both to sustain the faith of followers of Christ who can’t survive in existing contexts and to create space for seekers to be exposed to the way of Christ. I think that in many cases established congregations and informal faith communities can learn to coexist and in fact develop a real synergy together (ibid.).
5. When he is asked how an open congregation can move this way, he suggests:
a. Get a consultant outside your congregational or denominational system
b. Build new para-structures to foster new approaches to faith rather than trying to bend existing structures to that end (renewal in RC churches came through the Franciscans, Jesuits, etc., the ecclesiolae). You don’t challenge existing structures but build parallel ones (e.g. Methodism began within Anglicanism).
c. Expect to bring in a new day with new people. Young people or people “new to the field” are almost always necessary to bring about a paradigm shift. People coming from other denominations, or no religious commitments--’the seekers’-- can help bring about change.
d. Add. Don’t subtract. Write new creeds or a statement to experiment with rather than attempt to abolish or modify old ones.
e. Develop a theology of institutions. McLaren feels that “institutions exist in a dynamic relationship with social movements” (4212-24). The “priestly class” maintaining the institutions need not be enemies, but as colleagues in the work of changing and developing.
f. Preach the Bible—let it come alive with the new quest. McLaren is adamant that we preach it with all five of the lines of moral reasoning: fairness, compassion, tradition, in-group loyalty, and purity (see 4224-34).
g. Employ experiential learning; like mission trips so people can see great need and injustice; visits to another church; reading groups with lots of interaction followed by action; listening groups who listen to people they would not normally listen to (e.g. to people who dropped out of the church, young adult children and their friends), asking questions, drawing out deep understanding of why people left without judging or defensiveness, then developing responses and creative action.
h. Keep your short-term expectations low and your long-term hopes high. Opposing forces will weed out all but the strongest quests for change. Expect “setbacks and mistakes, opposition and misunderstanding, conflict and discouragement at every turn.” (4242-51). He concludes with the African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” (4251-60).
22. Conclusion: A New Kind of Christianity
McLaren’s hope is that a large number of people will come to agree that these questions need to be asked, and that we need to have “reverent and respectful conversation” about them. Our real quest will be “to receive and participate in what Jesus called God’s kingdom, life to the full” (4269-78).
There will be new questions in addition to these, and McLaren suggests a few. He reminds readers of the four crises he noted a preached about in his book Everything Must Change. Those were (1) the crisis of the planet, the prosperity crisis because our way of pursuing it is unsustainable ecologically; (2) the equity crisis because the gap between rich and poor is leaving more and more people is a terrible position; (3) the security crisis because this rich versus poor gap “plunges both groups into a vicious cycle of violence, each group arming itself with more and more catastrophic weapons” (4278-87); (4) the spirituality crisis since “all our world’s religions are failing to inspire us to address the first three crises, and in fact too often they are inspiring us to behave in ways counterproductive to human survival” (ibid.). He called this a “suicide machine,” with all four gears turning simultaneously.
But when he preached about this, the Q&A sessions ignored the crises and were more upset about his “decentralizing their favorite theory of atonement,” or his obviously unconventional reading of biblical reference to homosexuality. McLaren began to realize that his “conversation partners simply couldn’t address life=and=death issues like poverty, the planet and peace from within the conventional paradigms they inherited” (4287-96).
[He heard people say: ‘Oh yeah, yeah a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. But your decentralizing our preferred theory of atonement!’ Or ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re in danger of environmental collapse and religiously inspired catastrophic war, but you seem to be questioning our conventional ways of reading the Bible about homosexuality”( 4291).]
So he knew he had to address that inheritance head on, and hence, the present book. And so now that he has written it, he goes back to these questions:
How shall we live in relation to the planet? How can we go from a consumptive to a sustainable way of life and from a sustainable to a regenerative way of life? What is our duty to the living and nonliving creations among which we live and on which we depend…how can our faith provide healing, inspiration, formation, and motivation for the way forward?
How shall we live in relation to poverty? Given that capitalism out-competed communism, what threats does capitalism in its current form pose for our world? How can capitalism be redeemed, retrained, and redirected so that a prosperous minority of people don’t continue to suffer the dehumanizing meaninglessness of self-centered luxury while a struggling majority suffer the dehumanizing degradation of crushing poverty?...how can our faith provide motivation and wisdom for the way forward?
How shall we live in relation to the people who are different from us—in religion, region, race, class, caste, political party, sexual orientation, history, and so on?
He thinks that tackling these questions will make us feel more alive, more significant. He worries that the word “new” in the title will lead people to ignore the fact that much of this is ancient content. He also worries that the word “Christianity” is misleading, since he doesn’t believe Jesus came to found a new religion, nor does he think Christianity is the entire answer, but a part of the answer. “Christianity” has developed a lot of accretions that were problematic especially in their application.
We just refer to our past study as “theology,” not “white theology” or “domination theology” or “male theology.” He has a care for what is being created here. Is it just another spin on the past, or “is it more creative and subversive than that?” (4324-33). Today we don’t nail theses to a door, but post them on a website or put them in a book or discuss them in a coffee shop.
McLaren feels that, like Luther, we must raise these questions about “urgent and emergent issues.” He wants to start a conversation and call for “collegial and creative collaboration.” We must, he says, “come out of our closets and admit we have been asking these …questions in secret.” Doing so is scary, because “we don’t want to betray our heritage..to prove unfaithful to the faith that has nourished our souls” (4351-4360).
His is a call, not just to talk and repeat statements from the past, but to act and “precipitate a change, foment a …gentle and hopeful revolution.” We must be loyal to the past, but also loyal to the present world “in which we serve,” and especially loyal to the future: “to be loyal to the God who was…the God who is.. and the God who is to come.” He has a sense that there is something in Christianity trying to be born. He says we may feel it as curiosity and “a desire for better answers,” or as frustration, “know that there must be more to faith than you currently know,” or as hope, knowing that God is seeking people through whom this can come to life (4379-86).
For more resources, go to http://www.brianmclaren.net.
20: How Can We Translate Our Quest into Action?
The question is whether any of this is of God, or is it simply another human attempt to interpret reality? A LOT of people claim that God is at work in what they do (and send money so the work can continue!). McLaren wants to steer a middle course between overstatement about God’s involvement, and a catatonic inertia for FEAR of overstatement. He doesn’t just want to change some beliefs and ideas. He wants to see people inspired to put faith into action, action for the poor and action for peace.
First, we need to make room for God in our lives, to have a deep spiritual life. We need models in the people of the Spirit who have gone before, the saints who were full of God. His quest has not just been intellectual and theological, it has become personal and spiritual. So he affirms that a new kind of Christianity is not like a new tree planted some distance from an old one, but more like “green tips growing out on many of the fragile branches of the ancient tree of faith and spirituality that has been growing through history” (3861-71).
Helped by macrohistorians, McLaren offers a structure to explain the historical development of this quest. The first stage of development, he calls “the quest for survival.” God provides (or withholds) the essentials for survival: water, food, land. He labels this the red zone.
Then came our “quest for security.” In this stage, God becomes our warrior, protector, provider. We had to look for ways to engage God to “miraculously protect and provide for us, so shamans and priests—with all of their mysterious God-appeasing and god-recruiting rituals—became our combined Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.” We began to be afraid of God because we could be cursed with various calamities. This he labels the orange zone.
The third was a “quest for power.” Competing city-states needed a competitive advantage over other tribes. Our God was superior to all others. Our God was king, emperor, absolute dictator. Disobedience to him could result in eternal torture. We had a sense of awe and transcendence when contemplating a God far above humanity. This he labels the yellow zone.
Fourth was a “quest for independence.” As our kings protected us with increased power, they became corrupt and we felt exploited. And so we searched for laws and principles that even kings had to observe and submit to. God becomes the rational architect for universal laws. He becomes “the judge who enforces laws, mandates punishment, and negotiates settlements.” Some felt less of a need for God: the universe ran by its own laws. This he labels the green zone.
Fifth is the “quest for individuality.” Since the world was now a rational machine, “we were free to discover and express ourselves as autonomous or independent individuals, joyfully exercising our personal freedom through competition for goods and services” (3898-3907). God becomes our personal savior and “the spiritual life often involved mastering techniques for earning God’s favor and blessing on our ambitious plans for personal prosperity and individual achievement” (3907-16). We formed denominations and political parties.. He labels this the blue zone.
Sixth was the “quest for honesty.” We realized in the middle of the 20th century what we were doing to the earth and to each other: 2 world wars, a holocaust, segregation, apartheid, burning forests, covering the earth with cement, turning fossil fuel into greenhouse gases, driving wildlife to extinction, and multiplying high-tech weapons. We created uncountable prosperity while leaving the majority of people in abject poverty. We became obsessed with short term profit. Our capitalist system was grossly malfunctioning. And at least we wanted to be honest about it. We realized that much of what we had done had unintended consequences. We called this deconstruction, humility, repentance. McLaren labels it the indigo zone.
Finally, we come to the seventh quest, the “Quest for healing, for unifying and liberating what we’ve tragically divided and conquered, and the quest for rediscovering a larger and more beautiful whole…” Although he is reluctant to name this question, McLaren says every culture has a word for it: Shalom, etc. (3924-36). He shies away from using the word “peace” because of Western dominance, and prefers the African Ubuntu, which means interconnectedness, joined in the common goodness, committed to the well being of all. Our society now needs for survival to transform the “other” into “one another.” He labels this the violet zone.
He thinks there could be zones beyond these, like an ultraviolet zone of sacredness, awareness of the presence of God in all things. He also acknowledges that we are all in different stages of this quest. [McLaren pairs theologies with the stages on 3948-57). When our focus is in one of these stages, we tend to ignore “inconvenient truths” that might “obstruct or interfere with our more immediate quests…” We can be unready for the “higher zones.” If, like this book, we enter the quest for honesty, we have to acknowledge we are good at raising questions, but not answering them. We never get to ‘wise action.’ But we can become quite critical, looking down on people in the other stages. We forget that they “have worked, lived, fought, and died to build and defend” [them].
Ubuntu requires that we CLOSE distances, not enlarge them. So the paradox is that you can’t fulfill the quest from within the zone that inspired it. Entering a new zone, especially the violet or Ubuntu one, is NOT easy. It requires that we see the earlier stages as necessary, offering something essential “to the larger human quest” (3976-86). “From red, the world looks red.” The people in them are seeing God in the only way they CAN see Him. It IS a mistake to say that God is red, green, orange, etc., but it’s no bigger a mistake than to attack those people for saying so.
Such attacks will only make people defensive and retard much needed progress. The violet stage is most important now because we need people of all denominations to create a zone that welcomes all people “to mature and advance in the human quest” (3986-94). McLaren has a table with columns representing the various options for religious orientation (such as Christian, Muslim Buddhist, Hindu, etc.). But then he has two rows, one for the old style of the religion (emphasizing domination, exclusion, assimilation, isolation, revolution, competition and supremacy) and one for the new (the Ubuntu approach). He thinks it crucial that more and more people opt for the new (“that sees us in you and you in us and some of us for all of us”).
In Jesus, McLaren sees the whole spectrum of color that is God (Jn. 1:4). He includes and transcends all of them. McLaren catalogues what happens when we refuse to transcend a stage. Each stage has its own aberrations. Then he adds:
If we do transcend the previous stages but then judge and exclude all that has gone before, we will remain stuck in the indigo moment of stage six, unable to continue the quest. …As we get acclimated to the violet zone, we learn to see all previous zones as appropriate and adequate for their context, just as we consider infancy, childhood, and adolescence as appropriate and adequate to their time, not bad, evil, or wrong (4022-31).
You can’t climb a ladder without the lower rungs. They’re good, but you can’t stay on them forever. So McLaren says his approach is not absolutist, claiming one zone is right and the rest wrong, nor relativist, saying that they are all equally good or bad. It is holistic, integral and hierarchical, saying all are partial and that “greater wholeness is better than lesser wholeness.” He quotes Jean Danielou: “Sin is ultimately a refusal to grow” (4041-58).
McLaren knows that people who haven’t reached the violet zone will consider it naïve, silly or evil. “..it requires habits and skills of the mind and heart that are profoundly hard to learn and master” (4058-67). He sees, however, each stage as pregnant with the next. He is confident that people will continue to move forward for three reasons: (1) the presence of God, creator of an expanding universe; (2) the uncontainable message that is Jesus; (3) the breath and wind and fire that is the Holy Spirit—His music eventually calls us out of our corner to dance!
21: Living the Questions in Community
McLaren envisions the day when the new paradigm for Christianity will be the normal and normative one, knowing that he and others like him have paid a price of a lot of “unfriendly fire” from people who want to keep it from spreading. Those who are spreading it have a difficult task, and McLaren urges them to be good to themselves. He’s had to deal with his own reactions to negativity, from frustration to anger to withdrawal.
He had to learn to combine or hold in tension the “courage to differ” and the “grace to differ graciously.” He simply began to share with those who either ‘got it’ or WANTED to ‘get it. His secret? “Say as little as possible and only share more if people ask” (4120-4131). He knows how to state the positive aspects of his paradigm shift and to let friends off the hook if they make the friends nervous.
He acknowledges that “you have to live your way into a new way of thinking,” and not vice-versa. He writes: “..new ideas and understandings are worth little until they’re translated into the ways we pray, worship, and enjoy life in the Spirit and into the ways we interact with others—with our families and friends, with people of other classes, races, and religions, and so on” (4131-40). Then there’s the translation into work, economics, politics, recreation and our communal church lives. And there’s the rub, as McLaren does a Q&A .
1. If the pastor’s not interested, he encourages people to be as good a member as possible, neither forcing this on anyone nor hiding it under a bushel. Be a joyful presence inside your church, he advises, but don’t stay where you’re not wanted.
2. If this has provoked a doctrinal crisis of consciousness, McLaren suggests some words to use with your pastor that allows him not to fix you but to suggest a peaceful transition to another church without causing anger or division.
3. If the Pastor can’t get his congregation interested, McLaren is adamant about NOT forcing it on anyone, but inviting a few interested people to a conversation rather than a series of sermons. This may mean the pastor’s having to go elsewhere rather than waste his or her time. It’s not a failure; it’s allowing people freedom.
4. If some of the people want this new approach and others don’t McLaren encourages them to “plant a new church” (instead of defending theological turf) but not in a divisive spirit. Then he talks about the fact that people who try this find that “church” carries too much baggage:
So instead, they form what I call faith communities. Some are more formal and large and other informal and small; some last a long time and others a few weeks, months, or years; some have regular meetings and high commitment and others simply enjoy social interaction and the conversations that emerge spontaneously during meals, walks or working together (4169-78).
…I believe we need thousands of them, both to sustain the faith of followers of Christ who can’t survive in existing contexts and to create space for seekers to be exposed to the way of Christ. I think that in many cases established congregations and informal faith communities can learn to coexist and in fact develop a real synergy together (ibid.).
5. When he is asked how an open congregation can move this way, he suggests:
a. Get a consultant outside your congregational or denominational system
b. Build new para-structures to foster new approaches to faith rather than trying to bend existing structures to that end (renewal in RC churches came through the Franciscans, Jesuits, etc., the ecclesiolae). You don’t challenge existing structures but build parallel ones (e.g. Methodism began within Anglicanism).
c. Expect to bring in a new day with new people. Young people or people “new to the field” are almost always necessary to bring about a paradigm shift. People coming from other denominations, or no religious commitments--’the seekers’-- can help bring about change.
d. Add. Don’t subtract. Write new creeds or a statement to experiment with rather than attempt to abolish or modify old ones.
e. Develop a theology of institutions. McLaren feels that “institutions exist in a dynamic relationship with social movements” (4212-24). The “priestly class” maintaining the institutions need not be enemies, but as colleagues in the work of changing and developing.
f. Preach the Bible—let it come alive with the new quest. McLaren is adamant that we preach it with all five of the lines of moral reasoning: fairness, compassion, tradition, in-group loyalty, and purity (see 4224-34).
g. Employ experiential learning; like mission trips so people can see great need and injustice; visits to another church; reading groups with lots of interaction followed by action; listening groups who listen to people they would not normally listen to (e.g. to people who dropped out of the church, young adult children and their friends), asking questions, drawing out deep understanding of why people left without judging or defensiveness, then developing responses and creative action.
h. Keep your short-term expectations low and your long-term hopes high. Opposing forces will weed out all but the strongest quests for change. Expect “setbacks and mistakes, opposition and misunderstanding, conflict and discouragement at every turn.” (4242-51). He concludes with the African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” (4251-60).
22. Conclusion: A New Kind of Christianity
McLaren’s hope is that a large number of people will come to agree that these questions need to be asked, and that we need to have “reverent and respectful conversation” about them. Our real quest will be “to receive and participate in what Jesus called God’s kingdom, life to the full” (4269-78).
There will be new questions in addition to these, and McLaren suggests a few. He reminds readers of the four crises he noted a preached about in his book Everything Must Change. Those were (1) the crisis of the planet, the prosperity crisis because our way of pursuing it is unsustainable ecologically; (2) the equity crisis because the gap between rich and poor is leaving more and more people is a terrible position; (3) the security crisis because this rich versus poor gap “plunges both groups into a vicious cycle of violence, each group arming itself with more and more catastrophic weapons” (4278-87); (4) the spirituality crisis since “all our world’s religions are failing to inspire us to address the first three crises, and in fact too often they are inspiring us to behave in ways counterproductive to human survival” (ibid.). He called this a “suicide machine,” with all four gears turning simultaneously.
But when he preached about this, the Q&A sessions ignored the crises and were more upset about his “decentralizing their favorite theory of atonement,” or his obviously unconventional reading of biblical reference to homosexuality. McLaren began to realize that his “conversation partners simply couldn’t address life=and=death issues like poverty, the planet and peace from within the conventional paradigms they inherited” (4287-96).
[He heard people say: ‘Oh yeah, yeah a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. But your decentralizing our preferred theory of atonement!’ Or ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re in danger of environmental collapse and religiously inspired catastrophic war, but you seem to be questioning our conventional ways of reading the Bible about homosexuality”( 4291).]
So he knew he had to address that inheritance head on, and hence, the present book. And so now that he has written it, he goes back to these questions:
How shall we live in relation to the planet? How can we go from a consumptive to a sustainable way of life and from a sustainable to a regenerative way of life? What is our duty to the living and nonliving creations among which we live and on which we depend…how can our faith provide healing, inspiration, formation, and motivation for the way forward?
How shall we live in relation to poverty? Given that capitalism out-competed communism, what threats does capitalism in its current form pose for our world? How can capitalism be redeemed, retrained, and redirected so that a prosperous minority of people don’t continue to suffer the dehumanizing meaninglessness of self-centered luxury while a struggling majority suffer the dehumanizing degradation of crushing poverty?...how can our faith provide motivation and wisdom for the way forward?
How shall we live in relation to the people who are different from us—in religion, region, race, class, caste, political party, sexual orientation, history, and so on?
He thinks that tackling these questions will make us feel more alive, more significant. He worries that the word “new” in the title will lead people to ignore the fact that much of this is ancient content. He also worries that the word “Christianity” is misleading, since he doesn’t believe Jesus came to found a new religion, nor does he think Christianity is the entire answer, but a part of the answer. “Christianity” has developed a lot of accretions that were problematic especially in their application.
We just refer to our past study as “theology,” not “white theology” or “domination theology” or “male theology.” He has a care for what is being created here. Is it just another spin on the past, or “is it more creative and subversive than that?” (4324-33). Today we don’t nail theses to a door, but post them on a website or put them in a book or discuss them in a coffee shop.
McLaren feels that, like Luther, we must raise these questions about “urgent and emergent issues.” He wants to start a conversation and call for “collegial and creative collaboration.” We must, he says, “come out of our closets and admit we have been asking these …questions in secret.” Doing so is scary, because “we don’t want to betray our heritage..to prove unfaithful to the faith that has nourished our souls” (4351-4360).
His is a call, not just to talk and repeat statements from the past, but to act and “precipitate a change, foment a …gentle and hopeful revolution.” We must be loyal to the past, but also loyal to the present world “in which we serve,” and especially loyal to the future: “to be loyal to the God who was…the God who is.. and the God who is to come.” He has a sense that there is something in Christianity trying to be born. He says we may feel it as curiosity and “a desire for better answers,” or as frustration, “know that there must be more to faith than you currently know,” or as hope, knowing that God is seeking people through whom this can come to life (4379-86).
For more resources, go to http://www.brianmclaren.net.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Session 5: Questions Eight and Nine
THE EIGHTH QUESTIONS: The Future Question
18: Can We Find a Better Way of Viewing the Future?
In this chapter, McLaren takes on the “Left Behind” theories of the eschaton, from its history through dispensationalism invented in the 1830s but publicized world wide through the Scofield Reference Bible since 1909 “and is now considered historic orthodoxy by millions of Christians around the world.”
He remembers being a third grader and returning home after school to find his doors locked, and feeling terrible dread that the rapture had occurred and he was one of the left behind children of saved parents.
He remembers preachers identifying the antichrist as Khrushchev, Henry Kissinger, Saddam Hussein, or now Barack Obama! “..in recent decades, dispensationalism and its eschatological cousins have become significant factors in the foreign policy of the richest, most consumptive, and most well-armed nation in the history of history, and that’s where things get even scarier than a B-grade movie.”
If the world is about to end, why care for the environment? Why worry about global climate change or peak oil? Who gives a rip for endangered species or sustainable economies or global poverty if God is planning to incinerate the whole planet soon anyway? ..Why care about justice for non-Jews in Israel at all—after all, isn’t it their own fault for being on land God predicts will be returned in full to the Jews in the last days? …why waste energy on peace-making, diplomacy, or interreligious dialogue? ..what’s so bad about another war, and maybe even a little torture and genocide now and then? If God sanctions it, why can’t we?
We need a way out of this thinking and a new eschatology, that frees us from the old linear, six-line Greco-Roman narrative. We need a dynamic, spacious biblical narrative, where, “at every moment, creation continues to unfold, liberation continues to unshackle us, and the peaceable kingdom continues to expand with new hope and promise” (3273-81).
McLaren envisions a time-space in three dimensions: [See the diagram on page 194 of the text, which includes these elements: creation-->liberation-->peace-making kingdom].
“At every moment, creation continues to unfold, liberation continues to unshackle us, and the peaceable kingdom continues to expand with new hope and promise.” (3273-3281). This is a result of “a generous, creative and liberating God.” With the above diagram, however, McLaren also acknowledges a direction to history, a flow to creation, “a moral arc to the universe that slowly but surely tends toward justice.” This is not to deny evil actions, which resist this flow and turn toward “the darkness of destruction, oppression, and violence, hatred, and fear.”
Creation keeps branching “out into an ever widening sphere of goodness, justice, and peace.” Living in this universe while still believing in the flat six-line universe, is, McLaren claims, the reason why “many of us find our religion limiting, cramped, and unlivable.” But this new diagram is an alternative to religious determinisms, where we’ll all get sorted in either destruction or salvation. In the new paradigm, McLaren says the future is “undoomed…to eventual healing and joy…to ultimate resurrection, liberation, reconciliation and…salvation, because the living God will never forsake or forget this beloved creation” (3299-3308).
In it, God is not in control and the universe is not out of control. They are in relationship. “God is like a parent guiding a child with a will of her own.” He relates inter-subjectively. We are harmed when we drop out of relationship and we groan to reenter a right relationship “so we can fulfill our God-given calling as creation’s stewards, students, and creative partners—and cease being its abusers, exploiters and plunderers” (3308-18).
And so the future depends on us, to whom God holds out such promise. We get to help create it. And so McLaren next tackles our understandings about the Second Coming, stating that biblical scholars agree that the scripture writers were NOT talking about the end of the world, but about “the beginning of a new spiritual-historical age or era” and so the end of the world as we know it.
The gospel writers focused on: (1) the resurrection; (2) the coming of the Holy Spirit; (3) the survival and rebirth of God’s people through an anticipated catastrophe “which came to fruition in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE). “The second coming of Christ” is NOT a phrase that appears in the Bible. Parousia does. Its opposite is apousia, which means “absence.” Its best translation is “presence.” In political terms, it could refer to the visit of a royal person.
We could, therefore, understand Parousia as the arrival of “the beginning of a new beginning,” in other words the “manifestation of a new age in human history…Christ again present, embodied in a community of people who truly possess and express his Spirit, continuing his work” (3347-57). After using the metaphor of the conception of this new covenant in the life of Jesus, its gestation in the early community, its being born in the great pain of early persecution, its being fully present but not completely present, its further realization when the destruction of the Temple ended the sacrificial system, the priesthood and the old era.
And so we have participatory eschatology, within which we are called to fully and passionately function like a musician playing passionately NOT to get to the end, but to make beautiful music. The kingdom is fully present, but not fully grown and mature. We hope for the renewal of all things as we help in the kingdom’s administration. We have “a passion to do good, whatever the suffering, sacrifice, and delay, because of a confidence that God will win in the end” (3386-95). In McLaren’s view, this eschatology inspires, gives a sense of urgency because we are protagonists in a show whose outcome we can influence; and it inspired humility because “we are aware of our ability to miss the point, lose our way, and play on the wrong side” (ibid).
The eschatology produces “an ethic of anticipation.” “..a better future comes as we join Jesus first in dying (metaphorically by dying to our pride, our agendas, our schedules, our terms, or literally through martyrdom as witnesses for God’s kingdom and justice), and then in rising, through the mysterious but real power of god” (3395-3404). And we can refuse to participate. Our stupidity is not stronger than God’s grace, but can cause real human pain and sadness.
McLaren offers the story of Jonah as illustration of this participatory eschatology, a story he calls “the most subversive document in the biblical library.” McLaren tells the story and then comments after Jonah asks God to kill him (“as if to say, ‘I’d rather be dead than have to live in a world where you love both our enemies and us’—a remarkably common sentiment among religious people still today..” (3422-31). In the story, McLaren says, “you keep bumping into a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love.” And so we are left with great hope. Our resistances and refusals are never the end of the story.
Finally McLaren takes on the concept of “final judgment” which seems pervasive in scripture. In God’s presence all is revealed. But McLaren says we have to stop defining judgment as condemnation. God’s judgment “involves ‘putting wrong things right.’” It involves reconciling, healing, transforming and revaluing (not just evaluating).
Second, we must realize that final judgment will not be merciless or graceless, as many assume, because in God what we may think of as opposites—grace and truth, justice and mercy, kindness and strength—are beautifully and fully integrated.
And third, we must see the life and way of Jesus—not a list of laws, rules, or beliefs—to be the high and gracious standard by which history’s events and our own lives will be valued and evaluated (3450-60).
Therefore, it will be the humble and poor in spirit, those who mourned injustice, and the makers of peace that “will be seen as bearing Gods family resemblance… (3460-69). McLaren puts it crudely that God will not be checking for circumcision or scanning our brains for beliefs, but “for a cup of cold water or a plate of hot food given to one in need…etc.” And then he quotes from Martin Luther King (3478-88). He concludes with a wonderful quote from Lutheran theologian Jürgen Moltmann about a Jesus who died first for the victims and then also for the executioners.
NINTH QUESTION: The Pluralism Question
19: How Should Followers of Jesus Relate to People of Other Religions?
This may be the most important question because so many people are killing or planning to kill each other in the name of pleasing and honoring God. McLaren says Christians number 33% of the world’s population, Muslims 24% and Jews less than .25 percent. So these three Abrahamic traditions make up over 50% of the population and are therefore responsible for putting everyone in safety or danger.
McLaren is most often asked about religious pluralism. He is caught between the us/them, winner/loser mentality of old, and the “whatever you believe is okay as long as you’re sincere,” which undermines commitment and identity among ‘us’ (3515-3524).
This is not only a religious, but a political, military, and humanitarian question, with millions of lives in the balance. Preachers need to remember that their work, “if taken seriously, literally becomes a matter of life and death’ (3524-3533). Christians have a long history of intolerance and violence towards others, even those of different ‘brands’ of Christianity. Mclaren gives examples, from expansion through native territories in many countries to the inquisitions and crusades, segregation and apartheid and the current animosity between Christians and Muslims.
McLaren cites scripture from Jesus to Paul (Romans) to illustrate what tolerance looks like. In Romans 5:12-21 and 2 Corinthians 5:14-19, Paul comes to understand that Jesus died for ALL—“God is not holding the sins of humanity against them” (3542-52). The Hebrew scriptures celebrate the “righteous outsider,” like Melchizedek, Rahab, Ruth, Uriah, etc. Solomon, he says, wanted the Temple “to welcome, not disenfranchise, people of other backgrounds and be for them a bridge, not a barrier, to knowing God (2 Chron. 6:32-33)” (3552-61). He finds other instances in the prophets (e.g., Isaiah 55:5-9), where God is depicted as above showing favoritism. He quotes from Paul’s speech in Athens as recorded in Acts 17:24-28: ‘In him we live and move and have our being…we too are his offspring” (3570-79).
People of every language, culture, and religion are given a place in God’s world, and no nation is given permission to crush, annihilate, dominate, or assimilate others (ibid.).
He makes the point that God chooses some for the benefit, not the exclusion of, others. He cites the example of Jesus with the Samaritan woman, the centurion, the Greeks; the story of the magi. He asks Christians how they would like to be treated by people of other faiths.
But soon someone will quote John 14:6 as if it tops all the other scriptures. It is so often quoted in supported of the Greco-Roman thinking. One, you feel on top and so vulnerable. You have to worry about what you eat, drink and wear. You strive for more wealth, power, influence to consolidate your position and feel safer. Two, you become paranoid. Your neighbors are a threat, competitors, rebels, obstacles. Three, you can only imagine a positive future where the “others” are gone or: converted, colonized and dominated, ignored and excluded, persecuted and kept off balance, or cleansed and exterminated. Four, life is an “unending, all-out war” and any means are justified to win it because ‘they’ are evil.
McLaren wonders if we have fallen victim to the syndrome in which the persecuted identify with their persecutors and have not yet recovered. Many of us feel like Peter who abandoned Jesus. And because of him, we know we will be invited back. But we must repent of the negative aspects of this imperial approach because we control most of the world’s wealth and weapons.
We could refrain from demonizing other religions and their founders. 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 all others…We would learn to discover God in the other and...discover a bigger ‘us’ in which people of all faiths can be included” (3645-54). We would see Jesus as a gift to the whole world. “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 stop, McLaren hopes, needing to preach fire and brimstone sermons threatening eternal conscious torment. We would simply proclaim the good news as Jesus did “in word and deed, through art and teaching, in sign and wonder, with clarity and intrigue, with warning and hope” (3654-63). We would, he says, “plot goodness and save the world from human evil, both personal and systemic.”
Continuing this positive note, McLaren envisions people being called to a way of life in the peaceable kingdom “that transcends and includes all religions.” These communities might be called Christian churches or something else, but they would be “interested in breaking out of the cocoons of Christianity that were spun within the Greco-Roman narrative, governed by a constitutional reading of Scripture, oriented around violent and tribal views of God, and so on” (3663-72).
And so McLaren has to return to those scriptural verses that are used to justify the separatist and combative attitude of many Christians, starting with John 14:6. He points out that 14:6 “has nothing—absolutely nothing—to say to the questions it is commonly quoted to answer.” McLaren maintains that the question Jesus in answering is the mundane question: “Jesus, where are you going?” He has said he is going where the disciples cannot follow, and they ARE his followers. He, of course, is going through suffering and death to return to his Father and be glorified.
Jesus tells his disciples what they MUST do: have love for one another (13:34-35). He calls this his last word, his new commandment. But Peter keeps after the issue of where Jesus is going. Peter says he will follow everywhere. Jesus tells him he will deny him, but then reassures Peter and the others that they shouldn’t let their hearts be troubled because there are many dwelling places in his Father’s house. McLaren says we shouldn’t be quick to assume the ‘Father’s house’ means “heaven,” which then means the rest of the speech is how to get to heaven.
To explain ‘heaven,’ McLaren refers to the cleansing of the Temple speech: “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” (Jn. 2:15-17). So the Father’s house means the Temple in this passage, but then Jesus goes on to say that “if you destroy this temple, I will raise it up…” and John says he is referring to his body.
So McLaren feels it is logical to conclude that in John 14, he is also referring to the temple, not heaven, and to his body, which is about to be destroyed and then be resurrected—not only in himself, but resurrected in the community of believers, the body of Christ, the “living stones of the new temple.”
Jesus, therefore, is telling them that “there will be a place for them in the new people-of-God-as temple” (3731-41). There are parallels with this house and “my Father’s house” and “kingdom of God.” “All of these phrases suggest the same reality: life lived in loving relationship with God and others, so that God’s will is joyfully done on earth as it is in heaven, and so that God’s presence spreads throughout the world in Spirit-inhabited human lives” (ibid.). McLaren develops a new paraphrase for Jn. 14:1-4.
When Thomas asks his famous question: “How can WE know the way?” he is asking for himself, not for members of other religions or no religions. So that is the context for Jesus’s reply: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me, etc.” (14:6-7). He is not talking “about the fate of unbelievers at the final judgment, he is telling his disciples…how they will get from HERE (with Jesus visibly present)—through a LITTLE WHILE (while his body is in the grave)—to there (with Jesus present in a new way).” Jesus is giving them (again) reassurance (3751-61). McLaren paraphrases what he has just said as Jesus’s reply to Thomas (see highlight in ibid.). Thomas, “the way and the truth and the life aren’t things separate from me. I am these things, so you’ll find them in me! Whether or not you know what I’ve been talking abou, if you know me, you know the Father, you know the way, you know the truth, you know the life” (3761-71).
“No one comes to the Father except through me”? “No one” refers to Jesus’s own disciples who “want some plan or instructions so they can get to God or the kingdom of God on their own” (ibid.). The apostles still don’t get it and Philip asks to see the Father. This is where Jesus makes the point that McLaren says we negate by our interpretation of verse 6. In other words, Jesus says that to see him IS to see the Father. And what have we seen? Has it been elitism, exclusion, rejection, condemnation? Just the opposite. So how can we claim that “God will reject everyone except people who share [our ] doctrinal viewpoints…”? (3780-90).
McLaren admits that we have a long way to go in living in a multifaith world. “But I hope this much is clear: there is a way to be a committed follower of Christ that doesn’t require you to be flatly and implacably against other religions and their adherents.” In fact, we can treat them with love, not suspicion (see my audiotape title). “May it be so,” he warns, “before it is too late, because even now some people are loading their weapons and enriching their uranium in the name of God” (3798-3806).
18: Can We Find a Better Way of Viewing the Future?
In this chapter, McLaren takes on the “Left Behind” theories of the eschaton, from its history through dispensationalism invented in the 1830s but publicized world wide through the Scofield Reference Bible since 1909 “and is now considered historic orthodoxy by millions of Christians around the world.”
He remembers being a third grader and returning home after school to find his doors locked, and feeling terrible dread that the rapture had occurred and he was one of the left behind children of saved parents.
He remembers preachers identifying the antichrist as Khrushchev, Henry Kissinger, Saddam Hussein, or now Barack Obama! “..in recent decades, dispensationalism and its eschatological cousins have become significant factors in the foreign policy of the richest, most consumptive, and most well-armed nation in the history of history, and that’s where things get even scarier than a B-grade movie.”
If the world is about to end, why care for the environment? Why worry about global climate change or peak oil? Who gives a rip for endangered species or sustainable economies or global poverty if God is planning to incinerate the whole planet soon anyway? ..Why care about justice for non-Jews in Israel at all—after all, isn’t it their own fault for being on land God predicts will be returned in full to the Jews in the last days? …why waste energy on peace-making, diplomacy, or interreligious dialogue? ..what’s so bad about another war, and maybe even a little torture and genocide now and then? If God sanctions it, why can’t we?
We need a way out of this thinking and a new eschatology, that frees us from the old linear, six-line Greco-Roman narrative. We need a dynamic, spacious biblical narrative, where, “at every moment, creation continues to unfold, liberation continues to unshackle us, and the peaceable kingdom continues to expand with new hope and promise” (3273-81).
McLaren envisions a time-space in three dimensions: [See the diagram on page 194 of the text, which includes these elements: creation-->liberation-->peace-making kingdom].
“At every moment, creation continues to unfold, liberation continues to unshackle us, and the peaceable kingdom continues to expand with new hope and promise.” (3273-3281). This is a result of “a generous, creative and liberating God.” With the above diagram, however, McLaren also acknowledges a direction to history, a flow to creation, “a moral arc to the universe that slowly but surely tends toward justice.” This is not to deny evil actions, which resist this flow and turn toward “the darkness of destruction, oppression, and violence, hatred, and fear.”
Creation keeps branching “out into an ever widening sphere of goodness, justice, and peace.” Living in this universe while still believing in the flat six-line universe, is, McLaren claims, the reason why “many of us find our religion limiting, cramped, and unlivable.” But this new diagram is an alternative to religious determinisms, where we’ll all get sorted in either destruction or salvation. In the new paradigm, McLaren says the future is “undoomed…to eventual healing and joy…to ultimate resurrection, liberation, reconciliation and…salvation, because the living God will never forsake or forget this beloved creation” (3299-3308).
In it, God is not in control and the universe is not out of control. They are in relationship. “God is like a parent guiding a child with a will of her own.” He relates inter-subjectively. We are harmed when we drop out of relationship and we groan to reenter a right relationship “so we can fulfill our God-given calling as creation’s stewards, students, and creative partners—and cease being its abusers, exploiters and plunderers” (3308-18).
And so the future depends on us, to whom God holds out such promise. We get to help create it. And so McLaren next tackles our understandings about the Second Coming, stating that biblical scholars agree that the scripture writers were NOT talking about the end of the world, but about “the beginning of a new spiritual-historical age or era” and so the end of the world as we know it.
The gospel writers focused on: (1) the resurrection; (2) the coming of the Holy Spirit; (3) the survival and rebirth of God’s people through an anticipated catastrophe “which came to fruition in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE). “The second coming of Christ” is NOT a phrase that appears in the Bible. Parousia does. Its opposite is apousia, which means “absence.” Its best translation is “presence.” In political terms, it could refer to the visit of a royal person.
We could, therefore, understand Parousia as the arrival of “the beginning of a new beginning,” in other words the “manifestation of a new age in human history…Christ again present, embodied in a community of people who truly possess and express his Spirit, continuing his work” (3347-57). After using the metaphor of the conception of this new covenant in the life of Jesus, its gestation in the early community, its being born in the great pain of early persecution, its being fully present but not completely present, its further realization when the destruction of the Temple ended the sacrificial system, the priesthood and the old era.
And so we have participatory eschatology, within which we are called to fully and passionately function like a musician playing passionately NOT to get to the end, but to make beautiful music. The kingdom is fully present, but not fully grown and mature. We hope for the renewal of all things as we help in the kingdom’s administration. We have “a passion to do good, whatever the suffering, sacrifice, and delay, because of a confidence that God will win in the end” (3386-95). In McLaren’s view, this eschatology inspires, gives a sense of urgency because we are protagonists in a show whose outcome we can influence; and it inspired humility because “we are aware of our ability to miss the point, lose our way, and play on the wrong side” (ibid).
The eschatology produces “an ethic of anticipation.” “..a better future comes as we join Jesus first in dying (metaphorically by dying to our pride, our agendas, our schedules, our terms, or literally through martyrdom as witnesses for God’s kingdom and justice), and then in rising, through the mysterious but real power of god” (3395-3404). And we can refuse to participate. Our stupidity is not stronger than God’s grace, but can cause real human pain and sadness.
McLaren offers the story of Jonah as illustration of this participatory eschatology, a story he calls “the most subversive document in the biblical library.” McLaren tells the story and then comments after Jonah asks God to kill him (“as if to say, ‘I’d rather be dead than have to live in a world where you love both our enemies and us’—a remarkably common sentiment among religious people still today..” (3422-31). In the story, McLaren says, “you keep bumping into a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love.” And so we are left with great hope. Our resistances and refusals are never the end of the story.
Finally McLaren takes on the concept of “final judgment” which seems pervasive in scripture. In God’s presence all is revealed. But McLaren says we have to stop defining judgment as condemnation. God’s judgment “involves ‘putting wrong things right.’” It involves reconciling, healing, transforming and revaluing (not just evaluating).
Second, we must realize that final judgment will not be merciless or graceless, as many assume, because in God what we may think of as opposites—grace and truth, justice and mercy, kindness and strength—are beautifully and fully integrated.
And third, we must see the life and way of Jesus—not a list of laws, rules, or beliefs—to be the high and gracious standard by which history’s events and our own lives will be valued and evaluated (3450-60).
Therefore, it will be the humble and poor in spirit, those who mourned injustice, and the makers of peace that “will be seen as bearing Gods family resemblance… (3460-69). McLaren puts it crudely that God will not be checking for circumcision or scanning our brains for beliefs, but “for a cup of cold water or a plate of hot food given to one in need…etc.” And then he quotes from Martin Luther King (3478-88). He concludes with a wonderful quote from Lutheran theologian Jürgen Moltmann about a Jesus who died first for the victims and then also for the executioners.
NINTH QUESTION: The Pluralism Question
19: How Should Followers of Jesus Relate to People of Other Religions?
This may be the most important question because so many people are killing or planning to kill each other in the name of pleasing and honoring God. McLaren says Christians number 33% of the world’s population, Muslims 24% and Jews less than .25 percent. So these three Abrahamic traditions make up over 50% of the population and are therefore responsible for putting everyone in safety or danger.
McLaren is most often asked about religious pluralism. He is caught between the us/them, winner/loser mentality of old, and the “whatever you believe is okay as long as you’re sincere,” which undermines commitment and identity among ‘us’ (3515-3524).
This is not only a religious, but a political, military, and humanitarian question, with millions of lives in the balance. Preachers need to remember that their work, “if taken seriously, literally becomes a matter of life and death’ (3524-3533). Christians have a long history of intolerance and violence towards others, even those of different ‘brands’ of Christianity. Mclaren gives examples, from expansion through native territories in many countries to the inquisitions and crusades, segregation and apartheid and the current animosity between Christians and Muslims.
McLaren cites scripture from Jesus to Paul (Romans) to illustrate what tolerance looks like. In Romans 5:12-21 and 2 Corinthians 5:14-19, Paul comes to understand that Jesus died for ALL—“God is not holding the sins of humanity against them” (3542-52). The Hebrew scriptures celebrate the “righteous outsider,” like Melchizedek, Rahab, Ruth, Uriah, etc. Solomon, he says, wanted the Temple “to welcome, not disenfranchise, people of other backgrounds and be for them a bridge, not a barrier, to knowing God (2 Chron. 6:32-33)” (3552-61). He finds other instances in the prophets (e.g., Isaiah 55:5-9), where God is depicted as above showing favoritism. He quotes from Paul’s speech in Athens as recorded in Acts 17:24-28: ‘In him we live and move and have our being…we too are his offspring” (3570-79).
People of every language, culture, and religion are given a place in God’s world, and no nation is given permission to crush, annihilate, dominate, or assimilate others (ibid.).
He makes the point that God chooses some for the benefit, not the exclusion of, others. He cites the example of Jesus with the Samaritan woman, the centurion, the Greeks; the story of the magi. He asks Christians how they would like to be treated by people of other faiths.
But soon someone will quote John 14:6 as if it tops all the other scriptures. It is so often quoted in supported of the Greco-Roman thinking. One, you feel on top and so vulnerable. You have to worry about what you eat, drink and wear. You strive for more wealth, power, influence to consolidate your position and feel safer. Two, you become paranoid. Your neighbors are a threat, competitors, rebels, obstacles. Three, you can only imagine a positive future where the “others” are gone or: converted, colonized and dominated, ignored and excluded, persecuted and kept off balance, or cleansed and exterminated. Four, life is an “unending, all-out war” and any means are justified to win it because ‘they’ are evil.
McLaren wonders if we have fallen victim to the syndrome in which the persecuted identify with their persecutors and have not yet recovered. Many of us feel like Peter who abandoned Jesus. And because of him, we know we will be invited back. But we must repent of the negative aspects of this imperial approach because we control most of the world’s wealth and weapons.
We could refrain from demonizing other religions and their founders. 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 all others…We would learn to discover God in the other and...discover a bigger ‘us’ in which people of all faiths can be included” (3645-54). We would see Jesus as a gift to the whole world. “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 stop, McLaren hopes, needing to preach fire and brimstone sermons threatening eternal conscious torment. We would simply proclaim the good news as Jesus did “in word and deed, through art and teaching, in sign and wonder, with clarity and intrigue, with warning and hope” (3654-63). We would, he says, “plot goodness and save the world from human evil, both personal and systemic.”
Continuing this positive note, McLaren envisions people being called to a way of life in the peaceable kingdom “that transcends and includes all religions.” These communities might be called Christian churches or something else, but they would be “interested in breaking out of the cocoons of Christianity that were spun within the Greco-Roman narrative, governed by a constitutional reading of Scripture, oriented around violent and tribal views of God, and so on” (3663-72).
And so McLaren has to return to those scriptural verses that are used to justify the separatist and combative attitude of many Christians, starting with John 14:6. He points out that 14:6 “has nothing—absolutely nothing—to say to the questions it is commonly quoted to answer.” McLaren maintains that the question Jesus in answering is the mundane question: “Jesus, where are you going?” He has said he is going where the disciples cannot follow, and they ARE his followers. He, of course, is going through suffering and death to return to his Father and be glorified.
Jesus tells his disciples what they MUST do: have love for one another (13:34-35). He calls this his last word, his new commandment. But Peter keeps after the issue of where Jesus is going. Peter says he will follow everywhere. Jesus tells him he will deny him, but then reassures Peter and the others that they shouldn’t let their hearts be troubled because there are many dwelling places in his Father’s house. McLaren says we shouldn’t be quick to assume the ‘Father’s house’ means “heaven,” which then means the rest of the speech is how to get to heaven.
To explain ‘heaven,’ McLaren refers to the cleansing of the Temple speech: “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” (Jn. 2:15-17). So the Father’s house means the Temple in this passage, but then Jesus goes on to say that “if you destroy this temple, I will raise it up…” and John says he is referring to his body.
So McLaren feels it is logical to conclude that in John 14, he is also referring to the temple, not heaven, and to his body, which is about to be destroyed and then be resurrected—not only in himself, but resurrected in the community of believers, the body of Christ, the “living stones of the new temple.”
Jesus, therefore, is telling them that “there will be a place for them in the new people-of-God-as temple” (3731-41). There are parallels with this house and “my Father’s house” and “kingdom of God.” “All of these phrases suggest the same reality: life lived in loving relationship with God and others, so that God’s will is joyfully done on earth as it is in heaven, and so that God’s presence spreads throughout the world in Spirit-inhabited human lives” (ibid.). McLaren develops a new paraphrase for Jn. 14:1-4.
When Thomas asks his famous question: “How can WE know the way?” he is asking for himself, not for members of other religions or no religions. So that is the context for Jesus’s reply: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me, etc.” (14:6-7). He is not talking “about the fate of unbelievers at the final judgment, he is telling his disciples…how they will get from HERE (with Jesus visibly present)—through a LITTLE WHILE (while his body is in the grave)—to there (with Jesus present in a new way).” Jesus is giving them (again) reassurance (3751-61). McLaren paraphrases what he has just said as Jesus’s reply to Thomas (see highlight in ibid.). Thomas, “the way and the truth and the life aren’t things separate from me. I am these things, so you’ll find them in me! Whether or not you know what I’ve been talking abou, if you know me, you know the Father, you know the way, you know the truth, you know the life” (3761-71).
“No one comes to the Father except through me”? “No one” refers to Jesus’s own disciples who “want some plan or instructions so they can get to God or the kingdom of God on their own” (ibid.). The apostles still don’t get it and Philip asks to see the Father. This is where Jesus makes the point that McLaren says we negate by our interpretation of verse 6. In other words, Jesus says that to see him IS to see the Father. And what have we seen? Has it been elitism, exclusion, rejection, condemnation? Just the opposite. So how can we claim that “God will reject everyone except people who share [our ] doctrinal viewpoints…”? (3780-90).
McLaren admits that we have a long way to go in living in a multifaith world. “But I hope this much is clear: there is a way to be a committed follower of Christ that doesn’t require you to be flatly and implacably against other religions and their adherents.” In fact, we can treat them with love, not suspicion (see my audiotape title). “May it be so,” he warns, “before it is too late, because even now some people are loading their weapons and enriching their uranium in the name of God” (3798-3806).
Saturday, February 19, 2011
PART II Session 4: Questions Six and Seven
BOOK TWO: EMERGING AND EXPLORING
McLaren acknowledges that at this point, some people will be energized and excited; some will be furious, and some will be in the middle not quite know what to think. In his own quest, “If my view of God changes, well, that changes everything for me.” It’s not just a head thing, but a heart thing. He acknowledges that people could lose friends, jobs, scholarships, whole communities. So he invites people who are fearful of these consequences to stop here, just adding some fine print to their theology. Others, he invites to go through the doors he has unlocked into the following chapters.
THE SIXTH QUESTION: The Church Question
16: What Do We Do About the Church?
Many people have left. But many have been saved from ritualism, emotionalism, rationalism, clericalism, historical amnesia by switching denominations. It’s a cycle. Some people are stuck in a church “by birth or marriage or inertia or duty” (162). When people don’t find a helpful kind of salvation from their church, they often drift away, find another church or drop out entirely, becoming part of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd. Young people are already there, having not even joined a church.
So then religious leaders ask: What are we going to do about the church? McLaren says that sometimes leaders with courage, creativity, kindness, collaboration and perseverance find that their denomination already has resources they can use to turn their “ocean liners” around. For example, Catholics can use the power of orders, those denominations with bishops can use the episcopacy; Congregationalists can just start a new congregation.
Savvy denominations of all types…will find ways to create ‘free trade zones’ and ‘R&D departments,’ in which old rules and strictures don’t apply and emerging leaders can be given freedom (and, we could hope, some financial support) to experiment, learn, and create new kinds of congregations to express a new kind of Christian faith (163).
McLaren looks at the developing structure of the church from its beginning, when over five centuries the development of bishops then brought about a remake of the Christian movement into “a mirror image of the Roman Empire after Constantine.” But since the Protestant Reformation, “the Christian faith has experienced ‘downward mobility,’ expressing itself in less hierarchical, less centralized, and less imperial forms and recapturing its earlier plurality of forms” (163).
Some see this, says McLaren, as division and think it needs to be remedied; others see it a diversification which can be celebrated. “What if the Christian faith is supposed to exist in a variety of forms rather than just one imperial one? “ What if it can be more responsive to the Holy Spirit in that way?
What if we could 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.
Then McLaren asks what could be the grand mission, this great danger to be saved from, this purpose to be saved FOR? He talks about harmonizing instead of homogenizing. And he comes to this: “…the church exists to form Christlike people, people of Christlike love. It exists to save them from the great danger of wasting their lives, becoming something less than and other than they were intended to be, gaining the world but losing their souls?” (164).
So this is our first task after being freed from the old paradigms, “to be communities that form Christlike people who embody and communicate, in word and deed, the good news of the kingdom of God (or we could say the shalom, harmony, dance, sacred ecosystem, love economy, benevolent society, beloved community, or preemptive peace movement of God).” --Do this not as a separate spiritual club, but in the world, to transform it. Churches exist to save us from the worst we can be [see Fall of Giants].
That means the leaders have to become Spirit-saturated people with the Spirit of Christ inside of us. But this is a long way from where we are…with all of our problems (unclear or divided purpose, for example, “in danger of fragmenting our way into nonexistence,” etc.). We are all a mess. McLaren suggests we don’t blame ourselves or others, but acknowledge our difficulties and failures as being a lot of the same kinds of things the first churches had to grapple with (e.g. Corinth, in which he points out that “God's goal is that there should be robust diversity without division, where each has equal concern for the others” (12:25-26) and then Paul shows them a still more excellent way (12:31). [See McLaren’s modern paraphrase of 1 Cor. 13 on p. 168].
Paul returns to the knowledge of Christ crucified, which “seems to expose Jesus as foolish, weak, lowly, and despised, a failure…But now we see that the lowly way of Christ, the vulnerable way of love is the only way of life” (169). “The church, then, in Paul’s mind, must be above all a school of love.” The church’s goal is to teach us how to love, “where you see living examples of Christlikeness and experience inner formation.”
McLaren wonders “what would it mean if we were willing to sacrifice—or at least subordinate—everything else for this one goal of forming Christlike people, people who live in the way of love, the way of peacemaking, the way of the kingdom of God, the way of Jesus, the way of the Spirit?” (169). And so he asks a lot of questions about how we can support this kind of church, develop leaders and liturgies and training models and calendars “to create a new future of the church as a school of love—which means a school of listening, dialogue, appreciative inquiry, understanding, preemptive peacemaking, reconciliation, nonviolence, prophetic confrontation, advocacy, generosity, and personal and social transformation. Anybody who thinks this is all soft and easy obviously has little experience in actually seeking to live this way and helping others to do so” (170).
McLaren doesn’t want ministers to add a new task to their to do list, but to throw out their present to do list and have ONLY this new task. This is the new wineskin: forming people of Christlike love. [See p. 171]. He knows this quest will mean finding “new liturgies, lectionaries, calendars, and music (with lyrics that celebrate and embed the new paradigm, not the old one), new heuristics and curricula for children and youth as well as adults of all ages, new training and support structures for church leaders; and so on.” Express that love in word and deed, “art and action. Where that happens, I believe church is happening, whatever the forms or structures, whatever the history or pedigree” (172).
THE SEVENTH QUESTION: The Sex Question
17: Can We Find a Way to Address Human Sexuality Without Fighting about It?
McLaren starts this chapter by stating that he can’t approve of the gay lifestyle and then goes on to write the stereotypes about the Bible and Jesus thoroughly disapproving and condemning this lifestyle. They live in their own ‘gated’ communities of thought and action, and can’t seem to free themselves. Professional therapy and groups formed to free gays still find that there is a residue of wounds that remain after they leave.
Gay groups spend huge sums of money to recruit and to attain media credibility and legitimacy. They obtain political clout and influence, especially, one party. Countries who allow this lifestyle end up with “a whole host of social problems” (174). Anyone who disagrees with them feels the heat of their anger and vituperation, threats and hate mail.
Finally McLaren reveals that he is NOT talking about homosexuality, but about fundasexuality, “a neologism that describes a reactive, combative brand of religious fundamentalism that preoccupies itself with sexuality.” It declares war on those who differ. It is rooted not in faith, but fear—fear of new ideas, of people who disagree, and above all, of “God’s violent wrath on them if they don’t fully conform to and enforce the teachings and interpretations of their popular teachers and other authority figures” (174). McLaren says it comes in many forms: Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or even atheist. It is natural for such groups to seek scapegoats, such as gays, etc.
But McLaren states that “our preoccupation with sexuality is a symptom, I believe, of our growing discomfort with conventional answers to the six questions we have already considered in this book.” He then rehearses them one by one:
1. The Greco-Roman narrative with its body/soul dualism can’t explain homosexuality. Many scientific disciplines blur the old distinctions between personality and chemistry, even between maleness and femaleness. He concludes that it is becoming clear “that whatever we human beings are, we aren’t simply metaphysical male or female souls riding around as passengers in male or female body-vehicles. This realization is creating a far-reaching revolution in Christian anthropology” (175).
Only in the Platonic world is there a perfect essence of “male,” “female,” and “marriage.” They are unchanging and we here in the cave have to seek to understand and conform to them. In the bible, the trouble is that there are stages of polygyny. Having moved beyond this question, we are able to ask of marriage what Jesus asked of the Sabbath: “was humankind made for the Sabbath, or vice-versa, to help humans –perhaps including gay humans? –live wisely and well in this world” (176).
2. The constitutional reading of the Bible makes homosexuality function like the motion of the planets around the sun in the Middle Ages. It couldn’t be explained under the current cosmology and was ordered to be explained as a “deceptive appearance.” In the same way, good, faithful, ethical, kind gay people can’t be explained if the constitutional approach needs them to be dangerous, abhorrent abominations, and evil.
Just as the constitutional readers learned to ignore the texts used against Galileo and Copernicus (such as Eccl. 1:4-6; Ps. 93:1; 104:5; 2 Kings 20:11; Josh. 10:12-14) and as they forgave people violently opposed to these astronomers such as Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon and the Catholic Congregation of the Index, whose ban on Copernicus's ideas was not lifted until the 19th century…
McLaren adds the discovery of fossils that indicate an ancient earth; Darwin’s theory of evolution, slavery, segregation, and apartheid; and the rights of women to vote and lead in state and church. He notes a four-stage process: 1. Oppose, condemn and reject; 2. Modify and make small concessions; 3. Go silent for a while; 4. Tolerate and accept what they once condemned (177).
…Just as all of the above, this pattern is at work concerning homosexuality. After opposing, many leaders then acknowledged an “unchosen orientation” (McLaren notes that ‘orientation’ is not a biblical concept). They counseled loving the sinner and hating the sin. After healing and therapy was not a permanent cure, they counseled “bearing the affliction as a cross.” Now many are silent.
3. The image of God as violent or even genocidal. So certain classes and types of people are judged to be inferior—Jews, women, gays, Gentiles, nonwhites, non-Christians, etc. Behind this is “what God does is automatically fair and we must not question it” (176). Might makes right can be defended “by a constitutional reading of the Bible.”
If you believe in a God who smites and damns, “sympathizing with the damned takes either a lot of courage or a lot of stupidity…it’s much easier to stay loyal to the lucky heterosexual tribe favored by the tribal God” (178).
But if we now believe God is best revealed in Jesus as the one who has been smitten, not the smiter. His identification is with those who are rejected and excluded, so we had better not cast the first stone at the ‘sexually other.’
4. Jesus’s identity as the ultimate Word of God. “We have many examples of Jesus crossing boundaries to include outcasts and sinners and not a single example of Jesus crossing his arms and refusing to do so” (179).
5. The Meaning and Purpose of the Gospel , as we have seen, is NOT to save people from hell, but to liberate people, including homosexuals. The question then becomes: “How should gay and straight people understand and treat one another in God’s kingdom” (ibid.)
6. What will the church be and do? In the old view, acceptance of gays would be judged as just one more step down the slope toward moral relativism; in the new, it would be one more step toward removing “the old dividing walls between Jew and Gentile…black and brown and white, male and female, and so on” (179 f.).
McLaren sees this creative and “catalytic way” as the way of the original gospel, and so deems himself truly conservative in being faithful to it. But he acknowledges that being a catalyst for change and trying to make disciple communities is NOT easy and the complexities can be daunting. But progress can come in unexpected ways and he tells the story of Philip and the eunuch from Acts. McLaren interprets the plight of this man—a man who wanted to worship in Jerusalem, but whose presence in the temple would have been rejected by his skin color (Gentile) and his physical deformity (Dt. 23:1). Yet Philip has told him about another man (Jesus) who was similarly rejected, a man with no physical descendants, who also was wounded, and humiliated and rejected. And so the Eunuch passes water and asks to be taken into this community of believers. Philip replies with action; he baptizes him. So even the ‘sexually other’ are accepted, even those who “will never have a place in the traditional religion or in the traditional culture based on the ‘traditional family.’” (183).
Philip and the Eunuch “represent a new humanity emerging from the water, dripping wet and full of joy, marked by a new and radical reconciliation in the kingdom of God” (ibid.). The event is fulfillment of Isaiah 56:1-7. And Isaiah recalls the cleansing by Jesus of the Temple’s money changers, whose policies excluded so many “and embedded the faith in the economy of the empire and vice versa” (184).
The eunuch brought the gospel back to Ethiopia: “a non-heterosexual in mission leadership from the very beginning of the Jesus movement” (186).
McLaren then adds other sexual issues that we have to cope with. First that the traditional marriage format is NOT working for heterosexuals. Pre-marital sex in the norm for Christians and non-Christians. Even teens who make abstinence pledges postpone premarital sex for about 18 months on average. And they are less likely to use contraceptives.
Then there’s divorce. The rates are not different in Christian circles. “Ironically,” states McLaren, “some subgroups with the highest divorce rates can be the most strongly vocal against homosexuality” (187). We are in a culture where “we’re all virtually anonymous and where anything goes. So sex and community are less connected than ever before.” And low-cost birth control has removed the connection between sex and pregnancy. And condoms and antibiotics make sex and disease less connected. And ‘women working with men outside the home’ has increased the possibilities for extramarital entanglements. And our education system has pushed the average age of marriage higher and higher, so the peak years for sex and reproduction are out of sync with the cultural norms. And the age of puberty is getting lower and lower; and the internet is making pornography ubiquitous and the advertising industry uses sex to sell everything, making sexual stimulation also ubiquitous. Then there’s the “perfect body” syndromes that make partners unrealistic in their expectations. Then there’s the poverty and unemployment that have millions of people with nothing to do day after day, increasing casual sex among people with no resources to raise children.
McLaren doesn’t offer solutions to these problems, but returns to homosexuality, hoping that this coming out of the closet will “help the rest of us come of the closet regarding our sexuality…because the longer we hide from the truth of our sexuality…the sicker we will be, as religious communities, as cultures, and as a global society” (189).
He calls for a practical down to earth theology and “an honest, fully embodied spirituality” that find a middle road between fundasexuality and “sexually unrestrained hedonism.” We all need this, Catholics and Evangelicals and mainline Protestants as well. He concludes this chapter:
A new kind of Christianity must move beyond this impasse and begin to construct not just a more humane sexual ethic in particular, but a more honest and robust Christian anthropology in general. To do that, some of us at least will need to start talking and walking and working together as never before, even when we disagree (190).
McLaren acknowledges that at this point, some people will be energized and excited; some will be furious, and some will be in the middle not quite know what to think. In his own quest, “If my view of God changes, well, that changes everything for me.” It’s not just a head thing, but a heart thing. He acknowledges that people could lose friends, jobs, scholarships, whole communities. So he invites people who are fearful of these consequences to stop here, just adding some fine print to their theology. Others, he invites to go through the doors he has unlocked into the following chapters.
THE SIXTH QUESTION: The Church Question
16: What Do We Do About the Church?
Many people have left. But many have been saved from ritualism, emotionalism, rationalism, clericalism, historical amnesia by switching denominations. It’s a cycle. Some people are stuck in a church “by birth or marriage or inertia or duty” (162). When people don’t find a helpful kind of salvation from their church, they often drift away, find another church or drop out entirely, becoming part of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd. Young people are already there, having not even joined a church.
So then religious leaders ask: What are we going to do about the church? McLaren says that sometimes leaders with courage, creativity, kindness, collaboration and perseverance find that their denomination already has resources they can use to turn their “ocean liners” around. For example, Catholics can use the power of orders, those denominations with bishops can use the episcopacy; Congregationalists can just start a new congregation.
Savvy denominations of all types…will find ways to create ‘free trade zones’ and ‘R&D departments,’ in which old rules and strictures don’t apply and emerging leaders can be given freedom (and, we could hope, some financial support) to experiment, learn, and create new kinds of congregations to express a new kind of Christian faith (163).
McLaren looks at the developing structure of the church from its beginning, when over five centuries the development of bishops then brought about a remake of the Christian movement into “a mirror image of the Roman Empire after Constantine.” But since the Protestant Reformation, “the Christian faith has experienced ‘downward mobility,’ expressing itself in less hierarchical, less centralized, and less imperial forms and recapturing its earlier plurality of forms” (163).
Some see this, says McLaren, as division and think it needs to be remedied; others see it a diversification which can be celebrated. “What if the Christian faith is supposed to exist in a variety of forms rather than just one imperial one? “ What if it can be more responsive to the Holy Spirit in that way?
What if we could 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.
Then McLaren asks what could be the grand mission, this great danger to be saved from, this purpose to be saved FOR? He talks about harmonizing instead of homogenizing. And he comes to this: “…the church exists to form Christlike people, people of Christlike love. It exists to save them from the great danger of wasting their lives, becoming something less than and other than they were intended to be, gaining the world but losing their souls?” (164).
So this is our first task after being freed from the old paradigms, “to be communities that form Christlike people who embody and communicate, in word and deed, the good news of the kingdom of God (or we could say the shalom, harmony, dance, sacred ecosystem, love economy, benevolent society, beloved community, or preemptive peace movement of God).” --Do this not as a separate spiritual club, but in the world, to transform it. Churches exist to save us from the worst we can be [see Fall of Giants].
That means the leaders have to become Spirit-saturated people with the Spirit of Christ inside of us. But this is a long way from where we are…with all of our problems (unclear or divided purpose, for example, “in danger of fragmenting our way into nonexistence,” etc.). We are all a mess. McLaren suggests we don’t blame ourselves or others, but acknowledge our difficulties and failures as being a lot of the same kinds of things the first churches had to grapple with (e.g. Corinth, in which he points out that “God's goal is that there should be robust diversity without division, where each has equal concern for the others” (12:25-26) and then Paul shows them a still more excellent way (12:31). [See McLaren’s modern paraphrase of 1 Cor. 13 on p. 168].
Paul returns to the knowledge of Christ crucified, which “seems to expose Jesus as foolish, weak, lowly, and despised, a failure…But now we see that the lowly way of Christ, the vulnerable way of love is the only way of life” (169). “The church, then, in Paul’s mind, must be above all a school of love.” The church’s goal is to teach us how to love, “where you see living examples of Christlikeness and experience inner formation.”
McLaren wonders “what would it mean if we were willing to sacrifice—or at least subordinate—everything else for this one goal of forming Christlike people, people who live in the way of love, the way of peacemaking, the way of the kingdom of God, the way of Jesus, the way of the Spirit?” (169). And so he asks a lot of questions about how we can support this kind of church, develop leaders and liturgies and training models and calendars “to create a new future of the church as a school of love—which means a school of listening, dialogue, appreciative inquiry, understanding, preemptive peacemaking, reconciliation, nonviolence, prophetic confrontation, advocacy, generosity, and personal and social transformation. Anybody who thinks this is all soft and easy obviously has little experience in actually seeking to live this way and helping others to do so” (170).
McLaren doesn’t want ministers to add a new task to their to do list, but to throw out their present to do list and have ONLY this new task. This is the new wineskin: forming people of Christlike love. [See p. 171]. He knows this quest will mean finding “new liturgies, lectionaries, calendars, and music (with lyrics that celebrate and embed the new paradigm, not the old one), new heuristics and curricula for children and youth as well as adults of all ages, new training and support structures for church leaders; and so on.” Express that love in word and deed, “art and action. Where that happens, I believe church is happening, whatever the forms or structures, whatever the history or pedigree” (172).
THE SEVENTH QUESTION: The Sex Question
17: Can We Find a Way to Address Human Sexuality Without Fighting about It?
McLaren starts this chapter by stating that he can’t approve of the gay lifestyle and then goes on to write the stereotypes about the Bible and Jesus thoroughly disapproving and condemning this lifestyle. They live in their own ‘gated’ communities of thought and action, and can’t seem to free themselves. Professional therapy and groups formed to free gays still find that there is a residue of wounds that remain after they leave.
Gay groups spend huge sums of money to recruit and to attain media credibility and legitimacy. They obtain political clout and influence, especially, one party. Countries who allow this lifestyle end up with “a whole host of social problems” (174). Anyone who disagrees with them feels the heat of their anger and vituperation, threats and hate mail.
Finally McLaren reveals that he is NOT talking about homosexuality, but about fundasexuality, “a neologism that describes a reactive, combative brand of religious fundamentalism that preoccupies itself with sexuality.” It declares war on those who differ. It is rooted not in faith, but fear—fear of new ideas, of people who disagree, and above all, of “God’s violent wrath on them if they don’t fully conform to and enforce the teachings and interpretations of their popular teachers and other authority figures” (174). McLaren says it comes in many forms: Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or even atheist. It is natural for such groups to seek scapegoats, such as gays, etc.
But McLaren states that “our preoccupation with sexuality is a symptom, I believe, of our growing discomfort with conventional answers to the six questions we have already considered in this book.” He then rehearses them one by one:
1. The Greco-Roman narrative with its body/soul dualism can’t explain homosexuality. Many scientific disciplines blur the old distinctions between personality and chemistry, even between maleness and femaleness. He concludes that it is becoming clear “that whatever we human beings are, we aren’t simply metaphysical male or female souls riding around as passengers in male or female body-vehicles. This realization is creating a far-reaching revolution in Christian anthropology” (175).
Only in the Platonic world is there a perfect essence of “male,” “female,” and “marriage.” They are unchanging and we here in the cave have to seek to understand and conform to them. In the bible, the trouble is that there are stages of polygyny. Having moved beyond this question, we are able to ask of marriage what Jesus asked of the Sabbath: “was humankind made for the Sabbath, or vice-versa, to help humans –perhaps including gay humans? –live wisely and well in this world” (176).
2. The constitutional reading of the Bible makes homosexuality function like the motion of the planets around the sun in the Middle Ages. It couldn’t be explained under the current cosmology and was ordered to be explained as a “deceptive appearance.” In the same way, good, faithful, ethical, kind gay people can’t be explained if the constitutional approach needs them to be dangerous, abhorrent abominations, and evil.
Just as the constitutional readers learned to ignore the texts used against Galileo and Copernicus (such as Eccl. 1:4-6; Ps. 93:1; 104:5; 2 Kings 20:11; Josh. 10:12-14) and as they forgave people violently opposed to these astronomers such as Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon and the Catholic Congregation of the Index, whose ban on Copernicus's ideas was not lifted until the 19th century…
McLaren adds the discovery of fossils that indicate an ancient earth; Darwin’s theory of evolution, slavery, segregation, and apartheid; and the rights of women to vote and lead in state and church. He notes a four-stage process: 1. Oppose, condemn and reject; 2. Modify and make small concessions; 3. Go silent for a while; 4. Tolerate and accept what they once condemned (177).
…Just as all of the above, this pattern is at work concerning homosexuality. After opposing, many leaders then acknowledged an “unchosen orientation” (McLaren notes that ‘orientation’ is not a biblical concept). They counseled loving the sinner and hating the sin. After healing and therapy was not a permanent cure, they counseled “bearing the affliction as a cross.” Now many are silent.
3. The image of God as violent or even genocidal. So certain classes and types of people are judged to be inferior—Jews, women, gays, Gentiles, nonwhites, non-Christians, etc. Behind this is “what God does is automatically fair and we must not question it” (176). Might makes right can be defended “by a constitutional reading of the Bible.”
If you believe in a God who smites and damns, “sympathizing with the damned takes either a lot of courage or a lot of stupidity…it’s much easier to stay loyal to the lucky heterosexual tribe favored by the tribal God” (178).
But if we now believe God is best revealed in Jesus as the one who has been smitten, not the smiter. His identification is with those who are rejected and excluded, so we had better not cast the first stone at the ‘sexually other.’
4. Jesus’s identity as the ultimate Word of God. “We have many examples of Jesus crossing boundaries to include outcasts and sinners and not a single example of Jesus crossing his arms and refusing to do so” (179).
5. The Meaning and Purpose of the Gospel , as we have seen, is NOT to save people from hell, but to liberate people, including homosexuals. The question then becomes: “How should gay and straight people understand and treat one another in God’s kingdom” (ibid.)
6. What will the church be and do? In the old view, acceptance of gays would be judged as just one more step down the slope toward moral relativism; in the new, it would be one more step toward removing “the old dividing walls between Jew and Gentile…black and brown and white, male and female, and so on” (179 f.).
McLaren sees this creative and “catalytic way” as the way of the original gospel, and so deems himself truly conservative in being faithful to it. But he acknowledges that being a catalyst for change and trying to make disciple communities is NOT easy and the complexities can be daunting. But progress can come in unexpected ways and he tells the story of Philip and the eunuch from Acts. McLaren interprets the plight of this man—a man who wanted to worship in Jerusalem, but whose presence in the temple would have been rejected by his skin color (Gentile) and his physical deformity (Dt. 23:1). Yet Philip has told him about another man (Jesus) who was similarly rejected, a man with no physical descendants, who also was wounded, and humiliated and rejected. And so the Eunuch passes water and asks to be taken into this community of believers. Philip replies with action; he baptizes him. So even the ‘sexually other’ are accepted, even those who “will never have a place in the traditional religion or in the traditional culture based on the ‘traditional family.’” (183).
Philip and the Eunuch “represent a new humanity emerging from the water, dripping wet and full of joy, marked by a new and radical reconciliation in the kingdom of God” (ibid.). The event is fulfillment of Isaiah 56:1-7. And Isaiah recalls the cleansing by Jesus of the Temple’s money changers, whose policies excluded so many “and embedded the faith in the economy of the empire and vice versa” (184).
The eunuch brought the gospel back to Ethiopia: “a non-heterosexual in mission leadership from the very beginning of the Jesus movement” (186).
McLaren then adds other sexual issues that we have to cope with. First that the traditional marriage format is NOT working for heterosexuals. Pre-marital sex in the norm for Christians and non-Christians. Even teens who make abstinence pledges postpone premarital sex for about 18 months on average. And they are less likely to use contraceptives.
Then there’s divorce. The rates are not different in Christian circles. “Ironically,” states McLaren, “some subgroups with the highest divorce rates can be the most strongly vocal against homosexuality” (187). We are in a culture where “we’re all virtually anonymous and where anything goes. So sex and community are less connected than ever before.” And low-cost birth control has removed the connection between sex and pregnancy. And condoms and antibiotics make sex and disease less connected. And ‘women working with men outside the home’ has increased the possibilities for extramarital entanglements. And our education system has pushed the average age of marriage higher and higher, so the peak years for sex and reproduction are out of sync with the cultural norms. And the age of puberty is getting lower and lower; and the internet is making pornography ubiquitous and the advertising industry uses sex to sell everything, making sexual stimulation also ubiquitous. Then there’s the “perfect body” syndromes that make partners unrealistic in their expectations. Then there’s the poverty and unemployment that have millions of people with nothing to do day after day, increasing casual sex among people with no resources to raise children.
McLaren doesn’t offer solutions to these problems, but returns to homosexuality, hoping that this coming out of the closet will “help the rest of us come of the closet regarding our sexuality…because the longer we hide from the truth of our sexuality…the sicker we will be, as religious communities, as cultures, and as a global society” (189).
He calls for a practical down to earth theology and “an honest, fully embodied spirituality” that find a middle road between fundasexuality and “sexually unrestrained hedonism.” We all need this, Catholics and Evangelicals and mainline Protestants as well. He concludes this chapter:
A new kind of Christianity must move beyond this impasse and begin to construct not just a more humane sexual ethic in particular, but a more honest and robust Christian anthropology in general. To do that, some of us at least will need to start talking and walking and working together as never before, even when we disagree (190).
Friday, February 18, 2011
Session 3: Questions Four and Five
THE FOURTH QUESTION: The Jesus Question
12: Who Is Jesus and Why Is He Important?
McLaren starts this chapter by making the controversial statement: “Just saying the name Jesus doesn’t mean much until we make clear which Jesus we are talking about” (p. 119). Just as “God” can mean many things, so Jesus can disguise many different saviors and Christianity can mean vastly different ways of living. He quotes one of his critics saying: “I can’t worship a guy I can beat up” and casting Jesus as a warrior intent on inflicting violence and shedding blood (he gets this, naturally, from Revelation).
To illustrate this, he quotes a section from the grace before meals in the movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, who calls upon the baby Jesus since he likes the Christmas Jesus best. McLaren remarks: “We all are tempted to remake Jesus into just about anything we like…who hates the people we hate and likes whatever we like” (p.121). Sadly, we feel our view is an objective view, with no distortions.
He returns to the passage from Rev. 19:11-16, but places it in its historical context and genre of Jewish apocalyptic literature “which in turn is part of a larger genre known as the literature of the oppressed” (p. 122). This genre, he states, functioned for its readers like Science Fiction does for us. It is NOT predicting the future, but talking about the present with a view of changing it for the better (cf Planet of the Apes, The Matrix, Star Trek, Wall-E). For example, The Matrix and Wall-E “warn us about losing our humanity in a technological and consumerist culture.” “They provide windows on the actual present from the perspective of an imagined future and they do so in hopes of influencing us in the present to live and choose wisely, thus creating a better future than we otherwise would” (p. 123).
And so, McLaren says, we must interpret the passage in a way to be true to the reconciling messages of Jesus’s gospel and life, and NOT as if these were a sham because Jesus was going to return as a Caesar, “more of a slash-and-burn guy, brutal, willing to torture, and determined to conquer with crushing violence.” The passage from Revelation is intended, rather, to reassure the persecuted Christians that Jesus’s message of peace and reconciliation will in the end prove more powerful than Caesar’s swords and spears. The blood on his robe is his own blood, or perhaps the blood of the martyrs.
See pages 124 - 126 for an eloquent testimony of Jesus’ message of nonviolence and peace. “Jesus matters precisely because he provides us a living alternative to the confining Greco-Roman narrative in which our world and our religions live, move and have their being too much of the time” (p. 125). What Revelation actually tells us, says McLaren is “that the humble man of peace is Lord…the poor unarmed Galilean riding on the donkey, hailed by the poor and hopeful, is the one to trust…Revelation celebrates not the love of power, but the power of love…It asserts…that God’s anointed liberator is the one we beat up, who promises mercy to those who strike him…In response to the crucified one’s name—not Caesar’s or any other violent human’s—every knee will gladly bow” (p. 126).
13: Jesus Outside the Lines
McLaren answers another of his critics in this chapter—one who said Jesus had no social justice agenda or desire to help the poor: he only came to save people from hell. McLaren then uses John’s Gospel, which McLaren calls the “least likely” to support his alternative view of Jesus from the viewpoints of creation and reconciliation (Genesis), liberation and formation (Exodus) and new creation and the peace-making kingdom (Isaiah).
He says it’s “least likely” because it is most often used to “buttress the Greco-Roman story” (with verses quoted like 3:16, 5:24 and 14:6A). And so McLaren needs to show how John immediately evokes the Genesis story of creation, and continues with references to it in the conversion of water to wine and the walking on the water (as the Spirit does in Genesis). He has a wonderful interpretation of the resurrection story in John as the beginning of a new day, a new creation, ending with a reconciliation of brothers just as Genesis does with Joseph reconciling with his brothers.
He translates Jesus promise of ‘eternal life’ with “life of the ages.” He envisions him as promising a life that transcends life in the present age and is part of God’s original creation. “John wants us to see in Jesus a rebirth of the original garden” (p. 130).
He then moves on to show how the Exodus themes of liberation and formation shine through the Gospel of John, right from 1:11, 17. Jesus liberates from the social and spiritual oppression of his day. Jesus identifies himself as “I am” (Exod. 3:14). John the Baptist identifies him as the Passover Lamb; Christ means "anointed" suggesting a king or leader of the people. He is leading the people on a new Exodus journey. He even gives a new command as Moses gave the commandments: “…that you love one another” (Jn. 13:34).
And at the end of the Gospel, Jesus hands his disciples off to the Spirit, saying He will guide them. He will guide them into the promised land, i.e., the peaceable kingdom, celebrated by the prophets, especially Isaiah. This concept changes in the O.T. from a literal piece of geography to a social kingdom and an era of harmony, justice, prosperity and safety. McLaren points out that the “key to this golden time is light” with many quotes from Isaiah, and then shows how many references there are to light in John’s Gospel. This kingdom is one in which “God’s wisdom draws nations up to a higher level of relating, so disputes are settled nonviolently, wisely, peacefully” (pp. 133 - 134).
THE FIFTH QUESTION: The Gospel Question
14: What Is the Gospel?
For Evangelicals, the Gospel is the message of justification by faith (M. Luther). The major source of this theory is found in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. One of McLaren’s friends 15 years ago started him on a different quest when he pointed out that McLaren quoted Paul to explain what the Gospel is. “Shouldn't you be letting Jesus define the Gospel?” he asked. --That is, read Paul in the light of Jesus? (p. 138)
Note that as a constitutional reader of Scripture, the words of Jesus and Paul were on a par for McLaren. AND if the major point of the Gospel according to Jesus is that “the kingdom of God is at hand,” for McLaren this meant heaven, when you die. McLaren felt Paul taught a theory of “penal substitution” for the forgiveness of original sin.
McLaren took Jesus’ word “repent” literally. He became 'pensive' again and had 'a change of mind and heart.' Now the meaning of ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’ got transformed into Rod Washington’s : “God’s new benevolent society is already among us.” This kingdom was meant to be in stark contrast to the kingdoms of Caesar and Rome. Calling Jesus Lord meant that Caesar wasn’t. Martyrs gave their lives for the contrast between the violent kingdom of Rome and the peaceable kingdom of Jesus.
Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion, named after him. He “came to announce a new kingdom, a new way of life, a new way of peace that carried good news to all people of every religion” (p. 139).
It wasn’t simply information about how individual souls could leave earth, avoid hell, and ascend to heaven after death. No, it was about God’s will being done on earth as in heaven for all people. It was about God’s faithful solidarity with all humanity in our suffering, oppression, and evil. It was about God’s compassion and call to be reconciled with God and with one another—before death, on earth. It was a summons to rethink everything and enter a life of retraining as disciples or learners of a new way of life, citizens of a new kingdom (p. 139).
McLaren finds the good news fulfilling 3 prime narratives of the Hebrew scriptures: (1) being born again; i.e. participating in a new Genesis, a new creation that would interrupt the downward death spiral of violence, and joining in an upward regenerative movement; (2) embarking on a New Exodus of baptism, eating the new Passover meal and experiencing liberation from the powers that oppress and enslave; (3) becoming a citizen of the new kingdom, “a peaceable kingdom imagined by the prophets and inaugurated in Christ, learning its ways as a disciple and demonstrating in word and deed its presence and availability to all as an apostle” (p.140).
And Jesus proclaimed that the time for this kingdom was NOW. This is the time “to cancel debts to forgive, to treat enemies as neighbors, to share your bread with the hungry and your clothes with the naked, to invite the outcasts over for dinner, to confront oppressors not with sharp knives, but with unarmed kindness” (p. 140). And so the call to repent and adjust our way of life to these invitations.
At this point, McLaren wonders what is so disturbing his critics, since he is on a conservative quest, going back to Jesus and the scriptures, to the original Evangelists and apostles. And so he asks if this new way of looking and acting can simply be added to what we already do and believe so it won’t disturb anyone. Many ministers are trying to do this and McLaren wishes them luck. For him, the new understanding of the kingdom changes everything. It can’t co-exist with the six-line Greco-Roman narrative.
But what about the traditional reading of Romans? Are there irreconcilable differences between Paul and Jesus? McLaren sees Paul in Romans as trying “to clean up a mess that Jesus had created through his gospel.” --Like prostitutes and tax collectors closer to God than some Pharisees and priests; like great faith being found in a political enemy who belonged to another religion; like what was clean and unclean; like the Sabbath observance; like how to treat outsiders and like who is a descendant of Abraham. Jesus made it possible for non-Jews to be accepted in a faith tradition that “had previously been exclusively Jewish” (p. 142).
As Christianity expands, little cells of people created centers of koinonia (fellowship) and diakonia (service). Geographic centers became less important. McLaren is confident that Paul never intended his letter to be an exposition of the gospel. Instead, he was dealing with this mess: “How could Jews and Gentiles in all their untamed diversity come and remain together as peers in the kingdom of God without having first-and second-class Christians, on the one hand, and, on the other, without being homogenized like a McDonald’s franchise with the same menu, same pricing, same bathroom soap?” (p. 143).
McLaren also points out that Paul, like Jesus, is NOT a linear thinker. He is eastern, more akin to poetical, circular thought. And so Paul circles around his theme, coming at it from all angles, using metaphor after metaphor. [McLaren cites Mt. 13 as a similar way Jesus argues]. He is dictating a letter to Tertius and this is the natural flow of his thoughts. “Together, the Holy Spirit and Paul make move after move toward the single goal of justifying the gospel as good news for Gentiles and Jews alike” (p. 146).
15: Jesus and the Kingdom of God
McLaren is still wrestling with Romans (since it would be the pivotal Scripture thrown against his new quest?). And so he interprets Romans as a series of brilliant moves on Paul's part; explaining Paul’s first brilliant move as reducing Jew and Gentile to the same level of need (Rom. 1:18-3:20). He details first the sins of the non-Jews, and then the sins of the righteous believers! Everyone fails and breaks God’s laws. No one has an inside track. We are united in our need for grace.
Paul’s second move is to announce a new way forward for all, Jew and Gentile: the way of faith (Rom. 3:21-4:25). The way out is not a new religion or trying harder at the old, but faith—“having reverent confidence or dependence on God” (p. 148). Everyone is guilty and everyone is liberated/justified by grace through faith. He goes back to the story of Abraham and notes that he was justified neither by the Law of Moses nor by circumcision, but by his faith. So, he maintains, regardless of whether you are a Jew, you can be a a child of Abraham “if you are marked by the same kind of faith Abraham had when he responded to God’s call” (pp. 148 - 149).
Paul’s third move is “to unite all in a common story, with four illustrations: Adam, baptism, slavery, and remarriage (Rom. 5:1-7:6). Paul starts talking about ‘we’ and ‘us’ and ‘our’ instead of Jew and Gentile. Despite our differences, we are united in the story of Adam and in Jesus as a new Adam, a last Adam. We also share the death and resurrection of Jesus that is dramatized in baptism. Our bodies can be either slaves of sin (“evoking slavery under Pharaoh”) or liberated and surrendered to God as “free agents of God’s reign, as agents of God’s restorative justice.” In Christ we are now married (enslaved) to a new master “like a former widow newly wed, we are impregnated with our divine lover’s goodness, bearing more and more good into the world” (p. 150).
Paul’s fourth move is to “unite all in a common struggle and a common victory, illustrated by two stories: the Story of Me and the Story of We (Rom. 7:7-8:39).” Paul never says the law is or was evil, but he means to correct any misunderstandings. He adds the metaphor of adoption. He details the struggles he personally has had internally, following a course from forgiveness to relationship to suffering to victory and reward. He concludes with the famous passages about all creation groaning in anticipation of this new humanity in Christ—one new humanity; and the passage asserting that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ (8:37-39).
Paul’s fifth move is to “address Jewish and gentile problems, showing God as God of all (Rom. 9:1-11:36).” He agonizes over the issue of why his Jewish brethren have not accepted the gospel of the kingdom of God. He retraces his steps and the stories of the O.T. Finally, he opines that may God has hardened their hearts for some greater good. Maybe they were too proud because they had the Law; and maybe, he warns, the Gentiles could become too proud at discovering the gospel and adhering to it. Finally, he comes to the mystery: “..God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.” And then he concludes with the famous passage: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Rom. 11:33-36).
Paul’s sixth move is to “Engage all in a common life and mission (Rom. 12:1-13:14). “We should present our entire selves to God as a ‘living sacrifice,’ Paul says, a new kind of sacrifice in which Gentile and Jew can equally share. We shouldn’t be conformed to the patterns of the world, but should be transformed by the renewing of our minds” (p. 153). McLaren notes similarities with the Sermon on the Mount. “They live and work as law-abiding, tax-paying citizens within the kingdom of Caesar, even though they are now citizens in God’s kingdom,” and their highest law is not Roman or Jewish, but the law of love.
Paul’s seventh move is to “Call everyone to unity in the kingdom of God (Rom. 14:1-16:27).” Paul grapples with the current issues that can divide Jews and Gentiles, like dietary laws, holyday practices, etc. His message is the same as Jesus’s: “Don’t judge one another.” “What they do regarding disputable matters is important, because it expresses their devotion to the Lord. But what they do is not relevant to what others do as their expression of devotion to the Lord. The Kingdom of God…will not be a community of uniform policies and practices. Only one policy will be universal: love” (p. 155).
Paul concludes with four benedictions. “Through all these moves, Paul makes it clear that there is only one gospel: Jesus’s good news of God’s kingdom, available for all people…Paul is a Jesus and the kingdom of God guy from first to last…Repent and believe the good news. Be reconciled” (p. 158).
12: Who Is Jesus and Why Is He Important?
McLaren starts this chapter by making the controversial statement: “Just saying the name Jesus doesn’t mean much until we make clear which Jesus we are talking about” (p. 119). Just as “God” can mean many things, so Jesus can disguise many different saviors and Christianity can mean vastly different ways of living. He quotes one of his critics saying: “I can’t worship a guy I can beat up” and casting Jesus as a warrior intent on inflicting violence and shedding blood (he gets this, naturally, from Revelation).
To illustrate this, he quotes a section from the grace before meals in the movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, who calls upon the baby Jesus since he likes the Christmas Jesus best. McLaren remarks: “We all are tempted to remake Jesus into just about anything we like…who hates the people we hate and likes whatever we like” (p.121). Sadly, we feel our view is an objective view, with no distortions.
He returns to the passage from Rev. 19:11-16, but places it in its historical context and genre of Jewish apocalyptic literature “which in turn is part of a larger genre known as the literature of the oppressed” (p. 122). This genre, he states, functioned for its readers like Science Fiction does for us. It is NOT predicting the future, but talking about the present with a view of changing it for the better (cf Planet of the Apes, The Matrix, Star Trek, Wall-E). For example, The Matrix and Wall-E “warn us about losing our humanity in a technological and consumerist culture.” “They provide windows on the actual present from the perspective of an imagined future and they do so in hopes of influencing us in the present to live and choose wisely, thus creating a better future than we otherwise would” (p. 123).
And so, McLaren says, we must interpret the passage in a way to be true to the reconciling messages of Jesus’s gospel and life, and NOT as if these were a sham because Jesus was going to return as a Caesar, “more of a slash-and-burn guy, brutal, willing to torture, and determined to conquer with crushing violence.” The passage from Revelation is intended, rather, to reassure the persecuted Christians that Jesus’s message of peace and reconciliation will in the end prove more powerful than Caesar’s swords and spears. The blood on his robe is his own blood, or perhaps the blood of the martyrs.
See pages 124 - 126 for an eloquent testimony of Jesus’ message of nonviolence and peace. “Jesus matters precisely because he provides us a living alternative to the confining Greco-Roman narrative in which our world and our religions live, move and have their being too much of the time” (p. 125). What Revelation actually tells us, says McLaren is “that the humble man of peace is Lord…the poor unarmed Galilean riding on the donkey, hailed by the poor and hopeful, is the one to trust…Revelation celebrates not the love of power, but the power of love…It asserts…that God’s anointed liberator is the one we beat up, who promises mercy to those who strike him…In response to the crucified one’s name—not Caesar’s or any other violent human’s—every knee will gladly bow” (p. 126).
13: Jesus Outside the Lines
McLaren answers another of his critics in this chapter—one who said Jesus had no social justice agenda or desire to help the poor: he only came to save people from hell. McLaren then uses John’s Gospel, which McLaren calls the “least likely” to support his alternative view of Jesus from the viewpoints of creation and reconciliation (Genesis), liberation and formation (Exodus) and new creation and the peace-making kingdom (Isaiah).
He says it’s “least likely” because it is most often used to “buttress the Greco-Roman story” (with verses quoted like 3:16, 5:24 and 14:6A). And so McLaren needs to show how John immediately evokes the Genesis story of creation, and continues with references to it in the conversion of water to wine and the walking on the water (as the Spirit does in Genesis). He has a wonderful interpretation of the resurrection story in John as the beginning of a new day, a new creation, ending with a reconciliation of brothers just as Genesis does with Joseph reconciling with his brothers.
He translates Jesus promise of ‘eternal life’ with “life of the ages.” He envisions him as promising a life that transcends life in the present age and is part of God’s original creation. “John wants us to see in Jesus a rebirth of the original garden” (p. 130).
He then moves on to show how the Exodus themes of liberation and formation shine through the Gospel of John, right from 1:11, 17. Jesus liberates from the social and spiritual oppression of his day. Jesus identifies himself as “I am” (Exod. 3:14). John the Baptist identifies him as the Passover Lamb; Christ means "anointed" suggesting a king or leader of the people. He is leading the people on a new Exodus journey. He even gives a new command as Moses gave the commandments: “…that you love one another” (Jn. 13:34).
And at the end of the Gospel, Jesus hands his disciples off to the Spirit, saying He will guide them. He will guide them into the promised land, i.e., the peaceable kingdom, celebrated by the prophets, especially Isaiah. This concept changes in the O.T. from a literal piece of geography to a social kingdom and an era of harmony, justice, prosperity and safety. McLaren points out that the “key to this golden time is light” with many quotes from Isaiah, and then shows how many references there are to light in John’s Gospel. This kingdom is one in which “God’s wisdom draws nations up to a higher level of relating, so disputes are settled nonviolently, wisely, peacefully” (pp. 133 - 134).
THE FIFTH QUESTION: The Gospel Question
14: What Is the Gospel?
For Evangelicals, the Gospel is the message of justification by faith (M. Luther). The major source of this theory is found in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. One of McLaren’s friends 15 years ago started him on a different quest when he pointed out that McLaren quoted Paul to explain what the Gospel is. “Shouldn't you be letting Jesus define the Gospel?” he asked. --That is, read Paul in the light of Jesus? (p. 138)
Note that as a constitutional reader of Scripture, the words of Jesus and Paul were on a par for McLaren. AND if the major point of the Gospel according to Jesus is that “the kingdom of God is at hand,” for McLaren this meant heaven, when you die. McLaren felt Paul taught a theory of “penal substitution” for the forgiveness of original sin.
McLaren took Jesus’ word “repent” literally. He became 'pensive' again and had 'a change of mind and heart.' Now the meaning of ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’ got transformed into Rod Washington’s : “God’s new benevolent society is already among us.” This kingdom was meant to be in stark contrast to the kingdoms of Caesar and Rome. Calling Jesus Lord meant that Caesar wasn’t. Martyrs gave their lives for the contrast between the violent kingdom of Rome and the peaceable kingdom of Jesus.
Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion, named after him. He “came to announce a new kingdom, a new way of life, a new way of peace that carried good news to all people of every religion” (p. 139).
It wasn’t simply information about how individual souls could leave earth, avoid hell, and ascend to heaven after death. No, it was about God’s will being done on earth as in heaven for all people. It was about God’s faithful solidarity with all humanity in our suffering, oppression, and evil. It was about God’s compassion and call to be reconciled with God and with one another—before death, on earth. It was a summons to rethink everything and enter a life of retraining as disciples or learners of a new way of life, citizens of a new kingdom (p. 139).
McLaren finds the good news fulfilling 3 prime narratives of the Hebrew scriptures: (1) being born again; i.e. participating in a new Genesis, a new creation that would interrupt the downward death spiral of violence, and joining in an upward regenerative movement; (2) embarking on a New Exodus of baptism, eating the new Passover meal and experiencing liberation from the powers that oppress and enslave; (3) becoming a citizen of the new kingdom, “a peaceable kingdom imagined by the prophets and inaugurated in Christ, learning its ways as a disciple and demonstrating in word and deed its presence and availability to all as an apostle” (p.140).
And Jesus proclaimed that the time for this kingdom was NOW. This is the time “to cancel debts to forgive, to treat enemies as neighbors, to share your bread with the hungry and your clothes with the naked, to invite the outcasts over for dinner, to confront oppressors not with sharp knives, but with unarmed kindness” (p. 140). And so the call to repent and adjust our way of life to these invitations.
At this point, McLaren wonders what is so disturbing his critics, since he is on a conservative quest, going back to Jesus and the scriptures, to the original Evangelists and apostles. And so he asks if this new way of looking and acting can simply be added to what we already do and believe so it won’t disturb anyone. Many ministers are trying to do this and McLaren wishes them luck. For him, the new understanding of the kingdom changes everything. It can’t co-exist with the six-line Greco-Roman narrative.
But what about the traditional reading of Romans? Are there irreconcilable differences between Paul and Jesus? McLaren sees Paul in Romans as trying “to clean up a mess that Jesus had created through his gospel.” --Like prostitutes and tax collectors closer to God than some Pharisees and priests; like great faith being found in a political enemy who belonged to another religion; like what was clean and unclean; like the Sabbath observance; like how to treat outsiders and like who is a descendant of Abraham. Jesus made it possible for non-Jews to be accepted in a faith tradition that “had previously been exclusively Jewish” (p. 142).
As Christianity expands, little cells of people created centers of koinonia (fellowship) and diakonia (service). Geographic centers became less important. McLaren is confident that Paul never intended his letter to be an exposition of the gospel. Instead, he was dealing with this mess: “How could Jews and Gentiles in all their untamed diversity come and remain together as peers in the kingdom of God without having first-and second-class Christians, on the one hand, and, on the other, without being homogenized like a McDonald’s franchise with the same menu, same pricing, same bathroom soap?” (p. 143).
McLaren also points out that Paul, like Jesus, is NOT a linear thinker. He is eastern, more akin to poetical, circular thought. And so Paul circles around his theme, coming at it from all angles, using metaphor after metaphor. [McLaren cites Mt. 13 as a similar way Jesus argues]. He is dictating a letter to Tertius and this is the natural flow of his thoughts. “Together, the Holy Spirit and Paul make move after move toward the single goal of justifying the gospel as good news for Gentiles and Jews alike” (p. 146).
15: Jesus and the Kingdom of God
McLaren is still wrestling with Romans (since it would be the pivotal Scripture thrown against his new quest?). And so he interprets Romans as a series of brilliant moves on Paul's part; explaining Paul’s first brilliant move as reducing Jew and Gentile to the same level of need (Rom. 1:18-3:20). He details first the sins of the non-Jews, and then the sins of the righteous believers! Everyone fails and breaks God’s laws. No one has an inside track. We are united in our need for grace.
Paul’s second move is to announce a new way forward for all, Jew and Gentile: the way of faith (Rom. 3:21-4:25). The way out is not a new religion or trying harder at the old, but faith—“having reverent confidence or dependence on God” (p. 148). Everyone is guilty and everyone is liberated/justified by grace through faith. He goes back to the story of Abraham and notes that he was justified neither by the Law of Moses nor by circumcision, but by his faith. So, he maintains, regardless of whether you are a Jew, you can be a a child of Abraham “if you are marked by the same kind of faith Abraham had when he responded to God’s call” (pp. 148 - 149).
Paul’s third move is “to unite all in a common story, with four illustrations: Adam, baptism, slavery, and remarriage (Rom. 5:1-7:6). Paul starts talking about ‘we’ and ‘us’ and ‘our’ instead of Jew and Gentile. Despite our differences, we are united in the story of Adam and in Jesus as a new Adam, a last Adam. We also share the death and resurrection of Jesus that is dramatized in baptism. Our bodies can be either slaves of sin (“evoking slavery under Pharaoh”) or liberated and surrendered to God as “free agents of God’s reign, as agents of God’s restorative justice.” In Christ we are now married (enslaved) to a new master “like a former widow newly wed, we are impregnated with our divine lover’s goodness, bearing more and more good into the world” (p. 150).
Paul’s fourth move is to “unite all in a common struggle and a common victory, illustrated by two stories: the Story of Me and the Story of We (Rom. 7:7-8:39).” Paul never says the law is or was evil, but he means to correct any misunderstandings. He adds the metaphor of adoption. He details the struggles he personally has had internally, following a course from forgiveness to relationship to suffering to victory and reward. He concludes with the famous passages about all creation groaning in anticipation of this new humanity in Christ—one new humanity; and the passage asserting that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ (8:37-39).
Paul’s fifth move is to “address Jewish and gentile problems, showing God as God of all (Rom. 9:1-11:36).” He agonizes over the issue of why his Jewish brethren have not accepted the gospel of the kingdom of God. He retraces his steps and the stories of the O.T. Finally, he opines that may God has hardened their hearts for some greater good. Maybe they were too proud because they had the Law; and maybe, he warns, the Gentiles could become too proud at discovering the gospel and adhering to it. Finally, he comes to the mystery: “..God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.” And then he concludes with the famous passage: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Rom. 11:33-36).
Paul’s sixth move is to “Engage all in a common life and mission (Rom. 12:1-13:14). “We should present our entire selves to God as a ‘living sacrifice,’ Paul says, a new kind of sacrifice in which Gentile and Jew can equally share. We shouldn’t be conformed to the patterns of the world, but should be transformed by the renewing of our minds” (p. 153). McLaren notes similarities with the Sermon on the Mount. “They live and work as law-abiding, tax-paying citizens within the kingdom of Caesar, even though they are now citizens in God’s kingdom,” and their highest law is not Roman or Jewish, but the law of love.
Paul’s seventh move is to “Call everyone to unity in the kingdom of God (Rom. 14:1-16:27).” Paul grapples with the current issues that can divide Jews and Gentiles, like dietary laws, holyday practices, etc. His message is the same as Jesus’s: “Don’t judge one another.” “What they do regarding disputable matters is important, because it expresses their devotion to the Lord. But what they do is not relevant to what others do as their expression of devotion to the Lord. The Kingdom of God…will not be a community of uniform policies and practices. Only one policy will be universal: love” (p. 155).
Paul concludes with four benedictions. “Through all these moves, Paul makes it clear that there is only one gospel: Jesus’s good news of God’s kingdom, available for all people…Paul is a Jesus and the kingdom of God guy from first to last…Repent and believe the good news. Be reconciled” (p. 158).
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Session 2: Questions Two and Three
The Second Question: The Authority Question
How should the Bible be understood? As McLaren says: “There will be no new kind of Christian faith without a new approach to the Bible, because we’ve gotten ourselves into a mess with the Bible.” One reason is from any type of fundamentalism, that requires the Bible to be treated as a book (science book?) dictated by God.
[Even today, there is a creation museum in Kentucky whose purpose is to visually show dinosaurs and humans co-existing and to prove that the earth is only 6,000 years old; and the Governor is saying he will contribute state funds toward building an ark. And there is the government official who quoted Genesis as the reason he doesn’t believe in global warming].
McLaren cites many horror stories about depressed people whose pastors would only allow prayer and fasting (and exorcism) as cures; many of whom committed suicide. Nor does he allow it as an ethical rule book; it has no mention of so many of our modern ethical questions whose answers start becoming only “a litmus test for political affiliation.”
Moreover, “proof texts” were selected from the bible to “justify unjustifiable positions,” such as racism , support for torture, the death penalty for homosexuality and parental rebellion, as a reason for pre-emptive war and an explanation for natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. The Bible has too often been used, affirms McLaren, as an excuse for an “us-versus-them” mentality. “…there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.”
His big example is a short history of slavery and how the Bible was used to justify it. Although he feels many denominations and religious people have gone through a process of freeing the Bible from recommending anti-Semitism, apartheid, anti-feminism, etc., he calls for a “new, more mature and responsible approach to the Bible.” This is not for purposes of “moral relativism” or lowering of ethical standards, but for the purpose of raising those standards so we no longer harm human beings and dishonor God.
8: From Legal Constitution to Community Library
We need, he claims, to stop reading the Bible as if it were the Constitution and to stop treating it as if it were a legal document with precedents of interpretation set over the years. “At every turn, we approach the biblical text as if it were an annotated code instead of what it is actually is: a portable library of poems, prophecies, stories, fables, parables, letters, sage sayings, quarrels, and so on.”
An example of the way we use the Bible can be shown by asking the question of how we should treat our enemies. McLaren cites different approaches from Jesus in Matthew, and Paul, and the Psalm (“dash their infants against a rock…” 137:9).
Treating the Bible as a legal document means, for one thing, that you have to be learned to interpret it, the interpreters are often insiders whose salary and/or social status depends on their interpretation. And there are no checks to that interpretation (if you object, you could be excommunicated).
But the biblical authors were “writing for their own times, to address specific problems and questions of their day.” We have to remember that when the OT writers wrote, there WAS no Bible, and the Gospels were written decades after Jesus lived. And we have to remember that the canon was only gathered in its present form CENTURIES later.
McLaren wants to remind us that the Bible is the “library of a culture and a community.” As a library it’s a carefully selected “group of ancient documents of paramount importance for people who want to understand and belong to the community of people who seek God...and Jesus.” Culture is messy; it’s not coherent and logical. It grapples over and over with questions it considers of prime importance. McLaren asks a really interesting question: “Are the rich dependent on the well-being of the poor?” or vice-versa. These are healthy discussions. The questions are important. The answers will vary. And so they do, in the Bible. The differences are a sign of vitality.
But what to do with the label “inspiration?” McLaren feels conservatives use it as a synonym for “inspired constitution” or “authoritative constitution.” But he is okay with calling it an authoritative Library because it doesn’t imply “enforceable agreements.” He retains the belief that God breathes life into the bible and through it into communities and into people. The bible guides communities like no other texts can. The Bible has a unique place among all the words that brilliant and inspired people have written. But that doesn’t make it a constitution!
McLaren wants us to read the Bible as “an inspired library.” “This inspired library preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed.” It’s meant to be heard and discussed and responded to. To the people whose deep-seated beliefs or their jobs depend on their seeing the bible as a constitution, McLaren doesn’t demand that they change, but only that they be careful in the way they use the bible. He also wants them to try to understand that just as they can’t stop regarding the Bible as a Constitution, so McLaren and many others can no longer read it that way and “are on a quest to find other ways to cherish, understand and follow the Bible.” (1500-09)
He realizes that this will be heresy for many, because it is NOT the main way of teaching in seminaries and is NOT the implicit approach of many denominations and it is NOT what we hear on religious radio and TV. He wants us to jettison our fears about the “thought police” and continue our conversation with God!
9: Revelation through Conversation
McLaren has been called Lucifer, heretic, dim-witted, ignorant, arrogant and deceiver. But he is grateful that he is not being made subject to decapitation, hanging, or burning at the stake and disembowelment.
McLaren gives the example of the book of Job to explain seeing the Bible in a non-constitutional way, and not as “God’s official position as to why there is evil and suffering in the world.” Job is “an inspired portrayal of human beings struggling and arguing over the realities of suffering and evil.” After Job’s friends say all the “right, pious things,” in a concluding chapter GOD makes a speech. He does NOT vindicate the pious friends, but vindicates Job instead, indicating that most of the book is false and nonsense [including the friends’ quoting from Deuteronomy—‘Do good and good will always happen to you…’]. McLaren asks which part the constitutional devotees are saying is inspired.
McLaren says Job gives us a way out of reading the Bible this way. “Revelation occurs,” he says, “not in the words and statements of individuals, but in the conversation among individuals and God.” In other words, it occurs and emerges through the whole story. In short, the bible text gives us tools for discovery, breaking open, encountering meaning and God. Therefore, he concludes: “…if we enter the text together and feel the flow of its arguments, get stuck in its points of tension, and struggle with its unfolding plot in all its twists and turns, God’s revelation can happen to us.” (1583-92)
The Bible was never meant to end conversations and solve every conceivable problem. If so, “it has failed miserably” (1601-11). ..’If, instead, it was inspired and intended to stimulate conversation, to keep people thinking and talking and arguing and seeking, across continents and centuries, it has succeeded and is succeeding in a truly remarkable way” (ibid.). At the end of Job, when God finally speaks, He does Not answer the problem of evil, but instead peppers Job with lots of questions. They end up being a rebuke in the face of the unknown. And this is a great revelation in itself.
McLaren wonders if God’s Word is really sneaking up on us, transforming and disarming us—“rather than arming us with ‘truths’ to use like weapons to savage other human beings” (1619-29). We become, like Job, reduced “to a posture of wonder…and smallness in the face of the unknown.”
Then McLaren asks if OUR voices are meant to be a part of the conversation. Just as Job doesn’t accept and let himself be silenced by his friends' quotes from Deuteronomy, so maybe we are meant to enter into the conversation.
What McLaren calls a possibly ‘terrifying question’ arising from the book of Job is the “God-character” in the story. Is this really God or the writer’s best idea of God? McLaren prefers to see the book of Job as a “theological opera,” NOT an historical event. To say the text is inspired, according to McLaren, “is to say that people can encounter God—the real God—in a story full of characters named job, Eliphaz, Bildad, the Satan, and even God.” God reveals himself through stories like this. Our belief in the Holy Spirit, the creative Spirit in Genesis, holds that He works through these stories and these characters and this text to evoke understanding and to draw us into the conversation.
THE THIRD QUESTION: THE God Question
10: Is God Violent?
Even though McLaren feels many biblical problems were solved when he could differentiate between a “Theos” who would send mostly everyone into eternal conscious torment, and a God of compassion and love; and when he could see the Bible as an inspired library instead of a constitution, he still found problems with the God depicted in that library. There are still violent, cruel “un-Christlike” images (like the God who sent the flood to destroy everyone but Noah’s family; the God who smites enemies and directs the Israelites to conquer and occupy weaker enemies). Even so this God is not as horrible as theos.
He looks at God again in the light of his answers to the first two questions and finds that people’s understandings about God changed and evolved over time, and God initiated this evolution. Moses, for example, gets a fuller idea of God than had been given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob . In Hosea, “the Lord says that a time is coming when Israel will no long refer to its creator as ‘master,’ but instead as ‘husband’ (2:16)” (1720-29).
In the N.T., Jesus tells his followers that there will be a time when they stop considering themselves servants and starting thinking of themselves as friends (Jn.15:12-17). The Spirit, He says, will guide them to this new understanding “as they are able to bear it” (Jn. 16:12-15). And then Paul in Galatians (3:23-26) talks about an “age where they walk free in the Spirit.”
McLaren has come up with five “specific lines of evolution in the biblical writers’ understanding of God:”
1. The understanding of God’s uniqueness. The bible starts with the concept of God as supreme among the many Gods. But then it evolves into the idea of only one God being real and alive, relegating the others to fictions, superstitions or exceptions.
2. The understanding of God’s ethics. First the bible shows Him as concerned primarily with rituals, ceremonial fidelity, holidays, dietary and cleanliness codes. These were vigorously promoted by the priests, who strove for purity in worship and “technical perfection in the fulfillment of religion regulations.” But then the prophets helped show God’s concern for social justice, for the plight of the poor and the systemic flaws that kept them in poverty.
3. The understanding of God’s universality. First, God seems to favor one tribe, but then it becomes clear that he loves all people and being called the chosen people doesn’t give you favoritism and exclusive blessing, but responsibility to be a channel of his blessings.
4. The understanding of God’s agency. Sometimes God seems to act magically, swooping into the affairs of the universe from afar. In fact, there are two views. Ecclesiastes makes God distant or absent to a chaotic world; Matthew makes God ”hyper-present, to the “Point of controlling nearly everything.” But finally there grows a mature, “highly nuanced and delicately balanced” view. God is at work in, along with, and through events, but can’t be “rendered indistinguishable from the events themselves, nor is God deterministically controlling the universe as if it were a puppet or a machine” (1753-62). Even in the midst of evil, God guides people to do good.. Romans: “In all things, God works for good” and see Gen. 50:20 for his working out the evil perpetrated by Joseph’s brothers.
5. The understanding of God’s character. Sometimes God is portrayed as violent, vindictive, given to favoritism and not caring about human life. But slowly this image evolves to one of a compassionate, gentle, fair to all, forgiving rather than retaliatory. He is no longer capricious, but “loves justice, kindness, reconciliation, and peace.” (1762-71).
This progression in understanding is very difficult for fundamentalist approaches and religions. God is exclusive, retaliatory, loving those in the in-group and even hating those who are not in His group. He is deterministic and moves events, often in punishment and torture. Some fundamentalists don’t want God to act this way and resolve not to act this way themselves. Those who see the logic of these understandings are afraid to publicly espouse them because they will be called a “heretic” or a “liberal;” they may be ostracized and excluded from their beloved community of faith. There are gate-keepers in each sect who ensure this purity of interpretation.
McLaren acknowledges that these harsh passages are in the Bible, but he is affirming that “human beings can’t do better than their very best at any given moment to communicate about God as they understand God,” and scripture tries to communicate their best understandings. He gives an analogy with second graders who are taught that you can’t subtract a larger number from a smaller number, but then in sixth grade have a lesson on negative numbers. This doesn’t mean that the second grade text was lying or that the 6th grade writers were doubting the absolute truth of an earlier text. “The author of the 2nd grade text told the truth that was appropriate for second-graders.”
And so he argues: “What if those who live in the second-grade world of polytheism need to learn about one God as superior to others before they can handle the idea of one God as uniquely real?...What if, then, God must first be seen as the God of our tribe and then only later as the God of all tribes?” Etc. on 1807-16. “What if God’s agency in the world is mysterious and complex, reflecting God’s desire to have a world that is truly free yet truly relational?”
What if we need to see God one way in order to evolve to a more mature understanding of him, just as we do with our own parents? (E.g. God as violently committed to justice before we can see him as nonviolently yet passionately committed?). And of course our understanding is continuing to develop. We haven’t arrived yet! We are like a school of learners that includes all levels of growing and learning together. So some faith communities are “good for some of us even though they would not challenge others of us, because we have already learned the lessons they are ready to teach. Other faith communities are over our head...” This has implications for how we deal with other denominations and religions.
Concerning violence, McLaren suggests this hypothesis: “…if the human beings who produced those passages were violent in their own development, they would naturally see God through the lens of their experience. The fact that those disturbing descriptions are found in the bible doesn’t mean that we are stuck with them, any more than we are stuck with ‘You cannot subtract a larger number from a smaller number, just because that statement still exists in our second-grade textbook. [The bible] is like the library of math texts that shows the history of the development of mathematical reasoning among human beings” (1834-43).
McLaren then launches into a time machine analogy from a people far into the future who can’t understand how we could be believers and still believe in just wars, in eating meat, and in using fossil fuels even though they are so destructive of our planet. He wonders if this analogy helps us “look at violence, patriarchy, religious supremacy, and other disturbing characteristics of some biblical passages in a new light?” (1861-68).
11. From a Violent Tribal God to a Christlike God
Although McLaren acknowledges how difficult it must be for someone who has a constitutional view of the Bible to be at all comfortable with these changing images of God, he says that the less mature images might be a step UP from the more immature ones they were replacing.
For example, he cites the Noah and the Flood story as an example of a story often read for its saving message, but which is also a message that under certain conditions, genocide might be OK (he calls it “playing the genocide card,” and cites it as happening from Gen. 7 to Dt. 7, from American colonization to the Holocaust to Rwanda to Darfur. He states that a God who permits genocide cannot be worthy of worship or even respect. “How can you ask your children—or non-church colleagues and neighbors—to honor a deity so uncreative, over-reactive, and utterly capricious regarding life?”
He reminds us that the Flood didn’t even work: Noah gets drunk, his sons are up to mischief and soon the human race is right back to violence and crime. That Genocide doesn’t solve anything might be the learning. McLaren compares the Flood story to the Gilgamesh epic. He notes the theological progress in the Genesis story: Yahweh (Elohim?) is moved with justice and mercy. And maybe the Gilgamesh story is a step up from the myth it was replacing as the way of explaining some facets of human existence.
Then he compares the Noah story to the Moses story, the little child saved from drowning in an ark of reeds. The image of God has developed! And he cites Jesus’ healing the Canaanite woman in Mt. 15 after which he feeds 4,000 Gentiles, overturning what happened in Dt. 7 with Joshua’s No Mercy instructions. Following Jesus, we now “heal, feed and serve the other…instead of rejecting the ‘gentile dog,’ we allow ourselves to listen and be ‘converted’ by the other, seeing the other’s humanity and great faith” (1913-22).
“This approach helps us see the biblical library as the record of a series of trade-ups, people courageously letting go of the state-of-the-art understanding of God when an even better understanding begins to emerge.” McLaren calls this an “evolutionary approach." Maybe this is why the Jews will not tolerate an image of God that freezes our understanding of Him. And we do the same thing with printing and our sermons and songs: conceptual idolatry.
For those afraid of this process which they fear will allow an “anything goes” attitude toward conceptualizing God and reading Scripture, McLaren offers another procedure that requires, first, reading the Scriptures in a narrative way, arranging the biblical stories in more or less chronological fashion, and then choosing a new view of God that is consistent with the whole narrative but further along in its maturity (chronology?).
He adds to this trajectory, the visions of the desired future given by the biblical prophets. Then he adds a “sun” at the end, which represents Jesus, “whose light shines through the whole story,…alpha to omega” (1947-55). He concludes “..we can only discern God’s character in a mature way from the vantage point of the end of the story, seen in the light of the story of Jesus” (ibid). He quotes the Quaker scholar Elton Trueblood as saying that 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.”
Jesus explodes the predetermined concepts of God. “..the experience of God in Jesus requires a brand new definition of understanding of God” (1955-64). This is “the best single reason to be identified as a believer in Jesus,” and we can offer this gift to people of all faiths. Jesus is the touchstone for Old Testament images of God: the ones that are most like Jesus are the more mature ones. And so “..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.”
McLaren sees Jesus as the “hinge of the biblical story, the spine or backbone of the narrative..” He wants us to “look through the Bible to look at Jesus, and you will see the character of God shining radiant and full.”
How should the Bible be understood? As McLaren says: “There will be no new kind of Christian faith without a new approach to the Bible, because we’ve gotten ourselves into a mess with the Bible.” One reason is from any type of fundamentalism, that requires the Bible to be treated as a book (science book?) dictated by God.
[Even today, there is a creation museum in Kentucky whose purpose is to visually show dinosaurs and humans co-existing and to prove that the earth is only 6,000 years old; and the Governor is saying he will contribute state funds toward building an ark. And there is the government official who quoted Genesis as the reason he doesn’t believe in global warming].
McLaren cites many horror stories about depressed people whose pastors would only allow prayer and fasting (and exorcism) as cures; many of whom committed suicide. Nor does he allow it as an ethical rule book; it has no mention of so many of our modern ethical questions whose answers start becoming only “a litmus test for political affiliation.”
Moreover, “proof texts” were selected from the bible to “justify unjustifiable positions,” such as racism , support for torture, the death penalty for homosexuality and parental rebellion, as a reason for pre-emptive war and an explanation for natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. The Bible has too often been used, affirms McLaren, as an excuse for an “us-versus-them” mentality. “…there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.”
His big example is a short history of slavery and how the Bible was used to justify it. Although he feels many denominations and religious people have gone through a process of freeing the Bible from recommending anti-Semitism, apartheid, anti-feminism, etc., he calls for a “new, more mature and responsible approach to the Bible.” This is not for purposes of “moral relativism” or lowering of ethical standards, but for the purpose of raising those standards so we no longer harm human beings and dishonor God.
8: From Legal Constitution to Community Library
We need, he claims, to stop reading the Bible as if it were the Constitution and to stop treating it as if it were a legal document with precedents of interpretation set over the years. “At every turn, we approach the biblical text as if it were an annotated code instead of what it is actually is: a portable library of poems, prophecies, stories, fables, parables, letters, sage sayings, quarrels, and so on.”
An example of the way we use the Bible can be shown by asking the question of how we should treat our enemies. McLaren cites different approaches from Jesus in Matthew, and Paul, and the Psalm (“dash their infants against a rock…” 137:9).
Treating the Bible as a legal document means, for one thing, that you have to be learned to interpret it, the interpreters are often insiders whose salary and/or social status depends on their interpretation. And there are no checks to that interpretation (if you object, you could be excommunicated).
But the biblical authors were “writing for their own times, to address specific problems and questions of their day.” We have to remember that when the OT writers wrote, there WAS no Bible, and the Gospels were written decades after Jesus lived. And we have to remember that the canon was only gathered in its present form CENTURIES later.
McLaren wants to remind us that the Bible is the “library of a culture and a community.” As a library it’s a carefully selected “group of ancient documents of paramount importance for people who want to understand and belong to the community of people who seek God...and Jesus.” Culture is messy; it’s not coherent and logical. It grapples over and over with questions it considers of prime importance. McLaren asks a really interesting question: “Are the rich dependent on the well-being of the poor?” or vice-versa. These are healthy discussions. The questions are important. The answers will vary. And so they do, in the Bible. The differences are a sign of vitality.
But what to do with the label “inspiration?” McLaren feels conservatives use it as a synonym for “inspired constitution” or “authoritative constitution.” But he is okay with calling it an authoritative Library because it doesn’t imply “enforceable agreements.” He retains the belief that God breathes life into the bible and through it into communities and into people. The bible guides communities like no other texts can. The Bible has a unique place among all the words that brilliant and inspired people have written. But that doesn’t make it a constitution!
McLaren wants us to read the Bible as “an inspired library.” “This inspired library preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed.” It’s meant to be heard and discussed and responded to. To the people whose deep-seated beliefs or their jobs depend on their seeing the bible as a constitution, McLaren doesn’t demand that they change, but only that they be careful in the way they use the bible. He also wants them to try to understand that just as they can’t stop regarding the Bible as a Constitution, so McLaren and many others can no longer read it that way and “are on a quest to find other ways to cherish, understand and follow the Bible.” (1500-09)
He realizes that this will be heresy for many, because it is NOT the main way of teaching in seminaries and is NOT the implicit approach of many denominations and it is NOT what we hear on religious radio and TV. He wants us to jettison our fears about the “thought police” and continue our conversation with God!
9: Revelation through Conversation
McLaren has been called Lucifer, heretic, dim-witted, ignorant, arrogant and deceiver. But he is grateful that he is not being made subject to decapitation, hanging, or burning at the stake and disembowelment.
McLaren gives the example of the book of Job to explain seeing the Bible in a non-constitutional way, and not as “God’s official position as to why there is evil and suffering in the world.” Job is “an inspired portrayal of human beings struggling and arguing over the realities of suffering and evil.” After Job’s friends say all the “right, pious things,” in a concluding chapter GOD makes a speech. He does NOT vindicate the pious friends, but vindicates Job instead, indicating that most of the book is false and nonsense [including the friends’ quoting from Deuteronomy—‘Do good and good will always happen to you…’]. McLaren asks which part the constitutional devotees are saying is inspired.
McLaren says Job gives us a way out of reading the Bible this way. “Revelation occurs,” he says, “not in the words and statements of individuals, but in the conversation among individuals and God.” In other words, it occurs and emerges through the whole story. In short, the bible text gives us tools for discovery, breaking open, encountering meaning and God. Therefore, he concludes: “…if we enter the text together and feel the flow of its arguments, get stuck in its points of tension, and struggle with its unfolding plot in all its twists and turns, God’s revelation can happen to us.” (1583-92)
The Bible was never meant to end conversations and solve every conceivable problem. If so, “it has failed miserably” (1601-11). ..’If, instead, it was inspired and intended to stimulate conversation, to keep people thinking and talking and arguing and seeking, across continents and centuries, it has succeeded and is succeeding in a truly remarkable way” (ibid.). At the end of Job, when God finally speaks, He does Not answer the problem of evil, but instead peppers Job with lots of questions. They end up being a rebuke in the face of the unknown. And this is a great revelation in itself.
McLaren wonders if God’s Word is really sneaking up on us, transforming and disarming us—“rather than arming us with ‘truths’ to use like weapons to savage other human beings” (1619-29). We become, like Job, reduced “to a posture of wonder…and smallness in the face of the unknown.”
Then McLaren asks if OUR voices are meant to be a part of the conversation. Just as Job doesn’t accept and let himself be silenced by his friends' quotes from Deuteronomy, so maybe we are meant to enter into the conversation.
What McLaren calls a possibly ‘terrifying question’ arising from the book of Job is the “God-character” in the story. Is this really God or the writer’s best idea of God? McLaren prefers to see the book of Job as a “theological opera,” NOT an historical event. To say the text is inspired, according to McLaren, “is to say that people can encounter God—the real God—in a story full of characters named job, Eliphaz, Bildad, the Satan, and even God.” God reveals himself through stories like this. Our belief in the Holy Spirit, the creative Spirit in Genesis, holds that He works through these stories and these characters and this text to evoke understanding and to draw us into the conversation.
THE THIRD QUESTION: THE God Question
10: Is God Violent?
Even though McLaren feels many biblical problems were solved when he could differentiate between a “Theos” who would send mostly everyone into eternal conscious torment, and a God of compassion and love; and when he could see the Bible as an inspired library instead of a constitution, he still found problems with the God depicted in that library. There are still violent, cruel “un-Christlike” images (like the God who sent the flood to destroy everyone but Noah’s family; the God who smites enemies and directs the Israelites to conquer and occupy weaker enemies). Even so this God is not as horrible as theos.
He looks at God again in the light of his answers to the first two questions and finds that people’s understandings about God changed and evolved over time, and God initiated this evolution. Moses, for example, gets a fuller idea of God than had been given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob . In Hosea, “the Lord says that a time is coming when Israel will no long refer to its creator as ‘master,’ but instead as ‘husband’ (2:16)” (1720-29).
In the N.T., Jesus tells his followers that there will be a time when they stop considering themselves servants and starting thinking of themselves as friends (Jn.15:12-17). The Spirit, He says, will guide them to this new understanding “as they are able to bear it” (Jn. 16:12-15). And then Paul in Galatians (3:23-26) talks about an “age where they walk free in the Spirit.”
McLaren has come up with five “specific lines of evolution in the biblical writers’ understanding of God:”
1. The understanding of God’s uniqueness. The bible starts with the concept of God as supreme among the many Gods. But then it evolves into the idea of only one God being real and alive, relegating the others to fictions, superstitions or exceptions.
2. The understanding of God’s ethics. First the bible shows Him as concerned primarily with rituals, ceremonial fidelity, holidays, dietary and cleanliness codes. These were vigorously promoted by the priests, who strove for purity in worship and “technical perfection in the fulfillment of religion regulations.” But then the prophets helped show God’s concern for social justice, for the plight of the poor and the systemic flaws that kept them in poverty.
3. The understanding of God’s universality. First, God seems to favor one tribe, but then it becomes clear that he loves all people and being called the chosen people doesn’t give you favoritism and exclusive blessing, but responsibility to be a channel of his blessings.
4. The understanding of God’s agency. Sometimes God seems to act magically, swooping into the affairs of the universe from afar. In fact, there are two views. Ecclesiastes makes God distant or absent to a chaotic world; Matthew makes God ”hyper-present, to the “Point of controlling nearly everything.” But finally there grows a mature, “highly nuanced and delicately balanced” view. God is at work in, along with, and through events, but can’t be “rendered indistinguishable from the events themselves, nor is God deterministically controlling the universe as if it were a puppet or a machine” (1753-62). Even in the midst of evil, God guides people to do good.. Romans: “In all things, God works for good” and see Gen. 50:20 for his working out the evil perpetrated by Joseph’s brothers.
5. The understanding of God’s character. Sometimes God is portrayed as violent, vindictive, given to favoritism and not caring about human life. But slowly this image evolves to one of a compassionate, gentle, fair to all, forgiving rather than retaliatory. He is no longer capricious, but “loves justice, kindness, reconciliation, and peace.” (1762-71).
This progression in understanding is very difficult for fundamentalist approaches and religions. God is exclusive, retaliatory, loving those in the in-group and even hating those who are not in His group. He is deterministic and moves events, often in punishment and torture. Some fundamentalists don’t want God to act this way and resolve not to act this way themselves. Those who see the logic of these understandings are afraid to publicly espouse them because they will be called a “heretic” or a “liberal;” they may be ostracized and excluded from their beloved community of faith. There are gate-keepers in each sect who ensure this purity of interpretation.
McLaren acknowledges that these harsh passages are in the Bible, but he is affirming that “human beings can’t do better than their very best at any given moment to communicate about God as they understand God,” and scripture tries to communicate their best understandings. He gives an analogy with second graders who are taught that you can’t subtract a larger number from a smaller number, but then in sixth grade have a lesson on negative numbers. This doesn’t mean that the second grade text was lying or that the 6th grade writers were doubting the absolute truth of an earlier text. “The author of the 2nd grade text told the truth that was appropriate for second-graders.”
And so he argues: “What if those who live in the second-grade world of polytheism need to learn about one God as superior to others before they can handle the idea of one God as uniquely real?...What if, then, God must first be seen as the God of our tribe and then only later as the God of all tribes?” Etc. on 1807-16. “What if God’s agency in the world is mysterious and complex, reflecting God’s desire to have a world that is truly free yet truly relational?”
What if we need to see God one way in order to evolve to a more mature understanding of him, just as we do with our own parents? (E.g. God as violently committed to justice before we can see him as nonviolently yet passionately committed?). And of course our understanding is continuing to develop. We haven’t arrived yet! We are like a school of learners that includes all levels of growing and learning together. So some faith communities are “good for some of us even though they would not challenge others of us, because we have already learned the lessons they are ready to teach. Other faith communities are over our head...” This has implications for how we deal with other denominations and religions.
Concerning violence, McLaren suggests this hypothesis: “…if the human beings who produced those passages were violent in their own development, they would naturally see God through the lens of their experience. The fact that those disturbing descriptions are found in the bible doesn’t mean that we are stuck with them, any more than we are stuck with ‘You cannot subtract a larger number from a smaller number, just because that statement still exists in our second-grade textbook. [The bible] is like the library of math texts that shows the history of the development of mathematical reasoning among human beings” (1834-43).
McLaren then launches into a time machine analogy from a people far into the future who can’t understand how we could be believers and still believe in just wars, in eating meat, and in using fossil fuels even though they are so destructive of our planet. He wonders if this analogy helps us “look at violence, patriarchy, religious supremacy, and other disturbing characteristics of some biblical passages in a new light?” (1861-68).
11. From a Violent Tribal God to a Christlike God
Although McLaren acknowledges how difficult it must be for someone who has a constitutional view of the Bible to be at all comfortable with these changing images of God, he says that the less mature images might be a step UP from the more immature ones they were replacing.
For example, he cites the Noah and the Flood story as an example of a story often read for its saving message, but which is also a message that under certain conditions, genocide might be OK (he calls it “playing the genocide card,” and cites it as happening from Gen. 7 to Dt. 7, from American colonization to the Holocaust to Rwanda to Darfur. He states that a God who permits genocide cannot be worthy of worship or even respect. “How can you ask your children—or non-church colleagues and neighbors—to honor a deity so uncreative, over-reactive, and utterly capricious regarding life?”
He reminds us that the Flood didn’t even work: Noah gets drunk, his sons are up to mischief and soon the human race is right back to violence and crime. That Genocide doesn’t solve anything might be the learning. McLaren compares the Flood story to the Gilgamesh epic. He notes the theological progress in the Genesis story: Yahweh (Elohim?) is moved with justice and mercy. And maybe the Gilgamesh story is a step up from the myth it was replacing as the way of explaining some facets of human existence.
Then he compares the Noah story to the Moses story, the little child saved from drowning in an ark of reeds. The image of God has developed! And he cites Jesus’ healing the Canaanite woman in Mt. 15 after which he feeds 4,000 Gentiles, overturning what happened in Dt. 7 with Joshua’s No Mercy instructions. Following Jesus, we now “heal, feed and serve the other…instead of rejecting the ‘gentile dog,’ we allow ourselves to listen and be ‘converted’ by the other, seeing the other’s humanity and great faith” (1913-22).
“This approach helps us see the biblical library as the record of a series of trade-ups, people courageously letting go of the state-of-the-art understanding of God when an even better understanding begins to emerge.” McLaren calls this an “evolutionary approach." Maybe this is why the Jews will not tolerate an image of God that freezes our understanding of Him. And we do the same thing with printing and our sermons and songs: conceptual idolatry.
For those afraid of this process which they fear will allow an “anything goes” attitude toward conceptualizing God and reading Scripture, McLaren offers another procedure that requires, first, reading the Scriptures in a narrative way, arranging the biblical stories in more or less chronological fashion, and then choosing a new view of God that is consistent with the whole narrative but further along in its maturity (chronology?).
He adds to this trajectory, the visions of the desired future given by the biblical prophets. Then he adds a “sun” at the end, which represents Jesus, “whose light shines through the whole story,…alpha to omega” (1947-55). He concludes “..we can only discern God’s character in a mature way from the vantage point of the end of the story, seen in the light of the story of Jesus” (ibid). He quotes the Quaker scholar Elton Trueblood as saying that 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.”
Jesus explodes the predetermined concepts of God. “..the experience of God in Jesus requires a brand new definition of understanding of God” (1955-64). This is “the best single reason to be identified as a believer in Jesus,” and we can offer this gift to people of all faiths. Jesus is the touchstone for Old Testament images of God: the ones that are most like Jesus are the more mature ones. And so “..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.”
McLaren sees Jesus as the “hinge of the biblical story, the spine or backbone of the narrative..” He wants us to “look through the Bible to look at Jesus, and you will see the character of God shining radiant and full.”
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Introduction and Question 1
Session 1: Introduction and the First Question
A. Who is Brian McLaren—
Brian McLaren, M.A., is a nationally known author, speaker, activist, and networker among innovative Christian leaders. He has an M.A. in English literature from the University of Maryland, left teaching and founded a “transdenominational church” in the Baltimore-Washington area where he remained pastor until 2006. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Carey Theological Seminary in Vancouver. His many publications are foundational for the emerging church movement, including A Generous Orthodoxy, and Everything Must Change. His website is www.brianmclaren.net. He is married to Grace and has four adult children.
B. He is motivated by his experience talking to Christian leaders and discovering that “the Christian Faith in all its forms is in trouble..[and] is pregnant with new possibilities.” He wants to help the Christian faith be reborn in this new generation.
So in the womb of the Christian faith in all its wild diversity, I see a new generation of Christian disciples being formed, coming alive and coming of age, disciples who hold amazing promise, even as they face huge challenges (not the least of which are misunderstanding and criticism from some of their elders).
He became pastor of what started as a house church, and it got a reputation as a place for people to go who had questions, weren’t sure, or were addicts or broken people. Their questions led him to seek for honesty, authenticity and a faith that made more sense to him and to others.
Now I have to tell you that some of what disturbed him was the alignment of church leaders with “a neoconservative political ideology…” that was promulgated by radio and television talk show hosts. It took him five years to work through this to develop what he calls “a new way of believing.” At first, he felt all alone, but after his first book, people came out of the woodwork to tell him they were so glad they were not the only ones having these thoughts and questions. McLaren found organizations, too, grappling with these issues, including the Center for Action and Contemplation, whose founder is Rev. Richard Rohr.
Historic denominations were losing people dramatically: Episcopalians, according to one study some years ago, were losing the equivalent of a diocese a year; the average age of church goers in the U.S. was 62 although the average age of Americans was 32. One Catholic sociologist is quoted as saying: “We have largely lost the generations between 18 and 55.” Even the conservative Evangelicals were losing people.
What he and others came to is that “something is not working in the way we’re doing Christianity,” and so we need to keep talking and searching together in a “quest for a new kind of Christianity.”
McLaren objects to the “codified belief that is a means of social control” that arose after the alliance of Christianity with the emperor [but his implied dates for the inquisition are wrong; it didn’t start right after Charlemagne, as far as I know, but in the 13th century.]
He places himself in the company of others feeling the emergence of something new: Harvey Cox’s Age of the Spirit; Phyllis Tickle’s Great Emergence; Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones; Generative Christianity with church historian Diana Butler Bass or emerging mission with Marcus Borg; Hans Frei or Rene Padilla.
C. Organization of the book: the first five questions are meant to raise the possibility of freeing ourselves from an old paradigm about Christianity so we can be open to new possibilities. The second set of five questions is controversial and most people can’t explore them until they have been freed from the old mind sets. The goal is to free ourselves to answer other urgent questions beyond these ten. He is not looking for a new set of beliefs, but for a new direction, a new way of believing.
This course is about questions, questions that we still have, that have NOT been answered by our past encounters with religion or by our reading of scripture or by the sermons we have listened to. Take a minute to think: what are your questions? [Jot one or two down and hand them in].
The First Question: The Narrative Question [he has responses, NOT answers].
“What is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?” He discovered after a LOT of digging and thinking that since the fifth or sixth century, to be a Christian meant to believe in a very specific story line from the Bible “by which we assess all of history, all of human experience, all of our own experience.” Can you guess what this line of thought is, beginning with Genesis? It looks something like this: [See diagram on page 34 of the text. It contains these elements: Eden-->Fall-->Condemnation-->Hell OR Salvation-->Heaven].
McLaren asks: “Wouldn’t it have been better if this story had never begun?” The biblical writer has God asking the same question before the Flood.
McLaren knows this diagram has been tweaked by numerous scholars and preachers, but he wants to ask if the whole thing is really in the Bible and is it believable. Did Abraham or Moses, or even Jesus hold to these ‘truths’ and teach them? And does believing it lead to a better relationship with God and love of neighbor?
McLaren does not reject this as a true image from the Bible; he rejects that it could even COME from the Bible. McLaren tries to understand Jesus—not from the viewpoint of those who came AFTER him and interpreted his life and words, but from those who went BEFORE him, like Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, the Prophets and John the Baptist. None of these people talked about the Fall, Original Sin, total depravity or “eternal conscious torment.” It came from Plato’s story of the cave and was emphasized by the “social and political narrative of the Roman Empire….”
McLaren summarizes the Greco-mind as being: (1) dualistic (e.g. matter vs. spirit); (2) imbued with feelings of superiority in their material and intellectual accomplishments (felt they had absolute truth); (3) resulting in a social superiority, and “us” vs. “them”; in-group vs. out-group. All other cultures were of minimal importance. The others were barbarians, compared to the unchanging Pax Romana. Only Roman citizens counted; slaves, Jews and Christians were on the barbarian side of this equation.
But then Christians began to assimilate this Greco-Roman philosophy and become a “third race.” The Platonic Eden is no longer a story, but a STATE of perfect, unchanging innocence. The fall catapulted people into the changeable Aristotelian story, cave, decaying world.
McLaren names the God of this Greco-Roman world “Theos,” and says he is far different from the Jewish Elohim of Genesis. Theos hates matter and becoming and wants to destroy it, …”to purge all that is imperfect, so only perfect purified being remains.” Theos figures out a way to save this detestable creation, by which he means to liberate them and raise them to the “timeless plane of perfect Platonic being, so the creatures in question can be loved by Theos again.” They will be in heaven where “nothing will ever happen again.”
As for the rest, since humans can’t ultimately be destroyed, they must be consigned to the Greek Hades and the earth (universe?) must be destroyed. Hades has imagery borrowed from Zoroaster and Jesus; since it’s a state, no one can change and get out of it. They will be in perfect torment, experiencing the unchanging hate of Theos. And this is the “Good News!”
McLaren wants to find the “other God,” The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and not the one of the Greek philosophers. And so he starts the story from Genesis and what he finds there is not a static world of perfection, but the creative chaos of becoming. The world is not pronounced “perfect” by Elohim, but “very good.” It has room for reproduction and development. The humans in it create art, music, culture, even theology. But there is also darkness, unpredictability, danger. McLaren writes: “…it is agonizingly difficult for us to recapture the wild, dynamic, story-unleashing goodness of Elohim, a goodness that differs so starkly, so radically, from the domesticated, static, controlled perfection of Theos.”
These stories are NOT to be taken literally, but taken “seriously.” They use mythic language and coalesce rich meaning. And it is Elohim’s story. He doesn’t “pronounce the perfect state ruined and the planet destined for geocide.” McLaren tells a “coming of age” parable to illustrate God’s care for us.
Then he takes us through the actual Genesis story: the only consequence threatened by God is that they will die (and die on the day they eat the fruit on the forbidden tree). But God doesn’t kill them, he makes clothes for them! They no longer have access to the tree of life, and begin to live as hunter-gatherers. Then they proceed to nomadic herders, agriculturalists, city dwellers, and empire dwellers. But this ascent is accompanied by a fall into shame and fear, murder, corruption and violence, and oppression and genocide. Each advance socially and technologically prepares the possibility of a new descent into evil. But look at God’s treatment of Cain! He warns him, then he protects him with a sign on his forehead.
He continues this story with the crimes of the cities founded by Cain, God’s thought to destroy it all, then his noticing of Noah, and the reconstituting of the human race and His promise to be faithful despite human sinfulness. This continues through Babel, Sodom, and Joseph’s sale into captivity in Egypt.
A. Who is Brian McLaren—
Brian McLaren, M.A., is a nationally known author, speaker, activist, and networker among innovative Christian leaders. He has an M.A. in English literature from the University of Maryland, left teaching and founded a “transdenominational church” in the Baltimore-Washington area where he remained pastor until 2006. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Carey Theological Seminary in Vancouver. His many publications are foundational for the emerging church movement, including A Generous Orthodoxy, and Everything Must Change. His website is www.brianmclaren.net. He is married to Grace and has four adult children.
B. He is motivated by his experience talking to Christian leaders and discovering that “the Christian Faith in all its forms is in trouble..[and] is pregnant with new possibilities.” He wants to help the Christian faith be reborn in this new generation.
So in the womb of the Christian faith in all its wild diversity, I see a new generation of Christian disciples being formed, coming alive and coming of age, disciples who hold amazing promise, even as they face huge challenges (not the least of which are misunderstanding and criticism from some of their elders).
He became pastor of what started as a house church, and it got a reputation as a place for people to go who had questions, weren’t sure, or were addicts or broken people. Their questions led him to seek for honesty, authenticity and a faith that made more sense to him and to others.
Now I have to tell you that some of what disturbed him was the alignment of church leaders with “a neoconservative political ideology…” that was promulgated by radio and television talk show hosts. It took him five years to work through this to develop what he calls “a new way of believing.” At first, he felt all alone, but after his first book, people came out of the woodwork to tell him they were so glad they were not the only ones having these thoughts and questions. McLaren found organizations, too, grappling with these issues, including the Center for Action and Contemplation, whose founder is Rev. Richard Rohr.
Historic denominations were losing people dramatically: Episcopalians, according to one study some years ago, were losing the equivalent of a diocese a year; the average age of church goers in the U.S. was 62 although the average age of Americans was 32. One Catholic sociologist is quoted as saying: “We have largely lost the generations between 18 and 55.” Even the conservative Evangelicals were losing people.
What he and others came to is that “something is not working in the way we’re doing Christianity,” and so we need to keep talking and searching together in a “quest for a new kind of Christianity.”
McLaren objects to the “codified belief that is a means of social control” that arose after the alliance of Christianity with the emperor [but his implied dates for the inquisition are wrong; it didn’t start right after Charlemagne, as far as I know, but in the 13th century.]
He places himself in the company of others feeling the emergence of something new: Harvey Cox’s Age of the Spirit; Phyllis Tickle’s Great Emergence; Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones; Generative Christianity with church historian Diana Butler Bass or emerging mission with Marcus Borg; Hans Frei or Rene Padilla.
C. Organization of the book: the first five questions are meant to raise the possibility of freeing ourselves from an old paradigm about Christianity so we can be open to new possibilities. The second set of five questions is controversial and most people can’t explore them until they have been freed from the old mind sets. The goal is to free ourselves to answer other urgent questions beyond these ten. He is not looking for a new set of beliefs, but for a new direction, a new way of believing.
This course is about questions, questions that we still have, that have NOT been answered by our past encounters with religion or by our reading of scripture or by the sermons we have listened to. Take a minute to think: what are your questions? [Jot one or two down and hand them in].
The First Question: The Narrative Question [he has responses, NOT answers].
“What is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?” He discovered after a LOT of digging and thinking that since the fifth or sixth century, to be a Christian meant to believe in a very specific story line from the Bible “by which we assess all of history, all of human experience, all of our own experience.” Can you guess what this line of thought is, beginning with Genesis? It looks something like this: [See diagram on page 34 of the text. It contains these elements: Eden-->Fall-->Condemnation-->Hell OR Salvation-->Heaven].
McLaren asks: “Wouldn’t it have been better if this story had never begun?” The biblical writer has God asking the same question before the Flood.
McLaren knows this diagram has been tweaked by numerous scholars and preachers, but he wants to ask if the whole thing is really in the Bible and is it believable. Did Abraham or Moses, or even Jesus hold to these ‘truths’ and teach them? And does believing it lead to a better relationship with God and love of neighbor?
McLaren does not reject this as a true image from the Bible; he rejects that it could even COME from the Bible. McLaren tries to understand Jesus—not from the viewpoint of those who came AFTER him and interpreted his life and words, but from those who went BEFORE him, like Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, the Prophets and John the Baptist. None of these people talked about the Fall, Original Sin, total depravity or “eternal conscious torment.” It came from Plato’s story of the cave and was emphasized by the “social and political narrative of the Roman Empire….”
McLaren summarizes the Greco-mind as being: (1) dualistic (e.g. matter vs. spirit); (2) imbued with feelings of superiority in their material and intellectual accomplishments (felt they had absolute truth); (3) resulting in a social superiority, and “us” vs. “them”; in-group vs. out-group. All other cultures were of minimal importance. The others were barbarians, compared to the unchanging Pax Romana. Only Roman citizens counted; slaves, Jews and Christians were on the barbarian side of this equation.
But then Christians began to assimilate this Greco-Roman philosophy and become a “third race.” The Platonic Eden is no longer a story, but a STATE of perfect, unchanging innocence. The fall catapulted people into the changeable Aristotelian story, cave, decaying world.
McLaren names the God of this Greco-Roman world “Theos,” and says he is far different from the Jewish Elohim of Genesis. Theos hates matter and becoming and wants to destroy it, …”to purge all that is imperfect, so only perfect purified being remains.” Theos figures out a way to save this detestable creation, by which he means to liberate them and raise them to the “timeless plane of perfect Platonic being, so the creatures in question can be loved by Theos again.” They will be in heaven where “nothing will ever happen again.”
As for the rest, since humans can’t ultimately be destroyed, they must be consigned to the Greek Hades and the earth (universe?) must be destroyed. Hades has imagery borrowed from Zoroaster and Jesus; since it’s a state, no one can change and get out of it. They will be in perfect torment, experiencing the unchanging hate of Theos. And this is the “Good News!”
McLaren wants to find the “other God,” The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and not the one of the Greek philosophers. And so he starts the story from Genesis and what he finds there is not a static world of perfection, but the creative chaos of becoming. The world is not pronounced “perfect” by Elohim, but “very good.” It has room for reproduction and development. The humans in it create art, music, culture, even theology. But there is also darkness, unpredictability, danger. McLaren writes: “…it is agonizingly difficult for us to recapture the wild, dynamic, story-unleashing goodness of Elohim, a goodness that differs so starkly, so radically, from the domesticated, static, controlled perfection of Theos.”
These stories are NOT to be taken literally, but taken “seriously.” They use mythic language and coalesce rich meaning. And it is Elohim’s story. He doesn’t “pronounce the perfect state ruined and the planet destined for geocide.” McLaren tells a “coming of age” parable to illustrate God’s care for us.
Then he takes us through the actual Genesis story: the only consequence threatened by God is that they will die (and die on the day they eat the fruit on the forbidden tree). But God doesn’t kill them, he makes clothes for them! They no longer have access to the tree of life, and begin to live as hunter-gatherers. Then they proceed to nomadic herders, agriculturalists, city dwellers, and empire dwellers. But this ascent is accompanied by a fall into shame and fear, murder, corruption and violence, and oppression and genocide. Each advance socially and technologically prepares the possibility of a new descent into evil. But look at God’s treatment of Cain! He warns him, then he protects him with a sign on his forehead.
He continues this story with the crimes of the cities founded by Cain, God’s thought to destroy it all, then his noticing of Noah, and the reconstituting of the human race and His promise to be faithful despite human sinfulness. This continues through Babel, Sodom, and Joseph’s sale into captivity in Egypt.
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