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).
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