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.