I must apologize for my absence from the blog scene, life has been filled with so many exciting and challenging experiences lately that living seemed better than writing about it. So what has drawn me back to this murky world of shameless ideological self-promotion? I heard through the grapevine that Brian McLaren had published another literary jaunt into the hazy waters of the emergent conversation (not sure if I should capitalize) titled: A New Kind of Christianity. Encouraged by conversations with my girlfriend, I endeavoured to put up or shut up and actually read an entire McLaren work. Thus enter the blog. Why not write about my journey of skepticism and see where it leads. It is my hope to approach the book fairly and not allow my philosophical pre-conceptions inform my view, to take a modernist approach to a book that is labelled with a post-modern motif.
Attempting to be hip, I downloaded the book to my iphone, flashed through a very self-indulging introduction where McLaren discusses his credibility to talk of such theological matters, a short auto-biography if you will, onto chapter one entitled: “Between Something Real and Something Wrong”. The first several pages McLaren doesn’t say much, except when he’s talking about how many lives he’s changed and how many people think he’s a heretic. It seems every story is about someone coming up to him and discussing how revolutionary he is, I mean this guy has stopped people from losing their faith and renouncing Jesus just by the power of his words. Though its funny that Jesus doesn’t really show up in his first chapter only in reference to his stint with the ‘Jesus Movement’. The majority of the first chapter goes on in detail about his path to becoming such a “controversal” author. He talks about how it was in his later ministry – which developed from hosting dinner parties about faith – that he would receive questions that were increasingly hard to answer or respond to. At the same time he discusses America’s Christian transformation into political ideology during the 80s and 90s, which put him in a place where he was experiencing something real with the “spiritual seekers” in his congregation, while feeling wrong for not being able to speak out against the neoconservativism taking place in his country. It is very apparent that McLaren has an issue with mainline evangelicalism, to the point that if it did not exist, he would have very little to discuss. Regardless he proceeds to discuss how Christianity is undergoing a “rebirth” and that it does so every 500 years or so, where we shed the baggage from the past and keep what is good. This was probably the weakest part of the chapter, only considering his lack of understanding when it comes to ecclesiastical history. He gives high-praise to the early church while painting the second morph of Christianity after the adoption of Constantine as something better left in the past – you know the period where the key doctrinal statements of the church were created? In McLaren’s mind Augustine never existed and creeds are somehow constraining. I also had to laugh at how he makes it seem that the emperor was burning heretics left right and centre when in fact many church leaders were spreading the gospel north into Germania and Britannia. Not to mention the fact that he considers the Great Schism (where the church split into Eastern Orthodox and Western Roman Catholicism) to be a morph where we dumped the bad things, which is strange considering he appears to be very pluralistic. Apparently the next morph or rebirth, the adoption of modernity, became relevant at the time but is now irrelevant by this so-called “post-modern” society. In the end McLaren encourages the reader to take part in creating a new form of Christianity.
That’s a lot to digest or maybe not. I encourage you all to read it, I hate writing summaries. There is really not a whole lot to respond to after one chapter, but I imagine the plot will thicken. I feel that McLaren has neglected the fact that no one can escape modernity except to become an anarchist. Modernity is not merely a morph or change in thought, it’s an expose on how the rational human mind, spirit, conciousness operates in nature. Foundationalism, the belief that we all have a core belief that informs all the other beliefs is prevalent in every human being. Even McLaren, a post-modernist, uses foundational modernity. Even if he believes that truth is relative or adheres to a philosophical relativism, he is still a modernist with relativism at its foundation. How is this important? Because McLaren is failing to clarifying (yet) whether our doctrines need to change or whether our approach to people needs to change. He would have us believe that there is a war and he is leading all the youngsters against their legalistic parents, this is not in fact the case. Mark Driscoll, a fairly outspoken voice in the more conservative wing of the emergent movement, teaches at a church where they attract the same numbers and demographic of people as McLaren though the doctrine as found in Christ is central, traditional and foundational to his church. So we must assume that people are not so eager for relativistic ideology but crave sound truth, alas I am unleashing my bias.
I’ll have more to write about later. I also feel that I should forgo such a detailed summary. I fear that McLaren is simply going to rehash more brands of Christianity that he’s already circulated
Tags: A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren, Modernity, Post-Modernity
