New kind of Christian: an emergent voice

Christian Century, Nov 30, 2004 by Jason Byasse

BRIAN MCLAREN'S two most important books--A New Kind of Christian and the recent A Generous Orthodoxy--both open by raising the specter of an evangelical pastor leaving the ministry or the church altogether. The fictional lead character in New Kind is poised to abandon his ministry until a wise new friend initiates him into the ways of postmodern Christianity, rehabilitating his ministry and life. Orthodoxy reaches out to the disaffected in first-person plural: "So many of us have come close to withdrawing from the Christian community. It's not because of Jesus and his good news, but because of frustrations with religious polities, dubious theological propositions, difficulties in interpreting passages of the Bible that seem barbaric, or embarrassments from church history." Something has to change, or those on the ledge may go ahead and jump.

McLaren wants to make space for someone to be "postconservative." According to the subtitle of A Generous Orthodoxy, he himself is a "missional evangelical post/protestant liberal/conservative mystical/poetic biblical charismatic/contemplative fundamentalist/calvinist anabaptist/anglican methodist catholic green incarnational depressed-yet-hopeful emergent unfinished CHRISTIAN."

To understand McLaren, one must understand the sort of church from which he comes. It is nondenominational yet conservative Reformed in doctrine, holding to Cod's eternal election of some to blessedness and some to perdition. It is proud of its opposition to modern liberalism and its defense of the five "fundamentals"--the virgin birth, biblical inerrancy, substitutionary atonement, and the bodily resurrection and imminent return of Jesus. It is often (but not always) mobilized politically in support of the Religious Right and (culturally in opposition to such movements as feminism, environmentalism and the liberalization of sexual mores.

Emerging from such a background, MeLaren is urging his readers to embrace a more "generous orthodoxy." What exactly does he mean by "generous"? He seeks to draw on resources from across the spectrum of Christian history aid experience. An early chapter speaks of the "'seven Jesuses" McLaren has known, beginning with the two most familiar to him: the conservative Protestant Jesus and the Pentecostal Jesus. He has 'also learned from the Eastern Orthodox Jesus (culled from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), the Roman Catholic Jesus (froin Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton), the Anabaptist Jesus (with his way of nonviolence), the Jesus of the Oppressed (from liberation theologians) and, most strikingly; the liberal Protestant Jesus.

Many conservative evangelicals would have a hard time calling any of these five Jesuses anything other than heretical, especially the last. But MeLaren has great sympathy for liberal Protestants. He jokes that "if you scratch a liberal, you'll find an alienated fundamentalist underneath."

He knows something about being an alienated fundamentalist. As he writes, "I am far harder on conservative Protestant Christian who share this heritage than I am on anyone else." He hopes followers of each of these Jesuses will find themselves able to work with the Emergent network, though he seems to have the most hope for the ones who don't follow the "conservative evangelical" Jesus.

We can see McLaren's generosity also in his refusal to make a judgment about non-Christians" eternal destiny. He thinks the incarnation suggests an affirmation by God of human culture generally--including other religions, to a degree. Jesus" own approach to those who were different from him was to "threaten them with inclusion," to urge them to accept their acceptance (Tillich couldn't have said it any better). A religion might best be judged by the "benefits it brings to its nonadherents."

In fact, all religions face a common threat in the "McDonaldization and Wal-Martization of the world" and the weapons of mass destruction not in Arab countries but "down the road from my home in Washington, D.C."

McLaren's politics are another dramatic departure from conservativism-as-usual: "'The Lord is my shepherd" becomes 'the Lord is my president," ready to sacrifice 10,000 lives of noncitizens elsewhere for the safety of U.S. citizens here ... it sickens me," he says.

McLaren skewers the Sunday school version of faith from which he comes as only one who grew up in the fold can: "Christians are nice people who know the truth and do good. Non-Christians are bad people who don't. Therefore we need to avoid non-Christians or convert them as fast as possible or try to pass laws to keep them under control and protect ourselves from them--until we can escape them forever in heaven."

McLaren is also challenging a conservative staple in his philosophical commitment to nonfoundationalism. The Enlightenment confidence in our ability to appeal to universal "reason" as an arbiter in debate has crumbled. Post-moderns have realized that there is no one thing called "reason," that rationality is always embedded in specific stories and practices. Therefore the conservative defense of "absolute truth" in the culture wars is built on a cracked foundation. There are no "absolute" troths that float above the cultural fray, discernible apart from engagement in specific practices.