You have to love it when someone starts speaking about others using abstract titles when everyone knows who they are talking about. In this section of A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren answers some accusations from two other well-known Christian writers – specifically Mark Driscoll and John MacArthur. To Driscoll, Jesus was a man’s man; and to MacArthur, Jesus came only to save people from hell and nothing else. McLaren contends, and I agree, that neither of these positions reflect the full body of who Jesus is, was and shall be.

But I have some issues with the image of Jesus that McLaren constructs as well. To McLaren, Jesus is only the pre-Resurrection Jesus. He makes no reference to Christ’s return or even Jesus’ victory over death. Although McLaren professes that his view of Jesus is more accurate according to the gospels, he fails to include the end of those gospels.

There are two popular Beatles cover bands that come through our area. One, 1964, is an exceptionally talented band who performs the pre-Rubber Soul portion of the Beatles’ catalog with energy, talent and flair. The other, Rain, does the same thing but then they continue to perform the rest of the Beatles’ catalog, all the way through Abby Road. Although both are excellent performers, only Rain tells the whole story. Both are faithful, but 1964 leaves you with the impression that the story ends when the Beatles stopped touring. Really, that was only the beginning.

The same thing is true of McLaren’s depiction of Jesus. I know the theology from which he projects this image. I’ve read it many times in the writings of Bart Ehrmann and John Dominic Crossan. Jesus’ resurrection is not meant literally, but rather that Jesus is resurrected through our continuance in His Way. The Church is Jesus’ body because he is no longer with us. He died, but we live on.

This is contrary to the statements of the apostles; it is contrary to the gospels. I would go so far as to say that there is no gospel without the resurrection.

Certainly, McLaren brings something to the discussion. In my sermons, I will often remind people that Jesus is our Savior, Master, and Model. While McLaren is content to see him as Model; MacArthur sees him as only Savior; and Driscoll seems content to see him as Master, in reality Jesus is all three. We cannot ignore the Model part because it is as much a part of who Jesus is as his role as Savior and Master; but we also cannot overplay any one aspect of His ministry. To do so is to detract from the rest of who He is.

Mclaren’s third chapter marked the first time I had a genuine disagreement with his questions. Mclaren’s attempts to argue that human beings were not able to handle God falls short (he actually uses an analogy where he refers to the ancients as 2nd graders).

What if people 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?

I think that Mclaren is not speaking about ancient in specific but people in general. Unfortunately, that is not very clear in the book. If you want to say that people have to journey through the revelation of Jesus Christ, I can agree with you. But I think McLaren is saying something else – something that troubles me, although I cannot put my finger on exactly what it is.

This is the problem with reading McLaren. He asks great questions; and he offers answers that sound good but the more you read and re-read his answers, you get the sense that they are slightly off, slightly tilted away.

Here’s an example. Mclaren takes us on a hypothetical trip through time to the year 3013 to demonstrate how God reveals himself as we are ready. The illustration works, but if you read it carefully, you see that McLaren has tipped his hand and shown an underlying agenda to his seemingly rhetorical journey. He mingles his cultural ideals with his ideas of spirituality.  Here is what he writes about these future Christians he encounters:

They have continued to grow in the knowledge and ways of the Lord…Three social differeneces strike us immediately…they no longer fight wars…they live more ecologically sustainable live as vegetarians…they long ago outgrew the use of fossil fuels.

Do you see it? The ‘future’ Christians have adopted the supposedly enlightened values of McLaren’s world. They have progressed in their understanding of God and have become…well, Al Gore.

I am certain Mclaren did not intentionally project this stereotype but it illustrates how one’s matrix dictates his understanding. He still suffers from modernist’s problem of believing his views are superior to the ‘primitives’ who came before. Mclaren’s matrix speaks into his word although he does not do it intentionally.

Being perfectly honest, I think the subtle condescension of this section of the chapter disturbed me so much that I had difficulty sticking with him on the rest of his discussion.

Part 2 of Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity addresses how we should read the Bible. It presented a fairly decent contrast of what I refer to as the clerical and journey views of the Scriptures.

• Clerical View – the Scriptures need a professional caste of clerks who decipher the texts because the ‘laity’ couldn’t prossibly crack the code. Mclaren calls this the ‘constitutional view’.
• Journey View – the Scriptures are a compilation of the journey with God. They reflect more than report and the same struggles exist in our context as did with the ancients. Mclaren has a variation of this he calls the ‘library’ view.

Unlike a lot of people I know, I do not feel that we need to treat all of the Scripture the same. The Scriptures are not a single, codified rule. It is a library, a collection of the writings of those who share our journey. Far from being some kind of absolute, consolidated document, the Bible is actually a varied collection with many different voices expressed in it.

These voices unite in a dialogue, pointing us toward God and the way he has called us to live; but we must not just assume that because something is in the Bible that it is normative. For example, huge passages of the Hebrew Scriptures are poetic. The book of Job has enormous tractates that espouse positions out of sync with the rest of the Scriptures. The entire book of Ecclesiastes is a mingling of half-truths and perceptions.

This however, is not the same as Mclaren’s library view. He holds to a belief in in a very loose inspiration. To him, inspiration is the dialogue between God and man, with man predominant. The Scriptures are the human record of inspiration. I disagree with this oversimplification. It is a continuing dialogue, which occurs not just in Scripture but in all world religions (more on that in next week’s post).

The Scriptures do not simply inspire us nor are they the record of God’s inspiration. They are the God-breathed words. Together, they form the canon of his witness of himself to us. They cannot be used willy-nilly for support of this position or that position. That much I will agree with McLaren about. But to then redefine inspiration as basically a discussion between God and man – it does not line up with that the Bible says about itself.

And that’s really my problem with McLaren’s position. I agree with his question; and I even agree with his rejection of what he calls the “constitution” view of Scripture; but I think his response is too human, too driven by literary theory to fit with the mystery of inspiration as it played out in the Bible.