This is the one book I’m very glad Brian McLaren has written because he’s finally clear about what he believes and what he thinks Christianity should be. He’s quite explicit that it’s Christianity he recommends change; he’s not simply reporting to us what he believes. He’s suggesting
A New Kind of Christianity for all of us. His project is transformation of the faith. Alas, he fails because his conclusions aren’t new; they’re quite familiar 20th century Christian liberalism. Finally we have clarity on what McLaren believes, what he thinks Christianity is or should be, and that we’re all talking about what we believe is the true and correct expression of the faith, not just our private beliefs.
This review isn’t a refutation of McLaren’s book. I’ve linked to a couple of other sources at the end that do that. What I want to highlight in this review is that McLaren is finally being clear about what he believes. He’s not just interested in a new kind of Christian, he wants a new kind of Christianity.
McLaren values peace and love, which are powerful virtues. These are the lenses through which he reads the Bible and formulates his theology. Peace and love are the criteria for his hermeneutics and theology.
The fundamental question for any discussion of Christian theology and practice is what kind of book the Bible is. This is the watershed issue that determines practice and theology. McLaren denies the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible. The Bible isn’t literal in any way. It’s story, not history. It isn’t true, but it teaches true things if we understanding it properly. God’s revelation isn’t in the letters on the page; God’s revelation happens in us when we read and understand what the Bible can teach us. The Bible isn’t inerrant and we shouldn’t expect it to be. It’s a collection of books, like a library, and no one expects the books in a library to have internal consistency.
McLaren tells us that historic Christianity has imposed a Greco-Roman narrative on the Bible, leading to all of the errors of doctrine and practice, which have plagued the church for at least 1500 years. He reduces traditional Christian doctrine to a six-part diagram that has been imposed on the Bible: Eden, Fall, Condemnation, Hell/Damnation or Salvation and Heaven. This, he tells us, has been imported from the culture and distorted our understanding of the Bible. McLaren offers no argument for this claim, he simply tells a good story of how he thinks this happened.
He makes what he appears to think is a significant observation: Jesus never wrote anything. He implies that what Jesus taught carries more authority than what was written, ignoring the doctrine of inspiration that Jesus, the Word of God, did superintend the writing of Genesis through Revelation. Of course, this conveniently leaves McLaren free to cherry pick what he thinks is authentic Jesus teaching and create a Jesus of his own choosing.
The rest of us are blind to this because we’re stuck in the Greco-Roman narrative, while McLaren never suggests that his view is his own narrative. No, it is presented as the true and real view. So apparently while the rest of us are skewed by a false narrative, McLaren is objective, free of presuppositions, humble, and so in a position of being able to read the Bible as it should be read. He falls into the same trap postmodernism itself suffers from: It’s self-refuting. While claiming that we’re all subject to narratives that obscure our understanding of reality and truth, postmodernism itself is a claim of reality and truth. So after asserting that a Greco-Roman narrative has obscured Christian’s reading of the Bible for millennia, McLaren claims to have the clear perspective and recommends we adopt it. All the while, McLaren’s reading of the Bible and Christianity reads like a liberal-Marxist manifesto.
He asserts the worst motives on Christians as a whole, suggesting we ask “Whom does our current approach favor or empower?”, yet he apparently is free of bad motives. My point isn’t to accuse McLaren of bad motives. I don’t know what his motives are and I don’t care. They probably are just what he claims. I’m concerned with what he says, not why he’s doing it. I bring this up because it’s another example of McLaren smearing Christianity with the broadest and dirtiest brush possible, and yet he’s above it all. He doesn’t have access to the motives of other Christians, yet he claims what they are and uses that to disparage what we believe and boot-strap his own view. It’s an illegitimate tactic. And it’s another one typical of postmodernism and Marxism, which imposes struggle for power as an overarching narrative on what the rest of us understand to be a search for truth.
McLaren doesn’t think the Bible is to be taken literally. For instance, the Garden of Eden story isn’t about sin and the Fall, rather it’s a “compassionate coming of age story.” Consequently, the whole idea of sin and Hell is a horrible overreaction and has caused the church to offer a violent message and image all these years. It follows from this interpretation then, that there is no need for the cross and Jesus’ death and resurrection. Those are violent ideas resulting from a bad reading of the Bible.
Naturally, a different view of the Bible is going to result in very different theology. So this is the key point to understand about how McLaren gets it all wrong. Either the Bible is a book from God for man, or it’s a book by man about God. For McLaren, it’s the latter. The Bible isn’t God’s revelation, rather “God’s self-revealing happens to us.” He specifically rejects the idea of “sola Scriptura” (and misrepresents it – more on that in a moment). So McLaren is free from the authority of the Bible as God’s Word to become the authority himself and conceive the God and religion he prefers Christianity to be. So Jesus is peaceful and loving; His message is peace and love; and McLaren is free to drop the Biblical passages that counter that imposed narrative.
McLaren has always gained a great deal of the traction for his views by contrasting it with a negative portrayal of ugly Christians and their offensive message and manner. McLaren’s depiction of Christianity as a whole is a grossly exaggerated, mean-spirited, unfair caricature. His version of Christianity is all the more appealing by contrast. We all know of or know personally Christians that behave badly, act meanly, and believe weird things that are, frankly, embarrassing and discredit Christianity. These kinds of people do exist in the church. But they are by no means characteristic of Christianity as McLaren has consistently claimed over the years. His depiction of Christianity, frankly, bears no resemblance to the Body of Christ.
McLaren has justifiably complained about the mischaracterizations and misrepresentations of his views by some of his critics. But he has been an egregious offender himself all along and continues in this book. While there are pockets of Christianity with some of the faults he identifies, his portrait is by no means representative on the whole. Yet his project has been to ascribe the faults to Christianity as a whole and use that as a justification for wholesale revision.
It’s this hideous, offensive straw man that McLaren erects as Christianity to make it a simple project to knock down and erect a new kind of Christianity, not just in manner, but in substance. He believes that it’s the substance of what has been taught as Christianity for 2000 years that makes Christianity an offensive failure. So a necessary part of reinventing Christianity to be effectively engaged in the world is to redefine it. And that’s what he’s doing, from the bottom up.
It’s not only McLaren’s mischaracterization of Christians on the whole that is false, he misrepresents Christian doctrine to the point of absurdity. His error is so consistent that you have to ask why we should take anything he says seriously. The primary example he cites to show the absurdity of sola Scriptura is the book of Job. McLaren claims that reading Job according to sola Scriptura requires us to take everything said in the book at face-value as true and accurate, a naïve and stupid approach. He writes (p. 89),
“God has just told us that a large proportion of what is uttered in the book of Job is false and foolish. Yet we are taught that the book of Job, being part of the Bible, is the Word of God and is inspired by God. Does that mean that God inspired the introduction and conclusion, but not the middle, where the pious blowhards speak? Or does it mean that God inspired the pious blowhards’ false statements? Or that God was pretending to inspire that part, but was crossing the divine fingers behind the divine back, so as to come out later on to say, ‘I was only kidding in that part’?
This is an absurdly wrong view of what sola Sciptura means. Since he doesn’t understand the doctrine, why should his recommendation for an alternative even be taken seriously?
McLaren proposes redefining Christianity when he patently doesn’t understand it. This is only one example of such nonsense in the book.
A lot of the disagreement about the Emergent Church has been over whether the purpose is a matter of substance or manner. McLaren has made it clear it’s about the substance and nature of Christianity, not just the style and manner of Christians.
McLaren claims to be offering a new kind of Christianity, but it’s a liberalism we’re already familiar with. The 20th century liberals got there by way of modernism, applying rationalism to theology. Brian McLaren is a postmodernist, applying deconstructionism to the Bible. The paths may be different, but the destination is the same. It’s where I figured the conclusion of all of this was headed all along, McLaren was just cagey enough to elude clarity. Now we have it. Good. Now the debate over the merits and truthfulness can truly commence.
Peace and love are valuable qualities, but they aren’t to be pursued at the expense of the truth. If the Christianity Brian McLaren recommends is a false one, as I believe it is, then his Christianity leaves people in their sin, unreconciled to God. That isn’t a peaceful or loving state to be left in for eternity. It’s not peaceful and loving to offer a false message of safety. McLaren’s message has a pleasant veneer, but it’s a false one. It’s not Christianity. It’s not what the Bible teaches.
A new article by Greg on a similar false teaching is relevant here.
Tim Challies and Kevin DeYoung have written excellent and more in-depth reviews of McLaren's new book and I highly recommend them.