Tag Archives: Brian McLaren

Rob Bell and Brian McLaren: God is Leading Toward Same-Sex Marriage

23 Saturday Mar 2013

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(Credit: Faithful News)

(Credit: Faithful News)

Kristin Rudolph (@Kristin_Rudolph)

We shouldn’t be surprised as more and more prominent post-Evangelicals announce their support for same-sex marriage. Rob Bell has been in the news most recently, and he joins the company of other former pastors like Brian McLaren, who are breaking from traditional Christian teachings and following cultural trends.

As America moves beyond Christianity and formerly nominal Christians disassociate from denominations and labels entirely (becoming ‘Nones’), these culturally attuned post-Evangelicals are seeking ways to be relevant to the increasingly hostile culture. As Bell said in a recent interview with Odyssey Networks, “lots of us are realizing the old way of seeing things doesn’t work. It causes so much pain and heartache. And God’s inviting us to see things in new ways. And we need to say yes and then we need to step into the future together.”

Bell and others undoubtedly acting on a desire to reach the unreached and keep those drifting have framed a cultural trend as “God’s leading.” Simply “welcoming” without “affirming” homosexual practice is not enough for most young unbelievers. According to Ed Stetzer of LifeWay Research, “83 percent of the ‘always unchurched’ and 52 percent of the ‘friendly unchurched’ indicated that they would react negatively to a church that does not ‘welcome and affirm’ homosexuals as members. As a whole, it was 67% of the younger unchurched who said it would negatively impact their decision.”

In his interview with Odyssey Networks, Bell referenced growing cultural acceptance of homosexuality as a factor motivating his shifted view, but emphasized a supposed act of God. “What we’re seeing right now in this day, I believe God pulling us ahead into greater and greater affirmation and acceptance of our gay brothers and sisters and pastors and friends and neighbors and co-workers,” Bell said.

That may be what Bell believes, but if that’s true, it seems God is playing catch-up with the culture. For the last several years, positive media portrayals of homosexuality, effective rhetorical strategies, and numerous other factors have led to near complete cultural acceptance of SSM – especially among the under 30 crowd. As the stigma of homosexuality fades, more people “come out,” and now, it seems “everyone knows someone who is gay.” According to some estimates, around 5% of the population identifies as homosexual.

One of the most common reasons given for the growing cultural affirmation of homosexuality is personal relationships and interactions with gay people. As more people “come out,” it seems “everyone has a gay friend or family member.” Indeed, Bell stated “[W]e live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we’ve journeyed with for years who are gay.” In a short video endorsing Bell’s recent statements, Brian McLaren said learning people close to him identified as gay led him to believe “the traditional explanations for homosexuality were inaccurate and unfair … More and more pastors because of their contact with gay people and the honesty of the pastoral setting … are going to do what Rob has done, what I have done.”

With the narrative that all Evangelicals hate gay people, won’t welcome them into church, and believe they are ruining America, it’s little wonder some are putting distance between themselves and the common perception of Evangelicals. This picture is mostly false, as  surely some pastors and churches speak callously, but the most common response I hear from conservative Christians is a genuine desire to minister to those who identify as gay. These Christians believe that homosexual practice is sinful, but they are hardly venomous, hateful, and “throwing stones,” as Bell claimed.

But our culture has redefined love as unquestioning acceptance and affirmation, and sexuality is viewed as an essential part of our identity. To ask for change in that area of one’s life is seen as an attack on his dignity. Acquiescence to the cultural embrace of SSM simply follows acceptance of the watered down, mainstream definition of love at odds with scripture’s admonishment (Romans 12:2) to resist conforming to this world and submit all of ourselves to God’s will.

Book Review Part II: Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World by Brian McLaren

05 Tuesday Mar 2013

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Photo Credit: Jonathan Brink

By Aaron Gaglia (@GagliaAC)

A few weeks ago, I started reviewing Brian McLaren’s book, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World. After a bit of a delay, here is the rest of the review. As I covered the first two parts in the previous review, I will resume with part III, “The Liturgical Challenge.”

In part III, Mclaren seeks to remove “[t]he vestiges of Imperial Christianity” from the church’s praxis. “Racism, colonialism, exclusivism, elitism, and other members of the hostility family often hide camouflaged in songs and hymns, devotionals and prayers, sermons and Sunday School lessons” (168). He begins with the church calendar. He proposes such changes as devoting Holy Saturday to doubt, “the day at which we listen to agnostics and atheists and remind them, and us, that they too have a place among the people of God” (174).

He then reformulates the sacrament of Baptism as “a sign that one is repenting of all hostile identities, knowing that those identities can only lead to violent cataclysm” (185). He sees this type of baptism as John the Baptist’s reformulation of temple baptism. Citing the work of Peter Rollins, he sees being immersed into Christ as not receiving a new identity but rather the removal of all identity (citing Galatians 3:28). “To follow Christ is to share in his radical divestment of identity” (186).

He then calls for a reformulation of Christian teaching, songs, and Holy Scripture itself. “We must have the humble courage to side with some verses, prayers, and other liturgical resources and against others—not in an oppositional or a hostile way, but in a constructive, identity-forming way” (192). In speaking of Scripture, he cites Jesus’ and Paul’s quotations of the Hebrew Scripture as proof of picking and choosing, of a reformulation of the Scripture in light of the Gospel. “We will pick all passages that advocate hostility, vengeance, exclusion, elitism, and superiority to remind us of where we would be and who we would be if not for Christ. And we will choose all passages that advocate reconciliation, empathy, inclusion, solidarity, and equality to remind us of where we are going and who we are called to be in Christ—a precious identity indeed” (207).

He then reformulates the Lord’s Supper away from seeing Christ’s death as a sacrifice–away from “the gospel of penal substitutionary atonement”–to seeing his death as “the sacred self-giving of a gracious God” (210, 212). Thus through the Lord’s Supper, “we identify with it [Christ’s death], and we let our lives be reshaped by it into cruciformity so as to lay down our lives for others just as Jesus did for us all” (214). Though it is very important to see the cross as “sacred self-giving”, we cannot do this at the expense of understanding the cross as an atoning sacrifice.

Mclaren then ends the book with part IV, The Missional Challenge. In this section, he reformulates the mission of a Christian—how they live and interact with the world—in terms of love and solidarity with the other. His comments on the reformulation of evangelism sum up the spirit of these chapters. Calling Christians to a mutual conversion with the other, he writes, “This shared journey is not the call to convert from your religion to mine. It is, rather, the invitation for both of us to seek a deeper conversion that begins in our deepest religious identity and transforms all of life…We still cherish our distinctive religious identity, but we abandon what my friend Samir Selmanovic calls religious supremacy. We are converted from hostility, from seeing the other as a threat to be feared, pitied, eliminated, or refashioned into our image. We are converted into hosts and guests, practicing and receiving hospitality, sharing our treasures as gifts “(256, emphasis original).

Though this section, especially chapter 24 on “subversive friendship” presents some inspiring thoughts on multi-faith relations, sadly this model calls for interfaith relationships at the expense of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Mclaren presents the church with something that is much needed, but simultaneously removes the very truths that makes up the essence of Christianity.  St. Paul makes it very clear in his second letter to the Corinthians that one of our roles as Christians is the role of Ambassador: “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:20-21, ESV). Yet we must remember also that our religion is worthless without love (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). We must be Christians who are characterized by love as we bring the radical and demanding Gospel of Christ to a world. It is inclusive in that the call is open to everyone, yet it is exclusive in that it calls those who would receive it to repent and change both their belief and actions.

So is it possible to have genuine friendships with the other while still holding to the Gospel? Yes! If you survey a room of orthodox Christians, the vast majority will have either family or friends who hold different religious beliefs than them, yet are close to them and cherish them as a person. We have friends and family that may be offended and repulsed by our exclusive beliefs but still love and cherish us as we also love and cherish them. We must continue this tradition and take it a step further by actively seeking such relationships.

So what does such an interfaith relationship look like? It looks just like most other relationships. It includes having a genuine interest in them as a human just as you do with all of your friends. It means loving them as you love yourself. It means experiencing life with them and being there for them. It means respecting their religious beliefs and not being afraid to affirm that there is truth and common ground between your two beliefs. Yet it also includes showing them their eternal need for our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ.

I am not going to deny that exclusive beliefs may cause tension, but it is a tension we must accept. We must seek to minimize the tension through our love, but not through changing our beliefs. Let us seeks authentic and meaningful relationships with those of different faiths while maintain a fervent belief in Jesus Christ and his Gospel.

Book Review: Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World by Brian McLaren

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

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By Aaron Gaglia (@GagliaAC)

Christians are continually grappling with how to minister in this postmodern world. Though many Christians advocate changing the approach but not the message, some are calling for a restructuring of the message altogether. Brian McLaren, a prominent voice in the emergent movement, is one who is calling for a reformulation of the Christian message. His latest offering, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World, gives a rather detailed exposition of this new way of doing Christianity. This book, released on September 11, 2012, has received the 2013 Book of the Year Award by Academy of Parish Clergy. In this book, McLaren seeks to do away with the Christianity “that spent too little energy making peace and too much erecting and perfecting walls of separation, suspicion, and hostility” (McLaren,14). He seeks to create a strong benevolent Christian identity that accepts people of other faiths “not in spite of the religion they love, but with the religion they love” (32). He tries to find the middle ground between on the one hand, throwing off Christian identity in order to be benevolent to other religions, and having a strong Christian identity that is opposed to other religions.

The book is divided into four sections: I. The Crisis of Christian Identity, II. The Doctrinal Challenge, III. The Liturgical Challenge, and IV. The Missional Challenge.

Section I lays out the premise as described above, showing the need for a new Christian approach to those of other faiths. He argues that we need to go past the us/other dichotomy that demonizes those with different views than us and embrace the other as part of the us. “To be ‘in Christ’ is to be in solidarity with all people—and all creation. That solidarity contrast starkly with the realities of being ‘in Christianity’ or any other ‘Us’ religion” (48, McLaren quoting his response in an online conversation between those of varied faiths). He then goes on to grapple with the violence done in the name of religion and comes to this conclusion: “The tensions between our conflicted religions arise not from our differences, but from one thing we all hold in common: an oppositional religious identity that derives strength from hostility” (57, italics original).

As the first step in creating a new Christian identity, he takes the reader on a tour through the horrible ways Christianity has been used to propagate violence and hurt those with differing views. He goes back to Constantine, showing how Christian faith took on imperial elements. McLaren sees much of the great evil propagated in the name of Christianity arising from a doctrine of exclusivity—“the theological conviction that one group of people—Us—carries God’s blessing and favor in a way others do not. Taken further the chosen become children of God and light; the unchosen, the children of the devil and darkness. In the stark shadows of that duality, how could hostility not grow?” (93, 94). He then spends the rest of the book showing how we should “rearticulate our core Christian doctrine…healing hostility and nourishing benevolence… to creatively renew our essential Christian liturgies so they fulfill their potential for spiritual formation. And then we will be able to rediscover our compelling Christian Mission” (95, Italics original).

McLaren redefines the following key Christian doctrines: Creation, Original Sin, Election, Trinity, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. He first conjectures that our understanding of doctrine is imperialistic, “restricting not only freedom of speech but also freedom of thought, thus promoting exactly the kind of political submission that totalitarian regimes depend on [.]” He seeks instead that the idea of doctrine be changed to be “an instrument of healing” (101).

To understand his theological system, it is imperative to understand his reformulation of the doctrine of original sin. He rejects the traditional understanding of original sin which he sums up as saying: “God views all humankind…with hostility because it has lapsed from its original perfection. According to this popular understanding, God’s particular form of perfection requires God to punish all imperfect beings with eternal conscious torment in hell. So in this popular view of original sin, God’s response to anything that is less than absolutely perfect must be absolute and infinite hostility” (106). He asserts that this doctrine fosters hostility toward the other in which we “imitate the complex attitude that we understand God to have toward…sinners…and translate these learned attitudes into actions and words” (106,107). He admits that this doctrine leads some to act compassionately toward others, but if it is for the sake of evangelism he still sees it as a bad thing.

He then offers a new understanding of original sin based on the work of James Alison, a Catholic theologian who further applies philosopher Rene Girard’s work to theology. McLaren explains Girard’s mimetic theory and redefines original sin with this understanding: “…all human beings are caught in these subtle webs of destructive imitation, rivalry, anxiety, scapegoating, and ritualization…As a result, our very identity as human beings as individuals has been distorted from the image envisioned in the doctrine of creation” (110). Instead of seeing original sin as disobedience toward God that incites God’s wrath and requires divine rescue, he sees original sin as a decision to demonize and live in rivalry with the other and sees the Cross of Christ not as providing atonement for our sins, but of breaking the cycle of scapegoating that we humans created.

He removes from the doctrine of election the idea of “ ‘us’ as ‘the people of God’” and reformulates “God’s call as a vocation to be the other for the sake of others” (119, 121). Though Christians would agree with the idea that Christians are called to bless others, McLaren sees a Christianity that seeks to bless people by showing them that they are in a desperate need of Jesus as leading to hostility.

Also worth noting is McLaren’s Christology. He has Christ inform our view of God and not the other way around. He sees the God of the Old Testament and Jesus as incompatible. To make this point, he quotes from Rene Girard: “The gospel interpretation of the Old Testament can be summed up in this approach… the replacement [of] the God that inflicts violence with the God that only suffers violence, the Logos that is expelled….When the consequences of this substitution finally come to fulfillment, there will be incalculable results” (143)

He has good insights to offer, such as expounding on the Trinitarian idea of perichoresis, yet instead of supplementing Biblical and historical documents, he totally redefines the doctrines. He sees orthodox Christianity and a strong benevolent identity as incompatible. Instead of rediscovering the great power the traditional Gospel has in accepting the unaccepted and bringing reconciliation to groups hostile to each other through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, he reformulates the Gospel altogether.

I am going to stop there for now. In the coming days, look out for a follow-up blog post in which I’ll finish reviewing the book and provide an alternative for what interfaith relations should look like.

Emergent Christianity Comes to Memphis

18 Friday Jan 2013

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(Photo Credit: Flickr)

Writer Phyllis Tickle praised McLaren’s iconoclastic contributions to religious dialogue. (Photo Credit: Flickr)

At a national gathering on emergence Christianity (their term, not ours), noted writer Phyllis Tickle compared Brian McLaren’s Mere Orthodoxy to Luther’s 95 Theses and St. Anselm of Canterbury to an Islamist imam. The grandmotherly guru of post-evangelical Christianity was the star of the conference, sharing her characteristically saucy humor at her home parish of St. Mary’s in Memphis. She joined nearly four hundred attendees, including such luminaries as Tony Jones, Brian McLaren, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lauren Winner, and Doug Pagitt. A keen observer and chronicler of what she calls “the Great Emergence,” Tickle identified possible obstacles for the emergent movement to tackle in the coming years.

The founding editor of the Religion Department of Publisher’s Weekly explained, “What began as a conversation has become a movement…It won’t stay that way…What we’re talking about is a new tributary of Christianity.” Tickle instructed that, every five hundred years, Western civilization (especially members of Latinized Christianity) “goes through a rummage sale” and experiences significant paradigm shifts in all of life. “In the last forty years, things are starting to come apart,” she observed. She spent hours narrating an intellectual history of science, mathematics, politics, philosophy, and theology. She highlighted the breakdown of certainty, the erosion of authority to individualism, and especially the apparent downfall of Protestant biblical inerrancy. While the nimble and progressive emergence movement is perfectly situated to ride the relevance wave in the coming decades, more reactionary elements will experience a “realignment”—she mentioned that John Piper and Tim Keller are among the leaders of this countermovement. Ultimately, she foretold a “coming age of the Spirit,” in which dogmatic orthodoxy and claims to absolute truth (outdated artifacts from the ages of the Father and the Son) would melt before a loving communion of uncertainty.

Tickle offered important recommendations for emergent Christians. First, she intoned, “We need to address the authority issue, and we don’t know have that answer yet.” Using literary theory, emergents have excelled in tearing down claims of authority over their lives. They consider the Magisterium, confessions, creeds, and inerrancy as inadequate—they believe one can live life in contradiction with most or all of these foundations. “Scripture will play a part. The Holy Spirit will have a role in establishing authority in emergence Christianity.” Earlier, she claimed, “Emergents…believe the Scripture is actually true. Most people in the pews want it to be factually true.” Tickle commended the group for avoiding the “arrogance…that God can be trapped in our understanding.” The emergent thinker labeled the Bible as “patriarchal” (“only a fool” would think otherwise), condemned the concept of a closed canon of Scripture, and still supports homosexuality even though “the Bible is not in favor of homosexuality—it just isn’t. The approval is not there.”

Second, she advised, “You and I and our children and grandchildren are going to have to form a theology of religion.” Like many Christians, emergents struggle to be committed believers living alongside other people of earnest faith—all without falling into civil unrest. Nevertheless, the Episcopal lay woman criticized former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey for calling on European courts to address English courts who are attacking the religious liberty of Christians and caving in to Sharia law. Tickle preferred the opportunity to lump Islam into the Judeo-Christian stream, creating the category of “Abrahamics.” “Can we do that without universalism?” she inquired, “Christian universalism is an oxymoron looking for a place to park…We need something more than the elephant getting feeled up by the five blind Hindus [sic].”

The noted speaker also contended, “We need to devise a new doctrine of the atonement.” Informing the audience that there are at least six kinds of atonement theory, she excoriated the penal substitutionary view of redemption. This “bloody sacrifice” approach is the evangelical staple, teaching that Christ took upon God’s wrath against Law-breaking sinners upon himself as a substitute, thus purchasing grace and mercy for believers. “It won’t play anymore,” Tickle stated. She traced this view back to the broader satisfaction theory of St. Anselm of Canterbury. According to her revision, after failing to stave off the First Crusade, Anselm decided to write his Cur Deos Homo to comfort soldiers doomed to die in the Holy Land. She audaciously analogized, “It was like the way some radical imams tell suicide bombers that, if they strap twenty grenades on and blow themselves up, they’ll get twenty virgins in paradise.” However, emergents have so deconstructed this view of redemption and its offshoots that they have lost a coherent explanation for the Incarnation and crucifixion.

Finally, Tickle warned her peers, “For the first time in history, we don’t know what a man is.” Setting him apart for thinking, memory, emotional affiliation with a tribe, and language have all fallen away to scientific research. Moreover, drugs can change someone into a completely different person. She rhetorically pondered, “Maybe I’m just a wash of chemical over neurons in my head.” In short, Tickle outlined that contemporary men do not know what a soul is. She concluded that end of life issues, abortion, capital punishment, robotics, transhumanism, and other questions of personhood cannot be addressed until this question of the soul finds an answer.

Regardless, Phyllis Tickle has high hopes for the emergent movement. She deemed that Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy functions like the Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 Theses (albeit without the ensuing papal bulls and peasant revolts). If McLaren truly is of similar stature to Martin Luther (a doubtful point), then perhaps Tickle is most like Martin Bucer: granting identity, unity, and self-awareness to a disruptive movement. However, instead of a reform for the entire Western Church, Tickle generally addresses dysfunctional Protestants who have read too much Derrida. Whereas Bucer strove to tie together Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and Calvinism; Tickle attempts to unite such disparate chords as the neo-monastics, oldline “hyphenateds,” and the non-denominational “emerging.” Even if emergent Christianity’s presence is so far relegated to the bywaters of Anglo-America, the emergents themselves think highly of their matron.

Bart Gingerich is a research assistant with the Institute on Religion and Democracy. You can follow him on Twitter at @bjgingerich.

The Second Coming of Christ and Islamophobia

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

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By Aaron Gaglia

Yesterday, Brian Mclaren posted a link to an article entitled “Jesus Loves His Enemies…and Then Kills Them All” written by Aaron Miller. This article is in a series that seeks to combat Islamophobia by showing the hypocrisy of Christians and Jewish people who decry the violence of the Qur’an. Miller seeks to show that the Bible has “far more violent” content then what is contained in the Qur’an. Miller states in a disclaimer to this series that he wants people to see that one religion is not more violent than another religion but that there are both “peaceful and violent interpretations of religion.” In order to make this point, he spends this article showing how Jesus—the epitome of Christian peace and non-violence—will actually be very violent in his second coming.

He argues that just as critics invalidate the peaceful saying of Muhammad by his subsequent violent sayings, one can as easily invalidate the sayings of Jesus. He points to the Jewish conception of Messiah as the one who would defeat Israel’s enemies and restore Israel as a nation. He then shows how this militaristic understanding of the Messiah is consistent with the Christian understanding of the Second Coming of Christ. He quotes extensively from Revelation showing that Jesus will not “love his enemies” in his second coming but will “destroy them.”

A main point he is making throughout the article is how unfair it is that many people compare the most peaceful verses of the Bible with the most violent verses of the Qur’an when both contain peaceful and violent verses. He ends the article by stating how Muslims should respond to Christians who exalt Jesus above Muhammad because he loved his enemies: “Jesus loved them so much that he kills them.”

Though this article is polemical, it raises points that all Christians need to grapple with. We need to avoid caricatures of Islam based on certain texts outside of their theological and historical context. We do not want people to accuse us of condoning the stoning of adulterers or waging war in the name of God based on a bad reading of Scripture. Similarly, we need to be careful not to do similar things to Muslims. As Christians we need to make sure that we understand what the Quran says and how Muslims interpret it to make sure we do not inaccurately characterize Muslims.

Yet the presence of these “violent” verses in our Scriptures does not mean we should ignore the atrocities being committed in the name of Allah in our present day and age. Terrorist organizations such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah (translated Party of God) all claim to be Islamic organizations. In addition, arguably the greatest threat to international security, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is as its name states, an Islamic nation. Although we cannot dismiss the violent passages in the Bible, we can honestly say that in our present day and age much more terrorism and oppression is being done in the name of Islam than in the name of Christianity. This does not mean that Islam inevitably leads to violence, but merely that certain organizations and people within theme are using Islam currently in the name of violence and terrorism.

Islamophobia is a phenomenon that we cannot overlook. There are many who wrongly characterize Muslims as innately violent people. As Christians, and people of integrity, we must reject all errant characterizations of and prejudices against Muslims. We must be characterized by loving and seeking to understand them. Yet at the same time, loving Muslims does not mean that we deny or downplay the great atrocities being committed in the name of Islam. We must continue to oppose Islamist groups while seeking to understand the full continuum of Islam and not just an extremist pocket of it.

Yet in addition to raising questions about Islamophobia, this article is also a call for Christians to deepen their understanding of the passages in Scripture describing violence and judgment. Brian Mclaren deals with Jesus’ second coming by advocating “alternate understandings” of eschatology. Yet must we subscribe to such a reading of eschatology? Is the idea of Jesus punishing his enemies something we need to shy away from? Does this show an inconsistency in Jesus’ character or make him unloving? I would love to hear your thoughts and I will write my thoughts in the near future.

For your reading pleasure, below are links to the articles I mentioned:

Brian Mclaren’s blog post

Jesus Loves His Enemies….And Then Kills Them All

Disclaimer to The Understanding Jihad Series: Is Islam More Likely Than Other Religions to Encourage Violence? (Above post is a part of this series)

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