Brian McLaren Warns U.K. Audience of U.S.-Initiated Nuclear War

on October 6, 2011

U.S. nuclear weapons and American Christians are destabilizing forces that threaten to set afire an Israeli/Palestinian “tinderbox” and ultimately trigger a disastrous war, according to the Emergent Church movement’s chief guru.

“I think the most likely scenario for a nuclear war that could have worldwide consequences would involve my country some way intervening in the Middle East,” warned author Brian McLaren to an English audience. He assessed the situation in the Middle East as “unsustainable.”

“Behind the status quo is American policy,” McLaren alleged. “And behind American policy is the Christian community in the United States that has deep connections all around the world and an attitude of unconditional, uncritical support for the state of Israel and complete lack of concern for the well-being of the Palestinians.”

McLaren spoke in August at the annual Greenbelt Festival, a liberal Christian gathering in Cheltenham, England that attracted 20,000 people over four days. The increasingly left-wing annual festival, once historically evangelical, has come under increasing criticism in recent years by evangelical detractors who object to anti-Israel speakers championed by the festival, among others.

 

“Disaster Prevention”

Acknowledging that he was wading into a sensitive issue, McLaren sought to pre-empt controversy.

“I’m quite certain that if any of the talks that I give at Greenbelt this year are disseminated through Greenbelt and then picked up by different groups, that every line that I’m about to say will be highly scrutinized by certain people looking for something to put on the internet to call me anti-Semitic or to call me intolerant,” McLaren predicted. “It’s very hard to speak about this subject without being accused of absurd and awful things.”

The emergent church guru identified as problematic the practice of being “pro-Israeli in a way that makes you anti-Palestinian, or pro-Palestinian in a way that makes you be anti-Israeli.”

“I’m going to try to do some disaster prevention,” McLaren explained, sharing his outspoken record in favor of the elimination of nuclear weapons.

“We are at a point in history where every Christian, every person of moral and ethical conscience should agree that nuclear weapons – now the cost of being used – is far greater than any value that is brought by their continued existence,” McLaren determined. “Even people who defended nuclear weapons in the cold war era say now the danger of non-state actors, terrorist groups, getting nuclear weapons and using them means that any deterrent value that they had now is outweighed by the danger of them being used by terrorists.”

McLaren briefly suggested a hypothetical India-Pakistan conflict as possibly going nuclear but focused his speaking time on Israel potentially having to retaliate against a hostile state that used nuclear weapons against it.

“Israel would take drastic means of retaliation which then you could imagine would have retaliation from some of Israel’s neighbors and, pretty soon, the number one nuclear power in the world, the United States, would very likely come in support of Israel,” McLaren envisioned, asking why Christians were not more active in trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian “tinderbox” so that it would become less likely to occur.

Anecdotally citing a trip to Central America in which widespread support of Israel was on display, McLaren suggested that Pentecostal and charismatic “fervent support of Israel” had spread with the impoverished seeking more prosperity by blessing Israel. Prosperity Gospel preachers had added the “good luck charm” of Israel to their teachings, McLaren reported with disdain.

 

Countering Heresy of “Selective Theology”

The emergent church figure warned that an idea of God favoring one group – such as Jews or Arabs — over another was a harmful “selective theology.”

“It is time for Christians to firmly and decisively call that a heresy,” McLaren determined.

Claiming that it was “not uncommon” in his childhood to hear anti-Semitic statements in evangelical churches, McLaren alleged “a long and deep history of Christian anti-Semitism” and suggested that evangelicals were now making an effort to repent of an anti-Semitism of past by “transferring” it to Islamophobia or an anti-Palestinian bias now.

The emergent church guru demanded that Christians reject the theologies that he claimed “created and legitimized the status quo.”

“We have to say that we are members of a failed religion, a religion that when it was put to the test [in Nazi Germany], it failed,” McLaren judged. “Let that failure make us humble and more determined for those stories not to repeat themselves in the future.”

 

“Violent Apocalypticism”

In seeking to prevent future nuclear war, McLaren outlined four suggested changes in Christian theology.

First, he called for rejecting a “violent apocalypticism” based on a literally interpreted Revelation chapter 19, in which a returning Jesus wields a sharp sword to strike down the nations and rules with an iron scepter. Revelation, McLaren argued, should be viewed as an “evolutionary” apocalyptic transformation.

“If you believe the world is going to be destroyed violently through war, then you are in all likelihood going to be on the side of it happening, thinking you are doing God’s will,” McLaren cautioned. “But if you believe that the world is going to be transformed by people following in the way of Jesus, you will behave very differently.”

Secondly, McLaren urged changing an absolutist, dualist thinking “of good guys and bad guys,” a way of thinking that he charged made it difficult to see the person on the other side as a human being. The thought process, McLaren argued, made it easy to put perceived opponents in a refugee camp, behind a dividing wall, occupy territory or to “drop a bomb on them and be done with them.”

“It’s called ethnic cleansing because we’ve turned them into cockroaches, we’ve turned them into dirt, we’ve turned them into cancer or a disease,” McLaren said. “Part of our job as the body of Christ is to look at the other who is being dehumanized and to go stand with them and say ‘no’, to us this is a human being who bears the image of God, who is as precious as anyone else. Be that person lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, be that person Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, be that person a drug dealer, a sex worker, whoever the person is where dehumanization happens. We move from an absolutist, dualist mindset to a mindset of recognizing the image of God in all people.”

Third, McLaren spoke against exclusivism “that God accepts a few and rejects everyone else.”

Quoting missionary Lesslie Newbigin, McLaren said that God calls people to a position of service rather than privilege, and that a doctrine of election should be viewed accordingly.

Lastly, McLaren spoke against a “disease of Empire” that he described as based on a belief that safety necessitated being in control, a “peace through domination strategy.”

“My country is living by it; I hope we are getting tired of it,” McLaren alleged. “This is the belief that animates certain sectors of the Israeli government.”

In contrast, McLaren said Christ offers an alternative that “You can only be safe when you love your neighbor,” and that the United States has “built peace where we’ve decided to stop seeing ‘the other.’”

 

Redefining the Gospel

McLaren proposed that there were “many failures” in Christian teaching, among them a failure to instruct that “election is to privilege with responsibility.” While the prosperity gospel touts how “God wants to bless me,” McLaren said, that blessing is “so that I can be a blessing to others.”

“I used to believe that the Gospel was primarily information on how to help people go to heaven,” McLaren recalled. “That was based on an assumption about the doctrine of original sin, that the whole reason God set the world up was to get people into heaven, and that after original sin everyone’s going to hell and we need to get people out of that hell line and into a line toward heaven.”

McLaren said that he no longer understood the Bible as being about that story.

“When I looked at Jesus’ actual message, it was a message about the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of heaven, and I realized that wasn’t about going to heaven when you die, that was God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven,” McLaren said. “It forced me to go back and re-read a lot of the Bible and ask ‘is this just what the Bible actually says or is this what we have said the Bible says?’”

“I don’t think the primary question of the Bible is who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, the primary question of the Bible is ‘how can we help God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven?’”

 

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