Just wanted to call your attention to some great conferences coming up in the next month. Already there's been the Convergence women's conference in Portland and the Theology After Google conference at Claremont. But not to worry, there are plenty more on the docket. In fact, if you wanted to, you could go to something every weekend from now until May. You can find links to all of these in my right-hand sidebar, but here's another list:

Labels: conferences

Last month I contributed a series of posts for the newly redesigned website for my church here in Austin, Journey Imperfect Faith Community. I decided to focus on the topic of "evangelism" because of my desire to see Journey grow and bless even more people like we've been blessed by it. Anyhow, here are links to all five of my posts if you are interested in reading them. (BTW, I had a 300 word limit, which is why they are so short and why I don't say everything I potentially could have about the subject.)

Labels: evangelism

Nathan Gilmour, who knows way more about Greek philosophy than I ever will (and that is in fact saying something, since I actually do know quite a bit about Greek philosophy), recently raised some criticisms of Brian McLaren's treatment of Plato & Aristotle in A New Kind of Christianity. I thought about raising these same questions of Brian myself for part of the Q&R series we just did, but to be honest the questions were better coming from Nathan than from me anyway. Fortunately Brian was willing to respond to Nathan's concerns, and has posted his reply here.

Labels: A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren

So I just noticed that apparently the last series of posts with Brian McLaren finally put my stat counter for this blog over 100,000 unique visitors in the 5-years since I put the counter on it. Woo hoo!!!

Labels: fun, personal

Maybe it's because I'm in grad school, but it feels wrong to write a review of McLaren's book without citing all the other reviews I read in preparation for my own. I linked to a few in my post, but didn't even come close to scratching the surface of the ones out there that I looked at (which themselves were only a tiny fraction of all the ones out there now.) I've also included a few more decent reviews that have come out since I wrote my own. I certainly don't agree with all of these, and some even make me angry, but it is important to listen to people who think differently than yourself, and get multiple perspectives on any issue, so if you're interested in reading the good, the bad, and even the ugly, here you go:Mike Morrell - Brian & Spencer’s Excellent Adventure, On the McLaren Nay-sayers, The Excellency of Christ in ‘A New Kind of Christianity’, Brian McLaren: ‘I enthusiastically affirm the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. I’m a wholehearted Trinitarian.’

Labels: A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren

Here's the last of my questions for Brian McLaren about his most recent book, A New Kind of Christianity. You can read the rest here: Part I, Part II, Part III.

4) How do you respond to recent criticisms that you have mis-represented evangelical theology with your Greco-Roman six-line narrative?

Many forms of the real Christianity experienced on the ground by many people - in both Protestant and Catholic settings - has many of the negative elements of the six-line narrative I talked about. Of course there are positive elements right along with the negative ones, which brings us back to the "let's try to get beyond dualism, even though it's an ingrained habit for all of us" discussion we had earlier. Of course I'm not talking about the best idealized forms of the faith that every group holds in their hearts.

And of course, I said this in the book many, many times. Here's one example from p. 27:

Labels: A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren

Here's the third of my questions for Brian McLaren about his most recent book, A New Kind of Christianity. You can read the rest here: Part I, Part II.

Here's my third question:

3) In both your discussion of whether God is violent, and in your outline of the seven quests you seem to offer an evolutionary/developmental history of religions in which older, more primitive and more violent forms eventually progress and evolve into "higher" forms. I have a few concerns about this view. a) Doesn't this play into the Modern myth of progress whereby we believe our current forms of religion to be inherently superior to everyone else's (even if we admit that they're not yet fully evolved)? b) Is this even historically accurate? For instance, monotheism and polytheism have coexisted throughout history, many noble forms of polytheism still currently exist in our world today, and it doesn't seem as if one necessarily developed out of the other.

Great question. The other day I read through all the comments on a couple of blogs - well over two hundred - and several people brought this up, as did the CT review itself. First, as some people have already pointed out, to make a simple equation - evolution = modernistic progress - is pretty facile. There was a modernistic kind of evolutionary theory, and there are postmodern forms, and still other forms will follow no doubt. Similarly, to say that later is always superior or that more advanced is always good and less advanced is always bad is also simply ridiculous. That's like saying that lions are superior to grass, or that lions are good and grass is bad, when in fact lions can't survive without gazelles that eat grass, and when lions die, they fertilize grass that feeds gazelles. It's all connected and interdependent. So much of our us/them thinking flows from a set of modernist assumptions that a lot of us left behind a long time ago, or started trying to leave behind. Because they're deeply ingrained in all of us. And that's not bad! It's just there.

So let's talk about evolution. Evolution produces dinosaurs, ground sloths, and mastodons. My guess is that dinosaurs were more advanced in many ways than the primitive birds that outlived them and evolved into the birds we have today. And ground sloths could have been much more advanced in evolutionary terms - I'm just guessing here - than the tree sloths that still survive today, and mastodons may have been more advanced - I don't know - than the elephants that survive today. Many times, the more advanced forms become extinct and the more primitive forms survive. The key to survival isn't how advanced you are, but how adaptable you are, or how well suited you are to an environment that may or may not change. And on top of that, there are huge variables in how change happens ... like sudden meteor impacts and gradually advancing ice ages ... that mess up any simple schemas of progression.

So just as you said regarding monotheism and polytheism, when something new develops out of something else, it doesn't always replace it. Sometimes the two coexist for millennia. So you still have very primitive crocodiles that have hardly changed for millions of years, plus many species of lizards that have been evolving constantly into many new forms from common amphibian ancestors with the crocodiles - again, I'm just making this up, not knowing the details of crocodile and chameleon evolution. And there are times when adaptation involves losing features, losing previous advances, losing previous capacities ... so snakes lose their legs, and some cave species lose their eyes, and whales lose their legs and ability to walk on land.

That, to me, is a beautiful thing about evolution in God's creation, as opposed to a facile formulaic caricature of evolution. Survival of the fittest doesn't mean what so many people think it means - that everything moves towards one form surviving by eliminating all other forms. Evolution is this amazing random factory that produces novelty, interdependence, growth and challenge and development ... story as opposed to state.

I think it's a kind of fourth-grade understanding of evolution that makes all these false assumptions ... that newer is better, that newer replaces older, that advanced survive and primitive don't, that primitive is bad (or the reverse!) and so on. By the way, in an evolutionary mindset as I understand it, it could be that a hundred years from now, Evangelicalism, Mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, Pentecostalism, and Eastern Orthodoxy as we know them could all be tiny embattled minorities, having been largely replaced by vicious, ugly, and "primitive" forms of fundamentalism or magical prosperity theology ... Or Christianity and Islam and Judaism could be reduced to almost nothing through mutually assured nuclear destruction, and nearly everyone could have decided that it's just too dangerous to believe in one God. It makes me think of Paul in Romans and Jesus in John 15, reminding the early disciples that they shouldn't be arrogant: they're a branch that has been grafted in for a time, but if they don't bear good fruit, they won't remain in their blessed position.

Which brings some other factors into the mix: power, arrogance, and complacency. Let's say that you and I agree as Christians that theism is more true and "better" than atheism. Could it still be true that atheists have an important job to do, for some time at least - to keep theists from becoming too powerful, too arrogant, too complacent, and too challenge them to greater maturity? Or could it be that the doubts raised by atheists are the only thing that will push theists to a more mature understanding of God? (And of course, if atheists were in power, they would similarly need to be challenged by theists, or they would become no less powerful, arrogant, and complacent. And if atheism were in fact truer and better - as atheists believe, we theists could still bring some blessings and benefits to atheists they wouldn't have without us.)

I started watching this science fiction show Caprica recently, and I think they're playing with these kinds of questions in that series, with monotheists and polytheists squaring off. In that light, might we even be able to talk about how the doctrine of the trinity is a way of avoiding some of the dangers of an unmodified monotheism, by keeping alive in our concept of God the idea of otherness? It's very easy to have otherness without unity, or unity without otherness, but it seems to me that in the beauty of the trinity, we have oneness and one-anotherness.

I'm sure all of this will make no sense to some people, but you asked an interesting question that stimulated these thoughts.

Labels: A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren

Brian McLaren has graciously offered to answer some of the questions I have for him about his latest book, A New Kind of Christianity, which I reviewed here last week. Given the amount of misunderstanding and rather uncharitable accusations floating around out there about Brian's book, Brian and I agreed that this might be a great way to help bring some clarity to the conversation. I had a number of different questions for him, and he provided rather lengthy responses, so I'll be posting them here one question at a time over the next several days. You'll notice that as an aspiring church historian my questions tend to run in that vein, so I apologize if I didn't happen ask the questions most burning in your own mind, but I hope some of you will find these responses illuminating nonetheless.
1) More than a few times in the book you seemed to adopt the "Fall of the Church" narrative common to many Protestants (and especially Anabaptists and Restorationists, not to mention the Social Gospel folks), in which the mainstream of Christianity took a very bad detour shortly after the time of the apostles and only now are we rediscovering what the message of Jesus was really about. My questions for you about this are: a) Is it really so bad as all that? Aren't there any streams in Christian history where the gospel you describe in ANKoC can be found? What happened to a "generous orthodoxy"? b) If you really do think this is a wholly new rediscovery, isn't it a little bit arrogant to claim that we're the first ones to have been able to figure it out? And more importantly, wouldn't that imply a rather pessimistic view of the Holy Spirit and her work of guiding the church throughout the past 20 centuries? c) If you're not actually saying that, then what would be a better way to understand your own view of church history?

Brian responded to each part of my question separately:
Absolutely! I think it's everywhere to some degree, because the gospels were read in every church service through most of history - one of the great strengths of our liturgical churches, by the way. But I think it shines out very brightly in many beautiful resurgences, but none of them perfect or pristine (I just don't think in those terms when I think of creatures ... only the Creator is light in whom there is no darkness at all, and even more amazing, that light overcomes darkness!). I would point to Benedict, to the Celts, to St. Francis and the communities that he inspired, to the Anabaptists, to the Quakers, to the early Methodists and earliest Pentecostals, and to many others. But again, none of these groups are perfect or ideal, and the others aren't terrible and fallen. I don't buy into that unfallen/fallen dualism at all. We're all in this together.


I guess it must have seemed that I was being ungenerous to versions of Christianity that became violent in the Roman way? There I would want to echo Paul - the problem isn't flesh and blood people; the problem is a "spirit" in the Walter Wink sense, a spirit that, as Jesus said, motivates people to kill other people and think they're doing God a service. And I feel I need to be very direct when addressing that spirit, because it's still around, and frankly, I think if it were to express itself in today's world as it did in, say, racism or apartheid or anti-semitism or colonialism or crusades or inquisitions in the past, its beachhead would be in two places, first in the nation today that is most like Rome in the ancient world, and second, in the networks today that are most like the Zealots in the ancient world.


Of course that would be arrogant. But I never say anything like that. If there is a wholly new discovery, it's the revelation of God that comes through Jesus. That's been there all along, and it's up to us in every generation to receive that revelation and take in all of it we can. I'm sure I've only imbibed the tiniest fraction of it, so I would never ever claim to have "figured it out!" I do echo John Robinson's words, that the Lord always has more truth and light to show forth from his holy word. And I do believe that Jesus was right when he said that there are things that his disciples at any moment can't bear to hear, so the Holy Spirit brings us along as we're ready and able to learn - not just as individuals, but as churches, denominations, nations, civilizations. So I just want to be listening to what the Spirit is telling us now, just as our ancestors sought to hear what the Spirit was telling them then.

I try to make this clear in the book again and again - I'm not in any way saying we've arrived. Sheesh, that would be arrogant! (Although, ironically, those who are claiming that I say this seem in some ways to be saying it themselves - as in, "He hasn't arrived; We arrived a long time ago!") Again, we've got to get beyond that dualism that wants to say "we're right, they were wrong; we've arrived, they haven't." I try to model a different way of seeing things in the book, but it's notoriously hard to break old habits, both for me and for my readers, I'm sure. I try to make clear: my metaphor isn't dualistic statements/debates/states, but rather narrative questions/conversations/quests. So just because we're trying to get something through our heads now ... that doesn't mean we have any right to feel superior, that we're now in the "good" state and others are in the "bad" state. We wouldn't be getting what we're getting now unless our ancestors got what they got before us. We wouldn't be doing calculus if they hadn't created algebra. We wouldn't be doing Einstein if they hadn't done Newton. It's not us better-than them, but us because of them, us and them on a common quest across not only generations but millennia. It's not better and worse, good and bad.


I hope what I've just said addresses that. I'm not denying for a minute that the Holy Spirit was at work. I see the Spirit at work everywhere; today I'm listening, maybe tomorrow I won't be, which is why we all need to pay attention to our hearts, our receptivity, our repentance. This is so much about spirituality and heart, not just intellect and argument.

But I don't want to miss the importance of your question, so let's take the story of slavery, which I address in Chapter 7. Back in the 19th century, people could have said the same thing to the abolitionists. "Are you denying that the Holy Spirit has been at work in us all these centuries when we have accepted slavery as normative? Aren't you being pessimistic about the Holy Spirit? And arrogant too?" And of course, pro-slavery advocates did say exactly these things. For me the key is stepping out of the whole dualistic mindset that sees one group as perpetually right and another group as hopelessly wrong. I just don't see it that way. This also relates to the brief section where I talk about movements and institutions near the end of the book. I don't think that God is in movements and not in institutions, or the reverse. I think God is in both ... and God is trying to get each to contribute and listen to the other without becoming the other.


To me, it's a story of growth. But I think we'll get deeper into that in your question about evolution. For now, try this: what if the church sits in relation to God the way science sits in relation to the physical universe. Both are communities. Both are interacting with their appropriate subject. But are making their very best observations at any given moment. Both are filled with statement and counterstatement, theory and countertheory. And both are making painstaking progress over time. There are both breakthroughs and setbacks, advances and retreats. It's not smooth and neat or predestined. There are some rabbit trails and dead ends. Later forms don't mock their ancestors, but neither do they feel afraid to move beyond the assumptions of their ancestors to ask new questions and sometimes overturn old theories. Nobody says (today at least) that Einstein was unorthodox because he dared to see the world outside the lenses given him by Sir Isaac Newton. They see Einstein as the successor to Newton, as standing on his shoulders, so to speak. So I see church history as a kind of parallel to scientific history ... just as reality is always there for science to engage with, the Spirit of God is always present for us to engage with. And just as science can get so involved with its theories or internal politics or funding squabbles or pursuit of wealth that is sometimes loses its way, so can we. But reality - and God - are always waiting for us to return to, to engage with, to learn from, to be curious about. How does that work? (I wish I would have included something like this in the book, now that I think about it ...) No analogy is perfect, of course ...

By the way, this analogy would provide another reason why the Bible and the spiritual life are so important to me, which is one of the things that my most liberal friends might still see as conservative and evangelical. If stones and light and water and organisms are the realities that scientists engage with, it seems to me that the Scriptures and life in the presence of God are the realities that we Christians engage with. And that's why I appreciated in your review that you mentioned how the book has some engagement with Scripture in each question. I was shocked to see some of the commenters on the blogs completely ignore that, and actually claim that there was no Scriptural engagement. I guess we all see what we want to see, and find it hard to see what we don't want to see. I really hope that readers will take my engagement with Scripture seriously - grappling with Jonah, Job, John, Romans, Acts, Genesis, etc.

Labels: A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren