This is going to be my concluding post (unless of course I think of something totally awesome to say later on) on McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. In the end I think I was underwhelmed by the book from the time it set up Plato as the root of everything that’s wrong with Christianity. It’s not even that I particularly buy into the notion of Platonic ideals (I actually found Robert Pirsig’s critique of Plato rather insightful), but once McLaren sets up “Greco-Roman” dualism and portrays it (dualistically, I might add) as everything that’s wrong with the church, the book is irreparably wrecked for me.

This is a shame because it would be helpful to have a popular-level public discussion about many of the topics in this book – if for no other reason than that it would engage many more people in really learning about their faith. Instead the discussion has generated far more heat than light. Some of the things that McLaren said that I find fairly uncontroversial have been drawn into the morass that is the criticism back and forth about this book. I mean his comments about reading the bible from a Jewish perspective and recognizing that it is a mixture of literary genres both strike me as just plain common sense. I am sympathetic towards a lot of what McLaren says, but the way he says it, his philosophical underpinnings are so unsound that he makes good topics of discussion suddenly disreputable.

I shared some of my initial impressions of McLaren’s new book in my previous (somewhat rambling) post. In this post I want to narrow my vision a little bit and look at some of the theological currents running through the first part of the book. There are a number things that McLaren is talking about and I want to pull some of these strands apart and look at them individually.

• McLaren is looking at the atonement in a way that is outside of the Western (read: Augustinian) tradition. McLaren does not call out our man in Hippo by name, but he talks about how Western Christianity changed its views of these things (for the worse) in the 5th or 6th C. – pretty obvious hint there. The obvious place (at least for me) if you want to look for an non-Western view of the atonement would be the Orthodox tradition. Yet I see little or no evidence of McLaren looking East.
• McLaren is still holding onto the Anabaptist tradition into which he was born. The place where the church got it wrong was, in his view, at the Constantinian turn. Given the pacifist streak and the rejection of political power in many strains of Anabaptist theology, it is not surprising to see someone from the Anabaptist tradition uncomfortable with state power. Many, particularly in the neo-Reformed camp are much more comfortable with the church aligning with the state.
• McLaren does not take the creation account literally. Again this is something that would trouble some evangelicals but such a view is acceptable to even the current (conservative) Vatican.

All of this is, perhaps, a long-winded way of saying that there isn’t much that is actually new in McLaren’s book, though it may be new to some of his readership. I suppose in McLaren’s defense, it’s not a secret that he writes for a popular audience and isn’t necessarily try to break new intellectual ground. While his opinions may have antecedents in other strains of Christianity, McLaren is drawing a distinction between what he believes and what evangelicals have conventionally believed.

A number of bloggers have suggested that it’s for the best that McLaren has drawn these distinctions so that people will know who is on what side. I’m not so sure about that, what seems to have happened instead is that people are putting themselves into theological crouch positions where believers are asked to pick a “side” in this. This troubles me since one of the things that I have wanted to do more reading on is different Western and non-Western views of the atonement. If I end up incorporating something non-Augustinian into what I think about the matter are people going to say “Ah ha! McLarenite! Convene the heresy trial!” or something like that? Put another way: Someone (possibly N. T. Wright) has said that they think 1/3 of their theology is wrong, they just don’t know which third it is. If we have the humility to admit that we may be very wrong about lots in our theology we should have the ability to adapt our theology if we are convicted that we are wrong about something – choosing sides and making “teams” is not a great way to facilitate this.

There have been a flurry of reviews of Brian McLaren’s recent release, A New Kind of Christianity. The book itself has provoked strong reactions both pro and contra in the blogosphere (though it seems a great deal more contra thus far, though blogging seems to be a medium better suited to disagreement anyway). This piece I’ve put together here does not really strike me as a standard review, so maybe read those more conventional reviews first (if you haven’t already) and then consider this as my sort of supplement to all that. Darryl Dash has been so kind as to lend me his own copy of ANKoC so that I could see what all the hype was about. Given that I had already had a whole set of (often negative) reviews to go on, my questions heading into this book started with “is this as bad as it seems?”

The answer probably depends in part on your existing theological commitments. If, for example, you are fairly seriously a Reformed type, you will not like this book. People who thought that N.T. Wright was a heretic should not even bother. It would be akin to trying to convince an indie kid that the new Nickelback album might appeal to them. Save your money and your outrage. Some strands of evangelical thought might be more sympathetic, but on the whole McLaren is going very much against the tide of evangelicalism and it should not shock him that many in that milieu are going to be upset with him. In and of itself that does not make him correct or incorrect. Perhaps the most cogent comment I read concerning this book came from David Fitch who wondered  whether McLaren would receive nearly as much attention if he had written this book as mainline protestant and not an evangelical. Since McLaren is not a mainline protestant, and since he is writing for an evangelical audience, he does get these strong reactions. Why would he provoke this? I’ll come back to that later.

Where McLaren’s most egregious errors are made are in his attempts to reduce to all of Western thought into dualism and then claim that only those in the tradition of classical Greek thought tend to see things dualistically. Really? That must shock a lot of Zoroastrians. Actually, it’s weirder than that, McLaren locates dualism first in the Greek tradition (Greeks vs. barbarians, flesh vs. spirit, eternal vs. temporal) and then admits that the Jews had their own sort, but then goes back again and makes it appear as though these are unique cultural traits of the Greek intellectual tradition that leads to a sort of cultural chauvinism. This is a chauvinism of its own sort since these sorts of divides exist in all manner of other cultures. The Chinese referred their empire as the “middle kingdom” and all other nations as “barbarians.” The Japanese ruling class during the Tokugawa shogunate had similar epithets for foreigners (whom they did not allow into the country for some 200 years). I use these last two examples since they clearly developed beyond the scope of Plato’s influence. McLaren boasts that he has degrees in English, well I have one in history, and once I read the mangling of the intellectual history of the West present in this book, it was hard for me to recover and consider the rest of it being that it was built on such a suspect foundation.

If one can get beyond this extremely sloppy treatment of Western thought, some of McLaren’s critiques and rebukes of Western evangelicals are things that I found myself agreeing with often. Certainly when he compared Mark Driscoll’s extremely stupid comments about not wanting to worship a god he could “beat up” to the characters in the film Talladega Nights picturing Jesus with wings fronting Lynyrd Skynyrd, I found myself nodding in agreement.

I guess the next question one comes to is, why bother? Why is McLaren writing a book aimed at evangelicals that many of them will dislike? Why doesn’t McLaren just live life quietly as a moderate-to-liberal Anglican or something? Here’s the thing that I think is happening: in spite of all his criticisms and in spite of how his theology might differ with evangelical protestantism, McLaren is still an evangelical in significant ways. Consider the evidence even in ANKoC:

• McLaren’s narrative of Western church history looks a lot like the fairly standard evangelical narrative. The church as founded by the apostles was good at some point it went bad and now we have to get back to modeling ourselves on what we think the early church was doing. McLaren just happens to have a different view of the early church than that of most evangelicals.
• McLaren’s boast about his advantage in not having any formal theological training – it sounds a lot like that anti-intellectual streak in some strains of popular American evangelicalism where even scholarship as conservative as NT Wright’s is regarded as suspicious because it requires knowing foreign languages and reading other academics who write above a ninth-grade reading level.
• Redirected culture-war paranoia: the way McLaren talks about church thought police and whatnot sounds like those Christians who think the public schools will brainwash their children into being Islamic communist homosexual abortion doctors or something. Thinking a dominant culture is “out to get you” seems to be a theme in late Western evangelicalism, in McLaren’s case the dominant culture he perceives is late Western evangelicalism – and so it goes.

So if McLaren has standard, sort of middle-of-the-road mainline theology but he still thinks of Christianity like an evangelical, where is he going? I imagine that McLaren wants to keep the best parts of his cultural evangelicalism – the pragmatism, populism, the energized community – and fuse it with a different theology. The two predominant models for contemporary protestant churches are the evangelical model which tries to be pragmatic about form but rigid in theology and the mainline model that is rigid in form and more flexible in theology. There are also some (particularly Reformed) churches that like to be very rigid in both theology and form, and McLaren seems to be going for a fourth model that is pragmatic on all fronts. Will this work? I’m going to get to that detail in a second post, stay tuned…

I’ve read some negative reviews of Brian McLaren’s latest book, A New Kind of Christianity and of course that has made me more interested in the book partly just because I want to see if it’s as bad as it is said to be. (For the record, Battlefield Earth was actually worse than I thought, so bad we couldn’t even make fun of it, which was the idea when it was rented.) Soooooo, anyone have a copy of A New Kind of Christianity they want to lend me? I’m sure it’s not as bad as anything based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard.