"A New Kind of Heretic"

[I have a rant too...]

This was the title of a review of Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian that I just read off of amazon.com. I have to preface what I'm saying with the fact that I have yet to read McLaren's book (or anything by him), but this review and others that gave the book a terrible rating say some things that get my feathers ruffled.

It really bothers me when people condemn an opinion for speaking to something outside of their familiarity or for calling into question the whys and hows of the things we do. Especially when these people call themselves Christians. For me, the people writing these reviews seem to be the same sorts of people who will rant and rave against ministries like xxxchurch.com because of the use of "Pete the Porno Puppet" and the casual way in which the pastors and caregivers speak of pornography and its deadening effects. But let me return to the idea at hand...

There were several negative reviews of McLaren's book, and one of them made a claim that struck me as a bit odd. Perhaps the author of the post didn't realize the oddity (and I'm inclined to believe that). The poster mentions that he agrees with an idea that McLaren espouses: a need for a revision of evangelism. Yet he then says that McLaren's revisions don't capture the HEART of the gospel, and are therefore defunct and even more deadly than keeping with the "old system". The HEART of the gospel is, the poster claims as if all should know, "justification by faith through grace".

This just isn't the case.

I don't believe it.

The heart of the gospel, to me, is restoration and redemption and mercy and grace. Yes, we are justified to God and all of our sins are wiped away, but this is the message of the Cross and of what it means to come to faith. And this is where I was stuck in my life for so long, because the idea of justification doesn't move beyond the Cross, it stays there. It can't move beyond the Cross, and if it can't move beyond the Cross then we, who adhere so strongly to it, also cannot move beyond the Cross.

Let me explain a bit better. The idea for me is not that we are to do away with the Cross or that it doesn't continue to be useful in our lives (especially when we sin and are in need of repentance and during the meditative seasons of the Christian calendar like Lent). It is a central piece of the Christian faith, but is only the catalyst for the rest of the story of the Kingdom of God. When we claim that "justification by faith through grace" is the HEART of the gospel, then we clearly mean that this is the most important and fundamental piece of evangelism and the one thing that we should remember should we miss everything else. It is this kind of theology and attitude towards this theology that I think has caused a great deal of misery in my own life as well as in the life of the Church at large (at least in America, and at least in those churches who are loosely associated with Southern Baptism).

Throughout my life I've always heard that Jesus came to die for our sins; all we have to do is accept him as our personal savior and we would be guaranteed a spot in heaven. That's a nice story, and it definitely comes from Scripture. But I think it's quite incomplete. What I mean is that this is only a starting point, it is not the whole picture. What it is is the Cross - it is the knowledge that we are a sinful people who, through our own hubris, have decided that we are going to do things as we see fit rather than as God sees fit. "Justification by faith through grace" is this first piece, it is what happens when we accept our rebellion against the Lord of hosts and desire to return to His bosom. It is the first step in faith: belief. Yet merely believing is not enough - in fact, the demons believe as we recall. What happens after we are justified to God through Christ Jesus? What is our life's goal then?

For me growing up, the lifegoal wasn't really an option - I figured I'd teach English and tithe and go to church and be just fine. Remember, I was justified to God - nothing could happen to me and there was no way that I could lose my place in heaven. Life on earth became completely meaningless and I personally found it easier to just do my own thing with little regard for anything or anyone else. What I needed, and then found in Shane Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution and later in the Scriptures, was a raison d'être, and the doctrines that I'd grown up believing weren't giving that to me. It really wasn't enough for me to believe that God has everything under control and that we are just to pray and go about life; it's not enough to just sit around waiting to die and get to heaven when the fun could begin. I think I even started to become discontent in the early years of high school when someone on some retreat let me know that "abundant life" began on earth. And it took the better part of eight years to finally find out what it meant - leading small groups and volunteering, I now realize, were frustrating because I could not offer other Christians anything else aside from more head knowledge and a rebellious attitude toward institutions that didn't meet my own expectations.

Art has always influenced me greatly. I'm moving toward a greater appreciation for beauty in entropy and cacophony. Even when I was dissatisfied with the theology that I'd been brought up with, I leaned heavily on art to express this. It's not that I was creative, but that I needed something that would allow me to feel what I was feeling and have that be legitimate. Slipknot and Mudvayne moved me from the realm of conformity to the realm of non-conformity, albeit with a pretty terrible attitude and language. TOOL and Nine Inch Nails have moved me from the realm of doctrine (in an absolute truth sense - in thinking that I'm always right) to the realm of thinking for myself. And I don't think it's an accident that the first musical journey accompanied me throughout my high school career and that the second musical journey accompanied me throughout my college career. I'd like to think I grew in taste as well, but that can be decided later.

It's the same for me with the Church. I moved from a community church (loosely Southern Baptist) to no church - conformity to non-conformity. I also moved from that no-church period (during the middling years of college) to a newborn liturgical church that has a wide variety of people within it and a wide theological base - from the realm of the doctrine that I once held so tightly to the realm of thinking for myslef; I was encouraged to question and act. My answer, at least recently, has been to embrace liturgy and what some might call the Emerging Church. The questions that McLaren and others (see Rising From the Ashes: Rethinking Church by Becky Garrison for an overview of EC) are raising about the way to do church and to go about life are invigorating. The idea that Shane Claiborne espouses in Irresistible Revolution (in essence, that the Church should be meeting spiritual needs while meeting physical needs in many areas of the world; fighting for justice and peace without corporeal weapons; proclaiming a gospel of redemption by grace and calling others to live into that) is what I have found to live for. Yet it's not his ideas or the ideas of other leaders of this emerging revolution, but the ideas of Christ. After reading his book, I've understood the gospels not only differently, but better. I hear the call on my own life when Christ tells the rich young ruler to sell all he has and give it to the poor, I live the mysteries of faith for myself (the Eucharist, prayer, etc.), and I have developed (though not through my own doing) a heart that is more compassionate, more loving, more willing to be hurt, and more attuned to the moving of God on earth.

I think that it's always surprised me when those who speak much of theology that they pull very little from Christ's own life and words and much more from St. Paul's letter to the Church in Rome and the anonymous letter to the Hebrews Christians around the world (though I'd make the case that Paul was the author of this text as well). When I was younger, I'd try to take the pieces of Romans and Hebrews and thereby interpret Christ's words and commands and make them fit into the strict theology that I had immersed myself in. But now, I take the words of Christ and the story of redemption (which, in Genesis, had been foreshadowed since the fall) and thereby interpret and attempt to understand how Paul and the other writers of Scripture (especially those in the New Testament) came to the conclusions that they did for the societies for whom they wrote.

I believe that they were divinely inspired and that the Bible as the Protestants have it (without Maccabees and Tobit and the other books of wisdom) is how God intended it. I don't believe that it's somehow a manual for life in the 21st century - I'm not quite that naive. I do believe it to be truth, to be inerrant, but I reject the idea that all of the answers of life are found within its pages. What it does do, and I think what it is intended to do, is to point to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God is not the answer to all of life's many questions, but He is the answer to life and tells us quite clearly how we are to live it.

We are given, in the Old Testament, a vision of what God the Father is like and what living during the time when He spoke to men was like. In the Gospels, we see what God the Son is like and what living during the time when He walked the earth was like. We see what God says to us in the form of a man and what He has to say about our behavior and our beliefs and our lives. In the rest of the New Testament we see what God the Holy Spirit is like and what it looks like to live during the time when God the Holy Spirit breathes into our lives. This is the same time that we live in today. What the rest of the New Testament tells us is how the apostles and the early church attempted to live out Christ's commands as well as adhere to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit so that they would constantly be in tune with the living God.

Personally, I'd like to see more of that. I'd like to see Romans/Hebrews used for evangelism purposes for the respective cultures that they speak to, and I'd like to see the other books of the New Testament (as well as the words and commands of Christ) be used for post-conversion living. I haven't seen much literature that takes Christ seriously in what he says. Most of what I have seen (until more recently) consist of books and videos that seek to evangelize and do it terribly. But evangelism is only the beginning. Once the "souls are saved", we need to live. What are we calling the heathens to if we don't? Our lives should be demonstrably different and more enlivening than theirs, and it will only be done by the power of God. They should be shocked by our difference, not by how similar we are. Once they enter the fold, they'll quickly discover that we are much the same as them, we just daily trust Jesus to ACT and are obedient to follow when he does.

For me, at any rate, all of this goes beyond the mere justification by faith. It calls believers and non-believers alike into an active relationship with the God of the universe who does not fit into boxes of doctrine and creed, but uses those things to draw out His character for us to see. They are not the heart of the gospel, but are tools used to understand parts of it. Justification is only the beginning - sanctification and life await just beyond the foot of the empty Cross, and we are invited to put our fingers into His wounds and know (experientially, not just physically) that He is real and that the life He calls us to is abundant.

In conclusion (and to get back to the topic of McLaren), I'm all for liberalism and postmodernism when those things shed light on the HEART of the gospel - the restoration of life to God to His glory. I'm also for conservativism and modernism when it does the same. I'm sort of convinced, however, that in the Church in America it's much more likely to find the HEART of the gospel on the streets and in homes than it is in churches and synagogues. It's interesting that the "New Kind of Heretic" poster mentions Jesus, Paul and Augustine as people who who have a problem with McLaren's book and the ideas of the Emerging Church - I've read all three and I'd have to disagree with him. I think Jesus, St. Paul and St. Augustine would have a problem with the sort of "abundant life" that the Church offers and the measuring stick for conformity that doctrine has become in the United States of America.


[this is a DRAFT]