Considering A New Kind of Christian

On the right, where he doesn't want to be!

Feeling quite behind the times, I borrowed a friend’s copy of A New Kind of Christian.  I have been unable to get to it the last few weeks.  It was as if I just didn’t have the mental energy.  Oddly, I was able to make some significant headway today on the plane and relaxing in the backyard.

I am sympathetic to the concerns often raised by members of the emergent church movement.  I don’t often like their answers to the problems.  As I read Brian McLaren’s book, I experienced that same strange conflux of thoughts.

As I read the book I would be considered one of the modernist Christians McLaren is trying to ‘convert’.  I guess I feel like a non-Christian would feel when reading one of those poorly written novels intending to convert you to Christianity.  Not completely- I’m not angry with McLaren though I take exception with some of his conclusions.  Thus far anyway.

McLaren does point out that the extremes in popular American Christianity are problematic.  He comes off a bit reductionistic to me.  He does this by neglecting the good things that those modernistic American Christians have contributed to society.  He thinks we should do more than we preach- showing the gospel with our actions.  Yes, and many do this.  Many American evangelicals reach out to the poor and oppressed.  They are often very generous.  And it seems less than generous to ignore this in his gentle diatribe against enculturated modern Christians a.k.a. organized religion or the institutional church.

I also find it rather absurd to think that before the modern era (1500) the church wasn’t struggling with a conquest mentality (have you heard of the Crusades?), institutionalism and being wedded to political power (do the names Gregory the Great or Innocent III ring a bell), etc.  I don’t find some of these marks of “modernism” to be marks of modernism or the “modern church” McLaren reacts against.  They predate 1500.

I agree that we do tend to look at Christianity from our point in time- the time and culture in which we live.  I would say that there is a distinctively Christian worldview- a biblical worldview.  Each group of Christians will import elements from the prevailing worldview, but there should be plenty there that is counter-cultural precisely because they hold to truth as revealed in Scripture.

A biblical worldview would hold that there is a Creator who made all things and rules all things.  We were made in His likeness, but due to Adam’s initial act of disobedience sin and death entered our world producing  great misery.  But there is also a Redeemer.  The triune God acted to deliver a people from His wrath, and to relieve creation from the curse.  These are part of a distinctively Christian worldview.  We reject naturalism and materialism.  We recognize that God is “outside the box” but acts “within the box”.

Unlike Neo, I would not say that consumerism (though a huge problem today) is an aspect of modernism.  Consumerism probably arose in the last 100 years, the transitional period from modernism to postmodernism.  It’s a quibble, not a big deal.  Consumerism isn’t just a problem for people, but also for the church.

One of the other weaknesses I’ve found thus far is that Neo is nearly always right, and Dan nearly always wrong- unless he’s anticipating Neo’s reasoning.  It doesn’t seem so much a conversation/dialogue (or whatever) as a monologue.  That and how seminary seems to be a bad, modernistic, indoctrinating sort of thing which is perpetuating the problems of the church.  There is no distinctions made in terms to the type, quality or motives among seminaries.  They are all blurred.  Some seminaries are quite aweful, and merely force you in a box.  Some allow you freedom to think and explore while they provide a solid framework to consider.

McLaren also seems to make the childish maneuver of thinking that since a specific word is not used in Scripture it either isn’t true, or our modern minds have wrongly understood it.  He cites the phrase “God is in control.”  He takes a weak view of providence akin to “controlling kids”.  But Scripture would indicate that God, not in a “modernistic & mechanistic” way accomplishes His purposes in time & space using various means.  He controls history.  This is not a function of our modernistic isegesis.

He also labors the point that God is our authority, not Scripture.  I suppose I have a difficult separating the 2.  Scripture is authorative because God has spoken it.  When Dan explains why we no longer obey some of the various commands of the Old Testament, he gives a weak dispensational answer rather than pointing to the context of the commands (destruction of the nations in the conquest) or the progress of redemption.  His rationale seems overly simplistic, and his arguments only address the most mindless of fundamentalists rather than the more thoughtful elements of the church he would consider “modern”.

There are things to ponder here (despite the blatant use of strawmen), but as I said I find the direction he’s moving less than helpful.