A New Kind of Christianity: The Jesus Question

The two chapters which McLaren devotes to this question are based on a couple of quotes from sources he doesn't identify, though in the footnotes he does give a YouTube web address for one of them.

The first one is from someone he only calls "one of my most loyal and dedicated critics". This person said...

In Revelation, Jesus is a prize-fight with a tattoo down His leag, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.

McLaren, of course, finds this appalling. He tries to compare this to how the character Ricky Bobby sees Jesus in "Talladega Nights", p 121. He then brings out one of his favorite weapons--the Scare Tactic. "So, in successfully rejecting an insipt "hippie, diaper, halo Christ," we may unintentionally protect and uphold the white supremacist Jesus, the colonial Jesus, the Euorcentric Jesus, the Republican or Democrat Jesus, the capitalist or communist Jesus..." p 122. The paragraph and his various Jesus' goes on longer, I really don't want to give them all, I hope that's enough.

McLaren does reference the place in Revelation 19:11-16 where the other person gets the idea of Jesus, but he says this like sci-fi stories. "For example, when we read or watch Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, The Matrix, or Wall-E, we don't think the writers and filmmakers are trying to predict the future. No we understand they are really talking aobut the present, and they are doing so in hopes of changing the future." p 123

Which means that how McLaren interprets this passage is to say that the correct interpretation is rather the opposite of how it looks. "Rather, this image fo Jesus as a conqueror reassures believers that the peaceable Jesus who entered Jerusalem on a donkey that day wasn't actually weak and defeated; he was in fact every bit as powerful as a Caesar on a steed..." p 124

"Revelation celebrates not the love of power, but the power of love. It denies, with all due audacity, that God's anointed liberator is the Divine Terminator, threatening revenge for all who refuse to honor him, growling "I'll be back". It asserts, instead, that God's anointed liberator is the one we beat up, who promises mercy to those who strike him...The suffering, serving one who bled on a cross--not the one with a commitment to make others suffer and bleed--is the King of kings and Lord of lords." p 126

Here's the second quote that McLaren responds to.

The only reason Jesus came was to save people from hell...Jesus had no social agenda...[He didn't come to eliminate poverty or slavery or]...fix something in somebody's life for the little moment they live on this earth.

"For him, Jesus is not the one who saves from poverty, captivity, blindness, and oppression, even though these are Jesus' very words (borrowed from Isaiah) to describe his mission. I think you'll agree, my faithful critic's statement can only make sense, first, if we interepre Jesus within the confines of the Greco-Roman six-line narrative; second, if we predetermine to read the Bible as a constitution; and third, if we construct and solidify our understanding of God before seeking to understand Jesus, rather then letting Jesus serve as the Word-made-flesh revelation of God's character" p 128.

Over the next several pages, McLaren does an interesting exercise, comparing Jesus in John to events and people in the OT books of Moses, doing so in order to support his view Jesus as an earthly liberator.

"But even these few examples, selected from so many more, make it clear that Jesus, contrary to my loyal critic's assertion, did not come merely to "save souls from hell." No, he came to launch a new Genesis, to lead a new Exodus, and to announce, embody, and inaugurate a new kingdom as the Prince of Peace(Isa. 9:6). Seen in this light, Jesus and his message have everything to do with poverty, slavery, and a "social agenda"." p 135

My thoughts on this.

McLaren may well be right that sci-fi is most often not interested in trying to predict the future (though I suppose Jules Verne could complicate things a bit, like writing about submarines before there were such things). But equating biblical prophecy to sci-fi just won't work, and is a rather childish attempt to negate the importance of prophecy. They are two different things.

Also, McLaren shows an amazing lack of historical context, in his dismissing of the return of Jesu in judgment. Here are some excerpts from very early church leaders, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, and what they wrote about Christ's return.

“So that you ought rather to desist from the love of strife, and repent before the great day of judgment come, wherein all those of your tribes who have pierced this Christ shall mourn as I have shown has been declared by the Scriptures. And I have explained that the Lord swore, ‘after the order of Melchizedek,’ and what this prediction means; and the prophecy of Isaiah which says, ‘His burial is taken away from the midst,’ I have already said, referred to the future burying and rising again of Christ; and I have frequently remarked that this very Christ is the Judge of all the living and the dead. And Nathan likewise, speaking to David about Him, thus continued: ‘I will be His Father, and He shall be my Son; and my mercy shall I not take away from Him, as I did from them that went before Him; and I will establish Him in my house, and in His kingdom for ever.’ And Ezekiel says, ‘There shall be no other prince in the house but He.’ For He is the chosen Priest and eternal King, the Christ, inasmuch as He is the Son of God;
Justin Martyr, dialogue with Trypho, ch 118

For the prophets have proclaimed two advents of His: the one, that which is already past, when He came as a dishonored and suffering Man; but the second, when, according to prophecy, He shall come from heaven with glory, accompanied by His angelic host, when also He shall raise the bodies of all men who have lived, and shall clothe those of the worthy with immortality, and shall send those of the wicked, endued with eternal sensibility, into everlasting fire with the wicked devils.
Justin Martyr, First Apology of Justin, ch 52

If the Father, then, does not exercise judgment, [it follows] that judgment does not belong to Him, or that He consents to all those actions which take place; and if He does not judge, all persons will be equal, and accounted in the same condition. The advent of Christ will therefore be without an object, yea, absurd, inasmuch as [in that case] He exercises no judicial power. For “He came to divide a man against his father, and the daughter against the mother, and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law;” and when two are in one bed, to take the one, and to leave the other; and of two women grinding at the mill, to take one and leave the other: [also] at the time of the end, to order the reapers to collect first the tares together, and bind them in bundles, and burn them with unquenchable fire, but to gather up the wheat into the barn; and to call the lambs into the kingdom prepared for them, but to send the goats into everlasting fire, which has been prepared by His Father for the devil and his angels. And why is this? Has the Word come for the ruin and for the resurrection of many? For the ruin, certainly, of those who do not believe Him, to whom also He has threatened a greater damnation in the judgment-day than that of Sodom and Gomorrah; but for the resurrection of believers, and those who do the will of His Father in heaven. If then the advent of the Son comes indeed alike to all, but is for the purpose of judging, and separating the believing from the unbelieving, since, as those who believe do His will agreeably to their own choice, and as, [also] agreeably to their own choice, the disobedient do not consent to His doctrine; it is manifest that His Father has made all in a like condition, each person having a choice of his own, and a free understanding; and that He has regard to all things, and exercises a providence over all, “making His sun to rise upon the evil and on the good, and sending rain upon the just and unjust.”
Irenaeus, Against Heretics, Book 5 Chapter 27

McLaren essentially says that if we believe in this coming of Christ in judgment, then we negate all the things He taught about forgiveness. The truth is, no, we don't; rather, he is the one who has to make what Jesus and others say about His second coming mean something else.

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall the gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.
Matt. 25:31-32

Behold, he cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.
Rev 1:7

And to these also Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophecied, saying, Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgement upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their works of ungodliness which theyhave ungodly wrought, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.
Jude 14-15
these scriptures found in the book "What the Bible Teaches" by R. A. Torrey

McLaren seems to have almost no concept of justice, outside of what he considers "social justice". He can only seem to see Christ return in judgment as revenge, not as justice, just as he can only see hell as torture, not justice.

I can't help but find it off-putting that McLaren doesn't say who said the quotes he gives, or really when and where. I'm pretty sure that the first quote is from Mark Driscoll, I think I've heard him say that or similar. The second I'm not sure of, and when I looked up the YouTube address he gives in the end notes, it wasn't there. As such, looking up those quotes and checking the contexts is much more difficult. I would especially like to see the context for the latter.

Since he goes on for several pages concerning how Jesus is like Moses, going into it in detail is probably beyond what I'd care to do right now. There may be some points of interest, but as with most things with McLaren, I doubt either his claim, or his interpretation of it. Some of the parallels are rather weak, I think. "Just as Moses was initially rejected by his brothers (Exod 2:14), so Jesus was initially rejected", p 131. But such rejection was and is hardly uncommon. One could find rejection with almost any prophet. "In Exodus, God's presence was associated with the tabernacle, a sacred tent, and John says, "The Word became flesh and lived [made his dwelling, tented or tabernacled] among us" (1:14)" Unless there is some relation between the word John uses that is interpreted "dwelt", then this parallel isn't really saying much.

One thing I want to bring up is his attempt to re-interpret the concept of a Promised Land. "As we considered earlier, the narrative beings with the longing for a literal homeland...Gradually, the idea of a promised land morphs from a geographic reality into a social one: "a land flowing with milk and honey" becomes a society in which justice flows like water." pp 132-133.

One must be careful of saying too much here, but the practical outcome of such thinking should be clear--if there is now no geographical Promised Land, it does away with any divine right the Jews may have to the land of Israel, which plays into the Left's ideas about Israel and Palestine. I don't want to go so far as to charge anti-Semitism against McLaren, but just as he likes to play scare tactics about the ideas of others, so I think we can think of all-too-really-horrible outcomes that could come from his ideas.

Earlier, I pointed out where McLaren seems to show a streak of anti-supernaturalism when he wrote about the Nile turning to blood in Exodus, saying instead it was a red tide. He does it again, in regards to the prophecy in Isaiah 40:1-5, which speaks of "the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills;".

"Obviously, the prophet isn't predicting a literal tectonic shift in which Jerusalem rises further above sea level and Mt. Everest sinks, but rather a time when God's wisdom draws nations up to the higher level of relating, so disputes are settled nonviolently, wisely, peacefully..." p 134.

Umm...no, it's not "obvious" that this is only metaphorical language. The God I know and love and serve is the One who made the world, the One who made the waters into literal blood, the One who parted the waters of the Red Sea so that Israel could flee, and it is not beyond His power to literally fulfill this prophecy. Unlike McLaren's new-agey view of mankind going to a higher level, I think this prophecy will be literally fulfilled, that the Lord will Himself judge and arbitrate, and not the UN or any other man-made organization or institution. Certainly not anything McLaren is associated with.

This 'new-agey'-ness shows through a time or two more.

"Jesus evokes Moses directly in his conversation with Nicodemus, saying that the Son of Man (a complex term drawn from Daniel 7:13-14, which I believe suggests a new generation or genesis of humanity) will be lifted up as Moses lifted up a bronze serpent in the wilderness (Num 21:9)." p 132.

Jesus claiming to be the Son of Man "suggests a new generation or genesis of humanity"? What??? Is McLaren claiming that "a new generation or genesis of humanity" must be lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent? And how new-agey does "a new generation or genesis of humanity" sound?

He makes much of how the world 'hell' doesn't appear in John, "(John, it should be noted, never mentions hell, a highly significant fact)" p 130. But this quote has a footnote, which shows the shenanigans. "Since we aren't assuming the six-line narrative, it would be an unwarranted conclusion to equate words found in John like "condemnation," "death," and "perish" with the word "hell," which is never found in John." p 275.

Claiming there is no hell because John doesn't mention the word is like claiming there is no love because Ruth doesn't use the word, or there is no God because Esther doesn't mention God. It's a weak argument, emblematic of desperation, a thin straw a drowning man will grasp at with unthinking hope that it will keep him afloat.

Finally, you'll find very little about the crucifixion in this part of the book. I've found one mention it it of that event, "If you don't want to worship a guy you can beat up, then I might humbly suggest you reconsider Caesar and the Greco-Roman narrative. It sounds like "Christ and him crucified" is not for you. At least not yet". The one real mention of the crucified Christ in these chapters is little more than a cheap shot.

sad news

Michael Spencer, 1956-2010

For a couple of years, I worked at the private school where Michael Spencer was minister. I cannot claim to have known him well, but we got along well. On one committee that was for creating materials for the school's big yearly offering, he offered some good suggestions to one of my poster concepts, and the results were very good. He also started up a chess club, and I helped a bit with it, until my time there ended not long after it was started. And I remember a time or two of being invited to their house, to watch some episodes of MST3K.

reading into it

How would I answer if someone asked me to describe the story line of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"?

Probably something like this: Four human children are drawn to a fantasy world called Narnia when they walk into a wardrobe. One of them meets up with bad company, the White Witch, and tries to betray the other three. Those three are helped to reach Aslan, and with his help they rescue the betraying brother, who has learned the error of his ways. But the Witch claims the life of the betrayer, so to settle that just account with her, Aslan lets himself be killed by her. But he returns to life, destroys the White Witch, ends her perpetually winter, and appoints the four children as kings and queens of Narnia.

Now, suppose the person who asks me to do that then starts shaking his head in a superior fashion, and tells me that I have it all wrong. He says that his explanation is the correct one, and then goes on to give it. He talks about how the four children, who are English and white, merely show the author's Euro-centric, or even Anglo-centirc, superiority, and the fact that all of the Narnians they encounter are non-human merely show how the English, and whites as a whole, held and still hold a view of non-whites as being essentially non-human. He gets particular agitated when it comes to the Father Christmas in the story, who gives the children weapons, and says that this is a polluted view of the friendly and harmless Santa Claus, and shows how religion has compromised with the military-industrial complex. He laughs with a proud tinge when it comes to Aslan's death, saying that it wasn't really a substition for the traitor, becaus that would be barbaric, but was meant to show how awful the reign of the White Witch had been, even though (you think) the people of Narnia already knew how bad her reign had been and was why they were against her and for Aslan in the first place. Aslan setting up the children to reign over Narnia comes back, this interpreter says, to Anglo-centric superiority, saying that even the children of whites are more capable of ruling than the adults of the not-human conquered natives, and that God approved and himself set up the Anglos to reign.

If you've read Lewis' story, you'd probably think that this person's take on the story would be nonsense. I would agree. Keeping that in mind, read these remarks about a much greater book.

To be a Christian--in the West at least, since the fifth or sixth century or so--has required one to believe that the Bible presents one very specific story line, a story line by which we assess all history, all of human experience, all of our own experience. Most of us know the story line implicitly, subconsciously, even though it has never been made explicit for us. We begin our quest for a new kind of Christian faith by questioning this story line.

This unspoken story line of the Bible that we were explicitly taught--or that we implicitly caught--can be diagrammed with six simple, elegent lines

(I can't put the diagram here, so I'll sum it up best I can here)

Eden
fall
condemnation
salvation
heaven or hell/damnation

...That's why this quest begins not by tweaking details of the conventional six-line narrative, but by calling the entire narrative scheme into question. We do not for a second say "These six lines present the true shape of the biblical narrative, but we reject it". Rather, we stare at this narrative, scratch our heads, and with a bewildered look ask, "How in the world, how in God's name, could anyone ever think this is the narrative of the Bible?"
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, excerpts from pp 33-35

How in the world could anyone think that is the narrative of the Bible? A more important question would be, how in the world could anyone think that such a question is one worth asking?

Consider the elements of the narrative he wishes to denigrate.

Is there an Eden? Yes.

Is there a fall? Yes.

Are there seemingly endless pages of people falling into sin and suffering the consequences, even mention of the consequence of hell and eternal judgment? Yes.

Is there a Jesus who comes to offer salvation? Yes.

Is there a choice, Christ or the world, blessing or damnation, eternal life or eternal death, Heaven and a place in God's house or hell and the lake of fire? Yes.

Just as someone rereading a Narnia book to fit his politics is likely to sound ridiculous, so does McLaren start sounding ridiculous as he attempts to deconstruct/spin the Bible to do away with the obvious elements of the biblical account. Eden and the Fall and Cain and Abel becomes a coming-of-age drama and was actually a mythical story of mankind's rise from hunter-gathers to early farmers and city-dwellers; much of the Bible is fictional tales of people wrestling to understand god, and getting it less-or-more right depending on if the ancients agreed with McLaren or not; Jesus and the Apostles were actually anti-Roman Empire even though they never explicitly said so, and Jesus Himself seems to have disappointed those who were looking for an anti-Roman Empire Messiah.

seasonal message

Cross-Centered Not Cause Centered Ministry by Mark Driscoll

The sermon itself is actually on an episode of "Fighting for the Faith", a radio program. The link above goes to a page on the radio program's site where the audio file can be downloaded.

Though the sermon is from a couple of months ago, it is quite appropriate for Good Friday and Easter.

A New Kind of Christianity: The God Question

In this third part of the book McLaren puts his two prongs, the supposed Greco-Roman god Theos and the Bible as cultural library, into use.

He begins with the question "Is God Violent?". McLaren acknowledges that, as useful as his 'Bible as cultural library' proves to be for him, it just doesn't do away with all of what he considers disturbing images of God. "But as a serious reader of the Bible, I'm still a little uneasy, because I know about some of the other images of God that are also found in the Bible--violent images, cruel images, un-Christlike images", p 98.

What he posits to answer this is a form of 'progressive revelation', or as he called it, "this evolving understanding of God", p 100. He says there are five ways that the Bible shows such an 'evolving understand--God uniqueness, from a God supreme among many gods to one true God; God's ethics, from ritual and cermony to social justice; God's universality, from a tribal God to one who loves all people; God's agency, from a distant God to one close and involved; and God's character, from a violent God to one who is gentle, pp 100-102.

He claims that this isn't an evolution of God himself, but of how people understood God. "I am not saying that the Bible reveals a process of evolution within God's character, as if God used to be rather adolescent, but has taken a turn for the better and is growing up nicely over the last few centuries. I am saying that human beings can't do better than their very best at any given moment to communicate about God as they understand God, and the Scripture faithfully reveals the evolution of our ancestor's best attempts to communicate their successive best understandings of God...If we read the Bible as a cultural library rather than as a constitution, and if we don't impose a Greco-Roman plotline on the biblical narrative, we are free to learn from the evolutionary process--and, we might even add, to participate in it", p 103.

He likens it to math. Students in early grades learn simple math, and as they advace, they learn more complex forms of math, onesthat may even seem to contradict what they had previously learned. So, those early in the Bible who recorded what he considers less-mature images of God were simply understanding God as best they could, as a second-grader understands math in only a limited sense. But people like McLaren are more advanced. To make his point, McLaren uses one of his favority tactics--a series of unanswerable "What if...?", questions, p 104-105.

As if to show us what that is like, McLaren gives another example--people from today are somehow sent a bit over 1000 years into the future. People in this speculative future are some different from us, they are "deeply spiritual", they have "grown socially", they no longer fight wars, eat meat, or use fossil fuels, p 106. When those from today arrive, the people of the future are horrified that people used to fight wars and pray for God to bless them in doing so, eat their "fellow creatures" and even view vegetarianism as being 'pro-life', and thought it ok to ruin the planet by using oil.

People who don't like this way of thinking are, of course, stuck in the old Greco-Roman and constitutional way of viewing the Bible, p 108.

McLaren focuses on the story of Noah. Instead of seeing it as God saving a man and his family, he focuses instead on God practicing "ethnic cleansing", p 108, and a story in which people may find justification for similar destructions. "In this light, a god who mandates an intentional supernatural disaster leading to unparalleled genocide is hardly worth belief, much less worship", p 109. He even points out that the flood was a failure, as Noah and his sons soon enough start sinning and soon the world is a mess again.

He does say that, while for him the story of Noah is now distasteful, it is still a step up from what he considers to be the origin source of the story of Noah, something in Gilgamesh, where the gods kill mankind because man is too noisy for them to sleep.

"This approach helps us see the biblical library as the record of a seris of trade-ups, people courageously letting go of their state-of-the-art understanding of God when an even better understanding begins to emerge", p 111.

When coming to Jesus, McLaren quotes a Quaker scholar named Elton Trueblood, "The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means the God is like Jesus", p 114. Jesus, then, "...bring us to a new evolutionary level in our understanding of God. An old definition of God does not define Jesus--the experience of God in Jesus requires a brand-new definition or understanding of God", p 114.

"The character of God, seen in Jesus, is not violent and tribal. The living God is not the kind of deity who decrees ethnic cleansing, genocide, racism, slavery, sexism, homophobia, war, religious supremacy, or eternal conscious torment. Instead, the character of the living God is like the character of Jesus", p 118.

My thoughts on this.

A few years ago, I heard someone talk about "chronological snobbery", which essentially means that a person or people will look back on those before them as having been rather stupid. Maybe they will try to say nice things about those ancients, saying they did the best with what they had, but we today know so much more and know it so much better.

Essentially, McLaren's whole position here is an astonishingly towering tribute to chronological snobbery. The arrogance emerging from this part of the book is almost more than I can imagine.

About a year ago, I read parts of a book called "The Lost Message of Jesus" by a couple of emergents on the other side of the pond, Chalke and Mann. They say this about God in the Old Testament.

Hence, Yahweh's association with vengeance and violence wasn't so much an expression of who he was but the result of his determination to be involved with his world. His unwillingness to distance himself from the people of Israel and their actions meant that at times he was implicated in the excessive acts of war that we see in some of the books of the Old Testament. From the very beginning, Yahweh's dealing with Israel were motivated by his desire to demonstrate his love. But to a people saturated in a worldview that saw him as power, this was always going to be a slow uphill struggle

God's relationship with Israel took place in the messy and often brutal reality of their day-to-day lives, longings and ambitions. And in the ancient Near East, where war and unrestrained violence were commonplace, having a god of power on your side helped justify cruel acts of revenge towards those who wronged you. That is why, if we focus in on individual Old Testament verses and stories, it is easy to fall into the trap of seeing God as a vengeful despot...
Chalk and Mann, the lost message of jesus, p. 49

I called this god of Chalke's and Mann's "the incompetent god", because he was unable to get his real message across to humanity; for example, he was pacifistic, but kept having to send Israel off to war, because he was unable through his divine power to protect them.

McLaren essentially uses "the incompetent god", and adds a bit to it. For unspecified reasons, God cannot make ancient man understand Him, so He's doomed to have his character misrepresented in Scripture, at least until McLaren and other enlightened ones come along to set the record straight.

One of the most distasteful parts of his argument is positing a sort of conflict between God and Jesus. He claims that there are images of God in the Old Testament that were "un-Christlike". He says that we must compare views of God to Jesus, "The images of God that most resemble Jesus, whether they orginate in the Bible or elsewhere, are the more mature and complete images; the ones less similar to the character of Jesus are the more embryonic and incomplete...", p 114. As the quote states, he thinks that one can find 'images of God' outside the Bible, I suppose in other religions, that are better than some one can find in the Bible itself.

I noted before that McLaren seems to put a lot of the Bible on to the fiction shelves of his 'cultural library', and this is more confirmation of that. He pretty blatantly says that Noah is a made-up story, ripped off from another culture. More than that, he strongly implies that almost all of it was somehow made-up--it's a man-made book, not a divine revelation. It's a book of mankind's continual evolution in the understanding of God, and that evolution is still going on, an evolution was can still participate in today.

If McLaren's god didn't destroy the world in Noah's day, what does that do to other times that the Bible records God speaking? Does God not judge Sodom and Gomorrah, because that would be homophobic? What about what God did to Egypt? Did God really tell Israel to conquer Canaan, or was that just Moses and Joshua using god-language in support of their own agenda of conquest? And what about those prophets and all their dire warnings and predictions, did God really tell them to say those things?

In order for McLaren to hold to his positions, he must say that much of the Bible claims to have been spoken by God was not really God speaking. His continual emphasis on "an evolving understanding of God" makes that point as well, and is essentially saying that much of the Bible is simply made-up stories where a character called God is introduced, words put into his mouth, and those words given status as Scripture.

There is someone at the Christianity.com forums where I participate in discussions, who has a quote by Spurgeon in her signature area, which goes something like this: "It is a remarkable fact that all the heresies which have arisen in the Christian Church have had a decided tendency to 'dishonor God and to flatter man." As this seems a reasonable criterion, one can say that McLaren here soundly falls in the heretic category. Not only does he bring down God, he essentially places man, especially ones like himself, in a seat of judgment over God, pronouncing judgments on things God did and said, saying even the sometimes God is "un-Christlike".

Most people who read the Bible would probably agree that there is a sense in which God reveals things about Himself over time. But this is more of a sense of God adding knowledge of Himself to what knowledge was before, rather than "trade-ups" as McLaren posits. There is no sense in, for example, the New Testament that the God of what we call the Old Testament--God in the books of Moses, God in the prophets, God in the recorded history--is being traded out for a new, improved, better God, like an older man divorces his wife for a younger model.

In the end, I think what McLaren is most against is Hell. Instead of seeing Hell as an aspect of the the justice of God, even if a rather harsh and hard-to-understand one, he calls it "torture" several times, as if he's trying to equate Hell with liberal's views of Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. I think McLaren's politics comes into play here.

Finally, McLaren resorts to 'scare tactics' in order to try to make his interpretive method more user-friendly. He essentially says that we much do violence to the message of the Bible for our own good. Like all liberals, he sees people who don't agree with him as simply stupid, brutish, small-minded sheep, motivated only by self-interest. Perhaps because he has dismissed the Fall, he must hold to such a low view of man to explain why he isn't universally accepted.

recognizing a work of genius

Though I doubt Peter Rollins would care much for this parable. For my part, I found it hilarious and pointed.

Brian McLaren’s New Kind of Whole Foods Store: A Parable

ankoc: the authority question

McLaren's plan of attack in "A New Kind of Christianity" has essentially two prongs. One is in the first question, the positing of a Greco-Roman diety named Theos that at some time essentially replaced the God of the Bible. The second is how he claims most people interpret the Bible, how wrong it is (of course), and the way that he claims is 'corrected'. This is pretty much the Authority Question.

As per usual with the great enlightened ones, McLaren says that we simpletons have it all wrong. "There will be no new kind of Christian faith without a new approach to the Bible, because we've gotten ourselves into a mess with the Bible", pp 67-68. Apparently, because there are still Creationists, those who deny global warming, and those who think a good war is better than a bad peace, we just aren't interpreting the Bible rightly.

To prove his point, McLaren digs up some kind of novel from about the time of American Civil War, the early 1860s, a pro-slavery novel. Apparently, because someone tried to use the Bible to defend slavery in the US, we are interpreting the Bible wrong. It's a scare tactic he goes back to a few more times, so I've noticed, in what I've read so far of the book.

He says that we mistakingly read the Bible as a legal constitution, "Like lawyers, we look for precedents in past cases of interpretation, sometimes favoring older interpretations as precedents, sometimes asserting newer ones have rendered the old ones obsolete. We seek to distinguish "spirit" from "letter" and argue the "framer's intent," seldom questioning whether the passage in question was actually intended by the original authors and editors to be a universal, eternally binding law. As a result, we turn our seminaries and denominational bodies into versions of the Supreme Court. At every turn, we approach the biblical text as if it were an annotated code instead of what it actually is: a portable library of poems, prophecies, histories, fables, parables, letters, sage sayings, quarrels, and so on", pp 78-79.

The last part of that quote brings us to how McLaren's says we should see the Bible--as "the library of a culture and community--the culture and community of people who trace their history back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob", p 81. How this works comes back to the emergents' favorite word--conversation. "It's not the solitary scholar with furrowed brow, bent over a book in a library, whose approach best resonates with the Bible as library; rather, it's a community gathering in which people listen to the Bible being read, then respond and interact with it and with one another." p 84

He singles out the book of Job to show how it would work, in a way, I suppose. "God has just told us that a large proportion of what is uttered in the book of Job is false and foolish. Yet we are taught that the book of Job, being part of the Bible, is the Word of God and is inspired by God. Does that mean that God inspired the introduction and conclusion, but not the middle, where the pious blowhard's speak? Or does it mean that God inspired the pious blowhard's false statements? Or that God was pretending to inspire that part, but was crossing the divine fingers behind the divine back, so as to come out later to say, "I was only kidding in that part"? p 89. His conclusion about revelation in Job, and the Bible as a whole, is that "...revelation doesn't simply happen in statements. It happens in conversations and arguemtns that take place within and among communities of people who share the same essential questions acros genertaions. Revelation accumulates in the relationships, interactions, and interplay between statements." p 93.

What is all this about? "But here's what I hope: that his approach will not try to put us under the text, as conservatives tend to do, or lift us over it, as liberals often seem to do. Instead, I hope it will try to put us in the text--in the conversation, in the story, in the current and flow, in the predicament, in the Spirit, in the community of people who keep bumping into the living God in the midst of their experiences of loving God, betraying God, losing God, and being found againd by God." pp 96-97

Some of my thoughts about all this...

In the previous section, McLaren says that he wants look at things in a more Jewish way. But he seems to go against that here, because if I understand these things correctly, the Jews of biblical times viewd "the Law and the Prophets" in a way very like how people in the US view their own Constitution--as the basic laws by which their society is governed and ordered. If anything, the Law of Moses and the words of the prophets would have an even greater authority than the Constituion in the US, because while the Constitution was a document made by a group of men and has been changed or amended over time, the Law and the Prophets were God's own words, and we are given very few cases of God accepting input from people concerning them. He had taken some things into account, much like Jesus said in regards to divorce, but He didn't consult with Moses when He gave him the law, nor did He consult with Isaiah or Jeremiah over what prophetic words He was to give them.

If you read this part, "Like lawyers, we look for precedents in past cases of interpretation, sometimes favoring older interpretations as precedents, sometimes asserting newer ones have rendered the old ones obsolete. We seek to distinguish "spirit" from "letter" and argue the "framer's intent," seldom questioning whether the passage in question was actually intended by the original authors and editors to be a universal, eternally binding law. As a result, we turn our seminaries and denominational bodies into versions of the Supreme Court...", and wondered "Ok, what constitution is he writing about?", perhaps you have an interesting question. Remember, McLaren comes from the Left, in both politics and theology. Perhaps his attempts to make the Bible a kind of 'living document' (I haven't seen those words used the book, but the idea is certainly there), reflect a view he may have that the US Constitution is a 'living document', and neither are to be interpreted in a 'strict constructionist' type of way.

McLaren wants to liken the Bible to a library. Having read a bit in other parts of the book, I've seen that he has some interesting ideas on what sections of the library parts of the Bible would be in. Here's a few..

Science Fiction
(concerning Revelation) "Clearly, this is a work of Jewish apocalyptic literature, which in turn is part of a larger genre known as the literature of the oppressed. These kinds of literature worked in the first century in wasy similar to the way some science fiction works for us today. For example, when we read or watch Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, The Matrix, or Wall-E, we don't think the writers and filmmakers are trying to predict the future. No, we understand they are really talking about the present, and they are doing so in hopes of changing the future." p 123

Fantasy
(concerning Noah and the flood) "In this light, a god who mandates an intentional supernatural disaster leading to unparalleled genocide is hardly worthy of belief, much less worship. How can we ask children--or nonchurch colleagues and neighbors--to honor a diety so uncreative, overreactive, and utterly capricious regarding life?..."

"It's useful to compare the Noah story to the earlier sotry it seeks to adapt and improve upon, the Utnapishtim story (from Tablet 11 of the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in the mid-1800s, probably dating back in oral tradition to the second millenium BCE, and recorded in clay in the mid-seventh century BCE)...

"Now remember, in making this contrast, I'm not trying to defend the view of God in the Noah story as morally acceptable, ethically satisfying, and theologically mature. Nor am I trying to make Gilgamesh look bad to make the Bible look good. Instead, I'm simply recommending that we compare the Noah story to its predecessors as well as its successors...I'm acknowledging that, yes, the portrait of God found in the Noah story is far less satisfying in many ways than a portrait that emerges later in the biblical library. Yes we can celebrate it for being a step up from the portraits it was correcting and seeking to replace..."pp 109-110

Given such examples, I think we have the right to ask (if claiming a right isn't 'constitutional') just how much of McLaren's library-bible winds up on the fiction shelves. Since Revelation obviously does so, what about Daniel, and end-times prophecies by Isaiah and Ezekial, and even the sayings of Jesus about the end? Since the story of Noah is (for him) obviously fictional, what about other stories? Is what God did to Egypt early in Exodus unacceptable, making him "hardly worthy of belief, much less worship"? What about the events in Joshua concerning the conquest of Canaan, such as God knocking down the walls of Jericho? What about all the times this god let other nations conquer Israel, even carrying off many of the people into slavery and exile? Was God being "uncreative, overreative, and utterly capricious regarding life" when he did that?

And since McLaren lists such luminaries as Borg and Crossan among those he learned from, they who would toss out pretty much everything the Gospels say about Jesus, perhaps a better question would be "How little of McLaren's library-bible actually makes its way onto the nonfiction sections, if any at all?"

In reading his thoughts on Job, I really have to wonder if McLaren has really ever read a book, let alone the Bible. Only someone who hasn't ever read or heard a story, or who is showing a sense of desperation, could write such a thing expecting people to believe it a good argument. He may as well try to claim that God approved of the words of the serpent in the Garden, because they are recorded in the Bible, event though they are shown to be lies when God speaks. Or that God approved of the murder of Abel by Cain, because it's recorded in the Bible, even though when God speaks to Cain about it, he obviously disapproves. Or maybe that God approved of Pharoah's mistreatment of Israel because it's recorded in Exodus, even though God plainly says he doesn't. It's a weak argument to claim that inspiration means that all that is recorded in the Bible is in there because God approves of it, the mere fact that it records people sinning proves that. Moreover, McLaren would never make such an argument in regards to any other book or writer. Would he claim that Tolkien approved of Boromir's betrayal or Gollum's obsession? Would he claim that Lewis approved of the words and actions of the White Witch?

The last couple of points I've tried to make meet a strange combination here, "...What about God's voice, which we encounter in the introduction, striking rather strange bargains with the Satan, and at the end, flingin questions as a machine gun spits out shells? Can we trust God's voice to be God's voice? Or is even "God" a character int eh story too, no the actual God necesarily, but the imagined God, the author's best sense of God, the fictional character playing God for the sake of this dramatic work of art? This is a powerful and perhaps terrifying question." p 94. He goes on to say that he considers the book of Job to be "a kind of archetypal theological opera" without even the rather weak claim of being 'based on a true story'.

Considering what McLaren writes here about God in Job, and what he wrote God in the account of Noah, we may safely say that pretty often, in McLaren's mind, the God of the Bible is not really God, nor even a good portrayal, but is most often "the imagined God, the author's best sense of God".

One gets the impression McLaren thinks that God should have created McLaren long ago, so He could have him as His PR Manager.

Perhaps the real god who isn't worth believing or worshiping is the one who just couldn't get himself understood by those people long ago, who couldn't help that they kept writing about him killing people, telling to go to war and conquer, while all the time he's just a milquetoast diety who wants people to be good little pacifist. Such a weak character isn't even worthy of respect, let along worship.

I think I'll end this here, though no doubt a lot could be said about his idea of "revelation through conversation". For example, I can only imagine what criterion one must pass in order to qualify for their 'conversation'.

if only they would follow their own advice

I almost wonder how this particular article made it on to TheOoze. Or if I'm missing something.

Let me assure you, Jesus is not who you think He is. He is more glorious, more powerful, more confusing, more fascinating, and more radically inclusive than you or I can possibly imagine.

Perhaps this will give a bit of answer. Jesus is "more radically inclusive". Given that the main Oozer, Spencer Burke, is a committed universalist, then no doubt "more radically inclusive" is at least pointing towards universalism.

I don’t know about you, but if I am offered a choice between the Jesus I have made in my own image or the Jesus I have not fully understood yet, I would rather have the Jesus who is still bigger than my ability to understand, who defies my description, who challenges my preconceptions, and who takes my breath away. I would rather have the real Jesus, and I have to be willing to admit that the real Jesus may not fit into my convenient little box.

There's something to be said for this, but you still need to have some understanding of Jesus if you're going to have "the real Jesus". And the rhetoric of an 'outside the box' Jesus is open to some potential misconstruings.

Let Jesus be who he really is. Jesus is not your UFC fighting champion. Jesus is not your flag-waving Republican (or Democrat). Jesus is not your blue-eyed all-American boy.

Don’t fabricate a version of Jesus who happens to share your political viewpoint, or who hates all the same people you hate, or who tolerates all the minor sins you happen to practice.

What I found rather amusing was how, on the left side of the page where this article can be found, there is an advertisement for McLaren's "A New Kind of Christianity". A more glaring example of someone who has "fabricate(d) a version of Jesus who happens to share (the author's) political viewpoint, or who hates of the same people (he) hate(s), or who tolerates all the minor sins (he) happen(s) to practice" you will have a hard time finding.

It's not that it isn't a bit of good advice, but I do wish the emergents would practice it themselves, before telling us to do the same. It may give the words a bit of added impetus if they did so, rather than seeming like a bit of spin control.

ankoc: the narrative question

In an attempt to every-now-and-then deal more seriously with the contents of McLaren "A New Kind of Christianity", I will do what will likely be a series of posts about it.. The book is helpful, at least in this, in that McLaren has divided the content of it into a set of questions. The first, which will be what this is about, is The Narrative Question. I intent to give a broad overview of his points, reference bits as it may be helpful, respond, and so let the sparks fly from there.

Btw this serious in no way invalidates the use of humor, even mocking, which is itself effective. Just ask Elijah how much fun it was to rip the priests of Baal.

He begins by giving what he considers what we consider to be the basic story line of the Bible--Eden, the Fall, Condemnation (or history), Salvation, with a branching off from Salvation to either Heaven or Hell. He claims that this is not the real story of the Bible, but rather a construction based on the influence of Greco-Roman philosophy some time in the early church. He contends that we get this view by looking back on Jesus through the views of those who came after Him--Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and so on, but that it would look differently if we started with Adam and worked up to Jesus.

He posits that the early church created a Greco-Roman god names Theos, kind of like Zeus, who is the god of this Greco-Roman version of Christianity. This Theos is a god who doesn't like change, doesn't like matter, doesn't like story. This Theos likes unchanging perfection, likes spirit, likes it when things are in a perfect state. This Theos has replaced the Jewish Yahweh in the minds of Western Christians.

In reading the Bible in the way he recommends, from Adam forwards, McLaren claims to see a much different story. Eden is a not a perfect place, but one that is good or very good. It is not a place of static perfection, but of good things that change, and he even brings in the word "evolution". But McLaren plainly states that "It is patently obvious to me that these stories aren't intended to be taken literally...", so the story of Eden is not about a good place God created, but the first few chapters of Genesis are for him a coming-of-age story for humanity.

What this means is that the Fall, where man ate the fruit and sinned, has a different meaning to McLaren. "Rather, it is the first stage of ascent as human beings progress from the life of hunter-gatherers to the life of agriculturalists and beyond". The Fall, then, becomes an ascent, and the stories become an overview of mankind's socio-economic ascent.

From this point, McLaren's politics take over. God likes Abel's more "primitive" life as a herder over Cain's more "advanced" life as a farmer, because it's "not as morally compromised as settle farm life, with it's fenced-in privately owned lands, accumulation of possessions, violent seizure and defense, and related moral entanglements". So, McLaren's god does not like farmers, because they own the land they use to farm with. God punishes Cain by making him a hunter-gatherer. He goes on from there for a while, through Noah and Abraham and Joseph.

With Exodus, he finally tells us that the Bible story has what he calls "three dimensions". The first is "liberation", told through God liberating the oppressed Israelites in Egypt. The second is "internal liberation", which is about personal sins, which is God's dealings with Israel in the wilderness. The third is what he calls "the peaceable kingdom", which seems to take up the rest of the Old Testament. He claims that it reaches a sort of apex with King David, but fizzles out, and the dream changes, and becomes about a time. The prophets, like Isaiah and Joel, speak of coming time when God would set things right with the world--no war, wolves and lambs frolicking together, God will pour out His spirit on all flesh. But we can't interpret these things literally, but rather through the paradigm of his politics--wolves living with lambs means religious pluralism and ecumenism as Christians accept Judaism and Islam as fellow-travelers on the road to god. People keeping their vitality up to and beyond age 100 is about passing Obamacare. Men and women prophesying and knowledge of the Lord filling the would be about "....a deep kind of universal and egalitarian spirituality", which strikes me as being rather New-Agey.

Several things come to mind from all of this.

First, I've no idea where he gets the idea that Christians never view Jesus through the lens of the Old Testament. It's patent nonsense for him to insinuate it. It has been a common contention that the Old Testament points toward Christ; for example, Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac, which God himself commanded and interrupted, points to God's sacrifice of His own son Jesus, a sacrifice God did not interrupt.The Psalmists and Prophets spoke of Christ.

Of course you can contend that there is no Fall in the Bible if you're going to redefine the Fall as an ascension. I've dealing here with the few chapters of the book that are associated with this Narrative Question so far, but if the best McLaren can do to disprove the biblical narrative he so obviously despises is to claim that the something like the Fall was actually an ascension, then only those who are already committed to believing him will continue to believe him. It seems even many who may have liked him in the past are finding his new work off-putting.

When I've heard people speak of the perfection of Eden, I've heard it referred to as "sinless perfection"--that it was perfect in the sense the man had not sinned, and the consequences of sin had not yet entered into the world, consequences like death. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone say that Eden was a place where nothing changed.

Concerning his Theos, he does very little, if anything, to actually prove such a concept was ever created. He claims Greco-Romanism, adds a dose of his politics, and claims that almost right off the bat the church began getting the story of the Bible wrong. He makes claims about this Theos, tries to contrast it with Yahweh, and of course thinks Yahweh was much better than Theos. I'm still not convinced Theos isn't a strawman.

Some statements seemed rather incredible. On pages 40 and 41, he says about the Jews, "They (at their best) acknowledge the right of other nations to have their own languages and customs and even religions;...". When was Israel in the Bible ever so ecumenical? Is he really serious in saying that it didn't matter that the other nations are worshiping idols? That the God of Israel is completely ok in the Old Testament with Ba'al, Dagon, Asheroth, and the other gods of the nations around Israel?

On page 57, in dealing with Moses and the freeing of Israel from Egypt, he says that in regards to Pharoah's refusal to let God's people go, "God resonds with a firm but gentle consequence: a plague on the Nile River, which is the lifeblood of the civilization. Ironically, perhaps through a red tide, the Nile turn red like blood". Has McLaren adopted a materialistic view of the Bible? Is he now denying miracles? Does he think that the Egyptians were so stupid that they could not distinguish between a red tide and blood? A page later, in regards to the what happened with Moses and Egypt, "The so-called supernatural, in this way, seems remarkably natural".

Maybe the part that is most outrageous is when he tries to make the Fall, when man rebelled about God and ate the fruit God had forbidden them to eat, into a part of a mere "coming of age" story. Since this is the part that most brings into question his contentions, it's not surprising that McLaren tries to play it down, but his flippancy is distasteful to the extreme.The Bible treats that event very seriously, so for McLaren to treat it like the premise to all too many bad movies, or to try to spin it to fit his socio-economic politics, doesn't hold water. Consider the passages of Scripture...

For as through one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one shall many be made righteous.
Romans 5:19

Therefore as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed upon all man, for that all sinned
Romans 5:12
Verses taken from the book "What the Bible Teaches" by R.A. Torrey

The Bible does not brush aside this event with a flip of the wrist, but deals with it seriously, and sees its consequences through human history.

In regards to his take of the prophecies of a time when God will set things right with the world, let me reference someone else's words, because he says it rather well, I think. "The bottom line was that nothing like what Jesus said was going to happen was really going to happen, but that's okay, He didn't really mean that all that would happen, and besides, it really did happen, but it just wasn't anything like what He said would happen. So it's really all okay."

I can't say as I'm impressed so far.

love and power are not scales 2

Revelation celebrates not the love of power, but the power of love.
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, p 126

This quote is actually part of an excerpt in a recent previous post. I've taken it out here, though, because it's started to remind of some thing from roughly a year ago. A bit from Chalke and Mann's book "The Secret Message of Jesus".

Willard Waller, an American sociologist, spend his life studying people in order to gain an understanding in of the complex interplay that goes on in human relationships. Though he wrote many research papers, his life's work can be summed up in two simple statements:

1. In any relationship one person loves more than another

2. The person who loves the least in any relationship has (the) most power and conversely, the person who loves most has the least power.

These two statements make up his Law of Least Love...
Chalke and Mann, The Lost Message of Jesus, p. 182

I responded to this previous. You can see, I hope, how much McLaren's quote echoes that of Chalke and Mann--that there is some kind of balancing act between love and power, an inverse balancing act if you would, wherein the more one 'loves' the less 'power' one has, and the less one 'loves' the more 'power' one has in the relationship. McLaren applies that thinking to the Divine--if the Revelation portrait of Jesus as a warrior is literally and is what will really happen, then love has lost, and power has won; thus, we must discard this view of Jesus as conquering king, and keep before us the view of Jesus one a humble donkey. We must never accept the portrait of Jesus as a warrior, on a war horse, with a sword, coming to kill his enemies and create a veritable lake of blood where carrion birds will feast.

But like the simplifications philosophers create that simply will not work in real life, so this simplification simply will not work. There is no inverse relationship between love and power. A parent is not unloving when exercising power over his or her children. A husband is not unloving in exercising authority over his family. Such authority may be exercised in an unloving way, and no doubt some will be quick to point out the abuses, but the exercise of such authority is not itself unloving; in fact, it could be argued that the real unloving act would be to abandon one's responsibilities, to not exercise the authority inherent in one's position. and to not lead.

And the claim of such an inverse relationship between love and power completely falls apart when applied to God. Yes, no doubt some would point out how Jesus laid aside His glory and humbled Himself, even to the point of crucifixion, and yes, it is something to note. As Scripture notes, God shows His love for us through Christ having died for us, even when we were still sinners. Yet even it had something to do with power, as Hebrews 2:14 states, "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil--".

Moreover, here is what Revelation says about God and power:

Revelation 4:11
You are worthy, our Lord and God
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they were created
and have their being.

5:12-13
In a loud voice they sang:
"Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honor and glory and praise!"
Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them singing:
"To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honor and glory and power
for ever and ever!"

19:1,2a
And this I heard what sounded like the roar of a great multitude in heaven shouting:
"Hallelujah!
Salvation and glory and power
belong to our God,
for true and just are his judgments."

An awful lot there about God having power for a book that is just suppose to be about the "power of love", don't you think?

it's for your own good

For example, for me, today, the Noah story, in which God wipes out all living except one boatload of refugees, has become profoundly disturbing...In recent years, though, I began thinking about how some might use the story as a "constitutional precedent"--if God single-handedly practices "ethnic cleaning" once, and if God cannot do evil, then there is apparently a time and place when genocide is justified. And that means that maybe we (or our enemies) could be justified in playing the genocide card again at some point in the future--another sobering reason to take this quest for a new kind of Christianity seriously in spite of the risks and opposition.
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christian, pp. 108-109

Ah, those loving, caring people on the Left, who while accusing other people of seeing demons behind every rock and bush, do themselves seem to see them in every page of the Bible. How kind of them, to try to spin events in the Bible, so that we will not think that God is really one who would destroy the world with a flood, or that Christ would return in a mood for judgment.

Bearing that in mind, I offer that we continue McLaren's "divine cleansing" of the Bible. Here are some other examples of things that would be, shall we say, rethought, if not completely turned on their heads, lest we simpletons misunderstand.

Lest we think that women are the problem, we should remove the story of Eve being the first one who fell for the serpent's temptation.

Lest we think that God has something against elder sons, we should get rid of the stories of Cain and Abel, as well as Jacob and Esau.

Lest we think that God wants us to participate in global overpopulation, we should completely remove Jacob, because he had at least 13 kids.

Lest we think that God likes cupbearers and/or hates bakers, we should get rid of the account of Joseph interpreting the dreams of those two men while in prison.

Lest we think that God dislikes shoes, we should get rid of the story of Moses and the burning bush.

Lest we think that God uses natural disasters to send messages, we should get rid of the whole account of Moses and the disasters in Egypts--especially that last one, which ties in with God's hatred of elder sons.

Lest we think that God likes laws, we should get rid of all of the books of the Law of Moses.

Lest we think that God likes conquest, we should remove the book of Joshua.

Lest we think that God isn't ecumenical, we should remove the book of Judges.

Lest we think that God likes marriages based on law and not love, we should remove Ruth.

Lest we think that God hates tall people, we should get rid of the story of David and Goliath.

I hope those are enough to give you the picture.

very early constitutionalists

By now, I hope you can anticipate my three-part answer...Second, he seems to be working from a constitutional approach of the Bible, which privileges him to pass judgment as if he were a Supreme Court justice...

Instead, this image of Jesus as a conqueror (in Revelation 19:11-16) reassures believers that the peaceful Jesus who entered Jerusalem on a donkey that day wasn't actually weak and defeated; he was in fact every bit as powerful as a Caesar on a steed...

To repeat, Revelation is not portraying Jesus returning to earth in the future, having repented of his naive gospel ways and having converted to Caesar's "realistic" Greco-Roman methods instead...

Revelation celebrates not the love of power, but the power of love. It denies, with all due audacity, that God's anointed liberator is the Divine Terminator, threatening revenge for all who refurse to honor him, growling "I'll be back!".
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, pp 120, 124-125, 126

McLaren is dealing here with someone's quote, which clearly seens Revelation 19 as being a prophecy of Jesus' return, and one that is literal--Jesus will return as a conquering king, to being judgment to some people.

McLaren doesn't like that. He likes a pacifist Jesus, and hates it when Jesus just won't conform. So, he has to go to some lengths to try to makes the other person (isn't it against their code to disparage the other?) he quotes seem ridiculous.

Now, I think the one he quotes is someone who's around today (McLaren attaches no name to the quote, neither in the contents of the book nor in the footnotes, which seems rather iffy to me). And since it is someone who's around today, he may think he can get away with his interpretive shenanigans.

But I find it interesting that he appeals to the ancient church (a bit I did't quote here) in support for his reinterpretation, because some in the early church agreed more with McLaren's critic than with McLaren.

emphases mine

“So that you ought rather to desist from the love of strife, and repent before the great day of judgment come, wherein all those of your tribes who have pierced this Christ shall mourn as I have shown has been declared by the Scriptures. And I have explained that the Lord swore, ‘after the order of Melchizedek,’ and what this prediction means; and the prophecy of Isaiah which says, ‘His burial is taken away from the midst,’ I have already said, referred to the future burying and rising again of Christ; and I have frequently remarked that this very Christ is the Judge of all the living and the dead. And Nathan likewise, speaking to David about Him, thus continued: ‘I will be His Father, and He shall be my Son; and my mercy shall I not take away from Him, as I did from them that went before Him; and I will establish Him in my house, and in His kingdom for ever.’ And Ezekiel says, ‘There shall be no other prince in the house but He.’ For He is the chosen Priest and eternal King, the Christ, inasmuch as He is
the Son of God;
Justin Martyr, dialogue with Trypho, ch 118

For the prophets have proclaimed two advents of His: the one, that which is already past, when He came as a dishonored and suffering Man; but the second, when, according to prophecy, He shall come from heaven with glory, accompanied by His angelic host, when also He shall raise the bodies of all men who have lived, and shall clothe those of the worthy with immortality, and shall send those of the wicked, endued with eternal sensibility, into everlasting fire with the wicked devils.
Justin Martyr, First Apology of Justin, ch 52

If the Father, then, does not exercise judgment, [it follows] that judgment does not belong to Him, or that He consents to all those actions which take place; and if He does not judge, all persons will be equal, and accounted in the same condition. The advent of Christ will therefore be without an object, yea, absurd, inasmuch as [in that case] He exercises no judicial power. For “He came to divide a man against his father, and the daughter against the mother, and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law;” and when two are in one bed, to take the one, and to leave the other; and of two women grinding at the mill, to take one and leave the other: [also] at the time of the end, to order the reapers to collect first the tares together, and bind them in bundles, and burn them with unquenchable fire, but to gather up the wheat into the barn; and to call the lambs into the kingdom prepared for them, but to send the goats into everlasting fire, which has been prepared by His Father for the devil and his angels. And why is this? Has the Word come for the ruin and for the resurrection of many? For the ruin, certainly, of those who do not believe Him, to whom also He has threatened a greater damnation in the judgment-day than that of Sodom and Gomorrah; but for the resurrection of believers, and those who do the will of His Father in heaven. If then the advent of the Son comes indeed alike to all, but is for the purpose of judging, and separating the believing from the unbelieving, since, as those who believe do His will agreeably to their own choice, and as, [also] agreeably to their own choice, the disobedient do not consent to His doctrine; it is manifest that His Father has made all in a like condition, each person having a choice of his own, and a free understanding; and that He has regard to all things, and exercises a providence over all, “making His sun to rise upon the evil and on the good, and sending rain upon the just and unjust.”
Irenaeus, Against Heretics, Book 5 Chapter 27

Who knew that, so early in the Church, they had the Greco-Roman constitutional view of things, even before there was a Greco-Roman constitutional view around. Too bad they didn't have McLaren around as something like a prophet, to keep them from it.

an oh ode to ankoc

('ankoc', btw, is the initials of A New Kind of Christianity, just to clarify)

Oh, to be among the enlightened ones, the advanced one, the ascended masters!!

Oh, to be among those who have advanced so far in humility that you know how far you have advanced over the common rabble, to know when to Fall is really to ascend, to know that we who have never seen the face of God (or gods, or the universe) may look with supreme pity on he who gave God a meal at his tent, or he who talked with God as a friend talks to a friend.

Oh, to be counted among those fortunate few, who can gaze upon the sacred words of the prophets of old, and determine that they really didn't mean what they said. Oh, to be able to see that when the prophets of old said that God would do something, they really meant that man would do it. Oh, to know that when the prophets of old spoke of a coming time when men would be full of vitality past the age of 100, they really meant that we who live now should pass Obamacare. What sublime prophetic ability, for those of thousands of years in the past to use such an outlandish notion as people living so long, to speak specifically to us today to follow the agenda of the enlighened ones!

Oh, to know that to read the Bible as a Jew means that one does not read the Bible as Jews of old. Oh, to see that the Law was not a constitution, though the Jew of old thought that it was very like one. Oh, to see that we have advanced so far! God gave Israel the Law and the Prophets, and did not ask a by-your-leave to do so, yet we today have advanced to the point where we may talk with each other, determine what is revelation, and so determine for ourselves "Hath God really said?"

For the moment, that is my last word, so I'll let someone else provide the word after that.


see more dog and puppy pictures

(why do I suspect that pup could get a lot of use?)

making it worth it

I must now confess that, yes, I did it. I suppose one could blame it on a touch of madness, perhaps brought on by the poison of the philosophy I had only a day before drained to the dregs. Perhaps it could be blamed on a curious so morbid the modern puritan would call it obese. Whatever the cause, whatever the reason, I did indeed give over the almost-$30 that I knew would be required of me by those gatekeepers of the law and the profits, and having surrendered the precious amount, I was free to take in hand and from the store a copy of the incontrovertibly controversial "A New Kind of Christianity".

When one does such a mad thing, it only shows a steeper descent along the slippery slope to begin to scour the pages looking for an adequate return on investment. Perhaps because McLaren is decidedly of the Left, and for the Left a return of any such kind seems to be a sin on the order of the original Fall they do not believe in, I have thus far found all attempts at such a return to be fruitless. I am left with mere pages, and the words upon them, which any postmodern will all too readily tell you are worthless, anyway.

If nothing else, McLaren has proven the Bible to be literally true when it says that a fool and his money are soon parted.

But if a book must be worthless, at least it cannot be completely worthless. I have never written a book, so cannot claim to know the joy of such an accomplishment. Perhaps those who bind books may have at one time found satisfaction in such a craft, though I would think that today those who bind books are machines who take little joy in anything. Those like myself, who read, can find a degree of joy in doing our part. But what if that joy is denied us? To borrow McLaren's favorite type of question, what if he who reads does not enjoy the reading? What if he learns nothing, or at least nothing of value? What if he longs to find some joy, some satisfaction, in a book? What is he left with?

Merely the shredding of it.

So, let the shredding begin...

philosophical poison, with an added dash of Dogbert

In the last entry, I gave an excerpt from the called "Zizek: a (very) critical introduction" by Marcus Pound, a part of a set of books called Interventions. I also hinted that it was only one of several things said in the book that were poisonous. I intend to go into that here and now.

First, a couple of excerpts from Chesterton, to kind of give a bit of perspective.

...The temptations of philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety. They are always attracted by insane simplifications, as men poised above abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air. It needed another kind of philosopher to stand poised upon the pinnacle of the Temple and keep his balance without casting himself down. One of these obvious, these too obvious explanations is that everything is a dream and a delusion and there is nothing outside the ego. Another is that all things recur; another, which is said to be Buddhist and is certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is the matter with us is our creation, in the sense that our coloured differentiation and personalitiy, and that nothing will be well till we are melted into one unity. By this theory, in short, the Creation was the Fall.
The Everlasting Man, p. 135

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.
Orthodoxy, at the beginning of ch. II

I want to point out these two insights by Chesterton because most of the things I'm going to point out from the "Zizek..." book will prove him true; they will be "insane simplications" made into "cynical maxims" made by "thoroughly worldly people" which will simply be "not true".

Here are the insights in the book, made by the various persons referenced by the author...

(male) love is murder--p. 145; Christ's death was not a sacrifice, save in the sense of sacrificing sacrifice--p. 47; Femininity is athiesm--p. 109; all men are castrated--p. 106; God's creation of the material world is "proof of the divine madness, of the fact that God himself is out of his mind"--p. 30; we can believe in order to not believe--p. 62; the Holy Spirit is 'the spirit of the community of believers'--p. 38; Christ's death shows that 'there is no longer any transcendent God with whom to communicate--p. 38; concerning Job, it ' was not him (Job), but God himself, who was actually on trial in Job's calamities, and He failed the test miserable--p. 58; "it is when we learn that suffereing is meaningless that we cease to be tyrannized by it."--p. 58; Christianity is the religion of atheist, "He (Zizek) reads Christ's cry of dereliction as the "over-coming of metaphysics," i.e., the death of the big Other.--p. 114; Old Testament Judaism was masculine, while Christianity is feminism--p. 114-118.

I'll stop there. It's enough, though I think I could go on a bit longer.

I do want to conclude with something I've just read. It's today's Dilbert comic strip. Why do I feel so like the human?

philosophical poison

A few days ago, I felt as if I had been poisoned.

Not a physical poison, mind you. A mental one, maybe a soul or spiritual poison, would be the best way to phrase it. I was poisoned by a book, by something I had read. Here it is.

At this point one should clarify what Badiou means by truth. To borrow from Peter Hallward's succinct summary: "what Badiou calls a truth is the process that, sparked by a break with routine, persists as an affirmation whose progressive imposition transforms the very way things appear in the situation". On this account truth does not concern the correspondence between knowledge and its object, as if reality itself had been given in advance and all one had to do was discover it or ensure the right representation thereof. Truth is a process, a dynamic operation; truth does not descrive the world as real, it creates it as real by retroactively transforming the past to give meaningfulness to the present.

...In the case of Paul, the claim "Christ is resurrected" breaks with the existing background of Greek philosophy or Jewish legalism: Christianity introduces something new. Again, what mattes is not whether Christ was actually resurrected but the eventful nature of the declaration itself, unspoiled by any knowledge of the historical Jewsus, standing instead for the subjective possibility of victory over death. In this way Badiou's account recalls the disregard Paul has for Christ in Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis...Upon challenging Paul with the claim that he (Jesus) did not resurrect, Paul says, "Look at all these people, look at their faces. Do you see how unhappy they are?..Their only hope is the resurrected Jesus...I don't care whether you are Jesus or not, the resurrected Jesus will save the world". In short, what matters is not the literal truth of the resurrection, but the way one is carried through fideltiy to the event that subsequently establishes it as a universal field of truth--universal in the sense that it defines the field itself...
Marcus Pound, Zizek: a (very) critical introduction, pp 76-78

In other words, the importance of the Paul and the Apostles' claims that Jesus is risen is not in if it actually happened, but rather in how people may have reacted to it. To simply it further, it's not about reality, but about propoganda. The sole value of the statement of Christ's resurrection is in it's propoganda value.

And this person Badiou has the unmitigated gall to use the word "truth" to disguise his attempt to make lies into the truth.

This statement is poison, and it poisoned me. I felt it for several hours, as I had a fresh insight into just how far philosophers, those who are supposed to love wisdom, have descended into loving madness and lies. That anyone who may call himself or herself a philosopher should say such a thing, staining the noble name of truth by applying that name to lies, and that others who call themselves philsophers may think that this is a great insight and concept, was enough to bring on something like despair.

Well did Paul warn us against "vain philosophies". Nothing could be more vain than this. That whole book is poisonous, I've only given one example. I plan to deal with the whole book a bit more in a later entry.

what healed them?

A bit ago, I wrote some entries concerning a TheOoze article about "Theology After Google". The author of that article is part of a website called Transforming Theology. To give you an idea of what they consider good thinking, one may consider this.

Progressive Healing?

I believe that the progressive Christian vision is quite receptive to the non-supernatural understandings of Jesus’ healing ministry and our ability to share in God’s aim at healing and wholeness of mind, body, spirit, and relationships in our time.

These people are essentially anti-supernatural--for some reason, they think they are quite smart enough to say that God is not able to interfere in the natural world, to for example use His Divine power to heal people. Instead, they have to put forth the idea that somehow the healings in Scripture are some kinds of tricks involving, well, read on...

From this perspective, we can affirm and go beyond Crossan’s sociological understanding of healing. As a result of the intimate relationship of Jesus to the divine (Jesus as living fully in the dynamic divine-human call and response, in which God calls and we respond and we call and God responds), Jesus “mediated” the divine energy of the universe in superlative ways; Jesus awakened persons to their own healing powers and opened them to God’s healing touch; and Jesus invited persons to become actors rather than victims in responding to illness.

The divine energy of the universe? Their own healing powers? Good luck finding that in the Gospels, or in anything Jesus said.

reviewing a reviewer 2; belief is important

A bit more on my take of the review from the previous post. True, the first was quite long, but I hope you will be patient.

Is it just a coincidence that the dominant story line we find in the Church today is one where God is furious with the created realm, places higher value on right thinking and belief over right action and living (we are saved, so the story goes, by getting our thinking right about God, irrespective of whether or not our physical lives change), where sharing the gospel is reduced to ideas and mental consent,

There are several things that make for sure signs of a cults, things that all pseudo-christian cults have in common. One of those is this--Christianity makes salvation far too easy, so they feel the need to add to it. For them, it is not hard enough to say that the defining attribute of a Believer is that they believe. They must also act. But it is not enough that they simply act, they must also act in ways that the cult leaders approve of, they must hold opinions that the cult leaders claim are right, and not question them lest they be cast into the outer darkness of those unenlightened.

So, for this particular blogger, for someone to say that they believe the Gospel is not enough--they have to act as if they do. It is, in essence, adding law to the Gospel. I do not say "the Law", but it is a law, one that he and other Emergents have made for themselves, and insist on others follow.

Of course, it is a complex situation. We know that simply saying the one believes God exists is not enough, "the devils also believe, and fear". The demons know very well that God exists, and rather than that knowledge leading to their salvation, it only adds to the certainty of their own damnation.

Yet the truth is, when it comes to salvations, belief is essential. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved", "Repent, and believe the Gospel". The mental consent this blogger derides and ridicules is one of the essential first steps.

reviewing a reviewer

It is perhaps a testimony to my cheapness that I am here commenting on someone's review of a book, rather than reviewing the book myself. The truth is that nothing, not even a morbid sense of curiosity, has yet made a good argument for me to pass over what has to be almost $30 for McLaren's new book. I figure I must have much better ways of wasting my money than to purchase a book that I know is full of egomanical rot.

And, anyway, the review, by one who made not a few rather colorful comments here a few months back, has not a few bits of interest in itself. So saying, tally ho...!

The first thing that I think is important is to remind ourselves that McLaren is not saying anything new or radical here. He’s reminding us of something we need to be reminded of and urging us to conform our lives around right belief, but the meat of his argument is recognized and accepted by most everyone (well, almost). What’s the argument? Bottom line: Plato, a Greek philosopher from the 4th century BCE, looms larger than life in the minds of us Westerners. What did Plato teach nearly 300 years before the advent of Christ? Essentially that the physical, material world is an illusion and that ultimate reality, the things that really matter, are those that are spiritual and non-material. This body we find ourselves in is a prison, more or less, and the goal of human life, the greatest good, is to transcend the ugly, sick, doomed, perishing world of matter. One of the ways we can do that is through philosophy – by studying. The mind is a beautiful thing that operates on ideas and ideals – the best stuff of life.

These sorts of discussions (along with critiques by Aristotle, a student of Plato), was the life-blood of the Greeks and then the Romans. As philosophers abounded and debated the only things that really mattered (recall Paul’s visit to Athens in Acts 17) the Greek/Roman mind became accustomed to dualism. The mind would always see the world divided in two – the doomed, profane physical world our bodies are trapped in and the sacred, spiritual world of ideals, ideas and eternality (which, by the way, is unchanging. Change, they would argue, is weakness and something only material matter undergoes (e.g. flowers bloom, wither and die)).

From this dualism it is easy to see how a form of elitism would (and did) emerge. The Greeks/Romans saw themselves as superior to every other culture and saw it as their duty to bring the “peace of Rome” to other lands, graciously giving them a culture and knowledge that would help these “barbarians” transcend their dismal existences (One cannot help but overhear mission statements of the church when it comes to world evangelism. “Let’s save the heathens!” was a call to action disguised in racial and intellectual and cultural bigotry). The good life, the Greeks/Romans believed and taught, was one where the physical world was mastered and the spiritual world was preferred and accessed through the mind. Though you may never have heard of Plato there is no mistaking his grip on our minds even today.

I think it is Pagitt who gets into the whole "platonic dualism" thing. My concern here isn't to deny that Plato may have been a dualist, in a sense it's something that doesn't even matter; rather, one must ask why we should assume that Plato is the father and author of all things dualism. Whatever else good or bad we may have gotten from the Greek philosophers, is it accurate to say that all instances of dualism in the Bible are to be blamed on the Greeks?

Now, if you're going to dismiss all dualism as brought in from the outside, you have to do some very interesting things with the Bible. You have to explain why God accepted Abel's sacrifice while rejecting Cain's, especially since we aren't really told why. You have to explain why God put all of the world under judgment, but "Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord". You have to explain why God chose just one man, and not even all of his family, in order to found one people to be His chosen. You have to explain why God loved Jacob, a rather interesting character in his own right, and hated Esau. You have to explain why, out of all of the people in slavery in the world at that time, God sent only one of the them a Moses for them, and Himself worked miracles, many of a destructive sort, in order to deliver them.

And instances of dualisms in the Bible could go on for a long while, with the most important ones being the New Testament--sheep who are welcomed and goats who are cast out, wise virgins who are ready for the bridegroom and foolish ones who are left out, wheat that is kept and weeds that will be burned, the Pharisee whose prayer is self-praise and the publican whose prayer is for mercy. And most important of all, those who have been made Children of God and those who are children of wrath, those who belong to God and those who are still of the world, those who are believers in Christ and those who reject Him.

It is entirely too simple to look at every instance of dualism one can find, and expect that claimings "platonism" is an adequate answer.

Finally, I want to deal with his ridicule of missions at the end of that excerpt. As one who was in missions for a few years, and know people from many different countries and cultures who have been in missions in order to take the Gospel to people, I can only find this writer's words distasteful and disgusting. But having read the words of Emergents no small amount over the past few years, I can think of nothing more incongruous, nothing Emergents would find more distasteful themselves, than the notion of Christian missionaries trying to convert people from their false beliefs to believing in the true and living God. As one writer I recently read noted, there is nothing in Emergent theology worth giving one's life for, worth dying for, worth suffering persecution and martydom for. I would almost say that the whole point of Emergent thought is to avoid the painful necessities that make for persecutions and martyrdoms.

It would, I think, but most accurate to say that, if Jesus had been Emergent, He would not have died like He did. More likely, he would have been some kind of cultic quack who had a few followers, maybe caused a tad bit of trouble, but on the whole could be ignored.

And concerning missions, what message could an Emergent missionary give? "I'm ok, you're ok, let me go pray to Allah with you, and don't buy that car because you'll only be increasing global warming"? "I'm not concerned with you becoming a believer in Christ, I just want you to join my simply-living commune and eat nuts and berries the rest of your life"? "Yes, you live under an oppressive Communistic government that tries to keep Christianity from you, but you have to understand, we're leftists, too, and your place is actually much better than those freedom-loving, car-driving, oil-burning, meat-eating, Capitalistic countries in the West."?

Is it just a coincidence that the dominant story line we find in the Church today is one where God is furious with the created realm, places higher value on right thinking and belief over right action and living (we are saved, so the story goes, by getting our thinking right about God, irrespective of whether or not our physical lives change), where sharing the gospel is reduced to ideas and mental consent, where sharing the gospel in that way is more important than sharing a glass of water or a meal or a home, and where this world, in the end, will be vacated by a rapture and destroyed by fire while those of us with enlightened minds watch from the spiritual, pure, changeless heavens above.

Is this how Jesus would have read the Bible or how Plato would have read it?

Well, let's see...

We know a bit about how Jesus read the Scriptures of His day, because we have recorded instances of Him using them. He referenced the account of Noah in a way that suggests that He considered it to have really happened. He used Deuteronomy to answer Satan's temptations. He talked about Abraham as if he not only lived, but was still alive and even aware when Jesus came to Earth and was happy when He did. He even answers the Sadducees, who denied life after death, but pointing out that God was still the God of the Fathers because they still lived.

But he likely doesn't want to think that Jesus took the story of Noah seriously. How unscientific of Jesus!!

The question of how Jesus would read the Scriptures, then, depends on if they teach the things the writer lists. Is God furious with the created realm? Not sure where he got that, but there are reasons in the Bible to think that God is angry with the unrepentent-- "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness" Romans 1:18; "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him" John 3:36 "Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the might and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?" Revelation 6:15-17

Are right beliefs and thinking more important than right actions and living? Well, let me put it this way--how can you know what are the right actions and the right way to live if you do not have right beliefs and are not thinking right? The fact is, right beliefs and thinking are the things the help us determine right actions and right ways to live. As Christians, we are saved by grace through faith, not by works. We are saved by repenting and believing in Christ, a belief that must mean some measure of right beliefs about Him. But we are saved to do good works, and our works show our faith. But the right beliefs come before the good works.

And the idea that Christians who truly believe do not share with others is simply abject nonsense on this writer's part, a baseless accusation that is refuted a million times over by believers who share what they have with those around them, and give even when it strung a little. It is the sign of a bad argument when it has to tastelessly accuse Christians (I won't say "fellow Christians" because one making such an accusation needs to show something to even be considered worthy of that noble title) of what they do not do.

Finally, the rapture and the end of the world. I'm not sure how one cannot say that the world will one day end, given that the Bible is clear that "By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungoldy men", II Peter 3:7, and "...The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the everything in it will be laid bare", II Peter 3:10.

Whether Heaven will be "changeless" or not, or whatever that may mean, is something that cannot be known except by being there.

The God of Israel, Elohim, looks very different from the god we Greeks/Romans have made. Elohim delights in his creation, is perfectly happy with change (even instigating it!), is forgiving and full of mercy to a fault and his punishments are not to destroy or inflict eternal misery but to correct, discipline, encourage and redeem. This is a God who looks a lot more like Abba (Daddy!) than the Greco/Roman god we descendants of Plato created.

Some of this may be biblically obvious, but others are puzzling. The God of Israel doesn't punish to destroy? Perhaps Achan and his family could say otherwise, or the ones who stood up against Moses and God opened the ground to swallow them. Or how about those who occupied Canaan before God sent Israel to claim it for themselves. Even Israel could testify against that, for they no doubt remember the times God sent the armies of Babylon and then Rome to destroy the city of Jerusalem and the Temple.

we have stolen Elohim from the Jews and turned him into Theos (the greek name for “God”)

This is one of those things that simply doesn't make sense. We stole Elohim from the Jews? Really? When and were? Does the fact that the Jews of Jesus' day and in the time of the Apostles largely rejected Christ not come into the picture?

But even more puzzling are these last statements.

I once heard Dr. J. Kameron Carter, professor at Duke Divinity, say that we Gentiles are getting the story right only insofar as the Jews who are listening can nod in assent. To put it another way, to the extent the Jews disbelieve our Jesus as the Messiah of the world is the same extent to which we have butchered the story. Given that most Jews doubt our Jesus as Messiah gives me reason to think we need to rethink the narrative we have been telling and living.

This is such an absurd criterion that I doubt he's even thought how it could be implemented. Are we suppose to take a random survey of Jewish people and see what they think of a what the Gospels tell us about Jesus, and the ideas with the most votes are ok? Shall we gather a focus group of Jewish people together and let them discuss Jesus' life? What if they don't agree on things? What if we get several focus groups, and they all have disagreements? What kinds of Jewish persons are acceptable--actively practicing religious Jews, largely secular Jews who don't practice any religion, Messianic Jews who believe in Christ? Are half-Jews ok, or quarter-Jews acceptable?

And the topper, that last sentence. If that were really a sound criterion, we would be left with the conclusion that since most of the Jews of Jesus' own day doubted that He was the Messiah, than He should have rethought the narrative He was telling and living.

But then, what can you expect from a Blue Devil but nonsense.

mclaren--a new kind of oliver stone

Interview with Brian McLaren About ‘A New Kind of Christianity’

Keeping up the Sojo tradition of supporting every book of questionable theology out there so long as it supports their leftist agenda, here we have Sojo interviewing Brina McLaren about his new book. Here are some excerpts, with comments.

But I think you can make this very fragile generalization: before the Enlightenment, authority resided not in books, but in divinely ordained people.

First, if a 'generalization' is 'fragile', is it really worth making? And is it really worth anything?

Second, one of the aspects of the Bible is that it was based on what was recorded and written, not on the divinely ordained people (which I guess he means a pope, perhaps among others). Moses gave the people the law, but he did not create the law. When Jesus confronted Satan's temptations, He asnwered with statements beginning "It is written...".

McLaren's 'generalization' is so much 'fragile' as it is a lie.

Protestants, at least, dispensed with the divine right of popes and cardinals, and we shifted our authority to constitutions — doctrinal statements and systematic theologies — which we claimed were derived from and legitimized by the Bible.

Again, wrong. Doctrinal statements and theologies were around long before the Catholic Church and popes and other such things. One can find them in the New Testament and in the writings of the Ante Nicene church writers.

My proposal is that we’re moving from courtroom to quest as a primary metaphor.

Sure, because when you're losing in the courtroom, nothing seems better than to go on the lam. And when the Bible is so against all the things you want to be true, than you have to keep going until you find a way to make the Bible agree with you.

says it all

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

of course, sojo WOULD support this book

What if the Church were Christian?

And since the book isn't yet in general circulation, here's what's available at the publishers for reading...

browseinside

Reading through his interview at Sojo and what I've read of the book, it reminds me a lot of another book I've written a bit about here, "Saving Jesus from the Church" by Robin B Meyers; for example, look at the title of the first chapter--"If the Church Were Christian...Jesus Would Be a Model for Living Rather Than an Object of Worship". In the few pages we have of the chapter at the browser, we learn that it is silly to believe that Jesus had really been virgin-born, and it seems to be working up to saying that believing in miracles is equally foolish. Not unlike Meyers, who wanted us to stop worship Jesus.

And this is the type of book Sojo recommends on their blog for us to read. If they get Jesus wrong, how much are they getting the other things wrong, too?

Perhaps a better title for the Sojo blog would be "What if this author were Christian".

getting those funny looks

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

if i wanted a circular god, i'd find a fat buddha

Theology after Google

Theology after Google does not divide up the world between the “sacred” and the “secular,” as past theologies so often did. All thought and experience bears on it, and all of one’s life manifests it. Thus the distinction between one’s “ministry” and one’s “ordinary life” is bogus. All of one’s life as a Christian is missional.. The great 15th-century theologian and mystic Nicholas of Cusa imagined God as a circle whose radius is infinite and whose center is everywhere. It only takes a second to realize that Cusa’s picture wreaks havoc on all geometries of “inside” and “outside.”

This is hardly a new idea. I was hearing this from people in the missions organization I was in several years ago. I think it's something that could be debated. For example, when God spoke to Moses in the wilderness, He called where they talked "holy ground". Wherever that perameters of that "holy ground" was, it was different than the normal ground Moses had been walking on before, and so he was told to remove his sandals. A similar thing happened later, when Moses and the people of Israel were at the mountain and God came down to them. The mountian was not to be treated by them as another mountain--the people were not to approach it, and any animal that touched it was to be killed. The Tabernacle and later the Temple were not common buildings, and even in them there was a place that was entered only once a year by the High Priest, the Holy of Holies. The Ark of the Covenant was not to be touched at all, and God killed a man who touched it, even for the theoretically good reason of keeping it from falling. The tribe of Levi was different than the others, they were not given land, but were the priests and keepers of the Tabernacle and Temple.

It's an interesting idea, perhaps not without merit, depending on what is meant by it. I think the last sentence of the paragraph quoted above gives an idea of what he means--that in trying to do away with the concepts of "inside" and outside", he's essentially sneaking in, though not so subtly, universalism. Perhaps not surprising, since TheOoze is Spencer Burke's site, and Burke has claims to be some form of universalist.

And that is where this writer's version of "no sacred or secular" falls apart. I doubt the New Testament could be more plain that there is a very real difference between those who believe and those who don't, between those who are children of God and child or wrath, the sheep who are welcomed and the goats who are condemned, the wheat and the tares, the wise virgins and the foolish ones, those in Abraham's bosom and those in Hades, those whose names are written in the Book of Life and those whose names aren't.

One can point to divisions people have made that have been silly or even stupid. But pointing those out does not mean that all divisions are wrong. And when the Bible plainly says there are those who are pleasing to God, and others who are subject to God's wrath, then it is not wise to try to dismiss those divisions simply because one doesn't like them, and simply because they do not most kind "picture".

Finally, a bit on the difference between the symbol of the circle and the more obvious Christian symbol of the cross, from Chesterton's "Orthodoxy", toward the end of chapter 2.

As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.