Brian D. McLaren
ISBN 0-7879-5599-X
Read September 2006
Reviewed 2006 October 31
Viann read this book. It is on loan from a friend of hers; IÕm not sure whom. As she read it she kept saying, ÒThis reminds me of you.Ó So I read it.
This is an account written in the first person, of a pastor who is badly burned out. As a pastor he must be the champion of the party line of the church and its doctrines; he must lead his parishioners in the ways of righteousness. As an individual Christian, heÕs not even sure he believes a lot of that stuff himself. He decides that a year hence, he will not be in the ministry anymore. This hypocrisy is just too much to handle.
He takes one of his kids to a rock concert put on by some of their peers and sees a guy there who he knows is a teacher in high school. This guy is called Neo. He goes and starts a conversation with Neo with the idea of seeing if he can get information on how he could make a career change into teaching. Of course, this is a delicate and unsafe approach for a pastor, whose job is very public, to take with a relative stranger.
Neo knows more about what is going on here from the beginning than you might think. The book is the story of the friendship that develops and it is in this medium that the author discusses the situation of Christianity in our era. The main characters in this dialogue are Neo, Dan (the first person), and Carol, DanÕs wife. It is Òbased onÓ a true story. Allegorically, Dan is Brian.
Neo was once a pastor himself and ended up in teaching because of a similar blowup in his own history. He sees the potential in Dan and wants him to take a different course. Dan needs to have some mind expansion and as their relationship develops, Neo leads him in the direction of understanding the basic concepts of serious paradigm change and how they will ultimately effect his own course and the course that he may lead other Christians on. Neo doesnÕt want Dan to give up as he did. He wants to lead him to new understandings that he has come to and see if it is possible for him not to make the same mistakes.
The road is rough, as it must be when any personÕs core beliefs are shaken. After all, this is what their core being is based on. People are not monoliths, boulders, or rocks. At a crucial moment, Neo disappears. His father dies and he resigns from his job at the school to go take care of his ailing mother in another state. The conversation continues by e-mail and ends up diverging into copies of e-mails that Neo has had with a young pastoral intern along these same lines, a person who is just beginning her career and is wondering about seminaries, possible directions of leadership, and paradigms over the next fifty years which will constitute her own career. Then, after his mother passes, Neo embarks on an around-the-world trip to visit some missions he has supported and to do things that are important to him. The book ends with Neo absent and incommunicado. It is unclear whether we will ever hear from him again or not. It is also unclear whether this is a literary technique or a shadow of the Òtrue story.Ó My guess is that the Òtrue storyÓ is a bit more boring if presented in novel form, but was hair-raising enough when lived out.
More important is the content of the conversation which is subtly passed on to the reader through this Òthis is my own struggle to which you are a spectatorÓ device. The basic idea is that the church is not, as we were taught, the source and seat of unchanging truth. God is, but the church in the world is highly responsive to the world that it has developed to serve. There is much in todayÕs Christian faith that is Greek, or Victorian, or Capitalist, or Industrial because this is the world that the church members live in and in which they must frame their lives and their faith. To be absolutist about the Bible with the backdrop of this richly non-Biblical basis for faith is a feature of the church through the ages; it has always been disingenuous. And I had thought this was only the case in my own time.
In particular, the discussion places us at a cusp in history, a transition between what we now know well, labeled ÒmodernÓ and what we are becoming, labeled Òpostmodern.Ó This was really my first introduction to these terms in this context so I really donÕt have all the baggage I should probably already have with respect to Òpostmodern Christianity.Ó Led by Neo, Dan, and the others, it sounds a lot better to me than continuing to struggle with the old debates and fear-mongering that we were raised with.
Consider the transition from medieval to modern. A medieval Christian could not consider Christians today as even being Christian. After all, we are far past believing in divine right monarchy as they did. Does this mean that they were wrong or that we are wrong? Or that God has changed? Well, to cut past considerable discussion and perspective forming, they get to the point where Neo has to claim, ÒJesus is the Savior; The church is not the savior.Ó This was one of many ah-hah moments for me. Many of the concepts clarified in this book are just extensions of the personal theology that I have been developing based on my observations, study, and living experience.
Sometimes I mark up books like this and might have this one, not fully realizing that it was borrowed, but I didnÕt. I only marked one passage, one that illustrates this point. They are discussing the political differences in the church between evangelical conservatives who take the Bible ÒliterallyÓ and liberal Christians who see it more allegorically:
ÒOK,Ó Neo continued, ÒFortunately, evangelicals donÕt say that people who disobey their parents should be stoned, as the Bible teaches in Leviticus, or that people whose genitals are mutilated should be excluded from worship, as the Bible also teaches in Leviticus, or that itÕs a sin for women to wear jewelry or have a short haircut, as the Bible teaches in some of PaulÕs writings. They donÕt justify killing infidels, even though Moses ordered the faithful to do so in Exodus. They donÕt practice polygamy, even though David and Solomon did. They donÕt recommend dashing the infants of their enemies against stones, as one of the Psalms celebrated. No, they have a grid of decency that keeps them from applying the Bible literally in these situations. But they seem generally unaware of this grid; they think they rigorously apply the bible literally, and no one else is as faithful as they are. Their grid is like their own retina – they see by it, so they canÕt see it. As you said, the liberals do this sifting and sorting too, but they just have a different grid. So when evangelicals say theyÕre arguing about the BibleÕs absolute authority, too often they are arguing about the superiority of the traditional grid through which they read and interpret the Bible. Of course, IÕd not recommend you say that to any of them, because theyÕll get pretty upset with you. They really canÕt see it. TheyÕll think youÕre a fool or a troublemaker.Ó (page 49)
Well, IÕve been called a troublemaker. And a fool, come to think of it. Guess IÕm not subtle enough in these discussions of sense.
The key point here is, of course, ÒÉ the traditional grid,Ó the context that comes from Queen Victoria, Aristotle, and Adam Smith, to name a few, and from which much in our faith is derived.
To get the whole story youÕd have to read the whole book. This quote and the few things IÕve said about the structure and approach give the flavor.
Oh, one thing about the transition from the modern to the postmodern church, and by the way, this is something thatÕs going to happen whether we preach against it or not: We donÕt really know what we are doing. We donÕt really know where we are going or what the next developments will be. We are again proving the very existence of God through the survival of the church worldwide, despite itself. There is no guarantee of success with what we try as individual groups, however. IÕll be on the lookout for illumination on the rough paths to this future, both as an individual Christian and as a leader within the church. Maybe it will be in books or in life witnesses. Maybe we are writing the books.