the New Pantagruel

Who Has the Last Word? An Interview with Brian McLaren

by Dan Knausswith Brian McLaren

RIAN MCLAREN, whose website describes him as an “author, storyteller, and theologian,” has degrees in English literature and is the pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland. His sometimes controversial books have centered on “postmodern ministry,” and he is regarded as a founder and leader of the “emerging” or “emergent church” movement, which McLaren prefers to call “the conversation.” His recent books, A Generous Orthodoxy (Emergent/YS/Zondervan, 2004) and The Last Word and the Word After That (Jossey-Bass, 2005), the final book in his A New Kind of Christian fiction trilogy, have attracted a great deal of attention and have been heralded as major contributions to the emergent church conversation. TIME Magazine recently included McLaren as one of the 25 most influential contemporary evangelicals. Elsewhere online, you can read his own account of “Becoming Emergent” and some of Emergent’s critics, such as D. A. Carson and Al Mohler.

Dan Knauss recently conversed by email with McLaren for The New Pantagruel by posing a series of questions focused on The Last Word and the Word After That. The resulting dialogue has been edited for clarity and to follow the order of the topics they discussed:

• Violence, God, and the Bible
• Representing Race and Racial Division
• Christian Division and the Limits of Love
• Interpretation, Authority, Community, Dissent
• Evangelicalism
• Catholicism
• Post-Protestantism and “Deep Ecclesiology”

According to the publisher’s description, The Last Word centers on the character Pastor Dan Poole, his family, friends, and church as they “grapple with conventional Christian teachings about hell and judgment. … Is there an alternative to the usual polar views of a just God short on mercy or a merciful God short on justice? Could our conflicted views of hell be symptoms of a deeper set of problems—misunderstandings about what God’s justice and mercy are about, misconceptions about God’s purpose in creating the world, deep misgivings about what kind of character God is and what the Christian gospel is for? In The Last Word and the Word After That, as Dan and crew face and survive their doubts and dark nights of the soul, they begin to imagine a new vision of God and life with God—a life that is more truly biblical and faithful, more inspiring and challenging, more intellectually satisfying and emotionally healing than what is currently available. For all who have been on this journey, searching for a deeper, more transformative life with God and a new kind of Christianity, The Last Word can mark the beginning of an exciting spiritual adventure into new ways of believing, belonging, and becoming.”

Violence, God, and the Bible

Dan Knauss:

Your initial premise in The Last Word seems to be that cruel and otherwise unsavory images of God must be wrong. What justifies this view or intuition? Is it right or even possible to try to explain these images away? The Bible is full of things that tend to strike us as horrible—God commanding his people to engage in acts of genocide, for instance. You concentrate on divine judgment and hell, but even if we accept the view pastor Dan comes to—and even if we were to accept universalism—we’d still be left with a God who has advocated bloody vengeance at times. How do you deal with that? When divine wrath is spoken of in the Bible in stark terms of bodily harm to others, are we supposed to think that God’s anger with the various enemies of his people is just “business” and not “personal”—and once they are dispatched from the land of the living, God is quite merciful with the Philistines, the Amorites, etc.?