Who Has the Last Word? An Interview with Brian McLaren

by Dan Knausswith Brian McLaren

 

BRIAN 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:

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.?

Brian McLaren:

Dan, this is an important question, and I have two problems in answering it. First, it would take a long book to answer it well, so anything I say here will be so sketchy by comparison. And second, I can’t claim to have “the last word” on this—these sorts of questions have been grappled with by the greatest theological minds in history, and I’m not sure any of us are fully satisfied with their answers. But let me venture a few brief and admittedly partial replies.

First, the Bible says things like “God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all.” It speaks of God being abundant in compassion, gracious, not a respecter of persons. So, I suppose some people like myself believe these are the starting point—the core—of our concept of God. This is especially true for followers of Jesus, because his whole life and example demonstrate a God who would rather suffer violence than inflict it. For us, this is the starting point—not the slaughter of the Canaanites in the Book of Joshua.

Second, it’s important to realize that the occasions of sanctioned violence in the Old Testament are not as frequent as some people might believe. Aside from some bloody internal struggles within the Jewish community, there is a lot of violence clustered around the conquest of Canaan under Joshua. It’s also interesting to note that the seven nations they fight are identified as larger and more numerous than the Jewish people. So it’s not as if God is telling the powerful nation to attack the weaker ones: God is allowing a weak and small minority that has been in slavery for 400 years fight for some land—which was almost as common back then as traffic jams are today … it was just the way people lived, in constant skirmishes—and they are going to face and overcome more powerful nations. That doesn’t remove the ugliness of it, but it does give some perspective.

Third, I think we need to realize the degree to which the life and teaching of Jesus puts all of this behind us, and gives us a picture of God that is more complete. Sadly, Christians have too seldom taken all of this seriously, and have used pre-Christ Scriptures to justify horrible things. The approach I’m recommending is often called “narrative theology,” because it pays attention to the development of faith and ethics over time. So, for example, the Bible addresses the issue of slavery, but doesn’t forbid it. We would all agree today that it would be horrible to go backwards—to reverse or violate the narrative flow—and endorse slavery again. Similarly, the violence of the Old Testament needs to be left behind.

Your question shows sensitivity to the fact, though, that the picture of God in the Old Testament is to some degree tainted by violence. This opens up the whole question about the degree to which we have to see “anthropomorphism” in Scripture—the projection on God of human attributes like bigotry, revenge, and so on. I address this a bit in my chapter on Scripture in A Generous Orthodoxy if that would be of help.

Dan Knauss:

You seem to be minimizing “the ugly” elements of scripture and relegating them to the Old Testament, but the “taint” of violent language and imagery can be found throughout the New Testament too, and in the gospels, coming from Jesus’ mouth. How can this be anthropomorphic distortion? And isn’t it problematic to say it’s terribly evil what European Christians have done in the name of God in the past 1500 years or so while also saying that violence was just the rule of the day in Old Testament times?

Brian McLaren:

I’m sorry: I don’t think I meant to say that since violence was the rule of the day in Old Testament times that we should be happy about it or minimize it. Not at all. As a Christian, I look back and say, “It’s horrible that humans behaved in such terrible ways.” As I say that, I realize that 500 years from now, people will probably look back at us and say the same thing: they will see barbarism in us that we consider normal and normative. The fact that we presume to talk about God will seem like a pathetic and naive presumption to them, given our disgusting moral state.

So, to me, the fact that God deals with us in our current reality doesn’t mean we should see God as being happy with everything we do. Many things we do must grieve God deeply, but God is unfathomably patient and tolerant toward us, just as we are (to an infinitesimal degree by comparison) when our infant children scream and defecate and urinate at will, biting their siblings and throwing milk at their grandmother in fits of rage. We look forward to the day when they outgrow infantile behavior, and I imagine God does something analogous to this with our species on this planet. I try to extend this same sense of God’s patience and tolerance to people in ancient times - and I try to allow the Biblical writers the same level of sensitivity about their blind spots as I believe we have about our own.

But having said that, I don’t want to minimize the ugly elements of the Bible. Not at all.

Dan Knauss:

The idea that a smaller, “minority” culture that had been enslaved had some kind of special moral license to wipe out men, women, children and cattle in other tribes strikes me as highly suspect and prone to being used to justify violence by anyone who feels they are an oppressed minority. Violence may be justified, but is it justified by the principle of underdog status?

Brian McLaren:

Again, Dan, I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer. I don’t recall saying that their underdog status justified the violence. But one thing this realization does: it further withdraws justification from powerful nations (like ours) which use violence to conquer less powerful ones. That’s more of what I was getting at.

Dan Knauss:

If the Hebrew people were right to try to extirpate their neighbors in the past, why not their descendents today?

Brian McLaren:

I don’t recall saying that they were right to extirpate their neighbors. But here’s a counter-question: what was their alternative? If you were homeless nomads in 1400 BC escaping slavery and you needed a home, you were going to have to fight for it in those days. Again—I’m not trying to justify it, but I’m also saying that this was reality in those days. Today, as a follower of Christ, I would never feel it is justified to use the book of Joshua to justify that kind of violence; rather, I would be bound by the teaching and example of Christ to seek nonviolent alternatives.

Dan Knauss:

Isn’t there always an alternative? The alternatives would have been what they sometimes did, in defiance of God’s commands. I.e., not wipe out the others and instead take their women, children and cattle. Or make alliances with other groups, intermarry, soft-pedal their religious differences, try to pay off the bad guys, lay down and take a beating, hide in the hills. They could also conceptualize any of these responses as godly pacifism or non-violence—all the same stuff different people advocate today when others say, no, we have to fight.

Brian McLaren:

This is a really helpful push-back, Dan, and all I can say is that it sounds like you’re thinking like a Christian. I don’t want to excuse the people for failing to seek peaceful alternatives back then—but since they hadn’t received the good news of the kingdom of God yet, I’m simply saying maybe they were doing the best they could. For us—having received the good news of the kingdom of God through Jesus—we need to do exactly the kind of thinking you do here, in my opinion anyway.

Dan Knauss:

I don’t think we can sidestep the fact that the Old Testament really presents Israel’s acts of violence as being carried out under direct orders from God, not as God’s accommodation of the weakness and misunderstanding of the Israelites. To hold that kind of position, we have to say that at these points that the Bible is simply wrong when it ascribes these commands to God. But in an evolutionary understanding of God’s relationship with his people, we’ll run into problems if we assume that all movement forward in time is necessarily progress. We won’t be able to deal adequately with God’s violence in the New Testament. This doesn’t imply that we should take a ho-hum attitude toward the violence—I’m just noting what seem to be intractably problematic facts for us about the Bible.

Brian McLaren:

Dan—you’re hitting an important issue that I think a lot of people wonder about but few discuss publicly. Personally, I’d look for an alternative to saying the Bible is simply wrong. I’d instead explore the possibility that the Biblical writers weren’t playing by the same kinds of rules we want them to play by. The first person to get me thinking about this—of all people—was Alan Dershowitz in his book The Genesis of Justice. He presents a reading of Genesis in which God is a character who learns. That reading doesn’t necessarily require us to believe that God is still in process—but that one of the ways people seek to be faithful to God is by writing God into our stories as a character. It’s using imagination as a kind of scientific experiment: if we see God involved in such and such a way, how does it turn out? What is fascinating to me about this approach is that it reflects what seems to happen in the Bible—that later tellings of the story depict God’s involvement in ways that differ from previous tellings. But I’m not proposing this as an easy solution, as I know it creates a thousand other problems. I’m simply expressing my suspicion that the way forward is a third way—neither the wooden literalism of one side nor the dismissive approach of the other. Many think I’m seeking a third alternative that simply does exist, but I continue to hope and seek and imagine.

Representing Race and Racial Division

Dan Knauss:

We’ve been discussing the problem of reconciling violence in the Bible with justice, but the quest for justice in general seems always dogged by the spectre of violence. Take your characterization of Neo, a thoroughly modern, highly educated professional who has clearly reaped many of the benefits of western culture, when he tells pastor Dan that everything that white males represent is put in peril by God’s wrath. It seems like he is—and maybe you are—engaging in sweeping generalizations that create binary oppositions (white vs. non-white; oppressors vs. oppressed; the unjust vs. the just) to demonize and scapegoat a group of people whose main crime is demonizing, dehumanizing, and scapegoating others.

Brian McLaren:

One of the disadvantages of writing a fictional dialogue is that it is open to this kind of interpretation, and there’s really no foolproof defense against it. Let me assure you that I do not mean to scapegoat people for scapegoating or demonize people for demonizing. I regret giving you this impression.

One of the advantages of fictional dialogue is that your obligation as an author is not to anticipate every possible reasonable objection (as it would probably be in scholarly writing), but rather to create a character who anticipates the objections of his particular conversation partner in that fictional situation. So … can I say that I don’t think Dan would have interpreted Neil’s statement as a universal, absolute, binary, dehumanizing, scapegoating way?

Dan Knauss:

Sure, you can say that. I think I actually read it that way. But elsewhere some of those negative implications seemed reinforced, so I started to wonder. Pastor Dan, his wife, and some others in his church are frequently described (often by Pastor Dan himself in self-deprecating ways) as dour, stoic, anxious, and sartorially bland—the epitome of the honkey stereotype. The “enlightened” folks who help pastor Dan and act as his guides are just the opposite: Neo, Casey, Dr. Ruth Mitchel, Millie/Milagros Torres—even Pat the hermaphrodite lesbian. They’re all colorful in many ways—and often not white. They are emotional, spiritually and intellectually sensitive, frequently laughing, cultured, and relaxed; they aren’t hung up about things like smoking or drinking the way Dan is. They speak and are described in ways that image them as politically liberal and liberal-minded, as minorities who understand themselves in various ways as victims of white, European colonialism and “imperial Christianity.” In many ways they seem like projections of what Dan wishes he could be; he can live through them vicariously but without the burdens that would come from actually being them.

This sort of representation, specifically of black people, has been criticized by Spike Lee and others as the “Super-Duper Magical Negro“—a patronizing product of “white guilt” that, despite “progressive” intentions, reinforces or adds to racial stereotyping in which black characters remain one-dimensional sidekicks. They’re only important in relation to the white protagonist. Do you think this critique could be justifiably applied to the A New Kind of Christian trilogy?

Brian McLaren:

You put me in a tough situation in answering that question. If all my characters were white, I would have a different set of problems, wouldn’t I?! If all my white characters were interesting and all people of color less so, that would create yet another set of problems. I could have tried for some sort of mathematical equation—trying to parallel the actual percentages of interesting and less interesting people for each racial group. Doing so would have required knowledge that I don’t have, and a cast of characters I couldn’t manage. So, let me say two things in response. First, yes—I am aware of the concern you raise, and yes, I think the critique could be applied to the trilogy. I don’t think doing so would be justified, but then again, I’m probably not the person to judge that, since I have a bit of affection for all the characters. I don’t find all the white characters as the “dour, stoic, anxious, and sartorially bland—the epitome of the honkey stereotype” that you do. For example, Carol, it seems to me, is a fascinating and likeable person; Kerry in the second book doesn’t fit this characterization, and neither, I hope, do Jess, Kincaid, or Cliff. True, the minor characters aren’t equally well developed, but that’s the downside of having minor characters at all.

Having gotten that self-defense out of the way, though, again, I agree that we need to be careful of creating stereotypes of minority groups or majority groups. I think we all make mistakes in this regard from time to time. If I have done so in the trilogy, I am sorry.

Christian Division and the Limits of Love

Dan Knauss:

Pastor Dan is shaken by the idea that his daughter might not be welcome in his church because of her budding universalism. Toward the end of the book he learns about a church (Little Flower, in Camden) that is being presented by his companions as an ideal model of “post-protestant deep ecclesiology.” Without being Catholics, the Camden church members regard themselves as members of the parish in their area, and the parish priest “never asks any questions…’city lovers’ is all the denominational identity you need.” Are you advocating the idea that Protestants and Catholics should just ignore the past, their differences, their doctrines, and their leadership—acting as if they are in full communion with each other? What do you see as the limits of this inclusivist ethos that Pastor Dan and his friends seem so enamored with?

Brian McLaren:

I don’t think it would be wise to advocate ignorance. But I do believe that—facing our past, our differences, our diverse doctrines, and our different structures of leadership—we should obey Jesus’ command to love one another. That has to be worked out in each situation, and it’s messy —just as it is in friendships, neighborhoods, and families—but that’s our calling. I don’t see how we can claim some sort of exemption from Christ’s command to love another as he loved us.

Dan Knauss:

Does loving one another as Christians across confessional boundaries mean never discussing or taking seriously our differences, or even acknowledging they exist?

Brian McLaren:

I would never say this. My books are attempts to open up space for respectful dialogue about our differences. In fact, it is our differences that give us a lot to talk about. The key, it seems to me, is that we do so not as enemies but as brothers and sisters … and that we do so not in attack but in mutual edification.

Dan Knauss:

Specifically in the critical event of the Lord’s Supper, do you think that in churches that practice communion restricted to members in good standing—or merely any baptized Christian—that love means disobeying that restriction?

Brian McLaren:

This is a great question, and I am only speaking for myself in answering. Paul writes in I Corinthians 13 that love is not rude. That means, to me, that if I am visiting a church that restricts communion to members, the most loving thing to do is respect their restriction. To violate the wishes of my hosts would be, in my view, rude.

Dan Knauss:

Does love never necessitate exclusions?

Brian McLaren:

This is where life is sometimes too messy for rules and requires wisdom. In I Corinthians and Romans, Paul sees some issues as being below the threshold of division or exclusion. People who eat meat sacrificed to idols can coexist with those who don’t, if they have a loving attitude. But Paul is not tolerant when it comes to fellowshipping with a man who is sleeping with his father’s wife (presumably the man’s stepmother). Some differences can be tolerated, but others undermine the integrity and mission of the community and cannot be tolerated. Let me offer this rather facile analogy: a shepherd can tolerate black sheep and white sheep. He can tolerate goats and maybe even cattle mixing in with his flock. But if he decides to tolerate wolves, lions, and leopards joining with his flock, that’s another matter. How do we distinguish between areas where tolerance is or isn’t appropriate today? That is a matter, I think, of wisdom—and different leaders and groups will decide those matters differently, according to their own situation.

Dan Knauss:

So while love is not rude, this isn’t the Christian’s only normative principle of conduct—it may be better to err on the side of rudeness in aggressively pursuing higher goods? Wasn’t Christ somewhat rude to the Pharisees, and Paul to Peter for that reason? How about Stephen’s speech to the Sanhedrin?

Brian McLaren:

Great point. All these things have balance, don’t they? Or perhaps dynamic tension is a better word. Two things seem to flow from these dynamic tensions. First, we always have a moral responsibility that is more complex and demanding than following the simple rule that comes from one side of the dynamic tension without the other. Second, we’re always open to criticism from people who didn’t think we hit the right balance. If we’re bold (calling Pharisees whitewashed tombs), we have violated the rudeness principle. If we’re gentle, we’ve violated the boldness principle. If we try to hit a happy medium, we don’t do justice to either extreme. That’s a dilemma (or trilemma?) I feel I live with every day.

Interpretation, Authority, Community, Dissent

Dan Knauss:

Neil/Neo criticizes “modernist” rationalism for leading to analytical reductionism—taking analysis as the essence of knowing. But then he engages in several pages of precisely that. Neo is frequently educating pastor Dan with familiar critical, historicist analyses of scripture. These analyses are clearly integral to Pastor Dan’s new views (by the end of the book) on hell and divine judgment. However compelling those rational-analytical arguments may strike a person, they can’t be proven and may not even be falsifiable. There are plenty of other competing arguments as well. Why is Pastor Dan justified in taking Neo and his friends’ interpretation of scripture and history as authoritative? Should your readers take it as authoritative?

Brian McLaren:

First, your question seems to make an assumption that I don’t share. I don’t believe postmodern is antimodern. Just because analysis was overused in modernity doesn’t mean it has to go unused or underused in postmodernity. Beyond that, I have no loyalty to postmodernity, as if it were a dogma I must obey. Analysis is a great gift—I’m pretty sure I make that clear in the book. It’s just not our only gift, because God has also given us gifts of imagination and other capacities.

Second, I’m not sure what you mean by authoritative. For some people, it seems to mean, “Shutting down all conversation.” It’s a case-closed type of thing. Some people may want that, but I’m not sure it’s what we need, or what God wants. The Bible is extraordinarily successful in generating conversation about important things; its record is less impressive when it is used for inquisitions and censorship.

But your question raises another really important question for me: what makes a good argument or interpretation good? Again, we would need hours to discuss this in depth, but I’ll just offer one consideration. A better interpretation makes sense of more of the facts or observations or experiences than a worse interpretation. So, I hope that people will consider the ideas in the book, and evaluate for themselves whether they account for more of the Biblical material, and more of our own experience.

Dan Knauss:

When I used the word “authoritative,” I did mean “shutting down conversation” to a good extent and accepting a reasonably settled position. Isn’t this what pastor Dan is pursuing throughout The Last Word—even if there is always a Word After That? He seems to understand that individual minds and church polities (or any organization for that matter) can’t sustain a healthy existence if key beliefs are constantly in flux and continually subjected to serious doubt or criticism. Doesn’t living under the authority of others—in a community—properly entail not a suspension of thinking or an end to “conversation” but a discipline of propriety, of subordinating yourself to your community out of loyalty to it and care for it?

Brian McLaren:

Yes. Exactly. I think you’ve put this very well. I agree completely. And returning to the theme of rudeness above, if a person is unable to do this in good conscience, he probably owes it to the community - in love, not in hostility—to remove himself from it. If he stays, he will be rude.

Dan Knauss:

Some people would take this notion of authority and community and say that when a person experiences doubt or disagreement with the group, he shouldn’t presume his views should hold sway or that he should even air them in a very public fashion as opposed to relatively private venues, to confidants, to fellow theologians and pastors if he is a theologian or pastor. Of course this prudential view gives way when a person is convinced that their community is radically corrupt and really in need of a shakeup. Do you think, as Pastor Dan seems to, that Evangelicalism is radically corrupted?

Brian McLaren:

I feel a bit “led along” here. Are you implying that by publicly raising questions about hell in the book, I’m either a) proving myself as lacking in prudence, or b) judging Evangelicalism as radically corrupted? Are those the only two alternatives?

Dan Knauss:

I’m sorry; yes that was a leading question, but I wasn’t trying to lead you to espouse some kind of damning opinion, at least not one that I’d consider even terribly controversial. My inclination in the past ten years has been to increasingly regard Evangelicalism (and much of western Christianity as well, to different degrees) as being radically corrupt on some points you touch on as well as others, though we might disagree on specific diagnoses and prescriptions.

Brian McLaren:

Well, if I do agree with you in your diagnosis of Evangelicalism and some facets of western Christianity, it’s probably best for me to remain indirect about it at this point in my work, hoping that my work would stimulate people to at least raise the question in their own minds and see what they conclude.

Dan Knauss:

On the question of prudence, it seems like you might be inviting questions about your own sense of propriety by taking an ambivalent stance—“If anything offends you or might offend you, quit reading.” I understand you’re trying to minimize offended readers; I’m just wondering why (especially since the offended will always be with you) that imperative trumps the take-it-or-leave-it approach, which has its own merits and integrity. E.g., “This book raises critical issues for Evangelicalism and brings to light a lot of problems—elephants in the room, really—and Evangelicals need to grow up and face them if they aren’t already doing so.” If you’re leery of being seen as an Evangelical version of John Shelby Spong, I can understand where you’re coming from, and why you wouldn’t want to use that kind of approach, but it seems you’ve already got a foot in it.

Brian McLaren:

Yes, I think you understand my situation. I once received a personal letter from the great novelist Walker Percy. It included a fascinating malapropism: “The religious writer must always cover his tracts.” I never knew if it was intentional or not, but I think—whether one is writing for a religious audience or a nonreligious one, there are times when indirection is the best strategy. Of course, there are other times to call a spade a stinkin’ shovel.

Dan Knauss:

You seem to be thinking about the dangers of engaging in a very public conversation about widely-held doctrines in The Last Word when you warn people who are already reading the book that maybe they should get rid of it because it may do them harm. Similarly, the recent “Response to Critics of Emergent” says people should not read or buy your work if their trusted spiritual leaders have criticized it. This makes criticism into censorship. Then the Response says that people who follow this instruction have no right to express an opinion because they have not read, listened or engaged in dialogue with you and your colleagues. This seems like a rather conflicted attitude at best. At worst it feigns a respect for church authorities while baiting people into a conversation you’re orchestrating, perhaps against their own intuitions or their leaders’ counsel, with the clear implication that those who heed your critics (whom you depict as censors) are weak-minded. Their obedience is construed as the acceptance of the conclusions of another person rather than trying to come to their own conclusions by means of their own study. That’s a valid position—why not just say that leaders who exercise their authority by disrecommending your work are wrong to do so, and so are people who accept that censorship? The root question here for me is, what do you think authority entails, if it excludes handing down conclusions and judgments for people to accept pretty much at face value? Does authority that works that way have any place in the church?

Brian McLaren:

I think you’re right: the attitude is somewhat conflicted. On the one hand, we’re trying to avoid being rude or disruptive to communities that dislike what we’re doing. On the other hand, we do think that many people can handle and are ready for good dialogue, and we want to encourage that dialogue. On the one hand, I personally do not think that heavy-handed or censoring authority in the church is a good thing, but on the other hand, I want to do everything I can to be at peace with everyone I can—including deferring to people who have positions of authority in various communities which I would not want to be a member in myself. Perhaps that seems disingenuous to you, but to me it feels like an act of love (by avoiding rudeness) and also patience: I don’t need to push my ideas on anyone. If I’m right, it might take a hundred years for that to become clear, and I can handle being ignored or thought wrong for as long as I need to. If you feel by doing so I’m legitimizing censorship and heavy-handed authority, please be assured that this isn’t my intention. But perhaps I’ve misunderstood the intent of your question.

Dan Knauss:

I think it’s fair to open the question of censorship, and if one believes some form of it is being deployed, detrimentally, to criticize that. But speaking for myself, I don’t categorically oppose “censorship.” I agree with Stanley Fish that there is no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing too.

Evangelicalism

Dan Knauss:

How do you define and differentiate fundamentalism and evangelicalism? Pastor Dan says most evangelicalism now is fundamentalism—closed, narrow, dogmatic, antagonistic. He also identifies “5-point Calvinism” as an abhorrent component of the “fundamentalist” coalition of churches that his own church is poised to join. These images of an evangelical neofundamentalism seem to directly contradict recent reports from people like Alan Wolfe, Christian Smith, and Ron Sider that Evangelicalism has “salvation inflation,” a “therapeutic gospel,” and a predilection for a “moralistic therapeutic deism.” How do you reconcile these contemporary depictions of evangelicalism as liberalizing in many ways and taking on traits antithetical to fundamentalism?

Brian McLaren:

Great question. I think this is one of the great ironies of the moment. The public face of fundamentalism—represented by a number of well-known figures of the Religious Right—seems to be tightening up, constricting, growing more stern and tense. But “in the pews” it’s not working. So, I don’t seek to reconcile these things—I simply think there are contradictory trends occurring. It should make the next several years interesting, and challenging, for Christian leaders like myself.

Catholicism

Dan Knauss:

When he starts researching hell, salvation, divine judgment, etc., Pastor Dan seems to have a preference for Catholic and Anglican theology—the latter being rather “Catholic” in many respects. This makes sense, since Catholic doctrine maintains that the Church is co-extensive with all humanity, that all might be saved, that God wants all people to be saved, and that we are neither to presume or despair about our final destiny—or that of anyone else. These positions took a beating in the 16th and 17th centuries; they were essentially discarded in Protestantism (especially Reformed Protestantism) with the exception of Anglo-Catholicism and maybe some Lutheranism. Why didn’t this come up in your book—that the position pastor Dan is working toward is conservative and orthodox in the long view, while the prevailing evangelical view, which sees Dan as heading into a liberal heresy, is the liberal, innovative and heretical doctrine? I was also surprised that there is no mention of Rahner and von Balthasar, or even of Richard John Neuhaus and Avery Cardinal Dulles, all of whom have weighed in on the question, “May all be saved?” in ways that seem amenable to Pastor Dan’s changing position. Have you encountered their writing?

Brian McLaren:

First of all, if I had known you and we had had this conversation—I likely would have included more on this in the book. I think you make a very helpful point. Probably the place where I first encountered this more Catholic approach was in Pope John Paul II’s “Crossing the Threshold of Hope.” Before reading that, as a Protestant, I had never encountered the idea of the semini verbi or similar lines of thought. One of the subjects that concerns me—again, a huge subject that we can only mention here—is the ways that colonialism influenced Christian theology toward a more exclusivistic extreme. It’s a scary subject and one that would be hard to prove, but my sense is that there is a relationship between exclusivism and colonialism. Our theologies have far-reaching social consequences—and the consequences can be horrible, which is why taking theological conversation seriously is so important in these times. It’s why conversations like this really matter, and it’s why shutting down conversation prematurely can be so disastrous.

Post-Protestantism and “Deep Ecclesiology”

Dan Knauss:

The Last Word advocates the practice of a “Deep Ecclesiology” that values and honors all forms of the church. Can all forms really be valued and honored equally? For instance, can you honor and value churches in their “traditional forms” while also advocating a kind of para-church organization that appears to command a higher loyalty and a higher affection among its members?

Brian McLaren:

Again, Dan, I don’t think honoring all forms must mean “equally” honoring all forms. That would be—as your question implies—illogical and impossible. One way I like to say it is “honor the good, the beautiful, and the true wherever they are found.” They aren’t found everywhere equally, but they are found in varying degrees in various places. This certainly isn’t the easiest thing to do: it’s much easier to say, “Our forms are good and everyone else’s are bad.”

Dan Knauss:

Some of your Deep Ecclesiologist characters frequently identify “Imperialist Christianity” and “Consumerist Christianity” as the enemy—aren’t these forms of the church, or expressions of Christianity, that you tend to identify with “traditional,” “hierarchical” churches?

Brian McLaren:

To be honest, Dan, it feels like your questions are pushing me into the same kinds of binary thinking that you rightly critique above. I don’t believe the characters in the book identify imperialist or consumerist Christianity as “the enemy” (as if the world could be so easily cut into binary halves—enemies and friends). Nor do they identify imperialist or consumerist Christianity with traditional, heirarchical churches—as far as I can remember. (If they do, I would disagree with them!). Life isn’t that simple. For example, many of the most consumerist expressions of the faith are, in my view, the least traditional or heirarchical.

Dan Knauss:

Does Imperial or Consumerist Christianity have any concrete manifestation then? If it’s not an enemy, what is it? It sounds very much like a bad thing to be resisted. Similarly, does it honor Calvinism to suggest, as pastor Dan does, that some of its historic doctrines are conducive to a very ugly “fundamentalism?” Why not just openly state judgments about what seems better or worse, true or false, good or bad in different churches?

Brian McLaren:

Again, why must honoring be a binary thing: either all acceptance with no critique, or all critique with no acceptance? I try—perhaps I fail at this sometimes, but I know that I try—to never offer critique without also offering praise in some way, believing, as I do, that wherever God is at work there are good things to honor, and wherever human frailty and weakness is at work, there are problems and weaknesses. This, of course, is true of my work as well!

I think of Jesus’ statement about the kingdom of God being like a field in which tares have been sown among the wheat. If we try to root out all the tares, we’ll destroy the wheat. I don’t think that parable advocates a passive attitude toward bad things like Imperial or Consumerist religion—but it does say that sometimes we have to let tares remain for now and instead focus on nurturing the wheat. In my experience, whatever form of church one prefers - high or low, historic or contemporary or “blended,” etc., etc.—you can find plenty of tares growing. I’m just trying to resist seeing the problem as being primarily institutional or a matter of form (note I said “primarily”—an important qualification). Having said that—some other time we could have a long talk about problems that come along with various forms, institutions, hierarchies, etc.—and their alternatives!

Dan Knauss:

I agree that there’s plenty of room between total critique and total acceptance; it’s just that the one time Calvinism comes up in The Last Word, it’s a vituperative reaction from Pastor Dan, as if there is nothing good about 5-point Calvinism, at least in some constructions of it. There is no critique, just a hostile reaction, and that is it for Calvinism’s appearance in the book. I can’t imagine Calvinists taking this well, at least not those who esteem TULIP highly. (For the record, Pastor Dan’s reaction to TULIP is the same as mine, though that doesn’t stop me from having a great working relationship with a pack of Calvinists participating in tNP. We get to have some spectacular, very educational fights.)

Brian McLaren:

Good point. I think I sometimes tweak Calvinists because of the pugilism and stridency that seem to be so common among so many of them.

Dan Knauss:

It seems contradictory to advocate what your book calls a catholic, post-protestant, monastic faith community with so many forms and ideas borrowed from the Catholic—indeed the medieval church—and then to have Markus Park dismiss “the middle ages” and the church from Constantine to Luther as a long stretch of time when the church was focused on the afterlife to a pathological and cynically exploitative degree. Frankly, this sounds like stock Sunday-school historiography for Protestant Fundamentalists—and many Evangelicals, unfortunately. I’ve heard this stuff plenty of times in various classes in all kinds of Protestant churches, and if it appeals to common prejudices, it also offends common sense as well as any rudimentary study of the Reformation and medieval church. In what way does Markus really represent a “post-Protestant” vision, given his antipathy for the Catholic “dark ages?”

Brian McLaren:

Wow, Dan. It seems to me that you are interpreting Markus in a way that goes far beyond what he says. I agree with your critique of the fundamentalist dismissal of the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages: I believe I say something very similar in A Generous Orthodoxy. (In fact, I’ve gotten a few fundamentalist pretty angry with me for saying anything good about Catholics and the Middle Ages!) Markus’ critique of this one facet of western Christianity shouldn’t be equated with that common binary dismissal. Again, just because this one character in one place in one conversation points out one weakness of Medieval and Modern Western Christianity (acknowledging that these terms—Medieval and Modern—are themselves constructions and can be deconstructed) … doesn’t mean more than it says: I wasn’t trying to appeal to or reinforce those popular prejudices, and in fact, would want to join you in undermining them.

Dan Knauss:

I’m sorry, it wasn’t Markus, it was Pastor Dan, and he is counseling Chip, a Fundamentalist who is beginning to be in the position of doubt that Dan was at the beginning of the book. If Dan is pointing out one weakness of medieval Christianity, he sees it as a definitive weakness that characterizes the whole era. He says that “Neoplatonic philosophy”—described as a kind of world-flight, gnostic dualism—had corrupted the faith by making the concept of God more Greek than Hebrew. (The assumption here is that the older is necessarily truer—except I suppose the aspects of the Hebrew deity that led him to endorse a lot of violence.) Dan says Christians began to focus on escape from the world, and God was imaged as an angry judge. Injustice became “a less vital concern.” This shift, or profound corruption of Christianity, “was deeply connected…to the merging of Christianity with the Roman Empire after Constantine.” The Middle Ages saw a church in which Dan says “darker motivations may have been at work,” by which he means they were clearly at work: “if the church absolves itself of needing to address problems of this life, and it can demand respect and compliance whether or not it is fruitful here and now in this life.” The grammar is a little evasive, but it’s clear that this “if” was a reality, in Dan’s view, for some substantial period of time after the 4th century. The sheer generality and vagueness of that makes it hard to see this as a “critique.” It is a much narrower variation of a tendentious and, in my view, sub-scholarly modern Calvinist historical narrative popularized by Francis Schaeffer. Yes, you can historically ‘deconstruct’ it and discover its origins are in Reformation-era Protestant polemic. Maybe we’d agree that Pastor Dan has a long way to go as a “post-Protestant,” and his orthodoxy isn’t yet as generous as it may become.

Brian McLaren:

I suppose you could say that. But just because this historical narrative has been abused (and not only by Calvinists, by the way—my Anabaptist friends have a version of it too that is not much better) … it doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth to it. I wish I could have found a way to avoid sounding like I was endorsing these dismissive versions of the narrative. I’m sure my view is far from what it could be if I had more time to study the history in more depth—but I don’t think my thinking is as dismissive as you feared. As for Pastor Dan, who knows about him? I suppose he’s just like the rest of us—a mix of fragmentary insight against a backdrop of ignorance.

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