A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [10]
Paradigms and dogma can be defended and enforced with guns and prisons, bullets and bonfires, threats and humiliations, fatwas and excommunications. But paradigms and dogma remain profoundly vulnerable when anomalies are present. They can be undone by something as simple as a question—a question about the divine right of kings, the origin of species, the relation between matter and energy, how races can and should relate to one another, the motion of planets, and the standard operating procedures used by the church.
That’s what got a thirty-three-year-old seminarian named Martin Luther into hot water. On October 31, 1517, he dared question the issuance of indulgences, a procedure by which church officials transformed religious devotion into religious donations. The devoted, by making generous donations to the church treasury, could negotiate the early release of loved ones from purgatory to heaven. This ultimate commercialization of God’s house and commodification of salvation deserved to be questioned, so he posted a document on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany (or so the story goes). It began like this:
Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology…. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us, may do so by letter.
Imagine you’re a fellow student reading the invitation. Would you attend and get involved in the debate? Watch from a distance? Call the authorities and ask for an inquisition? Hand out canary yellow flyers?
Luther’s invitation for discussion was followed by ninety-five provocative statements, or theses, to be debated. Those ninety-five theses successfully sparked debate that further destabilized the uneasy status quo of the late Middle Ages, thus helping tip the Christian community from its medieval state into a new modern state. That’s what statements can do: create debate (and sometimes, sadly, hate) that moves us into a new state. Now, nearly five hundred years later, Luther’s ninety-five theses have completed their job. It’s time for another tipping point; it’s time, we might say, for a ninety-sixth thesis.
But the ninety-sixth thesis for today must be very different from the original ninety-five, because we already have more hate than we need, and a surplus of debate too, much of which is inversely proportional in intensity to the actual importance of its topic. At this moment in history, we need something more radical and transformative than a new state: we need a new quest. We need more than a new static location from which we proclaim, “Here I stand!” Instead, we need a new dynamic direction into which we move together, proclaiming, “Here we go!”1 We need a deep shift not merely from our current state to a new state, but from a steady state to a dynamic story. We need not a new set of beliefs, but a new way of believing, not simply new answers to the same old questions, but a new set of questions.
Again: new statements (theses, propositions, answers) can inspire debate and bring us to a new state. But only new questions can inspire new conversations that can launch us on a new quest. So, in homage to Martin Luther, this new statement, or ninety-sixth thesis, is humbly offered, in fear and trembling, to my fellow Christians of all denominations around the world:
It’s time for a new quest, launched by new questions, a quest across denominations around the