A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [103]
Take the story of westward expansion in the so-called Christian nations of North America in relation to the native peoples, or the treatment of Aboriginals and Maori in Australia and New Zealand, or the story of Pizarro and Atahualpa in the Andes of South America. Take the constant, brutal, catastrophic warfare between Catholics and Protestants in Europe between 1618 and 1648. Take inquisitions and witch burnings and Crusades. Take segregation and apartheid, and more recently in the United States and elsewhere growing animosity among some Christians towards Muslims. It’s not a pretty picture, and claiming these assaults on the other were isolated incidents perpetuated by a few bad apples rings of cluelessness and denial, not honesty and repentance.3
So how do we find a better approach to the religiously other in our quest for a new kind of Christianity? We could begin by a survey of Scripture. We might look at John 1:9; 3:17; and 12:32,4 not to mention 21:22, where Jesus responds to an inquiry about someone else’s spiritual status with, “What is that to you! You follow me!” We could then turn to Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In 2:1–29, Paul makes clear that people are never judged based on knowledge they don’t have, and that God will bless “those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality.” There will be “glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good…. For God shows no partiality,” Paul says. He adds that when people of other religions “who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, they…are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them.”5
We could also look at Romans 5:12–21, where Paul says that the impact of Jesus’s obedience will be as far-reaching as the impact of Adam’s disobedience, reaching “all” and “the many,” because “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” And in 11:25–36, as we saw in Chapter 15, Paul almost seems to surprise himself when he concludes, “God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.” We could trace Paul’s line of thought in 2 Corinthians 5, where he says that because Christ died for all (5:14–15), God is not holding the sins of humanity against them (5:19)—not just the sins of Christians, we must note, but the sins of all humanity. This realization causes us, Paul says, to see others in a new way—including, no doubt, others of other religions. A similar challenge to conventional us-them categories is offered in 1 John: not those who share our creed, but those who do what is right and just demonstrate that they are God’s children (2:29; 3:7); those who love show that they have passed from death to life and are part of God’s family (3:14; 3:24; 4:7; 4:16–21).
We could follow the theme of the “righteous outsider” in the Hebrew Scriptures. “Outsider” characters like Melchizedek, Jethro, Rahab, Ruth, Uriah, and several others prove themselves more just and godly than the religious insiders. The Scriptures don’t minimize their goodness, but rather celebrate it. The story of Jonah, as we’ve seen, doesn’t sanitize the wrong of religious insiders or downplay the goodness of outsiders (like the sailors who