A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [104]
We could pay special attention to the writings of the prophets, such as Amos, where the Lord says: “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” (9:7). Yes, God liberated and guided the Jewish people, but they shouldn’t become proud, as if they had some elite status, because God also guided and preserved the Ethiopians, Philistines, and Arameans. I’d take special note of the context in which Isaiah says that God’s thoughts and ways are higher than ours (55:8–9). In context, Isaiah refers to God’s desire to welcome outsiders—“nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you” (55:5). God’s higher thoughts and ways transcend our arrogant, exclusive, low-level religious supremacy and tribalism, and God invites us to transcend as well. To this we could add all the Scriptures that say God does not show favoritism.6
We could go to the book of Acts and notice how Paul expresses a similar conviction in a conversation held in Athens, where he says:
The God who made the world and everything in it…made all nations to inhabit the whole earth; and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For “In him we live and move and have our being” as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his offspring.” (17:24–28)
In those few words, Paul shatters the typical Greco-Roman us-them mind-set (and its corresponding Western Christian us-them mind-set). People of every language, culture, and religion are given a place in God’s world, and no nation is given permission to crush, annihilate, dominate, or assimilate others. In so doing, Paul unifies everyone in a singular “us”—people created by God, people who have a God-given right to life and land, people who are being invited to seek God right where they are, people to whom God is already near, people who are already living and moving and having their being in God, people who are already God’s children. We could also go back to the original calling of Abraham in Genesis 12, noting that God does not choose some to the exclusion of others, but some for the benefit of others.
We would eventually need to look at Jesus, considering in detail, say, his attitudes toward a Samaritan woman, a Roman centurion, a Syrophoenician woman, or some Greeks who wanted to see him and went through Andrew and Philip. We could even look at Jesus’s birth narrative in Matthew, noting how the Magi—what we might call New Age practitioners—are drawn to Jesus through their own religious arts. Scandalous!
When I’m asked about pluralism in my travels, I generally return to Jesus’s simple teachings of neighborliness such as the Golden Rule, saying something like this: “Our first responsibility as followers of Jesus is to treat people of other religions with the same respect we would want to receive from them. When you are kind and respectful to followers of other religions, you are not being unfaithful to Jesus; you are being faithful to him.” Then I ask them how they would want people of other religions to treat them. They typically say things like: “I would want them to respect my faith, show interest in it and learn about it, not constantly attack it, find points of agreement that they could affirm, respectfully disagree where necessary—but not let disagreement shatter the friendship, share about their faith with me