A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [105]
But then, as often as not, someone, like a gunslinger going for his revolver, will reach for John 14:6 and draw it in a flash. “But didn’t Jesus say he was the way, truth, and life and the only way to the Father?” they ask, implying that if Jesus is the “only way,” then we cannot show Christlike love and respect to our neighbors of other traditions.7 When this happens, I wonder: “Why do so many sincere, well-meaning, and well-trained Christians put aside a hundred other relevant verses and pull out this one? Why do they respond to this issue with the identical script, in a kind of quotation reflex, as if they’ve been struck by a rubber hammer on the patellar tendon?” The answer, I’ve come to believe, is that this pluralism question—about making room for “the other” in a multifaith world—taps into a key point of tension between the mind of Jesus and the Greco-Roman mind.8 Since we’ve been so well tutored in Greco-Roman thinking, the few passages that can most effectively be quoted (or misquoted) to bolster it are the ones best programmed into our response reflexes, instantly rendering thousands of other passages invisible, insignificant, nonexistent.
At least four characteristics of the Greco-Roman imperial mind contribute to the problem. First, if you’re Greco-Roman, you’re in a dominant position, which renders you inherently anxious. As the group perched highest atop the ladder of success, you have the greatest fear of falling. You’re always worried about what you will eat, what you will drink, and what you will wear.9 You’re always driven for more, more, more—more money, more land, more influence, more power, more pleasure, because you believe that just a little bit more will make you safe at the top and thus cure your anxiety once and for all. (If you’re Greco-Roman, you think this is a normal and universal expression of the human condition.) But like just one more hit of crack or heroin, it never lasts.
Second, your perpetual anxiety makes you vulnerable to paranoia. “They” aren’t neighbors; they’re enemies because they represent a threat—competitors for your profit share, rebels to your stable regime, obstacles to your anxiety-driven strategies. So the world is inherently divided between civilized “us” and barbarian “them,” between “good” insiders and “evil” outsiders.
Third, if you live by Greco-Roman anxiety and paranoia, you only have one logical hope for the future: a world (here or after death) where “they” are gone forever and where the only ones left are “pure us.” You simply can’t imagine a future of harmonious diversity and neighborly otherness; the other must be banished or gone.10 Ultimately then, your group is normative and belongs here; others are anomalies and don’t belong. They don’t really have the same right to exist that you do. So when it comes to “them,” you have only five options:
A. You can convert and assimilate them, so “they” become part of “us,” and their otherness is eliminated.
B. You can colonize and dominate them, making “them” subservient to “us” and maybe even useful to “us,” so less of a threat.
C. You can ignore, exclude, or otherwise distance yourself from them, keeping “them” at bay from “us.”
D. You can fight, persecute, shame, and keep “them” off balance and intimidated by “us.”
E. You can “cleanse” the world of them through mass murder, leaving only “us.”
Fourth, if you are driven by economic anxiety, social paranoia, and an unconscious will to assimilate, dominate, eliminate, persecute, or distance, life is an unending, all-out war. With the army of “us” there is goodness, civilization, reason, absolute and ultimate truth, liberal progress, conservative faithfulness. (Forms of liberalism and conservatism actually reside in the two hemispheres of the same Greco-Roman mind.) In the army of “them” there is evil, chaos, delusion, relativism and nihilism,