A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [106]
Blaise Pascal said, “Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?”12 But that stupidity is sanity in the Greco-Roman mind. Perhaps now you can see that, if the Christian religion were ever to be recast to fit within the Greco-Roman mind, it could become something very different from what Jesus intended, and something very dangerous. Perhaps you will also agree that this is precisely what has happened. Christianity has a persistant problem with pluralism not because of Jesus or his Jewish roots, but because of its Greco-Roman captivity. Psychologists and sociologists have uncovered powerful syndromes in which former victims later become victimizers and in which former hostages end up identifying with their captors. We might hypothesize that after centuries of persecution by the Romans, the Christian religion fell prey to this syndrome and has not yet recovered.13
As Christians raised in the Greco-Roman tradition of faith, increasing numbers of us feel like Peter after the crucifixion: we have been part of a massive betrayal of our Lord.14 What happens now? Will we be sent away in disgrace? Or will we be invited with Peter to repent and get back to our original calling in the kingdom of God—to feed, tend, and care for people instead of trying to conquer, dominate, and control them? Thankfully, Peter’s experience tells us what to expect. And this is good news for at least two reasons. First, for all its flaws (which must not be understated), the Greco-Romanized version of Christian faith has invaluable spiritual treasures (which also must not be understated) and remains profoundly redeemable. In fact, a humbled, repentant, reborn religion surely has more value to the world than either an arrogant, unchallenged one or an innocent, naive one. So I would rather see Christianity humbled, healed, and liberated from its imperial captivity than discredited, scarred, and discarded because of it. (I could say the same about every other religion too.)
And second, my fellow Christians raised in various versions of Greco-Romanized Christianity currently control most of the world’s wealth, consume most of the world’s resources, produce most of the world’s waste, and sell and use most of the world’s weapons. As I mentioned earlier, a recent study in the United States said that certain types of Greco-Roman Christians are most likely to support state-sponsored torture, and other studies have shown them to be more likely to be racists than their nonreligious neighbors.15 So, if we do not repent of our imperial, kingdoms-of-this-world ways and move firmly in the direction of the way of Jesus, I fear what we will do in the future, especially in light of what we have done in the past.16
If we could break free from the Greco-Roman soul-sort narrative, think of what could change. We Christians could offer Jesus (not Christianity) as a gift to the world, and we would no longer consider it a requirement of faithfulness to insult other religions and call their founders demonic. We would no longer envision a day when all other religions would be abolished and only our own will remain. We would no longer consider ourselves as normative and others as “other.” We would stop seeing the line that separates good and evil running between our religion and all others. We would be freed from the tendency to always think “insider/outsider” and “us/them.” We would learn to discover God in the other, and we would discover a bigger “us,” in which people of all faiths can be included.17
We would consider it a matter of faithfulness to show the same respect to other religions and their founders that we would wish to be shown our own. We would envision a day when members of all religions, including our