A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [11]
I’m certain that to some people, the quest for a new kind of Christian faith will be of no interest at all. “The old kind is just fine, thank you very much,” they’ll say. For them, this quest will have no more appeal than Luther’s original theses had to those religious dignitaries assembled at the Diet of Worms (if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry; it’s not what you think). To them, Luther instigated not renewal or reform, but betrayal—betrayal of the past and of the beloved institutions and belief systems so many had worked so hard to construct and defend. If our quest is a betrayal, it is only the most faithful kind of betrayal: a betrayal of the actualities of the past and present to seize the future possibilities toward which they reached.3 If it is a critique of the past, it is a critique of only the worst moments, while simultaneously celebrating the best moments and the best aspirations—and moving forward thus instructed and inspired.
So what are the questions that open the way for a new kind of Christianity? There are many, but in thousands of personal conversations and in hundreds of Q & R sessions with Christian leaders across denominations and around the world, I’ve noticed ten in particular that keep coming up. These ten, I believe, have a special power to stimulate the conversations we need to have. And these conversations, in turn, can become the context for new friendships among unlikely people. And taken together, those questions, conversations, and friendships have the potential simultaneously to weaken old, rigid paradigms and to help us imagine new and better possibilities. I sense the wind of the Spirit of God in these questions, and in them I feel a powerful summons to faith, hope, and love.
1. The narrative question: What is the overarching story line of the Bible? Many people read the Bible as a series of disconnected quotes and episodes yielding maxims, rules, formulas, anecdotes, propositions, and wise sayings. They have little or no sense of the larger story into which the statements fit and in which their meaning took shape. Others read the Bible within a narrative, but that framing narrative is actually foreign to the Bible, and many of us believe it is too small, narrow, and flat to do justice to the richness of the text. As it shrinks the text, it shrinks us too. So we ask: Is there a discernable plotline of the biblical library, and if so, what is it? What are the deep problems the original Christian story was trying to solve? What’s the big picture? Where did we come from, where are we going, and where are we now, according to the Bible and its stories and story?
2. The authority question: How should the Bible be understood? In a time when religious extremists constantly use their sacred texts to justify violence, many of us feel a moral obligation to question the ways the Bible has been used in the past to defend the indefensible and promote the unacceptable. If we continue to use the Bible as we did in the past, we render ourselves likely to repeat past atrocities. So we ask: What is the Bible and what is it for? If the Bible is God’s revelation, why can’t Christians finally agree on what it says? Why does it seem to be in conflict with science so often? Why has it been so easy for so many people to use the Bible to justify such terrible atrocities?4
3. The God question: Is God violent? Nearly all religions—and certainly all monotheistic religions—seem at times hell-bent on inspiring people to kill each other, making atheism sometimes seem a more ethical alternative to conventional violence-prone belief. So we ask: Why does God seem so violent and genocidal in many Bible passages? Does God play favorites? Does God choose some and reject others? Does God sanction elitism, prejudice, violence, or even genocide? Is God incurably violent and is faith capable of becoming a stronger force for peace and reconciliation than it has been for