A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [113]
So although I’ve been shy about speaking of it, I must here emphasize that for me this quest has not simply been a result of thought and study, although I’ve done a lot of both. It has been equally a result of prayer, worship, devotional reading, fellowship, solitude, fasting, soul friendship, and other spiritual practices that render me porous and thirsty for the living, loving, holy, and present God. At various turns in this quest, I have stumbled into moments or even seasons of insight so moving that I can only use the word “ecstatic” to describe them. I’ve felt my soul opening up, my mind being bathed in God’s holy joy, my vision being transformed, so that everything looks fresh and new and rooted and ancient, all at the same time. “God, you are so wonderful!” I find myself praying again and again. “Your good news is even better than I’ve ever imagined! Why didn’t I ever see it before?” Through many milestone experiences on this quest, then, I have become convinced that this quest is not simply an intellectual or theological one; it is also a personal and spiritual one.
For thousands and thousands of us, this personal, spiritual quest is part of our participation in the ongoing human quest that Paul described to the Athenians (Acts 17:24–28). God made and arranged all things “so that humanity would search for God and perhaps grope for God and find God—though God is not far from each one of us. For ‘In God we live and move and have our being.’”
This essential emphasis on spirituality reminds us, then, that a new kind of Christianity is not simply new—in the sense of a new tree being planted at some distance from an old one. It is, rather, the green tips growing out on many of the fragile branches of the ancient tree of faith and spirituality that has been growing through history.5 In recent years, a number of macrohistorians have been trying to look back to describe the general trajectory of this ancient and contemporary quest.6 They have discerned a number of phases or stages to the quest not unlike the stages of human development—from pregnancy to birth, to infancy, to childhood, to adolescence, and so on.
Typically (and to some, annoyingly), macrohistorians use complex schemes of numbers or colors to describe the stages or zones of the quest. For our purposes, the colors of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) provide a good organizing schema for reasons that will become more clear soon.7
Our human adventure began with the quest for survival. This was the life of our most ancient ancestors traveling in little bands of hunter-gatherers. In this stage, God (or the gods or spirits) provided (or, some thought, withheld) what we needed, especially water, food, and land. (Think of the stories of Genesis and Exodus and their focus on these essentials of survival.) God or Spirit may have even been identified with parts of the landscape, and spirituality was still too primal perhaps to be called religion; in fact, people in some later stages would probably call it superstition. We’ll call this the red zone, the passionate quest for survival.
Second came our quest for security. As we developed tribes, clans, and chiefdoms, and as we farmed our own lands to support our survival, new anxieties grew. Will our neighbors come and attack us? Will we win our next battle? Will the rains come, or will the crops fail? To counter these anxieties, God (or the gods) became our Warrior, our Protector, our Provider. We looked for magical ways to get God (or the gods) to miraculously protect and provide for us, so shamans and priests—with all of their mysterious God-appeasing and God-recruiting rituals—became our combined Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture. In this insecure stage, we began to be afraid of God, since failing to properly appease or honor God might result