A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [126]
3. The crisis of peace, which I called the Security Crisis, in which the widening gap between a rich minority and a poor majority plunges both groups into a vicious cycle of violence, each group arming itself with more and more catastrophic weapons.
4. The crisis of religion, which I called the Spirituality Crisis, since all our world’s religions are failing to inspire us to address the first three crises, and in fact too often they are inspiring us to behave in ways counterproductive to human survival.
Together, I said, these crises become like spinning gears in a suicide machine. Over those two years, as I spoke constantly about the relevance of Jesus’s gospel of the kingdom of God to the suicide machine, I remember returning to my hotel room night after night with a strange uneasiness. As I tried unsuccessfully to drift off to sleep, I would realize that the same thing had happened once again. During the Q & R session, most questioners simply ignored the four crises I had talked about. Instead, they focused on arguing fine points of theology with me—all within their conventional paradigms. It was as if they said, “Oh yeah, yeah, a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. But you’re decentralizing our preferred theory of atonement!” Or “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re in danger of environmental collapse and religiously inspired catastrophic war, but you seem to be questioning our conventional ways of reading the Bible about homosexuality!”
This frustrated me. And frankly it angered and depressed me. But gradually I realized that my conversation partners simply couldn’t address life-and-death issues like poverty, the planet, and peace from within the conventional paradigms they inherited. Their inherited conventional paradigms—shaped as we have seen by the Greco-Roman narrative, founded on a constitutional reading of the Bible, and so on—rendered those life-and-death issues invisible, insubstantial, and unaddressable. So there was no getting around it. Those inherited paradigms couldn’t simply be outflanked; they needed to be confronted, questioned, and opened up, which then shaped the direction this book has taken.
With that background in mind, it should be no surprise what directions I believe we should take in our next round of questions. We need to ask the same question Francis and Frank Schaeffer raised back in 1976: “How should we then live?”
How shall we live in relation to the planet? How can we go from a consumptive to a sustainable way of life and from a sustainable to a regenerative way of life? What is our duty to the living and nonliving creations among which we live and on which we depend? How has our faith been misused in the past in relation to these questions, and how can our faith provide healing, inspiration, formation, and motivation for the way forward?
How shall we live in relation to poverty? Given that capitalism out-competed communism, what threats does capitalism in its current form pose for our world? How can capitalism be redeemed, retrained, and redirected so that a prosperous minority of people don’t continue to suffer the dehumanizing meaninglessness of self-centered luxury while a struggling majority suffer the dehumanizing degradation of crushing poverty? How has our faith been misused in the past in this regard, and how can our faith provide motivation and wisdom for the way forward?
How shall we live in relation to people who are different from us—in religion, region, race, class, caste, political party, sexual orientation, history, and so on? How has our faith been misused to increase alienation, fear, and violence in the past, and how can it provoke understanding and reconciliation for the way ahead?
Maybe these questions make you feel overwhelmed. But ignoring them, I think, will make you feel something far worse: underalive. The truth is, questions like these—worthwhile, significant, moral ones—will help us be more infected with profound aliveness, more alive as human beings and more alive as practitioners