A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [128]
As we near the five hundredth anniversary of the day when Martin Luther came out of the closet, so that all would know what he had been thinking in secret, it is time, I propose, to reinvigorate the dialogue by having many of us come out of our closets and admit we have been asking these and other important questions in secret. We must stop being ashamed of our questions, and we must stop pretending to be content with unsatisfying answers. Instead, we must let our questions and our fresh readings of Scripture become passageways out of the thought boxes and mental stages and cages that can confine us. We must let our questions be the picks and shovels of a Spirit-inspired jailbreak. Once free, we can launch an exodus and continue our adventure, our quest for truth in the wild, unmapped places, as the biblical story beckons us to do.
Doing so is scary. We don’t want to betray our heritage. We don’t want to prove unfaithful to the faith that has nourished our souls and formed the communities to which we belong. Yet we must realize what being faithful and true to our spiritual forebears really requires. It’s not simply a matter of repeating again and again what Luther and the other Reformers said (or going back farther, what the scholastics or eremetics or patristics said). Rather, true fidelity means we must do what they did. Like them, out of love for the truth, we must dare to precipitate a change, to foment a kind of gentle and hopeful revolution, to give birth to a new generation of Christian faith. By transcending and including, we must now rise to a new zone on the spectrum—to turn a page and open a new chapter by vulnerably exposing our previously secret thoughts and by tenderly, reverently listening to one another as we do so.
Yes, we have a past, to be sure, to which we must show proper honor and with which we must maintain proper continuity. That past should always have a vote, as G. K. Chesterton famously said when he defined tradition as the “democracy of the dead.” But I would add that the dead should not be given excessive veto power. As part of our inheritance from the past, we have been entrusted with an ongoing mission, and that mission requires us to be loyal—yes, to beloved tradition—but no less to the beloved present world in which we serve. And perhaps our greatest loyalty should be directed forward, to a beloved future we are cocreating with the Spirit of the living God. To be loyal to the God who was without being loyal to the God who is and to the God who is to come would be, it seems to me, only a 33 percent infection with a new kind of Christianity. When I started this quest, I think I started catching the other two-thirds as well.
Recall once more Luther’s introduction and Thesis 1 of his Ninety-Five Theses:
Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed…. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite [repent, become pensive again, rethink everything], willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.
To put it in a slightly different way, but one I’m sure is in line with Luther’s original intention, we could say that repentance or radical rethinking and change was necessary at the birth of the Christian community. And it was no less essential in its early childhood, and then in its middle childhood, and then in its early adolescence. Now as it stands poised on the brink of late adolescence or perhaps early adulthood:
Out of love for the truth and the