A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [130]
2. Note that I do not say our quest is for new things to believe in contrast to old things, but rather new ways to believe. In How (Not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins expands on this distinction: “Instead of following the Greek-influenced idea of orthodoxy as right belief…the emerging community is helping us to rediscover the more Hebraic and mystical notion of the orthodox Christian as one who believes in the right way—that is, believing in a loving, sacrificial, and Christlike manner. The reversal from ‘right belief’ to ‘believing in the right way’ is in no way a move to some binary opposite of the first (for the opposite of right belief is simply wrong belief); rather, it is a way of transcending the binary altogether. Thus orthodoxy is no longer (mis) understood as the opposite of heresy but rather is understood as a term that signals a way of being in the world rather than a means of believing things about the world” ([Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2006], pp. 2–3). Rollins adds that this approach “emphasizes the priority of love: not as something which stands opposed to knowledge of God, or even as simply more important than knowledge of God, but more radically still, as knowledge of God.”
3. Thanks to Peter Rollins for this language of faithful betrayal, from his book The Fidelity of Betrayal (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2008).
4. My Evangelical friends would probably prefer I deal with the Bible question first, and I originally did. But after some conversations with early readers of this manuscript, I felt it was better to start with our precritical assumptions about the shape of the biblical narrative, assumptions that predispose us to read the Bible in certain ways. Then we will move to the question of how the Bible is read and what kind of authority it is given. These two questions together open up space to explore all the others.
Chapter 3: A Prayer on the Beach
1. Our denominations and local congregations face the daunting but also exciting and creative challenge of discovering new forms of affinity. In many cases, this means trading old unifiers like loyalty to institutions, assent to beliefs, and appreciation for styles of music for new ones like a common mission, shared practices, and a unifying dream. These new centers of affinity will, I imagine, create a radically different social shape and require new approaches to polity, a subject to which we shall return in Chapter 16.
Book One: Unlocking and Unopening
Chapter 4: What Is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?
1. An important admission must be made here. My invention and use of an abstraction called Greco-Romanism is fraught with vulnerabilities and temptations, among them exactly the kind of dualistic reductionism that I will suggest is characteristic of Greco-Romanism! What I will say about Greek thought could mislead uncareful readers into thinking there was one monolithic system within Greek thought, but, as we will see shortly, inherent in Greek thought were many different theological schools. Even a term like “Platonism” can hide the fact that Plato’s thought was so highly nuanced and richly layered that scholars who have devoted their professional lives to his work interpret it in strikingly different ways.
Similarly, in contrasting what we will call Greco-Roman thought with Hebrew thought, we can convey the false impression that there was such a thing as unified Hebrew thought. As the highly varied perspectives of Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, Essenes, and the Qumran community make clear, within Judaism there was profound disagreement, not a single shared, coherent “worldview.” We will be sliding into a common trap if we excessively vilify Greco-Romanism (which, in Chapter 20, we will locate within an early zone in our quest) or if we excessively idealize Judaism (which like all faiths, is always a composite of many competing and conflicting communities).
In addition, some will argue that what I’m calling the Greco-Roman narrative is simply the Christian narrative.