A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [132]
7. Jeffrey L. Bineham traces attributes of the superiority complex of the modern Western mind to other related causes. Dependence on written over oral communication, he says, creates this superior attitude. Drawing from the work of Sally McFague, James Chesebro, and Walter Ong, Bineham says that dependence on the written medium “blinds many to the relativity of interpretive contexts” and privileges the writing-based perspective as “absolute truth” in the minds of writing-based people. This writing-based “pattern of understanding” renders writing-based people (in Ong’s words) “abject prisoners of the literate culture.” By marginalizing or rejecting oral-based perspectives, writing-based people lose an appreciation for “the metaphorical, open-ended, and tentative nature of language.” The Protestant Reformation’s characteristic focus on the printed Scriptures as its primary authority thus tends to blind Protestants to “the notion of scripture as a living testimony” and then binds them to “an absolutist literalism.” See “Parables and the Oral Medium: A Metaphorical Approach to Religious Language,” Journal of Communication and Religion (March 1991): 1–8.
8. I believe this is the best sense in which the highly nuanced term “metanarrative” should be understood. A metanarrative is not just a big story; it’s a big story that marginalizes, discredits, assimilates, domesticates, invalidates, or in some other way annihilates all other stories. In this sense, I do not believe the real biblical narrative is a metanarrative, but I do believe the Greco-Romanized Christian narrative is.
9. The fact that, for many of us, this multicultural view of history seems messy and therefore hard to imagine or accept suggests how deeply we have imbibed the elitist Greco-Roman spirit.
10. Of course, one might ask why we need to reduce history to a single line at all. And we will explore exactly this question in our eighth question on this quest.
11. Again, this desire for stasis is described accessibly by Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization.
12. See the brilliant work of African theologian Kwame Bediako, Theology and Identity (Carlisle, UK: Authentic Books, 2000), pp. 38ff., 174ff.
13. For some other factors in this loss of the Jewish story line, see the Appendix to my The Secret Message of Jesus (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 2007).
14. There’s a lot of argument afoot about whom to blame for this profound embrace of Greco-Roman categories. Prime suspects include the emperors Constantine and Theodotius and the bishops who willingly subordinated the church to their imperial regimes. St. Augustine, for all his brilliance, is also implicated. Regardless of who is blamed, Harvey Cox sums up the matter well: “In entering the Greek world, Plato’s turf, the early Christians mixed biblical ideas into a Greek framework that gravely distorted their original meaning…. The triumph of the clerical elite under Constantine cemented this distortion into the structure of the church” (The Future of Faith, p. 221). Far better than merely blaming, to my mind, would be more deeply understanding how the story of Jesus and the reign of God became Greco-Romanized and what the effects of that conversion have been. With that understanding, we can be de-converted and liberated in the present so as to help create a better future.
15. This is not to reject the reality of sin’s horror and universality. It’s just to say that terms like “the Fall,” “original sin,” and “total depravity” frequently derive their meaning from a story that is, I believe, inherently un-Jewish and unbiblical, and so when they are read into the biblical story, they distort and pollute it. For more on this subject, see J. Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008).
16. This Greco-Roman framing story may help explain why Christian pastors and counselors have such a hard time convincing Christians that God actually loves them. Instinctively they know that Theos can’t.
17. We see the tension between