A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [137]
2. For more on this subject, see T. J. Wray and Gregory Mobley, The Birth of Satan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), or John Anderson’s self-published Satan: An Authorized Autobiography (Sparta, NC: Voice of Reason, 2007).
3. From “Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant,” by Emily Dickinson. Thanks to Jodi McLaren for her insights into this poem.
4. John Franke’s work in this regard is extremely helpful. See The Character of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005) and Manifold Witness.
5. Peter Rollins explores this theme beautifully in How (Not) to Speak of God (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2006).
6. Perhaps when our conservative friends ask those of us on this quest if we believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, our reply should be: “No, I believe the Scripture is better than inerrant. I believe it’s beautiful.” If they ask us what we mean by beautiful, we can explain: “It’s beautiful for creating a community that extends across generations and cultures to engage with God so they can experience, in that engagement, the gift of revelation.” They probably won’t be satisfied, but it might help them think a bit.
7. It’s worth noting again how long in the story the character named God remains completely silent. That silence says a lot, I believe, about God’s desire for us to have time and space to think out loud.
8. I’m aware of the fact that some of my wonderful conservative Evangelical friends will find this terribly unsatisfying in comparison to the gains they accrue through a constitutional reading. That’s why I don’t expect many, if any, of them to be convinced by this chapter. But I’m thinking about thousands of their children, grandchildren, and outside-the-church friends for whom their approach simply feels intellectually dishonest and morally unacceptable. I suspect that this approach could be as exciting and promising to the latter as it is disappointing and unconvincing to the former.
Chapter 10: Is God Violent?
1. For this reason, I would grimly prefer atheism to be true than for the Greco-Roman Theos narrative to be true. And for this reason, I joyfully celebrate the narrative centered in Jesus as a better alternative to both. For more on the subject of hell, see my The Last Word and the Word After That (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005), and an extremely helpful and concise article by Nik Ansell, “Hell: The Nemesis of Hope” (available online at http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=746). There he quotes Evangelical patriarch John Stott as saying, of the conventional view of hell, “Emotionally, I find the concept intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain.”
2. See, for example, the ability of the Egyptian magicians (Exod. 8:7) to perform miracles through the power of their gods, which—with delicious irony, by the way—just makes things worse—as if Egypt needed even more frogs! Or consider the “gods” of 1 Chron. 16:25; Pss. 86:8; 95:3; 96:4; 97:9.
3. See, for example, Isa. 1:11–17.
4. Michael Gerson, quoting research by Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman about religion and brain activity, explains: “But Newberg’s research offers warnings for the religious as well. Contemplating a loving God strengthens portions of our brain—particularly the frontal lobes and the anterior cingulate—where empathy and reason reside. Contemplating a wrathful God empowers the limbic system, which is ‘filled with aggression and fear.’ It is a sobering concept: The God we choose to love changes us into his image, whether he exists or not” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/14/AR2009041401879.html).
5. If we believe that the same God who created an evolving universe is revealed in an evolving Bible, we can derive some fascinating insights from contemporary studies of genetics. Today’s chickens, it turns out, still have the genetic information in their DNA that was used to produce long tails, scales, and teeth in their ancestors the dinosaurs. During embryonic development, some of those