A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [145]
Chapter 18: Can We Find a Better Way of Viewing the Future?
1. In a rather sad irony, left-behind theology has interpreted the phrase “left behind” (from Matt. 24 and Luke 17) about 180 degrees off course. For Jesus, to be taken meant to be taken by invading enemies, to be victims of a violent conquest. The fortunate ones were the ones left behind!
2. At the time I was writing and revising this chapter, two people obsessed with apocalyptic theories committed murder, so perhaps the word “harmless” isn’t appropriate.
3. Beyond the United States, several Latin American countries also have sizable political constituencies with similar eschatological leanings. And, of course, Christian dispensationalists have their Jewish and Muslim counterparts, including (at this writing) Iranian president Mahmoud Amadinejad, whose readings of Islamic sacred texts could lead to similar policies of cosmic war.
4. For additional critique of popular conventional eschatologies, see Barbara Rossing, The Rapture Exposed (New York: Basic, 2005); Craig Hill, In God’s Time (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002); and Tony Campolo’s chapter on the end-times in our coauthored book Adventures in Missing the Point (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), pp. 54ff.
5. It’s odd, though. When you tell some people about this 3-D view, they recoil in fear. They seem to prefer their linear world. Why would people prefer a flat, determined world? Primarily, I suspect, because their religious authority figures have taught them to fear life in three dimensions. Why would their authority figures do so? First, because they themselves, schooled in the Greco-Roman mind-set, believe that the Bible mandates this flat universe for believers to inhabit. They’re being faithful to what they understand to be true. But I think there is a second reason too, a more social one. When you’re an authority figure seeking to keep people “in line,” it helps to keep them in lines. And when you want to belong to a group supervised by a linear authority figure, then you want to keep yourself in line as well.
6. Küng said, “A church which pitches its tents, without constantly looking for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling…. We must play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, live by improvisation and experiment.” (The quote is widely attributed to Küng without noting the source. See, for example, http://www.the-next-wave.org/missionalspirituality.) Similarly, Kevin Van Hoozer frequently talks about biblical history as a drama in which we improvise, and N. T. Wright employs similar language. My friend Ron Martoia will explore this theme in an important book called The Bible as Improv (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, forthcoming).
7. Several of us have begun using this term quite independently of one another, including Marcus Borg, Thomas Oord, and Tim King.
8. We’ve already seen how the warrior and white-horse language of Revelation 19 wasn’t actually about Jesus repudiating peace and reverting to violence. It was a way of saying that the Pax Christi, in which Christ rules by a reconciling word, is more powerful than the Pax Romana, in which Caesar rules by the dominating sword.
9. The work of N. T. Wright is a good place to begin. See Surprised by Hope (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008). An amazing array of his lectures and articles is available at http://www.ntwrightpage.com/.
10. For a number of reasons, I am putting aside the kinds of questions raised in “higher” biblical criticism and the Jesus Seminar about both Pauline authorship and the authenticity of the gospels. So far, I’ve noticed that when disputed statements and texts are taken out of the Greco-Roman, constitutional, tribal, and related paradigms we are questioning in this