A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [149]
6. See, for example, Exod. 23:3; Lev. 19:15; Acts 10:34; Rom. 2:11; Gal. 2:6; Col. 3:25; James 2:1.
7. To sharpen the irony, the response seems to imply that to believe Jesus is the only Savior means we cannot obey him as Lord or follow him as Teacher when it comes to our relationship with our neighbors of other religions.
8. Speaking of the “mind of Christ,” imagine if, whenever the issue of pluralism came up, we habitually referred to Phil. 2:1–11 instead of John 14:6. Imagine what would happen if we Christians humbly treated Muslims and Hindus as better than ourselves (2:3), if we considered the interests of Buddhists, atheists, and Jews and not only our own (2:4), and if we did not try to grasp for superior spiritual status (2:6) but, instead, acknowledged our common humanity (2:7), acted as servants to people of other religions (2:7), even to the point of suffering, humiliation, and death in solidarity with them (2:8). My suspicion is that people everywhere would be far more ready “to bend the knee” to glorify God and honor Jesus as God’s anointed leader, teacher, and liberator, if followers of Jesus followed his example and attitude in these ways. (Note: the text never suggests all people will “bend the knee to Christianity,” “join the Christian religion,” or “renounce the traditions in which they were born and submit to the Greco-Roman Christian tradition.” Interpreting the text that way surely indicates a Greco-Roman habit of mind.)
9. This is Jesus’s diagnosis of the problem of the “Gentiles”—meaning the Greco-Romans—in Matt. 6:25–34.
10. It’s obvious how this mind-set needs and loves the conventional doctrine of hell, which I attempted to deconstruct in my book The Last Word and the Word After That (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). Jürgen Moltmann offers a powerful reconstruction of what I attempted to deconstruct in his article “The Final Judgment: Sunrise of Christ’s Liberating Justice,” Anglican Theological Review 89/4 (2007): 565–76. Evil, Moltmann believes, will not merely be punished: God is greater than that. Evil will ultimately be healed, as God brings restorative justice to victims of evil and sets right the perpetrators of evil. God’s justice is redemptive, not merely retributive, and just as there is no redemption without judgment, there is no judgment without redemption: “It is God’s own action in history to take sides of the victims and to redeem the perpetrators from their violence through this partisanship” (576). In this light, Jesus can never be seen as “an enemy of unbelievers,” nor is he “an executioner of the godless” (574). Moltmann concludes “Whoever thinks there are lost people Christ has not found is declaring him ineffective and rather unsuccessful” (570). Thanks to Jonathan D. Stanley and his unpublished paper “The Trouble with Judgment” for these insights into Moltmann.
11. This warrior mind-set will be explored beautifully and simply by my friend Cassidy Dale in his upcoming book The Knight and the Gardener. I talk about this mind-set in some detail in Everything Must Change (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 2007) and plan to explore it more deeply in an upcoming book.
12. Quoted in Gregory Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).
13. We might also hypothesize that Constantine made Christian leaders a series of offers they couldn’t refuse, and they sold out; or that Christian leaders made a series of seemingly logical compromises that ended up having disastrous unintended consequences; or all of the above.
14. In this regard, Dorothy Day frequently quoted Catholic theologian Romano Guardini (1885–1968), who said, “The Church is the Cross on which Christ is always crucified. One cannot separate Christ from his bloody, painful church. One must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the church.” From Robert Coles, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1987), p. 66.
15. For more on the torture study, see http://www.brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/what-do-white-evangelicals-stand.html. For more on the racism