A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [15]
We choose not to defend what we have done and what we have become. Again, we are all quick to defend ourselves in relation to one another. In the tradition of Peter, we point at John and say, “Hey, what about him?” But when we stand before the Word of God alive and embodied in Jesus—ringing and singing in his life and work, his teaching, his death, his resurrection, his abiding presence—how can we wish to defend ourselves, our views, or our track record?
We understand that many good Christians will not want to participate in our quest, and we welcome their charitable critique. A search for a new kind of Christian faith can’t be reduced to another list of propositions about which debates rage and over which debaters indulge in hostile polemics. Nor can its proponents be content to forge arguments urging converts to defect from the heretical “them” and affiliate with the righteous “us.” This quest must instead work more like a wedding proposal, an invitation. It must be about free conversation, not forced conversion. It must demand nothing of anybody, and it must make no threats or strike no bargains, because threats and bargains would invalidate the tender nature of the proposal. Rather, it must open up a “we” into which all are invited, but none are coerced, shamed, pressured, or even obligated. It accepts “No” as a response as valid as “Yes,” though it may do so with a tear because it is a proposal of love.
We acknowledge that we have created many Christianities up to this point, and they call for reassessment and, in many cases, repentance. We are not reassessing for the purpose of vilifying our ancestors in the faith or in order to contrast a dark, backward “them” with an enlightened, progressive “us,” snarkily implying that they got it wrong all along and (insert trumpet fanfare here) we have finally got it right after all these years. Such a damnably arrogant or pathetically naive thesis doesn’t deserve our attention, much less commitment. No, we are reassessing as a humble act of ethical responsibility, so that we can avoid merely carrying on the “traditions of humans” as Jesus said the Pharisees once did. We are in fact following the example of our ancestors, who again and again from the margins did this very kind of collective self-examination and repenting.
We are not reassessing and repenting of “Christianity” as a sacred abstraction representing the highest and best ideals of Christians everywhere. Instead, we are beginning to reassess and repent of the actual versions and formulations of the faith we have created. We are acknowledging that the Christianities we have created—or constructed—deserve to be reexamined and deconstructed, not so that we may slide into agnosticism, atheism, or secular patriotic consumerism, but so that our religious traditions can be seen for what they are. They are not simply a pure, abstracted, and ideal “essence of Christianity,” but rather they are evolving, embodied, situated versions of the faith—each of which is unfinished, imperfect, and sometimes pretentious, and each of which is often beautiful and wonderful, renewable and serviceable too.
We choose to seek a better path into the future than the one we have been on. We do not sense in the gospel of Jesus a once-upon-a-time newness. We do not experience the gospel as new only in contrast to something called the “Old Testament,” leaving the gospel over time to grow arthritic, hardened, stiff, and crotchety. No, we sense in the gospel a perpetual fountain of youthful newness, an ongoing advent, a constant beginning, a continually generative genesis, always fermenting like new wine, a tide that rises, wave by wave. We do not conceive of our faith primarily as a promise to our ancestors, a vow to dutifully carry on something that was theirs and we have inherited. No, it is more