A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [17]
Rare moments come to us in our journey when the penny drops, the tumblers click, the pieces fall into place, the lights come on, and our breath is taken away. The old paradigm falls away behind us like a port of departure, and we are won over to new possibilities, caught up in a new way of seeing, looking toward a new and wide horizon. The Lord has more light and truth to break forth, we believe, and so we raise our sails to the wind of the Spirit. We are embarked on our quest, launched by a prayer.
BOOK ONE
UNLOCKING and OPENING
You can’t go on a quest if you’re locked in a closet, cell, or concentration camp. And you won’t go on a quest if your captivity is sufficiently comfortable. That’s where we find ourselves: in a real-life version of the classic movie The Truman Show. We live in a comfortable captivity. Everywhere we turn we are surrounded by padded chairs, nice broadcasts of music and teaching, pleasant lighting and polite neighbors, all designed and integrated to keep us content under the dome. Life inside the dome is so perfect that every day we feel a little more afraid of the cold, unedited world outside.
The chains, locks, bars, and barbed wire that hold us are usually disguised so well that they have a homey feel to us. We see our guards not as guards at all, but as pleasant custodians in clerical robes or casual suits. They’ve been to graduate school where many of them mastered the techniques of friendly manipulation, always with a penetrating smile and a firm, heavy hand on the shoulder. We like them. They like us.
The high-tech security system that holds us inside the dome can be unlocked, should we ever wish to leave. The key is a question. When you ask it, something clicks, and you are free.
PART I:
THE NARRATIVE QUESTION
4
What Is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?
When I began feeling the tension between “something real” and “something wrong” in my faith, I began digging through layers and layers of practice, piety, and theology. After over a decade of searching, I had identified a lot in the “something real” category, but I still struggled to locate the heart of what didn’t feel right. Gradually, though, I began to notice something that had been there all along, so obvious that I had missed it. To be a Christian—in the West at least, since the fifth or sixth century or so—has required one to believe that the Bible presents one very specific story line, a story line by which we assess all of history, all of human experience, all of our own experience. Most of us know the story line implicitly, subconsciously, even though it has never been made explicit for us. We begin our quest for a new kind of Christian faith by questioning this story line.
This unspoken story line of the Bible that we were explicitly taught—or that we implicitly caught—can be diagrammed with six simple, elegant lines:
We start on the left with absolute perfection in the Garden of Eden. Then comes something called the Fall into original sin, “the Fall” and “original sin” (like “absolute perfection”) being terms that are never found in the Bible, but are fundamental to Catholic and Protestant Christian faith as we know it. The bottom of the trough, in which we are now living, is a state of condemnation we could call the fallen world, human history, or life on earth. Next comes an ascending line, which we might call salvation, redemption, justification, or atonement (depending on our tradition), leading us to the top line on the right, known as heaven or eternity:
Of course, for many people, perhaps the vast majority according to some versions of this conventional story line, the ending is not so happy. Instead, after everything they’ve suffered in this life, they face final damnation to hell, defined by most Western Christians as eternal conscious torment, supremely chilling words in spite