A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [23]
So theologians and pastors—I know, because I have done this—sew a patch on here, cover up that bit over there with some duct tape, put a nice coat of cheerful paint on that section over there, play really uplifting music to distract from that bit under there, move the furniture so that part doesn’t show, and so on. They can only be thanked for their hard labor in this regard, congratulated for their noble effort, and encouraged to keep up the good work.
But more and more of us are defecting from the project of cosmetically enhancing this story and trying to rehabilitate the image of Theos. We want to try reading the Bible frontward for a while, to let it be a Jewish story that, through Jesus, opens to include all humanity. We believe it is time to firmly escort the Greco-Roman reframing of the biblical narrative to the door and seek what master songwriter Michael Kelly Blanchard calls “the other God”—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the god of the Greek philosophers and Roman potentates.19 Or perhaps better said, it is time for us to exit the Greco-Roman narrative—to quietly and courageously walk out the door and leave its six straight lines behind, in quest of the Jewish story in which Jesus would have found himself, and in quest of the One Jesus called “Our Father.”
PART I:
THE NARRATIVE QUESTION
5
Setting the Stage for the Biblical Narrative
When I began losing faith in the six-line narrative, when I started trying to read the Bible frontwards rather than backwards, I began to feel an exhilarating sense of relief and hope, thinking, “Maybe I can believe and be excited about the biblical story again, but in a new way.” But it’s not easy undoing many years of training in order to see the Bible with fresh eyes; the process took several years—and is still going on, actually. Fortunately for me as a Christian, I could consult Jewish friends and authors to rediscover a frontward reading. And I could learn from Christian scholars who were engaged in a similar project, although each with his or her own emphasis—Protestants like Walter Brueggemann, N. T. Wright, Marcus Borg, Ched Myers, William Herzog, Rita Brock, and James Cone, and Catholics like John Dominic Crossan, Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Richard Rohr, Joan Chittister, and others.
So I went back and tried to adjust my sight line not backwards through Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, and Augustine to Jesus, but forwards through Abraham, Moses, David, and the prophets to Jesus. In particular, I immersed myself in the first two books of the Bible, Genesis and Exodus, and the writings of the prophets, especially Isaiah.1
As I allowed Genesis, Exodus, and Isaiah—rather than Plato, Aristotle, and Caesar—to set the stage for the biblical narrative, what emerged dazzled me: a beautiful, powerful, gritty story that resonates with, gives meaning to, and continues to unfold in the life and teaching of Jesus. And this story invites our participation as well, not as pawns on the squares of a cosmic chessboard, but as creative protagonists and junior partners with God in the story of creation.
This story begins with something better than the perfect realm of Plato: the good world of Genesis. Jewish goodness, it turns out, is far better than Greco-Roman perfection.2 As we’ve seen, perfection in the Greco-Roman sense of the word is inherently stale and sterile, since nothing in it can change except for the worse. But Genesis does not begin with stasis and sterility. From the first “Let there be…” it glows, whirls, swirls, vibrates, pulses, and dances with change and fertility. It seems far closer to the Aristotelian