A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [33]
The wild, passionate, creative, liberating, hope-inspiring God whose image emerges in these three sacred narratives is not the dread cosmic dictator of the six-line Greco-Roman framework. No, that deity, we must conclude, is an idol, a damnable idol. Yes, that idol is popular, perhaps even predominant, and defended by many a well-meaning but misguided scholar and fire-breathing preacher. But in the end you cannot serve two masters, Theos and Elohim, the god of the Greco-Roman philosophers and Caesars and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the violent god of profit proclaimed by the empire and the compassionate God of justice proclaimed by the prophets.
You can try to hybridize them and compromise them for centuries, but like oil and water they eventually separate and prove incompatible. They refuse to alloy. They produce irreconcilable narratives and create different worlds. It’s time to abandon the long experimental project of recasting the Bible in an alien narrative and reframing God in an alien story. It’s time to stop holding God’s people captive in that alien construction. God liberated God’s people from the economic and political concentration camp of the Egyptians and the Babylonians; perhaps now it’s time to be liberated from the conceptual tyranny of the Greco-Romans as well. Perhaps the word of the Lord can be heard again, crying from the wilderness, “Let my people go!” Or perhaps, “My people, let’s go! Let’s leave the narrow six-line narrative of the Greco-Roman empire and inhabit the spacious three-dimensional world of God the creator, liberator, and reconciler.”
Does anyone dare say “Amen”?
PART II:
THE AUTHORITY QUESTION
7
How Should the Bible Be Understood?
I love the Bible. This love goes back to childhood for me, to warm memories when my parents would read me Bible stories, either directly from a big, black, leather-bound, red-letter King James Version or from a children’s illustrated story Bible. (David held special appeal to boys like me because of that cool slingshot he had.) In my teenage years, I began to read the Bible for myself and found treasure buried on every page. (David became even more interesting at that stage, for other reasons.) I began journaling my responses to what I was reading, and followed several different schemes for reading through the Bible every year or so. I even memorized long passages, a practice I still cherish.
In my twenties, I planned to be a college English professor because I loved literature. When I ended up switching careers and becoming a pastor instead, in a sense I got the chance to focus on the collection of literature I loved most of all, and I’ve never tired of the Bible through all these years. The more I’ve asked of it, the more it has yielded to me. So, yes, I love the Bible. I’m in awe of it. At this very moment.
But my quest for a new kind of Christianity has required me to ask some hard questions about the Bible I love. There will be no new kind of Christian faith without a new approach to the Bible, because we’ve gotten ourselves into a mess with the Bible.
First, we are in a scientific mess. Fundamentalism—whether in its Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Pentecostal, or Orthodox form (for it exists in all streams of Christian faith)—again and again paints itself into a corner by requiring that the Bible be treated as a divinely dictated science textbook providing us true information in all areas of life, including when and how the earth was created, what the shape of the earth is, what revolves around what in space, and so on.
This approach has set up Christians on the wrong side of truth