A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [52]
It’s not that simple. The author of the second-grade text told the truth that was appropriate for second-graders. If second-graders had to learn subtraction of both positive and negative numbers, they would be overwhelmed. So experts in math education have determined an order of operations, a set of skills that need to be mastered in a sensible order: addition before subtraction, subtraction before multiplication, multiplication before division, positive numbers before negative numbers, solving for single variables before solving for multiple variables, and so on.
What if something similar must happen in the theological education of the human race? What if people who live in the second-grade world of polytheism need to learn about one God as superior to others before they can handle the idea of one God as uniquely real? What if, in order to properly understand God’s concern for social justice, they must first have a concept of God being pleased or displeased, and that concept can only be developed through the visceral reflexes of cleanliness and revulsion, which are in turn reinforced through ceremonial rules and taboos? What if the best way to create global solidarity is by first creating tribal solidarity and then gradually teaching tribes to extend their tribal solidarity to “the other”? What if, then, God must first be seen as the God of our tribe and then only later as the God of all tribes?6 What if we need to learn to find God in the face of our brother before we can find God in the face of the other, the stranger, even the enemy? And what if, until we find God in both our brother and the other, we can’t truly say that we know God maturely?7
What if God’s agency in the world is mysterious and complex, reflecting God’s desire to have a world that is truly free yet truly relational? And what if, in order to get to that high-level theological calculus, we must first teach people to imagine a simply chaotic universe and then to imagine its opposite—a simply determined and controlled universe? What if we must then transcend both of those simple paradigms in order to imagine an interactive, relational universe that has elements of both?
And what if, in order to understand the character of God that lies behind, beneath, above, and within the agency of God, we must similarly pass through some stages in which our understanding is imbalanced and incomplete? What if, for example, to view God as passionately committed to justice and goodness, we must first pass through a stage in which we see God’s passion for justice being expressed in the violent defeat of injustice? Or to say the same thing slightly differently: What if the only way to get to a mature view of God as nonviolently yet passionately committed to justice is to pass through an immature stage in which God appears to be both passionately and violently committed to justice?8 Don’t we, as children, go through similar stages in coming to understand our parents?
Now, if you’ve followed me through this line of reasoning, you’re probably aware already of what I need to say next: we cannot, we must not, assume that we have arrived. In other words, if we can look back and see the process unfolding in the past—in the Bible, in theological history—then we have no reason to believe that the process has stopped unfolding now, even at this very moment as I write, as you read. And we have every reason to believe that even now we are in a stage of understanding that is a step up from where we used to be, but a step below where we could venture next. To be a member of a faith community,