A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [69]
More and more of us have begun to see what was incredibly obvious all along, if it weren’t for our thorough Greco-Roman “civilizing” (or mind control): that the good news proclaimed by Jesus Christ wasn’t primarily a way of integrating Plato and Aristotle, spirit and matter, perfect being and fallen becoming, or even law and grace—even though, in a sense, it does all these things. More essentially, it was a fulfillment of the three prime narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures.
First, to accept the free gift of being “born again” into “life of the ages” or “life abundant” meant participation in a new Genesis, a new creation, interrupting the downward death spiral of violence and counterviolence and joining an upward, regenerative movement. Second, to follow Jesus meant embarking on a new Exodus, passing through the waters once again (this time, baptism instead of the Red Sea), eating a new Passover meal (the Eucharist), and experiencing liberation from the principalities and powers that oppress and enslave. Third, to enter or receive the “kingdom of God” meant becoming a citizen of a new kingdom, the peaceable kingdom imagined by the prophets and inaugurated in Christ, learning its ways (as a disciple) and demonstrating in word and deed its presence and availability to all (as an apostle).
In this way, the most striking single element of Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom may have been “The time has come!” The kingdom of God is not a distant reality to wait for someday, Jesus proclaims; the kingdom is at hand, within reach, near, here, now (Mark 1:15). Everyone agrees the poor and downtrodden should be helped someday, oppression and exploitation should be stopped someday, the planet should be healed someday, we should study war no more someday. But for Jesus, the dream of Isaiah and the other prophets—of a time when good news would come to the poor, the prisoners, the blind, the oppressed, and the indebted—was not five hundred or a thousand years in the future: the dream was being fulfilled today (Luke 4:18–21). The time has come today to cancel debts, to forgive, to treat enemies as neighbors, to share your bread with the hungry and your clothes with the naked, to invite the outcasts over for dinner, to confront oppressors not with sharp knives, but with unarmed kindness. No wonder Jesus called people to repent: if the kingdom is at hand, we need to adjust our way of life and join in the joyful, painful mission of reconciliation right now, ASAP!
Now it’s been tempting for those of us who are grappling with this message of the kingdom to try to minimize any implied discomfort for our good Christian sisters and brothers. Most of them are all, after all, quite comfortable in their padded pews, satisfied in their respectable denominations and nondenominations, entertained by twenty-four/seven religious radio, TV, and Internet, and content and confident with their familiar but vastly different version of the gospel. It seems unconscionably rude to disturb them or perhaps incite them to hand out canary yellow warning flyers.
After all, we’re not importing any strange language into our theology; we’re strictly working with what’s always been there. We’re not claiming some new revelation or new authority figure. We’re following the best Christian tradition of going back to Jesus and the Scriptures, so our quest for a new kind of Christianity is, in fact, a most conservative quest. In our return to our roots, however, we’re not writing off all the great sages, scholars, and saints of church history. We’re simply going back to the original Evangelists, apostles, and especially Jesus and making sure we’re as in sync with them as possible from this point forward. We’re not trying to explain away anything in the Bible. We’re simply trying to take seriously the central elements of the canonical texts that have been studiously