A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [70]
So, being peace-loving people who don’t want to needlessly upset anyone, we’ve thought, “Maybe this new understanding can simply be added to what we already have, gradually, gently, so people won’t even notice. Maybe it can enrich our existing understandings without upsetting them in any major way. Maybe we can simply add this kingdom-of-God stuff as fine print on the bottom of our existing theological contracts. Yes, those contracts presume the six-line Greco-Roman narrative, defend our constitutional reading of the Bible, and leave our pre-Jesus view of God unchallenged and unchanged. Yes, it will be difficult and delicate to do so, but maybe we can put this new wine into the old wineskins without upsetting anyone.”
Many are still working with this hope, and I wish them luck, but quite a few of us are coming to believe that the good news of Jesus the Liberating King cannot fit into or coexist with the Greco-Roman narrative. (If it did, Jesus would be neither liberator nor king.) Similarly, we’re discovering that the more we let Jesus’s message of the kingdom of God sink in, the more it begins to unsettle all our existing understandings and categories. It changes everything. Before this realization, we are like lawyers trying to save an old contract, adding more and more fine print on page after page, until the provisos are weightier than the original contract. (This is good work, I suppose, and must be done for a generation or two, but it is not the work to which I feel called.) At some point, though, more and more of us will finally decide that it would make more sense to go back and revise the contract from scratch. And that process has begun. It is nowhere near complete, but the cat is out of the bag; imaginations are sizzling, and exciting theological work is being done—by theologians, yes, but, equally important, by pastors, preachers, songwriters, screenwriters, producers, poets, dramatists, sculptors, photographers, painters, architects, youth leaders, community organizers, moms and dads, and thoughtful readers like you.
But perhaps you’re already anticipating the daunting problem that we all soon must face. Yes, our fresh discovery of Jesus’s good news of the kingdom of God makes sense of the gospels as never before. But what are we to make of Paul’s writings, especially that pivotal letter, Romans? I remember eight or ten years ago, getting up my courage to reread Romans now that I’d begun to reorient my faith around Jesus’s gospel of the kingdom of God. Would I uncover irreconcilable differences between Paul and Jesus, as some of my friends had done? Would I have to choose one over the other? Would I be able to fit my new understanding of Jesus into my old understandings of Paul and Romans or vice versa? I got the idea of downloading the text onto my computer, and I started reading slowly and closely, journaling my responses as commentary to the text.7
What struck me first was the impression that Paul wasn’t trying to define or explain the gospel at all; rather, he was trying to clean up a mess that Jesus had created through his gospel. By mess I mean Jesus had quite effectively ruined the tidy conventional categories of his religious community. In his mind, some prostitutes and tax collectors were closer to God than some Pharisees and priests—and the greatest faith Jesus could find in all Israel was found in the heart of a political enemy who belonged to another religion (Matt. 8:10). Similarly, Jesus broke the rules about clean and unclean, and he kept raising wild and revolutionary new proposals—about the Sabbath, about what’s kosher, about how to treat enemies and outsiders, about who’s a true descendant of Abraham, and so on. In all these ways, Jesus cracked open the door for non-Jews to be accepted in the faith tradition that had previously been exclusively Jewish. First Philip (in Acts 8) and then Peter (in Acts 10) and then Paul