A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [95]
Maybe now you see why I believe that a new kind of Christianity demands a new kind of eschatology, a new way of viewing the future.4 And maybe you can anticipate ways in which we have already opened up new possibilities by questioning the theological paradigms we’ve questioned so far. Most important, the Greco-Roman narrative offered us a vision of history as a time line, which forced us to think of past, present, and future as flat, narrow, linear, and predetermined. In that paradigm, we were driven from the past into the future at a constant pace on a flat plane, from left to right:
But we have begun exploring the future in light of the dynamic and spacious biblical narrative rather than the flat, linear, and predetermined Greco-Roman one. In that context, we see the future not as a time line on a flat plane, but as a time-space in three dimensions. In that expanding space, millions of good stories can unfold and be told. Suddenly we find ourselves not in a one-dimensional determined universe with a fixed future, but in a deep, expanding universe with a future full of widening possibilities. At every moment, creation continues to unfold, liberation continues to unshackle us, and the peaceable kingdom continues to expand with new hope and promise.
This continual unfolding, expanding, and opening all flow from a generous, creative, and liberating God, a God as far different from the static Theos of the Greeks as three wild dimensions are from a perfectly flat line. So let’s think of creation as height, liberation as length, and peaceable kingdom as depth. When we do, we quickly realize we’re not in theological flatland anymore:
To live in this 3-D universe does not mean we’re just stuck in static cycles like gerbils on a wheel. Nor are we spurting around aimlessly in an anything-goes universe like a deflating balloon, with one direction no better than another. No, there is a trajectory to history, a flow to creation, a moral arc to the universe that slowly but surely tends toward justice, as Dr. King used to say. If we think of the moment of creation at the bottom of our diagram, we can think of God’s light shining from above, calling all things from chaos, void, and darkness toward order, fullness, life, and light. Evil actions resist the flow. They turn away from the light and revert toward the darkness of destruction (anticreation), oppression (antiliberation), and violence, hatred, and fear (antireconciliation). Good things grow upward and outward, like seedlings from soil, like the branches of a tree reaching toward the light.
That means that, contrary to dispensationalism and many other conventional eschatologies, there is no single fixed end point toward which we move, but rather a widening space opening into an infinitely expanding goodness, like the air and sunlight into which a tree spreads out its branches. Creation branches out into an ever widening sphere of goodness, justice, and peace. This understanding, to me, is glorious, and I want to get up and shout and sing and dance around my office today as I sit here writing about it.5
But imagine what it would be like to live in this deep 3-D universe while still thinking you were living in the flat six-line universe. That, I believe, is the condition many of us find ourselves in, and it explains why many of us find our religion limiting, cramped, and unlivable. This 3-D approach provides a spacious and hopeful alternative to secular as well as religious determinisms—visions of the future that are set in stone, determined by either laws of physics or decrees of the Almighty. Secular scientists typically offer us two possible futures. In one, the universe is doomed to a final white-hot collapse of gravity (a big crunch) and, in the other, to an eternal dark,