A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [96]
Religious determinists have offered us another determinism we could call the “soul-sort” universe: everyone will be sorted into either the destruction/damnation or the redemption/salvation bin. Everyone is determined to end up in one bin or the other. That sounds good if you’re one of the chosen few, but, then again, how could good and generous people rest in peace or celebrate in bliss when they know the majority of their ancestors, friends, family members, and descendants are experiencing eternal conscious torment in hell? Soul-sort determinism may be an improvement over the big crunch or the big freeze, but then again it may not.
This 3-D approach, I believe, offers a better vision of the future than any of its deterministic alternatives. We might say that in it, the future is undoomed—undoomed from the crunching or freezing annihilation of secular determinisms, on one hand, and undoomed from burning destruction and eternal conscious torment of religious determinism, on the other. It is undoomed to eventual healing and joy, undoomed to ultimate resurrection, liberation, reconciliation, and (in the fullest sense of the word) salvation, because the living God will never forsake or forget this beloved creation.
In this 3-D view, God is not in control in the sense of being a machine operator pulling levers or a chess master moving bishops and pawns. Nor is the universe out of control in the sense of being chaotic, random, and purposeless. Instead, God and the universe are in relationship. That in-relationship vision is captured in a number of metaphors in the Bible. For example, God is like a rider guiding a horse with a will of its own, or God is like a parent guiding a child with a will of her own.
The universe, in this view, isn’t just an object upon which God acts by dominating fiat; it is a subject endowed by its Creator with millions of real minds and wills, a community with which God relates intersubjectively. All creation is harmed when humanity pulls, drops, or drifts out of relationship, like a moody child pouting in the corner or a rebellious teenager running away to a distant city far from home. All creation (try thinking of this ecologically) groans for humanity to reenter a right relationship with God, so we can fulfill our God-given calling as creation’s stewards, students, and creative partners—and cease being its abusers, exploiters, and plunderers.
Conventional eschatologies, whether premillennial, postmillennial, amillennial, preterist, and so on, tend to argue about different arrangements or lengths of the lines in the Greco-Roman narrative. That’s what makes this new approach so different and difficult to label, because it dispenses with the linear approach altogether. We could borrow from Hans Küng and others and call it an “improvisational eschatology.”6 We could also call it participatory.7 In a participatory eschatology, when we ask, “What does the future hold?” the answer begins, “That depends. It depends on you and me. God holds out to us at every moment a brighter future; the issue is whether we are willing to receive it and work with God to help create it. We are participating in the creation of what the future will be.”
If you explore this 3-D participatory eschatology for a while, you might feel a little naughty or even rebellious at first, because you’ll soon be in tension with things your six-line tutors have always taught you. But once you allow yourself some space to experiment with it, to try it on for size for a while, you’ll start seeing and noticing so much that you’ve been taught to ignore. Once that happens, I don’t think you can ever go back.8 And maybe more disturbing, you’ll realize that along with being taught not to see things that are there in the biblical text, you’ve been taught to see things that aren’t there at all. We’ve already seen how this is the case with “the Fall,” and when it comes to