This is a great post Scot. I look forward to reading the next two. One question: I may me mistaken about this, but doesn’t the E.Orthodox church diverge from this narrative in that they don’t have a judicial focus on sin and punishment.

I agree that McLaren’s writing about the Canonical Narrative as traditionally understood is rhetorically biased (and I’m basing this on your summary since I have not read it).
I recommend (as I have done before) that people consider R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology for a narrative that takes the Hebrew Bible seriously (the standard narrative, reflected in the creeds, leaves Israel out).
I also recommend your book A Community Called Atonement which deals with the narrative in detail.

salacious crumb,
Yes, the Eastern side is not as judicial. Having said that, however, the Eastern sense of heaven and hell, while having some clear differences, is no less dramatic. One’s final state is either theiosis or perdition, and it is determined by life on earth. In other words, the Eastern has its version of a soul sort narrative.

Scot,
I am a regular reader of both your blog and Brain’s. I find much in both that I can affirm and some that I can’t. I have read ‘A New Kind of Christianity’ and like many, thought it is a timely and needed addition to faith and the conversations/debates over many of the issues included in it.
Let me just say that although I agree with much that Brain wrote in his new book, I did find the style troubling at times. In a way this is humorous to me as in his earlier books my greatest grief was that he did not take a stand on issues. In this book he takes his stand, but at times seems to do this using ‘straw-men’.
Now concerning your post, and using some terminology from Brian’s new book, I feel that you are approaching his arguments in a constitutional manner. In nitpicking about terminology and phrases, I feel that you are ignoring the real issues Brain was driving at, and are attacking what he left out.
It grieves me that we Christians love to draw lines in the sand rather than rub them out. And I for one am on the verge of throughout it all away; I am ready to live a quiet and faithful life ignoring all the shit that our religion brings with it; ready to hang out with the tax-collectors and prostitutes eating, drinking and being merry rather than trying to dialogue with the religious.

Scot,
This is a grand slam post. Thank you, thank you. You are the one to do it. I’ve grown up in the USAmerican fundamentalist-evangelicalism and I never was taught anything like Brian’s caustic “soul-sort narrative.” Jeremy Bouma and I have been discussing Brian’s latest book and cannot believe people are actually buying his drivel as serious theology or critique. I think Brian believes he is really cool and wants to gather a gang of disgruntled young disciples to promote his outrageous story. … And you nailed it: Jesus Christ is the furious figure Brian *had* to ignore to make his fantasy story work. …
BarryH (#4), the most saving thing about your comment is that you ready to chuck the whole thing.

Well, again Scot, I have to disagree and say that some of this “story” is what is being told in churches. I have a box full of books and tracts that are from my fundamentalist days that portray this very story. The “angry” God hovering over detestable humanity, forcing the decision about “Jesus as Personal Lord and Savior” and watching the rest of humanity tortured forever in hellfire after watching the destruction of the evil, sin ridden world from our place post-rapture. ….

Rob,
I’m editing the last two comments a bit…
I agree with you on this on this: “some of this story.” I don’t doubt that a bit. The issue is whether Brian’s framing of the six elements can be called “conventional.” Even in your comment you’ve got decision about Jesus as part of it; that’s not part of Brian’s framing of the six elements.
The issue here, then, is not belief in final judgment and hell and heaven and the like, and I will bring this up directly next Monday morning. The issue is the framing of the narrative and calling it “conventional.”
Read that chp and see how Brian frames those six elements and I am convinced you won’t find any narrative like that and certainly not as the conventional narrative. Do you know any Christian narrative that has no place for Jesus, for the cross, for the resurrection, for grace, for … ? None of his appears in Brian’s conventional narrative.

Rob, would you admit the sketch Brian has is a caricature?

I would say that he is using a rhetorical device (which is based to some degree in reality and context) to make a point, yes.

John W Frye #5
I am not ready to chuck my faith, just so you know. I am ready to chuck any kind of dialogue with religious folk. They are often the most mean-spirit version of humanity.
(just look at your response to my comment)

I got the sense that Brian isn’t painting a literal picture but is drawing on the implications of the typical narrative. This is the picture many of the atheists I know have drawn from what their evangelical peers have reinforced.

Thanks for doing this short series, Scot.
What I find so fascinating is that Brian can 1) concoct this narrative and mention no theologian/practitioner, living or dead, that teaches this narrative as he describes it, as you point out; and 2) base an entire book on such a shoddy lie! His entire argument isn’t even real, yet he bases the rest of the book on a myth he simply cannot support with scholarship.
What compounds Brian’s problem is that he does not support the very arguments he makes with scholarship or voices outside Himself. In describing the GR6LN as “Platonic” he says it simply “popped” into his mind through 2 conversations with 2 separate friends. Ridiculous! Furthermore, his exegesis is doubly nonsensical as he (again) cites no one other than himself and just plain gets it wrong. For instance, in the chapters you’ve discussed, Scot, his explanation of Genesis 2 is either Brian is ignorant or patently lying when he says the text says ON THAT DAY THEY WOULD DIE. Mainstream commentators agree that the narrative is concerned not with immediate execution but with ultimate death and consistent with other patterns in the Bible used for issuing of death sentences for the future. Yet, Bran misrepresents the Text in order to serve his own agenda.
As I’ve waded through my own critique I’ve come to realize for Brian it really isn?t about Jesus Christ, it?s about God, which is very different than the biblical narrative and historic Rule of Faith. Amazingly, Brian?s retelling of the biblical narrative is Christless. Jesus Christ as exclusive Lord and Messiah is missing. In fact, Jesus isn’t even God Himself but merely ?the highest, deepest, and most mature view of the character of God.?
I was reading J. Gresham Machen’s CHRISTIANITY AND LIBERALISM the other day on the “universal Fatherhood of God” and realized this is exactly what he and others (like Samir Selmanovic) are doing. In fact, when he says the gospel is about the Kingdom of God divorced and decentralized from Jesus this IS what he is doing. There is little evidence Brian believes that the fulness of God?s presence is exclusively in Jesus Christ, that salvation and rescue and reconciliation is found in no other name under heaven besides His.
After Jesus, there is nothing left. And after Brian?s new kind of Christianity, neither is Jesus Christ.

Scot,
Thanks for your editing my comment #5. It was rough at points.
Joey #11,
Brian is not presenting how atheists view the Christian faith but how he thinks Christendom has skewed the Story. He is purporting that his straw man Christianity is the Christianity of the church. McLaren’s theory will not bear serious scrutiny.

Haven’t read Brian’s new book, so I can’t comment directly (not that that’ll stop me
But Scot, when you say that Brian’s sketch of conventional Christianity isn’t held by “any reputable thinker”, please understand that in much of the church, there are no “reputable thinkers”. Max Lucado (and no offense to him) is the height of theological inquiry. Maybe some C.S. Lewis, but probably just the Narnia books.
I think you are talking about what seminaries and preachers and theologians in the most conservative parts of the evangelical church believe and even teach, and Brian is talking about what most people actually believe on the ground.
Maybe he overplays his hand, maybe he simplifies to an insulting degree. But would you disagree that there are serious, serious problems with how most American Christians frame the Christian story?

Scot,
I admire both you and Brian a great deal, and am looking forward to a critique of his new book that rises above what I’ve seen elsewhere. Though I didn’t recognize your description of NKoCy in your CT review, you come across as better so far (more careful and fair) in this post.
You say there is no mention of Jesus in Brian’s summary, but I ask you to consider what I think is an intended point of Brian’s (or at least a point of mine): using the word “jesus” while battering me over the head with the “6 elements” did not necessarily mean the Jesus of the Bible was an honest part of the equation. What was presented to me was a caricature of the Jesus I have come to know (through your work as well as others). So much so, that I think it’s appropriate Brian left out the name of our Lord from his framing. I have come to see the use of words like “jesus” and “grace” in the Gospel offered me in my youth to be little more than a way of providing cover for the blood thirsty Theos.
This is why I am with the Mennonites now. They, like many, use a version of a soul sort narrative. But they earnestly place a rich and full vision of Jesus at the center of the story, as you well know. Perhaps you will be arguing that all Christian traditions, rightly understood, do this as well. Any explanation you have must contend seriously with the daily-lived, rank-and-file freak show that so many of us endured (and still endure).
Ultimately, I do recognize the narrative Brian describes, both the “elements” and the “framing.” You say, in response to people like me who tell you they grew up with this, “My contention is that they didn’t; nor can they find one gospel tract or one youth pastor who will ever admit to having believed in or preached Brian’s soul-sort narrative as he describes it.”
Hearing how you will justify this is very important to me as I look forward to this series of posts.
I’ve spent this comment pushing what troubles me with your post above, but I appreciate other things you’ve written here, and do look forward to what’s coming. I do truly care about you and your ministry. I never for a minute think it’s easy to do what you do, and want to thank you again here for it. I assume you and Brian are conversing about this behind the scenes (at least I sincerely hope so) and pray your friendship is strengthened by the back and forth.
Later,
Dave H.

I agree with Joey on this. A lot of my friends have ‘heard’ that story in just that way. That may have not been what was told them, technically. But that is what they heard. Especially when it comes to ‘believing in Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior’. What they hear is that if one doesn’t then ‘God’ will punish them eternally in conscious torment. Forget all of the good that they have done – feeding the poor, clothing the naked, etc. It all comes down to ‘belief’, which Brian talks about (and which, I’m sure that you, Scott, will touch upon).
I will say yes, it’s a caricature. But even a caricature is based on reality. A cartoon person still looks like a person (albeit a little whopperjawed). And that reality is not that far removed from the story that Brian drew – especially if one comes from a Calvinist camp.
I have another friend of mine that reads the OT story of God as an adolescent. He sees the story of God ‘growing up’ and finally reaching maturity in the New Testament.
The point I’m trying to make is that, in the ‘conventional’ reading of the story, something changes between the Testaments – the picture of God is different. We can either view it as God changed or our understanding was wrong to begin with. That, to me, is what Brian is getting at.

Come down from the ivory towers and pulpits. Please. Just because you don’t believe it after years of prayer and study doesn’t mean a lot of lay people and nonChristians don’t, even if they don’t like it.
The majority of Christians I talk to are convinced that the entire reasons for the atonement is so people that hear about Jesus and pray the sinners’ prayer and go to church (or not) will go to heaven when they die. There is little to no mention of the New Heavens and the New Earth. Resurrection gets mentioned maybe once a year, and even then we’re told that the point of it was just to prove that Jesus was the Messiah that will take us to heaven.
This is very similar to the issue you presented in “The Future of Christian Eschatology”- you thought that a new generation of pastors and theologians would educated the western church and instead we’ve seen an absurd growth in the popularity of the dispy rapture theories to the point where when Tom Wright presents the traditional doctrine of the resurrection, people initially question whether or not he’s going against the teachings of the church.

Scot,
Thanks for taking up this conversation with Brian’s work. That’s exactly what I think Brian and onlookers from every side have been hoping for!
As for my testimony, I have been pastoring for 13 years and soul-sort narrative was IT for most, though not all, evangelizing Christians (those who were passionate enough to share their faith). Dallas Willard was the one who unplugged this one for many of us and introduced a much larger world to us.
Obsession about living eternally (while following the one who gave up his life, of all Lords!) has been an unacknowledged absurdity (not mystery) of our faith that non-Christians can easily see and name. I saw families falling apart, individual lives and communities ruined, and not for the sake of the gospel, but for the sake of taking care of self (through God of course) and convincing others that they have to do the same.
To the extent that this narrative is losing its grip on believers’ imagination today, to that extent people resonate with Brian’s book. We have to face it like Roman Catholics of 16th century had to face it: Our “good news” is neither news anymore, nor good. It really is that simple.
The tipping point for the new paradigm will come when “new kind of Christianity” graduates from reaction to “bad news” and shows its maturity by furnishing some really good news to the world. I think Brian’s book is only a beginning.
Also, a question. Ignoring Brian’s chapter on Jesus, and all of his previous work on Jesus, why?
Finally, Brian’s work helped me personally see, love, and follow Jesus, often pulling me back to traditional, orthodox, and evangelical portrayals and treasures of faith, when I would lose heart. In this book however, he comes out and says where his heart and mind is finding peace and enthusiasm. It is inspiring. You, or I, don’t have to take it, or take it down. He has earned his right to be heard. “If it is from God, we can’t stop it. If it is not from God, we won’t have to!” God make people think for themselves.
Looking forward to the installment #2,
Samir

Let me say that this book isn’t the first time that I’ve felt that Brian (a) had a legitimate and important point to make, and (b) overstated it and/or said it with too much disdain for the very folks that could have otherwise benefited from hearing it. Yes, this soul-sort narrative is an obvious overstatement of conventional Christianity. Based on that, I doubt I’ll recommend this book to anyone. It’s likely to only further divide and inflame folks over these issues rather than discuss them, which is a shame because they need to be discussed.
The issues that need to be discussed is how much our individual legal status with God has become the sum total of what we mean by “saved.” Our usage in the evangelical church is so narrow compared to the biblical usage of the term. As part of the conventional paradigm, we’ve had (and continue to have) some of the following:
- SoM and Jesus’ other teachings are just ratcheting the Mosaic law into greater degrees of impossibility so as to show us how sinful we really are and “get saved.”
- The gospel isn’t about the Holy Spirit, the Church, or sanctification, etc.–it’s only justification (forgiveness, legal status, etc.). Scot, you recently had a pastor tell you that in an airport, I believe, who represented the thoughts of many.
- The thought that this physical creation has the same destiny as the devil (and worthy of the same disdain).
- In line with the above, “salvation”, as our legal status with God alone, has been functionally separated from discipleship, from Church, from what we do–from everything other than, in most cases, what we “believe in our heart” concerning Jesus’ death and resurrection.
I totally agree that Brian has overstated and as a practical matter, I think he’s likely pushed the conversation backward, which I’m reluctant to say. But the grain of truth in his thesis is really important, I believe, for the larger Church right now.

And regarding why Jesus isn’t mentioned in the sketch Brian has put out there, I often just hear his name in reference to his death on a cross that gets us to heaven. Never mind the life that he lived, the only part of it that really matters is that he’s sinless at the end of it.
I was at a planning meeting with a group of pastors working on a community-wide outreach event. As we were talking through presenting the Gospel I mentioned that our speaker was thinking about talking about reconciliation (socio-economic and racial) as an outcome of encountering God. We live in a historically racist community and the response of the pastors around the table was, and I quote, “What’s reconciliation got to do with the gospel?”
Yeah, soul-sorting is a straw man…

Scot, I think you are both right and wrong in this post.
You are right, of course, that “Western Christianity” did not reduce its narrative to this. Read Ireneaus’ “On the Apostolic Preaching” and “Against Heresies,” or even Anselm’s oft-dreaded “Cur Deus Homo,” and it is clear that the narrative, as you mention Scot, has always been far more robust.
But, then, Travis (#14) and Dave H. (#15) are right also. For those of us who find Brian helpful at times, very often, nobody in the churches we grew up in would have heard of Ireneaus or Anselm, probably not even our pastors (or if they had heard of them, we’d have been counseled us to avoid them, because they guys were “Catholic”). The “theology” many of us got growing up was of the “Chick Tract” variety. And here, on the Chick Tract website, is their most recent offering, which absolutely, positively, embodies the “soul sort” narrative — doesn’t it? I mean, look at the “check boxes” at the bottom: “I want to miss Hell”; “I want my sins forgiven”; “I believe the Lord Jesus died for my sins.” That, in sum, is the Christian Narrative from this perspective.
I heard this Chick Tract theology over and over and over again in the Swinging Dispensational ’70′s and ’80′s. Although times have changed, the same theology unfortunately underlies many of our “seeker-sensitive” and “purpose-driven” churches. The face is friendlier, but the bottom line is the same: the purpose of life, the only question that really matters, is “how can I miss Hell?”
Is Brian’s “answer” the right one? No, because judgment is real and “how can I miss Hell,” though very badly framed, remains a valid question. Does Brian paint with too broad a brush? Yes, its “North American Evangelical-Fundamentalism” that needs examination, not necessarily the entire “Western Christian Tradition.” But the “soul sort” narrative without a doubt is pervasive.

I agree with the commenters here who argue that what Brian says may not be how the story is believed by seminary-trained pastors or even youth pastors, but it is what is heard by many in evangelical circles including myself. I’ve been pretty certain most of my life that God is waiting for me to screw up so he can punish me. But he sent Jesus so I don’t have to be punished. And I’d better be thankful for that or else I’ll get punished. There are plenty of people in churches who have no experiential understanding of God’s love and grace. Just look at the immense popularity of The Shack.
As for your question of how the Lutheran would characterize the story: law and gospel. This is entirely anecdotal, I realize. My husband grew up Lutheran and I attended university at Concordia. My husband doesn’t have the hang ups about God wanting to punish him that I do. Maybe it’s coincidence, but from what I learned at Concordia, I think they frame the gospel story in a healthier way than the low church evangelicals I grew up around.

T and Samir,
Thanks for being more reasonable voices than myself on this. Great points.

As a man who grew up in the rural south I would have to say that the narrative that you ascribe to Brian seems to line up pretty well with my experience in a variety of rural churches. As a “city pastor” now, I’d agree that no respected Christian thinkers would admit to believing any such thing, but as someone pointed out earlier those folks had very little impact on my Christian experience in rural America.

@ Dopderbeck
Thanks for sharing that “Chick Tract” link. I read through their latest offering and I’d recommend others read through it too and see what some of us are reacting to and whether or not this straw man exists.

I had to link this Chick Tract as well. Note these line: “your enemy has put up another smokescreen [Science] to hide the amazing escape plan God has for you. . . . The real issue isn’t where the dinosaurs went. . . It’s where YOU will go when you die.” (Emphasis in original — really).

Yes, I like what I’m hearing:
Brian’s “conventional” narrative is not “conventional” but a caricature of what the narrative looks like if you strain everything through the lens of a God who torments eternally. But the caricature is not “conventional” in any way. Brian’s conventional distorts the conventional in order to shove in the face of some that running everything through the lens of a soul-sort narrative, where the focus in the book is on hell and judgment and Zeus tossing down thunderbolts, distorts the narrative into a Monster God.
Seeing things through that lens, I am contending, distorts the narrative.
So, dopderbeck, even the Chick tracts have grace and Jesus dying for sins… and my contention is that Brian completely drops all of that. Yes, a soul-sort narrative is conventional, but not the one Brian offers.
Many of you know that I’m myself working on this very theme: the gospel, the gospel as it has been reshaped through revivalism, and how we need to embrace a more robust narrative. But the “conventional” narrative I am finding is not even close to Brian’s conventional. (Which is not to say I agree with the conventional; I don’t.) The solution is bigger because the problem is otherwise.

Scott Ramsey, tell me the truth, did you hear any narrative that didn’t have Christ as Savior, God as being gracious in sending Christ … alongside (and this is the nature of the evangelistic rhetoric) a God who punishes? Seriously, and I’m not talking about one talk where some preacher just wailed away on wrath, but could you say that any church, over time, just presented Zeus with lightning bolts?

Scott,
How can there be no grace and Jesus in McLaren’s soul sort option if the whole narrative drives toward heaven or hell. Doesn’t that necessitate the things that you’re saying aren’t there?
How are you using the term “conventional”? I understand “conventional” to mean “typical” or “popular”. Do you have a different definition you’re operating from?

I mentioned this in response to your earlier post on this subject, but I’ll say it again here: I don’t think Brian is claiming that anyone teaches this narrative as he has laid it out. He admits he is “putting it baldly”, it is “seldom put this crudely”, and that the rough edges get smoothed out.
Instead, his contention is that if you draw out the implications of the conventional narrative and push it to its (extreme) conclusions, this is what it looks like. But I think he would admit (and has admitted) that no one actually presents it in the form that he has in his book.
For many (or most) average evangelicals in the pew, the 4 Spiritual Laws lay out the essential plot line of the Christian faith. Yes, I realize that it starts out with God’s love, which is conspicuously absent from the plot Brian lays out. But still, the narrative of perfection – fall – condemnation – salvation offer – heaven or hell that Brian sketches is the plot line of the 4 laws. And for the average evangelical, this narrative continues to sum up the essential points of the gospel and why Jesus came. I for one think this is seriously lacking.
As for why Jesus is left out of this narrative as Brian presents it, could it be because this gospel reduces the value of Christ to his death alone? In this story, Jesus’ sole value is his death which enables us to escape hell and go to heaven. His life, his teachings and his call to live his kingdom values in the here and now have secondary value at best if his primary mission was to deal with the heaven/hell question. In a way, Christ becomes just God’s mechanism to deal with the heaven/hell problem.
When I read Brian’s book, I took his argument as hyperbole intended to point out the limitations of this narrative that too many Christians call the gospel. There is so much more to it than this.

I am baffled reading the replies to this post.
Scot, I think you are right on. I wonder if many of the repliers actually read your post, or are simply replying to each other. I see lots of “yeah – that’s what I was taught”, but I have a hard time believing them. I sincerely believe that they were taught the six elements you point out. But are they really claiming that their church did not put forward Jesus Christ as the central figure of the story? I would be shocked to find a (non-emergent) church that claims to be Christian, that does not present Jesus as the son of God who fulfilled prophecy by dying in payment for our sins, then rising to bring us new life. The entire bible preceding Christ is a set-up to the gospel, and everything after Christ expounds on his ministry, and application in our life. If you take that detail out, what is left?!
As always, I wish Brian would stop defacing the term “Christian”. He may feel free to express his views on “McLarenism” as much as he likes. But a faith without Christ is not Christian. (Is it really this complicated??)

The issue, of course, is the soul sort narrative — it is true? is it from Jesus? is it NT? is it Christian? I contend yes, and here’s a good reason why: Jesus clearly affirms a soul sort narrative (though “soul” has its problems):
Matthew 7:13 ?Enter through the narrow gate, because the gate is wide and the way is spacious that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. 7:14 But the gate is narrow and the way is difficult that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
The issue, too, is learning to tell the story of Christianity through the lens of a soul sort narrative alone; with that I have a major problem. But there is a soul sort narrative in conventional Christianity. It’s the entailment of a religion/faith claiming it is the truth, and the entailment there being that if it is truth, other narratives etc are non-truth. That’s inherent to Christianity.
Is Brian’s narrative hyperbole, caricature, etc? If so, it is not “conventional.”

I believe McLaren grew up Plymouth Brethren. So did I. (as McLaren, so I also left it behind) I don’t know how similar or different his experience was from mine but the church of my youth had an hour-long communion service every week, prior to the Sunday School and preaching services. The service by definition focused entirely on the person and work of Jesus, culminating in bread and juice/wine.
If McLaren grew up celebrating such a communion service every week (and maybe he did not), a Zeus caricature sans the suffering and risen Savior would be an ironic one for him to draw.

Scot (#27) said — So, dopderbeck, even the Chick tracts have grace and Jesus dying for sins
I respond: Well, yeah, but it’s such a cramped view of “grace”. C’mon Scot — you really want to suggest the Chick Tract version of the gospel isn’t about “soul sorting?”
Let’s also not forget Jonathan Edwards’ classic Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, with nuggets like this one:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

Now, yes, Edwards was a theologian of grace. Yes, the point of the Sinners sermon is to call people to be born again, so there is “grace” of a sort underneath it. And the themes Edwards draws on are Biblical — judgment and wrath are real. But then again, Edwards the Calvinist knew that behind it all God had predestined some to Hell, that God in fact “abhors” us and is pleased and glorified to see us roast. What kind of God is that? What kind of “grace” is that?

@ Scot and others
What if the dominant, popular, “in the pews” view is the caricature where Jesus only matters in terms of being the way, truth, and life that my immaterial soul goes to heaven through?
Does the caricature become conventional then? Even if it’s not theologically accurate or orthodox?
I have no qualms saying that the narrative presented by many churches is not conventional in terms of historic theology or orthodoxy. I don’t think that makes Brian inaccurate in his portrayal of them.

Agreed with Doperderbeck’s comments. And McLaren is also correct in some respects (although he seems wrong to me in others) — i.e., he is correct that the “conventional” narrative taught in many churches suggests that (1) the world was “perfect” before the Fall, (2) the end state is returning to that perfection in a disembodied heaven, and (3) most of the in-between is about sorting out who gets to heaven. This is plainly conventional, but it is also a distortion of the faith for all the reasons given by N.T. Wright and others (including Scot, I think).
However, other aspects of McLaren’s narrative do seem very odd, and an inaccurate caricature. It is a distortion, for example, to say that the conventional narrative sees God as angered by Adam entering into a state of “becoming.” And to leave out Jesus, as Scot points out.
I think, however, that it is quite unfair of anyone to suggest that Brian leaves Jesus out of his own narrative of the faith. The fact that Brian leaves Christ out of his description of the conventional narrative does not mean that he leaves it out of his own narrative. Although there is room to disagree with Brian’s view of Jesus, Jesus is clearly at the center of Brian’s own understanding of the faith.
The sad thing about this “soul sort” discussion is that it distracts from Brian’s 10 questions that are confronting the faith, which are indeed important questions. I haven’t compared them, but they seem similar to me to Scot’s list of key questions confronting emerging types from his CT article a year or so ago. And Scot’s answers on at least a couple of them are similar to Brian’s.

Scot (#32) said: Jesus clearly affirms a soul sort narrative
I respond: NO! Please, let’s not try to make “soul sort” an acceptable phrase. Jesus clearly affirms that there will be judgment, that our character and our faith matter, that we are sinners in need of redemption. He clearly affirms a finality to judgment. He even speaks about avoiding Hell. But he never, never suggests that the post-mortem “sorting,” in itself, is the real point of our existence. He connects our lives now with our lives in the eschatological future in a holistic and at times mysterious way. There is NOTHING holistic or mysterious about the Chick Tract Narrative. Say a prayer, avoid Hell. Don’t say a prayer, Go to Hell. Life is nothing more.

Matthew 7:13 ?Enter through the narrow gate, because the gate is wide and the way is spacious that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. 7:14 But the gate is narrow and the way is difficult that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
But Scot, is that really a passage about going to heaven or hell (soul sort)? I’ll defer to you as the NT scholar, but my understanding is that Jesus in context is talking about the Kingdom in the now, and the destruction one finds in this life by choosing a way of life apart from the Kingdom.

@ Dopderbeck 37
AMEN E AMEN!!!

Scot (#32), I have tremendous respect for your wisdom and ministry. But I’m very surprised at your take on Matt. 7:13-14, given your own robust gospel. There is nothing in the context of this passage to indicate that Jesus is talking here about heaven and hell. All of the surrounding verses are dealing with how we are to live in the here and now, so it seems to me that “destruction” and “life” in these two verses should be taken as referring to destructive and healthy patterns of living.
Hearing people use this particular passage to defend the soul sort narrative has always been a particular pet peeve of mine, and I think it perfectly illustrates the evangelical tendency to reduce the narrative to one of heaven and hell.
That’s not to say I don’t think Jesus ever talks about heaven and hell, or that it’s not a real concern. But I don’t think that’s what he was driving at in that particular passage.

dopderbeck, I’m with you; I don’t like “soul sort narrative” as an expression and as I read Brian he despises the whole approach. I think it’s a cheeky description of the Christian narrative. But, let’s admit this: what we do now, how we respond to Christ now, matters now and eternally. In that sense there’s something to a soul sort narrative at work in the gospel and in life now. I’m happy to conceded your point; let’s abandon that set of categories for explaining the adequacy of the gospel and the Bible and the kingdom vision.
On Chick Tract: they aren’t my past; it was 4SL which always came with the “Bird Book” and that it was about having an abundant life.

I love this: “Jesus clearly affirms a soul sort narrative (though “soul” has its problems)”
Tradition and Scripture affirm that the soul-sort narrative is real. What you and I and others are saying is that the soul-sort narrative Brian says we and (Reformed) Tradition hold is a gross caricature. While the idea of people being separated at judgment into heaven (on earth) and hell is orthodox and scriptural and real, Brian’s characterization of that narrative is not even close to the way Tradition and Scripture frames that reality.
What Brian and others like Samir (thanks for joining the conversation!) fail to come to grips with is the reality that Jesus explicitly says there will be a sort and the rest of the NT makes it clear He Himself will be the sorter. In fact, they divorce the reality of restoration and the Kingdom from Jesus Christ entirely and place it in a pan-deity god.
The problem isn’t that we do believe a soul-sort narrative…Jesus Himself believed and taught it. The problem is the unfair gross characterization of that narrative, which in the end of more an attack against the person of Christ than the narrative of historic Christian orthodoxy.

“But, let’s admit this: what we do now, how we respond to Christ now, matters now and eternally”
In my limited experience, personal and anecdotal, I think a large number of Christians in North America and the West didn’t hear this regularly or connected with an explanation of why it matters.
Otherwise, why is there a tremendous need for Surpised By Hope, Jesus Creed, etc.

Now to Matthew 7:13-14. Wow, I’m surprised. “Kingdom” is not just now; it is now and eternal. Entering into the kingdom or not entering into the kingdom is the theme of 7:13-27, and those who do enter are those who hear Jesus and do what he says; those who don’t enter the kingdom are those who don’t do what he says. He’s calling people to follow him now because it matters now and eternally. This section in Matthew fits with all kinds of similar stuff about decision and consequences in Matthew, and one thinks of 25:31-46 for instance. I have no desire to de-historicize; to make these just about eternity; as if the fit into the revivalist’s evangelistic rhetoric; but to make them only for the moment at the time of Jesus and not for eternity is a huge mistake. This is one of those both/ands. The soul sort narrative of Brian clearly overdid the eternity part; but flip flopping to the other extreme is the same kind of mistake.
I quote now Dale Allison, who wrote the best commentary ever written on Matthew. “The eschatological orientation of 7.13-14 is manifest (1) from the many similar Jewish texts which are often eschatologically oriented [check out vol. 1.695-696]; (2) from the use of ‘life’ elsewhere in Matthew to refer to the future life of the kingdom; (3) from the word apoleia, which refers to eternal destruction; (4) from the verb eiserchomai, which so often in Matthew has an eschatological orientation (5.20; 7.21; 18.3; ;19:23-24; 23:13)…; (5) from the parallel with 7.24-27… ” (vol 1.697).

#31 Scott Smith, I think the presentation of Jesus as the Lamb ONLY is what #30 Glen is referring too. We follow Jesus because of his death and resurrection. Then we listen to and obey Paul. Jesus teachings aren’t that important. His death and Resurrection are. I think that is what people are referring to. Even look at the early creeds, they don’t saying anything about Jesus teaching, just the death. Of course, then not holding to obedience to anything in the gospels leads to dispensationalism, etc. and you’re left with a greater rift of platonic matter vs. soul ideology and dichotomy.

“The soul sort narrative of Brian clearly overdid the eternity part; but flip flopping to the other extreme is the same kind of mistake.”
So if Brian is dealing with such a straw man, is there anyone willing to go on record saying there are not a lot of western churches that are preaching this soul sort narrative that emphasizes eternity so much that there is no sense of the importance of this life now? If not intentionally than unintentionally through ministry practice and the use of certain tracts?

‘Soul sorting” or judgement functions as a primary belief not only in the NT but also in the inter-testamental literature. One needs only to read the Macabees or the Songs of Solomon to realize that most ( of course not all) Jews before and during the first century believed that God would act within history and that his action would have blessings for some and judgement for others. This was what was hoped for, nay even prayed for by some. What is most interesting is the way that resurrection itself in these texts served as a reward for those who were faithful under persecution.
Therefore when we remove a judgement from our narrative we turn a whole bunch of literature, not only the NT, on its head. The NT comes out of a framework that assumes God will judge the world as part of the process of restoring the world. Of course for the IT Lit, this is specifically in regards to other nations treatments of Israel, but could also include those which a group determined to be ‘apostate’ or ‘rebellious’ even with Israel (thinking of the worldview of Qumran at this point). Regardless, judgement is a primary theme in the NT and the IT and not a ‘caricature.’

Reputable Thinker ? Not to intentionally be condescending to you Scot, but does this mean theologian or author? I would say that the most reputable thinkers are the ones most listened to and followed therefore they are the pastors of all these small churches who do teach this approach toward Christianity. Your perspective is the definition of Ivory Tower mentality, IMHO.
Framing Story ? In my view, Brian is doing what I consider to be the best way to encounter the bible, and that is to find ourselves in the story. His approach cuts away all the causal elements and looks at how we participate in the Bible. I look at it this way. The Bible was written for Man, not for God. Therefore we have to find our individual self in the story. I would say the six line narrative is the way we participate in the story. If the definition of a caricature is the way we look in the story then that is what it is.
What is taught ? In line with the reputable thinker category, I listen to American Family Radio so that I can understand what the typical conservative person in my community is listening to. If you have not listened to this shocking Christian narrative, exactly the 6 liner, then you owe it to everyone to see what the masses are experiencing.
The bible study teacher in my church preaches this every week, along with a Rapture and the ?fact? that the end of the world is imminent. And my church is progressive in this rural Virginia community.
Again, it is the effect of the bible, the finding of ourselves in the bible that Brian is talking about, in my not so humble opinion.
Dave

Speaking of Samir…The trend that he and Brian are establishing within Christianity itself is that Jesus Christ simply does not matter. Like Brian, In his book, ITS REALLY ALL ABOUT GOD, Samir insists ?we Christians have insisted that our revelation is the only container and only dispenser of grace. The rest of the world has been steadily proving us wrong. Grace is independent.? (52) According to Selmanovic, the revelation that has come through the Holy Scriptures and Jesus Christ himself are not the only containers of God?s grace; grace is found outside the Christian Story. Ultimately, Selmanovic insists that “the Christianity that claims exclusive possession of God?s revelation in the person of Jesus has hijacked that same God from the world.? (68)
I am deeply disturbed that a self-described Christian and director of a Christian community would insist God is revealed outside of Jesus Christ and not exclusively in Him. Furthermore, to suggest that God?s grace is somehow found outside of the Story of Christ is offensive as a fellow Christian and pastor. I would expect a Muslim or Buddhist to say such a thing. Not a self-described follower of Christ. Both Brian and Samir are doing their best to wrench salvation from exclusive faith in Christ, which God’s Story of Rescue insists.
It is clear from the testimony of Jesus Christ and the apostles who testified to his Lordship and Messiah that the worlds Story will transition with the parousia, the coming of Christ at the Day of the Lord where every person will be judged and separated by Jesus Christ Himself. Christianity is not the point of the narrative which points to this reality and the reality of rescue from the consequences of rebellion (sin and ultimately death). Faith invested exclusively in Jesus Christ is. Unfortunately, both men deny this truth.

Scot (#44), I agree with you that there is both a now and not yet dimension to all of Jesus’ Kingdom teaching. But in reference to this particular passage, the tendency in my experience is for people to focus solely on the not yet aspect. I would go so far as to say that every time I have ever heard this passage referenced from the pulpit (and it’s been many, many times), it has been to make a point about heaven and hell. Which again fits the evangelical tendency to flatten the gospel to the soul sort narrative.

Richard, that “in the future” or “for now” dichotomy is not the focus of this chp in Brian’s book. No one doubts that many focus on the eternal, and it’s a big mistake to do that. Brian has helped many in that correction, but Tom Wright is probably the biggest voice in this regard.
Let me say this again: I’m not questioning the presence of the six elements of the narrative. Those have been part of most of Christian theology since Day One. The issue is not the six elements; the issue is how those six elements are turned into a story and which story will we create. (By the way, most of Western evangelicalism has not framed theology or Bible reading through that narrative; the Reformed always have — see Vos. They’ve got a narrative theology at work. But most evangelicals frame it all through a “plan of salvation.” More of that anon.)

Scot #41
I’m a little surprised by your comment “what we do now, how we respond to Christ now, matters now and eternally.” Most certainly the response that matters is the response of Jesus Christ himself as our high priest. Peter doesn’t respond very well when he denies Jesus, but he is upheld by Jesus’ prayers. How is the person with autism to respond? If there is a classic mistake that evangelicalism has made it has been to make the same mistake liberals have made: believe as if everything depends on God but live as if everything depends on us.

#48 DRT?”Framing Story ? In my view, Brian is doing what I consider to be the best way to encounter the bible, and that is to find ourselves in the story.”
Actually you misread what Brian is saying regarding the text. He is not simply saying we are to find ourselves in the story. He reduces the Holy Scriptures to human conversations about God, rather than God Himself revealing Himself to humanity. This is clear when he writes, ?revelation occurs not in the words and statements of individuals, but in the conversation among individuals and God. It happens in conversations and arguments that take place within and among communities of people who share the same essential questions across generations. Revelation accumulates in the relationships, interactions, and interplay between statements.? (91-92)
In the Bible itself, God does not actually reveal Himself to Humanity. Instead it is a cultural library that ?preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed.? (83) According to Brian the Bible neither contains the real voice of God, but rather the voices of individuals speaking about God, nor is it a real, single authority for understanding God properly, since it is merely an evolving conversation about Him in which varying people give varying perspectives.
The Text is simply an ongoing conversation about the character of God in which the writers trade-up varying images for better and more evolved ones, a process we ourselves are invited to shape. The Text, then, is not a Divine product, but a Human one, shaped not by God Himself but by you and me.

Alan K,
Are you making it an either-or? My own writings show that I’m into the recapitulation theory and am quite happy with the subjective genitive idea (though I think it’s hard to prove) in “faithfulness of Christ,” but for me this is not an either or but a both-and, and Jesus constantly pressed for people to make decisions to follow him and that what one decided mattered. There’s human responsibility here.

@Dopderbeck #21
So my 7 year old son walked up behind me and started reading the chick “comic” on my screen. I quickly closed the window, as I certainly don’t want him to have that influence (and maybe I ought to be as defensive when it comes to Sunday school experiences).
My personal favorite was the “discipleship” panel just after the prayer.
Read your Bible (KJV)…

Scot (#41) said: But, let’s admit this: what we do now, how we respond to Christ now, matters now and eternally.
I respond: Yes, indeed, without doubt. But we’d also nuance this in a whole bunch of ways, I hope: (1) “responding” to Christ isn’t primarily about saying a “sinner’s prayer” (though it may involve that); (2) it isn’t Biblical simply to write off as ineluctably Hell-bound every individual who hasn’t consciously responded to Christ by saying a sinner’s prayer; (3) “eternity” is a physical state both in continuity with and in disjunction from the present.
It’s these three points, for me at least, at which I would distance myself from the populist “soul sort” narrative of conservative evangelicalism.

#56, dopderbeck,
I agree. Had Brian described that, I would have clapped for him.

Sorry, also this point: (4) our response does not save us. Only God saves, and only by grace. Our response is part of and evidence of God’s gracious salvation.

Scot,
You say: “even the Chick tracts have grace and Jesus dying for sins”
I know this is not your main point, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it. But that offhand mention of something called “jesus” in the Chick tract is not the Jesus you have shown me in your work. Brother, I disagree with your claim that this is a narrative that includes anything like grace.
Then you say: “On Chick Tract: they aren’t my past; it was 4SL which always came with the “Bird Book” and that it was about having an abundant life.”
You may not believe this, but I literally choked up reading this information about you, that you inherited a tradition in which your materials were labeled “bird” and taught abundant life. If only I could have had your upbringing! It’s what I am desperate to offer my young daughter.
I’m a professor of communication and know the symbols and language we use matters. I see that Brian, by labeling his summary “the Western Christian Tradition,” has insulted and done disservice to your beautiful book about birds (this is not sarcasm, I’m sincere).
Please don’t dismiss the experience of those raised on Chick Tracts. It sounds to me that you think these monstrosities include the grace of Christ because there is a “mention” of something pathetic labeled “jesus.” Or maybe you just have a hard time believing that someone could be “raised” on them. We have nothing but our testimony to tell you that yes we were.
I know you have a generous capacity for listening to your students, so I know taking seriously the experiences of others is something you care about.
I wish Brian wrote about my experience in ways that didn’t alienate yours. I’m sorry for that.
Dave H.

McLaren’s soul-sort narrative appears to be a gross over generalization of the state of western Christian theology. While some of his characterizations are certainly true, his broad, sweeping attack on all of western Christianity is regrettable. I think more than delivering a call for the renewal of the church, McLaren’s new book will serve as nothing more than canon-fodder for those outside of the church who wish to attack it for its “flaws.” For someone seemingly so concerned with inaugurating a new age of harmony and generosity within the church, this book seems to do little but divide.

Jeremy @ 53,
I head into deeper waters than perhaps I should given that I haven’t read this book. But I don’t think your reading of McLaren’s take on Scripture is fair. The conclusions you draw do not come naturally from the quotes you pulled. Brian is saying God is revealed and is working through the communities that wrote and shaped the Bible. I don’t know how you get from that to “According to Brian the Bible neither contains the real voice of God, but rather the voices of individuals speaking about God, nor is it a real, single authority for understanding God properly, since it is merely an evolving conversation about Him in which varying people give varying perspectives.”
I think I’ll check out, since again, I haven’t read this book.
But Scot, Brian is reacting to the Chick Tract universe, which many of us know all to well, and I haven’t yet seen you acknowledge is a widespread and growing place. It’s not a straw man. Yes, the Chick Tract may say something about Jesus…but it’s entirely about Jesus’ act of dying. Not about his character. Not about his teaching. Not about his example. Not even about his resurrection. It’s about faith in Jesus as a historical actor only, not as a person in whom we entrust the whole of our lives (yes, including after death).
I agree with dopderbeck, that this theology frames the entire purpose of existence in the soul-sorting process. There is no answer that I could ever discern for why God created the earth in the first place.

Dave @ 59,
Well said. Ditto for me.

Travis, I understand what you are saying, and I do know that many heard of a God who was threatening punishment, but if we are honest and fair in our description, we describe what others say to their satisfaction and in their terms, and they say it otherwise.
The Chick Tract, Travis, can’t be equated with “conventional”. That term describes Western and I’ve not seen Chick Tract in this book at all. Nor can you say Brian is critiquing a Good Friday only gospel. He doesn’t even mention Jesus’ death in this chp on the conventional narrative. He does mention atonement and justification and salvation, but those are abstractions.
I encourage you to read the chp and see if you think it can be called the “conventional” Christian narrative. We’re talking 2000 years; we’re talking the Western Church, which means at least from the Nicene Creed and Augustine through Aquinas and Anselm and the Reformers and the major evangelicals and the Popes. (We’ll leave the East out for now.)

Scot, would it have been better in your view for Brian to say he was talking about the narrative of most branches of fundamentalism and “some” branches of evangelicalism as opposed to “Western Christianity”? I agree that it is too broad a sweep to say his charicature includes all of Western christianity.

#61 Travis Greene
You’re right: you should read the book. It is a fair reading because he completely does in fact de-revelationalize the Text. ?But to say that God inspired the Bible is to say that, for the community of people who seek to be part of the tradition of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Moses, Ruth, David, Amos, John, Mary, and Jesus, the Bible has a unique and unparalleled role that none of these other voices can claim.? (83)
This leads to a more important, fundamental question: Is God Himself revealed through the Bible itself? Unfortunately, according to Brian, no. The Living God then is not reveal through the Holy Scripture, but simply the ?ongoing vigorous conversation? and ?vital civil argument.? He says this very thing when he argues against reading the Bible in away that says ?God?s message is supposed to be found in the plain words of the biblical text:? McLaren believes revelation is about human conversation about God, rather than God Himself revealing Himself to humanity.
The Bible is not simply a conversation among many different voices, but one Voice speaking to us in a variety of ways. I do agree with Brian that the Bible is unlike any other book: it is a very diverse body of genres and voices through which God is speaking. Far from being simply a ?record of a vibrant conversation, and a stimulus to ongoing conversation,? however, it contains the voice of God itself as He has chosen to speak to us about Himself.
This is simply not true for Brian. This becomes clearer in his conversation on God at which point Brian blatantly says that ?the Bible is an ongoing conversation about the character of God.? He goes one step further by declaring, ?our ancestor?s images and understanding of God continually changed, evolved, and matured over the centuries. God, it seemed, kept initiating this evolution.? (99) Here Brian creates a quarterback sneak around the thorny prospect of God Himself evolving and instead postulates that our ancestor?s images evolved.
In fact, ?we have no reason to believe that the process has stopped unfolding, even at this very moment as I write, as you read, and we have ever reason to believe that even now we are in a stage of understanding that is a step above where we used to be, but a step below where we could venture next.? (105) While he gives zero biblical support for this assertion, it make sense in light of his view of the Holy Scripture. Again, for Brian the Bible is not God?s self-disclosure of Himself to us, it is our written ?record of a series of trade-ups, people courageously letting go of their state-of-the art understanding of God, when an even better understanding begins to emerge.? (111)
For Brian the Bible is not God?s self-revelation, it is purely a record of humans evolution in their understanding of God. In his own words: ?the Bible is an ongoing conversation about the character of God,? rather than the revelation of God Himself. This is diametrically opposed from how the Church has viewed the revelation of God for centuries. This is simply not Christian.

Rob, it would have been better for Brian to quote a wide array of how the Western Church has framed its narrative and gospel.

Scot (#63) — I think you’re right to about this, and Rob (#64) yes I think it would have been better for Brian to frame it that way. But here, I think, is the problem: it does seem that Brian is trying to articulate something that is not really tethered to the 2000-year tradition, either from the West or the East. It seems at points very much like process theology. If that’s the direction, that is a severe problem.

Much has been said already, so I’ll just add a couple of points:
1.) I agree with others who suggest that what Brian is doing is pushing the implications, rather than the actual presentation. And in so doing I think he’s saying that, for many, this is what they end up focusing on – the implications, the narrative taken to its most extreme end, at the end of the day. And while theologians may feel better about it with all the nuance and extra theological detail thrown in, I’m not sure that your typical Joe on the street is.
2.) Yes, I think Brian does tend to hold up a target and then attack it with machine-gun-like rhetoric. In other words, yes he can be a propagandist (but so are many of us), and he certainly tends towards hyperbole. However, I’d hope we could acknowledge that, call it what it is, but then get back to the points Brian is making (in less cariacatured fashion).
3.) I am really surprised by the degree to which people set up these either-or statements – as absolutes, and then attempt to shoot Brian down. For instance, Jeremy Bouma contrasted Brian’s take on the Bible being about people’s conversations about God, versus God’s revelation of Himself to humanity. Come on, its not so black and white. Of course the Bible is BOTH of these things. Unless you subscribe to some form of extreme dictation theory, more like how a Muslim would see the Koran, I don’t know how you could claim otherwise.

“He proposes we learn to read the Bible from the front forward and not from our time backward?”
“He proposes trying to read the Bible frontward (which is what that narrative does, if he’ll look at it again: it begins at the beginning).”
I don?t think McLaren?s emphasis here is that we read chronologically (although he might do that as well), rather he is referring to perspective and context. In other words, we tend to read whatever chronological part of the narrative with an inherited set of interpretations that we have as a modern lens. McLaren gives the example that we see Jesus through the lens of Paul, through Augustine?s view of Jesus through Paul, through Aquinas, Luther, Wesley or Calvin, Benny Hinn, etc. He suggests starting with Abraham into which comes Moses, then David, Prophets, John the Baptist, etc. Having said that, this does of course also implicitly require the chronology; basically seeing the Jesus section of the narrative as the culmination of Israel?s history up to that point.
As for Jesus missing, this might be informative: http://blog.beliefnet.com/contentfeeds/brian-mclarens-from-genesis-to/
I thought Brian?s ?Theos? caricature was common ? an old man with a white beard on a throne in the clouds waiting for me to screw up. Brings to mind ?Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God? for me.
It does make me curious to find more concrete references as to how Plato, Aristotle, Greek philosophy and Roman politics actually crept into the narrative.

Brians critique is fairly standards in most schools of theology and religious studies. I, for one, am glad for an ‘escape hatch’ from the theologies I grew up with and into something a bit more life giving.

68?Darren King
I agree it isn’t that black and white! It is both. I believe God primarily authored these books through the full participation of human authors under the guidance of their Jewish Spiritual Traditions, Culture, and specific contexts.
Brian does not believe this. God is not revealing Himself through this textual incarnation. Its all people. All the “community of the faith” simply conversing and conversing and writing about those conversations. God. Brians view is the extreme antithesis of the other extreme form of dictation theory: there is no divine.
Historic Christian orthodoxy, across the board, has always said the Bible is GOD’S revelation to humanity. Not HUMAN revelation about God. While humans are certainly involved, it is God who is revealing. Paul or Moses of John are not revealing to the world what God is like…it is God Himself who is revealing to the world what he is like. Brian’s view is clearly the former, not the latter.

Jeremy @ 49
Of course God is revealed outside of Jesus Christ. Do you discount the entire Old Testament? What about Hebrews 1:1? What about God being revealed through creation?
If grace cannot be found outside of Jesus Christ, how is that “grace”? What does that say about God? Did something about God’s very nature change with the cross?
Jesus is the fullest expression of God to humanity, but one cannot “reduce” God to Jesus. What about the Holy Spirit?
I don’t believe I would agree with this Selmanovic in his entirety any more than you do, but to say that grace may exist “outside” of Jesus Christ isn’t to say that Jesus doesn’t matter.
I’m not sure what it even means to say that grace can’t be found outside of Jesus? Outside the intellectual knowledge of Jesus? What about those who die in infancy or who have severe handicaps? What about all of the faithful Old Testament people? They trusted in God’s promise, but certainly had no clue what that would look like. If they did, everyone in Judea would have figured Jesus out!
Perhaps I am misreading you, but your point is then not very clear.

68?Darren King
I agree it isn’t that black and white! It is both. I believe God primarily authored these books through the full participation of human authors under the guidance of their Jewish Spiritual Traditions, Culture, and specific contexts.
Brian does not believe this. God is not revealing Himself through this textual incarnation. Its all people. For Brian it’s about the “community of the faith” simply conversing and writing about those conversations. His view is the extreme antithesis of the other extreme form of dictation theory: there is no divine.
Historic Christian orthodoxy, across the board, has always said the Bible is GOD’S revelation to humanity. Not HUMAN revelation about God. While humans are certainly involved, it is God who is revealing. Paul or Moses or John are not revealing to the world what God is like, though they are certainly involved in the process…it is God Himself who is revealing to the world what he is like. Brian’s view is clearly the former, not the latter.
-jeremy
(PS?Scot please delete #71…I jumped the gun and should have proofed this beforehand. Sorry!)

Scott #54
I agree with your both/and and that there is a human responsibility. However, according to Jesus in an traditional (soul-sort) reading, our destiny is according to our actions not grace. This to me is scary.
I have come to believe that our justification is a result of the work of God. All humanity will is justified by the Faith OF Jesus. The human flip-side is that we will also all be judged based on our works/ actions.
So, “All are justified by the work and faith of Jesus; All will be judged by our own works.” To me this makes sense of the ALL inclusive verses and the goats/sheep verses.

Two quick thoughts:
One: if you haven’t read Brian’s book twice (or at least the chapter) you really shouldn’t be commenting on it here in my opinion. Some of the stronger criticisms here really don’t ring like they really read the book, or at least the chapter being sussed out here.
Two: Scot: your main criticism of Brian’s 6 line version of the “conventional” gospel presentation seems to be that Jesus is missing, which he clearly is not from conventional western Christian narrative.
When I read the book, similar to Glen in comment 30, I saw it as Brian suggesting (I think correctly) that in this narrative — of Perfect Eden, marred by sin leading to Jesus coming ONLY to sort SOULS into a Perfect Heaven or “Perfect” Hell…in THAT Narrative: Jesus is reduced to hardly fitting on the 6 lines at all.
In that story Jesus is in fact only functional as the single vector point between the Perfect Heaven and the Perfect Hell. He is barely a dot on the 6 lines.
And as to the question of is that view common or conventional: for me I became a Christian in a very conservative branch of the Presbyterian Chruch, and I vividly remember EXACTLY this narrative (with some only slight smoothing of the hard edges) being taught from the pulpit and being taught as we were trained to do evangelism of this Story.
I just now looked back on some of the Evangelism Explosion teaching online that I remembered to be sure that I wasn’t remembering this too skewed.
Their narrative is “Steps to Life” and “Life is defined pretty interchangeably as “getting into Heaven.”
http://www.eeinternational.org/pages/page.asp?page_id=31469
Again, although Jesus and grace is mentioned it’s only as a “step to life.”
And see how saving faith in Jesus is described as step 6:
“Saving faith is trusting in Jesus Christ alone for eternal life. It means resting upon Christ alone and what He has done rather than in what you or I have done to get us into Heaven.”
To this narrative Saving faith is only about trusting Jesus to be a good vector point to turn on to reach a Perfect Heaven and to avoid a Perfect Hell.
Isn’t that a 6 line narrative in action? Saving faith isn’t about the whole person, or about repentance of injustice turning towards a new way of living… instead saving faith and Jesus role is reduced to that one dot on the six lines where souls alone make the turn up to the Romanesque clouds or down to the Hades like hellfire.
http://www.eeinternational.org/pages/page.asp?page_id=31469

Tim C, thanks for this. I don’t want to get into the EE program; I went through it and it is clearly shaped by a soul-sort narrative (plan of salvation is better) but Jesus plays a huge, huge role. (Yes, it’s not about kingdom life now, but about heaven when we die. I’m all for that critique.)
There’s a lingering comment you made, and I confess to finding it interesting. Brian’s not said this, so I suspect it was not intended but it might be something he can now use: the absence of Jesus Christ, and the absence of grace, the absence of God’s love, even in the self-substitution of himself in the Son for sinners, … the absence of this might be taken as a literary approach by Brian to show that the conventional narrative has no Jesus. But Brian doesn’t say this in the book; he hasn’t said this in his public responses… and had he intended it, the book would have been the place … and esp in his chp on Jesus where he could have drawn our attention to the absence of Jesus in that narrative. And then he could have told us that we need Jesus and that the presence of Jesus creates a new narrative. He doesn’t do this.
Now my point: no conventional narrative absences Jesus. The conventional narrative makes Jesus the Savior and the Lord.

Scot,
I have yet to read McLaren’s newest… though have read several others of his. But I just want to repeat what a few others here have said.
Based on the quotes and description you gave… YES. Yes, this is the narrative and basic way of framing the Christian story that I grew up with. This is what was happening in low church, evangelical protestantism in the 80s when I was a kid & young teenager. And I talk to many who grew up in even more extreme situations.
I think it is appropriate that he leaves Jesus out of the discussion… Jesus, as I was taught, was a means to an end. ‘Atonement,’ ‘justification,’ ‘salvation’ from damnation, these where the goal. And Jesus death (his life and resurrection where very rarely mentioned, and if they were the teacher didn’t know what to do with them) was a means to that end… Christ was objectified.
Does Brian over generalize?
Perhaps.
What I heard was hardly ever as blatant as what Brian describes… but what he says, in general rings true.
Is this ‘conventional’ Christian teaching?
Not ‘conventional’ in the way you are describing… but most of us did not hear the great theology out there, or the church fathers, etc. What was (and maybe still is) happening in low church evangelical ‘left behind’ Christendom in North America often came down to a formula… a ‘get out of hell free card.’
Maybe Brian should have said, ‘major strains of North American Evangelicalism over the last 30 or 40 years,’ instead of ‘Western Christianity.’
I think you’re trying to nuance him though Scot, when it sounds like his goals in writing are much more populist.
AND, I have to say… I had one or two teachers growing up that taught about God’s grace, love and mercy. For which I thank God! But these were definitely the exception, and often left me more confused.

I forgot to mention how this was taught to me while growing up in Catholic society (including Catholic school).
There I was taught that man committed original sin against God and that is taken away in Baptism. Until Jesus came and died for us, heaven was closed off to all dead people. But Jesus coming and dying again opened the possibility of heaven for us. We commit venial and mortal sins in our life and will pay for those in pergatory (if we are lucky) or in hell (if unlucky) which is followed either by eternal heaven or hell.
Sounds much like the six liner to me.
Dave

I realize that this comment has to do with the larger question concerning the Bible’s “soul-sort narrative,” rather then Brian’s or Scot’s particular take on it. But what do we do with the fact that almost all of biblical history (i.e. the OT), except at the very end (i.e. the NT) has almost nothing to say about life after death, much less about soul-sorting? C.S. Lewis contrasts the Jewish religion, for example, with the Egyptian religion. “In reading about ancient Egypt one gets the impression of a culture in which the main business of life was the attempt to secure the well-being of the dead. It looks as if God did not want the chosen people to follow that example. We may ask why.” Yes why, indeed. Until we can answer that question, I’m not sure we can begin to grapple with what Jesus meant when he referenced the afterlife. Lewis goes on to suggest, “For the truth seems to me to be that happiness or misery beyond death, simply in themselves, are not even religious subjects at all. A man [sic] who believes in them will of course be prudent to seek the one and avoid the other. But that seems to have no more to do with religion and looking after one’s health or saving money for one’s old age…. God is not in the center. He is still important only for the sake of something else” (Reflections on the Psalms, 39-40). I’m not saying that I agree with Lewis, but I find his thoughts provocative and, at least for me, cast an interesting light on the current discussion.

From Scot’s original post, “He proposes we learn to read the Bible from the front forward and not from our time backward, which is a contention without distinction: all theologians, all biblical scholars, and all biblical theologians have always done just that — taken us from Adam to the Consummation.”
When I originally saw this, I meant to comment on it. My reading of N.T. Wright over the last twelve years has really helped me see how or expectation of what we already “know that we know” in the Pauline Epistles pre-shapes how we Reformed folk read the rest of the Bible. Not everyone has always taught against this pre-knowledge way of reading the rest of the Bible.
Also, from the comments posted it appears that one way to characterize Brian’s book is to say that he seems to have a very scrambled eschatalogy.
Peace,
Randy Gabrielse

Scot, reading this (and only this, since I haven’t read the book) I wonder if you aren’t trying to fight 2 battles at the same time: 1. Whether or not this narrative is conventional (I don’t think it is for Western Christianity in general) and 2. Whether or not it is a narrative that has actually been received by some (I would say it has, while in your post you say it hasn’t.
From a bare reading of your post, lacking any experience with McLaren’s book, it still seems like the chick tract sort of Christianity might be a good example of how this narrative has played out. Even though it mentions Jesus, it only mentions him as that way which God “finds” to save humans. It is so reductive of The person of Jesus that it is fair to align this concept of Jesus as salvation mechanism with McLaren’s other abstractions (justification, etc.)
I would agree that this isn’t conventional Western Christianity, but in some American evangelical circles, this reductionist narrative with the name Jesus stamped on it is alive and well…or at the very least, alive, so I don’t think you can say no one has recieved it.

Scot, @ 76
Wouldn’t it be neat to see Brian rewrite the book based on what he has learned or sharpened since its release by reading through thoughtful encouragements and critiques? I think his hope was that these conversations would happen and he seems pleased with their direction.
I wonder though – You keep emphasizing that this must be a caricature, and that may be true, but don’t Brian’s claims that this is “put badly” and that it isn’t stated as crudely clear that up? I think he is admitting that this isn’t the word for word narrative that folks hear/teach but it is the implication – it is what I hear communicated daily by Christians even if not put so crudely. There are words like “Grace” and “Jesus” but never representing what scripture says about those two.

Let me say it again:
This is not about the six point narrative. Yes, I agree and so does everyone that those six points are part of the narrative of Christianity, though there’s a fundamental mistake in omitting Jesus Christ. No narrative omits that.
Brian’s conventional narrative is not “conventional” in the West; it’s a caricature. That point is very important to me; to call it “conventional” is to say that most Christians actually believe that narrative (which they don’t because it’s a caricature).
Now for a challenge:
I keep hearing that folks say “I grew up with that narrative.”
Show us a really good example that lines up, not with the six points, but with how Brian puts those together in the Monster God narrative. (Forget the Plato/Aristotle stuff. Just a solid presentation of the Christian belief that lines up with what Brian says.
If it’s conventional, it ought to be out there.
Again, not that someone believes that deciding for or against Christ makes a difference for eternity. Most Christians have always believed that. We’re talking his narrative and some other sketch of the Christian belief system.

To clarify, Scot, you said:
“One reason I’m doing this series is that I’ve had a few say to me that they actually grew up with Brian’s soul-sort narrative. My contention is that they didn’t; nor can they find one gospel tract or one youth pastor who will ever admit to having believed in or preached Brian’s soul-sort narrative as he describes it.”
I think this is an exaggeration. First, I think that many people grew up with this narrative, and just because Jesus’ name was stamped onto it doesn’t mean that the framework of the narrative is any different, and I think many Chick Tracts are solid examples to counter your claim here. Second, I think that many youth pastors/revivalist pastors who have taught this narrative wouldn’t admit to teaching it, because, when broken down to its bare components, it sounds so completely terrible. But when you stamp it when the name of Jesus you might be able to make sound ok.
Is it conventional? No. A caricature? Yes. But does it exist? I think we have to say that it does.
Thank God that the story, that Jesus, is so much bigger than that.

Scot (#83), I’d have to go back and re-read the chapter to confirm what Brian actually says about this being the conventional narrative. But I agree with Joey (#82) that Brian’s admission that he his putting it baldly and crudely is an admission that he is presenting some kind of caricature. When he says “conventional”, I take it to refer to the 6-line narrative, and not to the crude implications he’s drawn from that narrative. And from the number of thoughtful believers who have already posted their experiences in having been taught (or themselves teaching) this narrative, it’s clear that it is normative in some circles at least.
Myself, I recently ended an 11-year career with the organization that published the 4 Laws because I could no longer live with my own cognitive dissonance over this very issue.

Scot,perhaps I am dense. Here is the “we believe” statement from http://www.beaverdambaptist.com/
Isn’t this emphasizing the just punishment of God? Is that what you are saying? Again, I think i am dense so a specific example may help me.
One God: Infinite, Eternal and Unchangeable, subsisting in a mysterious and Eternal Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 1 John 5:7-8, Matt. 28:19
One Word: The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments of faith and practice. 2 Timothy 3:16-17, 2 Peter 1:16-21
One Condemnation: There being no difference, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, because the carnal mind being born of corruptible seed, is enemy against God. Romans 3:10-26, Romans 6:23, John 3:16, Ezekiel 16:4
One Savior: The Lord Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh; His essential deity, virgin birth, sinless life, vicarious death, physical Heaven from whence He shall return personally and premillennially to set up an earthly kingdom. John 1:1-14, John 14:9, Isaiah 7:14, Acts 3:12-26, Hebrews 9:24, 1 Cor. 15:12-15, 1 Thess. 4:13-18, Acts 1:11, Rev. 19:11-16, Rev. 19:19-20, 20:1-6, Titus 2:11-14.
One Atonement for Sin: Made by Jesus Christ in a substitutionary and sacrificial death on the cross, sufficient for all, available to all, and that all must be born again or be forever lost. Mark 10:45, John 3:3, 36, Romans 5:1-10, 1 Cor. 5:18-21, Hebrews 2:9.
One Spirit: God, the Holy Ghost whose work is to reprove the world, of sin, of righteousness and of judgment, and through whose sovereign agency in sanctification the soul is changed more and more into the Divine Image from glory to glory. John 16:7-15, 2 Cor. 3:18.
One Life: The Life is with Christ in God – The Life Eternal; begun when a sinner believes and receives Him and continuing thereafter by the effectual and sovereign grace of God. Phil. 1:6, Eph. 1:13, John 1:12, Romans 10:9-10, John 10:26-29.
One Church: Which is Christ’s Body, all the members of which God hath from the beginning chosen in Christ to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth. Eph. 1:4, Eph. 1:14, 22-23, 6:25-32.
Two Destinies: Heaven, a place of eternal life and bliss, and Hell, a place of everlasting punishment eternally separated from God. 2 Cor. 3:10, Rev. 20:1-15, Rev. 21:1-29, Hebrews 9:27-18, Matt. 25:46, Luke 16:19-31.
One Satan: Both Temper and Accuser who exists in personality and reality. Rev. 12:9-10, Matt. 4:2-11, John 8:44, Eph. 6:11-12.
One Commission: The Great Evangelistic Commission given by Jesus Christ to the Disciples and the continuing Church. Matt. 28:16-20, Acts 1:8.
The Blessed Hope: The personal premillennial return of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. John 14:3, 1 Thess. 4:13-18.
Two Ordinances: Baptism, the immersion in water of a believer in Christ which symbolizes His identity with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, and the Lord’s Supper, the eating of the unleavened bread and drinking of the fruit of the vine, commemorating the broken body and shed blood of Jesus Christ for the remission of sin. Acts 2:11, Acts 8:36-38, Romans 6:3-4, Luke 22:14-20, 1 Cor. 11:23-26, Acts 8:12-13.

I have spent several minutes reading first, the post by Scot and then the multitude of comments. It’s been invigorating, enlightening and I’d have to say a bit overwhelming keeping up with the pace of the comments. I need to read McLaren’s book before commenting on his ideas.
Regarding the idea of “soul sorting”. (I’ve never thought in that specific phrasing but am at how I instantly knew the definition of the term.) In my local cemeteries it seems that a lot of people are dying these days. That leads me to ask, “what now?” This leads me to ponder over the idea that the “what now” is dependent on how these people responded to the Call of God. It seems pretty clear from a variety of biblical texts that scripture indicates that not all dead people have the same destiny with God. In other words, something gets sorted out. If we describe the “what now” in soul terms, (I seldom use the term but I know it is a popularly used term) then….God’s work might very well be to sort some things out.
Most of my up-bringing was in churches where heaven/hell….lost/saved was a big part of the concern. Even though I can readily see the deficiencies of that being an exclusive rationale for Christian living, I can’t see myself walking through a cemetery without thinking that God’s “sorting-out” is somehow still a relevant idea to kick around.

Christ is risen!
Scot.
I agree that Brian stretches things to make a point. His writing and thought have limitations. Like T, I think sometimes he goes too far- and his point is valid and it needs to be discussed.
You know that I’ve been involved with the whole spectrum of Western Christianity at one point or another. Growing up RC, I heard all the “historical stuff”. And in spite of that, I still believed that the Christian god resembled “Theos”. The great gift Protestantism gave me was assurance that grace was available and free, and God didn’t really want to punish me. But there was still the teaching that he had to punish people, because his own perfection and law demanded it. And never as a Protestant did I hear anything that could better answer my question, “…but *why* did God create anything at all, and humans in particular?” than what I had learned memorizing the RC catechism at age 7: “God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and be happy with him forever in Heaven.” That took me a long way, but eventually it was just not big enough. And there you have the “reputable” teaching of a “historic church” ending up precisely with the point of “going to Heaven”.
I heard a lot about the grace and love of God as a Protestant, even among “low church” folk. There is constant talk about Jesus as *A* pivotal point in the story (though the story pretty much discounts what the Jews made of their own story, and what the socio-cultural conditions were in 2TJ), about following him, about discipleship, about making him the center of one’s life. ***And to what end?*** That ultimately we avoid “the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell” (RC Act of Contrition). If you draw it all out, the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ is merely (yes, the most important but still just only one of) ***the means to this end***. The fulcrum of history is not the events of AD 33; it is the judgment/sorting to come. This un-nuanced, non-historically-informed thing is in fact what the “average Joe” in this country hears and believes. And that is what most of the commenters here have been saying. (I also believe this line of thought is symptomatic of the lack of a robust Trinitarian theology in American Protestantism.)
You may have read Fr Kalomiros’ “River of Fire”. He’s even harder on “Western Christianity” than Brian is, and he comes to the same conclusion: this god is a monster.
It seems Brian is not familiar with the writings of the Eastern Fathers. If he were, he would see that their thought stands very strongly against Platonism and “Greek philosophy”. Just because they studied a Greek scholarly curriculum doesn’t mean they agreed with the teachings of the ancient Greeks. They took some of the same vocabulary and made it serve Christian thought- *just like St Paul did*. It’s true that narrative of Israel doesn’t really show up in the N/C Creed, but the Creed is a distillation. If one begins to “unpack” it one will very shortly come to grips with that narrative, and it and its meaning for Christians is discussed throughout the writings of the fathers.
Finally, I love the bible. I read it often. I believe it is a revelatory gift from God to human beings and it needs to be treasured. The bible needs to be promulgated, especially the Gospels and the Jesus Creed.
AND
JESUS CHRIST is the full and final revelation of the one true and living Trinitarian God. Not the bible.
I think Brian is pushing back really, really hard against the tendency we have, because of our place in history and the most recent influences on our collective thought life, to worship the bible instead of God. Let’s talk about Brian’s ideas without judging his “orthodoxy”, which judgment I think is a further symptom of the tendency to place one’s hope in writings, and in “creeds” of another sort. I haven’t yet encountered a truly heretical statement from his mouth or pen. I don’t think Brian’s ultimately going to find what he’s looking for in the direction he seems to be going, but right now it’s makes better sense for him than what he was part of for most of his life, and is probably the only alternative he can see, and I understand that.
Dana

Scot,
Thanks for repeating your point that the 6 line narrative is the biblical narrative. You’re not quibbling with that. So, of course, many if not most of us “grew up with it” in whatever skewed form it may have taken–EE, 4SL, Chick Tracts, etc. The point is that McLaren says that 6 line narrative is *not* biblical, but is a Platonic “monster god” overlay on the biblical narrative. This is McLaren creating a theory out of thin air. I think a drive for a non-Christocentric universalism is at work in all this “new Christianity.” The last thing we can have Jesus being in this “new think” is a dividing line…a soul-sorter.

ANKOC did not, in my view, describe mainline Christianity, which is muddling along fairly well as the pilgrim church it is. So, the very title of the book amounts to hyperbole. Extrapolating from that rhetorical strategy to the 6 line narrative, one might suspect hyperbole, again, oversimplification. No author, in that amount of space, likely ambitions a robustly explanatory account. All one can reasonably hope to accomplish is to offer a rather vague heuristic device, a skeletal outline of conceptual placeholders, to get a good conversation going. So, even where fundamentalism is concerned (the book’s real over-against), it will only be able to map that trajectory very roughly. And it did map fairly well.
Certainly the Gospel narrative was implicitly read into his philosophical account or should have been by any who properly received McLaren’s critique within – not apart from – the overall context provided both in the remainder of the book as well as his entire body of work, taken as a whole. There is an efficacy in McLaren’s abstracting the philosophical presuppositions from the Gospel narrative as he did. Such an abstraction reveals in starker relief how theological concepts, categories and even conclusions can be impacted, for better or worse, by one’s philosophical approach.
There can be no doubt that an impoverished epistemology and sterile metaphysics, or even bad science, can lead to some very poor theology. How we integrate the autonomous methods of science and philosophy with religion will affect our theology, pneumatology, Christology, anthropology, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology. That’s one of the practical take-aways of McLaren’s message. He may not have precisely determined exactly HOW so much of Christianity is outright failing in this integration (whether via Greek, Roman, Continental or Eastern influences or even Rorty’s vulgar pragmatism) but McLaren’s diagnosis THAT it is failing in many sectors is no caricature. And I find McLaren’s prescriptions right-on!

I feel like there’s a big distinction between saying “conventional” and “out there.” I think McLaren’s wrong in saying it’s conventional. But I think it’s out there.
I think the chick tracts demonstrate that.
And I think (and honestly, this is only from the information you’re providing because I haven’t read it) that to argue about not mentioning Jesus misses the point. Not because Jesus isn’t the absolute central part of the story, I obviously think it is. But it seems like the way McLaren makes the argument is to explain the framework of the narrative and to assume that the reader sees how the Judeo-Christian story is laid over that framework. I feel like it can be assumed that Jesus’ death on the cross is the way Theos “finds” to save the creation (although I obviously also have a problem with the word “finds”)
And I think there are examples of the Monster God (as far as I understand what you’re saying he means by that). Extreme examples are Soul Winners and Westboro.
And I think there are less extreme examples that, when taken to their logical conclusions, would end up like those extreme examples.
But are those examples representative of Christianity on the whole? No.

DRT, thanks for that very typical evangelical framing of the soteriological scheme of belief. Now compare that to what Brian says (not the six points; the six points are not “conventional”; the Greco-Roman stuff is called “conventional” too.) and you will see that there’s a world of difference. [And I have a number of issues with that doctrinal statement, but that's not my concern here.]
So, let me say this again to all: I have an overriding concern with how the gospel is understood in Western evangelicalism, and I share a number of criticisms of it with Brian, but we see neither the conventional narrative nor the solution in the same way. I’m writing a book called In the Beginning was the Gospel and hope to be done with it by July, but one never knows. This is an important topic; sorting out the Church’s framings of gospel and the “plan of salvation” and the biblical narrative (not all the same things) takes time so one can ponder what is being said and describe it accurately and sympathetically.

Scot,
I will read the book, and I’ll certainly keep your critiques in mind as I do so.
But doesn’t being fair also mean not flatly contradicting other people’s experiences? Saying “One reason I’m doing this series is that I’ve had a few say to me that they actually grew up with Brian’s soul-sort narrative. My contention is that they didn’t…” is going to get you a fight. They may not be able to dig up a youth pastor on the spot who will say “yes, I taught this”, but when people say they grew up with something, they mean they believed it. They don’t have to quote anybody else.
I’ll reserve judgment about the accuracy of the soul-sort narrative until I actually read the book, but I hope you won’t dismiss me out of hand if I find it fits my own experiences.

So glad you are doing this series. I appreciate the very robust discussion regarding McLaren’s book.
I read your post as well as your review of McLaren. While I have not read his most recent book, I did hear him speak recently.
While I am sympathetic with some of his concerns here, arguing from a caricature does not help his cause. In fact, I think it becomes a significant distraction.

To follow up on Kyle’s point (#91): the Monster God exists in the Chick Tracts. He also seems to exist in Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. To that God, according to Edwards, “you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.” Yes, Edwards’ God invites us to be born again, but underlying that invitation is double predestination. So, it seems from the “Sinners” sermon that God creates people knowing they will sin, in His sovereign decree predestines them to Hell before they are born, “abhors” and “hates” them for their sin, and is glorified by their eternal punishment. Isn’t this a monstrous view of God?
We should recall here just how important Edwards was to the early development of American Evangelicalism. It is of course unfair to reduce Edwards’ theology to that which I stated above, but what I stated above is the narrative that gets taken up in the Great Awakenings, both by the Calvinist preachers and by the Arminian / Wesleyan preachers who reacted strongly against double predestination by emphasizing the point of human decision. And after the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, that gets boiled down further into Chick Tract theology.
The question is, faced with this kind of reductionism, where do you go? It can be tempting to look for another god, such as the process theologian’s god. That’s my biggest fear about the direction of Brian’s book. Or we can re-inflate the tradition that has become so reduced.

Thought I would add this. I think Wittmer’s critique seems like a good one:
http://mikewittmer.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/brian-mclaren-a-new-kind-of-christianity-question-1/

Scott: thanks for the response (#76)
You wrote:
“There’s a lingering comment you made, and I confess to finding it interesting. Brian’s not said this, so I suspect it was not intended but it might be something he can now use: the absence of Jesus Christ, and the absence of grace, the absence of God’s love, even in the self-substitution of himself in the Son for sinners, … the absence of this might be taken as a literary approach by Brian to show that the conventional narrative has no Jesus. But Brian doesn’t say this in the book…”
I’m glad that was interesting to you. I thought that was what Brian meant when he described the emaciated role of what passed for “salvation” inside the “Greco-Romanized” version of the Gospel.
Here are the sections that I read saying that:
In specific when he wrote:
“In the Greco Roman telling of this story, Salvation (which in this version of the story is virtually identical to atonement, justification or redemption) when Theos finds a way to forgive fallen creation from being Perfect Holy Being….”
I took that to mean, that Jesus was watered down into just being Salvation, which was in turn watered down to just being justification…or as I put it before: being reduced to just being the dot that is the vector point between a line going up to a Perfect Heaven.
And in the Chapter on Jesus in the book Chapter 12, doesn’t Brian specifically talk about the two different views of Jesus also relating to the Greek-Roman narrative?
Inside the one view Jesus is viewed as a Ceaser, conquering and sorting out his friends from his enemies?
Brian specifically views the Jesus in the Greco-Roman Narrative as “trimmed down to fit” that narrative and He can “only be crucified by it’s violent right angles” (i.e. only his death matters on that one vector point on the 6 lines)…
And Brian wrote by contrast to that view: “Jesus matters because he offers a living alternative to the Greco-Roman narratives that our religions too often live and move and have their being.”
Those sections in the book are where I thought he was saying much that you just saw in my comments:
“… the absence of this might be taken as a literary approach by Brian to show that the conventional narrative has no Jesus. But Brian doesn’t say this in the book…”
I may be wrong but those were the sections where I read Brian as saying much of that same thing. Or at least that the conventional view had a “trimmed down to fit” Jesus or a Ceaser-like Jesus, rather than the real one.

Travis #93, thanks for that reminder because my language is bold. I have a theory for that, and I’ll show you what I think next Monday morning.
doperbeck, good one. Because of what I’ve read of Edwards’ God and theology, I can’t say his God is a monster god though at times he’s way over the line for me. (I know, to be honest, that his theology was soaked in a context that was much less offended by that stuff than we are today. Still… but not the place for an Edwards discussion.)
I’ll put it this way: the Monster God for me is Brian’s Theos, and the God of the Chick Tracts is not that kind of Monster God.

An unsubstantive question here: Scot, what is the “bird book?” Never have heard of that, but I’m guessing there’s no connection to “The Blue Parakeet!”

Tim C,
Thanks for this. It helps me see some things. I was really asking if Brian explicitly reflects on the absence of Jesus in his G-R narrative as a literary device. He doesn’t. But, yes, I see what you are saying, and he poses Jesus over agains the G-R narrative. This is hard for me to respond to: since I don’t think the G-R narrative is conventional, the Jesus he poses may still fit (and does for me) in the conventional narrative.

Christine – The ‘bird book’ was a companion tract to the Four Spiritual Laws that focused on the work of the Holy Spirit. It was blue with a white dove on the front and referred to as the ‘bird book’. I don’t know if it is still around or not.

Scot,
I’m looking forward to your book. Someone needs to state these issues in a different way. As I’ve said, I think Brian moves the conversations that need to happen backward in many respects.
That said, let me push back a little on this: “Now my point: no conventional narrative absences Jesus. The conventional narrative makes Jesus the Savior and the Lord.” Can we absence parts of Jesus–expressly and as a feature of our theology–and still not “absence Jesus.” Would a theology that says that all his teachings/commands were only for Israel (not the Church) absence him? How about one that called his teachings “law” (as opposed to part of the gospel or grace) and went on to say we were disciples of the gospel (read as the news of consolation alone)? If we say that only his blood saves, but not following his words, is Jesus still “present”? Is he still preached as “Lord” in the way he himself meant it?
Lastly, to give appropriate breadth to this critique of Jesus’ partial absence from “conventional” Western Christianity, look at Gandhi’s observations. He clearly saw a religion in which Christ’s blood had been neatly (if oddly) separated from his teachings, with only the former capable of “saving.” Thankfully, Gandhi also saw the power in the other parts of Jesus. Can we really say that the many conventional theologies that dislocate our trust from the Leader, a person, to the Man’s blood really don’t “absence” Jesus in a very serious and historically obvious way?
A few posts ago we discussed the disconcerting and growing tendency to de-personalize the Holy Spirit. I fear that we’ve done the same to Jesus in that we trust and announce his blood, for it’s purity and holiness. The rest of him is not logically connected to conventional understandings of the “salvation” God brings through him. We trust “the blood;” the rest of the Man is optional or even explicitly disconnected/absenced from “salvation” and from the conventional gospel.

In some ways I can’t comment on the passage at hand – I’m a Uni student studying languages (Russian and German) in Scotland (St Andrews), so getting hold of ‘A New Kind of Christianity’ at an affordable price is a bit tricky.
Related to your comment regarding removing Jesus from the picture, Scot, one thing I do keep wondering about evangelicalism as a whole is if we can sometimes be guilty of also removing Jesus from the picture.
Not in the sense of not mentioning Jesus or the cross or grace (which is right and good) but in having a Christology that is moulded around sin and the sin problem, as opposed to a Christology that is focussed on the Jesus story. For me it seems that, at least in many popular expositions of the gospel, Jesus just comes from no-where and does the atonement thing (and/or preaching of Kingdom thing depending on your theology) and then does the ascension and that’s it. It’s almost a bit like we’ve created a superhero Jesus – coming from no-where and doing some crazy stuff – as opposed to the Jesus that is expressed in evangelicalism at its best as the saviour deeply embedded in the Jewish story and Jewish imagery. On that level, then, I think part of the problem with a common exposition of the gospel is that it misses out on the Israel story and that can lead to us ignoring Jesus to a lesser or greater extent. This isn’t an inherent problem with evangelical theology, but maybe an encouragement to sharpen up our ideas slightly.
But that’s just my perspective as a very non expert

David,
This has been said in one way or another a few times in this thread. And sometimes folks blame the Creeds for this, but for one who is a specialist in the Synoptic Gospels, I feel this every time I read Romans. The Jesus of the Gospels becomes the Jesus Christ, Lord in Paul’s theology where the focus is on the death and resurrection of Jesus, as well as on his ascension into Lordship over all.
What I’m saying is that Paul’s narrative is not identical to Jesus’ and Paul’s narrative in many ways has been picked up by much of the Church, especially in the West when it comes to its soteriological narrative. Bukt this isn’t a G-R narrative origins thing; it’s already present in Paul and Peter.

Thanks for your input – it is helpful in shaping my thoughts.

@ Scot 104
Could you clarify that last statement.
I would agree that the West has been heavily influenced in its understanding of the gospel narrative by Paul.
However, while recognizing that Paul uses different terminology than the gospel narratives, wouldn’t Wright and Holland contend that it is still the same narrative and that Paul would’ve understood himself as telling the same narrative?

Sue #72
In reading your post I’m pretty sure that I hear Karl Barth sit up in his grave and say “Nein!” Perhaps I misunderstand you but you seem to suggest that natural theology can get us to the truth of God. Is not God the unknown and Jesus Christ the known?

Scot and all,
This is one of the most vigorous comments’ thread I’ve read at Jesus Creed in a long time and I learn from all of you. Thanks. And thanks, Scot, for offering a place and trigger for such an intriguing virtual conversation.

Hi, everyone. I just typed a long and brilliant reply … but then I lost it when I tried to post it. Maybe that’s for the best.
Let me just thank everyone for taking the time to engage so vigorously with one of the ideas from the book. I wish I could have anticipated and avoided some of the misunderstandings that I sense in many responses – i.e. saying I say things that I don’t say, making assumptions that aren’t accurate, etc. No doubt, the book has many flaws – inevitable considering its author! – but I also think there are some real issues there that deserve attention. I hope you will be able to graciously ignore the chaff to find whatever few grains of wheat there might be.

Brian, I’m sorry for that. We are all annoyed with the BeliefNet setup with Movable Type and the captcha text; it expires after a few minutes and it says hit refresh but more often than the comment is lost.
I have a habit of copying every comment before I hit “Post” or any other button.
Beliefnet just got a note from me on your behalf.

I apologize if this has already been said but I don’t have the resolve to read through every comment…I thought the point of Brian’s narrative is “more or less” what is taught. The way I read the first couple of chapters (granted I have not read the whole book) I see Brian talking about perception. What the Bible has been reduced to in many circles is this Greco-Roman/soul-sort narrative.

Sort of missing the idea here but wasn’t the original question about whether the context in which Brian placed the standard soul sort narrative an accurate reflection of NA protestantism? As I understood Scot’s question, it was not whether soul sort language was or was not, or should or should not be, a standard feature of NA protestantism, it is no matter how finely you wish to parse the Message, but whether it should be understood within the larger context of the Greco-Roman pantheon of gods – is it accurate to suggest that God the Father, Yahweh, be likened to, if not in reality be understood as nothing more than a renaming of Zeus/Odin? So Scot’s point about the absence of Jesus is spot on, just as there was no Jesus-like figure in that pantheon, presumably Brian has no need in his reconstruction from the ruins of what was the Christian faith for Jesus.
By this incessant and irresolvable back and forth and effort at parsing, isn’t Brian’s underlying point being made? This whole Christian faith thing has been co-opted, clearly today as I understand his argument, but possibly all the way back to the early church? If the Gospel message is so skewered that it makes no sense, then Brian can be seen as an effort to reclaim the Message – while I disagree with that premise, nevertheless you can read his argument as let’s chuck all but the absolute barest bones and build it back up from there.

Alan K @ 107,
I am not saying at all that natural theology can get us to the entire truth of God. What I am saying is that creation reveals *something* about the truth of its creator, and not nothing.
I am also saying that God revealed himself to Abraham, to Moses, to Elijah, to Isaiah, and that God reveals *something* of himself, and not nothing, through the entire arc of the Old Testament. And I am saying that God showed grace to the people of Israel before Jesus? birth, and that God shows great grace everyday to people who do not know the name of Jesus.
Jeremy @ 49 seems to be saying that he finds it offensive that anyone could believe that God can be revealed in any fashion outside of the person of Jesus Christ, or that God can show any grace outside of the person of Jesus Christ.
I wholeheartedly believe that Jesus ?is the image of the invisible God.? Now, I suppose that you could define the ?Story of Christ? to include the Old Testament since the pre-incarnate Christ of course is involved, and to include creation, since ?without him nothing was made that has been made,? but I don?t know that Jeremy is saying that. He doesn?t seem to be.
I haven?t studied much about Karl Barth. Did he believe that God revealed himself in the Old Testament? I can?t imagine that any orthodox theologian would say otherwise.
Much of this thread with over 100 comments has to do with the word ?conventional? and what the definition of conventional Christianity ought to be. Definitions are important.
I?d like to know how Jeremy would define the words ?Story of Christ,? and ?grace? and ?salvation? and ?exclusive faith in Christ.? I would like to know how Brian McLaren defines those terms, and how Scot McKnight would define those terms, and how you would define those terms.
If we don?t agree on our definitions, we are just talking past each other.

It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who has had this problem with posting. I’ll just offer a quick reconstruction of one of the points I tried to make earlier.
It’s very discouraging to hear people speak for me with complete confidence and then get it wrong. There have been quite a few examples of this today, but just to offer one: “I believe God primarily authored these books through the full participation of human authors under the guidance of their Jewish Spiritual Traditions, Culture, and specific contexts.
Brian does not believe this. God is not revealing Himself through this textual incarnation. Its all people. For Brian it’s about the “community of the faith” simply conversing and writing about those conversations. His view is the extreme antithesis of the other extreme form of dictation theory: there is no divine.”
As someone with a bit more access to what Brian believes, let me say that this commenter misrepresents me. Nowhere in Chapters 8 and 9 (or anywhere else) do I say the Bible is just the community of faith conversing – all human and no divine. I say God self-reveals through human conversations about God and life. (Check out pages 91, 94, 95 for example.) It’s not divine OR human, it’s divine through human. I’d rather not use the term “incarnation” for the Bible, though – I’d rather reserve that for Jesus. I believe, as Martin Luther said, that the Bible is the manger that presents the Word of God to us. As I explain in chapters 10 – 14, I believe Jesus is the ultimate, complete, unique, and unparalleled self-revelation of God.
On Scot’s original question, several commenters picked up my point. I feel that the soul-sort narrative as I described it (those four words should be in bold!) doesn’t honor Jesus enough. To paraphrase (and tone down) a spicy comment from Dallas Willard, it wants Jesus for his blood and little else. To me, every dimension of Jesus’ life is unspeakably precious … every word, every gesture, every interaction, every miracle, every tear, the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, everything … because through Jesus, God speaks. God self-reveals. In word and deed. In life and death and resurrection. Folks may disagree with me on this, but this is what I believe. There is plenty of room for real disagreement … but I hope we can try to avoid misrepresentation.
Scot – if you want to use the six lines in the narrative I described but give them more and better and richer meaning, I’ll cheer you on. It’s the narrative as I described it (wish I could bold those four words) that I’m critiquing. I know you don’t think that narrative is very widespread. But I hear from people constantly who say this is what they were taught – not just Evangelicals either. Many Catholics tell me this is what they picked up as well. Some details were different – “observe the sacraments” instead of “say the sinner’s prayer,” for example.
Also, just to clarify … I’m not against using the word “the fall” (as I say in the book). I’m not against talking about the garden of Eden (although I think the image of a state of platonic perfection is very hard to square with either science of Genesis 1). I’m not against talking about this world as a sin-scarred and in that way fallen world. My problem is a version of the story that reduces Jesus to the solution to a problem, that flattens Scripture, and that has a number of unintended social and political consequences that I consider quite dangerous.
Maybe sometime you could host a dialogue about what those unintended consequences have been in the past and what they could be in the future, and how they could be avoided by people like you who hold a better version of the six-line narrative – or like me who are seeking another way of articulating the narrative. As I said in the book, I don’t expect many people to change narratives. So I’m happy when groups like this one can at least try to improve upon the standard narrative.

Hey Brian — thanks for dropping in! Can I ask you something specific? As some of my comments above, I agree with much of your critique (I’m the guy who linked to the “Chick Tract Narrative”, which is what I inherited). But what I’m unclear about in reading your book is the extent to which (if at all) you’re borrowing from process theology. I hear echoes of Moltmann in what you’re saying (and I like Moltmann to a certain degree) but I also seem to hear echoes of Whitehead.
This is my main concern at this point: is God still the Triune God who is “other” than creation? This isn’t a rhetorical challenge. I genuinely was left a little unsure from the book. If so, and if the world is still sin-scarred, and if Jesus is still uniquely as the second person of the Trinity the savior from the scars of sin — then I’d ask how the narrative you want to offer is so different from that of the broad historic Christian Tradition (as you so paint the outlines of that tradition, say, in A Generous Orthodoxy)?
I guess what I’m asking is, why a “new” narrative? Why not a fleshing out, a recovery, an exploring in its fullness, of the true and age-old narrative of redemption, which the Church so often unfortunately reduced to mere “soul-sorting?”

Scot,
I couldn’t stay away from the comments. I’ve visited and re-visited throughout the day. It has been a rich and robust discussion. After my first comment, I ordered up a copy of Brian’s book. I look forward to reading first hand as I have his other books. Also just completed Jesus Creed. I read Blue Parakeet after hearing you at Lipscomb last Fall. For guys like me in the trenches of ministry, people like you, Brian and others keep our brains from becoming vises.
P.S. My previous comment had a typo or two. Thanks for understanding.

Last Friday, Christians all over the world recognized and remembered the death of Christ on the cross. What is it they were recognizing and remembering? What is supposed to have taken place in this event that seems so important to Christians?
As for me, it seems to be too much blood, wrath, judgment, agony, guilt, mocking, scorn, violence and abuse. It’s over the top. And the fact that Christians find this worth rehearsing over and over is at best unhealthy. The gospels seem to tell a pretty good story until they get to this part. Then they turn ugly.
I know that in most of the churches in the world they act out this event every Sunday in taking bread and wine as if they were [or somehow represented] the actual body and blood of Christ. Why this obsessiveness with blood ritual? It’s just plain weird, even repulsive.

If at first it looks like your comment has disappeared after you click “Refrest Text,” you can usually recover it by clicking in the box where your name is. For some odd reason your comment then returns to the text box, and it isn’t lost. It has worked for my every time.
And its good to see Brian commenting here.

EricG,
I have tried many things to get back “lost” comments – but that wasn’t among them … this is the weirdest system. There must be some underlying logic somewhere (or not). But I will still try to remember to copy every time before submitting or refreshing.

@dopderbeck #115 asked: “But what I’m unclear about in reading your book is the extent to which (if at all) you’re borrowing from process theology. I hear echoes of Moltmann in what you’re saying (and I like Moltmann to a certain degree) but I also seem to hear echoes of Whitehead. … This is my main concern at this point: is God still the Triune God who is “other” than creation? This isn’t a rhetorical challenge. I genuinely was left a little unsure from the book. If so, and if the world is still sin-scarred, and if Jesus is still uniquely as the second person of the Trinity the savior from the scars of sin — then I’d ask how the narrative you want to offer is so different from that of the broad historic Christian Tradition (as you so paint the outlines of that tradition, say, in A Generous Orthodoxy)?

This discussion has been SO interesting but I am wondering how much of the disagreement concerns the difference between what is taught and what is learned, since they are rarely the same thing.
Scot and many bloggers are arguing that what has been taught historically differs greatly from McLaren’s caricature, while other bloggers are saying, “but this is what I learned/ heard/believed”. The evident difference between the two would be worth exploring properly since so much is at stake.
Good teaching always, always, always involves checking the understanding of the student.

John (#120),
I found your conclusion very enlightening: “Such views remain Christocentric and profusely pneumatological even as they trade in exclusivistic outlooks for a more inclusivistic stance regarding the salvation of nonChristians and even nonbelievers. Such an approach does not conceive God in classical fullness of being terms but, rather, asymmetrically (cf. Robert C. Neville). This is not the rather conventional “creation as broken symmetry” conception.”
This helps me better grasp McLaren’s hostility to what he calls the “soul sort” narrative. Thanks.

Hi, all – I was going to reply to 115, and then I realized that John Sylvest in 120 said exactly what I would have said, but more intelligently and articulately.
John knows that my intellectual and theological outlook was deeply influenced by my engagement with Walker Percy, where I imbibed a lot of Catholic creation-as-sacrament thinking.
So – rather than radically separating God from creation the way that some do, and rather than conflating God with creation as others do, I see God in loving, dynamic, unbreakable relation with creation – both as its faithful creator, and as the one who has entered and embraced creation through incarnation.
Interestingly, I get on a plane in a couple hours to spend the weekend with Fr. Richard Rohr who continues to extend the tradition of St. Francis and Duns Scotus, where this incarnational, sacramental view of creation has been most celebrated.
115 asked another great question. Is my view really so different? Why not just improve the traditional narrative and speak of a refreshed or renewed old kind of Christianity?
I think that the negative response to the book seen among some here and many elsewhere suggests that my view is pretty different, but not simply for the reasons many people jump to.
I think the differences become clearer when you tease out the social, political, and ecological implications of the traditional narrative and the alternative I’m exploring.
I think that when you divide the world in two – the saved us who are God’s beloved people of light versus the damned them who are Satan’s people of darkness – you unleash a pandora’s box of trouble. The saved and the lost are, in this view, ontologically different and will be so for eternity. You can’t get much more different than that!
This kind of social dualism is complicit in, I think, exactly the non-Christ-like violence we’ve seen in “Christian” history, from anti-Semitism in the past to anti-Palestinianism in the present, from the enslavement of Africans to the genocide of Native Peoples in the past to the vilification of gay people and the second-class status of women in many churches today, from the Crusades to the Iraq War (not to make these pairings morally equivalent).
It’s very easy for white and male Christians to minimize this, but if you really listen to our Jewish and Palestinian neighbors, our Native American friends, our neighbors in the third world, our non-heterosexual-male and non-white neighbors, and if you look back over history from their viewpoint, you get a feeling for what this has meant to them. I get the feeling from reading many of the comments here and elsewhere that I’m seeing the response of privileged people who have never tried to see the world from the position of “the other” much before. I believe we “Western Christians” have a profound ethical responsibility in a post-Holocaust and post-colonial world to face the possibility that our narrative has been flawed … in hopes that our next two thousand years will be better than our first.
Some, when they begin to see the impact on our us-versus-them narrative in the past, leave the faith entirely. I understand why they do this – not simply as a “falling away” from faith, but as an ethical decision not to ally themselves with an oppressive and violent narrative. But I remain passionately committed to Jesus and his gospel, and I think this narrative has been unfaithful to Jesus. So I’m seeking to be more faithful to Jesus and his gospel while fulfilling what I (as a white male Christian with all the privileges that come with that status) have come to see as my ethical responsibility.
In my view, what is so absolutely radical and beautiful in Jesus (among many other things), is that he proclaims and embodies not a narrative of “us versus them,” or “us instead of them,” or “us over them,” but rather “us on behalf of them,” or “us sacrificing and even dying for them,” or better yet, “some of us for all of us.” But that’s the topic of a future book.

I know the comment party might be drawing to a close (and just when it was getting interesting), but I do have one question. Scot and others seem to be troubled by the suggestion that the church has gotten it wrong, and badly, starting very early. But many of us are also very influenced by Anabaptist thinking. How can one hold to any sort of Anabaptist thinking about the history of Christianity, or even just a Protestant view of that, and not hold to some level of “the church has screwed up badly and for a long time”?
I don’t think you can, nor do I think that position is at all inconsistent with “but the church is the body of Christ, the people of God, through and in whom he is at work”.

What a spirited and, in many ways, very helpful discussion. I am so glad that Brian popped in and cleared his view up, as he knows what he meant. I believe Brian’s comments would silence a mass amount of people crying heretic, if they just listened a bit more closely, or at least clearly. I understand we all read books and hear messages through the veil of our own experiences and world view, so breaking point can be somewhat understandable. I agree with you Scot, in that the narrative described by Brian is not the “conventional,” although many have said that’s exactly what they learned. The narrative Brian describes was so emphatically and incessantly taught in my childhood, that it diluted almost any mention of Jesus within it. This has led me to enjoy and relate to so much of what Brian has written about. I remember that there were pictures of Jesus on the cross, and one large resurrection painting, albeit a bit Left behind-ish, hanging on the walls of the church I grew up in. But I cannot recall any sermons involving Jesus due to the passionate fire and brimstone rhetoric, which obviously left any hint of Jesus, sadly, distinguished. I would venture to guess that Brian’s description works so well because many others have been left with lots of hell speak, which can easily drown out the person and place of Jesus (which may be satan’s most effective work). Thanks to both Scot and Brian, the work is incredibly helpful for this inner city pastor trying to make sense of poverty, addictions, and finding Christ in the common.

To clearly state it, it’s not that Jesus was left out of what I learned, but I cannot recall it due to the strength and volume in which the hell/damnation rhetoric was preached. Too much fire not enough Jesus the Christ. That is my central guess on why many feel so in sync with Brian’s work. I think we just need to find a healthy balance, learning to respond graciously.

I echo Dopderbeck’s question in #115 and am not sure Brian, that your comments in 123 adequately address it. All along it has seemed to me that the quest for a New Kind of Christianity, the demand for a whole new Narrative, was accurately seeing many problems but was barking up the wrong tree for the answers. It seems patently clear that a refreshing and a restoration is needed, but the tools for that restoration (and abundant examples of their use) already exist within the traditions and sub-narratives that have sprung up in and around the “old” narrative that you caricature, that Scot describes more generously and fairly, and which has by and large been in existence for the first 2,000 years of Christianity.
To suggest that any narrative that includes a “soul-sort” component is inevitably and inherently oppressive and violent and leads to all the terrible things mentioned in 123, you have to be selective and ignore the many examples throughout history of Christians, individually and in groups, for whom some type of “soul-sort” was part of their narrative but who did not participate in those bad things and in fact worked counter to them. It seems like either historical ignorance, or intentional historical proof-texting to make a previously and independently arrived-at point.
I have a hard time with the idea that any New Narrative is the “real” ancient, long-forgotten narrative, closer to Jesus than the narrative that came into being in the wake of his life, death and resurrection. With C.S. Lewis I tend to doubt “the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars. ” But I have no argument with a desire to call the old narrative back to its best self, to seek richer and deeper understandings of its implications for love of God and others, for humility rather than arrogance, for caring for the poor, widows, orphans aliens and strangers, for stewardship of creation. Those all already exist within the old narrative, and strongly so, even if a bunch of American fundamentalists and evangelicals don’t realize it. I’m surprised Brian, that you don’t seem to realize it or if you do, that you don’t seem to acknowledge it much as you press for a wholly New Narrative that will do what the old narrative at its best already does – and better, IMO.

John (#120) and Brian (#123) — I think the question of whether sin was an “ontological rupture” is one of the key questions on which I’m regrettably going to have to differ here. It certainly is not necessary to elide the ontological consequences of sin in order to incorporate the findings of mainstream science. Yes, there was no “literal” paradaisical state — young earth creationism and so on is a failure. But ontology is much, much more than merely the material. The narrative of Haught and of other process / panentheistic theologies seems to me thoroughly compromised by modernity’s cramped ontology.
Brian, I very much resonate with your ethical concern that “when you divide the world in two – the saved us who are God’s beloved people of light versus the damned them who are Satan’s people of darkness – you unleash a pandora’s box of trouble.” However, I think the best “answer” to that problem isn’t to elide the clear deliverances of scripture, the tradition, and even of reason and experience, that some people simply are not participating in the Kingdom of Light.
The better approach, IMHO, one which many orthodox Christians through the ages have taken, is to recall again and again that that sort of final judgment belongs to God and God alone. The Gospel parables and stories of the vineyard, the sheep and the goats, the plank in the eye, the Rich Young Ruler — all of these remind us that God is Judge, not us, and that we need to focus primarily on our own issues, not on the issues of others. I agree with you 110% that many Western Christians, not the least my Evangelical forebears, often have been much better and pontificating about the lostness of others than about attending to Kingdom work. But at the end of the day, Jesus is the coming Judge as well, or else it seems to me the Jesus narrative doesn’t hold together.

Karl #128-
I agree. Well said.

Brian (#123),
I resonate with Karl in comment #128. I think you are extremely perceptive in your critique of an oppressive, socially devastating use of the biblical narrative by some in the Western (privileged) world. (As part Cherokee, I do not have a “white eyes” fascination with USAmerican Christianity.) Theology and its packaging can be use to divide, exploit and even eliminate others. But abuse of the biblical narrative by some does not mean the narrative in itself is a Platonic monstrosity promoted as Christianity as you create out of thin air. You are defended as using turbulent rhetoric to create and sustain a conversation. That is fine. But you know and so do a lot of others that your “new kind of Christianity” is not in the least novel. I’d put your thinking in the same box as a Chick Tract. Both are very bizarre expressions of an undeniable beautiful and beneficial to the world Story. I say this as one who has benefited from some of your poignant and provocative contributions to the bigger conversation. But to me, you’ve gone off toward gooney land

Karl (#128) states the matter well.
Brian McLaren writes: “It’s very easy for white and male Christians…”
I don’t think your issues concerning your race and sex support your efforts. Speaking as an Egyptian (naturalized US citizen), I reject your employment of the reality of racial and ethnic distinctions (which God created good and will be welcomed in the new heavens and new earth) as a vehicle for overturning Christianity as it has been taught and believed.
There have been been millions of Asians, Arabs and Africans, among many others, who have been abused, oppressed and killed for their commitment to the narrative you wish to cast aside. Were they fools? Should they simply have capitulated? In the case of converts, should they have stayed with the religion of their family and culture?
How is what you are doing different from what Joseph Smith did a couple of centuries ago? One of the issues with Mormonism is that if Joseph Smith was right, then that means the Father, Son and Holy Spirit abandoned their church and mission from her inception for 1800 years. What you’re saying is that the abandonment has actually been a couple of centures longer.
Or how is it different from what Muhammmed and his followers claimed in the 7th century. Muhammed wanted to call people to the one God and certainly held Jesus in very high esteem. But what he thoroughly rejected was his being a God and Savior who died for the sins of the world.

dopderbeck (#128) wrote: “I think the question of whether sin was an “ontological rupture” is one of the key questions on which I’m regrettably going to have to differ here. It certainly is not necessary to elide the ontological consequences of sin in order to incorporate the findings of mainstream science. Yes, there was no “literal” paradaisical state — young earth creationism and so on is a failure. But ontology is much, much more than merely the material. The narrative of Haught and of other process / panentheistic theologies seems to me thoroughly compromised by modernity’s cramped ontology.”
I’m not sure we differ on your first point. I set forth a theory of incarnation, not a recharacterization of the nature of sin.
We may not differ on your second point either. I resonate with Neville’s critique of process theology. I call my own theology of nature a pan-SEMIO-entheism. I wholly agree with what Brian said so beautifully: “So – rather than radically separating God from creation the way that some do, and rather than conflating God with creation as others do, I see God in loving, dynamic, unbreakable relation with creation – both as its faithful creator, and as the one who has entered and embraced creation through incarnation.” My approach prescinds from any robustly metaphysical description to a much more vague phenomenological perspective. In advancing a view THAT creation and Creator are intimately in relationship, I positively eschew any appeal, whether to substance or process approaches, that ambitions a description of HOW. The SEMIO in my
pansemioentheism designates my attempt to recover and reemphasize the notion that profound religious symbols can grip people and engage them with the Ultimate.
To be clear, when I say prescind from metaphysical description, I personally subscribe to a metaphysical agnosticism even while I defend such a metaphysical realism as would affirm anyone’s right to “do ontology” as long as it proceeds hypothetically and with a contrite fallibilism. My own theological perspective does not see Christianity inextricably intertwined with any particular ontology, for example, vis a vis the nature of the soul, a philosophy of mind, a design inference, super/naturalism, contra-causal free will and so on. For example, in my view, an essential Christianity needn’t resolve in favor of a robustly Cartesian ghost-in-a-machine vs a nonreductive physicalist account of the im/mortal soul. What could be less “cramped” than that?
As for Haught’s narrative, an aesthetic teleology, perhaps you did not grasp (or do not buy) my distinction between natural theology and a theology of nature? Jack, in his own words, eschews any “attempt on the part of finite humans to grasp the infinite and incomprehensible God in rational or scientific terms. These arguments diminish the mystery of God, seeking to bring it under the control of the limited human mind. For religious reasons, therefore, we should be grateful to Darwinians for helping us get rid of the pretentiousness of natural theology.”
A natural theology can be, as you say, “thoroughly compromised by modernity’s cramped ontology.” However, a theology of nature belongs to the genre of poetry, not ontology. A theology of nature is analogical and metaphorical, to be sure, like much of science and metaphysics, but it is mostly lyrical. It’s like St. Francis’ hymns to nature, like the metaphors of the psalmists, like the allegories of the Bible but brought up to date with modern references to nature. One could say that “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” is a cramped ontology but that would be a category error because it’s a hymn not an ontology.
In my view, the problem with radical fundamentalisms, whether the sola scriptura variety of Protestantism, the solum magisterium of my own Catholicism, or even that of a radical Islamism, is essentially epistemological. It may very well be that our people are being taught and evangelized by those who are trained as critical realists (of whatever school) but that so many of the faithful are receiving these teachings as naive realists, who employ a folk-psychological understanding that is incapable of processing what are critical nuances.
Brian mentioned the late Walker Percy, my fellow Louisianian, whom we both loved. Percy’s novels and essays articulate, in an engaging and accessible way, the insights of Charles Sanders Peirce, perhaps the greatest American philosopher, who was also largely inspired by John Duns Scotus. Robert Cummings Neville, whom I mentioned above, has been similarly inspired by Peirce and his semeiotic realism. Neville’s Realism in Religion: a Pragmatist’s Perspective (SUNY Press 2009) well chronicles what he calls “liberal theology as a near miss” and well critiques the neo-liberalisms of the Whiteheadians as “still near misses.” None of this means that he finds Barthianism attractive, either. I employ what I call my Peircean-Nevillean Integral Axiological Epistemology in an exploration of my own pentecostal sensibilities, which could hardly abide with a cramped ontology!
I hope we can continue to vigorously explore these critical naunces without too cursorily or facilely applying our different sort-narratives, whatever their philosophic origins, to decide who’s in and who’s out. I suppose that’s a tall order once considering how Christianity has splintered into SO MANY denominations. It WOULD be a RADICALLY NEW kind of Christianity that would thus cease and desist from such sorting and over-against engagement! I think that’s what Brian really hopes for. I know I do.

Brian you said:
“In my view, what is so absolutely radical and beautiful in Jesus (among many other things), is that he proclaims and embodies not a narrative of “us versus them,” or “us instead of them,” or “us over them,” but rather “us on behalf of them,” or “us sacrificing and even dying for them,” or better yet, “some of us for all of us.” But that’s the topic of a future book.”
my question to you is “where is it in the text?”
it ain’t. While Jesus Christ (I’ll use his messianic designation here though you refuse to) did come opened armed to invite all people to experience the grand majestic reconciliation movement of His kingdom, it is crystal clear that we must come to that kingdom through Him. It is also clear that Jesus Christ himself will separate believers from unbelievers. The lost and saved. Your social dualism charge does not square at all with israels election and all the way through the teachings of Jesus. It is aberant teaching built on a pluralistic platform.?
You have fashioned for yourself an idol born out of your own oppressive Plymouth Brethren childhood/adolescent experience. Out of that you have grossly caricatured Gods Story of Rescue as found in Jesus Chrsit alone and have intact written Jesus entirely out of the story. Hebrews 6 makes it clear that after Jesus there is nothing. I pray that you will return to the real Jesus in whom salvation and forgiveness and rescue and reconciliation to God alone is found. ?All of this is found in no name under heaven besides the Jesus of the Text. All of human history comes to a point in this Jesus, the one through whom all of creation has it’s being and are held together. The one before all the world will eventually bow and confess as Lord yet be separated between believer and unbeliever. ?Gods salvation plan pivots around this Jesus. Not the one you have offerd in your aberant teachings.?
I pray you fall in love with this Jesus agian Brian…
-jeremy?

Brian,
Thanks to your last comment, I think I can see what you’re thinking (and why), esp. here:
“I think that when you divide the world in two – the saved us who are God’s beloved people of light versus the damned them who are Satan’s people of darkness – you unleash a Pandora’s box of trouble. The saved and the lost are, in this view, ontologically different and will be so for eternity. You can’t get much more different than that!”
First and most importantly, let me totally agree with you that Christians have a severely mixed track record in relating to the other. My comments above mention some other points of agreement. Further, the sorting in the Bible, even if some twisting was required, certainly has been the most powerful religious justification/excuse for the historical mistreatment of the other by Christians where it has happened on a large scale. I think I share with you the conviction that our history demonstrates that, ironically, Jesus and even the cross have often been missed in a big way, at least in the following central respect: The cross was never intended to be an isolated incident. It was supposed to be the divinely beautiful and powerful way of life adopted by those who trust Jesus, as Jesus made abundantly clear. The cross-shaped life (loving the other even to the point of giving our money and even blood) was supposed to be central to what it meant to “trust Jesus” and be his disciple. Whether we look at Jesus’ teachings or his example, or Paul’s teachings and his example, God’s plan for good overcoming evil centers on “us” loving “them” (which should be made easier since we’ve all been “them” and continue to be “them” in so many ways.) Every epic story is a story of good vs. evil. The thing that makes Christianity so unique is not that it is an exception in that regard, but rather how good combats and overcomes evil in this story, which, as you mention, is by “us sacrificing and even dying for them,” with “us” originally being God alone and adopting sons and daughters outward from there who follow suit. Crazy! Genius!
But all that said, it’s unfortunate that you felt that there wasn’t enough ammunition (no pun intended) in Jesus’ own teachings regarding dealing with the other (and even the enemy other) to pull us all toward better social and political implications without making the argument that sorting/judgment is a Greek-Roman idea (as opposed to legitimately, if distinctly, also Christ’s), especially when your highest ground is that you want to take seriously all that Jesus says and does as the best revelation of God. You undercut your credibility on that very note by suggesting that Jesus himself doesn’t affirm several times and ways that sorting/judging is part of Jesus’ message and our destiny, even if God’s judgment, according to Christ, is on terms different from what his hearers expected and also different from what we predominantly teach in the West. Your argument/alternative story on that point comes across the same as that of the cessationists, for example, when they try to say that tongues, signs and wonders or the like were real then but aren’t for today, or when others try to use “social gospel” like a dirty word that Jesus would supposedly be horrified to hear. It just doesn’t match what Jesus himself says in the NT, and the obviousness of it all makes claims or implications that “this argument comes from my loyalty to Jesus” hard to swallow and diminishes the rest of what you have to say, which in this case is really, really unfortunate.
In any event, I know that Scot’s initial review included a hope for a book of your thoughts in a positive sense rather than a comparative one. You seemed to imply that such a book is in the works, and I, for one think it would be fantastic to see these ideas flushed out in extravagant detail:
“In my view, what is so absolutely radical and beautiful in Jesus (among many other things), is that he proclaims and embodies not a narrative of ‘us versus them’ or ‘us instead of them,’ or ‘us over them,’ but rather ‘us on behalf of them,’ or ‘us sacrificing and even dying for them,’ or better yet, ‘some of us for all of us.’”

John (#132) — ok — so I said above that I like some aspects of Moltmann’s theology. I also like some aspects of Eastern Orthodox theology (particularly with respect to the “Divine energies”) and kenotic Christology. So, I also understand God to be “in loving . . . relation with creation – both as its faithful creator, and as the one who has entered and embraced creation through incarnation.” However, I don’t think this is in any way a “new” Christianity. It is plumbing the Tradition for aspects of the economic Trinity that were in some respects and at some times marginalized as the Western tradtion developed. Yet even here, these elements clearly are present: St. Francis, for example?
Now, you’ll notice I elided the terms in “dynamic” and “unbreakable” from Brian’s quote. These are terms I’d need to carefully define. Is God’s relationship with creation “dynamic” in that God truly interacts with creation, responds to prayers, and so on — yes, we aren’t Deists. Is it “unbreakable” in that God has made covenants with his creatures, particularly humans, that God will surely keep? Yes.
But is it “dynamic” in that God’s essential nature changes and develops as creation changes and develops? And is it “unbreakable” in that creation and God are “part of” each other?
Well, now we’re getting into territory that very potentially implicates something other than Yahweh, “God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and Earth . . . Jesus Christ His only son, our Lord . . . and the Holy Spirit.” I have to part company with Moltmann on his modalism, and on process though with its immanent-only god.
And I just don’t see any need to go there. All the very legitimate faith-and-science, ethical, and soteriological concerns that have been raised can be considered thoughtfully within an essentially Nicene framework.

Jeremy (133),
Maybe we’re reading different things into that quote from Brian, but how can you say that the narrative of “us sacrificing and even dying for them” isn’t in the narrative that Jesus presents?!
First, it was the Trinity that was the “us” with all humanity as the hostile “other.” Christ on behalf of God sacrifices himself and dies for the “enemy-other.” But it doesn’t stop there. Jesus teaches that this is how we are to live as well. He says that picking up our own cross and following his example is necessary to being his disciple. Paul urges Christians to return good for evil (never the other way around), blessing for curses, etc. We are told further that this is how evil is overcome (not just through Christ’s work, but also Christ’s work through us). If we are called to love the lost the way Christ does, do we get to take the sacrifice part out of his love? If not, how is this narrative not only there in the text, but central to the plan of God? Over and again we are told that it was God who loved us, even died for us, while we were still hostile to him. We are told in several places to do the same, not only for enemies but strangers and neighbors. How is this not only in the text but anything short of a major, major theme, perhaps the major theme?

Brian #123: I get the feeling from reading many of the comments here and elsewhere that I’m seeing the response of privileged people who have never tried to see the world from the position of “the other” much before.
Seeing through the eyes of “the other” is difficult and painful and something many of us in the dominant culture tend to completely fail to do.
But there are those who have have gone there and still have deep concerns. Robert Kelleman (http://www.rpmministries.org/category/brian-mclaren/), a student of the Black Church in America (including during slavery) writes in response to NKoC:
Do we really want to help the oppressed? Do we have deep compassion and empathy for the suffering? Do we have hearts that long to comfort the hurting? Then for goodness sake, don?t practice identity theft on Jesus! Don?t make His eternal existence, life, crucifixion, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, present intercession, and future return simply be about ?Jesus meek and mild? the community organizer!
Rev. Pennington got it right. The enslaved, the hurting, the wounded, and the oppressed first and foremost need a Savior from sin. Then they can find healing hope by celebrating the resurrection of their loving, forgiving, reconciling, redeeming Savior. Biblical counseling deals thoroughly with suffering and with sin through a Christ-centered focused on Jesus the God-man. ?For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are?yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need? (Hebrews 4:15-16).
Elsewhere, about a related subject Kelleman said,
Okay, someone explain to me how in the world it is compassionate when the ?most of these? (the affluent) jettison an other-worldly, future-worldly perspective that for 2,000 years has been the only perspective which has brought sustaining comfort and healing hope to ?the least of these??

The italics didn’t carry but the three final paragraphs in comment 137 are quotes from Kelleman.

dopderbeck (#135) wrote: “However, I don’t think this is in any way a ‘new’ Christianity. It is plumbing the Tradition …”
D’accord! This is consistent w/my own review(s) of the book when it was first published and w/my general thrust in this particular thread.

T (136)
What I am reacting against is Brian’s assertion in the quotation and the book itself that any narrative that separates the saved from the unsaved is a wicked, evil distortion of God’s Story. It is clear that he’s against any narrative which separates and divides and categorizes “us” vs “them.” I am with you, and even Brian to some extent, that Jesus did die and was sacrificed on behalf of “the other.” This is not the issue. The idea that Jesus does not sit at the center of a narrative that has elements of “us and them” is absurd.
The hopes of the people of Israel for this very thing are expressed in the prophets which looked forward to the Day of the Lord at which time the wicked “them” would be separated from the righteous “us” and judged/punished. The parables of Jesus Himself, particularly in Matthew 13 regarding the Wheat and the Weeds, speak exactly to this “us/them” dichotomy and separation at the parousia.
Brian along with others like Samir Selmanovic have adopted a universal Fatherhood of god in which all religions are housed under the protective wing of god. In their case, the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which conveniently removes the polarizing, dividing, separating, and judging Jesus from the picture.
With Jesus there is a line in the sand: you are either with Him or not. Now thankfully all people of every tribe, nation, and tongue can be with Him…or in the words of Paul, “in Him.” But not everyone is nor will everyone be so in the end. Brian cannot bring himself to recognize this is what the bible and Jesus Christ Himself teach. This is evidenced in his ABYSMAL hatchet “exegesis” job of John 14:6, one of the most ridiculous readings and interpretations of the passage I have ever read. So that’s the issue I have with the quotation in particular and book in general, among other things.
-jeremy

Jeremy – I pray you can get out of your own framework about what others believe and listen to what they are actually saying they believe. You have made many polarizing and flat-out untrue statements about what Brian believes. You don’t seem to be able to hear past some preconceived decisions about him.
Yesterday you made a statement “Brian believes…” which was absolutely not true, and he corrected. He asked to not be misrepresented in these extremes, and in your last couple of posts you language has been as polarizing:
“it ain’t. While Jesus Christ (I’ll use his messianic designation here though you refuse to)”
“What I am reacting against is Brian’s assertion in the quotation and the book itself that any narrative that separates the saved from the unsaved is a wicked, evil distortion of God’s Story.”
Brian would not refuse to use the Messianic term for Jesus! And he was very clear in his comments here that he was critiquing the six-line narrative AS HE DESCRIBED IT, not more robust, complete understandings of that narrative.
“I feel that the soul-sort narrative as I described it (those four words should be in bold!) doesn’t honor Jesus enough. To paraphrase (and tone down) a spicy comment from Dallas Willard, it wants Jesus for his blood and little else.”
I could pick out many more. You obviously disagree and are very angry with him, but please stop the incendiary comments that stop conversation and are very unfair.
Shalom,
Pam

Hi Pam…thanks for your words. I probably should be more cautious in my language toward Brian. But from what I have read and the direct quotations from the book itself, I stand behind what wrote. Though my “Brian believes…” statements are certainly definitive black and white, they reflect what he himself has written.
In his book, he in no way affirms the Bible is God’s self-revelation. He does not affirm Jesus Christ is exclusive Lord and Messiah. He uses that Messianic designation?Christ?less than 15 times through his book, which really only reflect the basic arguments themselves that the world is not rescued through Him and Him alone. He does not affirm Jesus Himself is God, but merely reveals His character. It is clear from the book that he is a pluralistic universalist and leaves no room at all for judgment and separation of individuals at the parousia. I could go on and on…
In all honesty?and I need to be careful here because I want to come as close to the shoreline without judging his soul?after reading his book, twice, I wonder why he is even committed to Jesus at all. The faith he describes in his book does not need him. The faith he describes in his book is not orthodox by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it isn’t even Christian. Strong, I know, but that’s the way I see it. In fact, (shameless plug alert!) I have been systematically working through his arguments at my own site. I offer this not to drive traffic but to explain I am not simply runnin my chops, but speaking from a place of deliberate research and analysis.
Anyway, thanks for your reminder to write from a place, as much as possible, outside my own preconceived ideas. In this case, though, your assertion doesn’t fly because my comments flow from his own words, which I’ve quoted in at least 3 other comments on this blog.
-jeremy

Brian. I really like your book.
I also believe that Brian is talking more about the application of different points of emphasis on the community of Christians and their relationship with the world.
If the theology is correct in that a soul sort takes place is true but that leads to the world sinning then it should not be used. Was it not Paul who said something similar in that it is OK to eat meat sacrificed to idols except if by doing that it causes others to sin?
Dave

dopderbeck (#135) asked: “But is it ‘dynamic’ in that God’s essential nature changes and develops as creation changes and develops? And is it ‘unbreakable’ in that creation and God are ‘part of’ each other?”
Semeiotic realists (e.g. Peirce, Percy, Neville) view essentialism and nominalism as the obverse sides of an epistemic dualism that will generally extend, respectively, to either a substance or process metaphysic, neither which cashes out much value for science. They thus launch a critique of process approaches because of their nominalism. Neville argues against another flaw in process theology as an instance of a theological conception of God as a determinate entity and suggests that the ground for determinateness in reality is not being but the act of creation, creatio ex nihilo.
At any rate, there is a parsing required for any who aspire to articulate a panentheism (I don’t because I cannot imagine how) and it speaks directly to the questions you raised. There are indeed some who subscribe to a panen-theism, which sees God as part of all things but more than the sum of all things; others speak of a pan-entheism, which sees God indwelling in all things. Only the latter parsing would be considered orthodox per our Nicene formulations. But it’s precisely because of all of the problematics aforementioned that I prescind to a panSEMIOentheism and reject both essentialistic and nominalistic categories, substance and process approaches.
Of course, again, Brian can speak for himself (but he’s in Albuquerque for a few days), but what I affirm in Jack Haught’s theology of nature is its radically incarnational approach and its robustly analogical imagination. This is a kataphatic affirmation that can balance an overly dialectical imagination and such a radical apophaticism as would suggest that God is not only wholly incomprehensible but cannot even be partly apprehended. I do know that Brian has also shown some interest in the work Amos Yong has done regarding what Amos has called the pneumatological imagination, which may well have profound significance for interreligious dialogue. (Amos is my collaborator-mentor in articulating an integral axiological epistemology.) All of this resonates, too, with Jamie Smith’s views on our participatory imaginations. I’m sure that none of us subscribe to every detail of the others’ perspectives but we can recognize and affirm what we have in common and advance our understanding where we differ!

@ Jeremy 142
“your assertion doesn’t fly because my comments flow from his own words”
Brother, her assertion flies because Brian directly refuted the things you were saying, especially regarding his understanding of Scripture and Jesus:
“As someone with a bit more access to what Brian believes, let me say that this commenter misrepresents me. Nowhere in Chapters 8 and 9 (or anywhere else) do I say the Bible is just the community of faith conversing – all human and no divine. I say God self-reveals through human conversations about God and life. (Check out pages 91, 94, 95 for example.) It’s not divine OR human, it’s divine through human. I’d rather not use the term “incarnation” for the Bible, though – I’d rather reserve that for Jesus. I believe, as Martin Luther said, that the Bible is the manger that presents the Word of God to us. As I explain in chapters 10 – 14, I believe Jesus is the ultimate, complete, unique, and unparalleled self-revelation of God.”
I can handle you acting like you understand what Brian is saying better than myself or anyone else on this blog. I might disagree but I can only attempt to humbly refute your case when we disagree.
However, I think it’s sheer arrogance to claim that you know what Brian means, says, and believes better than he himself does. Please stop. It’s not nice and it doesn’t reflect the humility of Christ. I’m sure you have helpful arguments and points to be made but it’s a heck of a lot more enjoyable not having to sift through a load of hubris to get there.

Scot #83:
“Show us a really good example that lines up, not with the six points, but with how Brian puts those together in the Monster God narrative. (Forget the Plato/Aristotle stuff. Just a solid presentation of the Christian belief that lines up with what Brian says. If it’s conventional, it ought to be out there.”
The best example, Monster God and all, is Left Behind.
Other than that, it’s very much out there, but it’s in an academic blind spot. There’s no Journal of Tuesday Morning Starbucks Bible Study Theology. On paper, in their creeds and confessions, most evangelical churches believe in the narrative you call “conventional”; there’s nothing in the Nicene Creed that they’d disagree with. The degenerate “soul-sort” narrative is transmitted by conversations like this:
Alice (reading from tract): “Man is sinful and separated from God. Therefore, he cannot experience God’s love and plan for his life.”
Bob: Okay, what does that mean?
Alice: Well, God’s plan is for you to go to heaven when you die. But your sin separates you from God, so if you die and your sins aren’t forgiven, you go to hell.
I swear this actually happens. And it’s not necessarily that great emphasis is placed on this narrative, but that it’s emotionally compelling and easy to remember. This is self-reinforcing: if we believe that everyone who doesn’t accept some version of this narrative will burn in hell, we’ll cling to the shortest, simplest, most readily marketable version we can find.

Pick A or B. The Bible’s big narrative and the meaning of Christ’s salvation is…
A) to get your butt into heaven after you die?
or
B) God’s Kingdom coming down to the earth, bringing healing, wholeness, and peace to all creation?
Is it…
A) Up religion, going up to the right place after you die?
or
B? Down religion, Christ coming down to us to meet us here?
I agree that the “soul sort” narrative is dominant over against the “God’s will being done on earth as in heaven in the coming of the Kingdom”

When there is a division between the “saved” and the “damned,” the Jesus I see in the Gospels inevitably stands with those on the “damned” side of the line over against the religious/political leaders who stand with the “saved.”

#145?Richard
While I thank you for your gentle chiding?seriously, who wants to be THAT guy who argues arrogantly and huberistically, much less BE that guy?I only meant my arguements still stand because of what Brian himself has written. I said “Brian believes…” because, for me, his writings are unmistakably clear that he does not believe the Bible is God’s self-revelation
Look at what Brian himself has written:
?This inspired library preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed.? (83) The Living God then is not reveal through the Holy Scripture, but simply the ?ongoing vigorous conversation? and ?vital civl argument.?
?revelation occurs not in the words and statements of individuals, but in the conversation among individuals and God. It happens in conversations and arguments that take place within and among communities of people who share the same essential questions across generations. Revelation accumulates in the relationships, interactions, and interplay between statements.? (91-92) Revelation does not come from God himself speaking to humanity, but humanity speaking to each other about God.
His line of reasoning is even more tragic when discusses his view of God and the Bible’s “revelation” of Him:
While Brian?s understanding of God mirrors the evolving conception found in process theology, he goes one step further by declaring, ?our ancestor?s images and understanding of God continually changed, evolved, and matured over the centuries. God, it seemed, kept initiating this evolution.? (99) Here Brian creates a quarterback sneak around the thorny prospect of God Himself evolving and instead postulates that our ancestor?s images evolved.
Likewise, for Brian the biblical writers ?matured? in their understanding of God. ?Scripture faithfully reveals the evolution of our ancestor?s best attempts to communicate their successive best understandings of God.? By viewing the Text as a community library through which humans converse about their understanding of God?rather than the vehicle through which God Himself reveals Himself to humanity?Brian is able to attempt to get away with arguing we learn from its evolutionary process.
And, in my estimation, the most damnable statements of all: our written ?record of a series of trade-ups, people courageously letting go of their state-of-the art understanding of God, when an even better understanding begins to emerge.? (111) For Brian the Bible is not God?s self-disclosure of Himself to us, and it doesn’t get much clearer than this statement right here.
While he may now try and appear to claim differenly?it is obvious that he has been in damage control mode since this thing has been released? according to what he himself has written, it seems as though Brian does not believe the Bible is God?s self-revelation, but is instead purely a record of humans evolution in their understanding of God. In his own words: ?the Bible is an ongoing conversation about the character of God,? rather than the revelation of God Himself.
I am not trying to arrogantly claim that I know what he means. I am merely going off of what he himself has written. And from what he has written the Bible is not divine, it is human product.
At this point I’ll turn it to you, Richard: What else could Brian mean in these quotations? Since he has not explicitly said the Bible is God’s self-revelation, why do you believe differently, that Brian does believe this?

Jeremy,
The man answered your objection, and you aren’t listening. He said it’s divine through human, not all human and no divine. It’s God’s word in human words. See Peter Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation. This isn’t a radical idea.
As for whether God’s community’s images and understandings of God changed over time…of course they did. That shouldn’t be even controversial. God appearing to Abraham is a start to God’s self-disclosure to his community, but the fullness of his self-disclosure is in Jesus. Even Jesus says Moses allowed this or that because of our hardness of heart, but Jesus came to express the truth fully. There is a trajectory in Scripture such that God reveals more and more of who he is.
You and Brian obviously disagree on the nature of Scripture, but don’t misrepresent what he believes, and also don’t overemphasize something orthodoxy doesn’t require. I don’t think I would measure up to your (imho, borderline idolatrous) theology of Scripture, and I bet a lot of folks wouldn’t either. So tone it down with those kinds of judgments, please.

Jeremy – I pray you can get out of your own framework about what others believe and listen to what they are actually saying they believe. You have made many polarizing and flat-out untrue statements about what Brian believes. You don’t seem to be able to hear past some preconceived decisions about him.
Yesterday you made a statement “Brian believes…” which was absolutely not true, and he corrected. He asked to not be misrepresented in these extremes, and in your last couple of posts you language has been as polarizing:
“it ain’t. While Jesus Christ (I’ll use his messianic designation here though you refuse to)”
“What I am reacting against is Brian’s assertion in the quotation and the book itself that any narrative that separates the saved from the unsaved is a wicked, evil distortion of God’s Story.”
Brian would not refuse to use the Messianic term for Jesus! And he was very clear in his comments here that he was critiquing the six-line narrative AS HE DESCRIBED IT, not more robust, complete understandings of that narrative.
“I feel that the soul-sort narrative as I described it (those four words should be in bold!) doesn’t honor Jesus enough. To paraphrase (and tone down) a spicy comment from Dallas Willard, it wants Jesus for his blood and little else.”
I could pick out many more. You obviously disagree and are very angry with him, but please stop the incendiary comments that stop conversation and are very unfair.
Shalom,
Pam

Jeremy – I don’t have time to go through each of your arguments, but this one represents the problem with many of them:
‘?This inspired library preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed.? (83) The Living God then is not reveal through the Holy Scripture, but simply the ?ongoing vigorous conversation? and ?vital civl argument.?’
The quote from Brian DOES NOT lead to your conclusion without a whole lot of additional thoughts in your own head. My theology completely agrees with the part from Brian, but does NOT at all agree with the conclusion YOU make from that.
In my mind (and having my degree from a Conservative Baptist Seminary), you can’t possibly study the process of canonization without seeing Brian’s point.
‘?record of a series of trade-ups, people courageously letting go of their state-of-the art understanding of God, when an even better understanding begins to emerge.? (111) For Brian the Bible is not God?s self-disclosure of Himself to us, and it doesn’t get much clearer than this statement right here.’
This is also a huge leap that requires a framework outside of Brian’s words. And it is NOT true!! Brain was clear on this in one of his comments!!!
The church was absolutely convinced that Scripture taught the world was flat. Once science proved to people the world was round, after the Christians had killed people for this teaching, people had to let go of their ‘state -of-the-art’ understanding of God. New understandings of the verses that seemed to teach a flat earth began to emerge.
In our recent history, Christians believed Scriptures supported slavery and segregation. God’s Truth through His special revelation and His general revelation does not change. our understanding of that special revelation absolutely changes as we learn more from His general revelation. All Truth is God’s Truth.
Just by these two passages, I can see how you have completely misunderstood Brian’s words. The one does not equal the other, period. AND you won’t listen to him correct your misunderstanding. Yesterday you claimed that he refuses to refer to our Lord as Jesus Christ. Your support for that was that he only does it 15 times in the book. That means he refers to Him as Jesus Christ. If that is the test for Orthodoxy, we better start counting everyone’s books. C.S. Lewis would be in trouble.
Your accusations and assertions here are way out of line in many places. I did go to your blog as you suggested, and was physically sick at how you have misrepresented someone. It is mean and vindictive and not in line with the commitments of this community. Brian is a friend, and I don’t agree with everything he says (I doubt any of us have friends we agree with all the time), but your perspective on his words has some serious sway to it, and you make statements that are flat out lies.
I agree with Richard that you have brought great points to conversations in the past, and would like to hear them now. You lose credibility when you say “Brian believes…”, he comes back and says he does not believe that, and you say yes he does rather than trying to understand what he might have been saying if that wasn’t it.