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This was my first full encounter with what is sometimes called "postmodern Christianity" or the "emergent church" and I will admit I came away less disgusted than I thought I'd be. That may be because I found so little to gnaw on.
Okay, to be fair, I did also start to read before this some book titled "Morph!" by an author whose name escapes me (because like this book, its content was memorably unmemorable; and I dropped it after the third exegetical absurdity) but I recall enough to say that it had this in common with McLaren's book. My responses were just as able to be summed up as:
- "Okay, good point. So what's the answer?"
- "Huh? Snoooore...."
- "What the &*^* was that all about?"
My mind is a bit drugged by the ennui that came of reading McLaren, so let's just use some bullet points to sum up what I learned from this book about postmodern Christianity and the so-called emergent church so far:
- It does correctly discern some real problems in the church today -- individualism, and decontextualizing the Bible, and modern evangelism as a sales pitch. Unfortunately it doesn't realize that it gives us more of the same. McLaren's dialogue between two characters lays heavy emphasis on personal experience (um, that's an "individualism" thing, you know) and in places where I would have loved to have seen, "to find out what this part of the Bible means, let's check this commentary" all I got was stuff like let the Holy Spirit lead you and don't put the text in a straitjacket and it's pointless to argue [47] anyway. McLaren doesn't seem to be someone who'd care much for scholarship or even be aware of it; there's some guff early on about how radio preachers disagree with each other, and that seems to be offered as an excuse for just giving up when it comes to discerning the meaning of the text. I have seen that in other books he actually makes use of N. T. Wright, but after this one I'm hard pressed to see how he'd have any idea what Wright was talking about. A discussion on slavery [50] was a perfect place to appeal to contextualizing scholarship showing how early Americans misused the Bible on the point (as abolitionists of the day even showed) but McLaren never gets past simple "how do we know what interpretation is correct" and the spectre of diverse interpretation. "Ignorant preacher[s]" are excoriated [65] for mocking Buddha or Mohammed. I can go with that -- so what about informed apologists? It would be nice if McLaren let us know whether his "inclusive" approach to evangelism (in other words, let's emphasize how you can get in, not how you're kept out) made it clear whether it was all right for a qualified person to say when another religion was in error. McLaren's approach all too easily lends itself to the charge of spin-doctoring. Jesus indicates that there will be people ultimately excluded from the Kingdom of God. What will he tell his convert to the "inclusive" Jesus when they find these very exclusive passages from Jesus' mouth?
- The main purpose of postmodern Christianity is not to give you an answer but to put you off finding one by keeping you busy.
- Being fresh is a priority. Of course I also read this in terms of the prior book which indicated that the author (a pastor, apparently) used things like "scent" and "sculpture" in his church to send the message. A sermon in Smell-o-vision, then? That said, being "fresh" is a bow to, um, modern entertain-me selfishness and individualism, isn't it?
- Emergent Christianity seems to think that making "what if" statements such as, "What if faith were more like the earth than a building?" is somehow an argument that validates the point. It doesn't. McLaren seems to have a hard time getting from "what if" to "what is".
Some people call the emergent church leaders like McLaren heretics (see comments from our friends here, and maybe they are and future readings will show me this myself, but from this book at least, all I got is that McLaren is very fluffy and naively simple-minded, and in no hurry to provide answers, perhaps because he has none, or perhaps (as would be worse) he's so afraid of offending someone that he refuses to give them. So far, then, if I had to draw the face of postmodern Christianity, it would be a face with a huge, drooling smile going, "DUH!"
Discuss this review here.
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