Review: A New Kind of Christianity

The work reviwed here would serve well as a manifesto for the emergent movement: Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity (NKC). As I have noted as well in a review for Creation Ministries International, McLaren is a demanding read, though it is not because (as he believes) his ideas are challenging or difficult. Rather, it is because McLaren tends to be so unqualified at such matters as Biblical exegesis and logic that it becomes difficult to read him – especially since he seems indifferent to his lack in these areas.

I will not repeat criticisms found here, though many apply just as readily to NKC. Instead, we will primarily focus on that which is unique to NKC.

Chapter 1: Between Something Real and Something Wrong

Chapter 2: The Quest and the Questions

Chapter 3: A Prayer on the Beach

This chapter is primarily a sort of manifesto of expectations and perceptions, and as such is not subject to criticism with respect to accuracy; it reflects McLaren’s own beliefs. We may note however the emergence (pun intended) of a frequently-repeated dichotomy McLaren creates between what he calls “an ongoing advent, a constant beginning,” etc. and what is “arthritic, hardened, stiff, and crochety.” [28] For someone who frequently admonishes against generalizing thought, McLaren is quite free with generalizing adjectives, particularly those that present a sharp dichotomy. But as in other cases, we are seldom if ever given an example of who is offering “arthritic, hardened,” etc. positions, or what these positions are, much less are we offered an informed critique of those positions.

Chapter 4: What Is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?

Here McLaren begins the meat of his blueprint for change, and it starts with a presentation of the old blueprint. We should begin with a general description before engaging specifics.

Essentially, McLaren avers – in tones hauntingly like those of a Mormon of Jehovah’s Witness – that the pure message of Christianity has been corrupted by “Greco-Roman” thought, and that modern Christianity has continued in this vain.

There are two immediate problems with this thesis. The first is that it is far from clear that McLaren has any idea what he is talking about when he speaks of “Greco-Roman” thought. Though he bandies about the names of Plato and Aristotle, it appears he has very little understanding of what they actually said or mean.

I am not an expert on Greco-Roman thought myself, so I would note that another person better versed in the subject has heavily criticized McLaren on these points, and McLaren’s reply from his blog is quite instructive:

I didn't include a detailed bibliography of the sources that formed my understanding (or misunderstanding) of Greek thought. I won't try to do that here, but will mention a few resources that come to mind. Of course, I read the basics of Plato and Aristotle that were required in my undergraduate and graduate liberal arts/literature curriculum, especially as they informed English and American literature - from Plato, the Republic and the Dialogues, and from Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Poetics, and On Rhetoric. I haven't kept up with contemporary scholarship on them, so if what I was taught in the 1970's has been discredited, then I'm correspondingly out of date and would be happy to be re-educated. I also read Boethius (The Consolation of Philosophy) and was repeatedly made aware of the literary influence he and others like him had in embedding what my professors called "Platonism" or "Neoplatonism" in popular spirituality along with more formal theology.

In terms of research, the level of irresponsibility displayed here is appalling. McLaren has admitted that his interpretations and criticisms are based almost entirely on personal readings of the primary sources as a literature student. There is nothing of knowledge in the social, historical, and philosophical aspects of these authors. The further admission that McLaren learned all of this almost 40 years ago makes this all the more appalling and irresponsible.

For the present we refer readers here for a critique from someone more studied. We also note this definition of Platonism for reference, provided by our expert:

Plato believed in a world of perfect forms that the things down here represent. There's a perfect bed, perfect chair, perfect car, perfect man even, and such ideas as "larger than" "redder than"...Of course, this included realities like goodness, truth, beauty, etc. He had a lot right, but I would say the forms are nothing external to God but in the case of goodness and beauty and such, God is that based on his simplicity.

But we can say more about the second problem, which is well within our expertise: McLaren’s critique of modern Christianity.

According to McLaren, modern Christianity teaches a certain “story line” [33] that is claimed to be found in the Bible, but is not. McLaren notes six elements of this story line in particular: Eden, Fall, Condemnation, Salvation, Heaven, Hell.

Now of course, we have said much on Tekton with respect to fine-tuning five of these six concepts, but McLaren rejects any such efforts; he believes that this “story line” is way off base, or as he puts it, “How in the world, how in God’s name, could anyone ever think this is the narrative of the Bible?” [35]

The problem is much bigger, however, than McLaren not seeing the storyline in the Bible: The problem is that he pretty much has the wrong story each and every time – even without the tweaks we have offered. To put it bluntly, McLaren’s assessment and description of modern Christianity and what it teaches resembles overall nothing I have heard or read taught anywhere – not in the Popular Pastors, not in the commentaries, not in the church services. Some elements of what McLaren thinks are taught best resemble what might come from, say, Westboro Baptist church – but even that doesn’t match enough for an identification.

So the question that needs an answer is, just whose position is McLaren describing and denying? He names no names and quotes no sources, so it is impossible to tell.

It should be noted as well that in the same blog entry quoted above, McLaren, despite all this work and effort on the alleged “Greco-Roman” problem, ends up saying that it does not matter if he is wrong about all this anyway; his key point is the sense of “superiority or supremacy” that he sees in modern Christianity along with an “us vs. them” mentality. [39] That much we may agree is or can be a problem, but we don’t think McLaren is out of it himself, and if anything, is one example of it, if not also the most unaware that he is such an example. If he is free of such issues, then what do we make of dichotomies like “arthritic, hardened” vs. “ongoing advent”?

The simple truth is that truth creates dichotomies – there is always an “us vs. them” when some truth claim is at stake and is disputed.

At the same time, even a surface reading of the Bible shows a heavy “us vs. them” mentality, and when that reading is deepened by social-science and other contexts, the dichotomy becomes even more pronounced. So how does McLaren evade this problem?

First, in this chapter, McLaren must admit that yes, the Jews did have a “binary social outlook” in which the world was divided between Jews and non-Jews. So doesn’t this defeat his point? It does, but he says, “their outlook was rarely imperial...they seldom if ever aspired to rule all nations in a Roman way.” [40]

One must wonder exactly what the point is supposed to be here. McLaren has distracted from the issue of whether “us vs. them” is found in the Bible – rather than whether it is an infection of the Greco-Roman mind – to a matter of to what purposes the mentality was applied. And not even this is done quite right, as McLaren says that the Jews “acknowledged the right of other nations to have their own languages and customs and even religions.” [40-41] Again, what is the point here, exactly? “Languages” are neither “right” nor “wrong”; to refer to them in this context is a category fallacy. “Customs” may be based on some right or wrong claim of fact, but they are also, beyond that, in another category.

That leaves “religions,” and I suppose McLaren could be right that the Jews ”acknowledged” the rights of other nations to have their own gods, if we qualify that to say that they did so in the same sense that a farmer “acknowledges” the right of a pig to wallow in his own mud hole. The OT is replete with hearty condemnations of pagan deities and those that worship them; it clearly regards beliefs in them as false and dangerous, and as a matter of course, when the Jews were victorious in a foreign land on those rare occasions they went to war on the offense, they did not hesitate to smash the idols and destroy the temples of the pagans. We can only wonder what McLaren makes of, for example, the story of Dagon being dumped over in his temple when the Ark was present (1 Samuel 5). Dagon here is portrayed as thoroughly humiliated and shamed by God’s power – or perhaps McLaren would say that this was a new and revolutionary way of acknowledging the rights of the Philistines to worship him.

But let us now turn as McLaren does to the first two of his six points, “Eden” and “Fall”. I have not written on Eden before, but we can deal with this one simply: McLaren has somehow gotten the idea that the authorized teaching about Eden is that it was a “perfect Platonic garden” in which “nothing ever changes” [41]. There’s not much need to say more, because no one I have ever read or heard teaches such a thing about Eden. Eden is regarded as “perfect” only in the sense that there is no sin and no lack of God’s presence – there’s no lack of change, and no stasis, in this view; though what McLaren might mean by this in the first place is not well specified. Does he believe that in the “Greco-Romanized” Eden, the bugs only walk in straight lines? That Adam never needed a haircut or could not have one, because his hair would break the scissors? That the birds do not defecate freely, and dig little holes for their excrement – or maybe don’t produce excrement?

I have associated with members of the creationist/young earth community for a while now, and they would consider such ideas outlandish. Whether McLaren’s own ideas about this version of Eden are the same I cannot say, since he does not explain beyond vague generalities. The closest I find to a specific is where he says that the Greco-Roman version of God, “Theos”, “hates matter, story and becoming” because they involve change, and once you are perfect, change can only mean decay. The only thing that comes to mind here in terms of who might teach something similar involve Mormons who argue much like McLaren does in order to suggest that the Fall was a good thing, not a bad one. It resembles no teaching on Eden that I have ever seen from any commentary, or heard from any pulpit.

So again, we have no idea where or how McLaren arrives at this teaching of Eden as a “perfect garden” or even in what sense he is defining “perfect”. His notes do not say who teaches such a thing, either. The storyline which McLaren calls “barbarous and hideous” seems to exist mainly in his imagination.

Chapter 5: Setting the Stage for the Biblical Narrative

McLaren begins by offering further commentary and critique of the “perfect Eden” view [47] which we have yet to see specifically defined or explained, or attributed to any person or teacher; later [65] we are told that we might hear it from “many a well-meaning but misguided scholar and fire-breathing preacher,” but who these people are we cannot say and are not told.

We do finally get a sample of a specific: “A perfect world would have come into being complete with names, but each creature remains nameless until Adam names it.” [47]

Really? That’s what a “perfect” world would be like? How so? This is a clear fallacy of category; neither namelessness nor being named is “perfect” or “imperfect”; McLaren is apparently confusing “perfection” with “completeness” – and also assuming, again, that someone is actually teaching that Eden was perfect in the Platonic sense. This is all the more peculiar since McLaren is insistent that we have all been “thoroughly trained” or even “brainwashed” into accepting such a view. [48] (I asked an expert consult about whether this is even in Plato or anywhere he knew, and his reply was, “Plato has a whole dialogue on names called Cratylus but it's not about why things have names but rather if things are named rightly.”)

But of more intrigue is how McLaren himself reads the story of the Fall. He poses it as a “compassionate coming-of-age story” which he likens to a daughter crashing her sports car, and her father, after giving her a “stern lecture” a few months later buys her a “modest economy car.” [49] McLaren accomplishes this reading in part via lack of knowledge of the governing honor-shame dialectic needed to interpret the text; there is no “coming of age” here, but a very humiliating demotion in status and privilege; if any analogy could be drawn it would be like the daughter being compelled to get about on roller skates after wrecking a Lamborghini Reventon (worth 1.6 million dollars). Second, McLaren misreads the promise of “death” as punishment the same way I have seen Skeptics do, as I have reported:

So, we often hear the standard objection from Genesis: Adam and Eve did not physically die from eating of the tree, as God's comment, taken with wooden literalism, would indicate ---

Gen. 2:16-17 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."

Commentators as far back as pre-Christian Judaism have read this as indicating spiritual, not physical, death. But a literalist critic will say: "That's not what the book says. It says they will die. Nothing is said about a spiritual death."

It has been noted that the literal Hebrew says, "Dying you shall die," which does indicate a "progressive" death. However, even if it did not -- as is the case with many cites where "death" and "die" is used in isolation -- nothing needs to be said because the context says all that is needed. Critics would have us believe that the writer of this story, which forms a literary unity, wrote something so blatantly contradictory in such a short space. Common sense alone therefore supports the "spiritual death" interpretation, but there is more, and this is where we come back to the overall pervasiveness of figurative language in Hebrew, combined with an understanding of the Semitic theological mindset.

The account in Genesis goes on to depict Adam and Eve as losing fellowship with God. To the Hebrew mind, loss of fellowship with God is a fate worse than death, for it was the loss of fellowship with the prime source of peace. Thus the word "death" --- representing the most fearsome and irreversible fate in this life --- was chosen to figuratively describe this loss of fellowship with God.

Like Skeptics, McLaren reads Gen. 2:16 as promising literal and immediate capital punishment – and then proceeds to make “capital” out of that not happening, supposing that this means that God settled for a more lenient punishment. But this reading is in error, and so likewise are all of McLaren’s conclusions that follow from it. Rather disturbingly, this leads McLaren to describe the Fall in what amounts to Mormon terms: It is a “developmental threshold” in which leaving the Garden is something “truly ambivalent,” and there is “a childhood lost, an adulthood gained.”

Thankfully, McLaren at least calls this a “downside” aspect of “progress” and does acknowledge that the act involved “rebellion”. But his exegesis is thoroughly erroneous and devoid of defining contexts.

Chapter 6: The Biblical Narrative in Three Dimensions

The depth of McLaren’s misplaced self-confidence highlights the start of this chapter, as he notes that he “wasn’t formally trained in theology” but he considers this an “accidental advantage”. Sadly the only people I have ever heard speak similarly have been “fundamentalist atheists.” As we have said here repeatedly, there is a certain basic understanding that can be easily achieved from the Bible, but for the sort of depth claims McLaren is making, far more is required than that. We can see why at once.


The next several chapters of NKC have to do with Biblical usage and interpretation. Such activities, as we have often said, require a certain degree of authoritative knowledge in direct correspondence to the depth of claim being made: Radical interpretations, thus, demand a higher burden of epistemic support which would validate the interpretation over and against other interpretations; or as I like to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary explanations (not “extraordinary evidence” as Skeptics like to put it).

With McLaren, it is no surprise, we are offered a few radical interpretations, but nothing like the needed support for these interpretations. If anything, McLaren reads the text very much like a fundamentalist would – simply reading it “cold” with little to no concern for defining contexts. This is perhaps just as well, given that when he does make contextual appeals – which is rare – his sourcework is dismal (in line with the use of Ellerbe).

Chapter 7: How Should the Bible Be Understood?

McLaren professes that his quest has “required me to ask some hard questions above the Bible I love.”[67] That’s quite fair. We believe that Christians should ask hard questions, and seek answers. But there is quite a difference to be seen in someone like, say, Jason Berggren -- whose own “hard questions” we believe have been asked, and had answers brought to bear by himself, as free of any agenda as can be humanly done – and one like McLaren who tries to answer the “hard questions” with answers amenable to the image of God he has created. I believe that if McLaren were honest, he would do as some liberal Christians have done, and simply admit that there are parts of the Bible he cannot stomach – and thereafter, re-enact Jefferson’s editing process. But McLaren – whether because he knows it will distance him from the “evangelical” camp he professes to belong to, or some other reason – instead pursues the less honest route of force-interpreting texts out of all recognition.

McLaren begins this chapter, however, not with rational discourse but with emotional diatribes and unwarranted generalizations. He relates completely anecdotal claims about how, in his youth, he heard preachers “passionately decry psychology and psychiatry” and of how Christians who went to churches that forbade the use of those practices ended up committing suicide. Really? What is the evidence for this? What are the statistics to support that this actually happened to any real extent? While we would not doubt that such things may have occurred, there is nothing offered to show us that these were anything but fringe aberrations of the sort that can never be entirely eliminated, given that they result from the factor of human fallibility. McLaren uses this anecdotal evidence as a reason for a wholesale repositioning of how we read and interpret the Bible – and this is far from meeting the need for “extraordinary explanations” to justify the repositioning.

McLaren briefly cites those who “deny our environmental crises by quoting Bible verses and mocking science” but again offers nothing in terms of specifics, much less does he back up the “science” in question. He then moves on to the incredible claim that the Bible “when taken as an ethical rule book, offers us no clear categories for many of our most significant and vexing socioethical quandaries.” [68] McLaren follows with a laundry list of such “quandaries” which is a mixed bag: Some are indeed able to be addressed from the Bible’s ethical teachings (such as abortion and just-war theory); others aren’t “socioethical quandries” save by a meaningless definition of the words (autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder???). McLaren admonishes us against “wrestling biblical passages to bear on these issues in a simple ‘thou shalt not’ way,” but once again we are left wondering who in McLaren’s universe has been doing this apart from fringe lunatics. Once again, he gives no names or examples. I have certainly never seen anyone try to “wrestle” any Biblical passage to address autism, and with respect to issues like abortion and just-war theory, there have been an ample number of thoroughly sophisticated apologetics on these subjects that are far more than “thou shalt not” applications.

But apparently, McLaren is aware of none of this; he has nought but anecdotal stories of nameless persons or broad movements (eg, “Christian Reconstructionists”) who allegedly did no more than throw a “thou shalt not” in the air with a Bible verse or two. We are not even told the name or McLaren’s reputed opponent on a radio show who allegedly justified the Iraq war with a tinfoil-haberdashery exegesis of Biblical verses about “crushing Satan” underfoot. Is McLaren accurately reporting the sum and total of his opponents’ positions? Or is he simply restricting himself to debating fringe lunatics?

McLaren appeals further to an example that should have been a signal to him, but was not. He notes that he once spoke to “Rwandan Tutsis” who justified their superiority their Hutu opponents by noting that they (the Tutsis) were “descendants of the sexual union between King Solomon and the Ethiopian queen of Sheba.” [69] The irony here is that this alleged sexual union is not even in the Bible – it is an imaginative version of history with no textual or scientific support. Yet McLaren fails to get the point that the problem is not the Bible or how we read it, but with human pride, selfishness, and greed. McLaren is aiming at the wrong target.

We can certainly agree that our sacred texts must be approached in a sane and rational manner. [70] However, that manner involves contextualization. McLaren offers a long diatribe [70f] on how slaveholders of the pre-Civil War era justified slavery from the Bible, but not once does the right answer occur to him: Their interpretations were contextually erroneous (see here). Indeed, McLaren notes five lines of arguments used by pro-slavery advocates, and somehow fails to notice that four of the five do not even have anything to do with the Biblical text. Shouldn’t this tell him that Biblical justification for slavery was an afterthought?

Indeed, the few OT texts cited by pro-slavery forces were just those noted in the linked article to be referring not to chattel slavery, as pro-slavers wished, but to what they would know as indentured servitude; so likewise the NT texts McLaren notes being used are addressed in the linked article. In any event McLaren cannot look past these as abuses of the text used to support a decided agenda – and thus he is again citing right problem, wrong solution. And what is that solution? We’ll see that in the next chapter.

Chapter 8: From Legal Constitution to Community Library

Now turning to what is his “positive” case for how to read the Bible, McLaren begins by charging that “we read and use the Bible as a legal constitution” whereas he supposes it to be more like, as the title indicates, a “community library.” We may begin by noting that McLaren is certainly not wrong to call the Bible a library of sorts (though the word “anthology” would be more accurate). However, that is not mutually exclusive of the use of appropriate portions of it as a source for authoritative teachings. But is this what McLaren means when he says the Bible is (mis)used as though it were a constitution?

That is hard to say, since he never clearly explains what that means. McLaren himself wields some passages with authority to advance his own views, so if that is what he means, he is also a hypocrite. Perhaps McLaren simply means that some texts have been used out of context. McLaren will later refer to the fact that certain passages were not meant to apply to other times and places [80], so it’s a good chance that this is what he means. And if this is so, then we heartily agree.

However, as noted, McLaren is most reticent in offering specifics, and when he does, his answers and understanding are unusually poor, and he offers examples that are nonsensical. Where does he get the idea, for example, that Ps. 137:9 teaches that “we” should joyfully dash the infants of our enemies against rocks? [79] I know of no one who has ever read Ps. 137:9 as a literal instruction – not even the most hardened fundamentalist of the Westboro tradition has done that.

McLaren apparently meant for pro-slavery advocates to be the best example he had of persons reading the Bible like a “constitution.” Ironically, this is precisely what was not the case. Had the pro-slavers indeed read the Bible like a constitution, they would have found nothing at all to justify slavery – they would have found in the OT justification for indentured servitude, and in the NT, values that undermined the premises on which slavery was built. The real problem was not that they read the Bible constitutionally, but that they read it void of contexts. McLaren once again has the wrong solution to a real problem.

I also cannot fathom where McLaren gets the idea that “Christian scholars” deal with reputed tensions in the Bible with “interpretive techniques” such as “last mention trumps first mention.” [79] Outside of a children’s Sunday School, I have never heard or read such reasoning used, and it certainly has appeared in no scholarly work out of thousands I have read.

McLaren alleges that one sorely neglected point in Biblical interpretation is, “Whom does our current approach favor or empower?” [80] In truth, this is a worthless, even a childish point. McLaren’s profession that “insiders” who “depend on the constitutional system for their salary and social status” are not “disinterested” is the sort of rhetoric we would expect from conspiracy theorists and from Dan Brown, not from a serious Christian author. It remains as well that whatever reading we have will inevitably “empower” someone, even if it is McLaren himself. Asking questions like these is merely a useless distraction.

One final irony emerges from this chapter. McLaren professes to prefer the Bible as being read in terms of “a community gathering in which people listen to the Bible being read, then respond and interact with it and with one another.” [84] This picture McLaren paints sounds suspiciously like an “emergent paradise” – and not what we’d find in the world of the Bible. The community would gather to be read to, but mainly because 90-95% of the people were illiterate and could only “hear” the word, not read it. They would not “respond” or “interact” but listen in respectful silence – unless the speaker mangled the text or somehow offended the audience’s sense of rhetoric. In this light, McLaren’s raising the specter of “religious thought police [who] stand ready to raid places in which theological conversation strays” [85] is not merely a displaced case of an unwarranted victim complex, but a perfect example of why what McLaren unjustly calls “religious thought police” are needed in the first place. McLaren has the idea that he is being “policed” because he is controversial with the Biblical text and the facts, when it fact it is because he is grossly incompetent with them.

Chapter 9: Revelation Through Conversation

This chapter adds little new. McLaren rather arrogantly equates himself with those who underwent “decapitation, burning at the stake, hanging” etc. for expressing their beliefs [87] but compared even to a Servetus, McLaren is far from taking any sort of courageous risk in explaining himself. He repeats an error (noted in our prior articles on McLaren) in which he claims that the idea of Satan was taken from “Zoroastrian religion”. [88] The balance of the chapter is spent in explaining the absurdity of reading the book of Job as though it were a “constitutional” document, which as far as I know, no one is doing in the first place. McLaren does rightly see Job as a sort of “dialogue” – it is in the genre of an ancient text of that sort --- but to expand this such that Job is a “fractal of the whole Bible” [93] in this respect in an unwarranted leap. Job IS in the genre of dialogue; other parts of the Bible are not. In essence McLaren is committing the very same error of decontextualization that he accuses “constitutional” readers of performing.

McLaren writes, “Could it be that God’s Word intends not to give us easy answers and shortcuts to confidence and authority, but rather to reduce us, again and again, to a posture of wonder, humility, rebuke, and smallness in the face of the unknown?” [93] It can certainly do that, but such is far from mutually exclusive of finding “easy answers and shortcuts” in particular cases. The critical question is whether such answers are derived competently from the text, or whether they are simply imagined by one predisposed to find what they want to find. Sadly, McLaren is just as apt to do this – with his description of the whole Bible as a “portable library of an ongoing conversation about and with the living God” [96] – as those he criticizes.

Chapter 10: Is God Violent?

It is here that McLaren begins confronting the textual and narrative demons that beset him, and the next two chapters are an attempt to deal with passages in the text in which God sanctions “violent images, cruel images, un-Christlike images.” [98] It ought to be noted to start that by inserting that last qualifier, McLaren has created and failed to solve the conundrum that Christ himself apparently validated and stood by the full authority of the Old Testament and all of the “un-Christlike” images therein.

McLaren’s solution to this “problem” lacks in both courage and honesty. He opts for the idea that “our ancestors’ images and understandings of God continually changed, evolved, and matured over centuries.” [99] The question McLaren never answers quite clearly is whether this means God Himself was, at some point, not actually prone to react with violence and war under certain circumstances in history. He admits that the Bible is not “free of passages” that depict God as violent, etc. but qualifies by saying that these passages are “not the last word on the character of God.” [103] I know of no one who says otherwise. He also claims that he “not saying that the Bible reveals a process of evolution within God’s actual character” but rather “that human beings can’t do better than their very best at any given moment to communicate about God as they understand God, and that Scripture faithfully reveals the evolution of our ancestors’ best attempts to communicate their successive best understandings of God.” Later he says that the authors of the OT saw God as violent because they would “naturally see God through the lens of their experience”. [106]

Behind all the doublespeak we find here, there’s a critical unanswered question: How could “our ancestors” have misunderstood eg, divine commands to destroy the Canaanites and Amalekites under this rubric? Did God actually command Israel to do something else that they misunderstood (because it was their “best understanding”) as commands to destroy? Does McLaren envision God as being this poor of a communicator? How much “understanding” does it take to grasp, “destroy/don’t destroy”? Is he saying God didn’t actually communicate these things (in spite of Jesus’ endorsement of the OT)?

In the end McLaren’s solution is left without any explanation. He uses the analogy of math textbooks for 2nd graders and 6th graders, the first of which says that “you can’t subtract a larger number from a smaller one,” while the second says you can, as it introduces students to the concepts of “negative numbers.” To begin, this analogy is quite poor, as I have never seen such advice given in any math textbook without qualifiers, such as “When using natural numbers...” Indeed, I have found a comment here in an educational textbook that indicates that McLaren’s example is something math teachers should avoid, instead introducing students as early as possible to negative numbers and not using the sort of absolute statement he offers about our inability to subtract larger numbers from smaller ones.

Ironically, McLaren’s own “evolution” idea also raises the clarion call of warning that the math textbook does. His solution is neither consistent nor intellectually satisfying, and would be rightly seen as a dodge by the atheists and critics I have dealt with over the years.

McLaren then suggests that God first eg, revealed Himself as “tribal” because that was the best way to shepherd people to a more advanced view. Of all of McLaren’s thoughts, this one does have some merit; we have used the same arguments ourselves regarding, for example, how God undermined the basis of human slavery rather than forbidding it outright, a sort of “Martin Luther King” approach. But in this, God is consistent in His rejection of slavery. McLaren cannot apply the same rubric when it comes to such things as God sanctioning violence in the OT, for a transition from “violent” to “not violent” manifests inconsistency, not development. His idea that perhaps there was a stage where God “appears to be both passionately and violently committed to justice” [105] in order to shepherd us to a stage where we would understand God as He “really” is (“nonviolently yet passionately committed to justice”) cannot be reconciled by appeals to how God might have “appeared” or been misunderstood, because there is nothing to misunderstand.

Otherwise, McLaren’s positive case for an “evolving” understanding of God is, not surprisingly, thin. [99] He notes God’s deeper self-revelation of His name in Exodus 6:3, but this in no way amounts to a revelation that indicates God’s character was misunderstood; indeed, the revelation of a name would indicate to the reader that Abraham’s descendants were being offered a covenant, indicated by access to God as sovereign. He notes that Hosea 2:16 says that Israel will refer to God not as “master” but as “husband,” and that Jesus said that the disciples were his “friends”. [99-100] McLaren takes this all to indicate increases in levels of intimacy. However, as we have noted, this latter verse is badly misinterpreted. At the same time, while these verses do indicate an increase in rank or status, this would not be any sort of unexpected “evolution” but the natural progress involved in a covenant relationship, in which rewards (such as access and privilege) were earned by obedience. There is no “evolution” here because the system was known as a whole from the very beginning.

Then, McLaren notes that Paul spoke of the law as a tutor. [100] Here, though, this has not to do with an evolving understanding of God, but with the “evolving” (developing) education of men. God’s character is not part of the stated curriculum. The same may be said regarding McLaren’s note that early parts of the Bible were written by priests concerned for ritual purity, while latter portions, from the prophets, had more emphasis on social justice. McLaren somehow gets from this an idea that this reflected a shifting emphasis in the “heart of God” but it seems more likely that it reflects shifting social conditions and needs in the nation of Israel which correspondingly required addressing. If Exodus or Numbers do not mention “the systemic flaws that plunge people into poverty and imprison them in oppression” [100] it is primarily because as a predominantly nomadic barter society, the Jews at the time of Exodus and Numbers did not possess the social mechanisms that would produce those flaws in the first place.

McLaren’s final case of evolution is that whereas God seems “very tribal” in the OT, by the NT He “created all people and loves all people.” [100-101] These latter concepts are far from missing in the OT text; Genesis 1, and the natural theology of creation, already speak to these things for those with “ears to hear.” McLaren also wrongly positions the OT as picturing God giving "one people privileges over others as God’s favorites," committing the same error atheists make as discussed here.

Chapter 11: From a Violent Tribal God to a Christlike God

McLaren begins this chapter with a professed fear of “slippery sloping” – that is, he worries that men will use Biblical passages about genocide to justify their own. The flaws here are the same as those found in his appeals regarding slavery, and it is sad to have to note that McLaren sounds very much like an atheist in the way he characterizes God as depicted in the OT. [109]

The chapter otherwise adds little, other than offering several incomprehensible diagrams that remind one of the work of Theosophist Lloyd M. Graham. McLaren adds an egregious error in thinking that idols were forbidden to the Jews because “idols freeze one’s understanding of God in stone” [111]. Such notions would come from an emergent theologian, but were far away from what an ancient person would have been concerned with: Idols were forbidden because they were considered to be “points of contact” for the deity, where one communicated with the deity, and God had designated prophets as His mouthpiece. Additionally, no idols meant there was no sense of God being at the beck and call of humans. They were not meant to send any message about the fixity of our understanding of God.

Chapter 12: Who Is Jesus and Why Is He Important?

Two ironies abound at the start here. First, McLaren notes that “Jesus can be a victim of identity theft” and he uses the example of one of his alleged “loyal and dedicated critics” (again, unnamed, though I have found some indications that it was Mark Driscoll) who envisioned Jesus as a sort of Rambo character [120]; this of course, as we have noted, as McLaren does little better, remaking Jesus and Christianity into his own image. Second, even as McLaren professes a sort of personal humility, he makes it clear that “those who become more self-aware” and “[t]houghtful readers” [121] will end up thinking more like he does.

But apart from these issues, what of the depiction of Jesus in Rev. 19:11-16, in which, astride a white horse, he is seen indeed as a warrior (and we might well suspect Driscoll was being somewhat tongue in cheek, while McLaren fell for it, hearing what Driscoll said too literally)? McLaren resorts again to the profession that one gets a warrior Jesus out of this passage only by reading the Bible is a “constitutional” fashion; he rightly notes that Revelation is an “apocalyptic” [123] document, and that such documents were intended to speak of the future. This much is true. However, McLaren then steps out of all semblance of genre wisdom by suggesting that this passage means nothing more than, “don’t worry, Jesus will win in the end” as an encouraging message to persecuted Christians.

My own preterist reading of Revelation actually does not read Rev. 19 in either of these terms. Nevertheless, McLaren cannot escape the quite graphic predictions earlier in Revelation – which correspond also with the Olivet Discourse – of God’s judgments, which happen to correspond in some detail to what historically happened during the Jewish War of 67-73 AD. It is therefore quote impossible to read Revelation as McLaren wishes to, as an extension of the “message of forgiveness and reconciliation” in which no one will suffer for disobedience. McLaren is mistaking God’s mercy in being slow to judge for a total refusal to judge.

McLaren rightly supposes that it is necessary to reconcile the picture of God as merciful with that of God as judgmental. But his solution of arbitrarily force-interpreting the texts, and ignoring others completely, will not do the job.

Chapter 13: Jesus Outside the Lines

Here McLaren addresses a critic (unnamed, but I have found that it is John MacArthur) who says that “[t]he only reason Jesus came was to save people from hell” and that he had “no social agenda”. McLaren takes this to somehow mean that Jesus gave no message to eg, aid the poor, though given MacArthur’s emphasis on obedience to Jesus’ commands it is doubtful that this is what he meant. I find it rather suspicious that McLaren “brackets” much of what MacArthur says in his own summary: “[He didn’t come to eliminate poverty or slavery or]”. [128] I would suspect what MacArthur meant (as I would too) is that Jesus was not so much a social activist, as one who served to teach and inspire in a way that would cause others to aid the poor and (outside Judaea, where there was no slavery) abandon slavery. McLaren’s supposition that MacArthur is following the “Greco-Roman narrative” is not only baseless, but likely comes of a patent misunderstanding of what MacArthur is saying.

Beyond this, there is not much to address in the chapter. McLaren is addressing a vision of Jesus that his opponents do not hold: A Jesus with no care whatsoever for social matters.

Chapter 14: What is the Gospel?

McLaren’s key argument here is that the words of Jesus, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” should define the Gospel. I know of no one who argues otherwise, but McLaren seems to have the impression that we do a disservice by (say) quoting some part of Romans to define the Gospel. I don’t think so, although it would be fair to say that Romans is more specific in saying what we should do as a result of the kingdom of heaven coming to bear: Jesus’ words are thematic, while Paul’s are applicational (as McLaren himself unwittingly recognizes later [144]). McLaren is simply too worried about words here.

However, far more serious is his claim that “Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion to replace first Judaism and then all other religions...” [139] Given that Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple – something which as much as anything could declared an “end” to Judaism as it was then known – that is rather a hard claim to countenance. At the same time, McLaren hoists a caricature when he supposes it is as though Jesus literally announced that he was going to start a new religion named after him. A far more nuanced expression would be that Jesus offered a covenant of exclusive service to YHWH, with him as broker – which directly indicates that all other covenant options to YHWH are off limits.

Following some generally non-disagreeable explanation about what it means to be a member of the Kingdom of God, McLaren supposes that once we recognize the applicational power of Romans, it does not allow “God [to] be shrunken back into the categories of anyone’s exclusive religion.” [144] How this is so is not really explained. It is vaguely noted that Paul does not use Western, linear-type arguments, and to an extent this is true (and it is also true that he uses Greco-Roman rhetorical forms!), but this says nothing pro or con about whether Paul speaks of a message providing exclusive access to God. In the end of the chapter, McLaren provides an incomplete picture of Paul working with his scribe, Tertius, not being able to provide a “premeditated work of scholarly theology” [146] due to the limits of the scribal craft. Of course, this is simply wrong: We know Paul used carefully-crafted rhetorical forms; we also know that it was normal for a scribe’s work to be carefully prepared and later checked by the one who dictated. In any event, that Paul may have followed any “natural flow of his thoughts and feelings” has no bearing on whether Romans offers literal truths about Christian theology. In the end it is hard to see what point McLaren is reaching for with this portrait of Paul.

Chapter 15: Jesus and the Kingdom of God

This inaptly-titled chapter offers an extremely brief exegesis of Romans in which McLaren highlights, mostly unobjectionably, the themes from Romans that he finds most useful for his purposes. We do wonder who it is he supposes is using Romans 1-3 to create what he calls a “blacklisted out- group” created “in contrast to a righteous in-group,” [148] unless this is an oblique reference to those who point to Romans 1 as an argument that e.g., homosexuality is wrong. More on this particular issue is found in one of McLaren’s later chapters.

Chapter 16: What Do We Do About the Church?

Another mostly unobjectionable chapter in which McLaren vaguely lays out a few of the problems with the modern church (ones that pretty much everyone agrees exist) and recommends that diversity and unity be encouraged (which is good, save that he does not bother to say where diversity stops and such things as heresy begin). The problem is not so much that McLaren is wrong in this chapter as that he doesn’t say enough of substance to decide whether he is wrong in the particulars.

Chapter 17: Can We Find a Way to Address Human Sexuality Without Fighting Over it?

This is McLaren’s attempt to argue that homosexuality isn’t a sin after all, and he spends far more time attempting to sound winsome about the issue than he does actually making a case that homosexuality is not a sin. He deftly avoids making any specific case for an extended period, instead arguing for several pages using associative logical fallacies (e.g., the church was once wrong about geocentrism [177], therefore it may be wrong about homosexuality; homosexuality is no different than race [186]); repeatedly offers refrains about a “constitutional reading” of the Bible, and objects that there are other things we should pay more attention to, but in the end, there is not a single actual argument made.

Arguably, it can be said that some spokesmen for the Christian worldview have spent an inordinate amount of time discussing homosexuality, when it is no more or less a sin than (say) gluttony. But gluttons do not have activist groups promoting their agenda and making public protests where they stuff themselves with food to show that gluttony is “normal”. There is no “Glutton’s Day” at Disney. It needs to be fairly asked if what is “inordinate” is merely “proportionate”.

Chapter 18: Can We Find a Better Way of Viewing the Future?

McLaren tackles dispensational eschatology, which, as a preterist, I do not myself defend. This is not to say that any or all of McLaren’s critiques are valid, just that I do not have a recourse to answer them honestly.

Chapter 19: How Should Followers of Jesus Relate to People of Other Religions?

The issue for which McLaren inspires the most irritation among critics is his refusal to speak plainly when it comes to the truth or falsity of religions other than Christianity. In this chapter, McLaren is no more forthcoming on the subject. While in an endnotes for the chapter [292] he denies that he is advocating an “anything goes” view in which sincerity of belief is all that matters, he still refuses to say outright that any given belief is true or false, and instead diverts to emphasis on charity and good deeds commanded by Jesus.

To be sure, the commands of Jesus are important, but they are not meant to be abused by being used as something to hide behind. As it is, McLaren dodges the question seemingly as many ways as he can, preferring instead to lay some sort of guilt trip on Christians by pointing to misdeed of the past: “Take inquisitions and witch burnings and Crusades.” [209] McLaren is evidently unaware of how badly those sorts of charges are overplayed, which is no surprise since he uses disreputable sources like James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword [287] (rather ironic, given that he regards it as a sign of “cluelessness and denial and not honesty and repentance” to speak of such things as isolated incidents done by a handful of evil persons).

As the chapter continues, McLaren continues to paint any and all opposition to other faiths as though it were a matter of wanting to subject such persons to more inquisitions and crusades. The idea that there might be, eg, informed, intelligent arguments showing that eg, Islam or Buddhism is false, is not once considered. McLaren also confuses categories as he points out that Jesus ministered to all sorts of people: Romans, Syrophoenicians, and Greeks. [211] But McLaren is trying to confuse the category of ethnicity with that of religious allegiance.

A good chunk of the chapter is devoted to trying to defuse John 14:6. Here again, McLaren overstates the point, caricaturing opponents as using it to say we “cannot show Christlike love and respect to our neighbors of other traditions.” [212] No one argues any such thing; rather, it is argued that John 14:6 shows that the covenant offered by Christ grants exclusive access to God. McLaren never honestly presents this view.

Some years ago I had addressed an article by McLaren in which he tried to analyze John 14:6, and naturally I made comparisons between what McLaren said then and what he says now. The difference is at first fairly significant. Here, unlike before, McLaren spends a great deal of time going on about how the “Greco-Roman imperial mind” creates anxiety which in turn causes people to defend their point of view. Aside from that his “Greco-Roman imperial mind” is a mere contrivance, this is a mere distraction which has absolutely no bearing on whether or not an argument is true.

McLaren continues on in this vein for several pages, making much over “us/them” and “insider/outsider” mentalities while judiciously avoiding the “true/false” dichotomy. He says he looks forward to a time when “members of all religions, including our own, learned to be reconciled with God” but conspicuously avoids saying what it is that any particular person, particularly a person in another religion, will need to do to achieve that reconciliation. The closest McLaren comes to any such statement is when he suggests that part of our duty is “recruiting people to defect from destructive ways” [216]. But even that is far too vague to be sure McLaren is saying that other religions are not true.

Then, as before, McLaren maintains that John 14:6 “has nothing—absolutely nothing” to do with the question of Christian exclusivity, and after this, his arguments are exactly the same as before, even of the verbiage is at times tweaked. I will therefore repeat my response to this made in an earlier article, with a few tweaks of my own:

The "original literary and social context" supports fully the use of this verse to indicate that Jesus is the "only way to heaven." In that context, Jesus' role is that of the broker of God's grace and largesse. John 14:6 contextually means that Jesus is the Father's SOLE broker. No one else can broker the client-patron relationship we are to establish with God.

With our time-tested propensity to twist Scripture in mind, I have noticed that John 14:6 is often quoted out of context so that it seems to say, "I am in the way of your getting to truth and life. I will keep everyone from getting to the Father unless they get by me first."

The loaded language is little but spin-doctoring, once again. Jesus as broker of the covenant is the only access to truth and life; no one is "kept" from an open doorway -- they refuse to go through it when told it is the right way to go! McLaren further spins with this parochial recasting of the verse:

"Not one person will go to heaven unless they personally understand and believe a clearly-defined message about me and personally and consciously ask me to come into their heart."

There's a great deal of evasion here. The message of Jesus' brokerage is not that hard to define or understand. There's also an entirely separate issue of "those who have never heard." McLaren certainly knows (but wishes to hide) that most of the usage of John 14:6 in favor of Christian exclusivity is made in response to those who know perfectly well what that "message" about Jesus is. Elsewhere I have explained my position on "those who have never heard" and John 14:6 does not exclude it. In such cases, I envision God revealing to people all they need to know to be saved; Jesus still brokers the agreement, even if the person has never heard the name "Jesus". Thus also McLaren's emotional appeal to poor, lost heathen being thrown into a fiery hell is defused.

After this, McLaren finally begins his parodic attempt at exegesis, but he begins all the way back at John 13! This serves no actual purpose, other than that McLaren once again wants to tweak the emotional chords. The washing of the disciples' feet proves, we are told, that for Jesus, "leadership means servanthood, not domination." This has no relevance to John 14:6 at all, but if it did related to this, the point would be that as broker, Jesus does serve -- as a mediator between God and man. The "domination" description is yet more spin-doctoring by McLaren, this time as he caricatures the exclusivist reading of the verse as he did above.

McLaren rambles on through Chapter 13, and none of it is of any relevance to how 14:6 is interpreted, though McLaren almost (not quite) gets it when he says that Jesus is "mirroring Moses in inaugurating a new era as lawgiver with one overarching commandment in place of ten, or hundreds." (That's true, by the way, but that "one overarching commandment" if obeyed would result in us behaving in ways that essentially cause us to follow many of those "hundreds" which are of a moral nature.) McLaren does rightly see (and could hardly miss) that Jesus enters Ch. 14 reassuring his disciples in their troubled state. We finally get to John 14:1-3:

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.

Contextually, this would be an assurance that Jesus will be enacting his role as broker -- preparing a place for us. This affirmation is necessary in light of what would seem to be the very contrary experience of Jesus being crucified which is to come. Any person undergoing the shameful death of crucifixion would never be recognized as God's honored broker.

In that light, McLaren's "exegesis" is irrelevant:

Do you feel the flow of the conversation? It's as if Jesus is saying, "Listen, you can't accompany me down the bitter path to suffering and death I must take alone. One of you has just left me to betray me, and another of you will deny you even know me. But it's OK. Don't be overwhelmed with discouragement. Love one another. Keep faith in God. Keep faith in me. I will go alone into suffering and death. But beyond the suffering and death, I will arrive home – home in my Father's house. And you'll be with me there."

No, sorry. This was not a touchy-feely "conversation" but a firm affirmation of Jesus' role and identity, despite apparently contrary circumstances. But more than this, McLaren jumps off the edge to create an interpretation he is comfortable with:

Now before we assume that "my Father's house" means "heaven" – which it may, but I doubt it – we should at least be open to the possibility that this phrase actually refers to the overall message of Jesus. What Matthew, Mark, and Luke call "the Kingdom of God," John generally translates into the terms "life," "eternal life," or "life to the full." So let's consider the possibility that "kingdom of God" is here rendered in yet another kind of parallel language – "house of God" or perhaps "family of God." (This, by the way, is the line of interpretation followed by Leslie Newbigin in his commentary on John, called The Light Has Come [Eerdman's, 1982]). All of these phrases would suggest the same reality: in God's presence, in God's territory, in a place where God's will is joyfully done.

McLaren is forcing a dichotomy between the present manifestation (kingdom of God) and one of its resultant aspects (eternal destinies of the righteous versus the wicked). But let us note the full absurdity of McLaren's reading. Jesus says he is "going" to this place to prepare it. What did he do after this? He was crucified. He rose again. He ascended to heaven and sat down at the Father's right hand (the position of the honored broker). How can this have been "going to" the "kingdom of God" -- which was an ideological rule? McLaren's idea that "Father's house" is synonymous with "kingdom of God" is simply nonsensical and contrived for his own purposes.

Even so, McLaren cannot help but end up with something that bespeaks fellowship with God, which completely defeats his attempt to "de-heavenify" the "Father's house" phrase! He admits that this is also some place or condition where the disciples will eventually go. So all of that rattle and bang was to no purpose, especially to no purpose with respect to John 14:6. When does McLaren think the disciples will join Jesus, if not upon their deaths? Where does he suppose they will go to be in God's presence at that time? How does he think this relates to those who deny Christianity (since Jesus was speaking to people who had accepted his brokerage of God's covenant)? He does not say, and is wise to avoid saying.

Next, McLaren distracts the reader with this comment on 14:4-5:

Now Jesus returns to his earlier point, preparing them for the shock of his suffering and death: "You know that for me to reach my glory, and for me to go to prepare a new place for you, I have to suffer and die first." But Thomas, like Peter, has a chronically low "get-it factor," and so he asks a question, and it is a thousand miles away from "What about people who never heard about you? Will they go to heaven?"

No, sorry, it isn't "a thousand miles away." It's actually only five feet away. What McLaren wishes to avoid is that the question asked by Thomas -- "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" -- will produce an answer from which can also be derived conclusions about how others can follow the same way. If I ask, "How do I get to the Scripture twisting party at Brian's house?" then the answer will give directions that others will be able to follow. Not only that, if that answer is, "Go by the Emergent Street route -- all the other roads are closed" then it is an absurdity to suggest that no comment is being made about whether someone else can get to Brian's house using Eisegesis Drive instead.

But once again, McLaren dishonestly evades this point, and distracts the reader to a red herring:

What is Thomas asking here? If we don't properly understand his question, it's highly likely that we'll miss the meaning of Jesus' answer. But here's the problem. It's clear he is not asking anything like "Will people who have never heard of you go to heaven?" It's clear he's not thinking about Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Zoroastrians, followers of tribalism in Africa or South America, much less modern secular atheists or skeptics of modern or postmodern bent.

McLaren is dishonestly mixing two separate questions: "What about those who never hear?" and "Is Jesus the only way the heaven?" These are two related, but still entirely separate, issues. Of course, the former question is much easier to use as an emotional prop, which is no doubt why McLaren uses it instead of the correct question.

In typical emergent fashion, McLaren then proceeds to the "what if" game:

[W]hat if we read Jesus' answer, then, not as an explanation or answer – certainly not an answer to a question about the eternal destiny of people who never heard of or believe in Jesus – but as a repetition and reinforcement of what Jesus has just given them: reassurance? He has just said, "Don't be troubled. Trust God. Trust me."

How about this: What if we DON'T read it that way? Actually, though, we agree that it is a reassurance, but it is still a reassurance that happens to answer the question of exclusive salvation.

From here, McLaren gratuitously reinterprets the critical verse itself:

In this light, Jesus is saying, "Listen, you don't need to understand all this. You simply need to trust me. Don't look for a way apart from me. Don't look for a route or destination – some concept or technique or system of thought that is separate from me. I'm not trying to give you information or instructions so you no longer need me and can instead depend on the information or instructions. No – just trust me. Everything you need is in me. I will bring you to my Father's house [whether that means heaven after death or the kingdom of God on earth]. 'The way' or 'the truth' or 'the life' aren't things separate from me. I am these things, so you'll find them in me! Whether or not you know what I've been talking about, if you know me, you know the Father, you know the way, you know the truth, you know the life."

The reader will notice that despite the reworking and the smarmy tone McLaren injects, it still reads as a message that Jesus is the one and only broker of God's covenant, pointing to himself time and time again in McLaren's reworking. But McLaren judiciously leaves out the most critical words: "NO ONE comes to the father EXCEPT by me." These he instead breaks off and separately treats in an even more absurd way:

But what of "No one comes to the Father except through me?" Clearly, taken in context, these words are not intended as an insult to followers of Mohammed, the Buddha, Lao Tsu, Enlightenment rationalism, or anybody or anything else. Rather, the "no one" here refers to Jesus' own disciples, who seem to want to trust some information – a plan, a diagram, a map, instructions, technique – so they can get to God or the kingdom of God without or apart from Jesus, since he has just told them he is leaving them for a while at least.

First, note how McLaren manipulatively describes the exclusivist exegesis in terms of an "insult" when it is no such thing -- any more than it is an "insult" to tell people that only one route is open to the party at Brian's house. The reading of "no one" as "Jesus' own disciples," however, is the key point, and it is simply exegetical fantasy. Of course, "no one" is inclusive of Jesus' disciples, since they are part of the whole of which "no one" would be comprised. But to claim that it refers exclusively to the small party of his disciples that existed at that time is a ludicrous contrivance with no interpretive support at all, least of all in the informing context of Jesus as broker of God's covenant.

Further, McLaren reads Jesus' words in modern, anachronistic terms:

This reading takes seriously the play on the word "know." Thomas is saying, "How can we have intellectual clarity on where you're going or the route or technique to get there?" Jesus replies, "You don't need intellectual clarity: you need personal knowledge. It's not a matter of 'knowing about,' but rather, 'knowing.'" Remember, this theme of personal knowing as interactive relationship is strong through all of John's gospel – and in just two chapters, Jesus will say, "And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." "I am the life" in John 14, then, has a powerful resonance in John 17 with "Eternal life is to know God and to know me."

Sorry to break this to the emergents out there, but in the NT world, people did not "know" each other the way this indicates. "Knowing" can't mean "personal knowledge" in the modern sense; the real matter is much closer to "intellectual clarity" to the extent that it means accepting Jesus' role as broker, as indicated by the validation of his ministry and soon, his resurrection.

McLaren now goes beyond 14:6-7, into 8-11, but without the informing context of patronage, he offers little but emergent babble. Philip's request to be shown the Father is the request of a client asking for direct access to the patron -- which was NOT typical of patronage relationships of the time; rather, the broker was the one who maintained direct access with the clients. In this light, Jesus' reply -- "Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works." -- are a statement that Jesus' own presence as broker is more than adequate -- and Jesus points to his works as evidence (sounds a lot like "intellectual clarity" -- use of evidence as proof).

McLaren's own reading is emergently comical:

Jesus says in verse 9 that the invisible God has been made visible in his life. "If you want to know what God is like," Jesus says, "look at me, my life, my way, my deeds, my character." And what has that character been? One of exclusion, rejection, constriction, elitism, favoritism, and condemnation? Of course not! Jesus' way has been compassion, healing, acceptance, forgiveness, inclusion, and love from beginning to end.

Oh really! Is McLaren's Bible missing Matthew 25? Or Jesus' condemnations of Chorazin and Bethsaida? Or his warnings to avoid hell (however we understand that experience)? That sounds a lot like "exclusion, rejection, constriction, elitism, favoritism (properly defined), and condemnation" to me! Yes, there was also a great deal of inclusion -- prostitutes, tax collectors, a Roman centurion and a Samaritan woman. But McLaren seems to forget that the latter two are shown conceding to Jesus' authority, while the former groups apparently (and the Samartian woman, clearly) are being offered the chance to concede that authority. It's not "free for all" acceptance but acceptance at the price of concession, and to require a concession means that there can be "exclusion" of those who refuse to make it.

Despite all this rap, McLaren makes a judicious admission:

By the way, it would also make me want to scream if you misread what I'm saying to mean, "It doesn't matter what you believe. Anything goes. God doesn't care." That would be equally ridiculous! By looking at what Jesus cares about, we see what God cares about, including what makes God angry: carelessness towards the poor and vulnerable, putting religious rules over relationships, complacency, a lack of compassion, and so muchmore.

Indeed! Then all of McLaren's objecting about how John 14:6 is not a message indicating exclusivity has just gone out the window. Like most emergents, McLaren talks out of both sides of his mouth; he uses distraction (especially to heart-rending issues of charity) to keep you busy so that you won't ask the hard questions, or even consider them at all; instead, we are to blindly "trust Jesus" and neither ask questions nor concern ourselves with evidence. McLaren does well to stress the service aspect of Christian faith; but he fails to acknowledge that facts and evidence were the basis upon which people were called into that service.

There is, again, not a lot of change in the NKC version of this; some of the same stuff appears verbatim. Perhaps the only significant variation is that McLaren now argues that “the Father’s House” is Jesus’ own body (!), which is based on an even more peculiar strain of logic worthy of Alvin Boyd Kuhn:

By that exegetical logic, I suppose when Jesus says that his Father’s house has “many mansions” he is referring to his liver, kidneys, and other organs, thus indicating that he is the ideal universal organ donor.

All that said, McLaren has only marginally brushed the correct logic, which would be as follows:

By extension, only the body of Christ resides in heaven, and thus the standard interpretation holds true. McLaren still cannot defuse John 14:6 and its implications for exclusivity.

Chapter 20: How Can We Translate Our Quest Into Action?

Chapter 21: Living the Questions in Community

In the main these chapters are plans of action as opposed to argument, though they are also McLaren once again rather presumptuously portraying himself and his ideological cohorts as specially enlightened persons who will usher in a new era of peace and unity. McLaren continues to display an uncritical nature by absorbing the ideas of Ken Wilber, a New Age author whom McLaren credits as a “macrohistorian” – though he is decidedly unqualified to write on anything as complex as history. McLaren also once again depicts himself and his cohorts as pseudo-martyrs suffering for their faith, an almost laughable and contemptible self-identification, especially since McLaren encourages followers to offer to leave their churches if their pastors find their ideas difficult. [245] Apparently the strength of conviction doesn’t hold in McLaren’s world. One wonders how McLaren would handle true persecution as was experienced by first century Christians under Rome.

Chapter 22: Conclusion

The book closes with reiterations of what is found in prior chapters as McLaren once again declares the terms on which he will accept criticism, which includes assuming that he is right and that his criticisms of your views are valid.

Here is the matter in sum: McLaren’s ostentatious “invitation” to come and “dialogue” with him at the table is little more than a preventative to keep him from facing the harsh criticism he so well deserves. McLaren repeatedly dodges giving clear, honest answers, and then makes that out to be a virtue; he mischaracterizes his opponents in the same narrow way he accuses them of acting; he makes use of source material in a manner so uncritical it resembles the methodology of the least critical atheists; and he arrogantly portrays himself and his fellows as misunderstood persecution victims.