As promised, part 1 of my thoughts on McLaren

Long ago, in a month far, far away, a bold blogger once promised to interact with Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy.

Today that promise will finally be met.

As I've noted before, I was surprised at how much McLaren didn't tick me off. I actually agreed with more of what he said than I expected to. There were some major exceptions to that principle, mind you! But nevertheless, I have to recommend this book as food for emergent thought.

On with some of the details, eh?

In a nutshell, McLaren would like us to be discriminating diners at the buffet of Christian tradition. Take the good from this tradition, the good from that tradition, add it all up without any of the bad from any tradition and - POOF! - you have a "generous orthodoxy"!

If it sounds too good to be true, it's because it is.

But having said that, McLaren does make some good points. In this post, I'll identify some of the concepts I really liked in this book. In a later post I'll deal with some of the more troubling aspects of his thinking...

Good things

Chapter 1 - The Seven Jesuses I Have Known: here McLaren openly acknowledges what so many of us won't. Our upbringing/tradition plays a huge role in how we see theology and the Christian life. If, for example, the "spiritual warfare" motif is how you primarily see the Christian life (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), that fact probably has as much to do with your spiritual upbringing as not. It's simply not true that we arrive at theological/ethical decisions about our faith in a vacuum. Kudos to McLaren for not only telling his personal story, but in so doing implicitly encouraging the rest of us to acknowledge the role ours has played.

Chapter 3 - Would Jesus Be a Christian?: here McLaren serves up red meat for the emerging (and emerging-friendly) crowd. This quote serves to illustrate his point perfectly:

If the real Lord Jesus were to knock on our door as Revolutionary King/Master/Teacher, I think we'd look through the peephole and judge him an imposter, since our "Buddy Jesus" as Savior is already sitting on the couch inside, watching TV with us, thumbs up and grinning, "meeting our needs" very well, thank you very much.

How can I add to that?! Preach it, Brian!

Chapter 4 - Jesus: Savior of What? Here McLaren deals with the thorny issue of salvation. I say "thorny" not because I have any doubts about how a person truly becomes a Christ-follower, but because I doubt very much that "personal salvation" is all that Jesus was concerned about. We've made the Gospel too narrow - for most Evangelicals today it means the "message of salvation" for us as individuals. That's very American, very Modern (as opposed to Postmodern), and very easy to fit onto a cute little tract.

But it's also not the whole truth. As McLaren, so do I "fear that for too many Christians, 'personal salvation' has become another personal consumer product (like personal computers, a personal journal, personal time, etc.), and Christianity has become its marketing program".

If the Gospel were strictly a "fire insurance policy" then why in Heaven's name does God leave us here on Earth?! If I "got saved" and then immediately - poof! - was carried away to Heaven, don't you think that would be a pretty powerful testimony!?

Chapter 5 - Why I Am Missional. I'll not repeat my many Missional thoughts here (they're here, in case you're curious). Suffice it to say that I love McLaren on this point.

Chapter 14 - Why I Am Methodist. In the margins of my copy of the book I wrote "this is perhaps the best chapter in the book" when I read it. His focus here is on the very Methodist idea of a process of spiritual formation. I've often gotten myself in trouble by saying that "God doesn't give a flying leap about your personal spiritual growth if it's not in the context of a local church". McLaren draws upon that thinking and concludes that too many Christians are just focused on getting to the next plateau in their spiritual journey, without ever thinking about the other Christ-followers below them on the path. He ends this chapter with a great prayer:

May God save us from forgetting to reach back. Otherwise our orthodoxy will surely lose its orthopraxy, which will make it ungenerous and eventually unorthodox too.

There are other random phrases and ideas that I appreciated in this book, but these are the whole chapters that I most agreed with. That's five chapters I really loved. As it turns out, there are six that I really didn't.

But enough of my thoughts. Have any of you read the book, or any others by McLaren? What do you think? Even if you haven't read him, what in my summary resonates with you?

Hatushili