blip : Being Lonely In Paradise :

In my last post on McLaren and in Drew’s comment we wondered what all the big McLaren fuss is all about. He doesn’t seem to be theologically original or careful, and on the other hand he doesn’t write fiction all that great. So why the popularity? Jared gives a great account for why McLaren is a breath of fresh air for his disenchanted Reformed/Evangelical friends (see his comment). That makes sense to me. For me, I think some of it has to do with the way McLaren captures how the Christian faith is never something that has arrived at total understanding; we are en via as Augustine would put it; we are always on our way to knowing God, prayerfully waiting for God’s gracious touch of Truth. The God who is the Truth is always emerging, never finally grasped as a possession. At his best Brian McLaren captures this so-called “postmodern” ethos: faith is about the struggle to know the God that transgresses pre-determinations, erected walls that demarcate what counts as God’s redemptive work among us. (In A New Kind of Christian McLaren explicitly maps this project; in The Story We Find Ourselves In this project emerges implicitly as he wrestles with Darwin; and in The Last Word the theme is hell). Constant journey on this road to the Truth that is imminently arriving through the power of the Spirit involves the “authentic” (a pomo word of choice) vulnerability that turns to others as the possibility to discovery a hopeful common future in Christ.

From my read of McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian triology, it seems like the thread that weaves all three books together is a view of faith that acknowledges the vulnerability of convictions (check out Steve Bush’s site for a great response along these same lines to D.A. Carson’s polemic book). In Last Word he sets up this character named Gil as the antithesis of the sort of Christian faith he advocates. McLaren’s main character, Dan Poole, describes Gil: “For people like Gil…, faith was meant to be solid, bolted down tight, static, secured; in the midst of a turbulent world, it was one unchanging reference point, something from the past that we keep going back to, a place to escape the chaos. Christianity was a Sousa march, completely charted…not jazz” (16). Drawing from the categories McLaren develops in the first book of the trilogy, A New Kind of Christian, Gil personifies the Modernist conception of faith that is rooted in the values of the Enlightenment. This take on faith aspires to assume the Universal perspective above the chaotic way knowledge comes to us according to our discipleship or catechesis or just hard life experience (see Camassia’s post on Telford Work). When the Christian conception of faith is forced into the modernist ideal—something solid, static, secure, a way of escape from the chaos of the everyday bustle—there is so much important stuff that is left out, stuff that is actually essential to the dynamics of our faith. The influencial British theologian D.M. MacKinnon narrows in on this escapist impulse in us modern people:

The impulse to avoid the peculiar critical experience is strong in most of us; it can easily pervert our concern with the ultimate into a false acceptance as final truth of that which in its nature is inevitably impermanent and relative…. Whether we try to use our categories as ladders to scale the heights of heaven, or deify as metaphysical finality the cosmology of a particular age, we are dodging the critical problem, turning aside from the description of our actual intellectual situation. (Borderlands of Theology, pp. 212-213)

Our tendency is to find a secure footing away from the fluidity of life—the way experiences of pain and pleasure wash over us and make us re-conceive the way we thought things worked. So, as MacKinnon puts it, we tightly wrap our fingers around an apparent ultimate and turn aside from our actual situation. The danger here is that we get so preoccupied with this discovered ultimate that we don’t look at the world around us and the way that world displays transfigurations of grace that open up into a window into the Divine reality of the Christ who is “all and in all”. Maybe a helpful analogy is the way the ring in Lord of the Rings is the “ultimate” that makes all other concerns fade away at the periphery.

Well, McLaren contrasts Gil’s modernist conception of faith with that of Dan Poole, through whom McLaren advocates a faith that is

a dynamic force in the midst of the turbulence. It beckons, calls, guides us through the turbulence, toward something ahead of us and above us, calling us higher up and deeper in and farther on into the ongoing adventure of life…. [The Kingdom of God] is always ‘at hand,’ always available, always coming to us from the future, always keeping us moving onward, straining forward, leaning, raching, stretching ahead to touch it, receive it, enter it. (17)

This faith is a dynamic journey into the infinite abyss of divine revelation. It is not an escape from the chaos, but looks to the turbulence of life for the hope of God’s sustaining mercy, the touch of Emmanuel—the God who is imminently among us through the power of the Holy Spirit. Modernist faith tends to form people into a confidence that leads to a stagnant exclusion—”This is the way it is and you have nothing to teach me. My identity is secure without and against you.”

If all this talk of faith sounds too trendy and post-modern for your senses, let me point you to some pre-modern passages from an influencial church figure from the 4th century: Augustine. I think the reason why I like the heart of McLaren’s project to re-configure North American evangelical conceptions of faith is that I can see streaks of Augustine’s brilliance shinning through. Augustine offers a faith that lives in the paradox of a satisfaction that never fully satisfies: a perpetual satisfaction (see the quote at the end of this post). In his autobiographical masterpiece, Confessions, he writes, “I tasted and now I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and now I burn with longing for your peace” (10.27). For Augustine, when we are graciously given a taste of the knowledge of God’s reality, then the hunger pangs begin. The gift of knowledge is not reason for a secure position above rival claims, but reason for embarking on a tireless quest for more of God. Elsewhere he writes, “Before experiencing God you thought you could talk about him; when you begin to experience him you realize that what you are experiencing you cannot put into words” (en. in Ps. 99.6). Instead of confident formulation that sets the bounds for God’s reality, Augustine seems to think that when God encounters us with his reality we are left in the humility of speechlessness. The gift of the divine Word renders us wordless.

But this wordlessness is not reason to end conversation, to retreat into the saftey of an isolated self. No. Our experiences of God, if they are truly experiences of God will drive us to others with whom we can explore the reality of the divine in our midst, the Christ who is present in the gathering of belivers. Augustine writes, “What is it, therefore, to believe in him? It is in believing to love, in believing to delight, in believing to walk towards him, and be incorporated amongst the limbs or members of his body“ (Commentary on John, xxix). The purpose for faith is a conversation that provides space for the Word to make himself present in our words to one another. Where the Modernist faith seeks high ground above the apparent threat of shifting perspectives, Augustine offers a faith that longs for the more-of-God available in others. And, I think, a charitable reading of McLaren’s project highlights this emphasis on an ongoing conversation that, like Augustine, longs for connections with others that provide avenues for the flow of the peace of Christ. But, mind you, this is a charitable read that looks over moments when McLaren falls into the temptation of setting himself up above the flux where the rest of us live.

(Here is an example where McLaren sets himself up in a position of visionary power like a prophet, or martyr: “The biblical character I identify with most these days is Balaam’s ass… If I, like the donkey, seem to be veering uncooperatively from the conventional path, it’s because I see something ahead that others might not see. Balaam’s poor beast was beaten three times, but eventually his message was heard and Balaam stopped long enough to reconsider and see what he needed to see. If I can have similar results, any beatings I get will be well worth it” (The Last Word, xiv-xv). This passage makes it sound like McLaren needs a healthy dose of the humilty that comes with listening to the voices of the dead, the “communion of saints”, who still offer direction for our church (it belongs to the dead as much as to us). As G.K. Chesterton put it, Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It wouldn’t hurt McLaren to step off the visionary platform above the demos and listen to the living voices of the dead, and maybe develop a way to display that listening in his writing so others may learn how to do the same. That is a way for him to come down from self-situated prophetic heights and live among the common (theological) folk.)