I just finished reading Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity. Over the last several years I have read most of McLaren’s works and on the front end I found him to be refreshing and asking the right questions. My first introduction to McLaren came over a decade ago when, while doing some work for Zondervan, I was given a prepublication manuscript of his book The Church on the Other Side.  This was about 13 or 14 years ago when discussion within the evangelical world was centered on the rise of postmodernism. A few years later I picked up his book A New Kind of Christian and almost immediately thereafter read the sequel The Story We Find Ourselves In.  I found myself appreciating very much the questions with which he was wrestling and the implications that those questions had, both personally and for the church. (I must confess that I never got around to reading the third volume of the trilogy: The Last Word and the Word after That.)

About four or five years ago I picked up his work, A Generous Orthodoxy. By this time McLaren had emerged as the guru of the emergent church movement. As an historical theologian I appreciated both his unwillingness to be locked absolutely  into any particular Christian tradition, and the fact that he saw contributions that came from all different stripes of historical Christianity. Likewise, I found it interesting/refreshing that he did not lock spiritual expression into the cultural forms of Western Christianity.

I found McLaren stimulating, somewhat edgy and outside the box. As someone who has done more than his share of cage rattling over the years I kind of identified with him. But I began hearing a lot of pushback about some of the things that McLaren is saying in public settings if not in print. For example one of my former colleagues at Western Seminary was nearly apoplectic when he had McLaren in his class speaking. During the discussion the question of the atonement came up. McLaren challenged the widely accepted Orthodox understanding of Christ's atonement as penal substitution, declaring that that was the ultimate in child abuse.

By way of background, we must understand here that evangelical Christianity is rooted in the Reformation and the view of the atonement that has come out of the Calvinistic Reformation is that of penal substitution, i.e. on the cross Christ suffered the wrath of God for the sins of all humanity of all time. In other words there was a one to one substitution that Christ bore the literal penalty for our sin. Among most evangelicals this is the one and only orthodox/biblical explanation of the atonement. (As an aside: over the years a host of explanations of the nature of the atonement have been set forth by those who are well within the stream of historic orthodoxy.  When I was in seminary I once heard a great Anglican scholar, Peter Toon, speak on the nature of the atonement. He wisely observed that the imagery of the atonement that is put forth in Scripture is wide and varied. And that no one's image or theme could capture adequately the variegated scriptural data.) While the idea of substitution is clearly a scriptural teaching supported by numerous passages, there are numerous other images that cannot be so subsumed under the umbrella of substitution. Looking at the question from this perspective, trying to understand the atonement as only substitution is reductionistic. But there is another aspect of the evangelical church’s more informal theological understanding that I find much more troubling. . .that is the popular conception that the eternal son and second person of the Trinity in his death on the cross interposes himself between sinful humanity and an angry wrathful God. This popular understanding presents the incarnate Son as a cosmic "whipping boy" who was arbitrarily selected so everyone else won't have to suffer. It also makes a mockery of explicit biblical testimony of the love of the triune God for his broken creation. Such an understanding involves a thoroughgoing violation of the unity of the Trinity and the fact that what one Trinitarian person does always involves the other two in some level of participation. The unity of intent and purpose of the members of the Trinity is eloquently addressed in the gospel of John in numerous places, perhaps most clearly in Jesus unequivocal statement, "if you have seen me you have seen the Father." (John 14:9)

Now back to McLaren. Assertions like, "penal substitution is the ultimate child abuse" are at best provocative and seemed to reveal a lack of theological sophistication on McLaren’s part. This ought not be surprising when we look at where he is coming from. Although he has spent nearly a quarter century as a pastor he has no formal theological training. From my understanding his background is the Plymouth Brethren (of which denomination I have in the past personally been a member). The Plymouth Brethren are historically a very conservative and anti-intellectual, anti-educational Fellowship of Assemblies (they don’t call themselves churches). There is an old joke, "how many Plymouth Brethren does it take to change a light bulb?" Answer: "What is ‘change’?” In other words, the dispensational system first articulated by John Nelson Darby in the 19th century is the final theological answer. It has final authority because it is grounded solely in the Word of God and is really nothing more than the Scripture’s own teaching about itself. And since the Bible is the normative message of God for us in all ages, we are bound not only by apostolic precept but also apostolic practice. In other words we have to do things the way the apostles did, right down to the head covering of women in worship services.

While McLaren has never had formal theological training he does hold an M.A. in English literature.  We see this side of McLaren early in his works as he is dealing with postmodernism. Contemporary postmodern thought is represented in the literature departments of the world's major universities. French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean François Leotard, have been at the lead in the idea of deconstruction. The presupposition is that language is not about communication or exchange of ideas but it is about power and oppression. In reading A New Kind of Christianity we see this skeptical postmodern method being self-consciously (and it seems to me uncritically) employed.

McLaren self-admittedly employs deconstruction of the received Christian narrative in A New Kind of Christianity. Deconstruction as a tool is in and of itself not necessarily evil or bad, for it can raise hidden assumptions that need to be challenged. However it is a tool that must be wielded carefully and with great precision. This is something that it does not appear to me that McLaren does. He boldly challenges the received Christian narrative in toto. And in some respects mirrors the points that some contemporary New Testament scholars, such as NT Wright are making, particularly, since the in late ancient period the Church lost touch with its Jewish heritage. In place of the Jewish there was a self-conscious synthesis of Christianity and Neoplatonism particularly under the mind of the great Augustine. That this is historically accurate has been recognized since the time of Thomas Aquinas. Calvin who was himself a follower of Augustine often complains about Augustine's use of Platonic philosophy. But I digress. That is a topic for at least an article if not an entire book.

 The point I want to make here is that in criticizing the past, particularly in early sections of the book the sense that I get is that McLaren has uncritically bought into the current politically correct narrative with its anti-Christian, anti-western agenda. He paints with broad brush strokes that are unnuanced and give no indication of any depth of understanding of what he's criticizing. Again speaking as an historical theologian, one of the dictums by which I operate is that before you can criticize a position you must understand it from the inside out. Or to put it another way you must be able to walk in the shoes of those with whom you disagree to understand why it is they believe what they believe. Running down the hall and throwing a hand grenade into a room through an open door is not valid methodologically. McLaren sees all historical readings of the Bible as flawed by the Greco-Roman narrative but then suggests that his proposed narrative is not flawed!

I was very troubled by what struck me as a somewhat arrogant condescending tone taken particularly in the early part of the book.  The “generous orthodoxy” of a few years ago has largely been left by the wayside. In fact a close look at what McLaren is espousing as a “New Christianity” looks very much like the liberal Christianity of the nineteenth century.  He posits an evolutionary understanding of the presentation of God in the Old Testament.  He pits traditional understanding of God against Jesus and contends that the Church’s understanding of Theos (the Greek term for God) has more to do Zeus than it does with Scripture. With Harnack he sees Christianity as hopelessly Hellenized.  With the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule ("history of religion school") he espoused an evolutionary development of God (as a character in the biblical story).

While I find much of McLaren’s proposal for “a new kind of Christianity” to be fatally flawed that is not to say that there are not a few diamonds amongst the coal.  McLaren’s most positive proposal is that the Bible be read as a "portable library of poems, prophecies, histories, fables, parables, letters, sagely sayings, quarrels, and so on."  Evangelical New Testament scholar,  Scot Mcknight from North Park Seminary comments in his evaluation of A New Kind of Christianity:

(I think of the Bible in terms not unlike this: as a collection of inspired texts that come at things from different angles and use differing terms and speak to ever-shifting contexts, but always with the ever-true truth of the gospel that leads us to Christ.)

In this new kind of Christianity, with its new view of the Bible, Brian finds a narrative built from Genesis, Exodus, and Isaiah: God as creator and sustainer, God as liberator, and God as shalom-maker. When one reads the Bible with these images of God in mind, one finds that the Bible points constantly to Jesus, whose God is not Theos but Abba. And one finds that the Bible finally makes sense from beginning to end: It's about God's redemptive plan to restore all of creation. In these sections, Brian is doing some of his best work.

I have often quipped that McLaren strikes me as having a spirit similar to a prominent contemporary Evangelical theologian (who shall remain nameless):  he has never met a boundary that he didn’t want to push.  In this case however, as valid as many of McLaren’s questions and critiques may be, he has not just pushed a boundary but has trashed nearly a millennium and a half of God’s work among humanity, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is reacting to the rigidity of his own past rather than having a sympathetic and adequate understanding of the church’s history and theology.