The Emergent Church, Community, and Confusion in the thought of Brian McLaren.

The Emergent Church, Community, and Confusion.

“I don’t think the liberals have it right. But I don’t think we have it right either. None of us has arrived at orthodoxy.” Brian McLaren.

What a bizarre man. Brian McLaren is a leader in the deconstructionist dogmatics of the “Emergent Church” movement, a surreal re-definition of the Christian faith in a postmodern cast. He’s a man that paradoxically seems to think that he can judge the ignorance and uncertainty of Evangelicalism with an indefatigable certainty of his own. He’s convinced that we are confused and certain of our uncertainty, because, we think we know the truth in knowing Christ and Him Crucified. I don’t mean to sound uncharitable here, but he has taken it upon himself to robustly attack us all the while claiming to be one of us. That he does so with an air of sophistication and in the form of calm, poised, and careful consideration with the measured tones of a solilicrat only increases his bitterness toward us. The tone one takes is not identical with the message given and to harass us nicely doesn’t make him friendly. “Wounds from a friend can be trusted.” But this is not friendly, it is subtle, and subtlety is not a Christian virtue. Truth, peace, patience, kindness; these are Christian virtues. Subversion, obfuscation, and theological haze have no place among the methods of the Christian mind. For us, Christianity, is about truth. Anyone that is in the business of convincing us to re-evaluate Truth as the measurement of Christian thought has sorely missed what true religion is all about. This makes him fair game as far as I can see it, so if everyone could stop moaning about how hard everyone is on poor beleaguered brother Brian and actually look at the things that he says and does we’d all be a little better off.

“I’d have to say that we probably have a couple of things right, but a lot of things wrong, and even more spreads before us unseen and unimagined. But at least our eyes are open! To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall.” 2.

This is an old canard that the voodoo mystic types pull out from time to time. They imply that nobody really knows anything, everything is grey, all the edges are ill defined, and the only borders and parameters are that there are no borders or parameters. When it comes to our doctrines, they say, we can’t really know anything because it’s all a “mystery” and when it comes to their thing, whatever their thing may be, we should readily embrace it because nobody can possibly know any better than they. Since none of us apparently know the things we think we know, we should do things their way. Their way is better because they have learned the deep wisdom of embracing their ignorance, and we should join them with a sense of mild confusion and the goal of a passive intellect unencumbered by the presumption of inflexible facts.

Really, I don’t doubt that the incoherence of saying that someone knows that nobody knows, or that truth is unobtainable and we know that it is true, or that we should do good things as a replacement for thinking true thoughts is lost on the McLaren crowd, because when somebody tells you plainly, and clearly, that they do not know, believe them. I understand and believe what Brian McLaren says when he says that he does not really know or understand Christianity and does not believe the doctrines of the Christian faith as held by the historical Christian Church. Why would I doubt his testimony? I don’t have any reason to think him dishonest. So if he says he doesn’t know and doesn’t believe lets just take him at his word.

“I don’t think we’ve got the gospel right yet. What does it mean to be “saved”?” 3.

“I must add, though, that I don’t believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu, or Jewish contexts.” 4.

McLaren can say this kind of thing because he has already abandoned truth as a worthwhile goal. Epistemology being written off for dead, Ethics is all he has left, even if he can’t know why. It’s a strange illness of the soul that people with this inclination want so desperately to be found within our churches, to follow Christ (if at enough of a distance to see him only vaguely) and to share in our community of faith and love, but only at the cost of never being able to know if they are doing the right thing or believing a true word. If we can’t know the truth we can’t even begin to be good, because being good involves knowing the good and acting accordingly. Most varieties of theological liberalism consist in the reduction of theological truths to simple ethics. For Jesus, of course, ethics were important stuff, but it was also important for the Pharisees, and He did not agree with their ethics. The barrenness of making the “practical” primary to the “theoretical” (what you do more important than what you think) is self evident, because it involves self contradiction at the most fundamental levels. One cannot be good, without knowing what good is, and knowing what good is, presupposes the apprehension of theological truths.

“One good way to think about the Bible, for me, is to think of it as the scrapbook or the memorabilia, the essential documents that tell us the story of people who believed in….God.” 5.

They are agnostic, of course. Post-moderns in general and Emergents in kind. Not actually agnostic, or self consciously agnostic, but practical agnosticism has a certain sympathetic ear for this kind of pseudo-mystical rhetoric. It has the ring of piety but none of its force. Every set of words is meant to invoke the power indistinctness. Meaning carries a fluidity in their speech that gives them a horrible lack of focus and form. If it always sounds like you are saying that no one can know what they are talking about then you never have an obligation to tell anyone what you are talking about. But really, you do. If you are going to say something, especially if we are bold enough to write a book for general consumption, sooner or later you are going to have to tell us what in the world you’re talking about. If not, McLaren is just hedging and hoping that no one will call the bluff of inscrutability.

He writes at length about his personal struggle with the faith and how he emerged from the struggle with a re-envisioned faith that was different from what we understand our Christian faith to be, and he thinks this gives room for a new version of the faith that is more, because it is less, than traditional Christianity. In the old books and confessions we would call that, that he doesn’t believe it anymore. Is there anyone that has figured out the Gospel in McLaren’s thought? Well… no, to be brief. Possibly N.T. Wright who may be the most confusing and overrated theologian in a century, or New Age mystics like Alan Jones and Leonard Sweet, but McLaren has no stomach for those that think they’ve found the truth if finding the truth means anything other than the truth that you don’t have it.

But let’s just be honest here. This is the moral stain inherent within Post-modern thought in general as it has come into its own within the churches of Evangelicalism. It’s the hard teaching of simple theological liberalism hidden in the robes of an apparent orthodoxy. It is a lying thing. A dishonesty. A con. It claims in all of its presumptions to be an obscure light pointing its way to a far off something or other, but there is a sense in which the abandonment of the very knowable truths of the person and work of Jesus Christ are the sole aim of the method. Did Jesus, the Christ of God, really, in time and space and history, rise from the dead on the third day? Was He the Creator God of all things that entered into our experience and took on humanity in order to teach and save from death all those that believe in Him? Well yes, they say, and no, and when pressed, “kind of”. This is “the new kind of Christian” that McLaren is selling, marvelously. The kind that doesn’t know. And because he doesn’t know, it is hard to say meaningfully that he believes. Unless we think that he believes the things he does not know.

Just getting McLaren to give an answer as to what he’s supposed to be talking about can be the most frustrating thing about engagement with his thought…

“Well, you know, a couple people tell me they think I’m being evasive, they think I’m a coward, I’m afraid to say what I really think. But here’s the interesting thing. I don’t think I’d be saying what I’m saying if I was a coward. And what I’m actually saying is a little more difficult. I’m saying, when they’re asking me to answer a certain question, I’m saying, “I don’t think that’s the right question. I think we should be asking another question.” I’m not saying that because I’m afraid of saying what I believe. I’m saying that because I’m trying to be faithful to God, I’m trying to be faithful to the teaching and example of Jesus. So it’s my fidelity to my understanding of the Christian message that makes me say sometimes, “We’re asking the wrong question.”” 6.

I’m not sure that this kind of thing says anything meaningful so I’ll just skip it and hope the reader gets the point he is not making.

Understanding is a very important thing in these discussions. Faith, whatever else it might be, is never, never, devoid of understanding. Faith, is not only, but is primarily, believing the truth. Without truth as the center and goal of faith it’s easy to end up with a nothing to replace your belief in something. So, McLaren by definition cannot believe all of the truths he doesn’t know. If he can’t know them, he certainly can’t believe them. Why is this neo-Orthodoxy so generous? Because it has the benefit of never needing to hold anything dear. It’s easy to be generous with other peoples things. And he is far too Generous with the purity of our Evangelical Orthodoxy to which he does not hold.

Jesus was all about the truth. “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” He was not open to Postmodern thought, a generous orthodoxy, or an Emergent Church. He is Truth, and His Truth is what the Christian knows, believes, and understands. Apart from this truth, there is no Christianity. “So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” John 8:31-32

The Lord of Glory taught a plain and understandable exclusivity of salvation in both its content and its scope far different from the irreconcilable Universalism and emotionally oriented Inclusivism of the Emergent group. “Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” John 14:6 “And He said to them, “You are from beneath; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.” John 8:23.

He cannot be worshipped in ignorance. He must be known to be believed and believed to be loved and loved to be praised and all of these things are of the essence of the Christian life. The life of faith, the calling of following Christ, is one that is known by those who are His, but we should expect those that do not know Him to share in equal parts of skeptical confusion and denials of the obvious.

“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” John 4:24

“But because I tell the truth, you do not believe Me. Which of you convicts Me of sin? And if I tell the truth, why do you not believe Me? He who is of God hears God’s words; therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God.” John 8:45.

McLaren and those that follow him into the mist of theological and epistemic obscurity seem to be more in the community of Pilate, who in response to Jesus’ claims about the truth said to Jesus, “What is truth?” John 18:38

It’s all about the Truth when the Christian enters in to discussions about what their faith is and what their faith does. It is not an empty faith, it is not a faith without works, and it is certainly not a faith without meaning, the mind, the intellect, the apprehension of the truth, and the conscious rational action of the human soul in understanding and living, the Truth.

McLaren’s ambivalence and skepticism about Jesus Christ as presented in the Bible and the things that He taught and did might awaken a flurry of anticipation and excitement from a bevy of brooding similarly minded doubters that find themselves comfortable warming the pews of Christian churches, but their thought, their truth, if you will, or lack of it, has no place in the faith or practice of the Christian churches, except as a possibly necessary corrective for the faithful Christian’s falling into cultural isolation and needing to define themselves clearly as those that know, and live, the Truth.

Christopher Neiswonger

Part One. The Emergent Church, Community, and Comedy.

1. A Generous Orthodoxy, Page 206.
2. Brian McLaren, The Emergent Mystique, Christianity Today, 2004
3. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week846/interview.html
4. A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 260
5. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week846/cover.html