I’ve been slow getting around to Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity, but here I finally am. Reading books I disagree with is fun and a regular part of my omnivore reading diet. A friend even urged on and loaned me Jodi Picoult’s Change of Heart, and what do I do, but read it?

The difficulty with reading McLaren is that it’s like talking to a salesman who swears he has nothing to gain personally from you purchasing his product and he genuinely appears to believe it. In other words, the self-deception is sincere; he really thinks he is loving and humble, evidenced by self-effacement and endless declarations of humility and generosity. Oh, sorry, those declarations would qualify as statements, and don’t you know that statements “create debate (and sometimes, sadly, hate) that moves us into a new state” (p17). Those italics and fine rhymes are his. You want to walk away, but I won’t because I’m so humble. I need you to know this. Humble, humble, humble. Did I mention that?

He asserts this ad naus. At conferences, he stoops, offering “stimulating Q & R times (question-and-response, rather than question-and-answer times–since many questions aren’t suited for a simple answer)”.  Did anyone ever think Q&As were designed to answer only simple questions? Ignorant me, I always thought they were for complex questions or potentially complicated misunderstandings that occur and require follow up by an audience member. I recant, I will not receive an answer, only a response. That is what is called for.

The first three chapters are part biographical and part road map, accounting for how McLaren came to call for this “quest.” At one point he briefly considered going into Episcopalian ministry but “got cold feet. I loved God, and I loved the idea of serving God and helping people spiritually, but I didn’t feel like a great fit for the religious bureaucracy and politics that are an inescapable part of the life of the religious professional. I thought I could do more good for the spiritual cause outside the institutional church than inside of it. So I became a teacher and felt very fulfilled living out my faith in the environment of a secular university” (p3). Unlike those chumps who do think they are a great fit for religious bureaucracy, McLaren thought his talents best used elsewhere. No one denies there is sin in church government–He didn’t come for the well but the sick. But choosing to deal with secular university bureaucracy, that bastion of love and tolerance, because the church is just too political, now that’s a good one.

McLaren tells omits details about why many “formerly churched” refugees are fleeing to his message, but never does he say anything that reveals any loyalty to the visible, “institutional” church. His stated goal for his church is “that everything we said and did was as accessible as possible to them [the nonchurch majority], so they could discover the goodness inherent in the Christian good news” (5). He is positive and welcoming to “their questions, uncertainties, skepticism, and honesty”, so much so that “their questions became my own” (pp.5, 6). Does this jive with his declaration to believe in the Apostle’s Creed? He doesn’t address what skepticisms won him over, so it’s too early to tell. But so far he makes it sound like he didn’t have answers to questions, and so instead of finding them he embraced the doubts. It might have been humble to have read the answers the church has come up with over the millenia, but maybe he will deal with those later. Even hopefully he will deal with them later.

Regardless of his stated antipathy to statements, McLaren states the need for a new quest. It’s bizarre that he doesn’t see the pointless semantics of these distinctions.

But the ninety-sixth thesis for today must be very different from the original ninety-five, because we already have more hate than we need, and a surplus of debate too. . . . At this moment in history, we need something more radical and transformative than a new state: we need a new quest. We need more than a new static location from which we proclaim, “Here I stand!” Instead, we need a new dynamic direction into which we move together, proclaiming, “Here we go!” (p17)

Of course any faithful and responsible traveler will first ask “Where?!” before taking one step. And so far the guide doesn’t sound like he knows what he is doing. “It’s time for a new quest, launched by new questions, a quest across denominations around the world, a quest for new ways to believe and new ways to live and serve faithfully in the way of Jesus, a quest for a new kind of Christian faith” (p18). New way to believe? So not by grace through faith in Jesus which is old, as old at Seth, right? We then get the ten questions. I won’t comment on McLaren’s brief synopses but will wait until he develops them.

1. The narrative question: What is the overarching story line of the Bible?

2. The authority questions: How should the Bible be understood?

3. The God question: Is God violent?

4. The Jesus questions: Who is Jesus and why is he important?

5. The gospel question: What is the gospel?

6. The church question: What do we do about the church?

7. The sex question: Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?

8. The future question: Can we find a better way of viewing the future?

9. The pluralism question: How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?

10. The what-do-we-do-now question: How can we translate our quest into action?

The only thing I’ll say about these new questions is that they are not new at all. McLaren might have new answers; reading will tell. But not one of these questions has a whiff of originality, or a slice of new angle. Is this an exercise in provincialism?

The third introductory chapter confirms one thing. For all the questing and responsing going on so far, McLaren is convinced the church needs to repent. “We acknowledge that we have made a mess of what Jesus started” (p26). He assures us we’re not repenting of abstractions, but of “actual versions and formulations of the faith we have created” (p27). Okay, what might those be? He promises to deliver “so that our religious traditions can be seen for what they are.” Well I’m braced. Sounds like some dogmatism is coming. From where, on what basis, and how it doesn’t conflict with everything he says in the first three chapters, I don’t know. But here it comes.