Post Series
Introduction
Reimagining Christian Religious Identity (Part 1: The Crisis of Christian Identity)
Reformulating Christian Doctrine (Part 2: The Doctrinal Challenge–1)
Reformulating Christian Doctrine (Part 2: The Doctrinal Challenge–2)
Reconstructing Christian Practices (Part 3: The Liturgical Challenge)
Redefining Christian mission (Part 4: The Missional Challenge)
This post is the third in a series examining the ideas in Brian McLaren’s newest book, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World
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In many ways McLaren’s doctrine reformulation is rooted in his reformulation of two foundational doctrines of the historic Christian faith: Scripture and God. According to McLaren, the Bible isn’t to be read and interpreted and applied like a constitution, as if it was an absolute authority on everything in life. (204) While describing his understanding of the Bible in A New Kind of Christian, McLaren couldn’t (bring himself to) say that the Bible is inspired by God and is the sole textual point of God’s divine self-disclosure, only that it has “a unique role in the life of the community of faith, resourcing, challenging, and guiding the community of faith in ways that no other texts can.” (ANKCh, 83) How, then, does McLaren conceive of the Bible as an authoritative document?
For him “the Bible is a library filled with diverse voices making diverse claims in an ongoing conversation.” (204) As he maintained in A New Kind of Christianity, “This inspired library preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed.” (ANKCh, 83) A fuller quotation from the same book illumines his view of Scripture and its authority even more clearly:
“revelation occurs not in the words and statements of individuals, but in the conversation among individuals and God. It happens in conversations and arguments that take place within and among communities of people who share the same essential questions across generations. Revelation accumulates in the relationships, interactions, and interplay between statements.” (ANKCh, 91-92)
Pay attention to what he is saying here: McLaren believes revelation is about human conversation about God, rather than God Himself revealing Himself to humanity. This is why he can say in this recent book, “Faithful interaction with a library means siding with some of those voices and against others.” (204) In fact, reimagining our Christian identity in a multi-faith world “requires us to go back and reread our Scriptures and ‘flip them,’ faithfully picking and choosing—subverting hostility in the strong pursuit of love.” (203)
And how can McLaren suggest this? Because Paul himself faithfully picked and chose, or that’s what he would lead us to believe. McLaren argues that Paul edits two passages of Scripture in the Old Testament—Psalm 18:41-49 and Deuteronomy 32:43—to reimagine salvation in Romans 15:8-10. Remarkably, McLaren suggests that “Paul courageously re-articulated the meaning of salvation,” (203) which he says was inspired by Jesus himself, (202) as if both of them were simply adding their voices to an ongoing conversation about God’s salvation movement. It seems clear McLaren doesn’t believe God Himself is actually saying something through the Bible, merely that people are trying to say something about God. And we are called to carry forth this “picking and choosing” effort to say something more, something more advanced and more magnanimous than other people have said, including people in Scripture. McLaren says this very thing when he writes, “It remains to be seen to what degree we Christians today will move forward with Jesus and to what degree we will dig our heels in with the less magnanimous voices in the biblical library.” (206)
I’d sure be interested in what “less magnanimous voices in the biblical library” he’s referring too. And if we can simply “side with some voices and against others” because they don’t conform to our current, contemporary conversations about God, how isn’t this precisely “simply picking and choosing according to one’s own tastes,” which McLaren somehow denies? While I acknowledge a careful, deliberate interpretive effort surrounds our interaction with the text, it seems clear that for McLaren, meaning doesn’t reside in the text itself, because God Himself is speaking. Instead, the interpreter decides by way of siding and opposing what the Bible says, or perhaps more accurately, should say in light of our 21st century God-conversation. This makes more sense when one understands McLaren’s understanding of God.
One could say McLaren’s view is largely heretical, given that it verges on the heresy of tritheism. (Tritheism is the view of God that emphasizes the three persons of the Godhead without any unity of essence.) He seem to reject the Trinity, at least the way the Church has understood it for centuries. In fact, McLaren actually suggests that the doctrine of the Trinity is responsible for anti-semitism, (126) the Nazi gas chambers, (126) is no more than a “sinister tool of mind and speech control,” (128) and has threatened Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and members of indigenous religions. (126) You may think I am unfairly representing McLaren’s position here, but this is what he has said in this latest book, that “Trinitarian doctrines have indeed been part of the problem.” (127) While the Trinity has been central to the Christian faith from the beginning—mainly because of what it says about Jesus Christ specifically as much as it says about God generally—McLaren seems to mock its centrality and importance to the Church. (127) How, then, does McLaren conceive of God, particularly in his reimagined Trinity?
Of the Trinity McLaren says, this: “God is one and in some sense three; that Christ is man and in some sense God; that the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son but in some sense not reducible to the Father and the Son.” (127, emph. mine) I’m not sure why McLaren uses the terms “in some sense” to describe the Trinity, especially Jesus. The historic Christian faith has always said that God is one essence and three persons (curiously, McLaren leaves “one essence” out of his concept of God, which makes more sense below); that Jesus Christ is man and God; that the Holy Spirit is a separate Being, yet one with the Father and the Son—not merely in some sense, but actually so.
McLaren rejects the historical (i.e. Nicene) understanding of the Trinity in favor of so-called Social Trinitarianism, a view he claims is supported by church history, particularly the Cappadocian Fathers. (128) Without going into great detail here given the scope of this examination, I believe McLaren’s assumptions regarding the Cappadocian Fathers are dependent upon problematic readings of their works. (For an excellent treatment of the Trinity, especially in regards to religious pluralism, see Keith E. Johnson, Rethinking the Trinity and Religious Pluralism: An Augustinian Assessment (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2011). And because McLaren relies upon Jurgen Motltmann’s Trinitarian scheme—who called his own view “trinitarian panentheism”—we see an emphasis on the three persons of God at the expense of his essential unity; McLaren’s view is similar to the heresy of tritheism.
Like other social trinitarians, McLaren “images God as a dynamic unity-in-community of self-giving persons-in-relationship.” (128) In this view, Father, Son, and Spirit are neither three independent units bound into a larger unity, nor one independent unit with three identical parts. (128) According to McLaren, God is the relational unity in which each person of the Trinity relate. (128) Rather than God being defined as an essential unity of three persons, as historic Nicene Christianity has always defined God, McLaren’s conception of the Trinity makes God out to be a community rather than an essential unity. Thus, for McLaren, the “triune God” is merely the community of divine beings, which verges on the heresy of Tritheism.
While McLaren appears to follow the Eastern view of perichoresis (mutual indwelling) to bind Father-Son-Spirit together, like Moltmann he fails to recognize how united the East and West were in their view of the unity of the Godhead in essence, in nature. And instead of conceiving of this mutual indwelling as governing their essential unity as three persons, McLaren merely projects a human scheme of ideal social relatedness upon the Godhead. Theology, then, very quickly mirrors anthropology, in that humanism defines and governs theism. In the historic view of the Godhead, however, it isn’t that God functions like some human community of love, where the persons of the Trinity are bound together by such love in community and thus form the Being of God. Instead, God is defined as one essential Being who knows, wills, and acts in concert as three persons, yet as one Being. This is not McLaren’s understanding of God.
It is problematic that McLaren views God merely like a human community of persons without having a strong belief in their essential unity of nature. It’s a problem primarily because Jesus Christ is left as merely a person who exhibits the character of love, which we’ll see is McLaren’s Jesus. If Jesus is not united in essence with the Father as God, then He isn’t God Himself. If the Holy Spirit isn’t united in essence with the Father and Son, then he can act separately, particularly in other religions which McLaren affirms. (153) Because the Holy Spirit isn’t bound in essential unity to the Father and Son (Jesus Christ), “we would expect the one Holy Spirit to be moving, working, ‘hovering’ over each religion” as McLaren argues. (153) More bizarrely, McLaren seems to suggest all people actually participate in this divine community as interpersons or interpersonalities, because we are creatures made in God’s image. (129) Thus, every religious community encounters God equally, because all people share in the divine community— “we live, move, and have our being in the Spirit” and “each religion…[has] a unique, particular, and evolving perspective from which to encounter the Spirit in a unique way.” (152) It is for this reasons McLaren’s understanding of God is suspect and should be heartily rejected.
The danger in projecting humanistic social relatedness upon God—as merely a community of persons, while the essential unity of Father-Son-Spirit in nature is ignored—comes to the surface when one realizes religious pluralists use such a view to argue for God’s different saving activity among other religious communities. We see such and advocacy when examining the rest of McLaren’s gospel scheme, which includes our problem and human identity; the saving solution to our problem; and the one who bore our solution, Jesus. This scheme is the topic of the next post continuing McLaren’s reformulation of Christian doctrine to suit a new kind of Christianity for a multi-faith world.
