AN OLD KIND OF CHRISTIANITY: A HISTORICAL THEOLOGICAL COMPARISON BETWEEN ALBRECHT RITSCHL AND BRIAN MCLAREN

Introduction
On Human Nature and Sin
On The Person and Work of Christ
On Salvation
Conclusion

This is a short series based on a 30-page paper I wrote for my ThM in Historical Theology. I set out to compare the theology of Brian McLaren to Albrecht Ritschl, a German liberal theologian who was the successor of Friederick Schleiermacher, the father of modern day liberalism. The reason I chose to do this type of theological comparison is because I want to bring the lens of historical theology to bear on contemporary theological discourse. People have said McLaren is a liberal theologian along the lines of Schleiermacher, and I wanted to see if that’s true. Here are the fruits of that labor.

McLaren first provides a glimpse into his theological understanding of human nature and sin in an early work, The Story We Find Ourselves In. In this second part of his New Kind of Christian trilogy, McLaren establishes the framing narrative for his new kind of Christian, one that would eventually form the foundation for his new kind of Christianity. First, through his protagonist Neo, McLaren contends that the modern telling of the story has been distorted, because it imported “the Greek idea of a fall from a perfect, unchanging, ideal, complete, harmonious, fully formed world into a world of change, challenge, conflict…” ((Brian McLaren, The Story We Find Ourselves In (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 52. This is later affirmed and further developed in A New Kind of Christianity, 33-45.))

For McLaren, there was no fall, in the traditional, original sin sense of the historic doctrine of sin. Instead, “the God-given goodness in creation isn’t lost…God’s creative fingerprint or signature is still there, always and forever. The evil of humanity doesn’t eradicate the goodness of God’s creation, even though it puts all of that goodness at risk.” ((McLaren, Story We Find Ourselves, 52.)) Instead of creating a perfect world that “falls” from a Platonic perfect ideal, it is “a story of emergence;” creation is evolutionary and “must go on creating itself.” ((McLaren, Story We Find Ourselves, 52. In fact, in A New Kind of Christianity McLaren asserts, “Evolution fits beautifully in the good world of Elohim.” 267n.4. )) In essence, humanity has not fallen and is still good. This initial exploration of McLaren’s view of Creation and the Fall is important when we begin exploring his understanding of humanity and sin.

As the Earth’s story is one of emergence, so too is humanity’s; our story is not a fall from perfection into a state of imperfection, but “unfolds as a kind of compassionate…classic coming-of-age story.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 49, 51.)) While the traditional doctrine of the Fall contends “there is one catalcysmic event in which the first humans descend—or fall, if you will—from their ideal, perfect state into the material, imperfect story of history,” McLaren does not see just one single cataclysmic crisis but “an avalanche of crises” that:

all involve human beings gaining levels of intellectual and technological development that surpass their moral development—people becoming too smart, too powerful for their own good…Human beings leave their identity, their life, their story as creatures in God’s creation…As they become more independent, they lose their connection to God, their sense of dependence…So they experience alienation from God.” ((McLaren, Story We Find Ourselves, 53-54, 56.))

In other words, as humans “come of age” they grow beyond God, and their relationship deteriorates in progressive, fitful “experiences of alienation.” McLaren describes this progress and growth in his book, The Secret Message of Jesus in this way:

[Adam’s and Eve’s] noble status quickly deteriorates as they disconnect from God and reject any limits placed upon their freedom by their Creator. The results of their disobedience are visible as the story unfolds—a sense of shame and alienation from God and one another, violence of brother against brother, disharmony with creation itself, misunderstanding and conflict among tribes and nations. ((Brian McLaren, The Secret Message of Jesus (Nashville: Word Publishing, 2006), 27.))

For McLaren, there is no event of “the Fall” or corresponding “original sin” and “total depravity” in which humanity is plunged into rebellion and alienation, resulting in an inherited sinful nature. ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 43. In an endnote McLaren asserts that these terms “frequently derive their meaning from a story that is, I believe, inherently un-Jewish and unbiblical, and so when they are read into the biblical story, they distort and pollute it.” 266n.15.)) Instead, the framing narrative of humanity is one of systemic progression and ascent, with corresponding descent resulting in “new depths of moral evil and social injustice.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 51.)) In his re-imagined framing narrative, individuals are no longer the issue, but the human systems; “socioeconomic and technological advances” lead to moral evil and social injustice, not individuals acting upon their sinful nature. ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 51.)) In the words of McLaren, “it’s a story about the downside of ‘progress’—a story of human foolishness…the human turn toward rebellion…the human intention toward evil.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 51.)) The problem isn’t that humans rebelled against God and are rebells or that humans did evil and are evil. For McLaren, the story is one of humans creating evil and damaging and savaging God’s good world, it is a story where “humans have evil intent,” instead of being evil themselves. Those evil intentions are not the result of an evil heart, but the bad systems and stories that consume humans.

This framing narrative first written in The Story We Find Ourselves In evolved into a later work in which McLaren addresses the big questions and problems that face our world, insisting that everything must change. In his similarly titled book, Everything Must Change, McLaren believes the main dysfunctions of humanity are ethical; he frames the crisis of the human condition as a crisis of prosperity, equity, and security. ((Brian McLaren, Everything Must Change (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2007), 5.)) These three crises form the “cogs” in what McLaren terms the suicide machine. ((McLaren, Everything Must Change, 53.)) The suicide machine is a metaphor for “the systems that drive our civilization toward un-health and un-peace.” ((McLaren, Everything Must Change, 53.)) McLaren envisions the driving force behind our broken, problematic condition to reside in the systems of the world, rather than in the individual person. According to him, humanity suffers from a “dysfunction of our societal machinery,” which is operated not by single individuals but by humanity acting together.” ((McLaren, Everything Must Change, 53.)) In other words, individual sinful human nature is not the problem, but rather a universal sin of society.

Primarily, the dysfunction and sin of society is measured by our collective framing story. No mater what group we belong to, we are under the influence of that group’s framing story, where we learn our origin, our destination, and how we should act in between. According to McLaren, our world’s dominant framing story is failing for three main reasons: it does not “guide us to respect environmental limits, but instead inspires pursuit of as much resource use and waste production as possible,” resulting in an unsustainable way of life; it does not “lead us to work for the common good,” but instead encourage each group to become “a competing us/them faction that seeks advantage for ‘us,’ not a common good for all;” and “our framing story does not lead these competing factions to reconcile peacefully,” instead locking our world “in a vicious cycle of tension between an anxious global empire of the rich and an angry global terrorist revolution of the poor.” ((McLaren, Everything Must Change, 68-70.))

In his latest book, McLaren illustrates this explanation of the human condition and reality of so-called “social sin.” Using the story of the Israelites in Exodus, he explains that it is a story of “liberation from the external oppression of social sin,” while also celebrating “liberation from the internal spiritual oppression of personal sin.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 58.)) Because McLaren does not believe that sin is part of human nature because of an event of rebellion, he must mean something different by “internal spiritual oppression of personal sin.” It seems even this internal oppression is related to the social systems of sin, because he asserts that people are freed from “the dominating powers of fear, greed, impatience, ingratitude, and so on.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 58.)) The power of Fear and Ingratitude, then are the oppressors, which in the Exodus narrative apparently results from years of being “debased by generations of slavery.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 58.)) This slave framing story, then, is what contributed to the Israelites communal and individual commitment to “fear, greed, impatience, ingratitude, and so on.” The internal compulsion toward greed, for example, was an internal power that resulted from the external system of slavery and bad framing narrative out of which Israel was liberated. Systems and bad framing narratives are our ultimate problem.

Unlike the traditional historic faith that locates the problem of the human condition in individual sinfulness and an inherited sinful nature, McLaren believes humans are in trouble because we are in bondage to the “dominant societal machinery,” which entices us to keep faith in its systems of wealthy, security, pleasure, and injustice. ((McLaren, Everything Must Change, 271.)) This faith and bondage has led to a sort of universal consciousness that is driven by destructive, dysfunctional framing stories. The global crises of which McLaren says we must be saved are the symptoms and consequences of the dysfunction, resulting in a collection of human evil. Dysfunctional societal machinery, destructive framing narratives, and collective human evil are our problems. They compel innately good humans to act badly, rather than in inner, natural compulsion.

McLaren’s understanding of the human condition and sin finds several points of connection to the theology of Ritschl. First, McLaren reflects Ritschl’s own rejection of the historic doctrine of original sin. In confronting the idea of original sin, Ritschl relegates it to the sphere of “doctrine,” insisting it is an intellectual idea that does not conform to experience. ((Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine. Edited by H.R. Mackintosh and A.B. Macaulay (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1902.), 328.)) Like McLaren, Ritschl rejects the notion that there was both an original righteousness and fall from that original constitution. ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 331.)) In fact, the doctrine of original sin that developed in the early church and was codified by Augustine out of this assumption ((Albrect Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion. Translated by Alice Mead Wing (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1901), 203.n27. Here he writes, “Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, ie., that the original inclination to evil transmitted in generation is for every one both personal guilt and subject to the divine sentence of eternal punishment, is not confirmed by any New Testament author.”)) is challenged by Ritschl to in no way reflect any New Testament authors: “Neither Jesus nor any of the New Testament writers either indicate or presuppose that sin is universal merely through natural generation.”((Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion, 203.n27.)) Likewise, the Reformed assertion that humans are incapable of doing good because of an inherent sinfulness of individuals is challenged as finding no assertion in the NT. ((Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion, 206-207.n4.)) He further argues that this notion of universal necessity of sinning and original sin is neither derived from the natural endowment of man, ((Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion, 204.)) nor is it transmitted from generation to generation or inherited. ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 348.)) Instead it is acquired.

McLaren describes the human narrative as one that is a “classic coming of age story.” In other words, the condition of humanity evolved. Instead of inheriting a sinful nature from Adam, the generations from our first human parents got trapped in an “avalanche of crises” that engulf humanity in dysfunctional systems and destructive stories. In the words of Ritschl, humanity is now caught in a “whole web of sinful actions and reaction, which presuppose and yet again increases the selfish bias in every man.” ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 350.)) Humans were created with the capacity to freely direct their impulses toward the “perfect common good” or highest good. ((Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion, 202.)) From the beginning humans were created with an internal goodness that was to be directed toward the highest common good, which the Kingdom of God reflects. Now we are caught in webs similar to McLaren’s dysfunctional systems and destructive stories that have escalated over time, webs which compel everyman toward selfish acts.

Was it inevitable that humans would use their freedom to choose the opposite of the perfect common good? “The possibility and probability of sinning…can be derived from the fact that the human will…is a constantly growing power whose activity also is not from the first accompanied by a complete knowledge of the good.” ((Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion, 204.)) Like McLaren’s assertion that human power grew and developed over time from hunter-gatherers to empire dwellers, Ritschl suggests that the capacity for humans to act grew and developed over time, which inevitably led to an abuse of freedom. This freedom from our first parents resulted in a “defect in reverence and in trust in God, or indifference and mistrust of Him,” which is the basic form of their sin. ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 334.)) In other words they lost “their connection to God, their sense of dependence…So they experienced alienation from God.”((McLaren, Story We Find Ourselves, 56.))

This loss of connection, dependence, reverence, and trust in God becomes universal in Adam in that every generation has actively participated in the transgression of freely mistrusting God and rejecting the perfect moral good. These collective acts have resulted in what Ritschl calls the “kingdom of sin” or “web of sin.” For Ritschl, the kingdom of sin is an alternative hypothesis to original sin that explains the human condition. ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 344.)) This kingdom or universal sinfulness is the collective human sins that act as a collective conscious out of which individuals themselves act. He also describes this kingdom and universality as “united action,” which leads to a re-enforcement of sin in every generation: “United sin, this opposite of the kingdom of God, rests upon all as a power which at least limits the freedom of the individual to do good.”((Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion, 206.))

Like McLaren’s dysfunctional systems and destructive stories, the sin that swirls around us compels us to sin, which cashes out as a sinful bias that is acquired by individuals because of bad examples. As Ritschl explains, “The sinful bias…is not described by [Paul] as inherited, and can with perfect reason be understood as something acquired. In the individual [the sinful bias] comes to be the principle of the will’s direction.” ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 346, 347.)) This individual bias contributes to the larger whole of “wickedness and untruth” in what Ritschl terms a “web of sinful action.” It is the collective contribution of individual actions and reactions and also “increases the selfish bias in every man.” ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 350.)) This “web of sin” is the dysfunctional systems and destructive stories of which McLaren speaks.

Both McLaren and Ritschl believe our human problem is ethical and not inherent to our nature. Instead, the web that surrounds us of bad systems and stories creates a bias within us toward selfishness and compels us to sin. Our solution must also be ethical, as well as the one bearing it.