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.
As this examination has already illustrated, Ritschl and McLaren believe our problem is the dysfunctional systems and destructive stories of our world. The solution was God calling Jesus as a messenger to show a better way of living and teach a better story: the Kingdom system and Kingdom story. McLaren and Ritschl agree that he is the vehicle of the Divine because of the way he lived and taught. Through his vocation as founder of the Kingdom of God Jesus was filled with God—meaning He acted like God would act on earth—and ultimately revealed the character of God. In so acting and revealing he is the vehicle for an ethical solution to our ethical problem.
McLaren has written of his journey toward better understanding the dynamics of this solution. Perhaps this theological exploration was most expressed in Everything Must Change when he asked, “Is Jesus’ healing and transforming framing story really powerful enough to save the world?” ((McLaren, Everything Must Change, 269.)) Because McLaren believes our systems and stories are the problem, our solution is found in an alternative system and story, which we find in Jesus’ message on the Kingdom of God. McLaren answers his question on the following page:
If we believe that God graciously offers us a new way, a new truth, and a new life, we can be liberated from the vicious, addictive cycles of our suicidal framing stories. That kind of faith will save us…our failure to believe [Jesus’ good news] will keep us from experiencing its saving potential, and so we’ll spin on in the vicious cycles of Caesar. ((McLaren, Everything Must Change, 270.))
According to McLaren, our salvation is found in being liberated from the systems and stories of the world and believing in the new system and story—the new way, truth, and life—found in Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom. We find salvation when we “transfer our trust from the way of Caesar to the way of Christ.” ((McLaren, Everything Must Change, 271.)) McLaren urges us to transfer our trust from the world’s systems and stories—represented by Caesar—to the system and story of Christ, which is the Kingdom of God. Ultimately, salvation is participation in the Kingdom of God, which he calls participatory eschatology.
While conventional eschatologies have cultivated “resignation, fear, and arrogant aggression,” participatory eschatology inspires “a passion to do good, whatever the suffering, sacrifice, and delay because of a confidence that God will win in the end; courage, because God’s Spirit is at work in the world and what God begins God will surely bring to completion; a sense of urgency, because we are protagonists in a story; and humility and kindness, because we are aware of our ability to miss the point, lose our way, and play on the wrong side.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 200.)) In fact, the death and resurrection of Jesus are paradigms for this salvation in which we ourselves are to participate in anticipation of this coming Kingdom: we join with Jesus in dying (metaphorically to our pride and agendas, literally in martyrdom as a witness to God’s Kingdom and justice); and rising again in triumph “through the mysterious but real power of God. In this cruciform way, we participate in the ongoing work of God, and we anticipate its ultimate success.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 200-201.))
For McLaren, our dying and rising with Christ are symbolic of our rejection of and triumph over the dysfunctional systems and destructive stories of our world. Salvation comes not from dying to the old sinful nature by believing in Jesus’ death and rising to new life by believing in his resurrection. Instead, we are called to die to the bad ethics of the world and rise to new life by living like Jesus. Salvation is entirely ethical.
Because we are called to live in the system and story of the Kingdom by living the teachings of Jesus, ultimate salvation at judgment will be based on behavior, not beliefs. “God will examine the story of our lives for signs of Christlikeness…These are the parts of a person’s life that will be deemed worthy of being saved, remembered, rewarded, and raised to new beginnings.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 204.)) Rather than believing in Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and God resurrecting the Son, giving food and water to the needy, showing mercy, welcoming the stranger, and being generous like Jesus is what God cares about, what will lead to salvation.
Conversely, “all the unloving, unjust, non-Christlike parts of our lives…will be burned away, counted as unworthy, condemned, and forgotten forever.” ((McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 204.)) In the end ultimate salvation is dependent upon our ethics, whether we walk the path of Jesus in word and deed. Since “no good deed will be forgotten,” we are urged to “start doing the next good thing now and never give up until the dream comes true,” until God’s Kingdom comes. ((McLaren, Everything Must Change, 146.)) Human salvation is not found in the broken body and shed blood on the cross, but in the new system and story of the Kingdom coming to earth as founded by Jesus’ life and teachings.
It is important to note that the cross carries little soteriological significance for McLaren beyond pointing to an example of love and suffering in the face of the oppressive system and story of Caesar. ((n fact, in the part of A New Kind of Christianity that is designed to answer the Narrative Questions (Ch. 4-6) the event of the cross is neither emphasized nor mentioned.)) In fact, in his counter narrative to the traditional view of the cross—which maintains “God sent Jesus into the world to absorb all the punishment for our sins” ((McLaren, Story We Find Ourselves, 101.))—one of McLaren’s characters insists this view “sounds like divine child abuse,” ((McLaren, Story We Find Ourselves, 102.)) as if God the Father was abusing His Son on the cross. Instead, the cross is about Jesus’ vulnerability and accepting suffering, showing God’s loving heart, and showing us that Kingdom sacrifice is not violent but reconciliation through suffering. ((McLaren, Story We Find Ourselves, 105.)) For McLaren, salvation comes when we follow Jesus’ example of non-violent vulnerability and suffering, which culminated at the cross.
His view of salvation agrees with the theologian Jürgen Moltmann, whom he quotes: “The one [Jesus] will triumph who first died for the victims and then also the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through the vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which, from the victims and executioners, creates…a new humanity.” ((Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (London: SCM, 1974, 178. As quoted in McLaren, New Kind of Christianity, 206)) This view does not stem from the apostle Paul’s, which viewed the death and resurrection of Christ revealing a new righteousness from God that comes through faith in that death and resurrection. ((See Rm. 3:21-26.)) Likewise, a new humanity is not born out of the defeat of sin through death and the resurrection, as Paul argues. ((Rm. 5:12-20.)) Instead, this new righteousness and new humanity is ethical; salvation from the dysfunctional systems and destructive stories comes because of Jesus’ acts of love in the face of hate and suffering in the face of vengeance. Likewise, an alternative community is born through similar ethical acts of love and suffering; a new humanity happens when people participate in the righteous ethic of Jesus.
Like McLaren, Ritschl rejects the traditional substitutionary view of the cross as providing the means of salvation for humanity: “The view that Christ, by the vicarious endurance of the punishment deserved by sinful men, propitiated the justice or wrath of God, and thus made possible the grace of God, is not found on any clear and distinct passage in the New Testament.” ((Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion, 220.n3.)) And like McLaren, Ritschl does not believe the solution to man’s problem of alienation comes through faith in the substitution of Christ on the cross. Instead, salvation comes through attaining the Kingdom of God. According to Ritschl, “The kingdom of God is the divinely vouched-for highest good of the community…the ethical ideal for whose attainment the members of the community bind themselves together through their definite reciprocal action.” ((Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion, 174-175.)) Ritschl explicitly claims that the Kingdom of God is the solution to the problem of mankind when he writes:
[the kingdom of God] offers the solution to the question propounded or implied in all religions: namely, how man, recognizing himself as a part of the world, and at the same time as being capable of a spiritual personality, can attain that dominion over the world, as opposed to limitation by it, which this capability gives him the right to claim.
Here Ritschl reveals that the problem is very similar to McLaren’s: humanity must rise above the world, which is the bad systems and stories. In fact, “A universal ethical Kingdom of God is the supreme end of God Himself in the world,” ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 451.)) and thus the end toward which all of humanity is to move. This movement toward attaining the ethical ideal of the Kingdom is possible through the justification Christ provides, two concepts which are in reality one in the same.
While others often separate justification and the Kingdom of God, claiming that “justification and reconciliation concern men as sinners, while the Kingdom of God concerns them as reconciled,” Ritschl insists this dichotomy is “not quite exact.” ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 31.)) Instead, “the conception of the Kingdom of God and justification are homogeneous,” they are one and the same idea. ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 33.)) The aim of justification and reconciliation is “lordship over the world,” it is transcending and moving beyond the systems and stories of the world through “dominion over the world and participation in the Kingdom of God.” ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 609, 628.)) Though McLaren doesn’t frame it in terms of justification and reconciliation—that would be too similar to a Reformed framing—he does insist we need deliverance from the world as Ritschl does.
As Ritschl defines reconciliation: “[it] is not merely the ground of deliverance from the guilt of sin…it is also the ground of deliverance from the world, and the ground of spiritual and moral lordship over the world.” ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 357.)) Rather than deliverance from the condition of sin, we receive deliverance from the effects of sin, which in reality is ethical deliverance. This is further emphasized when Ritschl claims justification leads to eternal life now, “which is present in our experiences of freedom or lordship over the world, and in the independence of self-feeling both from the restrictions and from the impulses due to natural causes or particular sections of society.”((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 534-534.))
That Kingdom is the product of “love-inspired action” and “the righteous conduct in which the members of the Christian community share in the bringing in of the kingdom of God [which] has its universal law and its personal motive in love to God and to one’s neighbour.” ((Ritschl, Instruction in the Christian Religion, 178, 174.)) The Kingdom is not the eschatological reign of God per se that will restore the world from the ontological consequences of sin, but rather the “moral society of nations” and ultimately “the organization of humanity through action inspired by love.” ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 10, 12.)) Salvation, then, is found by aligning one’s life with the teachings and way of Jesus and participating in his own vocation as the prototype of a life of love, and liberation and elevation from the worldly motives, systems, and stories. ((Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 469.)) Similarly, McLaren exclusively emphasizes a salvation from the systems and stories of the world through aligning one’s life with Christ and participation in the ethical, earthly Kingdom of God. Our ethical problem is solved not through belief in the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross and his defeat of death through the resurrection, but instead good behavior and ethical deliverance from the world.
