Time for our daily dose of squirting water down the hole into the postmodern rabbit warren, as part of my on-going project of trying to prevent these guys from emerging into the garden of orthodoxy in order to nibble on the carrots of truth.
In his next chapter, Brian McLaren discusses why he is still willing to use the term evangelical to describe himself. He distinguishes between Evangelicals, who are associated in his mind with the Religious Right (p. 116), and evangelicals, who may be much more open to being called post-evangelicals, joining in together with the post-liberals, post-modernists, post-conservatives, and all other post-thinkers (p. 121).
In the course of this, ladeling out the post-generosity, McLaren explains “why many younger evangelicals don’t want to be identified with an older generation of Evangelical leaders whose name I won’t mention” (p. 115). And this is a characteristic of numerous ecumenical pioneers of our day, a characteristic that many pastors could tell you about. It happens in local churches, and it happens on a national level. In order to achieve ecumenicity and good will around the globe and throughout all the ecclesiastical corridors at high levels, certain cantankerous individuals will start fights with all the Christians they actually know, dismissing them as moss-backed barriers to peace and unity. These are the people who strive for unity with people they wouldn’t know from Adam’s house cat, and can’t get along with anybody that has actual flesh and blood from their own tradition. And with several layers of literary irony operating, they fight with all the people they know over the doctrine of unity, and then go on to “connect” with “people they don’t know” because these other “people” share with them a distaste for “abstractions.” So a little village forms on the Internet, let us call it emergent Gnosticville, where people can gather around the abstract idea that living situated lives in concrete contextualized settings is the way to go. There is a small initiation rite which requires expressions of contempt for all the Christians you actually know and live with, but this is a small price to pay for the Grand Idea that we are living in the post-Grand Idea era.
By evangelical, McLaren primarily is referring to an attitude. He does mention four specific characteristics that are shared by Evangelicals and evangelicals — high respect for the Bible, emphasis on personal conversion, teaching that intimacy with God is possible, and a desire to share the faith — but the main thing he is interested in is the attitude of passion. In discussing this characteristic evangelical passion (which McLaren is right about), we have to put it in perspective. The passion, however misdirected at times, comes from somewhere. And that somewhere is a commitment to the Bible as the absolute Word of God, and to the gospel as the objective truth of God. These are hard, unyielding, objective facts. They are not raw uninterpreted facts (as Van Til would note), but God has established them. There they are.
Evangelical passion is like the speed of a hot car. The objective truth of the gospel is the engine, black, covered with oil, not very pretty sometimes, but it is what makes the car go fast. Emergent, sensitive types want a kinder, gentler engine. They don’t want this “propitiation” gunk, and it creates emissions n’ stuff, and the noise scares some seekers who don’t want to get in. Some creative thinkers among them begin to muse a bit. “How much does that engine weigh? Hundreds of pounds? And how is it possible for something that weighs so much to not weigh us down? Hmmm?”
After you hoik the engine out, an illusion of that old passion for speed can be maintained for a short time. Tony Campolo waves his arms when he speaks. That’s passionate. Must be evangelical. But in reality it is someone sitting behind the wheel of a car up on cinder blocks, making evangelical motorboat noises. “Vroom! Vroom! Beep, beep!”
When will our hungry, approval-starved souls learn that nothing is more irrelevant than a lust for relevance? The Church has done this before. At the beginning of the century, a large portion of the church went liberal in the lust for relevance. Now they have scores of empty churches, and scattered handfuls of muttering ministers who preach like a flat brain wave. How did that happen? Whose advice was followed at that time? And was it anything like the advice that is being offered to us now? You bet. After a time, the drivers of the cars on blocks forget how to make the vroom vroom sounds, and so they have to go off in search of people whose cars still go, talk them into taking that icky engine out, put it on blocks, and then you evangelicals (what a passionate people you are) can teach us how to make those noises with our lips.
In a footnote, McLaren proves his hyper-sensitivity by describing how he has met some gracious fundamentalists and some very ungracious liberals. “Labels must be used with a wince, and I wince at having to use them here” (p. 117). Of course, labels can certainly be tricky, and we have to learn how to use them with care. We have to qualify what we say, when necessary, but the Bible is full of labels. So painful? Never used without a wince? I guess I can identify. I have trouble getting through sentences myself. The nouns really bother me.
“At the end of the day, I hope evangelical can become an inclusive and positive term” (p. 121). If it does, just picture a farm out of town with lots of tall grass, some Louisiana lawn furniture scattered about, and lots of cars on blocks. Does it really matter at that time which pretend drivers make the best noises?