I promise I won’t blog anything about Brian McLaren on Christmas Day. Apart from that, the only thing to say is that his next chapter is on Methodism, and coincidentally, so is mine!
McLaren has a good eye (as all adversaries tend to have) for how belief in objective truth goes to seed. As Chesterton puts it somewhere, if you leave a white post alone it will become a black post. And orthodoxy needs to be defended, at all times, not just from the heretics and trend-mongers, but also against nominalism and notionalism. And there has never been a stretch of nominalism in church history longer than fifteen minutes that McLaren does not see and lament. So true faith does drift, over time, into yeah, uh huh faith. Falling from your first love is hardly a new-fangled sin, as the Lord’s admonition to Ephesus should tell us. So when the orthodox commit the kind of sin that the orthodox are vulnerable to — e.g. hide-boundness, apathy, idolatry of confessions, etc. — they perform the kind of face plant that McLaren can readily see. But where Mclaren fails, spectacularly, is in identifying what the problem actually is.
He begins by describing the ministry that the early Methodists had among the coal miners, and describes how God did a marvelous work among them. But then he represents the problem this way: a converted coal miner, now a lay preacher, notices his daughter making eyes at a young coal miner who has just recently begun attending the society meetings. None of that, he thinks. “So at the next society meeting, he preaches a little harder than usual against sin and implies that sinners aren’t really that welcome anymore” (p. 217). But does anybody really think that Methodism began to get lethargic because of a firmer stand on sin? It is quite true that evangelical movements begin to go to seed when they substitute works for grace, and moralism for transformation. That does happen, and all the time. But if anyone thinks that the earlier messages on sin to be found among the Methodists would have made McLaren happy is just kidding himself. Notice how McLaren describes the kinds of problems that existed among the coal-miners. “The miners were probably planning to anesthetize their aching muscles and downtrodden hearts with strong drink, which might lead to wife beating and other sad outcomes” (pp. 215-216). Thus it is that therapeutic schmooze comes to Newcastle, and nobody is actually converted, but the coal miners began journaling about th “sad outcomes.”
In short, legalism does grow out of a period of dynamic reformation and revival, and legalism is hard on (some) sins in its stiff and brittle and ineffective way. And it is easy to protest this after the fact, as McLaren does, but the fact remains that the earlier (pre-legalistic) denunciations of sin were far more clear, authoritative, objective, and inflexible than the legalism is. And McLaren has to praise it because the fruit was so obviously good, but he also has to take care to ignore what such preachers actually believed, and what they actually preached. When you are dealing with hardened sinners, the Word must be preached as the jackhammer of God. But when the Word is “shared” as the feather duster of God, very little outside of flattery occurs. McLaren simply does not have a category for the blessedness of grace that results from dogmatic proclamation. “This is the absolute Word of the eternally gracious God. Deal with it.”
Broad brush treatments of church history are one thing, but gross distortion is quite another. McLaren represents the Reformation as Luther and Calvin creating an intellectual hierarchy to replace the organizational hierarchy of the Roman church. But alas, “nobody created a new system of spiritual formation”(p. 218). This was not just a slight oversight either. “Nobody did so in the sixteenth century, and nobody did so in the seventeenth or most of the eighteenth — until the Wesleys” (p. 218). When it comes to spiritual formation, just an apparent wasteland from the Reformation to the Wesleys. Reading something like this makes me just wonder what McLaren has been reading. Quite apart from the spectacular pastoral work of the Puritans (men like Burroughs or Watson), or the devotional brilliance of poets like Herbert or Taylor, or the faithful catechesis and education of tens of thousands of children, it has to be said that life in the congregation of Church is God’s program of spiritual formation, and it involves things like His appointed means of grace. Biblical spiritual formation happens centrally in public worship, and the recovery of public worship for the people of God was a central aspect of what the Reformation was all about. Having recovered the gospel, administration of the sacraments, participatory liturgy, and congregational psalm singing, the Reformers ought not to be asked a question about what they ever accomplished in the area of “spiritual formation.” What McLaren is urging is actually a central part of what the Reformation was against, which was the privitization of devotion, and to define “spiritual formation” in terms of personal quiet times is a return to that cul de sac.
But McLaren continues. “By the 1970s a strong new spiritual formation system had been developed among conservatives, drawing loosely (and often unintentionally) from the Methodist heritage, largely by so-called ‘parachurch’ organizations such as the Navigators, Campus Crusade for Christ, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship” (p. 219). Notice that he is defining spiritual formation in private, and individual terms. This is a problem with many of these programs–they disparage the public worship of God. I have heard many Christians define their “walk” in terms of personal Bible reading and witnessing, and not make any reference to their participation in the body of Christ at all. This is a problem, and well worth dealing with. But McLaren begins to criticize this approach for one of the good things it retained — systemtic knowledge of God and the Bible. This is how Mc “Few realized that much of this late-modern methodology had a thoroughly modern underlying goal: to inculcate a basic systematic theology, predicated on the purely modern notions that right thinking = right behavior, that more biblical content = better Christians, that knowledge = power” (p. 219). Now I don’t want to argue with McLaren about the things he is rebuking here. Go ahead, rebuke away. Anybody who thinks that right thinking is equal to right behavior, more biblical content is equal to better Christians, and that knowledge is equal to power ought to be rebuked, even by McLaren. What I can’t get around, or over, is McLaren’s bald statement that such errors are “purely modern notions.” So prior to Descartes, nobody ever did this? Any wise pastor should be able to tell you that these sins are as old as dirt.
Ironically, McLaren laments the absence of a systemtic approach to personal devotions this way: “The search is still in its infancy, hampered by a hard-to-shake addiction to modern thought and methodology in the church and the pressures of consumerism in the culture at large” (p. 220). But if you don’t want the consumer to be king, then you have to return to the wisdom of the wise Puritan, who preached a great sermon on how God prefers the gates of Zion to all the dwellings of Jacob. Public worship is to be preferred to private, and members of the Church are growing up into a perfect man, and they are being knit together by the means that God has established. For McLaren to identify the “pressures of consumerism in the culture at large” is something that beggars belief. How could McLaren be the kind of spiritually eclectic consumer that he is (one bundle from Methodism, a shopping bag from the anabaptists, a wrapped parcel from the Anglicans, and so on) in any other kind of culture? How could he have filled the trunk of his car at any place other than the mall?