Just finished McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christian. All in all, taking one thing with another, the book is an almost perfect jumble of cant, cliche, and bad trouble.
A number of very true points are made throughout the book, but the problem is that they are offered as part of a breathless discovery of a new postmodern world, when in actual fact they are truths that every wise pastor has known for centuries. Where the book is true, it is not new (as it pretends to be). And where it is new, it is a very fine artifact of the mental smudginess that passes for theological discourse these days.
Assumed standards of goodness abound throughout the book, and these standards are clearly “caught” from the surrounding zeitgeist, and the pretense is then made that they arose from wrestling with the text of Scripture. For just one example, the main mentor guy Neo is making the (perfectly valid) point that the kingdom is larger than the church, but then he goes on to express it this way. “The bigger circle of the kingdom represents God’s work in the world at large–God’s concern for the environment, God’s work with people of other religions, God’s identification with the poor and oppressed, God’s dispensing of artistic gifts so that artists can express beauty and glory and truth, that sort of thing” (p. 83). In short, the kingdom of God turns out to be the sort of soft socialism that CNN keeps trying to teach us.
Of course the Church is less than the kingdom, and of course, what we are becoming in the community of parish life in the Church informs and directs our engagement with the world. So let’s try another form of this, paraphrasing McLaren’s words. Only this time, the Christians involved live in Idaho and not under the shadow of Levithan in the D.C. area. Can red-staters play this game too?
“The bigger circle of the kingdom represents God’s work in the world at large–God’s concern for renewable energy development and logging contracts, God’s work in establishing democracy in Iraq courtesy of the U.S. Army, God’s identification with Second Amendment activists, God’s dispensing of business acumen so that merchants can make a pile, create jobs, that sort of thing.”
Here is the problem. Facile identification of whatever it is we are doing with the growth of the kingdom of God is a perennial temptation, right, left and center. The principle stands — we are engaged in building the kingdom. But if we try to do it by catching at each passing fad, we are going to look as ridiculous as a pair of seventies bell-bottoms, and we will look this silly (in a very short time) because we cared so much about contemporary “relevance.” McLaren thinks we are on the cusp of a postmodern revolution, and we just have to adapt. But maybe we are on the cusp of a red state Republican ascendancy, a century or more of American empire. Why don’t we “just have to adapt” to that? The answer is that the Christian faith once delivered to the saints is neither medieval, modern or postmodern. To apply C.S. Lewis at this crucial point, whatever is not eternal is eternally out of date.