So I come to the end of my review, taking the last three chapters together. McLaren is coming in for a landing here, and these three chapters can be managed in one setting. In these last chapters, McLaren explains why he is depressed/yet hopeful, why he is emergent, and why he is unfinished.
In case we weren’t sufficiently appalled with the world religions chapter, McLaren reiterates his point. “I suggested that Jesus didn’t come to start another religion, which would include the Christian religion, I wasn’t kidding” (p. 267). Now there are two ways to take this. If by this, he only means that Jesus didn’t come to establish an ideology or an ism, and the point is Leithart’s in Against Christianity, then amen, and pour it on. But this is not what McLaren is talking about at all. Leithart is against etherized abstractions, and is for the church, which in McLaren’s world has receded entirely into the background. McLaren again refers to “why [he believes] a person can affiliate with Jesus in the Kingdom-of-God dimension without affiliating with him in the religious kingdom of Christianity” (p. 282). In other words, a Buddhist can “affiliate” with Jesus by thinking propositions in his head, without having to be baptized or needing to join together with other Christians in the body of Christ, hearing the Word, and partaking of the Lord’s Supper together. In McLaren’s world, ideas about Jesus are sufficient.
In the next chapter, McLaren quotes someone who explains that “emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts” (p. 276). If this is all McLaren means, then okay, what else is new? Christian thinkers have been talking about this for centuries. McLaren asks if emergent thinking will in any sense “arrive.” If we have been paying any attention at all, we should know the answer. “Will this emerging form finally get it right? Of course not” (p. 285). But while McLaren assumes that emergent thinking will not in any sense “arrive,” he fails to ask if it is in any fundamental sense “departing.” On the journey toward the elusive and distant truth, must every pilgrim be somehow closing on it, somehow improving? Or does anyone ever veer off and head toward the Pit? If they do, then how can we know? How can we warn them?
McLaren knows exactly what his program sounds like. “Perhaps this sounds to you like a heterodox compromise with pluralistic relativism” (p. 285). Yep. It sure does. McLaren insists that he is not a relativist, but his explanation of why not left me agape. He in effect says that he is not a relativist, but that we all have to become relativists until we, with Jim Morrison, break on through to the other side. Relativism is the treatment, the medicine, for recovering modernists. McLaren says that “because I and others, while we aren’t ‘for’ pluralistic relativism, do see it as a kind of needed chemotherpy” (p. 286).
Some of McLaren’s defenders are on a high horse, and simply do not understand how I could possibly say what I am saying about McLaren. But McLaren understands why I would say it, and he returns fire. “Again, I understand why people often accuse me (and others on this emergent path) of pluralistic relativism. If you hold to a modern, exclusivist, absolutist, colonial version of Christianity, anything not ‘us’ seems to be ‘them'” (p. 287). According to his version of why he seems relativistic to me, he uses four words to describe me, and others like me. They are modern (which I deny), exclusivist (which I affirm because Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, no man comes . . .), absolutist (which I am because God is there, and He has spoken), and colonial (which I deny, having sold my powdered wig last year in a yard sale).
“Could there be an approach that avoids both stagnant, modern fundamentalism and narcissistic boomeritis? Is it possible that modern, exclusivist, absolutist Christians are right — pluralistic relativism is dangerous? But is it possible that the way ahead is not to stop short of a pluralistic phase, but rather to go through it and pass beyond it, emerging into something beyond and better?” (p. 287). Instead of explaining what a biblical alternative to modern fundamentalism and “boomer” narcissism might be, that we might consider it, McLaren tells us to press on through the prevailing relativism, and we will disover on the other side what a cool thing we have done. Just like the dictatorship of the proletariat will “wither away,” so the relativism that we press on through will vanish, and we will discover “an inclusive, non-modernist, non-fundamentalist faith that is vibrant, and real, and dynamic, and whoa, and no, I can’t really explain it right now. It’s just a third way, all right? Not relativistic, though we do have to go through the relativism, and not fundamentalist, but on the other side we will believe . . . something. For some reason. Now, take my hand, close your eyes, and come with me.” My summary.
His summary says that we have to look “beyond the current alternatives of modern fundamentalism/absolutism and pluralistic relativism” (p. 287). This third way, after the chemo treatments of relativism, what will it look like? Will it be an absolutism, but not fundamentalist? Or will it be relativism, but not pluralist? Or will it be a third thing entirely, some kind of absotivalism, that we cannot envisage right now, peering, as we are, through the glass darkly? But if we cannot see it right now, can McLaren? If he can, why won’t he explain it to us? If he cannot, then why is he talking about it? How does he know what is on the other side of the chemo? Is there any chance that we will come out the other side with all of our modernist cancer, and none of our postmodern hair?
McLaren says things that, understood in a sane and Christian world, are almost true enough. “To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall” (p. 293). To make this a statement of a genuinely orthodox faith, it should be emended to read “not to claim to have every truth captured.” For if I have no truth mounted on the wall, I cannot have the truth that truths cannot be mounted on the wall mounted on the wall, and I really ought to shut up. McLaren teases us with the possibility that “truths” might be getting genuinely found, but he never tells us what they are. He says, describing our long treasure hunt, “We’re finding enough to keep us going” (p. 293). But what has he found that he knows? What has he found that he can just tell us, without equivocation, that he knows?
McLaren is coy about it, and he pretends as though a claim to know anything is tantamount to a claim to know everything. If I claim to know, with assurance, that Jesus rose from the dead, then I am somehow verging on hubristic claims to omniscience. “It’s like claiming to love your spouse ‘right,’ with technical perfection or by following appropriate directions and rules, which sounds like grounds for marriage counseling” (p. 294). Yes, indeed, husbands who claim to know everything about their wives are fools and blind. And they need marriage counseling. But so do husbands need marriage counseling who don’t know anything about their wives. “What color are her eyes?” “Um, I don’t want to fall into Enlightenment dogmatisms here.” Oh, for Pete’s sake.
McLaren ends the books by borrowing some gloriously orthodox feathers from Chesterton in order to adorn his closing pages. But Chesterton represented a completely different mode of thought from McLaren, and this intellectually dishonest display is as good a way as any for McLaren to end a book like this.
I will be posting once more on McLaren, with a short list of questions that anyone who would defend McLaren needs to answer.