When C.S. Lewis undertook to describe “mere” Christianity, he stated that he had no intention of discussing, for example, the subject of Mary. Few subjects had, in his view, the capacity for derailing the train of Charity than this one did. But he did not just sidestep the question. He noted that for devout Roman Catholics, the Protestant neglect of Mary was not just a false teaching, but a false teaching perpetrated by obvious cads and bounders. On the Protestant side, the Roman Catholic veneration of Mary touched off a jealousy that went down, as Lewis noted clearly, to the roots of monotheism itself. In other words, Lewis knew exactly what he was sidestepping, and he let us know that he knew.
In contrast to this clear-headed approach, Brian McLaren continues to push his tray down the stainless steel rods of cafeteria christianity, and he stops at the next bin and peers through the sneeze guard. He asks the lady behind there to give him a little dollop of catholicism.
McLaren begins this chapter by describing a visit he took to a garden in Our Lady of Peace Roman Catholic Church. There in the garden was a “huge statue” of Mary. “An Asian woman knelt at Mary’s feet, obviously in prayer and in some anguish, her hand reaching up and resting affectionately on Mary’s big toe. Sitting there, I was deeply moved by the woman’s piety and by Mary’s image. How ironic, I thought, for a boy raised Protestant to be sitting there with tears in his eyes, moved by Our Lady of Peace and a humble Asian lady seeking peace. That day I became a little more Catholic and a little more catholic, too” (p. 221). This is nothing but sentimentalism with a thin, religious veneer. This has all the doctrinal rigor of a Touched By An Angel episode, not that I’ve seen one.
This is no hearty broth Catholicism. This is McLaren getting a lump in his throat from watching someone else pray to a statue of Mary, who is really in heaven, and this real Mary is the mother of Jesus, who is the Son of God. This is way too removed from the action, but it is the only kind of catholicism you can get at the cafeteria. This is like chicken soup that somebody made by boiling water and having the chicken walk through it on stilts.
McLaren moves from his sentimentalist appreciation of this prayer to Mary to another statement of the liberalism that is driving this book. “From this understanding we place less emphasis on whose lineage, rites, doctrines, structures, and terminology are right and more emphasis on whose action, service, outreach, kindness, and effectiveness are good. (That is one of those sentences that might deserve a re-read.)” (p. 223). It actually deserves a re-write. I called it liberalism because this classic dualism is right out of the liberal playbook. Opposing right doctrine and right living is not a scriptural opposition. You do not have to deemphasize one in order to have the other. As Warfield once put it, this is like arguing over whether a soldier needs his right leg or his left leg more. The pretended opposition of “ethics” to “doctrine” was the mantra of the liberals in the early twentieth century. And of course, those who favor ethics over doctrine will soon have neither. And now McLaren is pushing it here.
“We believe God wants the Christian church to be an accepting, welcoming community, not an exclusive, elitist community” (p. 225). Okay, fine, but we still need to flesh out the direct objects. Accepting of what? And those elitist churches, why are they bad? They are exclusive of what? I think we could all agree that elitist churches that exclude people based on their inability to maintain a membership in the country club would be bad. And I think that we would also say that to be a welcoming community for the local Gestapo “Adolf Was Misunderstood” Fan Club would be problematic as well. Accepting and exclusive are meaningless terms by themselves. What are you accepting, and why? What are you excluding, and why?
Catholicism respects tradition (p. 227), and so McLaren respects their respect of tradition. He then quotes Chesterton’s great comment on how tradition is allowing dead people to have a voice in current affairs. And we get a little kink in our hose. “While this view of tradition gave some confidence, it felt smothering to others. Ironically, some reacted and created a kind of biblicism that was equally smothering” (p. 227). The problem with that darn old tradition, n’ dead people voting n’ stuff, is that, well, it just feels smothering to some. But for others, it is not smothering at all. Gives them confidence. What’s a guy to do? Well, the one thing we can’t do is go home and have Mom serve us whatever she fixed. We have to go to the pomo cafeteria and ask for some of that dish that reminds us of a food that a friend was once served by his mom. And he told us about it once.
Tradition is smothering to some, and not smothering to others. This is why this tradition or that one, or a combination of them, is according to McLaren, left up to the Consumer. McLaren is trafficking in catholic spiritualities, and is trying to evoke some kind of scratch n’ sniff sense of ecumenicity. I can be (and have been) good friends with devout Roman Catholics. But nothing is gained on either side by hypocrisy and pretence, and sacharrine goo. Friends don’t need to do the pseudo-listening, faux-empathy kind of routine. I would only want the kind of Catholic friend who told me, plainly, what he believed, and wasn’t ashamed of his stupid rosary. I would want to be the same kind of friend for him, and not be ashamed of the fact that I pastor a church that started in 1975. And we would no doubt give each other a hard time about each item respectively, along with other issues that ocurred to us. But listening some of the estrogenic ecumenism these days makes me feel like I being made to listen to pillow talk between lesbians, and I would very much like to be somewhere else.
But back to the huge statue of Mary. “. . . I realized just a little, I think, of what Catholics know more deeply. By venerating Mary (not worshiping her of course!), we come more fully to know who we are: simple humans, like Mary, called upon to bear Christ in our bodies, through our lives, to our world, whispering, ‘I am the Lord’s servant.’ Not only that, but as I sat there, I realized how impoverished my Protestant faith was with its exclusive male focus” (p. 228). This kind of Feminism Lite has been pervasive throughout McLaren’s book, but now look what he has done. By saying that we are not to worship Mary (of course) and that we are supposed to break out of our Protestant tendency to focus exclusively on the male, and that we do this by not worshipping Mary (of course), but rather by venerating her, McLaren has actually given us an argument for the eternal subordination of the female. The male God gets the Worship and the female Not God gets the Veneration, which is not worship (of course). By trying to straddle two incompatible positions, McLaren has just fallen between two stools. Feminism and the Christian faith are utterly inconsistent, and so McLaren (and his defenders) need to choose.
But feminism is actually hostile, not only to the Christian faith, but also to true femininity. And the Christian faith is the true friend of women, at least those women who want to be women. A Trinitarian approach to worship and life, in contrast to feminism, understands that everything in this created order answers to something within the Godhead. This includes femininity. Male and female He created them, in the image of God He created them. But femininity is defined by that reality within the Godhead, and it is within the nature of the triune God Himself that we find the ultimate source of the harmonious glories of both masculinity and femininity (along with the source of the glories of everything else). The triune God is the only creator God, and this means that everything that is came from Him. But this is not accomplished as though God the Father were like Zeus, and needed a consort. We do not gain wisdom if we talk about it in accordance with the changing winds of feminist doctrine. The triune God contains the ultimate pattern of authority and submission, for example. But the triune God is holy, and does not contain the pattern of unhappy and pushy women, and apologetic and effeminate men.