Some of McLaren’s chapters are outrageous, some are stupefying, some are intellectually dishonest, while others, like this next one, are just plain sad. This is the chapter where McLaren explains how he is a “charismatic/contemplative.” I am not really going to say anything about the sad parts, and there were only two other comments worth a response here.
“Catholic contemplatives, it seems, have had an easier time with joy than non-charismatics Protestants, preoccupied as they tend to be with modern rationality, abstract theory, and depressing topics such as total depravity” (p. 177). Statements like this make me wonder if McLaren knows anything at all about the history of ascetic contemplation. There are contemplatives in the history of the Catholic church who, when compared to some Calvinist rolling around in his private stash of piled up total depravity, can make him look like he is doing cartwheels down the street, singing “Keep On the Sunny Side.”
But the statement most deserving of comment was this one. “But the Spirit of Jesus is real, active, powerful, present, and wonderful. Of this I am deeply confident” (p. 174). I am interested in that phrase deeply confident. Now as written, this does not contrast sharply with what we, who are supposedly in the grip of dat ol debbel Englightenment, have come to call certainty or assurance. Now assurance, when conservative Christians have it, is supposed to be a product of Cartesian rationalism. So what is it when McLaren is deeply confident? Why is his deep confidence not arrogant? Isn’t it an epistemological claim? About how the Spirit of Jesus is active, powerful, present and wonderful?
There are a couple of possibilities here. One is that McLaren, this book notwithstanding, has not shaken some of his old bad Enlightenment habits. This expression is just a throwback to his conservative youth. Another is that while he uses phrases like deeply confident he does not mean deeply confident, but rather something like not despairing yet. Teddy Roosevelt called such words “weasel words” — words where the content has been sucked out of them the way a weasel sucks out the inside of an egg, leaving only the shell. Another possibility is that he believes that the subjective emotion of being “deeply confident” is possible apart from a word from God in Scripture. If mediated directly through a contemplative experience inside one individual’s head, it is not really authoritative and/or threatening. In other words, a walk in the midst of autumn glory is the basis for deep confidence, while to have deep confidence as the result of having read through the Gospel of John is Enlightenment arrogance, and a sneaky kind of foundationalism.
I have been enjoying myself rereading Pilgrim’s Progress, and just yesterday came across a phrase that sums up my views on the emergent church nicely. C.S. Lewis quotes the same passage in The Abolition of Man, where he is fighting this same enemy in a different guise, the enemy of subjectivism. “Then it came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a Slave.”