There are many destructive things to be found in Brian McLaren’s “generous orthodoxy,” but as I bring this review to a close, I want to summarize some of the clearest problems here. I then want to offer a few thoughts on the subject of humility and heresy.
McLaren does not show us a way to submit to Scripture as the absolute Word of God (which is what it claims for itself), and he claims that all who seek to do so are somehow falling prey to Enlightenment assumptions. At the end of the day, this does not give us any true scriptural authority, but rather allows emergent writers to claim to have a “high” view of Scripture (whatever that means) while at the same time cherry-picking the passages they want to pay attention to. But unless we have defined the terms, what does a “high view” of Scripture mean? The scriptural position on Scripture itself is that it is inspired by God Himself, and that what the Bible says, God has said. McLaren is certainly free to differ with this, but he is not free to say that this difference represents a high view of Scripture. If the jots and tittles of Scripture are the very breath of God, if Scripture cannot be broken, if all things in Scripture must be fulfilled, then to differ with these sentiments is not to adopt a high view of Scripture. It is to adopt a lower view of Scripture. Throughout his book, McLaren presents us with this false alternative — either pomo (or pomo friendly) approaches to truth or your faith in Scripture is actually a theological form of Enlightenment foundationalism.
Secondly, McLaren is soft on certain bellweather cultural issues confronting the church. No, he is more than soft — he has capitulated. He is a feminist (of the evangelical variety) and he does not know if Paul’s prohibition of anal intercourse in the first century applies to anal intercourse in the 21st century. This kind of applicational befuddlement is typical of those who are being driven by winds of doctrine, rather than being led by the Spirit of God. Those who stand with McLaren are feminists of the same stripe also, as well as complicit with the homosexual agenda for the church.
Third, in his drive to be inclusive, he winds up teaching that Muslims, and Hindus, and Jews, and Buddhists, can all be disciples of Jesus without leaving their respective religious communities. In this, I would call Leithart’s sound criticism of McLaren, and raise it ten. McLaren sees being a disciple of Jesus as a radically personal (and individual) kind of thing. In my posts, I have pointed to the impact this has on making religion into a consumer choice, and so on. Leithart points out how modern (and typically evangelical) this actually is. But although McLaren’s teaching on this comes out most explicitly in his chapter on being “incarnational,” it is the very reverse of being incarnational. To explicitly teach that a person can follow Jesus Christ without being joined in koinonia with totus Christus, with the entire body of Christ, without submitting to the teaching of the apostles, and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and prayers (Acts 2:42) is to say that “external” incarnational embodiment does not really matter. If a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or a Jew, is thinking “I-am-a-disciple-of Jesus” thoughts in his head, then the embodied life of the religious community surrounding him does not matter. Whether it might be a pilgrimage to Mecca, or a prayer wheel, or a seder, the expression does not matter. It’s all good. But Jesus said to disciple the nations, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey all that He had commanded. On what authority does McLaren now say that a Muslim “disciple” of Jesus does not have to be baptized? That he can stay right where he is?
And so this brings up a general point that applies to this whole line of criticism of McLaren, and which needs to be made again and again. Postmodernists tell us (rightly) that all human knowledge is contextualized, and situated, and local, and particular. And they tell us (also rightly) that this means that Enlightenment Pronouncements are not what they have so long pretended to be — detached, objective, dust-free rational, and so on. When the Enlightenment comes a cropper, good riddance say I, and it doesn’t bother me that the postmodernists are cheering too.
But where postmodernists stumble is in failing to apply their critique of others to themselves. In this they reveal that they are more modern than postmodern. But Jesus said to consider the beam in your own eye. Is this postmodern critique of Enlightenment hubris a local, contextualized critique? Or a meta-critique? Does it not apply in certain time zones, or in some language groups? Or does it apply across the board? How could it? But if it doesn’t, then why should we pay attention to it? This is not a word game to play with postmodernists; it means that their whole point has to be picked up out of the miry clay, and placed on the Rock, who is Jesus Christ. And a central point of modernity, which is that man can genuinely know, has to be picked up out of the miry clay, and placed on the Rock, who is Christ Jesus. Until both of them come to Jesus, with unwavering faith and dogmatic devotion, the interactions between modernists and postmodernists is nothing more than Curley and Moe slapping and wup-wup-wupping each other.
There is a hidden premise in postmodern evaluations of epistemology, and that hidden premise has come out in a number of critical comments on this thread. The hidden premise is that since all human knowledge is not omniscient, thorough, complete, timeless, decontextualized, and so forth, then it follows we must always speak humbly (with “humbly” understood as the opposite of “dogmatic”). This hidden premise is there even if we assume that God has given us His views on things in Scripture, because our knowledge of that book is not omniscient, thorough, complete, timeless, decontextualized, and so on.
But this is not what we were told to do. This hidden premise is not a scriptural one. How do we justify holding it? The premise is that since we do not know all things, we must be tentative about everything. And being tentative (“I could be wrong”) is equated with humility.
This relates in turn to questions about heresy, and notice how the hidden premise comes into play. “How can you, Wilson, who were rashly accused of heresy by Joe Morecraft and others, then turn around and accuse Brian McLaren of heresy? Isn’t that inconsistent?”
No. It does not even approach inconsistency . . . unless we are all required to be tentative about everything. If Joe’s sin against me was that he was dogmatic, then it would be bad for me to turn around and be dogmatic in another direction. But dogmatism was not the sin. That was not Joe’s problem. His problem was that he was dogmatically wrong. I do not hold what he accused me of holding. Now it is quite true that dogmatism is potent, and so when you are wrong, it can do a lot of damage. And when you are tentative and wrong, it usually does less damage. If you throw pebbles in the bushes and accidentally hit someone who is in there, not much harm is done. If you unload your rifle into the bushes, it is a different matter. This is why we have gun safety classes, and not pebble-tossing safety classes.
“Wilson was accused of heresy, but then he accuses somebody else. What a lark!” But this leaves out the importance of adverbs, like rightly, wrongly, honestly, competently, and so on. Was Jesus inconsistent because He cast out demons, after He Himself was accused of having a demon? No, because the charge against Him was false, and the demons He cast out were truly there. “False? True? These are strange words and concepts. Tell me more about this faith of yours.”
But if our recognition that we are always local and situated requires us to be always tentative, what are we to do with the direct commands of the God who situated us in the first place? He created us, and then told us that we are finite, that we don’t know everything, and that we must therefore do what we are told. He situated us, and He told us that we are situated. But in response to this creational truth, He did not then supply us with that hidden, driving premise of the postmodern ethos — “Go ye, therefore, and be tentative.” “Multiply and replenish the earth, shuffling apologetically as you think about doing so.”
The hidden premise is wrong. Therefore it is not humble to refuse to oppose heresy. It is arrogant. It is not arrogant to dogmatically oppose claims of unbelief. It is humble. But remember our gun safety classes. If you dismiss someone as “a heretic” because he denies a pre-trib rapture, then you are sinning through your dogmatism. The problem, however, is not dogmatism itself — the problem is the abuse of it. If you dogmatically reject some heresy that is a true heresy (a denial of the Trinity, say), but your heart is filled with personal malice toward the heretic involved, then you are sinning through the dogmatism again. But the problem (again) is not dogmatism per se. The problem is that we are not handling our rifles the way the Bible says that we must. We were not paying attention in God’s gun safety classes.
“But there is so much abuse out there by heresy hunters! Shooting their rifles every which way, and scaring everybody. We will therefore lock up all the rifles in the basement, and claim that this is the way of true humility.” And it would be too, if our Lord hadn’t commanded us to do something else. This approach looks humble when all you are doing is chatting with fellow shepherds about different methods of sheep management, and everybody in the conversation is a good-hearted fellow, and more than polite. In fact, the whole thing goes swimmingly until a pack of ravening wolves appear and come down the slope toward your flocks. A few shepherds (who were not persuaded by emergent-shepherd-pacifism) open fire on the wolves. For this they are sharply rebuked by some of the other shepherds. The rebukes may vary. “The gunfire frightens the sheep.” “If you think it is alright to shoot wolves, you must also think it is alright to shoot sheep for grazing on the wrong clump of grass. If you use guns at all, you must admit that no sense of proportion is possible.”
But I admit nothing of the kind. Attacking a dangerous teacher like McLaren is not tantamount to arguing with the other disciples on the road over who is the greatest. It is not the same thing as calling down fire on a Samaritan village, with no self-awareness of a censorious and judgmental spirit. It is not a dispute over orphreys on the chausible, or whatever it was that Wodehousian Anglicans squabble over. Nor is it a dispute over how you spell them, or even what they are.
The faith once delivered to the saints is worth contending for. Blinkered sectarians abuse the charge given to us by throwing charges of heresy against anything unfamiliar, including vocabulary. And a spirit of indiscriminate catholicity that has all the discernment of a vacuum cleaner equally abuses the charge given to us. I am a shepherd, and this means fighting wolves. Not only am I not going to stop doing it, I will not even be prevailed upon to feel bad about it. Is my knowledge situated? You bet. Do I know everything? Not even close. Do I know everything about the meadow in which my flock is grazing? Not a chance. But all this self-deprecation aside, I do know a couple of things. I know that those pointy gray ears sticking up out of that rumpled and funny looking sheep skin are not sheep ears. And I know how to use this gun here.