In his fourth chapter, McLaren asks what salvation means exactly. He then goes on to explain that salvation means God coming in judgment to deliver us from the evil oppression of others, God confronting us with our own sinfulness and forgiving us, and God teaching us. And McLaren affirms that God does all of this for us in Jesus. All of which is true, and so can we go home now?
Afraid not. McLaren favorably quotes Vincent Donovan, a missionary in Africa, who said, “If a theology did emerge from my work, it would have to be a theology growing out of the life and experience of the pagan peoples of the savannahs of East Africa” (p. 92). This move is a move from a theology of salvation to a theology of creation (p. 92). And the subtext here is to minimize the fallenness and depravity of man and hence of creation. It is also an instance of the missionary going native, and having a real crisis of faith. What happens when the Christians go to the pagans to evangelize them, and they are far more attracted to the paganism than the pagans are attracted to Christ. They lose their faith, that’s what, and then they write books to help us lose ours.
But there are complications on this issue. McLaren rightly emphasizes that Jesus is the savior of the whole world, and not just of a tiny snippet of humanity. And it is true that premillennial dispensationalism has muddied the waters here. But there are two ways to “correct” the prevailing idea among evangelicals that only a tiny remnant of humanity will be saved at the last day. One is to do what Mclaren and tribe are doing, which is to dilute (not necessarily eliminate) the need for salvation from hell in the first place, and to minimize the need of missionaries to get there in order for unbelievers to be saved — in short, to move from a theology of salvation to a theology of creation. The other is retain a full and orthodox commitment to the biblical representation of Christ’s atonement, and to adopt a robust and biblical postmillennialism. The earth will be filled the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, but it will not be accomplished by Christians who are embarrassed by the Bible. But postmillennialism as the answer to “lowering the salvation bar” is a subject for another day.
In this chapter, McLaren worries that we have thought too much about hell. But where do individuals get this idea of personal salvation from hell? Well, they get it from Jesus. The irony is that we learned in the previous chapter that we ought to consider Jesus as Lord, and not as Mascot. Great. He is the one who told us not to fear those who would kill the body, but rather to fear the one who could throw both body and soul into hell. Jesus is the one who told the story of a rich man who went to Hades and could not obtain a drop of water for his tongue. Jesus is the one who warned of the place where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. He is the one who talked about the outer darkness. If you were to ask, “Who is the premier hellfire and brimstone preacher of the Bible?” the answer would be Jesus, and there is not even a close second. The apostle Paul, for all his constributions to the New Testament, does not mention hell by name once in all his writings. But McLaren is just doing the same thing that countless others before him have done, which is to remake Jesus into the original flower child, the aboriginal hippie. Jesus, don’t you see came preaching the radical politics of inclusion, and everyone says, “Yes, of course. I remember something about Jesus being nice. That fits with what I am willing to believe.” But the real Jesus, the one who is not McLaren’s personal mascot, said things in his sermons that should make your back teeth cold.
But McLaren worries that emphasis on Christ “as a personal Savior” is an emphasis that can lead to treating salvation from hell as just another consumer product (p. 99). And yes, this is and has been a danger. In conservative, traditional evangelicalism, Jesus has too often been marketed as a cure for “what ails ya.” But for all his ability to look like he is checking whether he might be doing it too, McLaren makes this point without any sense of irony whatever. Just a few pages later, when he is talking about his presentation of “his kind of Jesus” to a friend, the friend responds, “I could believe in a Jesus like that. If I believed in God, I think I could believe in that Jesus.” But the question is who is Jesus and what did He say. It is not whether we could believe in Him “like that.” The real question is what Jesus would have been like if you and I had never been born, and never had any desires about it one way or the other. This business of McLaren’s here is not an abandonment of “marketing Jesus to consumers,” this is just a case of making the tailfins smaller. The consumer is still king in this world. All we are seeing is a shift in consumer desires. They used to be worried about going to hell for their misdeeds (which, come to think of it, is not an unscriptural worry). But now they are worried about staying in their humanistic comfort zone, and McLaren has a Jesus to help them do just that.