Okay, let’s be honest. Context matters. If someone had handed me a xerox copy of McLaren’s next chapter (the one on being “mystical/poetic”), I would have thought most of it was pretty okay. In fact, because he quotes Lewis and Chesterton repeatedly, bits of it were much more than okay. But the irony was not lost on me. In order to attack the older, “truncated” orthodoxy, McLaren had to quote two of the major champions of the same kind of orthodoxy he was attacking, pretending all the while that they had the same approach to truth that he does. But they did not, and this kind of intellectual dishonesty is typical of McLaren’s book.
But the problem McLaren is reacting against in this chapter is a real problem. The loss of poetic vision in the contemporary church is a real loss, and we do have to do something about it. But as nice as it might be to simply praise one of McLaren’s chapters, we have to look at, as they would put it, the contours of his emerging agenda. What does he want us to do about this problem? His praise of Lewis says the right things. After quoting a lyric passage from Perelandra, McLaren says, “This kind of writing depends on something beyond mere rationality. It depends on imagination and vision . . .” (p. 151). Quite right. But it also depends on the traction supplied by the older type of orthodoxy, the kind McLaren is busy trying to get away from. The kind of subjectivist mush being peddled by McLaren is regarded by Lewis as poison. Read Lewis on subjectivism. Read Lewis on how prisons made of stone cannot imprison one half so securely “as rigamarole.” Read Chesterton on sophistical poseurs. The question that McLaren needs to present and answer is this: how was it possible for men like Lewis and Chesterton to do what they did, while not rejecting the precious inheritance of objective truth? How did they do that? And how can McLaren continue to maintain that we need to get away from this older conception of truth in order to attain to poetic and mystical apprehension of “whatever it is” out there. The only examples of “how to do it right” that he cites were from the other team.
McLaren continues. “This rebuke to arrogant intellectualizing is especially apt for modern Christians, who do not build cathedrals of stone and glass as in the Middle Ages, but rather conceptual cathedrals of proposition and argument” (p. 151). This is a false alternative, and does not capture the real medieval achievement. They had scholastic theologians who could make Charles Hodge look like Teresa of Avila and they built these glorious cathedrals. The existence of people writing unreadable theology is apparently not any barrier to glorious aesthetic achievement. Maybe healthy civilizations create special ed program for their wordgrinders, locking them up in a room, letting them scribble to their heart’s content, and no real harm done.
But McLaren does this to disparage systematic theologies in themselves as the culprit. But he then changes course because it appears that postmodern thinkers want us to not abandon systematic theology after all. “Thanks to John Franke for help and insight on the emerging contours of postmodern systematic theology” (p. 153). Franke’s book on theological method, forthcoming from Baker, will discuss this further, and the fact that it is forthcoming means that we still have time to hide in the basement.
Returning to one of his favorite themes, the humbler-than-thou approach, McLaren then says, “A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, controlling, or critical orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is humble; it doesn’t claim too much; it admits it walks with a limp” (p. 155). “It is humble.” Thanks for telling us. “It doesn’t claim too much.” It doesn’t claim nearly enough. “It admits it walks with a limp.” It has one foot nailed to the floor and walks in circles.
The problem here is a false solution to a real problem. I admit that we do have some hyper-rationalists within the walls of Christendom. John Robbins has looked under the bed of orthodoxy, and has found every propositional dust bunny down there. And his idea of theology is to line up these propositional dust bunnies in a row, and demand that the rest of us approve of his particular Clarkian arrangement of them. So okay, there is a problem here. But to mark a problem is not the same thing as having a clue about the solution.
On the first page of this chapter, McLaren mentions Walter Brueggemann as “one of the theologians whose writings help [him] most” (p. 145). And, taking one thing with another, this figures. Brueggemann is a piece of work.
Because of my desire to see a restoration of poetics in ministry, when I first saw Brueggemann’s book Finally Comes the Poet, I got it. And actually read it all the way through. When I saw that McLaren was pushing this book as a remedy for pedestrian ministry, I took it down again and flipped through it, particularly noting my marginalia. Brueggemann knows not whereof he speaks. Here are some samples from this angst-ridden substitute for robust and incarnational and grateful faith, which the only basis for a recovery of Christian poetics.
So here goes. Hang on.
“The preacher permits, legitimates, and models interpretation that is daring, inventive, and faithful to the fresh command of God. The preacher commits acts of intellectual courage by interpreting beyond the commandment. It is only such interpretation that can resist the irrelevance of absoluteness . . .” (p. 97). Liberals should talk about irrelevance more, because they have so much experience with it. But it is not yet the kind of experience that has taught them anything. The “irrelevance of absoluteness?” Far better to listen to Lewis, as McLaren pretends to. All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
“There is wide agreement that in the post-exilic period the marginal poetic voice of Third Isaiah spoke for disenfranchised priests . . .” (p. 104). Third Isaiah is the prophet of the blank spaces between the text and the gold-embossed edge. Occupying the margins as he does, he is rightly identified as a marginal voice. He is tragically and often overlooked, which may account for his attitude.
“Yahweh’s ultimate response, wrought through generations of brooding . . .” (p. 58). Nothing worse than a brooding god of the liberals, one who is as wound tight as they are.
“Let the preacher be as dangerous as she can be about reparations in the family, in Central America, in all the enslavements and exploitations we practice” (p. 39). Yes, let her be as dangerous as she can be. And yes, let her especially get into Central American politics. That should restore aesthetic vision to the church!