Chapter One of A Generous Orthodoxy is actually Chapter Two, because of that odd Chapter Zero, and is a chapter which, for our purposes here, I will be calling Chapter Six. No, not really. The chapter is titled “Seven Jesuses I Have Known,” and is an outstanding example of the dabbler approach to truth that is necessarily the rage these days.
The chapter is a chronicle of McLaren’s pilgrimage through various wings of Christendom, some of them incarnational and some apparently through books or more distant experience. The seven Jesuses are the Jesus of “conservative Protestants,” of “Pentecostals,” “Roman Catholics,” “Eastern Orthodox,” “Liberal Protestants,” “Anabaptists,” and “Liberation Theology.”
Now all popularizers simplify, and this should not be a charge laid against them. But the simplifications ought not to result in gross distortions. McLaren simplifies (while acknowledging that the subject is bigger than what he is writing), but he does not see that the subject is frequently 180 degrees out from what he is writing. The snippet of “good news” that each of these Jesuses carry is that conservative Protestants focus on Jesus’ death, Pentecostals on the power of Jesus today, the Roman Catholics on His resurrection, the Eastern Orthodox on the Lord’s Incarnation, the Liberal Protestants on Jesus’ teaching, the Anabaptists on Jesus as the one who convenes communities of discipleship, and the Liberation guys on Jesus as a leader of activist bands to challenge unjust regimes (pp. 64-65). Some of this is fair (as a generalization), but other aspects of this are simply grotestque. Roman Catholics don’t emphasize that Jesus died? Has he never seen a crucifix? Classical Protestants don’t emphasize the resurrection? That was one of the central bones of contention between them and the liberals. Did Jesus actually come back from the grave? And they not only contended for its reality, but also for its centrality and importance. Without it, we are still in our sins, as Paul (not McLaren) would say to the liberals.
The hidden agenda of a leftward political drift starts to come out in this chapter. When he mentions the Jesus movement, he says in a footnote that a number of things “co-opted” that movement, one of them being the “Religious Right” (p. 45). In case you didn’t know “co-opted” is a bad word. But then, a few pages later, he starts musing about how his conservative background was not enough, and he wanted to get away from “an individualistic theory, an abstraction with personal but not global import” (p. 49). And then, later, he takes his hat off to the liberals. “Our mission, then, is to bring the teaching and example of Jesus to bear on our world — not only on our personal relationships, but also on the political structures and cultural systems of our world” ( pp. 59-60). And when he gets to liberation theology (he does stipulate the nonviolent kind), he gets in deeper. He talks of “Christians who understood the revolutionary social and political implications of the teaching and example of Jesus, whose gospel was good news to the poor . . .” (p. 63). And nonviolent “liberation theology sought to rediscover the Jesus who is the hero to the poor and oppressed, and the prophet who bravely confronts the establishment of power and privilege” (p. 63). So, when conservative Christians apply the faith to issues like abortion and pornography and countering homosexual agenda, they are (among other things) “co-opting” a movement of the Holy Spirit, and causing it to jump the rails. But when leftists do it, this is incarnational, and obedience, and the way of discipleship.
But, for all its faults (and there were many), the rise of the religious right in America was the result of conservative Christians rejecting their previous implicit gnosticism, and realizing that if Jesus is Lord, we shouldn’t be dismembering babies down at the hospital. If Jesus is Lord, then we have to actively engage the culture. This is precisely what McLaren was arguing for (in the abstract), but it turns out that when believing conservative Christians woke up to this truth, and engaged with the culture, the results are not in line with what McLaren’s soft leftism would have liked. And so their agenda “co-opts” the simple faith of the Jesus people, while the agenda of the leftists is something that must be deeply respected, and honored, and followed at a slower pace to make it palatable to Christians. So McLaren comes out clearly here. “No, no! Not that theonomy. This theonomy!” But I am from Idaho, and think that a case can be made that, if Jesus is Lord, we must maintain our vigilant defenses of the Second Amendment. Out here, we think gun control means using both hands.
One other issue. Turning this cannon around, in order to point it at left-wing theonomists, if Jesus is Lord and cares for the poor and the oppressed, then we ought to have nothing to do with economic systems that do nothing but increase the misery of the poor, all done while pretending that they care. If we put a socialist government in charge of the Sahara, it would not be long before we had a shortage of sand.
There was another problem here as well, mentioned in my review of the zero chapter. Strikingly, one of the reasons he was wary about Pentecostalism was because of the arrogance implicit in some of their expressions. “But over time I realized that this ‘full gospel’ terminology could have two dangerous side effects: pride (our gospel is fuller than yours!) and unteachability (we have it all — what more is there to learn?)” (p. 52). Note that the temptation lies within the terminology itself, and on this score, I think McLaren got it exactly right. But now watch what happens when we plonk a generous orthodoxy in there. The same two tempations emerge. Our orthodoxy is more generous than yours, you old prune, and whatever we have to learn in the future, it will not be the lesson of generosity, because we have that one down.
So McLaren is learning about various Jesuses. In the previous chapter, McLaren had unambiguously affirmed the Apostles and Nicene Creed, both of which talk about Jesus a lot. So why doesn’t he say that he knew the Jesus of the Great Creedal Formula? Or is that Jesus one of the seven? If so, which one? Now McLaren does qualify all this by saying that these Jesuses were not really different Jesuses, but were rather “a new facet, a new dimension, of the Jesus I had met as a child . . .” (p. 55). But consider the problem with terminology again. In a polytheistic setting, is it really helpful to talk about different Jesuses, only then to explain that they are are the same one. And did he ever meet a Jesus he didn’t like? A Jesus who was a completely different Jesus? (2 Cor. 11:4) Does McLaren live in a world where no one ever lies about Jesus?
After all, McLaren admits that according to the liberals a number of the miracles never “actually happened,” which would include the miracle of the resurrection, which would mean that at least one of the seven Jesuses is dead in the ground somewhere. McLaren personally believes that miracles can happen but is “sympathetic with those who believe otherwise, and I applaud their desire to live out the meaning of the miracle stories even when they don’t believe the stories really happened as written” (p. 61). What would possiblly cause McLaren to stop sympathizing, and to discharge the office of a minister, and start opposing?
These considerations are all troublesome, but in the last pages of the chapter, McLaren gives the game away. We get down to his point of application: what do we do with all these Jesuses? “Why not celebrate them all? Already, many people are using terms like post-Protestant, post-denominational, post-liberal, and post-conservative to express a desire to move beyond the polarization and sectarianism that have too often characterized Christians of the past” (p. 66).
A moment later he says, “What if we enjoy them all, the way we enjoy foods from differing cultures? Aren’t we glad we can enjoy Thai food this week, Chinese next, Italian the following week, Mexican food next month, and Khmer after that? What do we gain by saying that Chinese food is permissible, but Mexcian food is poison? Isn’t there nourishment and joy (and pleasure) to be had from each tradition?” (p. 66).
And the answer to this hard one is that our faith is not like suiting yourself at the food court down at the mall. The faith once delivered is not an item on the menu for the discriminating consumer. But this image of one who flits between restaurants is still a telling one, and it is the problem with the whole emergent project. But to make this clear we have to take a slight detour. The emergent church is simply the next stage in an advanced case of the commidification of faith. The emergent church is the next stage of evangelicals selling out to Mammon, and the false sense of security that purchasing power supplies.
Where this came from is what I believe to be one of the root causes of postmodernism itself along with emergence (which is just postmodernism lite for Christians desperate to be cutting edge, so desperate to lead that they they do nothing but follow). But cutting edge these days is defined by what you choose to buy.
So here is the detour. David Wells has done a fantastic job chronicling the implosion of modern Enlightenment thought (No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, and Losing our Virtue). His latest book in this series is just out: Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World. Wells argues (convincingly) that the massive shift to street-level postmodernism was not caused by the kids reading too much Derrida or Leotard (sorry, Lyotard). The kids frequently don’t know who Abraham Lincoln was, and so the problem is not likely to be caused by all the high school kids sneaking up to the university library. Rather, it is far more likely that the street level stuff and the philosophical stuff are being caused by the same cultural forces, affecting them each in different ways. One person buys another set of droopy trousers and another writes jargon in French. Wells argues that these underlying forces are actually the forces of what he calls “high capitalism,” which has generated more practical choices for more people on a daily basis than at any other time in history.
Technology, mass production, big box stores, and discretionary income have created a massive false analogy for the general population. This false analogy has always been present for the wealthy, which is why Scripture contains so many warnings to the wealthy. The rich landowner in Christ’s parable is told, “Thou fool, tonight your life is required of thee.” You are not self-sufficient despite the fullness of your barns. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And what the explosion of consumer culture has done is create a multitude of camels, all of whom are having the same difficulty with that needle.
In the past, the scriptural warnings on how to handle wealth (that you actually possessed) were warnings that were applicable to just a tiny sliver of the population. That sliver had wealth, and consequently had choices. But for the rest, they got up in the morning and walked behind a mule all day because that is what their grandfather had done. No real choices, at least not the kind that wealth produces. But now, those biblical warnings apply (in America at least) to the vast majority of the entire population. Now, one of the warnings that God gives to the wealthy is temptation of “forgetting God.” Wealth generates the false analogy that I can choose my religion the same way I choose my restaurants. My faith becomes simply another item for me to consume. And that is exactly the image that McLaren picks.
The most obvious thing about the emergent church is how this matter of consumption choices has them by the throat. And, to return to McLaren, the discriminating shopper has a smidgen of Eastern Orthodoxy, an occasional meal with the liberals, and “I could sure go for some Chinese.” Can you imagine a hardscrabble church in the Appalacians going emergent? Or a persecuted house church in China? Read David Brooks Bobos in Paradise, and take his insights about rich hippies trying to look like authentic peasants in that calculated, burlap book bag kind of way, and apply that insight to rich Christians in an age of expensive authenticity and fine cuisine. Try to imagine the emergent church without lots of money.