On the first page of the next chapter (“Why I Am Biblical”), Brian McLaren states this: “My regard for the Bible is higher than ever” (p. 159). And this about sums the whole problem up. Regard? After having read through the chapter, this is like hearing a divorced couple say they are still the “best of friends.” And it takes a certain kind of mind to believe it.
But something else, before we get to that. Let me begin my review of this chapter by acknowledging that at the start of this chapter McLaren lands a couple of good ones on some conservative noses. He identifies (for those who really do believe the Bible) a significant problem within our ranks, a problem that I think contributed mightily to the kind of fluff that McLaren has adopted. He says, “Back in the 1960s, we ‘knew’ the Bible taught that the world would end within about 25 years . . . oops” (p. 160). One of things that we have to admit, in the interests of biblical honesty, is that the rabid end-timers in our midst, with their numerous false predictions of the end of the world, have given belief in biblical infallibility a bad name. Who was it that taught McLaren to associate straightforward faith in Scripture with shrill predictions about how Anwar Sadat was the antichrist — until he got shot, and then on to the next one? Whoever it was, we have to acknowledge that this kind of eschatological hallucinatory exegesis has done more than its share of underming faith in the Bible it claims to take so “literally.” If false predictions drive intelligent people away, and they do, then somebody in our ranks needs to take responsibility for some portion of this emergence.
Whatever measure of responsibility there is with lurid exegetes, Mclaren has reacted to this silliness by adopting a position every bit as silly, and so we cannot absolve him of his share of the on-going meltdown. Now McLaren tries to say that his view of Scripture has shifted, but he claims that his regard for Scripture is just different, not lower. But it is plain from his description of this shift in this chapter that the locus of authority has moved from the Scripture itself to what trendy interpreters can do with Scripture. You will read it in his own words in just a moment.
But first, he poses a problem. “Interestingly, when Scripture talks about itself, it doesn’t use the language we often use in our explanations of its value. For modern Western Christians words like authority, inerrancy, infallibility, revelation, objective, absolute, and literal are crucial. Many churches or denominations won’t allow people to become members unless they use these words in their description of Scripture. Hardly anyone realizes why these words are important. Hardly anyone knows about the stories of Sir Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, the Enlightenment, David Hume, and Foundationalism . . .” (p. 164).
This is just a tangle of confusions, and so let me try to untangle it briefly. Right, these words are not scriptural words. But they were coined to defend scriptural realities, in much the same way the words homoousia and homoiousia came to represent the battle between Athanasius and Arius. Whether Jesus is God is a question that can be answered in multiple places in Scripture, but the battle came down (because heretics are sneaky) to an unbiblical word that Arius could not use. It is not the case that Christians were bumping along happily in a scriptural narratival trajectory, and then one day some dangerous felon introduced the world infallibility and screwed everything up. Rather, Christians lived for about 1800 years believing everything represented by words like infallibility, objective, absolute, and so on, and then one day some unbelievers crashed into the garden and began to question, challenge or dispute them. And so these words were hammered out as part of that noble and necessary defense.
Further, McLaren says above that hardly anybody knows why these words are important. On the contrary, just about everybody in conservative circles knows why they are important. To lose an understanding of their importance takes about two, maybe three, years of graduate school. Faith in the Bible as the Word that cannot be broken is necessary because we are Christians. We are under authority. Jesus taught us this kind of faith in Scripture. We are His disciples.
But McLaren doesn’t read the history of conservativism and liberalism in this way. He says this: “Oddly, I’ve never heard of a church or denomination that asked people to affirm a doctrinal statement like this: The purpose of Scripture is to equip God’s people for good works. Shouldn’t a simple statement like this be far more important than statement with words foreign to the Bible’s vocabulary about itself (inerrant, authoritative, literal, revelatory, objective, absolute, propositional, etc.)” (pp. 164-165). The answer is no. The reason why should be obvious. If I believe the Bible in my hands is the absolute and objective Word of God, then when I read it, then obedience, among other things, will tend to be on my mind. But if I do not believe this, then either the Scripture can be set aside as a guide to good works, as it pleases me, or the Bible can become a nose of wax, to be molded into whatever my idea of good works might be. For proof of this, we need look no further than McLaren’s book here. If the Scripture is given to equip God’s people for good works, then why is McLaren busy (in the name of this Bible) pursuing a bunch of bad works, like catering to homosexual hurt feelings, or pushing for women’s ordination. How did “male chauvinism” become a sin? I can’t find it in my concordance. The answer is that McLaren now has a Bible that can be employed as reinforcement of all the “good works” prepared beforehand for him to do, but prepared by the secularist opinion-shapers in New York and LA.
Which explains this. “The more I learn from Jesus, the more I cring when I read passages in Exodus or Joshua where the God of love and universal compassion to whom Jesus introduced me allegedly commands what today we would call brutality, chauvinism, ethnic cleansing, or holocaust” (p. 166, emphasis mine). The God of love allegedly commanded the Jews to wipe out the Canaanites? The God of love allegedly told Noah to build an ark because God was going to destroy all life on the earth? The God of love allegedly took the kingdom away from Saul because he did not slaughter all his prisoners of war? The God of love allegedly inspired Samuel to hew Agag to pieces before the Lord? McLaren goes on to attempt an explanation of how all this works (having to do with the survival of Israel, and God’s helpless realpolitik concerning the way things were back then). But if McLaren’s explanation works, they why does he now cringe when he reads the Bible? Note that he is not cringing when he hears some young turks yucking it up over the imprecatory psalms, not knowing what spirit they are of. We should cringe at such misuse of Scripture. But McLaren cringes at Exodus. He cringes at Joshua. And the dog and pony show he attempts afterwards, seeking to show that the problem is really not with the God of “universal love and compassion” shows that he getting his definitions of love and compassion from some source other than the Scripture itself. His idea of love and compassion is humanistic to the core. God is a God of love and compassion. What does He therefore do? “To him that smote Egypt in their firstborn: for his mercy endureth forever“(Ps. 136:10). “To him which smote great kings” for his mercy endureth forever: and slew famous kings: for his mercy endureth forever” (Ps. 136: 17-18). In the Bible, how do we know that God is merciful? We know, in part, through who He takes out. In McLaren’s world, how do we know that God is a God of love and compassion? We know because Oprah tells us.
At the end of this chapter, we find that McLaren is no longer bound by things that the text actually says. He is enabled to sit loose to the exegesis and — happy day! — embrace the “narrative trajectory” of Scripture that was modeled so well by St. Francis, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (p. 170). If this is evangelical, then I’m a Hottentot.