In Chapter 2 (Chapter 3, but who’s counting?) Brian McLaren starts to say some good things about the manifestation of God in Christ. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t get very far. Compared to the superlative language of less generous orthodoxy, his praise sounds comparatively anemic — “I believe God was in Jesus in an unprecedented way” (p. 69). And McLaren worries that using the name of Jesus will possibly summon up the demons of exclusion. “The name of Jesus, whose life and message resonated with acceptance, welcome, and inclusion, has too often become a symbol of elitism, exclusion, and aggression” (p. 70), which is apparently a bad thing. In this move Jesus gets credit for a demeanor that would be better suited to the Dalai Lama giving a speech in Beverly Hills, but we will let that pass for the moment.
But still, McLaren does seek to answer the basic question. “Why am I a Christian? Because I believe Jesus is Savior of the world, Lord, and Son of God” (p. 71). He follows this up by quoting some glorious passages from Scripture, which start to affect the tone of the entire chapter in a good way, quoting Col. 1:15-20, Heb. 1:1-3, and 2 Cor. 4:6 (p. 73). But this good work was exhausting, and he is not very far into it when he gets distracted by the need to grovel before feminism.
“This is as good a place as any to apologize for my use of masculine pronouns for God in the previous sentence” (p. 70). He goes on, even to the extent of apologizing for the English language itself. “In English, there just isn’t a personal pronoun to express this kind of Life/Personality that isn’t either exclusively male or exclusively female” (p. 74). But this raises a question in my mind — why didn’t the Holy Spirit issue a similar apology for the pronouns of Scripture? Of course, the Holy Spirit wasn’t up against what Brian McLaren is up against, which appears from this distance to be an entrenched blue state feminism.
In looking for a way out of this dilemma , McLaren considers capitalizing the pronouns. “Another option is capitalizing He (which for some successfully moves the male masculine pronoun beyond human masculinity to divine Personality, but for others creates a kind of Super-Masculinity, which is even worse)” (p. 75).
In the midst of this hand-wringing, he then attempts to hide his post-orthodoxy behind someone who really was orthodox — this approach of McLaren’s was apparently “shared by C.S. Lewis” and is the view “that God is not a male or a female, whatever pronouns we use” (p. 75). Of course God is not male. God the Father is not Zeus. And of course C.S. Lewis affirmed this, as do I, and so has the entire Christian church, down throughout its history. God is Spirit and therefore does not have biological characteristics. But Lewis accounted for the scriptural language of masculinity (which is quite different from explaining it away) by showing that divine masculinity transcends maleness, the view which McLaren dismissed as “even worse.” God is the ultimate Father, He is ultimately masculine, and human males bear just a dim reflection of that masculinity. That was what Lewis taught, and the orthodox have always affirmed that male and female together bear the image of this God. McLaren is twisting in the wind over nothing, but the feminists (all rise!) don’t think it is nothing.
But McLaren eventually gets to the real culprit in all this, which would of course be the Bible. “The masculine biblical imagery of ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ also contributes to the patriarchalism or chauvinism that has too often characterized Christianity, maybe even more significantly than the pronoun problem” (p. 75). Too many darn Christians reading their darn Bibles, and thinking they were supposed to . . . I don’t know . . . submit to it or something.
This travesty of a chapter can be summed up as McLaren apologizing for a use of language that God also used, with the difference being that God didn’t apologize. And this brings us to the central problem that McLaren has, one that he shares with a long stream of evangelical pietism — that cussed determination to be holier, or nicer, or better, than God.